Ultramates 2019

So on the Sunday just gone, 18 March 2019, Western Australia's largest Age of Sigmar tournament to date played out. Run by Mitchell Byrne, our very own TO extraordinaire, Ultramates was a doubles tournament that had 36 teams, or 72 players sign up, with 29 teams participating on the day. It was held on St Patrick's, in a pub (yes!) and was run by our TO extraordinaire Mitch Byrne.

Tournament Details

So in it's basic form, this was a 4 game tournament (gaming event?) held over one day. Each player brought a 1000pt army; two players per team meant each team was playing 2000pts. Each team needed to meet the usual requirement, so 1 leader and 2 battleline units. There were no restrictions on Grand Alliances playing as allies so Death could pair up with Chaos, or Order with Destruction; the aim was to allow people to play with their mates in a fun setting (hence Ultra'mates' - get it?). There were some house rules regarding the doubling up of terrain based allegiance abilities (ie. two Sylvaneth players were only able to place one Wildwood rather than two) and spells and abilities that affected 'friendly' units could only affect your own army (so no Blades of Putrefaction on allies which was very relevant for our list design). Other than this the Realms were in play (but largely forgotten in my games at least) and there were some slight changes to the way in which artefact's were selected. If you are interested there is a Facebook page where you can find the players pack, but the changes were primarily flavourful rather than significantly altering the way armies were built.

My partner and I

Doubles Tournaments always seem to pull people on the sidelines of Sigmar in to give it a shot. Players who have been on the fence or haven't played since Fantasy Battle can be convinced to join in on the basis that they can have a great time with their mates and that someone will be there to celebrate their victories and commiserate with their losses. In this sense, our team was no exception.

Back in the days of Fantasy, myself and my twin brother (Sam) both played here and there; I played Daemons and he played High Elves. He hadn't played Sigmar at all but I convinced him that he should come play in a Doubles event with me. He agreed on the condition that I essentially pick the army for him and away we went.

Over the past six months I had been adding Pestilens units to my roster, and with the Skaventide book approaching, it seemed like a good opportunity to expand my Nurgle collection further. Sam was on board, and so the lists I devised for us were as follows:

Our Lists

Alex: Maggotkin of Nurgle

Lord of Afflictions (General)

 - Rustfang

 - Virulent Contagion

Great Unclean One

 - Bile Blade

 - Doomsday Bell

 - Lore Spell: Glorious Afflictions

30 Plaguebearers

10 Plaguebearers

Total: 1000pts

Sam: Skaventide Pestilens

Plague Priest on Plague Furnace (General)

 - Master of Rot and Ruin

Verminlord Corruptor

 - Sword of Judgment

40 Plague Monks

 - Paired Foetid Blades

 - Doom Gong / Bale Chimes / Contagion Banner / Icon of Pestilence

40 Plague Monks

 - Foetid Blade & Woe Stave

 - Doom Gong / Bale Chimes / Contagion Banner / Icon of Pestilence

Umbral Spellportal

Total: 980pts

Creation of the lists

In building a list for Sam, I was very mindful that he had never played a game of Age of Sigmar, and that our time to practise would be very limited (in the end we got about 2 turns of a practice game in before the event). With that in mind, I wanted a list that would be straightforward to play, but one that would also give him some opportunity to create some fun stories. In the end (and with a certain degree of pride) his list ended up being absolutely filthy, but it ticked these two boxes:

1. It essentially involved throwing Plague Monks into something important, and given their power they were likely to kill what they touched. This meant that Sam didn't have to spend much time thinking about whether he would kill something, particularly when he would be relying on me to tell him what everything was.

2. The Verminlord Corruptor had the potential to go off both with magic against hordes and in combat against heroes and monsters. Sam could look for opportunities to create stories with the Corruptor, and if it died it was not going to be game breaking.

I was confident that the Plague Monks would blend almost anything they touched, and the Verminlord Corruptor was a fantastic toolbox for managing hordes, heroes and monsters alike. In designing my list, I was looking for ways to hold objectives, provide support to the Plague Monks, and to try and protect them from retaliatory counter charges. The Support GUO fit the bill here with his bonuses to cast and dispel, as well as the 3" movement to Nurgle units within 7". He would allow the Plague Monks to more reliably alpha strike when the opportunity arose.

The Plaguebearers were also fairly obvious choices. 30 Plaguebearers are tough to shift and they were exactly what we needed to hold objectives in our side of the field. If we held an equal amount of objectives but the monks could claim one enemy objective for a turn then we would ultimately come out on top. I would have liked the second unit to be larger but ultimately could only afford the 10 to meet the Battleline requirements.

The least straight-forward choice in my list was the Lord of Afflictions. I'm a huge fan of the Lord of Afflictions; I think he is super fun to play, benefits from the GUO command ability well and can take some damage. In this list though I had a particular purpose for him. We had way of killing heroes and monsters, and hordes weren't going to be a problem. What we didn't have an answer to were heavily armoured units like Sequitors or Kurnoth Hunters. Multiple wound units that could get a 3+ or 4+ re-rollable armour save were going to be very difficult for us to shift. The Lord of Afflictions provided an answer to this by being a mobile Rustfang carrier (he could reduce armour saves by 1) and he naturally had -2 rend on two of his attack profiles. When combined with the Rustfang this meant that he could ignore 4+ armour saves.

Allegiance Abilities

Something that I want to highlight is the interaction between the Skaventide and Nurgle armies that we were playing. Because of the way in which this tournament was set up, we had a unique opportunity to merge the Pestilens and Nurgle allegiance abilities on all of the Skaven units. While I couldn't buff the Skaven units directly, the Nurgle allegiance applies to all Nurgle units, whether friend or foe. This gave us the ability to supercharge the Plague Monks in a significant way.

Plague Monks start off by hitting on 4's and wounding on 4's as baseline with their blades. When in the Skaventide allegiance, units of 30 or more receive +1 to hit and +1 to wound, and they get +2 to their bravery for each 10 models, rather than +1. The way to reduce their power is to whittle them down to under 30 and then under 20.

In a Nurgle allegiance, Plague Monks  get access to the Cycle of Corruption, which can give +2 movement or +1 to wound. Importantly, Nurgle also provide Feculent Gnarlmaws which give run and charge. However, Nurgle can't buff the hit rolls of the Plague Monks and often don't have command points to save them from battleshock.

When combined however, the weaknesses of the Plague Monks are covered by each allegiance and a hideously powerful 240 point unit is created. With the wheel and the Great Unclean One, the Plague Monks have a move of 11', they run d6 + 1', and then they can charge 2d6 + 1'; this puts them squarely within alpha strike territory. The importance of them being able to alpha strike is that opponents don't have an opportunity to whittle them down and reduce the bonuses. Over the course of the weekend, this dual interaction was very important to our gameplay, and it heightened the power of the Plague Monks to a greater degree than what you will find at a singles event.

Preparation for the day

Leading up to the 18th, we ended up both being very busy. At the time that I settled on our lists I had the Nurgle side of the force adequately painted, and I had 20 Plague Monks with paired blades that were ready. This meant that we needed to buy, build and paint the following:

 - A Verminlord;

 - A Plague Furnace;

 - 60 Plague Monks; and

 - The Umbral Spellportals.

On the morning of Saturday the 17th, we had built everything and undercoated the plague monks, but that was it.

We had to paint 2 behemoths and 60 monks. Within a day. 

What followed was a painting marathon from 6:30am until 3:30am, with occasional breaks for coffee and food. By midnight my fiancee had decided that we weren't going to finish, and despite knowing nothing about painting or Warhammer, she spent the last three and half hours with us painting bronze bells, sword and woe staves. Come 3:30am we were all tired, but it was immensely satisfying to have powered through it all to a point where we could put two painted forces on the table (and wouldn't risk anything being removed for not meeting the requisite painting standard).

The Big Day

The next morning we were up early and got to the venue by about 8am. We had about 3 hours of sleep each and had a water with Berocca in hand as we entered. I had made Sam a file with each battleplan and scenario, and in the 30 minutes we had before the first game he re-read all his warscrolls and read the first mission and realm rules for the first time. We were as ready as we were going to be.

Stay tuned for Game 1, 2 & 3 in the next post!