Welcome to part two of our look at why we choose some Warhammer 40,000 miniatures to be Warlords and others bodyguards. You can find part one here, where we discussed how Warlords can add new deck building strategies to the game, using the T’au and Tyranid Warlords as examples.

Battles

The Warlords added in the previous ‘Warlord Month’.

Aside from deck building, the other aspect we look at is whether each Warlord lets you try different tactics in battle, and / or gives you something new to think about when you’re facing off against them.

Returning to last week’s examples, when using the T’au Warlord Commander Farsight, you have to decide whether to make your final cards two melee hitters to make use of Farsight’s end-of-battle melee boost, or perhaps save a card with the Taunt trait, to distract the enemy while Farsight assassinates the enemy Warlord.

And with the Tyranid Warlords, decks built around Ghosar need to focus on exposing the enemy Warlord before you’re forced to deploy your own Warlord (as Ghosar hits hard, but isn’t super tough). Whereas, because the Hive Tyrant costs so many points, his (its?) decks need to hold the enemy up for as long as possible, so the Tyrant’s special rule has as many turns as you can manage to deliver bonus damage.

Choices

Hopefully this and last week’s post mean you can now see why we select character A over B to become a Warlord, and by extension, why characters who are perfectly capable of leading a Warhammer 40,000 army end up as bodyguards in our game. After all, just because a fan-favourite character doesn’t achieve what we need as a Warlord, that doesn’t mean we’re going to leave them out of the game.

Taking this a step further, if you’re wondering ‘why isn’t my favourite HQ choice in Combat Cards yet?’ or you see us include a raft of new Games Workshop miniature releases but their leader is suspiciously absent, it may be that we’re holding them back as a potential future Warlord.

Power

A final point – we do intend that over time we’ll add new Warlords who are simply more / less powerful versions of ones in the game. I’m not saying we’ll have ‘powered-up’ versions of existing Warlords, rather that factions may get a second Warlord who does what one of their others already does, but in a more or less powerful way. This can be helpful because it alters the bodyguards you can / can’t afford to take when building around a specific strategy.

For example, the Tyranid faction already has a melee hitter Warlord in Ghosar, but he’s quite fragile and so has a reasonably low points cost. At some point we intend to add the Swarmlord as a Tyranid Warlord, even though ‘he’ (it?) is melee focused, too. In this example the Swarmlord would be much more powerful and tough – and therefore more expensive to include in your deck. The same could apply to the Aeldari Avatar of Khaine (powerful, expensive) and a potential new melee focused Warlord, such as one of the Phoenix Lords (smaller, cheaper).

Conclusion

So to sum up, each Warlord has to give you new options when building your deck, or new tactics to try in battle – and ideally both of those things. If a new card is simply too close to an existing Warlord from the faction then they become a bodyguard, because we don’t want to leave all these cool characters out of the game.

I’ll run a post on each of the eight new Warlords when the next ‘Warlord month’ rolls around, but in the meantime keep an eye on our Facebook page, where we’ll show each new addition and detail their special rule.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions for new Warlords please comment below, on Facebook, or mail us at [email protected].

Thanks,
Stu