Eldar...Eldar...and more Eldar! oh and don't forget the Daemons!

Hello all,

So I played in the local Huzzah Hobbies RTT (got to birdux.blogspot.com for more info on date/time/place) and it was an interesting jump into 7th. I have since the book came out played a few dozen games (yes I have been QUITE BUSY!) and as with most people I like the edition overall. I dislike the psychic phase (I think its dumb and bla bla bla, no reason to harp on this as this is what we have and I don't believe in making changes to the book and it is far too integrated to really ban in any sensible way).

Anyways...

So this RTT allowed us to try out 2 CAD (combined arms detachments) but limited every player to two sources per list (so 2 CAD, 1 CAD and an ally  detachment, 1 CAD and inquistion, etc etc etc). So of course I jumped on the chance and played this:

Farseer w/ bike
Farseer w/ bike, spear
Farseer w/ bike, spear
Baharroth
9x warlock w/ bikes and 2x spears

4x3 windrider bikes w/ 1 shuriken cannon each
2x wraithknight
1x6 swooping hawk

So the game plan was...roll for fortune or invis (if I played against someone with natural ignore cover (serpents, guard, etc etc) and then roll on whatever is needed. Warlocks would roll a few times on runes of battle and then 4-6 warlocks on malefic daemonology each game. So in 2/3 of games I got fortune and/or invis (the first game I rolled terribly) and 1-2 warlocks got possession and some other goodies. Every game turn 1 I turned a warlock into a Lord of Change (LoC) and he flew around doing more summons while my wraithknights and council did work. The strategy actually was pretty good, but round 2 I ran into 5 imperial knights (a match ive only theorized and never played) and got beaten pretty badly. My wraithknights performed horribly that game, which is unusual as they usually do well vs imperial knights. So I ended up 2-1 for the event but I did beat a droppod space marine army round 1 (17 objective secured units and 22 scoring units i believe) and I beat a draigowing player in game 3 pretty handily due to my very mobile army.

Deny the witch is soooo random by the way. I had many times throwing 15-16 dice hoping for just 1-2 6's and still you cant fail. I know those charts are apps are all over the place (hell I did the math for the Torrent of Fire power app) and still it can be surprising how difficult it is to block a power. I think that is the true weakness of 7th edition psykers, one turn you get everything off no problems, the next turn everything fails. Yes that happened in old editions but with a prevalence of LD 10 it was rare. Most games you would only see 1-2 powers fail to go off. Now you could easily see 1-2 turns where most powers fail to go off or are blocked by denial dice. Also the crazy amount of dice needed to have decent odds means that most armies going all into the psychic phase don't really have a shooting phase. Yes your opponent might summon 500ish points of stuff...but if you then kill that 500ish points you have actually more than leveled the playing field as the stuff that those daemon armies have..its not good at much else besides summoning. Then if in a good turn you kill the summoned stuff AND some actual stuff..well you can actually quite easily do near catastrophic damage to most summoning armies with a few well placed shots (example: opponent has 3-5 units of 11-16 man horror units...kill a few horrors in each unit and you drop their army by 3-10 warp charges, which a shooty army can easily do in a single turn).

I think that double CAD is really no worse than what we get with normal lists but I can see plenty of places keeping the old 6th edition limit of 1 CAD and some other detachment type for the second source. That is fine by me as honestly I would like to run a third wraithknight and if I lose baharroth, a farseer, and the hawks I get just enough space for this:

Farseer w/ bike
Farseer w/ bike, spear
Baron Sathonyx
9x warlock w/ bikes and 2x spears
1x5 kabbalite warriors
5x3 windrider bikes
3x wraithknight

Now that...that looks fun! I have come to realize that I just really really like wraithknights. I know they have bad match ups (venoms...mass str7 can take them down too) but they are fun and assaulty and tough! Which is fun for eldar. My other possible list I am looking at in a world that dissallows two CAD's is something like:

Autarch
1x5 fire dragons in a serpent w/ scatter laser, ghostwalk, shuriken cannon
4x5 dire avengers in a serpent w/ scatter laser, ghostwalk, shuriken cannon
3x wraithknight

It has lots of firepower, good ways to kill high AV, can easily kill low AV, and infantry. But it is 100% empty on the psychic phase which...I am not sure about. It should be fine as the loads of shooting and assault power in the serpents and the wraithknights should kill tons of stuff and dissuade things from coming near me. I don't know though, I love playing a seer council but...it would be nice to have 8 objective secured units in my army!

In any case none of these lists require me to buy anything new (I just have to build/paint that third wraithknight, but that should only take a day or so). Hopefully I'll start getting some games in with these two lists and I can decide if this really is the way I want to go. I know most people love hawks and I agree they are amazing, but sadly whenever I bring them..they never seem to really do what I need them to do. Hence why I am leaning toward just taking what I know and love (wraithknights and warlocks :D).

On another note, I spent a number of games trying to use a beastpack with 5 spiritseers and Eldrad...it works well..but I actually just think the seer council ends up performing better in many match ups now. Anyway I will probably discuss the beastpack more next week.

Regards,

-Tsarith