The Alchemical Guardian vol 1: A New Master

I have decided to try another go at warmachine this year, or more aptly, this march. I’ll be heading to a tournament on March 7th, and if you haven’t guessed it, I’m going to be first timing an army I’ve been looking at for a long while: Crucible Guard.

Long Overdue

Well before MK 3 arrived on our door, I was a huge advocate for people switching up factions when they got burnout. I would advocate taking a break and trying different factions, or more often a different system – Hordes to Warmachine and vice versa.

So, it naturally comes that I have steadfastly refused to change factions or systems for more than a year as my interest in the game waned, my desire to theory craft plummeted, and my faith in the company vanished. I was stubborn in my fixation on making Cryx work for me, and to make the gameplay to what I wanted. Well, a few weeks back, I was speaking with the legendary Michael Ireland and he told me that the best thing to do was switch factions. As someone who had played Ret singularly for as long as I’d known him, I took his advice and started thinking about a faction I would like to play if I wasn’t playing Cryx. It didn’t take me long to settle on Crucible Guard as the faction I wanted to try, even though I own Mercs, Cygnar, Skorne, and Gators. I had loved the majority of the concepts, rules, and models as they went through CID, and I had looked into buying them early on but was excited for Scaverous at the time. I started building lists, trying to settle on something I would want to play

In the Sky

I love the rocket men, and I love the tanks, so I wanted to start a list there. Something that would be awesome to look at on the board, but also a ton of fun to play, even if I was losing. Two tanks and thirty rocketmen just struck a chord with me, and I had to see if it was possible. I came up with this meme list that, while likely not a champion of tournaments, I still like.

This list has everything I want and need in it. It has two tanks, rolling up front and center. It has 30 rocketmen, including full packages for two units and two aces. It has a repair bot and a couple of warjacks that simply hang back and wait to be useful.

It isn’t some sort of high-concept list that covers for specific matchups and it doesn’t try to have a gotcha or other tactic. It’s a bunch of freaking flying people and a pair of tanks, one of which is my stone-cold badass Warcaster. I love this list, though if all it does is lose I’ll be pretty sad. We will see!

To go with this list of idiocy, I figured that I would double down on the train… train.

I’ve heard that Syvestro is good. I heard that Steelhead and Alejandro are good. I have a fascination with CG trains. This list is something that I expect will be able to succeed where my list fails in general.

It has been a long, long time since I’ve played another faction, and it has been a similarly long time since I used models without rules that I knew pretty much by heart. All in all, I think that this is a daring experiment set up to completely fail! What could possibly go wrong with taking a nearly 8-month hiatus, playing a new faction, with models I barely know in a tournament with WTC level players?

I know it sounds like I’m pessimistic about this, but it should come across as tongue in cheek. CG has been heavily on my mind these past few weeks as I’ve cemented in that I will be playing them at the tournament, and I hope they are just the type of fresh take I need on the game to start enjoying it again!

March should see a recap of the tournament as well as further thoughts on WM and CG in general. All signs point to positive!

Until next time!