Last Night's Battle Report

So I played a really good game last night against Sean's Legion. I was playing Epic Skarre and he was playing Absylonia. I haven't played eSkarre in MKII and never played against Absylonia, so it was a learning experience all around for me.

The 35 pt lists were something like:

eSkarre

Reaper

Seether

2 Nightwretches

Skarlock

20 McThralls

Necrosurgeon

Pistol Wraith

Absylonia (tier 4)

Ravagore

Angelius

Scythean

3 Shredders

Raek

2 Forsaken

Shepherd

It was a brutal game. He went first, and his tier bonuses let him run his beasts extra far up, getting right in my face. A lucky deviation from the Ravagore killed the necrosurgeon (but not the stitch thralls...useless bastards) and set a Nightwretch and Skarre on fire. He ended up outside of charge range, but if I moved up at all I'd be in range of his charges next turn.

Luckily, Skarre is well-equipped to deal with that. Fire went out on her and damaged the 'wretch a little bit, and I put 3 focus on the Reaper. Ran the node up and arc'd perdition through it to damage a shredder and move the Reaper up 6". Then she popped her feat and made her 2 heavies, her, the skarlock, and the pistol wraith immune to enemy attacks. The Reaper moved up and reeled in the Scythean, doing some pretty solid damage and feeling quite safe due to the feat. I ran most everything up, being well within charge range, but with all the key pieces immune to attacks.

This was the turn that probably shifted the game in my favor, in the sense that he decided to fall back instead of pressing the advantage. The Scythean killed the flaming Nightwretch and the rest fell back. Absylonia threw out a blight field to prevent allocation to either the Seether (including his freebie!) or the Reaper.

While that's all well and good, it meant that I had now gained the initiative. I killed the Scythean, perditioned to move the Seether closer, where it could charge Absylonia. She transferred the damage, but now her beasts were pretty torn up, she had a Seether with Death Ward in her face, and Skarre had Admonition on herself and was in cover, making any shooting next to impossible and any melee attempts prone to failure.

Still, the Angelius, 2 Shredders, and Absylonia killed the Seether, the Raek jumped behind Skarre so she couldn't retreat (but was out of Absylonia's control, so it couldn't grab her or boost at all), and the Ravagore got Playing God on it to kill 4 or 5 McThralls.

The rest of the game was a grindfest. I killed the Raek, Ravagore, and a Shredder, a Forsaken exploded and killed something like 7 McThralls, and eventually Skarre was able to Perdition the Reaper closer to Absylonia with 3 focus to charge and kill her. In the end I had something like 5 models left, and he had 2 (not counting his dead warlock).

Lessons learned:

1. Eyeless sight doesn't ignore cover!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is huge news to me, and makes fighting Legion in the future about a million times easier.

2. The Reaper with Seas of Fate is just sicknasty.

3. Absylonia is kind of crazy good with beast attrition. Very different from the offensive beast style of epic Doomshaper or epic Kaya.

4. There's a reason eSkarre was my favorite in MKI, and I think she'll continue to see table time. My main concern? She might be TOO good. I don't want to have another situation like Mortenebra, where she's just so insane that I never put her on the table in casual games.