World Championship Armies! ~ Ardacon 2023 breakdown 

My hobbit archer was an absolute champion! He got more kills in combat than in shooting over the weekend and only died once when Gully needed a snack 😂 but the main reason he's there is to provide my banner model with resistance to magic for AoE spells like nature's wrath and tremor to stop him going prone

Hi ! I'm Le Preux Shawn. Ardacon was such a great experience I really loved it. And so many faces I already knew because of youtube videos like this one. Your chanel was one of the first I spoted when I came back into the game and it's a pleasure to be mentionned here. (even with a eavy accent... 😆)

As the 3rd placed Numenor and Rivendell player who played against the 1st placed player and all 3 4th to 6th placed players I have some inputs. An important part about Cirdan that you missed is the blinding light. Lots of shooting lists that did well and having Blinding Light is pretty good against those. Besides the 4 top 10 players I also played against Jay Achyara (2nd place last year) who ended up in 30th place and played Assault Upon Helm's Deep with 2 ballistas and my last game I faced Serpent Horde/Far Harad with the Betrayer who ended up 32nd. Besides the Goblin Town list Blinding Light was pretty important.

Great video as usual, thanks for listing all the armies and breaking them down. Its great to see unexpected armies win.

I appreciate that Arnor was the highest ranked force in the video you put out a while ago that was based win ratings, and it ended up placing first!

Great video 👌 thanks 🙏

Cant wait to see your next terrain set! Love both of your sets

Another great video 😎

Great, thanks mate

the thing about hype armies is that everyone comes with a plan with how to deal with them. no one was planning to face arnor at the top.

It's interesting to see the high model count meta which I've also found to be supremely important. At the end of the day, you're generally trying to wound something on a 5+ so you end up list building and playing in such a way that you're using as many dice as possible to improve your odds (Beyond banners, higher F, more shooting, etc etc). That Arnor lists exemplifies the mindset: A lot of above average F and high D guys packing as many bows as possible with them to just absolutely grind opponents down. I've wanted to collect Arnor for a long, long time and feel more inspired now than ever to do exactly that lol

for the ugluk scout doubles list the empty captains are for early drops. by the time you put them down, you know where a fair chunk of the enemy are going to be (even in maelstrom, so you can decide if mighting is worth it) so then you can stack most of your army where you want. this means you dont need to move your orcs much and they can keep up for the bonus. scout captains can just run over and join up later.

I hope the next project is either Elf or Gondor based!!! But I get how difficult it would be designing and printing Elven architecture

The flail weapon swaps (there are one in each of the named hero warbands) are actually a brilliant play - Whirl doesn't reduce the FV of the spearman, but gets you an extra wounding die if you're against two models. With almost everyone carrying a spear, Whirl will almost never hurt you.

I think Lothlorien is seeing a big resurgence because it counters so many of the current meta lists. Blinding Light + widespread resistance to magic for AOL/shooting, F6 troops to shut down Dragon Emperor, great shooting, good offensive magic, and sentinels for positional play. It doesn’t have any big beatstick mounted heroes but it seems the meta these days is all about maximising numbers of good quality troops, which Loth can do

Gandalf the Grey can strengthen will on Alfrid, so it’s an “infinite”might combo. That’s probably why he was there.

@

Interesting to see LOTR armies took the podium but the Hobbit armies dominated the rest of the top 10, not sure if there's anything there...

Arnor! Well alright!

The great thing about Gandalf in laketown is that he can give more will to Alfred. Then he can generate even more might