Project Obsidian

In my Makeda 3 battle report, I decided to run 2 Ancestral Guardians (AG's) as a deterrent with Defensive Strike, and as a result, I've sort of become obsessed with Ancestral Guardians this past week.  They don't get a lot of love from the Skorne Community at large, and my impression with them in the past has been that their value is limited because they don't get enough Souls, and their damage potential isn't high enough that they can compete with our beasts for the various beast roles that need to be filled.

I'm not sure where, if anywhere, this obsession will end up, but I've decided to roll with it for now.

How?

By running a bunch of lists with the maximum FA of Ancestral Guardians.

Stat-wise, Ancestral Guardians have a lot of good qualities.  They have high Mat at 8, and a respectable P+S of 13.  They have Reach and Magic Weapon on their halberds; Reach is fantastic, and Magic Weapon can be game-saving on those occasions where it comes up.  AG's are pretty tough, with Arm 18 and 10 hit boxes, and they have Steady, so they can't be knocked down.  They're also Constructs which makes them immune to all the effects which target only living and-or undead models.

There are a few bad stats in there too.  The Ancestral Guardian is slow at Speed 4, although it can spend a Soul Token to speed itself up a bit with its Spirit Driven ability.  Its Def is awful for a non-heavy at 10.  Finally, it costs 3 points, which is on the expensive side for a solo.

Ancestral Guardians' most important features, however, are Soul Guardian and Defensive Strike.

Soul Guardian is really the Ancestral Guardian's bread and butter.  It gives an AG a Soul Token whenever a living friendly Faction warrior model is destroyed by an enemy attack in its Cmd of 10, and lets it use the token to buy or boost melee attacks.  Defensive Strike lets the AG attack an enemy who ends its move in its melee range.  When they have 3 Soul Tokens, AG's are dangerous.  Their high Mat threatens a wide range of targets, and their P+S is good enough to threaten anything short of heavy beasts or 'jacks.  The trouble is that Souls are a pretty limited resource.  Most Skorne armies run fairly beast heavy, and take one unit of infantry for jamming and attrition.  This often results in the unit being entirely wiped out, and the AG getting 3 Souls that it uses for one turn.  After that, AG's don't tend to get many Soul Tokens (if they survive).

Defensive Strike lets an Ancestral Guardian make a melee attack against an enemy model who advances and ends its movement in its melee range.  This gives the AG an extra layer of defense against infantry, and can remove a single enemy infantry model who charges it.  Like most abilities which generate out of turn attacks, each Defensive Strike gets better the more of them you have.  Two to three Defensive Strikes can make a fairly wide area dangerous for infantry, or be a fairly prickly deterrent to enemy.  There's no real downside to Defensive Strike, except that it's not all that likely to save an AG unless several Defensive Strikes are in play.

The idea behind Project Obsidian is that by taking a lot of AG's I'm counteracting the biggest limitation of Soul Guardian while maximizing the potential of Defensive Strike.  I'll be absorbing 9 or so Soul Tokens, so very few Souls are wasted.  I'm also going to run 3 (at least) Defensive Strikes together, which will make for a pretty significant obstacle to melee infantry.  Or that's the theory.  In practice, I'm still paying 9 points for the ability to absorb 9 souls instead of 3 points to absorb 3, which is kind of a big point sink.  And at Def 10, AG's are very easy to hit with ranged attacks too, and can be taken down before they even have a chance to use Defensive Strike.

I feel that about half of Skorne's Warlocks can use AG's pretty well.  I think they have at least some potential with all three Makedas, both Hexerises, Xerxis, and possibly Morghoul 2 and Naaresh.  Morghoul 1 and Rasheth both want too many beasts to really get the most out of multiple AG's, and Mordikaar makes one of his own units Undead with Hollow, so he doesn't work well with them either.  Zaal, of course, does great and terrible things with AG's.  I'll be running him too for comparison, but he really isn't the point of this project.

We'll see how this goes.  I'll either discover some huge untapped potential for AG's, or I'll decide they just aren't worth 3 points with most Warlocks.  At the very least, I'll have fun games (I do like using AG's regardless of their effect on the game), and maybe I'll write up a Tactica if I have some good ideas.