Terror Tactics: Tips for using Gûlavhar

Gûlavhar about to finish what that Troll Chieftain never could

There are few models quite as exciting as Gûlavhar, in my objective and unbiased opinion. The thrill of swooping around munching your enemies, the gruelling climb back from 1 wound after you whiff against some basic warriors, the satisfying vengeance when you line up the perfect Heroic Combat into your opponent’s centrepiece hero… It never gets old. However, ol’ Gully is also one of the most challenging models to use in the entire game. One misplay and your centrepiece model will be dead or crippled, with catastrophic results. Across 4 tournaments and many, many practice games with this model, I’ve experienced both the devastating rampages and the devastating botches more times than I care to remember.

As such, I thought I’d put out an article diving into this exciting model and how best to take advantage of him. I’ll talk through his best- and worst-case scenarios, his strengths and weaknesses, the standard gameplan you should adopt with him, and then the situations in which you should divert from that plan. Hopefully, by the end of this you should have a good idea of how to make use of this exciting model. And if you’re more keen on working out how to stop his rampage (boo!), then also make sure to check in next week for an article on how to defeat the Terror of Arnor.

 

Highs and lows

From this position Gûlavhar can Combat into either Elf hero, which goes about as well for them as you'd expect

An example of Gûlavhar at his absolute best came up in a game against Tom and Monty at the recent Doubles event I attended. Combat started with Gûlavhar charging into two Elves that were screening Erestor. I then called a Heroic Combat and pointed out that from this position I could charge into either Erestor or Gildor, in Tom’s backline. Rightfully concerned by this, Tom burned his last two Might on calling a Strike with both models. Gûlavhar killed the two Elves he was facing, then ignored the Elf heroes and Combatted into the banner bearer hiding in their backline and took it out. On the next turn, with the Elves out of Might to Strike, Gûlavhar charged and killed both Elf heroes. The turn after, he Heroic Combatted into Dáin and took him out as well. Across 3 turns, Gûlavhar crippled an 800-point force almost singlehandedly.

Things look good for Gully right now, but they're about to get much worse

On the flipside, a somewhat-less-recent tournament game saw Gûlavhar pinned down against the Champions of Erebor following some lost Move-offs. Several Dwarf heroes got into combat with him and Struck up, forcing him to call a Defence to survive the first round before being taken out on the second. Pinned down against Striking heroes, Gûlavhar felt exceptionally vulnerable.

I give these examples to show the variety of results Gûlavhar can achieve. He can singlehandedly win games, but can also crumple under pressure if misplayed. From here, let's dive into the underlying strengths and weaknesses that you (or your opponents!) can exploit to get these outcomes.

 

Strengths and weaknesses

Strengths:

-        Damage output. If you can get Gûlavhar into a fight against models with F6 or below and no way to Strike, your opponent will generally be picking them all up at the combat’s end. 10 S8 attacks is a truly ludicrous amount, and there are only a handful of models that can survive a lost combat if you’ve charged.

-        Mobility. He flies, and that means you get to pick your fights. One of the key determinants for whether a monster is competitive is whether it can fly, and that’s perhaps more true here than anywhere else.

-        Flexibility. As a result of this mobility and the innate options that come with being a monster, Gûlavhar has a sometimes-baffling number of choices available to him on most turns. This is a huge strength, because you can adapt on the fly (pun entirely intended) and always have options available to you. It's also a potential weakness, because you always have a bunch of bad options available to you that make it easy to mess up.

-        In the Angmar faction. This feels like a somewhat weird strength to have, but it’s absolutely critical to understanding this model. That's because Gûlavhar doesn’t have a particularly good profile. Compared to Gwaihir he’s arguably overcosted, and there are plenty of other top-tier heroes and monsters that can do the things that he can do. What makes Gûlavhar unique is that he fits neatly into Angmar, which has an unparalleled range of ways to mess with your opponent, all of which happen to synergise perfectly with what he does. Without the full suite of Spectres, Terror Orcs and massed magic, Gûlavhar will never reach anything like his full potential. And conversely, without his ability to swoop across the battlefield and take immediate advantage of whatever weaknesses your control tools have forced, Angmar has much less ability to capitalise on their strengths. It’s an extremely symbiotic relationship, and one can’t understand this model outside of that context. For reference, I have (almost) always run Gûlavhar with the Witch King, Spectres, and a Barrow Wight and/or Captain if I can fit them in, but I’ve heard he synergises excellently with a Shade as well. There are options here, but he really needs some amount of the Angmar suite to shine.

It's often these sneaky supporting pieces that allow Gûlavhar to really rampage

Weaknesses

-        No Strike­. This is probably the first thing a lot of players notice when looking at this profile, and it is a legitimate weakness. If Gûlavhar had Strike then it would dramatically influence how your opponent could play against him, even if you’d ideally not be using it very often at all. This is a weakness that must be played around, but it’s also a weakness that really can be played around.

-        Vulnerable to shooting. This weakness has always been present, and has been intensified a little (especially in Evil matchups) by the recent FAQ. D5 with no Fate is just a pain, and it means you will often take a wound or two on the slog into combat. You can generally then get stuck in and heal back up, but it certainly has the potential to be annoying.

-        Hates botching. This isn’t really a weakness unique to Gûlavhar, in that any mounted combat character is terrified of losing an early combat and getting dismounted. But Gûlavhar certainly cares more about an early botch than most monsters, as even a couple of warriors can strip valuable wounds off him and slow down his rampage. You can end up in a frustrating vicious circle, where you lose a couple of wounds to basic warriors, then get charged and lose the combat because of your reduced number of Attacks, take more wounds, get even less reliable at winning fights and killing models etc… See the second game of this tournament against Nick’s Gondorians for an example of this.

-        Hates F7+ heroes. If Gûlavhar can’t reliably win a fight against a model when they’re not Striking, then he never wants to end up in combat with them. Magic can compensate for this sometimes, but relying on magic is always relying on dice, and sometimes the dice just don’t feel like complying.

There's not much that Gully can really do against something like a Balrog

Default gameplan

We’ve talked about the best and worst outcomes for Gûlavhar, and the strengths and weaknesses that can lead to them. Gûlavhar’s standard gameplan is basically a logical extension of those sections, in which you’ll try to leverage his strengths to produce the great outcomes while mitigating his weaknesses to avoid the bad ones. That starts all the way from deployment, in which you’re aiming to make it easy to…

Step 1: Get stuck in

As discussed, Gûlavhar is not a fan of enemy shooting (to put it lightly). As such, the less time he spends being shot at the better. On centreline deployments of any kind that’s generally pretty easy, as there’s a limit to how far back your opponent can realistically hide. It gets trickier in scenarios with 12” deployments, where you may need to brave several turns of shooting before you can get to the killing. You might be tempted to race ahead of your Orcs to get into combat ASAP, but this is often a trap. An unsupported Gûlavhar is likely going to need to spend a lot of resources to survive, and isn’t really a threat.

Instead, hang back and use cover and range to keep yourself safe. There generally isn’t much benefit to arriving before your Orcs, and you move twice as fast as them. As a result, you can easily afford a turn or two of loitering in positions that mitigate your opponent’s shooting before you need to start swooping forward. Remember, while most models no longer block LoS to you, tiny bits of terrain still can. Abuse those weird loopholes in the FAQ!

Gully making use of cover and range to mitigate the Gondorian archery

Finally, remember that you’re playing Angmar, and have access to both Spectres and Compel. Spectres are generally your best tool for forcing an enemy model forward out of their formation, letting Gully swoop into combat a turn early. See our third game of this tournament for a particularly effective example of this. Compel is also useful for leveraging Gully’s threat a turn ahead as well: if you can threaten to Compel an enemy hero forward to be charged by Gully, then a smart opponent will burn whatever Might/Will they can to avoid it. Your big monster is now already costing your opponent valuable resources, and you haven’t even made it to combat!

A pic from a different game, in which I've Spectred a Bat Swarm closer to shield me from enemy shooting and let me bounce into an Orc Captain

Step 2: Threaten enemy heroes

Here we touch on Gûlavhar’s most powerful ability: his reputation. Your opponent knows that if Gûlavhar gets into their critical models on your terms then they will instantly disappear in an explosion of gore. So any competent opponent will therefore expend resources (here defined quite broadly) to prevent this. What you want is to make that as expensive a proposition as possible for your opponent.

Examples of how your opponent will try and protect their important models range from the extreme (bubblewrapping the hero in their backlines with multiple layers of anti-fly formation) to the expensive-but-necessary (calling Heroic Strikes on turns that you could Heroic Combat into them, even if they otherwise don’t benefit from the extra Fight value) or the optimistic (trying to screen you out with a single line of models). There’s basically a spectrum here from methods that keep your opponent’s best pieces totally safe but cost a lot of resources (including the enemy hero not fighting this turn, or lots of warriors standing around doing nothing in order to prevent Gûlavhar landing somewhere) right up to methods that don’t keep their heroes as safe but are potentially less expensive (like just screening their rear with a couple of warriors).

What you want to do is force them into the most expensive options. That can involve psychological mind games: nothing like letting your opponent know the ways that you could conceivably threaten a model that you have no interest in targeting this turn anyway. It can also involve ‘forcing’ more expenditure: maybe your opponent has successfully screened their hero so Gûlavhar can’t get into them, but then you Spectre a model away or Heroic Combat through the screen and now they need to call a Strike or die. It can also involve a combination of tools: perhaps they’ve screened their hero, but you Spectre one model away and cast Compel on them with the Witch King, while threatening to charge their screen and Combat with Gûlavhar. Now they need to resist this spell at all costs (and will spend any resources necessary to do so), and even if they do they will still need to Strike in order to dissuade you from charging them. Your opponent’s hero has now spent most of their resources and they haven’t even fought yet!

A huge number of Gondorians standing around making life trickier for Gûlavhar 

Let’s take a game I played against Nick’s Gondorians as an example. Nick had carefully screened his backlines with heaps of Warriors of Minas Tirith, trying to prevent me lining up a Hurl with Gûlavhar into Elessar and Hurin. Already, the mere threat of what Gûlavhar can do had forced around 100 points of enemies to stand around doing nothing instead of taking the fight to my Orcs. I responded by swooping into two Gondorians in the screen, threatening to open up a gap and Combat into either Elessar or Hurin. Playing Fog of War, Nick knew that if he lost Hurin it would basically be game over, so he was forced to both Strike with Hurin and Combat with Elessar. Elessar went into Gûlavhar and got picked up in a single turn.

Pics taken moments before disaster

In effect, what happened here is that the threat of Gûlavhar cost Nick the use of a bunch of warriors, Might on Hurin, and then also his army leader. Even had Aragorn not died this turn, the mere threat of Gûlavhar had already forced Nick to burn a lot of resources. He wasn’t wrong to either: I probably just win the game instantly if he lets me get into Hurin, so all resources expended are worthwhile. The key to using Gûlavhar well is forcing these impossible choices for your opponent. Incidentally, Nick ended up winning this game: he pinned down Gûlavhar and wounded him, and kept Hurin safe all game for a narrow victory. Even when things go right for Gûlavhar, he’s still far from impossible to beat!

Gûlavhar pinned down by bad dice and waves of Gondorians, while Hurin hides behind the building to avoid LoS

Step 3: Follow through on your threat, or don’t

 Once you’ve got your opponent’s heroes under threat, the question becomes whether to make good on that threat.

Let’s assume that you’re playing against an excellent opponent who has successfully screened you out, and who has dedicated enough resources to properly neutralise your threat. You could still fly Gûlavhar into Dáin, but that seems pretty risky now that he’s called that Heroic Strike. At this point, you’re best-off making use of that insane mobility to get value and stay safe somewhere else on the battlefield.

Getting value basically means ensuring that your 200-point centrepiece is still achieving useful things even after you’ve baited out resources from your opponent. That often just means killing warriors: if Dáin Struck up and killed the two Orcs he was facing but you Combatted through 4 Iron Hills Dwarves, then things are going your way. Aim for expensive elites here, including banner bearers, cavalry, or lesser heroes like Captains who might have no good way to protect themselves. Consider lining up a good Hurl if your opponent has allowed you one, or even using Spectres to set up little pockets where you can charge into 3-4 enemies at once. Be sure to get your opponent’s agreement with your positioning in the movement phase though: nothing worse than lining up your Hurl and then getting to combat, only to find that you’re actually a millimetre off hitting their banner.

In this position, I'm setup to either go into Elrond or into a couple of Rivendell Knights in a nice safe position

The other key consideration when not going into the enemy heavy-hitters is keeping Gûlavhar safe. In particular, you’re looking to forestall the worst-case-scenario of a big Striking hero and some friends getting into your D5 centrepiece and picking you up. So start by looking across the board and identifying what models can actually threaten Gûlavhar. If they can’t hit F7+, then they’re not a threat. If they can, but you can reliably neutralise them with magic (e.g. they’re out of Will, or down to just one and you have multiple casters ready), then they’re also not a threat. If they can hit F7+ and you can’t reliably neutralise them with magic, then prioritise avoiding their threat range.

Avoiding Sauron was priority #1 for Gûlavhar this game

Sometimes it just won’t be possible to both dodge these threats and get value from Gûlavhar. In that case, be prepared for things to go wrong. That starts by making sure another hero is within 6” of Gûlavhar to potentially call the Heroic Move next turn, because Gûlavhar really doesn’t want to be burning his own Might for Moves if at all possible. It also means trying to keep his flanks secure with your Orcs and other models. If Gûlavhar has Might for Heroic Defence and can back away, then he can definitely survive a couple turns against 1-2 enemy heroes. If he gets Trapped or runs out of Might, then you better be winning elsewhere because you’re probably losing Gûlavhar.

Let’s step back a moment now, and discuss what happens if your opponent hasn’t been able to protect their key models. Perhaps they rolled snakeyes to resist your Compel, or they didn’t think to/couldn’t call the Strike, or your Spectres successfully peeled open their screens in an unexpected way. At this point, you now have the choice to either dive in to pick up their hero, or to play it safe and get value elsewhere. As before, the choice is determined by the two considerations of value and safety.

For value, you’re ideally looking at how critical the model is to your opponent’s gameplan. In my game against Nick, Hurin was actually the key target rather than Elessar, because he was carrying around 6VPs just by existing. More generally, the key models are generally the ones that can threaten Gûlavhar, or that are bringing critical buffs to your opponent’s army. If you get a chance to go into Círdan with Gûlavhar, then that’s almost always going to be worthwhile to take away his Terror and Fearless bubbles.

The turn before this, Gûlavhar had gone into Aragorn off a Heroic Combat and torn him apart. In Contest of Champions, it basically doesn't matter what happens to Gully after that

Staying safe includes a similar range of considerations as before, but has the added wrinkle that sometimes the right call is sacrificing Gûlavhar. If he gets to go in and kill your opponent’s centrepiece model, and then your opponent has to burn resources on his other heroes to beat down and kill him, then that’s probably a great trade for you overall. Remember, Gûlavhar is worth no points to your opponent in 16/18 scenarios. Opponents love to kill him, but sometimes the sacrifice is worth it to guarantee that things go your way elsewhere.

Finally, it’s worthwhile considering Hurling for a moment. Opponents are often terrified that I’m going to lob a model through their battleline and into their heroes, and will devote lots of resources to preventing this. I find it surprisingly uncommon for that to actually be the best call, however, for a number of reasons. First, Hurling into a hero and dismounting them is great, but the easiest Hurl to prevent. It’s pretty transparent what you’re doing, and the wrong order of Heroic Combat resolution can often allow them to get out of the way of the flying model. It often forces you into dangerous positions as well, which can make it much less worthwhile. Dismounting a big hero is great, but not if it costs you your centrepiece model. In saying that, if your opponent doesn’t screen for this well then it can be the best option, especially against heroes with F7/magic resistance that you have little hope of actually killing. But generally, you’re better off looking for a way to get Gûlavhar in to actually kill the model rather than focussing on dismounting them.

I could have lined up a Hurl on Elessar this turn, but instead put myself in a position to actually kill one of the Gondorian heroes

Second, Hurling down the battleline is often way less effective than people think. For one, if you’re going through a bunch of combats then it will likely kill more Orcs than enemies, which dramatically reduces the value of the move. Against a D6 enemy, twice as many Orcs as enemies will die, which is rarely going to be a trade that works in your favour. That’s particularly true when you take into account the fact that you could probably have struck normally and killed 2 enemies, so something like 2 enemies and 1 Orc dead from the Hurl is actually a step down. It also requires very specific model placement, which frequently isn’t consistent with your goal of keeping Gûlavhar safe. In game two from this tournament Evan was able to take out Gûlavhar with Thranduil because I had put him in position to Hurl down the Elven line. Very much not worth it. Again, there are exceptions here (all-cavalry armies being the huge one), but generally Hurling isn’t as good of an idea as it might seem.

 

Step 4: Repeat steps 2-3 until either your opponent or Gûlavhar is dead

If the latter doesn’t happen, the former normally doesn’t take very long.

Gûlavhar could have died this turn, but he didn't. Instead, the Mahud were basically tabled within 3 turns

When to deviate from this plan?

The above steps are how a practiced Gûlavhar player will use him in 9 games out of 10. But that 10^th game does occasionally happen, and it’s important to be able to recognise it.

Firstly, there are moments where Gûlavhar has a more important strategic role to play than killing enemies/threatening their leaders. If Gûlavhar is picking up the enemy relic in Retrieval then skedaddling, that’s a great use of him. If he’s burning their supplies, or holding a key objective on the final turn, or just killing the models that would otherwise do that for your opponent, then you’re getting value from him. This is good advice for any model, but particularly relevant here because Gûlavhar can fly.

Gûlavhar is way off in the Gondor backfield, killing random dudes and allowing me to pick up a critical 2VPs

Secondly, sometimes your opponent’s heroes just don’t care about Gûlavhar very much. It doesn’t matter how big of a game you talk, Sauron is not going to be spooked into burning resources to stop Gûlavhar getting into him. Same deal with the Balrog, or with a lot of F7 heroes. Elendil is particularly annoying, as he will chop through your lines while laughing off your magic and daring Gûlavhar to take the chance. Bad times. In those instances, Gulavar becomes a glorified warrior-killer, chowing through as many dudes as he can every turn. I’ve faced both Sauron and the Balrog in recent tournaments (captured here and here), and in each game Gûlavhar went wherever the big scary monster wasn’t and killed everything he touched. It’s very hard to get your full 200 points worth of value from doing this, but do you know what else stops you getting value from Gûlavhar? Getting him punted by the Balrog.

Gûlavhar feels a bit wasted killing Goblins, but that's certainly better than facing that Balrog!

There and back again

If it wasn’t made clear by the previous three-and-a-half-thousand words, I adore Gûlavhar. He’s one of those rare models that dominates a game, but without being overpowered. In the hands of an experienced player he will do amazing things, but misplay him for one turn and he’s gone. It’s a wild ride, and one I recommend to any player. Just, be sure to get some practice games in first.

Moments like this are some of the most exhilarating parts of this game for me

I hope you enjoyed this extremely deep dive into the strategy behind one of MESBG’s most interesting profiles. Until next time, may your Gûlavhar never flub his rolls!