Clash for the Cure, Third Time's a Charm

This weekend is one of my favorite Texas events, Clash for a Cure. This is their third annual event, and will be the third time I attend. It's pretty cool to see how much the event has been growing in just 3 attempts. The first year was a single-caster event on an afternoon in a local gaming store. it was a very fun event,even though I lost quite badly. I was trying out Naaresh for the very first time (he had been out for a bout 2 weeks), and had not really dipped my head into the Texas competitive scene. The event has now grown into a full con-length event with 3 days of gaming!

High Command First Impressions

I was unfortunately not one of those lucky enough to get High Command pre-release, so I've only had it in hand for about a week now. Still, now that the game has been out for a little while, the forums are starting to pick up some noise about the game, and BoLS just released a first impression article that made me want to talk a bit about what I've liked about the game so far.

I'm not going to go deep into "how to play the game", as that is one thing that is very well covered elsewhere if you want to read more about it. Privateer Press published the entire rulebook as a free pdf, so if you haven't read that yet you'll get more out of going to the High Command downloads page on their site instead of me trying to explain the game. No disrespect to my fellow BoLS writer Relasine, but with such accessible rules it feels like a waste of space to give a game-play/rules overview as part of a first impressions article.

Self-Inflicted pain - thinking about tiers

Tier lists (or theme forces if you want to use the correct term...) are an interesting thing in Warmachine. The vast majority of tier lists are not exactly game-changing. Most tier lists give you a few small buffs to your force if you take a restricted subset of models for your chosen caster. some of these benefits are pretty worthless, like letting a warbeast cast its animus for free on turn 1. lots of theme forces give +1 to the starting roll, free focus to jacks, extra deployment space or point discounts on specific models.

The price of getting these nice little buffs is that you have to forgo some of the models you may normally have to choose from, and to get to the higher tiers you have to bring specific models or units. Some theme forces are never even considered because of some of these restrictions. For example, what Menoth player would willingly restrict him or herself to not bringing the Choir? Or who wants to bring multiple light artillery models in a single list? On the other hand there are a few theme lists that are quite popular because they let you take all the models you normally would want with a given caster and then add some benefits. the best example of this is eVayl. You almost never see eVayl (even at low point levels) without a tier 4 list. there are a few other popular theme lists like eHaley, pDoomshaper, Borka, eKreoss, eVyros, etc.