The Fall of Eagles: Cancon Day 2

The Eagles swoop in, but there are some big heroes to counterattack this time

After a big Day 1, I was feeling great: my Eagles had won all three games, and I could guarantee that they wouldn’t be facing Dale or Smaug for at least my 4^th round. However, there were plenty of scary matchups still to come for my birds, starting with one of the scariest of all: the Balrog of Morgoth.

Game 4: Depths of Moria in Reconnoitre, 12:3

Some excellent pink Moria to face my Eagles

The Balrog is scary for any list to deal with, but particularly so for a list like mine that physically cannot hit F10 (and that relies on big durable monsters to win the game). And Noah had had a terrifying run to the top tables, so he clearly knew how to use the list. However, I did have a few tricks up my wings that could allow me to take out the game.

First, the scenario meant that I just needed to get a single bird off the far edge (almost impossible for Noah to stop) to get a substantial points lead. As such, if I could quarter either the Goblins or myself before Noah could get the Balrog off then I’d almost certainly take out the win.

And second, Eagle shenanigans are excellent at shutting down the Balrog. If I could keep it pinned down and not killing anything for a few turns, then I could potentially do overwhelming damage to the Goblins before it had any chance to swing the tide back to the Depths.

Things started well in that regard. Both sides got most of their army on very quickly, with Noah surging up in one extended block on my right flank. 

Goblins surge through a chokepoint

Getting to move second on a critical turn, my Eagles swung into action to deploy my patented ‘Barge-Balrog-proning’ tactics. These start by diving an Eagle in to face a lone Goblin next to the Balrog. If I win the duel roll then I can Barge the Goblin into the Balrog, forcing the Balrog to Make Way. Assuming I’ve set it up correctly, then there won’t be sufficient space for the Balrog to Make Way 3” in a straight line, and it will be knocked prone. Follow it up with a Piercing Cry and the poor ‘Rog will be stuck on the ground for multiple turns, unable to contribute while my Eagles shred the Goblins. It’s a nasty, nasty trick, but fighting fair against a F10 monster with free Heroic Combats is a recipe for disaster.

The Balrog is being represented by the blank base there. No way for it to back away 3" if that Goblin loses!

As it turned out though, no part of that plan worked at all. To start with, both Goblins I could have Barged backwards on the first turn managed to beat their Eagles in one-on-one combats. I also had Gwaihir whipped into combat with the Balrog, although he survived with a plucky Heroic Defence. I used Piercing Cry to get away and kill a Cave Troll on the next turn, but again the Barge-Make Way-prone combo was foiled by lone Goblins winning duels against charging Eagles. Many a ‘banner reroll into a 6’ was celebrated by Noah, and many a sad 5-high was rolled by me.

From here, things started to snowball in the bad way. I was able to get Gwaihir to a safe position with a successful Move-off, but the Balrog began to rampage, killing one bird after the next. Moreover, my Eagles were apparently intimidated by this, and I had multiple turns in which not a single Eagle was able to win a fight against the lowly Goblins they were facing. As such, my grand plans of quartering the Goblins before things could go too wrong (which had worked twice in practice games) began to rapidly slip away.

These two Eagles both rolled snake-eyes to charge the Balrog. Love that for my C4+ models

In the face of looming disaster, I had to pivot: if I couldn’t quarter the Goblins, then they would have to quarter me. I had Gwaihir and an Eagle safe in the Depths backfield, ready to zip off the table with Gwaihir’s last Might whenever I needed them to. I was up on points, so what I needed was for my other three birds to die. This could only realistically be accomplished by them suiciding into the Balrog, which they did with aplomb. Durin’s Bane happily Heroic Combatted off one to swing around to about the halfway mark on the table, before Noah made a critical error.

I had won Priority and charged an Eagle into his Balrog, and he declared his free Heroic Combat. We resolved the fight, Noah won it, and I reminded him that he would be unable to Barge because he had declared the Combat. As such, he had no choice but to strike at my bird, which he left on a single wound but also Set Ablaze. I then Barged my other nearby Eagle into the ‘Rog, who promptly one-shot it.

From there, it was just a matter of time. The Balrog was about 3-4 turns of movement away from the board edge, and I needed to lose one wound on my bird in that time (my only other Eagle having darted off the board to secure the 12VP). I tried Break tests, I tried suicide by Goblins, but finally Noah rolled the second Set Ablaze S5 hit. His dice had been hot all game, and they remained hot to the last, getting the critical 6 and killing my Eagle.

This ended an absolute nailbiter of a game, with a surprisingly decisive 12:3 scoreline in my favour. It was a bloodbath, but I’m really proud of how I played. I made some small tactical errors, but overall I won the game because I assessed that I needed to change strategies and did so one turn before Noah did. That was literally the entire difference: if Noah cottons on one turn earlier and is able to keep Barging away my Eagles until the Balrog and 4 Goblins are off the board, then he wins and there’s nothing I can do about it. I did get lucky at the end with the 6 to wound, but the odds were in my favour there: the Eagle would have had to survive 4 turns of Break checks, Set Ablaze hits and maybe even strikes from Goblins (I’d been deliberately charging pairs of Goblins that couldn’t shield) in order for the Balrog to get off, and my odds of one of those things succeeding were good. An awesome game, and great to have it come down to such a critical moment in the closing stages of the game.

An unrelated but pretty army

Game 5: Battle of Fornost in Fog of War, 5:13

A carefully screened anti-fly formation

Excitingly, this win put me on one of the top tables to face the famous Kylie of the Green Dragon podcast (rip). I was looking forward to this a lot, and I did actually feel like I had a chance: Battle of Fornost obviously has some excellent answers to Eagles, but in Fog I could hopefully assassinate Kylie’s squishy heroes and keep Gwaihir alive to scrape out a narrow win. Practice games had shown me that I could beat the list, I just needed a few things to go my way.

Unfortunately, after a mixup with tables, we were swapped from a fairly ordinary board to one with a giant bridge and a bunch of other ruined buildings. It looked great, but the impact of it was that Kylie could hide Círdan and her Ranger of the North underneath the bridge and there would be no possible way for me to ever charge them. Ever. With anything.

Urgh, gross

As such, I was primarily playing for a minor loss off the bat. There was scope for a win if I was able to do crippling damage to the rest of Kylie’s list on my first few turns of combat, but given my inability to really threaten any of her heroes that was always going to be optimistic. In any case, I had to keep Gwaihir entirely unhurt in order to conserve the 12VPs that he was worth in this game, as well as Breaking Kylie and preventing her from holding her secret objective.

The game started predictably enough, with my Eagles taking up position atop the bridge while Kylie’s fragile heroes sheltered beneath them. Kylie spent a great deal of time engaging in excellent screening with her warriors, preventing me from landing anywhere with Gwaihir that could threaten both heroes with a Piercing Cry.

The flock descends to do some solid damage

In any case, I eventually committed, and Kylie pulled off a devastating Heroic Combat with both heroes to deny me a pair of Eagles. There wasn’t a huge amount I could have done to shut it down, but it still hurt. 

Glorfindel standing strong after killing two birds in one turn. Yikes

However, I was able to catch Glorfindel with a Piercing Cry and position to prevent Éarnur getting into combat either on the next turn, and over the first two turns of combat I was able to assassinate a banner and kill around 15 Elves and Gondorians.

I do some great damage on this flank, but not quite enough

From there, however, things started to crumble. Glorfindel was able to successfully Combat off an Eagle with just one other warrior in the fight (rerolling into a 6 off Lord of the West, of course) to drop two more birds, and while I was able to get more kills I wasn’t quite able to get ahead of the tempo. In the end I decided that the time had come to cut my losses and keep Gwaihir alive, and he jumped up onto a nice safe building before Heroic Combatting off a lone Hobbit to retreat to my backfield. My final Eagle then followed him onto the nice safe building, while Kylie arrayed troops around the base of the building to threaten me and head off any desperate last charges.

"I'm staying up here until we win Priority!"

In the end, the game came down to 3 relatively small things. First, on the second-last turn, Kylie’s Círdan managed to get the 6 on Call Winds on a single die to blast Gwaihir out of combat with two warriors (after he failed to resist on two dice). Second, I lost Priority and had to move first on the final turn. This meant that I had to leave my final Great Eagle atop his hiding spot rather than dropping him down to charge one model on my terrain piece and secure it with Dominant (3). And third, Kylie had picked the less likely of two possible terrain features in my backfield as her objective, and I had dumped Gwaihir onto the other one to prevent the warriors inside from securing it.

Gwaihir holding the wrong terrain piece, rip

If these three things align my way, then I probably Break Kylie back, get 3VPs for securing my objective, and deny those same points to Kylie for an extremely narrow win. If only the last two happen then it’s a draw; as it was, Kylie managed to take out a solid 5:13 win. This ended up sending her to first place, but tragically dropped me back all the way to 8^th. A reasonable outcome from a field of 79, but it always stings to drop from top table to outside the top 5.

In any case, I’m really happy with how I played this game. The matchup favours Kylie strongly, and my utter inability to touch 5-10VP worth of her models meant I was playing from a long way behind. As a result, I played a relatively conservative game, and managed to get closer than I’d expected to a win. There were definitely errors in there, but overall I think I put myself in about as good a position to win the game as I could have expected. And Kylie played an extremely tight game, denying me the small errors I needed to force my way back into it. Great stuff, and a well-deserved win.

A trio more of pretty lists to see

Tournament Review

Cancon was absolutely awesome, and I loved every minute of being there. The whole convention was absolutely packed with cool things, from tournaments of every sort to excellent second-hand markets and more boardgames and dice stores than I have seen in my life. Also, unlike a lot of market-style events, there were a surprising number of bargains to be had: I bought a copy of Seven Wonders Architects for $40, and a lovely hand-painted dice box for a pittance as well. The vibes were great, would definitely recommend.

As for the tournament itself, it went incredibly smoothly. Every one of my games ended with heaps of time to spare (8 models certainly helps with that, but so do generous timeframes for games) and everything started and finished at the appropriate times. The terrain was excellent (sad Eagle noises from Game 5 aside), and the TO rulings were quick and thought-out. 10/10, would attend Cancon again.

 

List review, and are the Eagles busted?

I’m not gonna bury the lede here: I loved this list, and I don’t actually think it’s busted overall at 850 points.

On my experience with the list, it was a total blast to play. I always had so many options and tools available to me, but they were all (with one exception) inherently unreliable. As such, I needed to set up fall-back after fall-back option, which pushed me to tighten up my play and avoid unnecessary risks.

There’s an interesting question as to whether I would have been better off with Radagast’s Alliance. 800-850 is about where I think the latter has a legitimate argument for it, with pure Eagles being definitively better in smaller games but losing its edge somewhat as you go up the points ladder. Bringing along Radagast and Beorn would have been pretty excellent, but losing two monsters and (above all) Piercing Cry is a huge deal.

Thinking through my games, I’m convinced that Game 1 needed pure Eagles to be winnable. Having three warbands instead of one would have tripled my potential Might expenditure, given that I would have needed to burn Might to get all three warbands into the tiny safe space behind my opponent’s siege weapons. Without Piercing Cry I wouldn’t have had the chance to fight back as easily on the critical third turn, and with two less models it would have been really hard to hang in there as the going got tough.

These turns would have been much worse without Piercing Cry and 8 models

Game 2 was probably going my way anyway, but Piercing Cry really shut it down for poor Jacob. And Game 3 was also dictated substantially by Piercing Cry, as well as by having an extra two birds to go and clear out the Rohirrim from multiple objectives while my main force brawled over the right objective. 6 extra Might would have been clutch, but those two extra birds were even better.

Game 4 is tricky to assess, because having a model that could fight the Balrog (Beorn) would have been great. But Piercing Cry was clutch to slow down the beasty for a turn, and once I had committed one Eagle to going off the board it gets really tricky for my 5 remaining models to keep the Balrog and Goblins contained. In particular, it becomes much harder for me to threaten to quarter the Goblins, which didn’t happen this time but is an entirely viable option for this list that possibly wouldn’t have been present for Radagast’s Alliance.

And finally, how would Game 5 have been changed? One immediate benefit would have been that Kylie couldn’t have hid her fragile heroes in the tunnel, because Beorn could have transformed into a human and hacked his way into them. That just forces Kylie to protect them in one of the other untouchable buildings in her backfield though, so I don’t gain a heap by doing so. The terrain had messed me around quite badly here, and it was going to remain a nightmare even if I could clear the bridge out. Having Beorn available does give me a better shot at taking on Glorfindel or Éarnur, but again I’m not sure that’s quite the fight I want to be picking.

Beorn at least could have killed this guy

Moreover, Piercing Cry was clutch to give me one full turn of killing without the intervention of Kylie’s heroes. That was what got me so close to Breaking her, and without the Cry it becomes very hard to win the tempo game we were playing. I would also have suffered from falling behind much faster (losing two Eagles early is a lot more devastating when that takes you to 4 models remaining than to 6), and would have had the awkward position of wanting to protect Beorn, Radagast and Gwaihir for VPs while still relying on them for damage.

Overall, it’s hard to say that any of my games would have been easier with Radagast’s Alliance, and at least two of them were much simpler for being pure Eagles.

And finally, the big question: are the Eagles busted?

As a whole faction, at 850 points, I would be inclined to say no. 4 of my 5 games felt very open to either side winning, and poor Jacob’s Legions of Mordor list has an awful lot of hard counters floating around. If anything, I would say that I probably had the list disadvantage in 3/5 games, with good scenario rolls mitigating that in two of my disadvantaged matchups. That certainly doesn’t seem like a busted faction by that metric.

However, there are caveats to this. The first is that 850 points is a level where it’s vastly easier to counter big flocks of birds, and where Piercing Cry is much less of a concern. I’ve practiced this list at 600 and found it unstoppable, and at 450 it wasn’t even fun anymore. Currently the faction strikes me as fairly balanced at 850, but much too strong at lower points.

And secondly, this is discussing the balance of the faction as a whole. But looking at specific parts of it, Piercing Cry just should not work the way it does. There is no rule like it in the game and (as far as I know) there has never been a rule like this, and for good reason. Just stopping most of your opponent’s army from moving is devastating, and while there is counterplay (as shown by Kylie in the final game), it’s still incredibly oppressive even with that.

None of these heroes even get to move this turn. At all. How cracked is that?

I think that honestly the best solution to the problem of Piercing Cry is to go back to the drawing board and reassess the problem it’s supposed to solve. I think the purpose of Piercing Cry is to make up for only having 3 Might by giving you one more guaranteed turn of moving first. To my mind, the easy way to achieve this without taking away the ability of a whole army to move is to just turn it into a Pits-esque Surprise Attack. That way you get to guarantee a turn of moving first (probably essential for a list with 3 Might that desperately needs its charge bonuses), without taking away all your opponent’s agency. And even better, it would scale with the points level, so it wouldn’t be vastly stronger at 450 than 850 like the current rule.

I also don’t think that GW have entirely thought through the new Barge rules. They clearly intended to buff it, but it’s unclear to me that they intended to buff it quite as hard as they did. Some FAQs to narrow its scope would be welcome and well-deserved.

Tournament Wrap-up

That brings us to the end of the Singles section of Cancon. But wait, there’s more! I’ll be back at some point with a write-up of the comically large 1400-point doubles, which were an absolutely hoot.

All told, this weekend was a great time, and an excellent start to the edition. It was such a great way to get back into the swing of things, and I'm looking forward to a big edition to come.

Until then though, may your hard matchups always come on decent tables!