Stone outlasts the Storm

Circle Orboros' Baldur the Stonecleaver versus Cygnar's Captain Allister Caine

Force lists of Karl's Circle Orboros and Jeff's Cygnar here.

Bakerofish says:  For last Friday's game I decided to use a list that I came up with on the spot. I really wanted to get more games with Baldur as my warlock. I felt that Kaya and Kromac were becoming crutches for me and I needed to learn how to use units more effectively. I love running beast-heavy and my 50 point list would reflect that. Since I'm playing on a higher pointage however, I had the opportunity to put in more troops.

Lately I've been favoring Tharn Bloodtrackers for their speed and annoyance factor and I've also been fielding the Skinwalkers as I really love the models. Personally speaking though I have never been happy with how the Skinwalkers  would perform or not perform on the table but I feel like i just need to get used to them. My unfamiliarity with my unit choices would show pretty badly as the game progresses.

The basic idea I had with this list was to allow myself some strong assassination threats with a forest-walking Baldur being the biggest one I have. I could pretty much create forests on demand and failing that I could teleport one of my heavies into the fray. I also thought I had a decent set of speedbumps in the Bloodtrackers and Skinwalkers as I positioned myself for the assassination run.

I stuck with that gameplan throughout the game. While Baldur and the heavy constructs were well protected by forests and the feat, I found my troops rendered ineffective or outright killed. The annoying part was the fact that the list is slower and with a shorter threat range than what I normally have when playing Circle. I found myself clogging up my own movement lanes with he slower Skinwalkers and Constructs.

Jeff positioned himself well here, with the Longgunners combining attacks and doubletapping made quick work of some of the threats I posed and with the help of sucky luck with dicerolls I found my bloodtrackers failing to kill a Hunter and my Stalker wiffing several times on his berserk attacks, failing to wipe out the  stormblade infantry

I found myself with several casualties by the 3rd turn with two units down. Since Jeff had Harlan Versh, my upkeep spells were suddenly a detriment and my Skinwalkers were eating boosted damage from the solo. I also lost my Stalker to double-tapping longgunners.

By rights I should've lost since all Jeff had to do was get Baldur in range of eCaine's revolvers and Baldur wouldve died byCaine's feat turn. What happened next was lady luck smiling at me.

I overextended my constructs with fury and found myself unable to transfer damage on Jeff's turn. I kept two fury on Baldur and prayed that Jeff doesn't  see my mistake. Smelling blood, Jeff used his feat to try to take down Megalith in melee range but due to the construct's armor and wounds Jeff failed. Caine was  standing base to base with Megalith.

with eCaine's high defense, hitting him in melee would normally be risky but I was able to bring  his defense down to more mundane levels by using the shifting stones to 'port Megalith behind the gunman. I then activated Megalith to get the backstrike bonus, spent focus  to activate the animus to bring down Caine's defense further. I then made a melee attack, boosting the attack roll and  after severely hurting the warcaster, Caine found himself at defense 10 versus Megalith's MAT 7. Another boosted attack roll from the construct sealed the warcaster's fate.

Again, I was just extremely lucky to win this game.If Jeff noticed I had no means to transfer damage to my beasts I'm sure he would've won.