Using Makeda 2: My First Impressions

I've been having a lot of fun and success using Makeda 2 so far this edition, so I decided to write up a quick take on my experiences with her so far.

I love the pose on this model.

Wednesday Battle Report: Makeda 2 vs. Magnus 2 - 75pts

I didn't get the chance to play any games yesterday, so here's one of my battles from earlier this summer.  This past Friday's tactics post was about Ferox, so here's the game that literally sold me on them (right after this game I picked up Tower's min box of Ferox that had been hanging around since MkI, and ordered two blisters).  I was very interested to try them out with Makeda 2, and here's the list I played.  Be warned, the Ferox are proxied by whatever spare large based models I could find: Molik Karn, my Archidon, my Aradus Sentinels, and my Tiberion.  In fact, since this was in late June, we were both playing a bunch of new things we didn't own.  I'll try to keep all the proxies straight.

What I'm Excited About in Skorne MkIII: eMakeda

MkIII is here for real, so I'll spend the next couple of weeks talking about what I'm excited for, and how I'm thinking of playing Skorne now that so much has changed.

I'll start with one of our 'casters who received a complete overhaul from her MkII incarnation: Supreme Archdomina Makeda, a.k.a Makeda 2 or eMakeda.  In MkII, I wasn't thrilled about eMakeda.  She was certainly powerful, and people did quite well with her, but she seemed pretty one dimensional, and never really sparked my imagination.

Now, she has a whole different playstyle, with a lot more defensive tools than she had before.  First up, Stay Death became a lot more interesting, since it can now be used any number of times per turn, as long as Makeda can pay for it.  Since her other spells are fairly situational, you can easily plan to have Makeda spend between 3 and 4 Fury keeping key models alive, and you can further improve on that with other defensive abilities.  This ability, as far as I can tell, is the core of Makeda's new playstyle, and using it well is what will make or break games with her.

She lost all of her old spells, but gained Deflection, Dash, Storm Rager, and a new spell called Prostration.  Deflection stacks with the new Krea, and is a good way to keep your infantry safe on the approach, and Dash gives her troops a little more speed and, more importantly, the ability to ignore free strikes.  Storm Rager can make one warrior model super dangerous, and Prostration is a decent nuke spell - it will be cast, but not every game.

Her Feat is pretty much the same, and is both a good way to get a turn of extra accuracy, and a good way to keep Makeda on her feet if she needs to get close to the enemy.  It no longer prevents free strikes - you'll need to cast Dash for that.

What I'm most excited about is Makeda's ability to play attrition.  Stay Death combined with other defensive tools is going to let her keep infantry alive in critical places, or force the enemy to expend huge resources killing a couple of models, and she can do this every turn.  Storm Rager is a good piece of tech for improving the damage and accuracy of a couple of infantry models, which is where a lot of our infantry needs help.  I'm really excited to try it on Hakaar, Ancestral Guardians, and the Legends of Halaak.

I've played a couple of MkIII games so far, and I'll have reports up pretty soon.  I'll also post things I'm excited about until I run out of things.  So that's what's coming up in the next couple weeks.