Post by Deller on Mar 10, 2017 9:33:25 GMT
The Ghost Fleet is Cryx's first theme force in Mark3 and was met with very polarizing opinions about it's viability. I was one of the people who at first glance thought the theme was utter garbage, and to be fair with the vast majority of Cryx casters it is, however when built the right way The Ghost Fleet is among the most powerful lists available to Cryx. In this thread I'm going to take you through my thought process when I began building for The Ghost Fleet, and why I've settled on the list I did. For those who haven't seen the list here it is:
As you can see The Ghost Fleet is extremely restrictive. Now lets first focus on what we get for playing in theme. We get +1 to go first, +1 to our Revenant Crew recursion, and 1-3 free solos depending on how many Revenants we take. These benefits are all about the Revenant Crew. Because these benefits are exclusively for the Revenant Crew I believe this theme should be played around them. While yes the theme force includes many Incorporeal options, and all of our non-character Warjacks, the theme force doesn't give us any real benefits for playing them. The theme force is all about supporting the Revenant Crew, so I feel that while you could build Incorporeal lists or warjack lists in theme, you're better off building those lists out of theme as the theme benefits are unlikely to be better for those types of lists than having unrestricted model access.
Now that we've decided to build around the Revenant Crew what should the list core look like by exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the Revenants. Starting with the Revenant's weaknesses their guns are horribly inaccurate. While the Pirates are accurate in melee, they do not hit very hard sporting only pow 9 on their Cutlasses and pow 10 pistols. The Revenants also suffer from having victim stats as 13/12 is not going to keep them alive against dedicated firepower. The final weakness of the Revenants is their inability to ignore rough terrain on top of the fact that The Ghost Fleet does not allow any terrain mitigation solos.
Now as for strengths the Revenant Crew themselves are actually deceptively accurate in melee. While they're base MAT 5, they go up to MAT 8 with Gang and Rengrave's Veteran Leader. Their recursion allows the unit to make attacks after recurring, and allows you to recur the Weapon Attachments. Revenant Crew are also decently quick at speed 6 which helps when you can move and attack after being recurred.
Because of where the unit excells, and how the theme force benefit interacts with Deathbound you're always going to want the full FA of Revenant Crew with 9 Riflemen. It's better to have multiple min units than a couple max units because the more units we have the more free guaranteed recursion the theme force benefit give us, and the more Riflemen we can take. Because our list is all about supporting the Revenant Crew our first free solo should always be Captain Rengrave since he provides synergy for the units.
Now onto the big money question that I and many others struggled to answer when this list first came out, "Which Caster should lead the Ghost Fleet?". The answer is Warwitch Deneghra, or Deneghra1. Deneghra1 complements The Ghost Fleet in a way that no other caster in Cryx does, and takes it from a mediocre recursion list to a tournament winning powerhouse. So what does Deneghra1 do for the Ghost Fleet:
1) Ghost Walk. The first thing Deneghra1 does is solve the Revenant Crew's terrain problem. Thanks to Ghost Walk instead of terrain getting in your way, you can use the terrain on the board against your opponent.
2) Armor Debuffs. As stated earlier while the Revenant Crew are accurate, they do not hit very hard, and will struggle against hard armored targets where gang will only bring them up to pow 11&12. Under Parasite & The Withering Revenant Crew go to hitting at pow 16&17. This is a huge swing that allows the Pirates to fight in games they ordinarily would not be able to.
3) Gunline. While the Revenants are accurate in melee, with Rengrave they are only Rat 5 with their guns. Rat 5 pow 10s are not going to accomplish very much, but with Crippling Grasp and The Withering Deneghra1 all of a sudden turns her horde of Revenant Crew into a potent Gunline capable of shooting down most non-stealthed infantry hordes.
4) Control. The Revenants have victim stats, and when your opponent dedicates a good of their army to a single unit, they will inflict serious damage, possibly even wiping the unit out. However The Withering provides the list some much needed control to help buy Deneghra a turn. It's no secret that it's very hard to fight through Deneghra1's feat. While under the effects of The Withering even a lowly Revenant Crew member becomes difficult to remove from the table. Deneghra's feat turn gives the Fleet a much needed pause on the game where they will receive much fewer losses and hopefully be able to replenish numbers uninterrupted.
5) Assassination. The Ghost Fleet is at its core an attrition list that hopes to use its recursion theme benefit to slowly grind your opponent out of the game. Deneghra1 however also offers the list a brutal assassination run on top of it's amazing attrition game. With Scourge, Parasite, and The Withering Deneghra1 can reduce casters to defense 5, -5 Armor. She then has a 20" threat range with the Revenant Crew Riflemen who all get to ignore LoS thanks to Ghost Shot. 9 PoW 15 shots is typically enough to kill most Casters, including some at full camp.
No other caster in Cryx offers this much power to the Revenant Crew. While some casters can offer some of this to the Fleet (Deneghra3 comes closest providing points 1, 5, and a little of 2&3) no other caster in Cryx can offer the Revenant Crew the complete package that Deneghra1 can.
So now that we've decided on Deneghra1 we need to take into account her big need, Arc Nodes. While I've seen different variants my current go to is 2 Deathrippers since they're the cheapest option. At the moment our core list now looks like:
Deneghra1
Deathripper
Deathripper
Captain Rengrave
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
and we have 1 Free Solo, 30 points, and 16 Jack points remaining.
The next addition I chose to go for was a Max unit of Blackbane's Ghost Raiders. The Blackbane's are included to force our opponent's hands during the list selection phase. Incorporeal is a very binary rule. Either your opponent has an answer for Incorporeal or they don't. Unlike other defensive techs like clouds or stealth, there is no way to play around Incorporeal with tactics. Including an Incorporeal element in the list gives us the edge during list selection. If we see that our opponent has a list with little to no magic weapons we know they're unlikely to drop it in fear of being automatically down on scenario by virtue of being unable to score while Blackbane's are around. I opted for the Blackbane's over a Wraith Engine because the Engine doesn't really synergize with the Revenant Crew well, while the Blackbane's benefit from Rengrave's Veteran Leader and add heavily to the recursion theme.
At this point we have 2 more free solo slots to spend on either Pistol Wraiths or Revenant Cannon Crews. While the Cannon Crew has more synergy with Revenant Crew, after testing I found it to be borderline useless in practice. The Cannon is only really effective at killing the models Revenant Crew already excel against, and the small amount of added recursion was largely insignificant. Pistol Wraiths even when used as sacrificial throwaways always did more work, so in the end I used my last two free slots on them.
Now I looked into filling out the rest of my Battlegroup. Since the Revenant Crew & Blackbane's mulch infantry well enough I was looking to add some more armor cracking capabilities. Eventually after realizing it was probably the right choice, I settled on my old pal Nightmare (Playing Nightmare with Deneghra1 kills me on the inside as I'm a fluff bunny and Nightmare did not become a character jack with his runic powers until after Haley possessed him and sliced Deneghra in half). Nightmare is hard hitting, defends himself with Stealth, ignores terrain innately, & with 2 open fists and no Uncontrollable Rage has access to the full range of power attacks.
This is the Core army:
Deneghra1
Deathripper
Deathripper
Nightmare
Captain Rengrave
Pistol Wraith
Pistol Wraith
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Max Blackbane's Ghost Raiders
And at this point there's 11 points left to play around with. Personally I chose to flesh out the army by adding 2 Machine Wraiths, to help control Warjack placements, and Maxing one of the Revenant Crew units. Other options include adding another light Warjack or upgrading your Arc Nodes.
As you can see The Ghost Fleet is extremely restrictive. Now lets first focus on what we get for playing in theme. We get +1 to go first, +1 to our Revenant Crew recursion, and 1-3 free solos depending on how many Revenants we take. These benefits are all about the Revenant Crew. Because these benefits are exclusively for the Revenant Crew I believe this theme should be played around them. While yes the theme force includes many Incorporeal options, and all of our non-character Warjacks, the theme force doesn't give us any real benefits for playing them. The theme force is all about supporting the Revenant Crew, so I feel that while you could build Incorporeal lists or warjack lists in theme, you're better off building those lists out of theme as the theme benefits are unlikely to be better for those types of lists than having unrestricted model access.
Now that we've decided to build around the Revenant Crew what should the list core look like by exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the Revenants. Starting with the Revenant's weaknesses their guns are horribly inaccurate. While the Pirates are accurate in melee, they do not hit very hard sporting only pow 9 on their Cutlasses and pow 10 pistols. The Revenants also suffer from having victim stats as 13/12 is not going to keep them alive against dedicated firepower. The final weakness of the Revenants is their inability to ignore rough terrain on top of the fact that The Ghost Fleet does not allow any terrain mitigation solos.
Now as for strengths the Revenant Crew themselves are actually deceptively accurate in melee. While they're base MAT 5, they go up to MAT 8 with Gang and Rengrave's Veteran Leader. Their recursion allows the unit to make attacks after recurring, and allows you to recur the Weapon Attachments. Revenant Crew are also decently quick at speed 6 which helps when you can move and attack after being recurred.
Because of where the unit excells, and how the theme force benefit interacts with Deathbound you're always going to want the full FA of Revenant Crew with 9 Riflemen. It's better to have multiple min units than a couple max units because the more units we have the more free guaranteed recursion the theme force benefit give us, and the more Riflemen we can take. Because our list is all about supporting the Revenant Crew our first free solo should always be Captain Rengrave since he provides synergy for the units.
Now onto the big money question that I and many others struggled to answer when this list first came out, "Which Caster should lead the Ghost Fleet?". The answer is Warwitch Deneghra, or Deneghra1. Deneghra1 complements The Ghost Fleet in a way that no other caster in Cryx does, and takes it from a mediocre recursion list to a tournament winning powerhouse. So what does Deneghra1 do for the Ghost Fleet:
1) Ghost Walk. The first thing Deneghra1 does is solve the Revenant Crew's terrain problem. Thanks to Ghost Walk instead of terrain getting in your way, you can use the terrain on the board against your opponent.
2) Armor Debuffs. As stated earlier while the Revenant Crew are accurate, they do not hit very hard, and will struggle against hard armored targets where gang will only bring them up to pow 11&12. Under Parasite & The Withering Revenant Crew go to hitting at pow 16&17. This is a huge swing that allows the Pirates to fight in games they ordinarily would not be able to.
3) Gunline. While the Revenants are accurate in melee, with Rengrave they are only Rat 5 with their guns. Rat 5 pow 10s are not going to accomplish very much, but with Crippling Grasp and The Withering Deneghra1 all of a sudden turns her horde of Revenant Crew into a potent Gunline capable of shooting down most non-stealthed infantry hordes.
4) Control. The Revenants have victim stats, and when your opponent dedicates a good of their army to a single unit, they will inflict serious damage, possibly even wiping the unit out. However The Withering provides the list some much needed control to help buy Deneghra a turn. It's no secret that it's very hard to fight through Deneghra1's feat. While under the effects of The Withering even a lowly Revenant Crew member becomes difficult to remove from the table. Deneghra's feat turn gives the Fleet a much needed pause on the game where they will receive much fewer losses and hopefully be able to replenish numbers uninterrupted.
5) Assassination. The Ghost Fleet is at its core an attrition list that hopes to use its recursion theme benefit to slowly grind your opponent out of the game. Deneghra1 however also offers the list a brutal assassination run on top of it's amazing attrition game. With Scourge, Parasite, and The Withering Deneghra1 can reduce casters to defense 5, -5 Armor. She then has a 20" threat range with the Revenant Crew Riflemen who all get to ignore LoS thanks to Ghost Shot. 9 PoW 15 shots is typically enough to kill most Casters, including some at full camp.
No other caster in Cryx offers this much power to the Revenant Crew. While some casters can offer some of this to the Fleet (Deneghra3 comes closest providing points 1, 5, and a little of 2&3) no other caster in Cryx can offer the Revenant Crew the complete package that Deneghra1 can.
So now that we've decided on Deneghra1 we need to take into account her big need, Arc Nodes. While I've seen different variants my current go to is 2 Deathrippers since they're the cheapest option. At the moment our core list now looks like:
Deneghra1
Deathripper
Deathripper
Captain Rengrave
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
and we have 1 Free Solo, 30 points, and 16 Jack points remaining.
The next addition I chose to go for was a Max unit of Blackbane's Ghost Raiders. The Blackbane's are included to force our opponent's hands during the list selection phase. Incorporeal is a very binary rule. Either your opponent has an answer for Incorporeal or they don't. Unlike other defensive techs like clouds or stealth, there is no way to play around Incorporeal with tactics. Including an Incorporeal element in the list gives us the edge during list selection. If we see that our opponent has a list with little to no magic weapons we know they're unlikely to drop it in fear of being automatically down on scenario by virtue of being unable to score while Blackbane's are around. I opted for the Blackbane's over a Wraith Engine because the Engine doesn't really synergize with the Revenant Crew well, while the Blackbane's benefit from Rengrave's Veteran Leader and add heavily to the recursion theme.
At this point we have 2 more free solo slots to spend on either Pistol Wraiths or Revenant Cannon Crews. While the Cannon Crew has more synergy with Revenant Crew, after testing I found it to be borderline useless in practice. The Cannon is only really effective at killing the models Revenant Crew already excel against, and the small amount of added recursion was largely insignificant. Pistol Wraiths even when used as sacrificial throwaways always did more work, so in the end I used my last two free slots on them.
Now I looked into filling out the rest of my Battlegroup. Since the Revenant Crew & Blackbane's mulch infantry well enough I was looking to add some more armor cracking capabilities. Eventually after realizing it was probably the right choice, I settled on my old pal Nightmare (Playing Nightmare with Deneghra1 kills me on the inside as I'm a fluff bunny and Nightmare did not become a character jack with his runic powers until after Haley possessed him and sliced Deneghra in half). Nightmare is hard hitting, defends himself with Stealth, ignores terrain innately, & with 2 open fists and no Uncontrollable Rage has access to the full range of power attacks.
This is the Core army:
Deneghra1
Deathripper
Deathripper
Nightmare
Captain Rengrave
Pistol Wraith
Pistol Wraith
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Min Revenant Crew w/ 3 Riflemen
Max Blackbane's Ghost Raiders
And at this point there's 11 points left to play around with. Personally I chose to flesh out the army by adding 2 Machine Wraiths, to help control Warjack placements, and Maxing one of the Revenant Crew units. Other options include adding another light Warjack or upgrading your Arc Nodes.