Spearhead: Seraphon vs Soulblight | Warhammer Age of Sigmar Battle Report 

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I just assembled one myself. It is AWESOME! and a good core to get a Seraphon army started.

It's amazing how good the new Seraphon are - it's not a range that has ever been well-served by GW's Studio colour schemes, but the new Kroxigor and Aggradons in particular are fantastic.

Spearhead seems to be something of a numbers game in both models and attacks - losing significant output from large parts of the army on fluffed charges or poor rolls is going to hurt low attack-high damage factions like Seraphon,

After seeing a score of 21 to 10 or 14 in the last supposedly comeback part, hard disagree. Too reliant of good vs bad cards or some cards do nothing for you. It's definitely not well-rounded, but did look atleast fun. Fine for a quick casual mode.

@@jakea3950 that’s a single datapoint. Statistically it balances the same as rolling dice. Just don’t forget to shuffle your cards before each game.

LOL well rounded? Whoever goes first just auto wins. They rush in and burn all their skills for maximum damage. Super unbalanced. Seen it across multiple channels and armies.

​@000NULL thats assuming all the cards are the same, which i doubt they are? Yeah maybe was a shuffle problem but its not looking good so far. If the game survives a 100 or so games i guess ill have a better data pool.

@@jakea3950each deck is the same for each player, so yea, one person can draw garbage and the other person can draw gold every turn, like we saw with this game.

Not when its super unbalanced.

@@jakea3950 It's more balanced than anything else GW has put out lately. Most of the unbalanced outcomes came from atrocious die rolling and poor tactics.

If the Underdog is down by 5 points or more they can still draw.

The Lumineth vs. OBR was decided by a nasty OBR double turn. You can still score big if you can take out some units and capture some points.

nope, only on units with 5 or more models

It definitely doesn't feel like Blood Knights just be re-enforceable, but hey, that makes this force REALLY strong.

They got them from GW because of the channel. We mortals have to wait.

Spearhead has split units in certain cases

They're 2x5 in Spearhead but minimum 10 in main AoS. Not sure why though they aren't great at 5 models each

It's a common thing for the spearhead forces!

Ah man I was hoping that some of those beefier units would go to 5 man units like how Stormcast has. I’d rather be running ardboyz and chaos warriors in units of 5 than 10 most of the time anyways

@@Questioningbasics 3 units would be too few to contest objectives effectively - even Sylvaneth have 4.

JuSt sCreEn~

Completely agree. This would also make armies like nurgle completely useless as not only do some of them HAVE TO start in reserve, but they are unable to do an effective alpha-strike even if they win the roll-off. And yeah, they have the ward and what not but that is not going to save your five (!) plaguebearers from a carnasaur or bloodknights charge lol. Major reworks are needed for this.

Remember that in spearhead you can bring back destroyed units. So alpha striking may mean your opponent can bring units back quicker. Better to 80% destroy them and leave them.

It is a hard balance, but I agree I don't like what they have at the moment. Underdog forced to pass double each time is bad idea, but somebody losing by 1 point having no penalty would be bad as well. They need a middle ground.

While I also have my concerns for the double in the full game, the problem is that in small scale games, a double turn can literally end the game early. I understand their hesitation in spearhead for it to be good

@@Kollider115 That's fair, I just thought it was a shame there wasn't even a shot for a comeback in this game. It was just a steady downward spiral

I very much dislike the double turn change - it wasn't needed and takes any tactical element or interest out of the decision: you can only ever use it if you're ahead, and so it usually just closes out the game and makes things feel bad for a losing opponent even though it rarely affects the outcome, and as you say it removes the comeback potential that was largely the point of the mechanic. The AoS 3 system was good, and with the addition of further reactive commands in AoS 4 I really don't see that any change to the mechanic was needed. And if anything I think it will be less punishing in Spearhead than in the main game - in Spearhead there will often be situations where you still have cards when you're in a position to take the double and may not lose a lot. Also, I think in this game there might have been a misplay by Ridge - you still get to draw the cards if you're 5 or more points behind when you take the double, and I think Ridge might have been.

If you pick the double turn. You are not allowed to pickup cards

The carnosaur was badly utilized and fought like once during the first 6 combat phase. It had a lot of impact. The vampire lord also had incredibly good save rolls too

@@franzt8955 I don't think it would have had that much impact. Had it made its initial charge it would have, at best, killed a skeleton unit that didn't do a lot except sit on an objective, amounting to a maximum of 3 points over the course of the game. More likely given its performance when it did fight, it would have been tied up with them for a couple of turns and, when it eventually cleared them, would give the Soulblight player the chance to bring them back with the enhancement. That's the issue - even with slightly better luck the tools just aren't there to clear hordes, and with battleshock gone the tarpit trumps the hammer. The Seraphon are only ever playing whack-a-mole with a list like this.

I suspect Seraphon are bad rather than Soulblight being especially good, although I'd bank on them being better than average - though with neither the Vargheist entry really mattering nor the enhancement skellie unit being called on, and the Seraphon still losing badly, this was a more one-sided game than it looked from the score. The Seraphon have very few units, and those with not many models and no tools for reinforcement or healing, and they aren't very well-matched against most of what Spearhead forces are using, which is largely chaff units with multiple ways to replenish or reinforce them. You don't want to have to commit a Carnosaur to clear a skeleton tar pit, and this army doesn't really have anti-cavalry tools. I was hoping for Cities to go all the way but I'm not optimistic they'll do well against Soulblight. The two factions seem broadly well-matched with what's on board at the start, though Soulblight having 20 Skeletons is outright better than having 10 Steelhelms with reinforce. Cities, unlike Seraphon, seems to have the alpha strike potential to clear a unit of skellies outright, though. I'm not sure what they can really do against the Vargheists as both forces are likely to be running low by then and I doubt that, if the cannon is still around, it can be effectively protected from a Vargheist attack.

@@philipbowles5397 yeah its sad. I just bought the Seraphon spearhead. And while they look awesome, they are definitely on the back foot against most other spearheads. They need 1 more unit. (Mabe som chameleon skinks or terradon riders)

​@@capefury8731hold judgment on the spearhead. Cards play a huge part of the game, rich got bad cards for what he wanted to do or bad in general. I think knowing what all your cards do is key and planning with that un mind. I think these matches are just learning and they aren't taking it too seriously like a tourny.

@jakea3950 yeah i think you are right. But i recon there should be a way to mitigate some of the bad luck with card draws. From what ive seen. Just to keep it more interesting

​@@capefury8731 yeah i agree. Some mulligan sytem is a must. Some cards seem to immensely buff some boxes and literally do nothing for other boxes, so that's not a good sign. Lets see more games i guess!

It's the spearhead version though.

@@GeneralPuni It's identical to the full game version, barring any advantages conferred by battle formations or enhancements - only keywords and abilities differ between warscrolls in Spearhead and main AoS, all stats are the same, and the AoS version has the same charge bonus to Saurus ability.

​​​​@@philipbowles5397which you said already more abilities which is not the same * Terror ability for control scores * Blood Frenzy ability You also didn't mention the real warscroll has a whole additional attack profile of 4 4+ 2+ -1 3 which is nothing to scoff at. And you didn't mention the bonus damage on the spear when it charges. So yes. It is different even excluding the whole army bonuses/ enhancements in the full game. So no it is not identical.

There was some really bad dice rolling for it, though.

@@craigwelter5862 That's going to be an intrinsic weakness of Spearheads like this - they have so few units and dice that they're going to be extremely swingy, especially as you have no All-Out Attack to give all your high-damage 4+ attacks +1 to hit whenever you need to.

I think that's the point. It's meant to get people's feet wet into aos. "Buy this box, build them, play this smaller sized non-intimidating board game". Not really intended for competition. Imo at least.

@@curticusmaximus Yeah the problem with that plan is the boxes are extremely badly balanced and the card-draw-scoring is too random to the point where you might end up losing the majority of your games cause you start on the back foot each time. A great way to turn people off.