Maelstrom deployment has always been contentious, and was one of the most expected and hoped-for changes to the new edition. Not making it alternating deployment was genuinely a shock to me, and actually making it worse (by removing the ability to Might rolls down) was even more surprising.
Nonetheless, Maelstrom deployment does actually take quite a lot of skill, for all the randomness involved. Yes, you could just roll 1s and 2s and that would be bad, but there are ways to mitigate the potential impact of the dice rolls. On the other hand, there are some real traps to fall into that mean many new players end up giving away effectively ‘free wins’ in Maelstrom.
This article is aiming to act as a general guide from Maelstrom deployment, covering a couple of key general rules for how to play it, before breaking down into the different strategies for when you’re moving first or second on the critical first turn. Hopefully by the end of it you’ll have a sense for how best to deploy in some of the trickiest of the 24 Matched Play scenarios.
Spend the Might
We’re gonna start today with a key general rule that will immediately win you quite a lot of games (or rather, prevent you losing them immediately). If you take away nothing else from this article, take this: when you roll a 2-3 on the roll to enter the board, spend the Might to get where you need to go.
Look, I get it. It stings to effectively start the game down several Might on the first turn. But it is almost always going to be the lesser of two evils. After all, if you choose not to spend the Might then you will likely have a whole warband out of the fight for the first 4-6 turns, or sometimes the whole game. There is absolutely nothing you could do with those Might points that would be worth anywhere near as much as having a whole warband actually contributing to the game. Even worse is where the rest of your army is in a safe spot and that one warband is left to face the whole enemy army by itself. For the sake of 1-2 Might you’re now effectively handing your opponent a pile of easy kills, which is never going to be worthwhile.
Now, there are a couple of exceptions to this strong general rule. If this is the first warband of the game to be deployed then it’s less pressing, because neither you nor your opponent has information about where other warbands will be yet. Even so, it can often be worthwhile spending in these circumstances in order to avoid getting dumped into a corner/behind a forest, in a position where you won’t be able to impact the game with that warband. But if there are truly no bad spots for the warband to go then it’s okay to not spend the Might.
In general though, just defaulting to Mighting up Maelstrom rolls will single-handedly increase your winrate in these scenarios by a large margin.
Pick your order
Speaking of Mighting up rolls, correctly sequencing the order of your rolls to enter the board can also improve your odds substantially.
The theory here is that later warbands will inevitably have more information when they deploy than earlier warbands. As such, they will get more benefit from Mighting up Maelstrom rolls, because they will be able to do more with the information. Your first warband would never think to Might a 4 into a 5, but that could be a game-winning play for warband number 3. Following from this, you want to order your warbands in order of how willing you are to spend their Might on Maelstrom rolls. So heroes with no Might or very valuable Might points should be near the front of the order, while heroes that were mostly just going to be calling Moves should be towards the end.
A classic (if now outdated) example would be an old Angmar list with a Barrow Wight, Captain, Witch King and Gûlavhar. In that list, the Wight has no Might at all, so clearly should be your first drop. Following that would be Gûlavhar, who has lots of Might but really needs it for Combats and duel rolls. Next would be the Witch King, who has lots of uses for his Might but needs it less urgently than Gully, and finally the Orc Captain, whose Might is relatively expendable.
This assessment will change army to army, and even matchup to matchup, but in general it’s a great way to ensure that your least-valuable Might is what gets spent on Maelstrom rolls.
What to do when you’re moving first
This should be obvious to most players, but Maelstrom deployment is much more concerning when you lose the Priority roll on the first turn. That’s because your opponent will always (outside a couple of niche situations like White Hand or Garrison of Dale) give you Priority, forcing your whole army to arrive before theirs. Needless to say, being counter-deployed by your opponent’s whole army is A Bad Thing.
In these circumstances, your initial goal is to not lose the game straightaway. Yeah, you want to be in position to go for objectives and such, but none of that matters if you get torn apart in the first couple turns. As such, you should be aiming to deploy defensively to ensure your army can take the punch that’s inevitably coming your way. Your goal is basically to deploy in such a way that returns you to a ‘neutral’ starting position, because that’s already a huge win once you’re the one entering the board first.
This starts with getting your army together. As mentioned, sequence your rolls and spend Might to bring in warbands in the same area, because you know that your opponent will have free rein to jump on any isolated warbands. If you get the choice, it’s also worthwhile to bring in warbands on the north/south sides rather than on the east/west, because that will mean you need to spend less resources on other warbands to bring them all in together. Similarly, deploying near a corner can be good because it means you will get to bring in other warbands nearby on a 4, 5 or 6 without spending Might (although corners aren’t always ideal for objective play, so there is some tradeoff here).
A quick note here is that rolling a 1 on the first turn is generally fine. Not only does this let you counter-deploy with at least some of your models, it means that your opponent has to deploy in the knowledge that they could have a bunch of your warriors jumping on any weakpoints they leave. Anything that shifts a tiny bit of the stress of going first back onto them is very beneficial.
As you bring in your warbands, a great trick to secure your rear is to leave warriors 2.9” apart along the board edge behind you. Because enemy models can’t charge on the turn they arrive, they will be unable to enter your control zones and thus will be unable to enter the board anywhere within the zone they block off. With careful positioning, you can deny a whopping 16” of board edge to your opponent with a mere 5 models (or an even bigger zone if you have models that move faster than 6” in the warband), basically guaranteeing that you can’t be ambushed from behind. And if you’re specifically concerned about something like a Balrog, then you can leave even bigger gaps between your warriors because you know that the warband leader won’t be able to enter through a 4” gap. The best thing about all of this is that if you manage to land a second warband in the same position they can happily stream through the gaps, because your own models don’t care about your control zones. Dastardly!
One other trick that I like to pull when moving first is to set up a killing zone for the enemy. Basically this is a neat little spot between your warbands that your opponent really doesn’t want to deploy in (because you’ll shred them if they do), forcing them to spend Might to go somewhere else. My favourite example of this (shown off to murder Shelob at Masters) is deploying two Dragons with a nice gap between them, ensuring that anything that comes on in the middle is getting hit with two fireballs first turn. Ouch! You can do similar things with massed shooting, several big heroes, or just a pile of scary warriors. In any case, it’s particularly powerful if done around a corner of the board, so that opponents are terrified of rolling either a 2 or a 3.
Finally, you do still want to think about the objectives a little bit. Your primary goal for the early game may be ‘don’t die’, but if you’re trapped in a corner behind giant forests you’re probably still in a bad position. Exactly how you want to deploy for these scenarios varies somewhat, but a central position on any board edge tends to be a good start. For Hold Ground, you’re looking for somewhere with a nice clean run to the middle, while for Command the Battlefield you’re looking to take a solid grip on the line between two table quarters. Sites of Power similarly encourages a central force that can strike at either of the two objectives on one side, and both it and Command want your mobile models in position to make runs for the other two objectives/table quarters once the coast is clear.
Finally, in Heirlooms you want to get lucky. That’s honestly the biggest thing, but bringing in warbands in position to threaten multiple Heirlooms is helpful for tilting the odds in your favour. Don’t spread out too much though, because it won’t do you any good to pick up the Heirloom with an isolated warband if it then gets jumped on and mulched.
On that note, it’s generally worthwhile remembering not to play the objectives too hard initially because Maelstrom effectively works as a tit-for-tat. Put another way, either your opponent deploys to match you or they suffer a negative trade-off of some kind. For example, if you get your whole army in together and they bring their whole army in beside you, then clearly you’re in a similar spot for both the fighting and the objectives. If they bring their whole army in opposite you then the same logic applies. And if they bring in part of their army near you and part of it far away, then they may have an initial lead on VPs but will probably find it starts to fall away quickly as you win the materiel fight by bringing your whole army to bear on part of theirs. As long as you can get your army in together and in a position to eventually make plays for objectives, you’ll be sweet regardless of how they deploy.
What to do when you’re moving second
When you win that critical first Priority (and thus give it to your opponent), on the other hand, life is much simpler. Now you’re the one trying to inflict some devastating damage on the opponent and take advantage of winning the most important single dice roll in the game.
In a lot of circumstances, that basically amounts to trying to bring your whole army to bear on a portion of your opponent’s. Many players who haven’t read this article will allow a warband or two to be separated from the rest, and at that stage it’s well-worth spending Might to throw your full force in together against it. Bring all of your resources to bear at top speed, force a bar fight to maximise casualties, and try to wipe out the mismatched enemy force in as few turns as possible. You’re aiming to clear them out super fast so that you can then consolidate and prepare to fight the rest of the enemy army for the objectives.
If your opponent has managed to get their whole force together, then you can still do some amount of early damage by deploying on one flank of their force. If done correctly, you can bring to bear your whole army against a portion of the opponent’s before they can reposition, allowing you to get a small-but-significant materiel lead and snowball to victory.
Probably the trickiest part of moving second in Maelstrom games is figuring out how much to focus on that materiel lead versus playing the objective. After all, if you bring in your whole army behind your opponent’s in Hold Ground then you can probably get some good charges off, but you’ll also be entirely boxed off from the middle.
As discussed in the section on losing Priority, I generally consider that the materiel edge is more significant than the objectives in the early stages on Maelstrom games, because the side that wins the early engagements can normally leverage that to come back from a points deficit. However, it is important to make sure that you have some opportunity to do so. Don’t come onto the board in positions where you could be easily boxed away from the objectives, and don’t forget to start at least some models off on their journeys towards the objectives. And if your opponent has given you an opportunity to screen them away from the VPs, then absolutely take advantage of it. A classic example would be an opponent who prioritised a defensive position in a corner, only to realise that all the VPs are outside of their little chokepoint.
Finally, if your opponent is in a great position and you can’t see any real weaknesses to exploit, then feel free to just cut your losses and bring your army in on the other side of the board. At this stage you’re basically conceding to your opponent that they have successfully prevented any big deployment wins for you, and just resetting things to a neutral board state. This is particularly good if your list happens to have a strong shooting advantage, so you can chip plenty of damage onto the enemy list as they slowly stomp up the board towards you.
Conclusion
A lot of players find Maelstrom scary or frustrating, and consider it to introduce an unwanted burst of luck into the game. And they’re not entirely wrong, with the roll for Priority on the first turn being extremely significant for both sides.
However, a huge amount of this luck can be mitigated by careful play. Ordering your drops correctly, freely spending Might to mitigate poor rolls, and deploying well to head off or take advantage of opportunities for early swings can make a huge difference. In fact, I would argue that maelstrom deployment probably has a greater scope for skill expression than any other form of deployment, with an enormous gap in how much it impacts newer players versus veterans.
Hopefully this article has helped to move you from the former category to the latter. As ever, I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments, and whether you have any other great Maelstrom tips for players to bear in mind.
Until next time, may you always win that first Priority roll!
Comments
Post a Comment