I regret to inform you that you should never take the Morgul Blade (with data!); Part 3 of How to Build your Witch King

Your opponent's Smaug when you say you have a Morgul Blade

The Morgul Blade is one of the most interesting options in the Witch King’s potential arsenal. For a measly ten points, it effectively gives you the Drain Soul ability of the Necromancer and King of the Dead for a single turn. The thought of ganking a Mumak and taking out half the opponent’s army in one shot is very appealing, and I see a lot of players recommending it for that alone. On the other hand, it’s the sort of purchase that may end up doing nothing at all for players in some (or many) games. How do you assess the value of such a swingy upgrade option?

To do so, I’m going to be starting by looking at the four benefits that I can see in taking a Morgul Blade. From there, we’ll be going back to our dataset of 26 tournament games with the Witch King and seeing how many times I would or could have gotten value from the Blade. Before doing this analysis, I assumed that it would have been game-winning in some matchups and useless in others. Did that assumption play out in practice?

Before that though, let’s dive into…

Studying the blade: the four benefits of taking the Morgul Blade

The first benefit is the most widely-applicable, and it’s actually a psychological one. When you have a Morgul Blade available to you, enemies will be less keen to spend their Fate to block other damage because they may need it to fend off an insta-kill from your Witch King. If the model taking the damage is the enemy leader (or a targeted/protected model in Assassinate or Fog of War) then merely having the Morgul Blade could sneak you some VPs. Having the Blade could also force more conservative play from enemy heroes, although whether that’s a benefit or just forcing your opponent to do what they should have done anyway will depend heavily on matchup.

Shagrat may not have burned his Fate against Sully if the WK had a Morgul Blade (although he died anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered)

Moving up the value spectrum (and perhaps down the probability spectrum), having a Morgul Blade could allow your Witch King to take out a 1-Fate hero on a turn they would otherwise have survived. The classic example would be doing two Wounds to a Captain, who then can no longer rely on their Fate to survive. It’s obviously even more exciting if done to an Elendil or Gil-galad, but the number of circumstances in which your Witch King is winning a fight and forcing multiple wounds through on those heroes is likely to be limited.

Better still is when you’re up against the handful of low-or-no-Fate monsters that are competitively viable. Going into the Spider Queen with a Morgul Blade would be awesome, and Gûlavhar would be terrified of a single Wound sneaking through his Heroic Defence. Even the Watcher in the Water would be very concerned about fluffing its Fate or taking two Wounds from your Witch King, as it could go all the way from 6 Wounds down to 0 in one fell swoop.

The Witch King one-shots a Spider Queen with a little help from his friends

Finally, the dream: beating a Mumak, Balrog or Smaug in combat and then Wounding it with the Morgul Blade. That’s probably game-winning right there, and is what everyone has in mind when contemplating a Morgul Blade.

Of course, there are a few challenges with these latter three scenarios. Firstly, you have to win the fight. That’s probably quite doable against your average Captain (or even most Mumaks), but becomes dramatically harder against proper combat heroes, let alone a Balrog or Smaug. And in those circumstances, losing a fight is probably disastrous; with only 1 Wound, a Witch King will be lucky to survive a single botch against one of these scary combat pieces.

Next, you have to do a Wound. That’s again probably easy against a Captain, potentially hard against a big hero, and likely very hard against a Balrog. If you spend the points on the Blade, send your Witch King in to Strike up against a scary opposing model, and then flub your dice on the 3-4 Wound rolls you generally get, it will feel pretty bad.

Finally, the model has to have otherwise been going to survive. If you do 1 Wound to a Captain after Fate, then the Morgul Blade was awesome. If you do 2 (including through the Attacks of any other models in the fight) then it’s useless, because the Captain would have died anyway. This element is paradoxically much easier to fulfil against the big super-monsters that are otherwise hard to take on, as it’s very unlikely that a Balrog was going down in a single combat without the Morgul Blade.

The Balrog rampages through my lines while the Witch King is a long way away from combat

An additional consideration that we should mention is whether the matchup is already a favourable one. The obvious example here is facing Mumaks, which are clearly very vulnerable to a good Morgul shankin’ but are also terrified of facing spellcasters like the Witch King anyway, thanks to Compel being busted against War Beasts. Similarly, Morgul Blades are great against Mordor Trolls. You know what else is great against Mordor Trolls? Literally anything. When considering how useful a Morgul Blade could be, it’s worthwhile considering how likely we are to win a game with it that we weren’t already likely to win.

So, those are our 4 use cases for a Morgul Blade. Honestly, writing this up has gone some way to convincing me that a Blade would be a worthwhile addition to my Witch Kings in future. But enough about potential uses, let’s look at some data. How often would the Morgul Blade have made a difference in the past?

The Data: would it have helped?

As mentioned last time, I’ve played 26 tournament games with the Witch King, none with the Morgul Blade. 22 of those involved a Witch King on horse with the Crown (with either 10 or 12 Will, as discussed last time) and 4 had a ‘budget’ Witch King casting spells from the backline. I’ve also played a number of practice games with the Morgul Blade, which haven’t resulted in any great results (and aren’t included in this analysis anyway, because I don’t have handy written records to refer back to for them).

Out of those 26 tournament games, there were 13 games in which the Witch King ended up facing an enemy hero or multi-Wound model in combat, such that he could have theoretically used a Morgul Blade if he had one.

Of those 13 games, there were 5 in which the enemy was killed in a single turn of combat even without the Morgul Blade, thanks to the Witch King himself or (generally) the supporting Attacks of his buddies.

This Crebain died quite handily even without a Morgul Blade to guarantee the kill

Of the remaining 8 games, 7 saw the enemy hero or multi-Wound model suffer no Wounds from the Witch King after Fate.

The final game was at Clash, and did see my Witch King do a single Wound to Groblog after Fate (i.e. perfect Morgul Blade territory). However, this was actually on the third turn of combat between them, and I would absolutely have used the Blade on the first turn if I had it (I’d charged into a Transfixed Groblog, won the fight, and absolutely flubbed my Wound rolls). So in practice, I would have wasted the Blade on that first turn, and then subsequently been cursing myself on the third turn of combat.

Groblog survives a clash with my Witch King while the Moria monsters rampage

The unfortunate conclusion here is that the Witch King having the Morgul Blade across all 26 games would have translated into no extra models being slain. That’s not a great starting point for the Blade’s viability, but let’s dive a little deeper.

To start with, what about my first use for the Blade? In other words, could it ever have forced an opponent to not spend Fate to prevent a Wound on a model that subsequently survived the game, and whose survival was worth VPs?

Out of 26 games, there is one circumstance where this could have occurred. I was facing an Elessar/Hurin combo in Fog of War, and Wounded Hurin with a Black Dart. If I had had a Morgul Blade, it is possible that Nick (my opponent) might have chosen not to spend Hurin’s Fate to block this Wound, and instead saved it to hedge against the potential Morgul shanking. If that had happened, the game would have swung from a minor loss to a draw.

Hurin is hiding behind that building, having narrowly escaped unwounded

In practice though, the Witch King was nowhere near Hurin, with the main melee of our battlelines (both unbroken) separating the two heroes. We were also rapidly running out of time, and ended up having only a single turn left afterwards. Nick might have chosen not to spend his Fate, but he’s a savvy player that’s won a number of events. I expect that he would have looked at the board, seen the low likelihood of the Witch King ever getting near Hurin and the 4VP swing that letting the Wound through would create, and played exactly as he did regardless.

Ultimately, I’m fairly certain that having a Morgul Blade in all 26 games would have given me no extra VPs from this effect.

The other possible impact of having a Morgul Blade is forcing more restraint on the part of enemy heroes. This is basically impossible to assess, save by noting that in 11/26 games I was taking the Witch King alongside Gûlavhar, so opponents were definitely playing conservatively with their heroes already. Otherwise, it is possible that the presence of a Morgul Blade may have forced some of the remaining opponents to protect their heroes better. Again, this relies primarily on an opponent making a mistake (in practice, I wouldn’t have killed any of those heroes with the Morgul Blade anyway), but it is possible that it may have occurred. Alternatively, it may have convinced otherwise over-bold opponents into correctly heading off my assassination runs, so there’s potentially a mixed effect here. Or none at all, it’s very hard to say.

Anyone playing against this list should be keeping their heroes safe wherever possible

Finally, all of this analysis assumes that I’d play the Witch King exactly the same even if I did have a Morgul Blade, which could be incorrect. After all, in the 15 games in which he didn't fight multi-Wound targets he definitely could have, and perhaps I would have received a benefit from the Blade if I had had it. Those 26 games included games against the Balrog, a super Troll Chieftain, a Boromir, a Sauron, and lots of other potentially-vulnerable heroes that I could have gotten huge value out of the Blade by shanking.

However, this strikes me as a sunk-cost fallacy. There are very good reasons, as discussed, that I'm not aiming to put my F5/1 Wound lynchpin army leader– whose magic and Harbinger I generally depend on– into powerful enemy models. Even if I successfully Transfix the Balrog or the uber-Troll-Chieftain, going in with the WK means I'm only one whiff and lost Move-off away from that super scary monster going right back into the WK and likely killing my leader. I could have played differently if I had the Blade, and I may have gotten more value out of it if so. But frankly, I think that would have been an error, and may actually have lost me games.

The Morgul Blade could have been incredible against these Bears... or I could have gotten my Witch King killed

The unfortunate conclusion from all of this is that in 26 tournament games, I would have gotten no value from it in at least 25/26 games. I could have gotten value from it in 1 game, assuming my opponent made a substantial misplay. Realistically, I think that that's a bad assumption, and that overall I would have received a benefit from the Morgul Blade in 0/26 games.

Importantly, that sentence is also asking whether I would have received any benefit at all, not a net benefit; i.e., it’s asking whether the Morgul Blade would have done anything versus whether it would have done more than having an additional 1-2 models or an extra two Will/Fate. Once we take that aspect of the question into account, I clearly was better off not having it for all of those 26 games.

It's looking grim for the Morgul Blade here. Obviously 26 tournament games is not a huge data set, and I imagine other players will have great stories of the time that their Witch King fought off and insta-killed the Balrog. I’m sure those stories are legitimate, and you may well find them persuasive. I can only speak to my experience and the data I have, and unfortunately that is quite unequivocal.

I've used the Witch King against the Balrog many times, and they have only ever duelled each other once

Wrap up: maybe Weathertop was a one-time thing

I want to like the Morgul Blade. It's very cool, and it feels like it has a niche. Other lists that want to use their WK more in combat may get more value out of it, perhaps alongside a Fell Beast (maybe). Or perhaps triple-caster Mordor lists that have the Witch King as their primary combat piece might get to use it a bit more reliably.

But overall, for 'standard' WKs that are primarily casters with a bit of combat flex, I think it just isn't worthwhile. It incentivises aggressive, duelling play off a character that isn't great at that, and has much better things they could be doing.

So in conclusion, should you field the Morgul Blade? In a competitive, optimised list, I think the answer is no.

In any case, I'd love to hear your views on the Morgul Blade, and the Witch King more generally. Share your best stories of epic kills with it, so I can feel envious!

And until next time, may your Witch King always be in combats that favour him!