Zarbag's Gitz vs Thorns of the Briar Queen 10.12.18

This week I played the second game using my Zarbag’s Gitz after changing the deck to have more ways to score glory passively. I was up against my mate Josh who fancied trying out the Thorn’s of the Briar Queen so he just used their deck straight from the box (more on this later). This was a bit of a strange game as I was playing a warband with almost as many models as I had and plenty of targets that I could kill quite easily – both unusual when playing the grotz. An exciting proposition for old Zarbag!

I lost the roll and Josh chose a board with some blocked and lethal hexes to make my life difficult and push his advantage of ignoring them. I set up the cog board with three single blocked hexes in an offset manner which put the two lethal hexes on Josh’s board out of the way. We did objectives with Josh putting three in his half (one on and edge) and me putting my two as deep in my territory as I could. We placed models with Josh having the Queen and Varclav around the middle of his territory and the chainrasps up front. I had Zarbag, Drizgit and the squigs central, bow grotz in the least useful positions and Sourtongue off to one side.

Round one I drew malicious kill, denial and dank haven. So one card requiring killing an enemy with two upgrades and two I could only score in the end phase… Redraw time! This time I got extreme flank, obliterated and keep them guessing. Much better, I could probably score two of them in turn one. I won the roll off (a literal first) and went aggressive charging a squig at a chainrasp and killing it to get me a glory I could use for some vital upgrades. I killed another chainrasp and moved around a bit, losing both squigs to the everhanged and the queen. I already had a fighter on an edge hex so I upgraded Sourtongue with the faneway crystal ready to jump onto the edge hex objective on the opposite side as my last activation. He did this and inspired to deter any attacks. So I managed to score extreme flank and keep them guessing along with two kills – having more than three glory inspired all my remaining fighters. Josh got two kills and the one glory objective for having three fighters adjacent to one of mine.

I managed to upgrade Zarbag with both great strength and great fortitude at the end of the first round so he was out of the queen’s one hit kill range and more capable of killing enemies himself. This round I drew both sorcerous scouring and flash finale… which would be great if I had any spells to cast with Zarbag! I lost the roll off and Josh went for some damage with the now inspired everhanged (with a supporting chanirasp) on Zarbag but I managed to double crit on defence. There was lots of pushing and shoving in the powerstep with both sidestep and confusion used by me and a nighthaunt specific ploy to push two chainrasps used by Josh. The end result of this was Zarbag was in a position to attack the everhanged one on one and promptly rolled two successes and a crit to immediately kill him.

At this point we were running a bit tight on time and Josh’s objectives in hand were all unscorable (two were to get the objective markers in the rear of my territory) so we called it there as the glory gap was up to six. I think this game really showed the importance of the deck building element of the game. With Josh just using the pre-built starter deck he didn’t have access to some of the more powerful nighthaunt cards in his power deck and his objectives were lacking in score immediately options as well as being very objective grab heavy which is more difficult against grotz. After the game we went through the extra nighthaunt cards in the box and had a bit of a browse online and saw just how potent the nighthaunt were capable of being with the right cards. 

I am sure the rematch will be a very different story!