Alongside the excitement of the Armies of Middle Earth book, GW have seen fit to grace us with a new Matched Play Guide! These two books have had a seismic effect on the game, and no prediction of what is going to end up on top once everything shaken out can be much more than guesswork.
But sometimes
guesswork is fun, and today I'm here to provide the best analysis I possibly
can on how the new Matched Play Guide will shake up the meta.
Of note, I'm
ignoring any changes from the new Armies book in this analysis. Yeah, Dale may
love that Dragons of the North is available as target practice, but it’s the
reduced proliferation of shooting scenarios that I'll be focussing on for them
here.
This article will
start by looking out how the returning scenarios from last edition have been
updated, before diving into the 6 exciting new ones we've received. I'll then
be assessing what impact all this novelty will have on the meta in general
terms, before closing out with a discussion of how some of the top armies of
the Meta That Was are likely to fare in the Meta That Will Be.
That's quite a lot to get through, so without further ado let's dive straight into our 12 returning scenarios from last edition!
What is old is new again: changes to the 12 returning scenarios
Starting from the
top, Capture and Control has had no changes, besides having its scoring scaled
to 20 points. Fair enough!
Breakthrough is
similarly unaltered, but does now award banner VPs (2 of them) and also has VPs
for killing your opponent’s most expensive non-general model. How does this
play out with models that are equivalently-priced, or if your
second-most-expensive model is Bombadil, or for models purchased ‘as a pair’
like Elladan and Elrohir? Absolutely no idea.
Lords of Battle has
made it easier to regain Might points (your hero just needs to be in the combat
with another enemy hero that’s killed, not to strike the final blow), and
awards a couple of VPs for killing enemy heroes.
Assassination is
now a night-fighting mission, so shooting will be shorter-ranged and more
dangerous. It also now awards points for keeping both your assassin and the
enemy’s target alive, which is interesting.
Contest has had a
substantial rework, with three big changes. First, you now pick a Champion at
the start of the game, rather than your leader being forced into the role by
default. Lothlorien and Laketown players rejoice! Second, deployment is now funky:
it’s basically inverse Capture and Control deployment, with your Champion’s
warband deployed on the centre line, and every other warband needing to roll a
4+ to deploy with them or else be stuck in the back 12”. This is a substantial
change, which means only around half your warbands will be in the fray from the
beginning of the game. And if you get unlucky, that number could be even lower.
Finally, the Champion that’s behind on the kill tally can call free Heroic
Moves every turn. Cute, and a good way to reduce the chance of an early lead
snowballing into unstoppable momentum. I think this scenario is still pretty
rubbish (from my single test game of it so far), but hey, it’s improved.
Heirlooms has been
even more fundamentally changed. Instead of 6 objectives scattered all across
the board and a funky ‘roll a 6 to discover the relic’ mechanic, the 6 sites
are now in a neat hexagon around the centre of the board. The relic is secretly
pre-determined to be one of the 6, which already means that last edition’s
weird incentives not to pick up objectives are gone entirely: a site
will be just as likely to have the relic if you investigate it first or sixth,
so there won’t normally be a reason to hang onto it. This is further
accentuated by investigating ‘blank’ sites being worth 1VP each – not enough to make up for not finding the
relic, but enough to encourage you to search them all. This scenario will still
be a bit luck-dependent, but hopefully much less so than before.
Command the
Battlefield is basically unchanged, with some new VPs for quartering the enemy
as the biggest shift.
Retrieval has
shifted the relics 5” closer to the centre of the table, making old strategies
of turtling on them and shooting a bit less effective (they had also already
been weakened a little by being unable to stand on objective markers). That
puts the objectives about 26” apart from each other, and about 16” away from
the opponent’s deployment zone. There
are also now points for hero kills, and some minor clarifications of how the
relic-related obligations to return your own relic to its starting position
play out.
Seize the Prize(s)
has had another big rework, and even a name-change! That new ‘s’ is doing a lot
of work, with the singular existing prize becoming three that are spread across
the centreline. Digging them up is an Intelligence check (that can’t be Might-ed),
and you’re hoping to get hold of all three and get them off your opponent’s
board edge. Notably, this scenario is even harder to end naturally than last
edition, because it requires either for all three prizes to have been
run off a board edge (although not necessarily the same edge), or for both
players to have been quartered. Also, weirdly, it still ends mid-turn if
one of these happens: yes, this mission can still end halfway through a fight
phase! Otherwise, this should be a lot less swingy than last edition’s version,
although it will still incentivise a headlong sprint for the centre for most
lists.
Storm the Camp has
had a bunch of subtle changes that I think are very positive. The camps (and
thus deployment zones) are now 18”, effectively shaving two turns of movement
off a march to your opponent’s camp (although you’ll still start a whopping 32”
apart, so don’t expect shooting-based strategies to be too much weaker).
You now get more VPs for capturing the opponent’s camp with a hero or banner,
so pushing forward in force is more important than before. And biggest of all,
every model in your opponent’s camp (up to 5) is now worth a VP at the end of
the game. So if your opponent sits back and ‘camps’ their deployment zone, you
just need to sneak 3 models in and you’ll have overcome their score from breaking
you. A huge change, much needed.
Divide and Conquer
now has a couple VPs for getting your leader to the central objective, and is
otherwise scaled as expected. Notably though, the full objective VPs are now
awarded only for holding them uncontested, which is going to be quite hard for
the centre in particular, and is a big disincentive to any ‘sit back and
skirmish’ plans you might have had going.
Finally, Clash by Moonlight now has a central objective that awards up to 4 VPs for controlling it. This is great, as it means that kiting into a corner comes with a significant points disadvantage. They’ve also reworked the complicated and confusing ‘kill more heroes than the opponent does’ (or was it ‘have more heroes alive than they do’? I could never remember) scoring, now just awarding VPs for killing heroes. Much better.
What is new is old again: a summary of the 6 new scenarios
Stake a Claim is
kind of like an inverse Capture and Control: it has the same objectives, but you
want to hold them every turn, not just at the end of the game. It will heavily
reward lists that can rush the centreline fast, and slow lists will need to win
the objectives back fast to compete. An army that falls behind early will also
need to fit in lots of turns before ending the game to swing the score back, so
don’t go quartering your opponent too quickly. It’s impossible to win if your opponent
has double your fortification points at the end (although you can draw), so players
will need to hit that 4VP bracket at a minimum in order to compete.
Sites of Power is
funky, but it plays a lot like a weird version of Command the Battlefield. Both
players are still fundamentally playing for table quarters, but are now
emphasising the centre of each quarter rather than the edge (as in Command).
The objectives give fun special rules, with the most relevant one sometimes
giving Fearless to make break checks a tiny bit less scary. Night fighting
means it's hard to shoot your opponent off an objective from across the board,
but easier from the edges of each quarter. Generally, just play like it's
Command and you'll be fine.
Treasure Horde is
very different to anything we’ve had so far, with unique deployment zones (a
12” bubble from the centre of your back edge) and two lines of relics on the
18” lines. The central relics will be easy for each side to get to, being 6”
from their deployment zones and 18” from their opponent’s. Surprisingly, this
is also true (to a lesser extent) of the edge objectives, which will be ~9.6”
away from the close player and ~20.3” away from the far player. I had to break
out my high school trigonometry knowledge for that little titbit! In any case,
that means that a cavalry model could sprint across the board and
dismount in contact with the opponent’s side objective before they take their
second move, but this is going to be hard to execute in a way that doesn’t just
get that cavalry model slaughtered for no gain. Instead, I think the defining
characteristic of lists that will do well in this scenario are those that can
reliably pick up their own objectives (i.e. by passing Intelligence checks) and
those that can threaten to wrest their opponent’s 3 objectives off them. Access
to Compel or flying monsters (or both!) will be very nice here.
Escort the Wounded
is perhaps the wackiest of the new scenarios, with three heavy objects (wounded
soldiers) being carried by friendly models across the board to the corners of
their opponent’s deployment zone. It’s quite touching that in the brutal wars
of Middle Earth, interfering with the enemy wounded is so taboo that not only
will an enemy never dare to touch a wounded foe, but the safest spots for that
wounded soldier are deep behind the enemy lines. #wholesome
In any case, this
is a really interesting scenario that I’ve been lucky enough to play quite a
few times already. It’s a great scenario for lists with fast non-Beast infantry
models, and for those with enough models to dedicate some of them to escorting their
wounded without crumbling in the main fights. It forces lists to spread out a
fair amount, because it’s very difficult to get all three of your objectives
moving towards one flank (unless you’re playing Eagles, who love this
scenario), and is generally a good scenario for mobile lists that aren’t too
reliant on cavalry.
Lead From the
Front, on the other hand, is a very hero-focussed mission, in that only heroes
can claim the three central objectives. As a result, it’s going to be very hard
for any list to win without ways to deal with the enemy heroes, or at least
protect their own. It’s generally quite hard to prevent most heroes getting
within 3” of a central objective by the end of the game, so players will either
need to kill those heroes or trump them with their own. This scenario favours
more expensive heroes, but also heavily incentivises having at least 3 heroes,
because two-warband lists will be basically conceding 4VPs to their opponents.
While the emphasis on killing enemy heroes (including getting Might back for
doing so) theoretically encourages aggressive hero play, I think in most
matchups heroes will be doing a lot of Leading From the Back: armies will generally
only have 3-4 models that can claim objectives, so keeping them alive will be
absolutely essential.
Finally,
Convergence is an interesting and different spin on Divide and Conquer, with
the same deployment and a similar race-to-the-centre dynamic that players will
need to balance with their desire to sandwich an enemy half between their whole
army. Unlike in Divide, force also needs to be devoted to tracking down the 4
relics, so the race to the centre won’t necessarily be able to take the most
direct route. This scenario has felt very interesting and different so far, and
has played really well in my test games. It will reward careful prioritisation
and strategic play, and I think the winning strategy will tend to involve
hunting the relics ASAP. It is possible to win when behind on relics, but it’s
an inherently more risky strategy that will depend on the game continuing
longer after break.
The shape of things to come: general
changes to the meta from the scenarios
With all the nitty
gritty out of the way, let’s zoom out to think about these 18 new/new-ish
scenarios are going to impact the meta of the first 6 months of this edition.
Before we dive in
though, some caveats: it’s way too early to know for sure on any of
this, because no one has played more than a dozen or so games with the new
missions at this stage. Some of these conclusions won’t pan out, because
inevitably I (and every other content creator) will have missed subtle nuances
in the scenarios that only become clear from repeated practice games. That’s
particularly true because I’m not taking into account the new Armies book at
all here, so conclusions like ‘shooting will be worse’ is ignoring the
possibility of more fire-breathing Dragons or Avenger Bolt Throwers. And
finally, I’m making a lot of estimations of how much certain scenarios favour
shooting, or mobility, or spreading out. There are debatable edge cases for each
of those assessments, so those numbers should be treated as ballpark estimates
rather than the word of Eru.
In any case, let’s
dive in to see some of our winners and losers!
Winner: Intelligence
Previously,
Intelligence was useful for Hurls and resisting Spectres and basically nothing
else. Now, it’s critically important for 2 of the 24 scenarios. I’m not saying
that lists with nothing but dumb Goblins will be out of the game in those
scenarios, but fitting in a couple of higher Intelligence troops will now be a
listbuilding consideration in a way it wasn’t previously. On that note, did you
know Warriors of Rohan are smarter than those of Gondor? Minas Tirith, City of
Himbos.
Loser: Beasts
Previously, the
restriction on Beast models picking up objectives mattered not a jot. Now, it’s
a real impediment in a full quarter of the scenarios. That’s huge, especially
for models like Crebain that were primarily taken for their objective utility.
Even in a lot of 1-day events, you can expect to have one game where you’ll
wish you’d taken a Warg Rider over a Crebain, which was basically never true
before this book. In saying that, Crebain, Bat Swarms, Wild Wargs and Cave
Drakes are all still excellent enough to be fielded anyway, despite this nerf.
War Bats, Warg Chieftains, both kinds of Spiders and War Drakes will suffer
more, although they should still be good in other scenarios at least.
Mixed bag: Aggressive heroes
Previously, there
were no scenarios that really required you to play aggressively with your
heroes. There were points for killing your opponent’s in To the Death and Fog,
and getting them off a board edge in Recon, but you were more incentivised to
play them passively than to risk them in general. Now, the presence of Contest
and Assassination is pushing players to get out and kill stuff with their
heroes, while Storm the Camp and Lead From the Front both incentivise heroes to
get into riskier parts of the board. In saying that, the presence of VPs for
killing heroes in many scenarios now also disincentivises this, and
encourages more defensive play. Ultimately, the winner here is likely to be
lists like Ugluk’s Scouts that can either fling their heroes forward or protect
them easily, depending on what the scenario incentivises.
Winner: Lists that like spreading
out
The new scenarios
have subtly increased the number of missions that favour spreading out relative
to those that let you clump up (by about 17%). While new missions like Lords or
Assassination will still give ‘bubble’ lists plenty of opportunities to play
their favourite boring grinds, the balance has definitely shifted to a majority
of missions requiring you to spread out to play them.
Loser: Shooting
Perhaps a bigger
nerf for that style of list is that shooting is being brought back down to
where it was last edition. Before this book, around 4 of the 6 scenarios (67%)
favoured shooting. Now, that number has tumbled all the way down to 9 out of
24, or 37.5% instead. That’s a huge impact, and one that should have a sizeable
effect on the meta. Lists can no longer assume that they’ll get to set up a
nice gunline in most of their games, and will instead have to actively move
towards the enemy in at least half of their missions. This is probably the
biggest change from the new book, and I am so here for it. Down with the
gunlines!
Winner: Armies with no banners
I don’t want to
overstate this point, because banner VPs are still in 10 of the 24 new
scenarios, and still make up about 1 in 18 VPs available across all scenarios.
That’s a big increase from last edition, when they were in 3/18 scenarios, and
made up a measly 1 in 36 VPs. But it’s also a big decrease from the
first half of this edition, in which they were in half of all scenarios and
were worth 1/12 of all VPs. And notably, those stats are also counting the 3VPs
for claiming a camp with a banner in Storm the Camp, which I expect one would
only ever get in a game that you’re otherwise thrashing the opponent (and thus
won’t be swinging tight games).
Overall, lists that
can’t access banner VPs are definitely feeling a lot happier than earlier this
edition. That’s likely to be especially true if veto becomes a bigger part of
the tournament scene again, as I hope will be the case (see this article
from last edition on what veto does for a tournament meta). Armies than can take
banners should absolutely still do so in all but the most awkward of points
values (most points values will remain awkward for 75-point Moria Drums), but
those that can’t will be feeling great about this change.
Loser: Token cavalry
Previously, the two
scenarios that really incentivised having access to a couple of fast models
(Supplies and Recon) were great for cavalry, because they could exploit their
speed, didn’t need to hold a point and didn’t need to dismount. Fog also had a
similar effect, in that the point the cavalry needed to hold was generally not
obvious to your opponent. Now, that remains true of those scenarios but of
literally no others. This immediately makes the classic ‘token cavalry’ beloved
of many factions dramatically worse. It’s still not necessarily the end of the
world to dismount and pick up a relic, and cavalry will still be useful for
threatening backfield objectives and the like. But threatening objectives
requires you to be able to push quite a lot of force across the map, and
dismounting means that you paid the mount’s 6-9 points as a temporary mobility
buff and didn’t get its full value. Token cavalry will still be important and
worthwhile including, but they’re noticeably worse than before this book.
Winner: Fast, non-Beast infantry
(and Heroic March)
If this sounds like
a niche category, that’s because it kind of is. But if your army is capable of
accessing models like Eagles (famously not Beasts), Dragons, or Uruk-hai
Scouts, then you should seriously consider it because they are excellent at the
new scenario pools. And similarly, access to Heroic March is worth much more
than it was before this book dropped, because it allows your basic battlelines
(your best bets for a lot of the objectives) to move much faster than is
otherwise possible.
Mixed bag: Model count
This may seem like
a surprise, with the addition of scenarios like Lords of Battle and Contest of
Champions seeming to skew things much more towards elite forces with big
heroes. But overall, the balance between scenarios that favour such lists and
those that support hordes has stayed relatively consistent, and actually moved
a tiny bit towards the hordes. So if you were wondering whether Lords returning
would bring with it the Vanquishers of old… Nah, probably not. Those days are
passed.
Loser: Specific mission plans
Previously, if you
attended a 6-game event then you knew exactly what missions you would play. You
might or might not know the order (with later missions obviously being more
important to build for), but you knew that you needed to be ready for every single
scenario. If a list couldn’t plausibly win one of the scenarios into most
lists, then it was a bad list.
Now though, there
are 24 scenarios. This means two things: first, it’s much harder to plan
for every scenario; and second, it’s a lot less of an issue to be bad at one or
more of them. Something like Ugluk’s Scouts could have a plan for all 6
rulebook scenarios, but is realistically going to struggle with Contest (and
Lords to a lesser extent) regardless of how they build. But on the flipside,
that’s only a 1/24 or 1/12 chance in any given game. It’s very plausible to
skate through a tournament and play neither of those scenarios, and building
with that in mind is not necessarily a bad idea. And of course, veto will make
this even easier (although it will also reduce the number of easy wins
available to the Scouts, as discussed here).
Winner: All of us
You know I gotta
end the section on a wholesome note!
But seriously, this book is excellent. The Armies of Middle Earth may have had some disappointments, but this one is like Christmas come early. All of the good scenarios are back basically unchanged, all of the bad ones have had some pretty great face lifts that look to be addressing at least some of their problems, and the new scenarios have all felt really fun in my practice games so far. The problematic parts of the first six scenarios (favouring banners and shooting) have been heavily mitigated too. I don’t know if I could quite give the book a 10/10 (I don’t like the new proliferation of VPs for killing heroes, for example), but a solid 9 or 9.5 feels very appropriate.
The shape of things to come: how (some of) the best lists of the edition
so far will be impacted
And finally, it’s
time for the most important part of the article, where I pontificate in a
vacuum about ‘Dale down, Eagles up’ and we ignore any nuance in the previous
3000 words. All above caveats do apply though: I’m ignoring Armies of Middle
Earth, these are very general takes, and above all, it’s too early to know
for certain.
Right, that’s done,
now let’s give some hot takes!
Winner: Eagles
Cacaw! It’s a very
good day to have an entire army of hyper-mobile infantry models that aren’t
Beasts. Lead From the Front is gonna be a tricky scenario for pure Eagles,
thanks to only having a single hero, but even then it’s not like Eagles have
ever struggled to kill heroes. And they will excel in scenarios like
Contest, Assassination, Escort the Wounded, Treasure Hoard… the list goes on. And
if you’re fielding one of the many lists that can drop in Gwaihir, strongly consider
doing so, because he is excellent in every single one of the 18 added
scenarios. Aside from the looming threat of Dragonfire, I think the future
looks bright for everyone’s favourite (lol) birds.
Loser: Army of the White Hand
Jumping from buffed
birds to nerfed ones, this list really enjoyed its Crebain, and will be sad to
see them become less relevant in most scenarios. Centre-line deployment is also
bad for its shooting and Lightning Strike, and that’s going to be a lot more
prevalent now than before. I expect this list to remain a powerful and flexible
force, but one that should be down a little from its heights.
Mixed bag: Depths
I’m not gonna lie,
relying on 5” Move Goblins for mission play isn’t entirely ideal. And missions
like Lords and Contest will depend heavily on which build of Depths is being
used, with the Balrog maybe being encouraged a little more to deal with them. But
more centreline deployment is good, as is the lists’ plentiful access to March
and crazy numbers. I think that if anything brings down Depths’ winrate, it’s
more likely to be players pivoting to generic Moria for some variety rather
than this list actually being any worse.
Winner: Ugluk’s Scouts
The Scouts may have
been great at the existing scenario pool, but guess what, they’re even better
at the new ones. An increase in demand for fast infantry is great for
them, their horde playstyle will be as good as ever, and even the shift to less
shooting scenarios is probably a net positive for them – especially because the new proliferation of
Night Fighting rules makes massed Uruk Bows a terrifying prospect. Contest is pretty
close to an auto-loss against most lists, but otherwise things are looking excellent
for one of my favourite armies.
Loser: Garrison of Dale
Leaving the best for last, Dale has taken a massive hit from the reduced importance of shooting. They’re a powerful enough list that they’ll definitely still be competitive (massed infantry with +1 to wound is never bad), but overall it’s a very bad day to be someone planning to gun people off the board with triple Windlances. I’m sure we all will feel very sad about this.
Conclusion: What a time to be alive!
It’s an exciting time to be part of the MESBG scene, and I
can hardly wait to dive even deeper into these new scenarios with more practice
games. Between the new armies and the new lists, there is simply too much to
test out!
But rest assured, there’ll be plenty of content from me in
the coming months. I’m attending a number of high-points upcoming events, and
am excited to be trying and writing up all my experiences from those. I’ve got
a long-delayed (and now hastily-updated) Ugluk’s Scouts tactica coming out
soon, as well as an article arguing that they’re much stronger than Lurtz’
Scouts. And of course, I have so many thoughts on the new Moria
profiles, so expect content on those. Some of the first articles I ever wrote
were exploring these beasties, and it’s very exciting to be analysing them in
somewhat of a renaissance.
Until then though, may your favourite armies be on the right side of the scenario changes!
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