Intro
With the release of Skorne’s new caster, eZaal, most people in Skorne clearly went through the 5 stages of grief in a very vocal and very chaotic manner after the initial spoilers of his rules. Since then though, I think most members of the community have calmed down a bit, and started to look at this newest caster in a more reasonable manner, with many of them coming to the conclusion that, while he might not be breaking the top tier of the game any time soon, he’s actually a pretty decent caster.
This might be a surprising fact to those looking at him purely on paper, but once you start playing it all out, eZaal is actually an amusingly legitimate caster choice. Despite looking particularly skornergistic and having no immediately obvious or overt synergy, I can honestly say that he has not only proved more fun than I ever would have suspected, but actually more powerful as well.
So, while it’s too early for a full write-up, I thought I would at least lay the groundwork for a preliminary article, and perhaps add to this as time goes on. I won’t be focusing on people’s comments or their personal issues or claims of skornergy about him as a caster, but what I will do is go over actually what I think makes him effective on the tabletop, and perhaps try to shed some light on what is a particularly controversial caster.
Overview
For those sitting at home and wondering what on earth is going on with this guy, there is a lot to explain, and more so if you’re sitting away from cards. Overall, eZaal has one of the most deceptive stat lines in the game, with some good (ARM 18, boxes, Fury 7), some middling (MAT 6, POW 14) and some downright awful (SPD 4, DEF 10). The reason I say “deceptive” is that once you start to incorporate his rules and some of the army abilities, it all goes completely out of the window:
– DEF 10 can quickly become DEF 14 (Concealment/Swarm animus and in the Krea bubble.)
– ARM 18 becomes 23 on feat turn, (again, 25 to range with the Krea bubble). You can also mess around with a Cannoneer here (Diminish) but I haven’t had the chance to test myself!
– SPD 4 becomes effective SPD 8 when you factor in Righteous Vengeance (making him the fastest caster this side of eXerxis, with a much smaller base to move around on). **
– Fury 7 quickly jumps up to Fury 10+ once you factor in Reclaim (even the low turns usually give you at least a couple of souls to play with and my personal record was 19 after only a handful of games).
– MAT 6 turns into free boosted hits (Feat turn) and MAT 8 (Krea bubble again), quickly upping your melee potential.
** Side note – Every time I see somebody forget to use this ability, I die a little inside. It’s huge what it does for his game plan, and should be triggering almost every turn with standard play…
His melee weapon (PS 14 with Reach and Silence) is also on the face of it nothing to write home about, but it does have some amusing applications. Not only does it hit better than you might think (given the feat/Krea for accuracy, and given the huge stack of fury he typically has to increase output) but it also gives him some interesting insurance in terms of failed assassinations. Even if your giant “beaty stick of death” fails to kill their caster after a charge with a big stack of fury, many of them are still left hanging out to dry when they can’t cast any spells. Against most casters it’s far from guaranteed to keep eZaal safe (after all, they can still attack in melee, though many of the spell slingers are screwed), but it’s nice to know that on occasion you can think about taking the bigger risk if you know your opponent is less capable of punishing you should you fail.
Aside from noticing how deceptive many of his abilities are, hopefully you’ll begin to notice that many of his stats and abilities start to point to a very specific, very focused playstyle. Once we take a look at his spell list though, you’ll begin to see how this starts to take form.
Spell List
eZaal has a rather peculiar spell list on first glance, giving you situational tools when you need them, but generally being nothing you need most of the time. Crucially though, I largely consider this an upside, as while many of them are useful, none of them are tempting enough to detract you from your full stack of fury and what it’s good for. In general then, there isn’t a huge amount of thinking involved for when to use them, because their usage is so damn obvious on the actual table. We’ll see how this all comes together in a minute, but let’s run through each of them so you see what I’m getting at here:
Annihilation
Every now and then you’ll see clustered infantry to kill and have 0 use for Transference/transfers, so blast away. Most people’s opponents understand proper spacing though, so it’s more a back pocket threat for “sleepy” (read – he’s in 0 danger) turns. However, every now and then it’s nice to take advantage of opposing mistakes, and using the spell essentially functions as a bank to turn the fury you don’t need this turn into extra fury for the next. Once you see the spell in that light, it’s function becomes clear (if admittedly, still corner case).
Vision
Stick it on something, move on. If you’re taking Wonder (I am, he doesn’t need anything else) then recasting it is the same as upkeeping it each turn anyway. Some argued early on that you should stick it on Tiberion, but I found that this was actually fairly useless pretty quickly, as every use of Shield Guard kept knocking it off and he wasn’t worried about the damage anyway. An important solo is generally the best target, such as the Agonizer. If your opponent is swimming in sprays and drifting AOE’s then the spell doesn’t come up much at all, but other games it saves you from the charge attack of an opposing heavy.
Mage Sight
The very definition of a situational ability, Mage Sight ranges from “incredible” to “useless” depending on your list and your opponent’s. Only battlegroup models benefit from the spell, and it tends to have more use on shooting models who are most concerned about the effects (ignoring clouds/forests for LOS and ignoring Stealth). One of the best uses of the spell though is for eZaal himself, letting him get an assassination off through the cloud/forest wall type casters, and sniping Stealth models with a handy spell.
Sunder Spirit
And speaking of a handy spell, this again is a spell that either dominates the matchup or lays idle by the wayside. Sunder Spirit is a big part of his assassination game, letting him get off a 21″ non-linear assassination threat (4″ Righteous Vengeance, 7″ charge, 10″ spell range), 23″ with the addition of the Shaman. Factor in Mage Sight above and Reclaim below, and any sliver of LOS spells a quick death for a big chunk of non-camping casters in the game. Otherwise, this spell has a nice little clutch of utility uses, letting you snipe out important solos with those same tools, and of course denying important animi in hordes which can quickly up his game. But again, when to use it is pretty obvious, so not much explanation should be required.
Transference
And now we come to the real moneymaker spell on his card, Transference. Of all the casters in the game that come with this spell, eZaal is fairly uniquely positioned to abuse the hell out of it, turning ridiculous numbers of fury into readily available boosts for the army. The trick with this spell is not to go overboard, as unless you’re facing particularly crazy DEF/ARM skews across the board, you should only need it to take out a few key pieces every turn. Save a decent amount for eZaal’s own durability (more later) and know the odds you face (don’t go fishing for stupid numbers unless you really have to) and it’s a really useful tool to have.
All in all then, his spell list all seems to point in one direction – Simple and Situational. I’m being very deliberate in my choice of words, because eZaal falls quite clearly into that category of casters who have really mundane spell lists (personally, people like eGrissel and Terminus spring to mind here). In many ways the gameplay for this spell list really writes itself… Upkeep/recast Vision, put up Transference, and save most of your fury for that, unless any of the other spells are needed.
Simple, right? Which is good, because the next section is where we start to get a real spanner in the works…
Abilities
Reclaim
The cornerstone of eZaal’s playlist, Reclaim is probably one of the most important abilities that he has in trying to understand his game plan. For those of you not used to facing High Reclaimer/Testament, this ability let’s eZaal pick up souls off any model which falls in his control area and convert it into extra fury. Given that eZaal has a bigger control area than either of these casters and can play rather close to the front (we’ll get to that), this generally means every casualty in your army is going to his fury stack.
There are typically 3 main things you want to be doing with this extra fury once it starts to trickle in:
1.) Transference. If most of your models are making contact with the enemy that turn, then saving enough fury for them to boost away with is often a good idea.
2.) Spell blasting. Often saved for the assassination, 4-5 fully boosted Sunder Spirits isn’t unheard of from eZaal, and can definitely put any caster in the dirt providing they aren’t camping too heavily and you can get the LOS.
3.) Mass transfers. If the other 2 options aren’t required, generally you just want to sit on it for durability. Providing you still have healthy beasts, most casters on 7-10 transfers (before any other defensive tech) are in the “don’t bother” range for a lot of assassinations. Just make sure you wipe your beasts with Paingivers first that turn.
Other uses of course exist, such as healing up beasts, reloading the Agonizer and chucking out a few animi. But I only mention these main ones for now as you want to keep in mind where any big stacks of fury might be going, as those turns can and do come up.
Direct Spirits
A familiar ability for old pZaal fans, Direct Spirits is back. Unlike pZaal however, eZaal might well be rather hungry for some of those spirits for himself, so the choices can get a little tricky. Obviously those lists that run minimal ancestral guardians won’t need to worry much about this ability, but for those of you who do take a full complement of statues, you want to think carefully about who gets what and why:
1.) If you give them to the regular Ancestral Guardians, they stick around past a single turn, but are also lost if the statue dies (well, you lose them if eZaal dies too, but then you lost the game so…). My rule of thumb is that, unless they want to be leaving his CTRL area (rare), then statues want souls whenever they’re looking to buy attacks, and you can simply direct the souls to eZaal for boosts seeing as they have access to transference anyway. Often it’s worth them having at least one though, even if just so you can use Spirit Driven at some point for an important turn.
2.) If you give them to Hakaar, it’s pretty much the same principle, but remember that any leftover souls instead contribute to his ARM, making it generally desirable to load him up as soon as possible. Fully loaded on feat turn, Hakaar reaches a near ridiculous ARM 26, which even colossals might not kill unless they’re fully stacked with focus (Hint – Agonizer). Hakaar thankfully doesn’t need Spirit Driven, but he does have Righteous Vengeance which still triggers even if he doesn’t get the soul.
3.) However, if your statues aren’t reaching anybody soon, die off, or eZaal just needs the fury himself for one of the main reasons above, send them to him. I tend to see this as the default option if I don’t think the statues will be doing anything useful the following turn, and of course his collection area is bigger so he often has access to some that they don’t anyway. Just make sure you don’t find yourself on a turn where he has a big stack for no reason and they’re all sitting dry.
Finally, I’ll note that if you have any Extollers in the list, they might be worth thinking about as well. Suddenly loading one up for a surprise “lazor beam” shot is an old favorite trick of pZaal players, and this is still true of eZaal as well.
Righteous Vengeance
As I alluded to earlier, this one of eZaal’s best and least talked about abilities, because people are fundamentally terrible at math and threat perception. Most of us in Skorne are probably well aware by now of how quickly a SPD 4 model can move, but this little extra move does absolute wonders for his game plan. Here are just a few of the uses I’ve found already:
– Repositioning a full 12″ a turn (4″ advance, 8″ run). Great for scenario presence, and if he plans on camping or just spending via transference, he can afford to run each turn anyway.
– Edging forward, doing his spell thing, and then using the normal movement to scoot back again. Kind of like a mini Fate Walker move, this yo-yo move can let him snipe things out and then return to the relative safety of your lines. Remembering that Sunder Spirit is 10″, just keep in mind that anything in your CTRL area at the start of your turn is susceptible to this maneuver.
– Full on threat range, non-linear. Now you’re basically SPD 8 for charging/spell threats, and the first move can reposition for optimal angles. When we consider that one of his great end-games is spell/staff to face, lateral repositioning like this is fantastic to get the right angle.
– Activation order issues. Getting eZaal out of the way or into a particular spot before he goes.
The other thing to remember is that Hakaar has this ability too. These two have been best buddies since Day 1 of my playtesting and I’d never leave home without him. In short, Hakaar is a decently durable screen (esp. with feat and/or Krea) and acts as the front screen for eZaal (blocking landing space, as well as some shooting) before scooting out the way again to let eZaal pass at the start of my turn. In this close proximity they will almost always trigger Vengeance together, and the twin free attacks can clear out a couple of jamming models from my army before anything else activates. Coupled with any defensive strikes from nearby AG’s, and suddenly, the list has quite some unjamming potential on its own.
Steady and Construct.
I put these two together, because they have important defensive consequences. Steady on DEF 10 isn’t saying much, but remember that shooting DEF mentioned earlier and it starts to become important. The other bonus here is how it helps retaliation (sensing a theme here anyone?) because eZaal can shrug off assassination attempts like the best of them and Steady keeps your options open for the following turn quite nicely.
Construct is generally really sweet. Aside from the fact that you can be repaired (lol?) and the numerous things that only affect “living” in this game (yay!) eZaal’s main love here is of course the interaction with the feat. And speaking of which…
Feat
While definitely more of a thematic (and some would argue skornergistic, given his love of living models) feat, thankfully his feat is about as obvious as his spell list in application, reinforcing this idea of him as a simple and situational warlock. Healing up constructs is nice for any incidental damage you take on the way in, and then they all get both boosted melee rolls (saving fury from needing Transference, which is important) and +5 ARM, bringing Immortals up to 22, AG’s and eZaal up to 23 and Hakaar as high as 26 with a full load of souls. All of this of course is pre-Krea, so bear that in mind shortly.
In terms of being situational, when to pop it is almost always a T2-3, looking for the turn where your constructs will be making it to melee and making them tricky to get rid of once they arrive. Just like most of his abilities, thankfully the “correct” choice is almost always incredibly obvious, reinforcing the simplicity side of this caster. Generally I find the healing always works out the same to offset early shooting, but the rest of it plays out in one of the following ways:
1.) When you are faster than they are, then you’re charging into melee en masse, jamming with high ARM, hopefully surviving to deal more damage the following turn. Think of it as the pSkarre feat turn and you won’t be far off.
2.) Counterattack. If the enemy is quicker than you, then normally you get jammed up and the constructs can sweep through with boosted hits (most jammers being the high DEF kind), clear offending models (again, remember the Defensive Strike/Righteous Vengeance above) and use the high ARM to mitigate any out of positioning problems they now might have.
3.) Risky eZaal plays. This covers everything from the personal assassination (for melee he’ll want the boosted hits, and the ARM boost means he might survive counterattack), turns you dump a load of fury on necessary transference and the weird poor positioning problems for scenario plays. It’s your get out of jail free card that occasionally solves a few bits and pieces along the way.
Some of this admittedly depends a lot on how many constructs you have in your army. The more you have, the more the feat will be primarily for their benefit most of the time, making options 1+2 more likely. If however you are primarily focusing more on living infantry for Transference, and perhaps solely running something like eZaal + Hakaar, then 3 becomes more attractive.
Either way, the feat is actually very easy to use, because normally the best time to pop it is pretty obviously dictated by the matchup, how the game is going, and which bit of it you need the most.
Gameplay
This is where it all comes together nicely. What’s amusing though about eZaal is how having all these options stands almost in direct contrast to the way I’ve found eZaal plays, because his biggest strength is that he does almost nothing on a given turn, and that’s what makes him powerful. This is primarily because, despite having a modestly deep toolbox, many of these tools can and should go unused on a given turn, and will only be something you resort to in a very specific situation when the moment’s right.
You see, a lot of what makes eZaal a strong caster is that he has several tools for the job, but rarely does he actually need to resort to using any of them. His default stance, of methodically camping the lot and edging slowly up the board until the crucial turn, is actually his biggest strength. A lot of this will soon become apparent once we review a few more of the basics, but you’ll see shortly that simplicity is the crowning achievement of eZaal, and it’s something that he manages beautifully. Allow me to explain…
Early game
– Fill Agonizer (if present).
– Cast both upkeeps, charge up the table.
– Or just run up the table, which is generally preferred if either of the first 2 will leave you in danger vs. long range armies (e.g. eLylyth) or you just want to be another inch further up.
Don’t forget you can always forgo the upkeeps early on if need be. You’re unlikely to be using Transference right away, and Vision only tends to pop T1 again vs. the very long ranged armies. The other part of the equation here is that with 3 upkeeps on the card, I often find Arcane Wonder a solid choice of objective (equating to one extra Transference/Transfer each turn…) so getting up field quickly and leaving an upkeep for T2 is usually just fine.
Mid game
This is even easier, and not many casters can boast that! The primary objective here is to build a bunker for eZaal, because some of those defensive stats are a little middling in these early turns (until the soul train and/or feat starts going) and any fury we don’t leave on eZaal is free to use on early Agonizer fills, upkeep spells, transference and so on.** Later on you can be a lot more risky, but we’ll get to that.
** As a small aside, I’ll just describe my own personal setup. Tiberion and the Krea are kept close by to guard eZaal from harm. I then have 1-2 Paralytic Aura’s going and surround him with Cataphracts (any variety will do) on the sides, as they require a bit more effort to remove than single wounders and make it trickier to reach him in melee given the placement of the bases. The cherry on the cake as it were is to have Hakaar immediately in front of the caster, as the tip of the spear. By his lonesome Hakaar is pretty durable, but the key part we’re interested in here is Righteous Vengeance, as Hakaar has TWO opportunities to get out of the way (and ideally clear some space) before eZaal activates, letting him perform the necessary screening role without blocking eZaal’s path. Considering how slow eZaal is, we really don’t want him to get boxed in if we can avoid it, but neither do we want him left out in the open where he can draw unnecessary fire, so this is an important bit of tech. Finally, I sometimes pull the Ancestral Guardians in as well (either side of Hakaar) if the enemy is running important jammers, or I need to simply concentrate my force. This lets you create a very strong central position on your feat turn, and the defensive strikes mean you tend to have some room still free to move around.
Now, assuming you have a solid mass of infantry (we are playing eZaal here) most of them go after their usual preferred models and use Transference where required to deal the maximum amount of damage. The only other consideration here is to make sure they are as annoyingly placed as possible and within eZaal’s control area whenever we can, as we want opponents to have to kill them and start loading eZaal up. Basically the key part here is to focus on the offense – providing eZaal is safe, focus on dealing the maximum damage you can to the enemy (especially the pieces that might threaten him and the battlegroup) and treat nearly every other model as disposable in the process .
Late Game
By now a good 40-60% of your models should probably already be dead, but if you’ve prioritized correctly, eZaal should be in almost 0 danger and have a boatload of souls to boot. In most games you’ve probably already spent the feat by now to deal a serious blow and survive retaliation, so now you need to focus on how you’re going to end the game. Most of the time this will be using the battlegroup/Transference selectively to clear the zones, but if you see an opening, a quick spell or melee assassination can put a number of casters in the dirt, so keep that consideration always on your mind.
Even if you never use it, the point is that this threat of assassination still keeps your opponent playing with it in mind, focusing on blocking LOS (especially with colossals) hanging back, camping more and so on. Just by making certain risky plays too dangerous to attempt, eZaal’s hefty stack of souls/focus not only serves to keep you alive and your models effective, but can serve as a dangerous deterrent to certain crucial caster plays.
The final thing to note here is to really try and keep your battlegroup both safe and open at all times. Having 10+ transfers is all well and good, but if you don’t wipe the beasts with handlers you’re just going to leave them open to frenzies every turn, as well as leave yourself with few viable transfer targets in the first place.
Mistake checklist
– Don’t forget Righteous Vengeance (going from a SPD 8 caster to SPD 4 sucks)
– Don’t SPEND the whole stack on Transference if it leaves you open (duh)
– Don’t SAVE the whole stack for transferring if you’re not in danger and other models need it (also duh)
– Don’t overextend on the offense (there’s no point throwing away 30 models on a given turn and getting soaked in souls if you’ve got nothing to do with them in turn).
– Don’t get too cocky on the defense (don’t stand in stupid places, forget to leave your beasts open or expose them to huge numbers of transfers for no reason, don’t take more damage than you have to)
– Don’t waste time (the beauty of this game plan is simplicity, so you should be ahead on clock much of the time, giving you additional late game pressure)
– Don’t forget your spell/melee assassination (always look for openings, math it out vs. their caster defenses, remember the non-linear 21-23″ threat range for spells, 13″ or so for melee)
Overall Assessment
As you can see then, simple, effective playstyle. Sit around in the midfield on 10+ transfers, let the models that need to boost away, camp and clear the zones while you threaten/wait for an assassination. You’ll notice I barely needed to touch upon the spell list in this analysis, and that’s because although those tools are useful in a pinch, the fact that they come up so rarely means they shouldn’t factor much into the thought process on 90% of turns. If you pull this off effectively, your own models should be efficiently killing most things with ready access to boosts, and yet killing them in turn is only serving to make you stronger.
List construction
While not being a particularly complicated caster to play, eZaal nevertheless has some rather complex list considerations to balance out that makes actually creating a balanced list a little tricky. Really, most eZaal setups come down to balancing between 3 major things:
1.) Constructs
These are mostly for the feat turn, as his feat does exactly nothing for the rest of the army. While most would say it’s important to not build an entire list around a feat (well, I suppose unless you’re playing his tier where you have little choice) I would say it’s probably important not to ignore it either. At a minimum, eZaal himself will always benefit from the feat, and I would say that Hakaar is definitely on the right side of the cheap/awesome equation to make him a really strong candidate as well for some of the reasons I’ve discussed already.
Beyond that, looking at the current Skorne range, it comes down to whether or not you want Ancestral Guardians and/or Immortals (+UA). Either way, both take up a decent chunk of points so you will need to carefully balance their inclusion with how many points you need free in the rest of the list. Immortals really want at least one statue (Hakaar will obviously do) for the speed boost, and Ancestral Guardians (more so with Hakaar as well) desire a modest supply of souls, which will have to be balanced around eZaal’s own demands and how many you have in the list.
At the low end then, we’re looking at a mere 4pts for the awesomeness that is Hakaar. Beyond that, you could easily end up spending closer to 20 for everything above, and even as much as 30 in tier (which I won’t discuss much further, but mentioning it for completeness). I probably wouldn’t go all out though personally – either Immortals or AG’s for my lists, and then Hakaar, keeping the cost from 10-14pts and giving me enough mileage for the feat.
2.) Living Infantry
You need at least some of these for Reclaim (which is a pretty important ability, I would argue) and in conjunction with Direct Spirits, they also help load up any statues that you’ve taken. Like all warrior models in the list they benefit from Transference too, so generally living infantry will be the bulk of any eZaal list to do the bulk of the heavy lifting as well as feed the soul machine on eZaal himself.
Really the only tricky thing to balance here is cheapness vs. effectiveness, because obviously the more souls the better, but you still want to have an effective fighting force no matter what. The problem with the cheap troops is that most of them are cheap for a reason, and trying to cram excessive numbers of them into a list just to have a hefty supply of souls means that you often struggle with things like quality attacks, durability, utility and so on. Clearly you don’t want to pour all your points into dirt-cheap living infantry then, as while it’s nice to have Transference + a boatload of souls, you still would really rather be turning decent attacks into excellent with the spell, rather than bringing mediocre ones up to acceptable.
So, I would say a happy medium is key here, and shooting for a list that focuses on having at least 20-30 souls is probably a decent balance, remembering of course that even some f your key support pieces can still contribute to this number. Again though, remember that while you can hit this target on a budget by reaching for the real budget items like Karax, Slingers, Swordsmen without UA etc, some of medium priced models (Nihilators) and expensive ones (Cataphracts) are also fantastic choices for all the normal reasons Skorne players love them so, and giving them access to Transference only increases their effectiveness. I try to shoot for roughly half my list here, looking for at least 2-3 full units + support and around 20-30 points.
3.) Battlegroup
We’re still playing Hordes, so we need at least 2-3 beasts as a minimum, even only for fury generation and eating up the warbeast points. However, there are two big reasons and a handful of smaller ones that we need to take into consideration when finishing up an eZaal list.
First of all, as we’ve noted earlier, eZaal can easily have an absolutely astonishing number of transfers, but all that won’t do you any good if you don’t have a healthy (and empty) battlegroup to pass hits onto in the first place. People always seem to overlook this fact in trying to build eZaal lists the way that pZaal ones were built, because a battlegroup with only a couple of utility lights really limits the personal durability of your caster (something pZaal isn’t even going to compete with, given his fragile old-man stats, 7 fury limit, important spells, soul converter…etc.). eZaal’s personal durability is kind of important as you’ve probably gathered by now, but as you’re only as resilient as the health of your battlegroup, we need plenty of beef here to take those big important hits.
Second of all, being primarily an infantry oriented caster with no direct ways to bust through opposing ARM, the battlegroup is pretty much the only armor cracking that you’re going to get. Even the most infantry oriented factions out there frequently have battlegroups of their own to crack, and with the relative popularity of colossals/gargantuans you’ll probably want at least one hard-hitting heavy in your back pocket. On the flipside we don’t want to go overboard in taking heavies either, as the other stuff we’ve noted above tends to come first and eats up most of the remaining points.
Then there’s all the smaller reasons. Skorne has some great animi on utility beasts like the Krea, Raider (shooting lists) and Shaman (if a Cryx drop to strip debuffs). Many of these beasts also have other tools we want, such as the Shaman granting extra spell range (added assassination) and things like the Brute or Tiberion giving us valuable Shield Guard. Models like the Sentinel, Raider, Shaman and Drake are wonderful ranged killers as well (+ Mage Sight), which makes them valuable at picking off key models without having to necessarily commit to fighting in melee. Finally, many of these models are more resilient than infantry no matter which way you slice it, making them valuable for body blocking, jamming, holding zones and so on. Currently, I’m taking Tiberion, Krea and a Shaman (if room) to fill this role. 20 pts
The Build
So overall, this is where I’m at right now, but as eZaal hasn’t exactly been out that long it’s something that is still very much subject to change:
eZaal +6
– Tiberion 11
– Krea 4
– Shaman 5
Max Nihilators 8
Min Incindiarii 6
Min Incindiarii 6
Min Paingivers 2
Tyccom 3
Ancestral Guardian 3
Ancestral Guardian 3
Hakaar 4
Gobbers 1
Basically the idea is to incorporate many of these elements I’ve described above, bringing a strong complement of living infantry, constructs and battlegroup while sprinkling in some of the more necessary elements of support. While most of the list is fairly standard, one thing that some people have asked about is the use of Incindiarii, which is primarily a matchup consideration, generally excelling into the lists that eZaal wants to see. Aside from thinning ranks and tackling high DEF troops at range, Incindiarii are durable enough to trickle souls throughout the game, while also simultaneously being able to fight well in melee also thanks to Transference.
However, the other build I’m very interested in (but sadly don’t have all the models for just yet) is something closer to the following:
eZaal +6
– Tiberion 11
– Krea 4
Max Nihilators 8
Max Incindiarii 9
Max Immortals 8
Min Paingivers 2
Shamblers 6
Tyccom 3
Hakaar 4
Gobbers 1
Basically the statues swap for Immortals to decrease some of the thirst for souls, while still taking advantage of the feat. It’s got a bit less battlegroup support so you have to play it carefully, but the addition of Shamblers lets you double dip on the recursion while letting you have more bodies on the field than the previous list. It’s a little rough around the edges at the moment (no points free for the Immortal UA for instance, unless you swap the Tyccom and Gobbers for him and Saxon perhaps?) but you can see the basics are there.
Fortunately, eZaal is also on ADR! While this won’t be much help in the long run, it has let me experiment with different choices for the slots, and work out quickly what I want to take in various matchups. In either case, it allows me to take an Agonizer (something which is clearly missed in both of the lists!) and play around with either the unit choices or battlegroups:
– In the first build, I quite like leaving Bloodrunners and Cetrati here as my other favorite infantry choices, but saving a few points at the end to swap a Drake for the Shaman is also stellar considering the kinds of lists he wants to be taking on.
– In the second build, things like the Task Master and Immortal UA are “duh” choices, and it’s probably worth putting the Shaman back in. That leaves 9 points (after the Agonizer remember) but I honestly haven’t played around with it enough to say what the list truly needs at that point, so I’d probably throw in another unit and call it a day.
Conclusion
So having given this guy some actual table time, I think I can definitely say that I’ve found him surprisingly interesting as a caster to run play. Once you correctly balance out his varied list construction considerations to come up with something functional, I think some players out there will find his very deliberate, methodical playstyle quite rewarding, and quietly satisfying to push around the table. eZaal is actually a much more interesting guy to play than he looks on paper, and I think that as people get over the lack of initial “flashiness” and start to temper their different expectations, they can get a start to play more effectively to his strengths.
So while it might still be early days, he’s definitely an interesting caster to me and somebody I can see myself playing a lot more of in the future. In fact, the pairing of eZaal and Makeda3 on ADR is proving somewhat irresistible to me right now, and this will definitely be a space to watch as I begin to test them further still.
But, until next time… 🙂
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