Shamblers

So Shamblers are a mixed bag, they are great for late game what with effectively turning into a heavy, but they are hard to keep alive for that long. The Bokor going down to 5 boxes sucks and the lack of a good way to hide him hurts. That being said, they are great if you are bad at keeping rask alive, and do great if you have enough troops to feed the things. Bring a mist speaker and they go to mat 6 which is cool. Combine that with backstrikes from placing them in the now super limited command bubble, and a damage buff and they can do serious work even before the Bokor can get into that heavy. Ultimately they aren't worthless by any means, but be prepared to be super careful of where you place your leader, since your opponent will be sure to kill him dead if he has anything more than a corpse at all. In conclusion they are a great late game piece and a good screen but otherwise they die to anything and are probably not your first choice for a melee unit, especially with calaban who actually hurts them as much as his spell list hurts his feat, since carnivore rfp's the models they want to collect corpses from. But they do well with rask and they might be ok with maelok.

It's only one downside if that's your only gameplan. It's not a complete blunder as you can still collect your own corpses but I hate antisynergy in list construction, which is why I'm not running a vault in my blindwalker themes that have posse in them.

With enough Shamblers to buy/boost attacks, a buffed Bokur can reasonably kill a heavy.

Rask is probably the prime example of using them. They add to his survivability and he can buff their damage output. Barney I have seem them with too since death march on them turns hilarious and makes them the ever encroaching Zerg swarm. Also for the 75$ you do get a lot of models, like more than some whole lists, so there is value in that. Do wish they'd make them plastic so they could be cheaper, but oh well, that is the life of playing minions and mercs

One of the shamblers is indeed upgraded to unit leader. This usually results in some shamblers being out of formation.

My issue is finding any other player that plays enough infantry for it to matter. Skrone dude is running Rasheth or Xerxis 2 with max elephants. Cygnar normally runs junior and a unit of lances. Circle runs manikins. Cryx are 90% undead. I cannot get corpse tokens from anything. I know the "no infantry meta" was sort of a joke running around but... It's really becoming the truth.

But that all aside, 11 point jamming unit can still be worth taking. I'm also trying to use them as food for beast. But I think i'm missing an rule interation. When running them with a legion Caster: Do I have to use minion models for the Chef to pass out the "stews on" or does it have to be the Legion models. I don't have the card in front of me but I swore the chef said "friendly faction" so which faction o.0?

So my plan to eat shamblers with Typhon doesn't work... I now somewhat regret buying shamblers. That seems unnecessarily restrictive.

Also I understand the whole "my meta is different from your meta". My experience is not representative of the game as a whole. It just seems that MK3 in my meta started with balanced lists and has no shifted to beast/jack heavy. So it's sort of sad.