Going dark horse ( no theme )

My dad plays Legion, and has found a few lists (not many) that are good enough to play out of theme. I think it's mostly because of how rockin Legion's Chracter Warbeasts are. I also know that minions had at one point a few lists that ran out of theme, but I think that changed with Will Work for Food. So long story short, it's not TOTALLY un-doable... but it's the exception rather than the rule. Most the time, you should be building in theme.

The benefits of going out of theme differ by faction. It mostly comes down to, "What units/solos/jacks/beasts can I not take together in any theme?" For Ret, there are quite a few (mixing house beaty-stompy-jacks with house amazing-jack-support). For Mercs, it's, um, Magnus2 and Gallant for DEF 15 with Dodge? Much of Merc stuff requires a theme to take in the first place.

I find that, whenever I try to build a list out of them, I run out of points to get the support I want anyway. So then I make some minor alterations, basically take out 1 unit or solo and squeeze it in theme anyway.

Definitely not impossible, but you need to get quite a bit of use out of the specialist models to offset the 15-point swing as well as the theme benefits.

I think that there is a way to do this - especially as things increasingly grow more diverse on the mercs side and we add models that are SUPPOSED to be in theme but which are pretty f'ing uber out of it. For Khador this largely would seem to be leveraging Koldun Lords non WOlves lists since we have lacked, prior to them, a reliable armor debuff.


Heck - you could make a strong argument that because of how they work they could be a solid add to the otherwise lack luster Jaws theme - accepting the loss of the free models for access to no shooting/debuff and possibly the additional empower options if you also had a Forgeseer.

In broader terms that is what I would be looking at - archetypal lackluster themes that really don't currently give you that much an advantage and then "out of theme" solos/units which would syngerize across themes.

That is better.  While it is NICE to take all that stuff in Themes, they are no more Merc stuff than a Road Hog or Blackhide Wrastler is Skorne stuff.

being 15-20pts down is so brutal. Even though freebies arent always worth their cost, at the end of the day more stuff = more stuff

I still do, from time to time. There's a lot of stuff that is just damn solid regardless of theme benefits in Khador; MoW Shocktroopers, Winter Guard, Strike Tankers... Probably Doom Reavers now with the points drop.

But it's harder to justify these days. Armoured Corps is well rounded enough that you can approximate anything except magic weapons in-theme, and the benefits are very handy. And whereas you might have been playing down 12 points before, that's crept up and up so 18-20 points down is not uncommon.

I wish they'd just standardise the theme freebies to 'X points of Y gives you 5 extra army points' or something simple. The current system is really inflexible, and the free-points arms-race is more than a little annoying.