What Kind of List Fits Your Playstyle?

Welcome to another Kith, Kriel, and Kin article. As always, I am Kyle (IAmSweeps on the various interwebs). I took a week off from writing a feature article to get some much needed painting done. I am a huge proponent to "Playing it painted" and I wanted to be sure both of my 50 point lists were fully painted. More on this is a different article. In this article I am going to introduce you to some basic strategies an army list can bring to the game, independent of the models in it. My hope is that you will gain a better understanding of the types of lists that you may find most interesting and gain some incite into some pro's and cons of playing a certain list type. 

There are a multitude of different types of lists that exist in Warmachine/Hordes and while many would say that every faction is able to play any style, at least in some fashion, there are definitely varying strengths for certain play styles in each faction. For example, in Trolls, I would say that a gun line style of list is not impossible to make. We have one of, if not, the strongest boostable gun in the game, with the Bomber. The Impaler increases the range of any gun we bring. Our War Wagon, battle engine, is an amazing gun platform. We have some really good shooting options, but we don't have the range required to REALLY make a gun line that other people have to fear and respect. Most of our enemies can stay just outside of our threat range, even with an Impaler, and shoot us off the table better than we can do it to them. 

Last week I ran a poll to see what Troll players favorite types of lists were. I chose what I believe to be the four most common ways I have seen, heard of, and tried to play a Trollblood army. Here are the results: 

What are your favorite list types? (14 People voted) 

List Type	Votes	%
Brick (Beast or Infantry Brick)	5	35%
Infantry Swarm	7	50%
Balance	4	28%
Skew	2	14%

Obviously with only 14 people who voted the numbers are quite low across the board but I will still analyze the data I have here and try to explain why I think the numbers turned out as they did. 

First, lets look at the different types of lists I chose, what they are and give some examples of what a list would look like in the given type.  

Brick 

A brick, of any type, follows a basic principle where everything in your army, or at least the lead models, form an impenetrable wall of bodies that are either/both extremely hard to hit or have extremely high ARM. Typically the brick moves slowly up the field and, at some point, must unpack and cause enough damage to the enemy that any losses on the approach are easily earned back in either a point trade of models or a scenario presence that your opponent can not reasonably compete against. 

There are a couple of ways to build and play a brick style of list. One way is a beast brick. A common beast brick package, which is technically caster independent is: 

• Mulg 
• Dire Troll Mauler 
• Earthborn Dire Troll 
• Troll Axer 
• Janissa Stonetide 
• Krielstone Bearer and Stone Scribes - Leader and 3 grunts 

The three heavy warbeasts clump together in the front, blocking LOS to the medium based models behind them. Janissa places her rock wall in front of, or sometimes behind the three heavies, to make sure they all benefit from the Earthborn's ARM increase from it's animus. The Krielstone unit give the increase in ARM. Whatever caster you have and the Earthborn, itself, place the Earthborn animus on the lead models. This give the maximum amount of ARM possible on the approach. Most long range shooting will not be able to put any damage on these beasts, keeping your whole army safe on the approach. Any small damage that does get past their armor, they can most likely regenerate off (Do not forget that Troll beasts can regenerate). The Troll Axer is typically seen in this module for when it comes time to "unpack" the brick. With the Axer's animus your heavies can charge/trample farther than they normally could and cause havoc in multiple directions, forcing your opponent to choose where to fortify their defenses and just how many points worth of their resources they want to commit to taking your beasts out. With some casters, rather than having your brick explode you might send out one alpha beast, cause a bunch of damage, and have it return to the brick to take the little punishment and do it again next turn. Lots of different ways to play it. 

Another way to play the brick is through an infantry brick. This is commonly executed by using Champions, since they gain an ARM bonus for being base to base with each other. The way it is played is very similar to the scenario of the beast brick except you don't use beast animus to increase the ARM. You use the wall to increase defense and use the Krielstone unit and the Champ's Defensive Line ability to boost ARM. Now that Warders exists there may be some infantry brick applications there as well. I have never heard of or seen anyone make a Longrider brick but using large based models to block line of sight is one of the key things that make a brick work. Someone should try that and let me know how it works. 

The poll said that 35% of the people who voted like this type of list. If we had more votes over a longer period of time I think this result would probably stay about the same. As a faction we have, debatably, one caster who can really make the beast brick sing and one that can really turn the infantry brick to 11. Luckily, these casters do see some play and I think this type of list is a popular "second list" in a two list pairing.  

Infantry Swarm 

The basic idea behind an infantry swarm list is, hopefully, obvious. You bring as many units and solos that synergize together as possible to create an overwhelming force that, hopefully, put your opponent in  position where they just can't handle the wave after wave of dudes coming to beat your face. 

Generally speaking, Trollblood infantry are a bit on the expensive side. Some would say it is a part of the "Tough tax," maybe it is because of the medium bases. Whatever the reason is we pay a premium for our infantry. The plus side to that is we have a ridiculous number of ways to make our infantry faster, hit harder, take a hit more effectively, etc.  

There are countless ways to create an Infantry Swarm ("Dude Spam") and a few ways to actually play the army during your game. I'm not going to go into any examples of a Dude Spam list because there are just too many variations and reasons for bringing certain models. The more important thing to talk about are the ways in which Dude Spam lists take control of the field and cause difficult situations for your opponent to deal with. 

Part the Red Sea 

The basic idea here is to split your army in such a way that if you look at the table your army looks like the tip of an arrow piercing a hole into your opponent's army and then splitting your opponents force down the middle. This situation can be used to clear a path to your opponent's caster, colossal/gargantuan, or some other high value thing that you want to focus on taking out or occupying. 

Envelope 

The strength of an Infantry Swarm is your ability to spread your models out and create a huge footprint on the battlefield. The strategy here is to spread out in such a way that you begin to wrap your army around the flanks of your opponent's army and pull and squeeze them in until your army is almost completely surrounding the enemy army. This strategy rarely ends with your army full circling the opponent because that just isn't practical, but I hope I have at least given you a good visual on what I am talking about. 

The poll says that 50% of Trollblood players like Infantry Swarm lists. If we took more votes over a longer period of time I think this number would go up but maybe not too much higher. When you consider all of the support models/units that exist in Trollbloods that boost our infantry it is no surprise that the Infantry Swarm is popular. 

Balance 

Balance means different things to different people. When I think of balanced lists I think of a strong melee component, effective/boostable ranged options, a decent amount of support, and a variety of beasts and units. Balanced lists are also considered an "All comers" list. This means they can be played against anyone and have something in the list that will be strong against your opponent no matter what they bring. This doesn't mean that you are guaranteed to win against every opponent, but you will have the ability to challenge your opponent and react to what they do in their game. 

Balance came in at 28% in the poll. This year's Steamroller definitely changed the army composition for a lot of factions. As the year went on we can see different trends in what is played heavily and works well. Meta's shift all the time, sometimes in a small way and sometimes Butcher3 is released and everyone takes a huge dump trying to react to what they need to do to try and deal with him. Balanced lists don't require a lot of changes to keep a consistent game. 

I think consistency is the big identifier in Balanced lists. They may only give you 50% match ups across the board (which is a ridiculously high estimation for across the whole board), but you will consistently see those results regardless of your opponent. 

Skew 

Skew is best described by "extremes." A skew list might be trying to make a gun line in Trollbloods, like I described earlier in the article. You will focus the list to perform a single task really well. A skew list is typically used in a multi-list format where the particular function the Skew list performs gives you the best match up against a small piece of the field. Skew lists typically have much more extreme percentages when looking at a match up. You can usually without having to think about how the game will play out to decide "This list will take a huge dump on their lists" or "This is an auto-loss for me." These comparisons are not meant to say you are a super amazing list builder or a terrible one. That is the nature of the skew. IF you are going to go this route you NEED to understand that you will have AMAZING match ups and others that you can't even play. 

Skew lists made up 14%, the smallest, of the poll. If you think about it, this make perfect sense despite the small sampling. A skew list is typically not going to be your main list that you lean on in the majority of your matchups. You would only bring it out if your chance of winning was significantly better than 50% or if you unfortunately have to play it so you don't get locked in to it when you REALLY don't want to play it.  

I hope that this article has given you some incite into the different types of lists you can make before you even choose a single model play. I, personally, swing towards Infantry Swarm and Balanced for my own play because it just feels like home and really fits the way that I like to push models across the table.  

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. As with all Kith, Kriel, and Kin articles this is not meant to be the end of the discussion but, rather, the beginning. 

~IAmSweeps