Putting meat on the menu AND the podium: How you can win with Ugluk’s Scouts

 

The age of men is over, the time of the menu has come

Ugluk’s Scouts have been quietly rising up the meta ladder recently, putting in solid performances in the hands of top players (including carrying me to podiums at Dagor Dagorath and Clash) and improving their winrate week on week. And as we'll discuss next time, they are basically just better than their temporally-translated cousins in Lurtz’ Scouts.

But what is behind this success, and how can you leverage it yourself? After all, at first glance the list is nothing special; it’s just a hodgepodge of basic Orcs and Uruk Scouts, with special rules that are mostly replicated from last edition and no heroes above F5. What’s making them tick?

To find out, we’ll be diving into listbuilding for this faction, before talking through its core tactics, how to apply them to the 6 scenarios, and how to use Ugluk himself. I’m going to be assuming you mostly know the relevant profiles and army rules, though I will dive into their little quirks where relevant. So if you only skimmed over the list when it first dropped, go have a deeper read now and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Wow, that was fast! Either you’re a really quick reader, or written articles are perpetually in an indefinite state of waiting. Huh. With those interesting philosophical implications breezed past, let’s dive right in to building a list for this army.

Listbuilding

A classic Ugluk's Scouts build, which took me to two consecutive podiums earlier this year

There are five key things to bear in mind when writing your Ugluk’s Scouts lists.

First, balance your Orc and Uruk numbers pretty evenly. There are good arguments for going slightly harder on either (more Orcs mean better combat endurance, more Uruks mean better flexibility), but in general you want to be keeping the balance pretty even. This also impacts your hero selection, as you’ll want to take an Orc hero for every Uruk hero at any points level where doing so won’t negatively impact your model count.

Second, your Orc heroes should probably just be generic Captains. Grishnakh is noticeably worse than last edition, with a heftier price tag, nerfed Strike, less Might and a pretty mediocre special rule that doesn’t synergise with his role in the list. And Snaga is arguably even worse than he was previously, when he was considered one of the worst Captain-equivalents in the game. Basic Orc Captains are tougher, cheaper, and bring Heroic March, and all three of those things are big benefits in this list. You won’t be hugely sabotaging your chances by taking the named Orc heroes, but your list will be just a bit worse.

Third, every Orc should have a spear (or banner). Orc bows are a trap, because you’d rather have your Uruks shooting than your Orcs. Shields are also largely a waste, because you would actually prefer shots and strikes to be targeted at your 6-point Orcs than your 9-point Uruks. And two-handed weapons (commonly recommended for this list online) are even worse here than in other factions, because they have anti-synergy with your other bonuses to wound: you’re more interested in winning the fight reliably because you’re already likely to kill when you win, and you’re less interested in wound bonuses because they’re less necessary to get the kills. Save two-handing for things like Elves that are likely to win the fight and need the hitting power.

If any of these Elves lose their fights they're pretty dead regardless, even without a two-handed weapon 

Instead, spears are the lifeblood of this list. As we will touch on next week, they open up huge amounts of flexibility that wouldn’t otherwise be available, and you will never be able to get enough of them. Horde armies are some of the best users of spears, because you’re constantly working to get more of your numbers into the fray. You’ll often want some of your Orcs on the frontline (as we’ll discuss later), but a spear doesn’t make a model any worse in that role. Take all spears, you won’t regret it.

Fourth, max your bows with Uruk archers. S3 bows that hit on a 4+ are pretty good for 1 point apiece, and you should take as many as you possibly can. The chance to outshoot enemy lists is key to how this army competes on To the Death and Fog of War, and there’s no real reason not to spam these out. Give the rest of your Scouts shields, or even run them ‘naked’ when you need to save a point or two to fit in an extra model.

The massed shooting forces the Gondorians and Elves to move out towards me and get swarmed

Finally, leave the Drummer at home but take at least one banner (and definitely two by 600 points). The Drummer isn’t really worthwhile here, because he only affects half your army (and the faster half at that), and you will have buckets of Might for Marches anyway. On the other hand, the second banner is critical. It gives you extra dice in the fights where you can’t bring your numbers to bear, and (more importantly) gives you a starting VP edge in Supplies and To the Death. Death in particular is made wildly easier by having a second banner, as it means that most armies will need to cross the field to your or risk losing by 1VP.

With all that put together, you end up with a powerful and optimised list, that probably looks something like the list above. You can viably run this army as low as 300 and as high as 750, and it is extremely powerful within that band. Big numbers, huge hitting power, solid shooting, great mobility, lots of Might, excellent objective play… It’s just a solid list with surprisingly few weaknesses. But how do we leverage this power on the field?

Core tactics

The core power of Ugluk’s Scouts is found in their combination of huge numbers, Animosity, and mobility. And all three of these things are much, much more effective against an enemy that is spread out or surrounded. If you are stuck fighting battleline to battleline, with one Scout plus spear support fighting one of your opponent’s warriors with spear support, then chances are you will be slowly whittled down. You can make it work – and this capacity is a large part of what makes Ugluk’s Scouts more powerful than Lurtz’ boys – but it will be an inefficient and slow trade.

The Scouts desperately grind their way through a Muster of Isengard chokepoint. Thank Saruman for spears!

Instead, where this list really shines is where you can get one Orc and one Uruk directly into the fight against a single enemy warrior. At that point you’re rolling twice as many dice as them to win the fight and wound, with at least +1 to wound and maybe the trap. If your opponent doesn’t shield then you can absolutely carve through their army once you force these fights, and if they do shield then your D4 models are taking no hits back. If you can put your opponent into the position of having to fight you like this, then you are very likely to break them and win from there.

Of course, your opponent is also probably a competent player, and they can see this risk as clearly as you can. So how do you force those messy mêlées that so favour your army?

These Men and Elves are gonna have a real bad time

In some games, it’s as simple as your opponent needing to spread out to play the scenario. This list loves games like Recon and Supplies for this reason, as we’ll discuss more below. But when an opponent doesn’t have to spread out to deny you VPs, how do you create that messy engagement and spread them out?

Shooting can be part of the answer. By kiting them with your pile of S3 bows, you can force them to engage you in a nice open position that will let you easily sweep around their flanks with your hordes. An early VP advantage (probably from your multiple banners) can have a similar impact. In the extreme, kiting can force your opponent to break up their army into multiple chunks to try to shut down your shooting, which gives you excellent opportunities to jump on each part and defeat them in detail. Even if they do stay as one clump, by swinging models around onto their flanks and then pushing everywhere you can rapidly fracture their lines. And as soon as a gap has been opened up, you can start spilling troops through it to start forcing those beautiful Orc/Uruk combos that clean up the enemy so quickly.

I managed to force a roughly 1" gap in the Gondorian line here, and just threw my army through it

One of the inherent challenges of this list is that the Orcs and Uruks move at different speeds. But its preferred engagement style can actually mitigate this, by allowing you to move the Uruks half (4”) and continue shooting while your Orcs get a little ahead of them. Ideally, your opponent is left in a tricky position: either they keep their formation and let you harass them with archery while moving up freely, or they move out of formation to attack your Orcs and then get jumped on by your Scouts in exactly the sort of bar fight brawl that your list loves.

Another way of creating gaps in the enemy lines and forcing those messy engagements is by leveraging all your cheap heroes. The key here is to remember that in most games, your Captains don’t really matter after they have spent their Might. If an Orc Captain has spent two Might on Marches or Moves, you generally don’t care that much if a rampaging Aragorn hunts them down and kills them. It’s not ideal, but it’s far from the end of the world. And because of this expendability, you can be a bit more reckless with these heroes than you otherwise might prefer. Slam them into your opponent’s battleline and start chopping, or use a Heroic Combat to ricochet a bunch of warriors around the enemy flank. This list thrives on putting the enemy under pressure, and using your Captains as another tool to create that pressure is a perfect way to set up the beautiful Orc/Uruk combos your list thrives on.

My Captains chop their way through the enemy Uruks to force some critical gaps

Finally, I touched briefly on big enemy heroes. This list is obviously lacking a lot of the traditional ways of dealing with enemy heroes or monsters (i.e. either magic or a big hero/monster of your own). Ugluk has Strike, but we’ll cover below why that’s more of a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ sort of situation than your primary gameplan. Instead, you have three ways to deal with big threats.

First, all your shooting is a handy way to either chip wounds onto heroes, kill your own models to stop them calling Combats, or (best of all) dismount them. I don’t suggest keeping too many models out of the fight shooting, because you also really need those Uruks sprinting into the enemy backlines and chopping them up. Nonetheless, it’s a handy tool to have in a pinch.

Second, you have 48 models and you only really care about losing 1 of them (Ugluk). If Aragorn is chopping his way through 2-3 warriors per turn, then that’s a totally fine trade to keep him locked down. Surround enemy heroes with warriors to stop them Combatting anywhere decent, and take advantage of their distraction to smash the enemy army. If Aragorn ends the game with 10 kills, that still left ~525 points worth of your army to tear apart the rest of theirs. Keep the big hitters away from Ugluk, and you’ll be sweet.

Aragorn does a great job here, but ultimately just can't kill enough warriors to make a dent in the horde

And third, this list is excellent at producing cheap existential threat. If Aragorn has charged into two Scouts, all it takes is a single Orc wrapping around behind him to suddenly make it a fight that he must win or plausibly die. Ordinarily, most heroes would be totally fine with copping a loss from three enemy warriors, even with a trap. They would only be scared if the fight involved an enemy hero, or an absolute pile of warriors. Inevitably, this means that they’ll only face these existential combats a few times a game, and can husband resources for those fights.

But the combination of Animosity and (sometimes) Meats Back on the Menu allows Ugluk’s Scouts to threaten enemy heroes with instant death in every single fight. As such, the enemy has no choice but to burn as much Might as necessary to win duels, because the alternative is probably death. This not only stops them using that Might for other things (like Moves or Combats), but it also means that if they botch while low on Might you can probably pick up a key enemy piece extremely cheaply. This list is surprisingly good at killing heroes, just by wearing down their resources and then flash-killing them. And if they don’t botch, they’ve still only killed a handful of cheap warriors for their trouble. Scary!

Even Glorfindel gets flash-killed here when he loses the roll-off

That’s how the list functions in general, but let’s try to apply that to some specific scenarios.

Playing the scenarios

Starting with our first mission, Domination is a pretty good one for this list. You should spread out the objectives as much as you can before deployment, and use your mobility and numbers to try to contest every single one. Ideally, your opponent ends up breaking their list into 5 little clumps to stop you doing so, allowing you to overwhelm each of them without the support of the others. If you can, try to touch one of the objectives early with Ugluk to make your army Dominant (2) on it, although I always seem to forget this. And if you’re going to break, make sure that Ugluk is in a good position to catch several objectives with his 12” Stand Fast (and has a warrior nearby to kill to trigger it). In general though, just fight everywhere you can and it should be a good matchup for your horde.

The Gondorians have to break through here because otherwise my horde will dominate 4/5 objectives

To the Death is trickier, and much more contingent on the matchup. Here is where your massed bows and (generally) double banner come into play. If your opponent is outshot by you and/or is starting down on points, then they basically have to commit into you to avoid getting kited to death or losing on banner VPs. As such, you can force them to come out of the nice chokepoints that opponents love to fight in and instead brawl with you out in the open. At this stage, you wrap and trap, trigger your Animosity, and count your blessings.

If your opponent does outshoot you by a lot, and you don’t think you can dance around them with your banner VPs for several hours without breaking, then things can get tricky. Running into a shooting list in a defensive position in this scenario sucks, and no list (other than Eagles) really has an answer to it. Just grit your teeth, consider Marching to limit casualties and try to flood around to their backlines as fast as possible. It is totally possible though: see my final game from Clash for an example of this list just pushing straight into an Elven defensive position in this scenario (and against a world-class player too!).

Moving on from there, Hold Ground is much better for you. To start with, while Maelstrom can be annoying for your pile of warbands, it’s also excellent for breaking up enemy forces into smaller chunks that your list can swarm more easily. And if an opponent is able to bring in a bunch of their army to bully one of your warbands, consider just abandoning them and sprinting to the middle. If you can get there first, then you can easily tap the centre objective with Ugluk, triggering Dominant (2) on it for your entire army. At that point, it’s just a matter of flinging your forces onto the enemy blades to keep them away from the centre and you should be in a great spot to win. If the game ends within the first couple of turns after you break, then you should still have an effective 30-40 models on the objective: enough to give you a win almost every time. Just keep Ugluk alive at all costs, because you need him for the Dominant (2) and for his Stand Fasts.

The Scouts swarm the centre and hold it against Army of the White Hand

Supplies and Recon both play quite similarly, and both are perfect for this army. Your opponent is forced to either split their army into at least three chunks (which you can then overwhelm and slaughter) or stay clumped up and give you an early lead in VPs. I have won a lot of games of both of these scenarios by charging into the enemy and getting quartered, while a handful of Scouts ran off the board/destroyed some supply markers. In Supplies it gets even easier, because there are 4 banner VPs. This forces your opponent to commit to actually destroying your objectives in a lot of games, because otherwise your second banner will give you the win. And if you’re facing something that doesn’t have a banner like Depths of Moria, you don’t even need to get to their objectives to win: banner VPs are worth more than breaking, so just get yourself killed on their side of the table and keep your banner alive and you’ll win every time.

Finally, Fog of War is this list’s hardest scenario. Only the terrain feature to make opponents spread out, no banner VPs, and a requirement to keep your lesser heroes alive are all annoying for you. In particular, this is the one game where you don’t want to be putting your Captains on the frontlines very often. Use them to spam Moves and fight in carefully managed combats against lone warriors, ideally using Heroic Combats to move lots of your warriors into the enemy backlines. Again, this scenario is much easier if you outshoot the enemy. If not, you’re hoping to get into their face quickly and just shred them faster than they can do the same to you. And remember, maintain that cheap existential threat. Yeah, a Faramir or a Dwarf King may not botch initially, but give them enough turns in combat and they will (knowing Faramir, probably very fast indeed). And if you’ve got them trapped with Animosity triggered when they do, then that’s potentially your target/your opponent’s protect target taken off the board.

Killing heroes with this list is surprisingly easy

Managing Ugluk

Finally, I wanted to dive a bit deeper into how you use the list’s centrepiece model: the big Uggers himself.

That phrasing is probably a bit misleading, because the number 1 tip to getting value out of this model is to keep him hidden safely behind your lines in the majority of circumstances. Yeah, he’s your best combat model (the Scout Captain with two-handed weapon doesn’t count, because two-handing is still rubbish for that sort of hero and the comedy +3 to wound just makes it worse).

But this list doesn’t really rely on its heroes to kill stuff, and Ugluk is too important to it to risk in anything but the most controlled fights. You need him to trigger Dominant (2) in some scenarios, to provide a 12” auto-pass Stand Fast after you break to keep your whole army in the fight, to give you an answer to Terror and a bit more lethality with Meat’s Back on the Menu, and to protect those crucial leader VPs that are present in every single scenario. All of those are worth too much to risk on the survival of a D5 hero with 2 Wounds/1 Fate. Plus, most of his buffs can’t even be triggered on a turn that he’s been tagged by the enemy, which will be about half the time once he’s on the frontlines. So, keep him safe and ready to move whenever you can.

Ugluk died to a random Rivendell Knight this turn, which scupered my chances of victory once and for all

The only times when you should be putting him into fights are into extremely one-sided combats (i.e. Ugluk, a Captain and a pile of warriors getting ready to Combat off an enemy grunt), or when you desperately need him to help you break through some scary enemy models. He is still the only model in the list that can viably Strike up above a medium-tier hero or monster, and sometimes you just need to take that risk for a shot at the game. A Strike/Combat combo through multiple monsters is particularly devastating, and can sew up a game way faster than anything else in the list. But even in these circumstances, consider whether it’s worth the risk of losing your source of Fearless and stacking +1 to wound, or whether you’d be better off taking a more patient approach and waiting till the enemy botches and gets dragged down by your warriors.

This list can outlast and grind down a lot of heroes and monsters

I mentioned the Fearless/+1 to-wound bubble of Meat’s Back on the Menu there, and its usage is actually an area that I’ve shifted on with time. I used to try to trigger it every turn, reasoning that those are amazing buffs for the loss of just one Orc. But I found myself often not getting value out of it, and wishing that I’d instead just kept alive an extra model.

Indeed, some back-of-the-envelope maths convinced me that I should be using it a lot less than I was. On any given roll to wound, there is a 1/6 chance that a +1 to wound bonus will translate into an extra kill. Given that this list is generally not winning more than 50% of its duels, that implies that I should only be using the special rule when it will affect more than 12 Uruks. This is underselling it a little, because most enemies are more expensive than my lowly Orcs, but also overselling it, because it’s not taking into account the possibility that the model would have been already slain by other friendly models in the fight (quite likely, given the list’s innate killing power!). Killing my own model to massively overkill an enemy who would have died anyway is hardly a good trade, after all.

With all that in mind, you should probably only use this special rule in one of the following circumstances:

• -            It will affect more than 12 Uruks. This one comes up surprisingly rarely, in my experience, because the list is otherwise very keen to fight in a spread-out formation.
• -            You need it to reliably charge an enemy with Terror. Fearless on demand is a very powerful rule to be able to access, and at that point +1 to wound is just a bonus.
• -            You’re facing lots of really durable models where you’re unlikely to overkill them and want the extra threat. If you’re swarming the Fellowship or Erebor Reclaimed, then any extra wound from the warriors is likely to be very high value, and much less likely to be wasted by overkilling the target.
• -            You desperately need to be killing faster in this area, even at the expense of reduced efficiency. Sometimes you have an advantage in one clash that you need to take advantage of now, and you’re willing to burn resources (Orcs are a resource) to make it happen.
• -            You were going to use your Head Taker rule for a big Stand fast anyway. Again, a free +1 to wound when you were going to kill that Orc anyway is certainly nice! Do note that Head Taker (the rule that gives the Stand Fast buffs) is triggered by killing an Orc or an Uruk, but Meat’s Back on the Menu is only triggered by killing an Orc. It’s important to be clear on exactly which head you are taking!

This sounds like a lot of circumstances, but in practice I find I only end up using this rule a handful of times a game, unless I’m up against an all-Terror list like Eagles. In the end, the most useful part of this extremely eye-catching new rule is the simple Fearless bubble, because it removes one of the classic weaknesses of horde lists like this one. Just like with Minas Morgul, auto-passing Terror checks goes excellently with a swarm of warriors with bonuses to wound.

I worked out at the time that killing an Orc here would translate into ~0.2 kills per turn. Even Orcs aren't that expendable

Another awkwardness with this rule is that it triggers at the start of his activation. So not only will it only capture models that were within 6” of him at the start of his move, you also need to move him before your Scouts if you want them to benefit from the Fearless. That can be surprisingly tricky for a model that you often want safely behind layers of friends, and can lead to him getting left behind (or messing up your whole movement if you had called a Heroic Move with him!). The key is to leave a gap for him to move through, blocked by exactly one Orc. Execute the Mordor scum to ‘open the door’ and Ugluk is free to move into a good position before your horde surges past him.

Finally, remember: Ugluk needs to be alive and able to activate to use this rule (or to touch an objective and give you Dominant on it, or to keep your whole army on the field with his Stand Fast, or to protect leader VPs). I have had many games where I regretted putting him onto the frontlines, and none where I regretted not doing so. 

In this game, the backline became the frontline

Conclusion: This list is one hell of a drug

I have played a total of 58 games with this list so far, and I’m still not bored. It’s such an exciting army to play, with so much mobility and hitting power and the numbers to take a few hits back. In preparation for Clash I tested a bunch of lists, and each time I kept finding myself saying things like ‘man, I wish I moved 8” here’ or ‘wow, my warriors just can’t kill things’. This list is seriously addictive, and I recommend it to anyone who’s willing to accept that it will always make other armies feel a little bit worse.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this mammoth guide to one of my favourite lists in the game right now, and one of the best answers to the current meta of monsters and hordes. Let me know in the comments how you’ve found the Scouts so far, and why I’m actually wrong and Lurtz’ Scouts are much better.

Until next time though, may meat always be on the menu!