GDNerd's Phoenix Open Report

I would have thought that the lack of magic weapons would hurt you into Grymkin, as he can use his gremlins to mess with your landing spots. How did you find this?

Valka Madrak and Lanyssa (plus sometimes objective) tends to be sufficient. It was a bit of a problem in one of my later games which I will report on later .

Sorry for taking so long to get around to Day 2, there's been some personal stuff distracting me. I come into Day 2 knowing the field will be the following for top 8: Legion, Cryx, Cryx, CG, Skorne, Mercenaries, Grymkin. The only change I made was turning Valka to a Fel Caller in my Kolgrima list to give it better options if I saw CG.

Round 1 - Legion (Invasion)

I forgot what his other list was but I knew he was basically monolisting Anamag. I had success with Madrak into the double Warspear variant but wasn't sure about the Chosen variant (this was double warmongers single chosen). Still I dropped it knowing Kolgrima couldn't do enough work. I win the roll-off and as you see from the Day 1 battles I feel like it's my game to lose.

I have one set of bears in ambush and put everything as far up to the middle as possible. I plan on holding one zone with a pocket where my swamp gobbers can hide behind a wall toeing in, and clear the hellmouth on the other side with my bears. He goes for an... interesting maneuver and jams his chosen into my Raiders stacking as much armor as possible. I retaliate by killing all but one of them with my champs and the glacier king stationaries the last one. My ambushing bears kill his Hellmouth and prepare to engage the Warmongers on that side the next turn. Madrak feats.

My opponent fails to kill much other than a couple of raiders, even fails to kill the ambushing bear handler. With no scenario traction or attrition things kinda just collapse for him. I clear the middle zone and the one on my ambushing side and run stuff so he can't clear his side with troops remaining. By top of 4, it's 4-0 my favor and he calls it.

In general this list is such a bully that if it goes first and you can't do meaningful damage when Madrak's feat turn, you probably will not win. With the death of Nemo3 and virtually every faction being pressured to take a medium base spam list that falls flat to Madrak's stat brick and anti-charging his stock keeps going up and up. I'm still surprised people are favoring Kolgrima so much over him, I guess it's because of how much overlap Borka2 and Madrak have when playing SotN.

Round 2 - Cryx (Spread the Net)

Hoo boy these were some brews. Morty2 and Scaverous both in Black Industries. I expected Morty because of how Scaverous' debuff doesn't work and Owl's Wisdom can cause problems however he drops Scaverous into Kolgrima. The Scaverous list is Withershadow Combine, DJ, some arcnodes, Aiakos with double stalker, Wrongeye and Snapjaw, double Cephalyx Overlords and various support elements.

I lose the roll-off which ends up being a problem that I realize fully when he puts Deathjack with Death Ward just behind a cloud and flanks loosely with some Stalkers on Aiakos. I get really nervous and go for a play where I put Applied Knowledge and Puppet Master on Kolgrima, turn on the stone without her, and have her vanish forwards to spray out Deathjack's cortex and feat. Luckily I succeed but paranoid of an assassination vector I jam with the Raiders and the Fire Eaters.

Scaverous proceeds to feat and kill all the Raiders and most of the fire eaters (~15 models die and one tough check made, woof). He's sitting on 8 souls and one focus and is hiding in a star crossed bubble that is hard to avoid. I have a scenario play to go up 2-0 but at this point I am so far behind on attrition that there's no way I can maintain that tempo even if I kill deathjack. Instead I go for an assassination.

I load up all of my buffs, turn on the stone, then vanish -> charge to one of his arcnodes where I can spray Scaverous without being in Star Crossed. Unfortunately I don't get a crit stationary but between my two sprays I get him down to ~12 boxes and eat some souls. My pyg lookouts run to Marked Target range of Scaverous, and I am able to burn through all his souls with two boosted to hit shots from the Bomber (far strike before walking into feat and thankfully don't need to walk into Star Crossed so boosted 7s eat his souls without a failure.

This game was... not one I should have won I don't think. Even if I had made better plays to keep my Raiders alive better and held back until turn 2 to do stuff I think he's too good at killing my jam. If he didn't give me a line for Kolgrima and the Bomber I just get totally crushed. Or assassinated. Better lucky than good I guess and this is a rare matchup so I don't have to spend a lot of time dwelling on it. That said this list has some problems, namely the raiders double fire eaters are hard for Kolgrima to support and I think I need to alter my jam package. Lynus and Edrea might be erroneous too but I love being able to walk up and stationary a heavy while scalpeling out its ability to shake. Not sure where the list will end up but it definitely feels like how my Madrak1 list felt at the beginning of the year.

Round 3 - Grymkin (Pit II)

Time for the big show, battle of the podcasters - it's me vs Tseung Tsu for the finals. I am very tempted to split here because he is already qualified for WMW and so the slot goes to me and I had TERRIBLE sleep the night before. However Tseung Tsu wants to do the match and I oblige him because, if not for the quality of competition whats the point?

He has King of Nothing and Dreamer (both Pat Dunford's lists? I'm not sure but they're in a similar vein at the very list). I figure KoN is a problem with clouds but his ability to do work is limited in that list so I put down Madrak again into Dreamer. I win the roll-off and loudly and confidently declare the game is over. This list just doesn't lose going first unless you screw up or your opponent is way luckier / better. And while I'm sure he's better than me I doubt he's going to have enough room to flip the matchup.

For his arcana he picks Accursed (lose tough if you hurt something with a corpse and no healing, he thought it blocked Sanguine Bond as well) and Sacrifice.

I jam up the middle of the board while he unpacks, he uses the dreamer's gun on a Raider and enfeebles them. I use the Runebearer to put guided hand on the Raiders then promptly screw up and prevent an objective-buffed Raider from getting on a Gremlin Swarm because of the stationary Raider not being in my Tactician bubble. The raiders half (or full? I cant remember precisely) a Gorehound while just getting in the way while my ambushing bears kill a second and poise to kill his objective. He triggers Accursed. The rest of my forces prepare to go in on whatever clears the raiders.

Here is where Tseung Tsu points to as his biggest mistake and considering how close the end is he very may well be right. He screws up his ordering such that there is no Cage Rager to arc Enfeeble onto the Glacier King. He kills about half of the Raiders, both non-ambushing bears and sets up to put a Cage Rager and both Skin and Moans onto my Glacier King the following turn. Also due to the slaughter he has racked up a TON of corpses which over the course of the game eat up probably ~10 jackhammers. So while Accursed was not as good as he initially thought, it actually probably got him a lot of value to set up for future turns.

Valka gets angry and Vengeances into a Gremlin Swarm, with which he triggers All Fall down. It isn't until later in the turn we realize that it doesn't knockdown Valka which screws with my plans a bit (needed him to clear another jamming gremlin swarm so I could go with the GK before Madrak but instead had to Jackhammer down his Large Phantasm that he made out of one of my bears to make room. The King kills one Skin and Moans and my Champs take his Cage Rager and Skin and Moans down to half. My ambushing bears kill his objective, one gets knocked down and I go to 1 cp on the turn.

On his turn he provokes a free strike from his Arcnode Phantasm and I get paranoid about some kind of Abyssal Gate assassination angle I'm not seeing so I kill it with Free Strikes which unfortunately procs sacrifice. He kills more raiders and tears into the champs and this turn remembers to Enfeeble the Glacier King.

I retaliate by killing the Cage Rager by my glacier King and toe-ing into the rectangle zone my Bears cleared scoring me a second point. The Skin and Moans lives unfortunately which means it kills even more champs. He puts a Gremlin Swarm into the rectangle zone to stop me from scoring and I no longer have options to clear it so I move the Glacier King in to retake the center. I kill his other Skin and Moans so at this point he's left with two Cage Ragers who have been working through the Raiders. Ultimately I kill another Cage Rager so all he has left is the wagon, one gremlin swarm, and one final Cage Rager.

Bottom of 6 he manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat so to speak and kills my objective to spawn a large Phantasm to bulldoze contesting models out of the rectangular zone and ties the game up 2-2. At this point I have like... 2 minutes on clock and go into panic mode because if I can't stop him from scoring I just threw. Hard. I use Madrak to try and kill his Corpse Wagon but leave it on a few boxes (3-5?) which would have let me clear the center zone and not worry. My Jackhammer prevents an easy entry into the rectangle zone for my Glacier King (and means he has even more stuff in the center zone). I run the Glacier King to toe into the rectangle zone rather than do work on it and pass to him with a couple minutes left on his clock. 

By the end of his remaining clock he comes to the conclusion that there is nowhere to score and we shake hands with me having a massive AP advantage. He played a hell of a match and TBH if that enfeeble had gone off on the GK he may well have won considering how poorly I was protecting my objective and zone from a Large Phantasm play. In general his phantasm play was superb and his arcana choices served him well. Attrition was pretty clearly in my favor all game though and going first was a HUGE advantage.

At this point I'm exhausted. I pick up a ton of PoM with my winnings (sorry to betray the Trolls community but PoM was my first love. Not 100% sure I'm going to play them next year but if not trolls they're my #1 pick) and help clean up the store. Once Will and Tyson are back on their way to SoCal, I catch an uber back to the airport and fly home. An eventful if exhausting weekend, I go home checking off my first major event victory (and hopefully not my last). By my estimates I jump up to #3 in WMW standings barring events not on the most recent standing sheet and am looking forward to my first trip to St Louis on the first of November!

I'd also like to take a moment to thank the Lormahordes Trollbloods community. I've been posting here less and less in the last few months but I love reading the theory posts here and I use it to come up with fun new ideas to tinker with / help me think about how my current lists play out.

Great read, man.

I think he wants the fell caller against CG to better handle Sylvestro's DEF 18 rocket men.

The higher up you get the more it swings.  When most of your games go to turn 7 it's quite an advantage as long as your opponent doesn't take too much of the board (See Slayers spam)

Even then I think you always want to go second again Grimkin and other lists that are slow.  Nothing like watching your opponent have to contest zones on their second turn and giving you free stuff.

Going through your questions/comments in sequential order:

Kolgrima into Cryx - Didn't want him to double fake back into Scaverous and go for the spell assassination out. Unsure if that call was correct but I read his playbook correctly.

Felcaller into CG - helps make me less reliant on Madrak to beat Rocketmen. Between her def debuff and the fel caller's mat buff raiders can get to only needing 8s to hit which while not amazing is pretty solid into rocket bois.

Lanyssa vs Mist Speaker - I get where you're coming from here but Lanyssa is too key for the brick that Madrak takes. It's a bunch of low-medium threat stuff and you need an extender. Also she is very hard to remove from a flag where she's chilling in a snow bank (pardon the pun).

Going first - I actually went first 6 out of 7 games. I believe 2 of those games my opponent intentionally gave me first because they thought they could score out on me. And while that might have been a valid strategy for their list in a vacuum that's a BIG no-no into Madrak. If you let him park in the middle of the board and get his stone started before you can start killing stuff you will never remove him from the center + side he finds more valuable. Also this doesn't get discussed a ton, but Bears get a LOT better when they ambush right after your opponent's first turn than after their second turn.

This is pronounced particularly with fury hungry Troll warlocks who have to split between their key spells and fueling the stone, and I think other bricks (maelok, primal terrors, etc) are much more resilient to going second. This Madrak list can go second and do okay as I get to set the scoring tempo but I probably lose a ton of raiders before anything happens and if it's a 7 turn slugfest its probably not worth it.