Cephalyx Overlords [8]

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Turn 1A

I take first turn and get the side with the rough terrain. Escort goes up and I charge into the trench. Steelheads run wide to get into a wide position on Coven’s feat turn.

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Turn 1B

Coven and Gaspy4 cloud up and stay outside of threat ranges. IM goes up on Deathjack.

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Turn 2A

Anastasia ambushes in and snipes out the on the right Warwitch siren. I keep back and make sure that the closest scenario elements are well contested.

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Turn 2B

Overlords kill Anastasia and a pistol wraith claims the flag. Gaspy puts up a cloud in front of the Pistol Wraith to make it more difficult for me to snipe him out.

The arc node runs up and the witches cast two stygian abysses to snipe out both my Arcanists. This is important both because it removes my ability to remove clouds, but also because it is a source of magical weapons. My opponent only has one arc node in his list so I should have spread the Arcanists out such that it would have been impossible for him to snipe out both in a turn.

Caine wraith toes into the central zone and the Machine wraith contests the flag. Nothing is contesting my rectangle zone.

Score 1-2

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Turn 3A

The cannon aims and knocks down the arc node. Rahera kills it with her charge attack, casts rough seas and sprints back into the rubble camping all 6 focus. I briefly consider sniping out the Hellslinger phantom with Eiryss, but in order to score the zone I would have to put Rahera within charging range of Gaspy4,

so I quickly abandon that plan. Eiryss tries to get a disruptor bolt off on Barathrum, but misses. She ends up in an unfortunate position, as will become apparent next turn.

I contest both the enemy zone and flag and ship the clock.

Score 3-2

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Turn 3B

My opponent decides to try for an assassiation. Barathrum does not have line of sight to Rahera directly, but I have misplaced Eiryss such that Bara can charge her if he gets Ghost walk and Infernal Machine. Then he can proceed to do the rest of his initials and bought attacks on Rahera.

The most critical part of this assassination is the crit blind from Stygian abyss. If the crit lands then all the random POW 12s are much more likely to land. In cover I am DEF 20 ARM 17 and camping 6 focus, so for the most part the to-hit rolls need to spike in order to land. In the end the crit does not land and the assassination fails. Because of the high number of small attacks involved OddsMachine crashes when I try to calculate the odds. It is in any case not possible to represent this properly in OddsMarchine because a crit blind would change all the subsequent to-hit rolls. Ultimately I think it ends up being somewhere around 50% due to the crit dependency, maybe a bit less.

Turn 4A

We theorycraft my next turn and find that with Rahera feat it shouldn’t be too difficult for me to seal the game. My opponent concedes so that we can reset and have time for a second game.

Victory for the Mercenaries!

:: Evaluation ::

I made the list sort of as a joke just before the game. It felt like a serviceable list, but probably not the optimal way to play Rahera in Mercs. This game illustrates Rahera’s problem quite well: It is super difficult to manufacture a situation where she can actually get use out of her spells and feat if your opponent knows what you are trying to achieve. To set up for this you need to put yourself in harms way and may very easily end up getting assassinated.