Reading the next expansion previews, I can't help but have this feeling:

Necrons are the only faction where the main goal is to play other factions. It just feels weird. I love my necrons, but I fear I might find them a bit boring in Conquest because I would just end up placing other factions' units and not see these good ole' robots.

Thoughts??

Is it the main goal though? Or is it just one of their tools to reach the real main goal - beating the opponent?

The spoilers so far have plenty of soulless robots - so many that people have worried there might be no reason to enslave any external units. It looks like using their own units will have one advantage (resurrection & healing tricks), while enslaved units probably have some other advantages (and some housekeeping with the enslavement dial?).

Legions of Death is showing as "shipping now", so by early next month we can hopefully stop speculating. But till then we'll speculate the hell out of it.

Agree with evilidler. I think necron deckbuilding will be a challenge because of the gigantic cardpool they have access to.

Is it the main goal though? Or is it just one of their tools to reach the real main goal - beating the opponent?

The spoilers so far have plenty of soulless robots - so many that people have worried there might be no reason to enslave any external units. It looks like using their own units will have one advantage (resurrection & healing tricks), while enslaved units probably have some other advantages (and some housekeeping with the enslavement dial?).

Legions of Death is showing as "shipping now", so by early next month we can hopefully stop speculating. But till then we'll speculate the hell out of it.

yeah, I'm still having a hard time accepting the "new" necrons, but I see your point. I'll have to start buying packs again, I took a break from Conquest because of RL taking up all my free time.

One of the main reactions I am hearing about the goal of Necrons as "play other factions" is that with the enslavement dial limiting what other factions can be deployed during a round, there is a real concern that you will find yourself with a handful of units that you just can't play. As a result, I've heard some speculation about whether or not it will ever be worth putting more than 1 or 2 other factions into the deck -- which, taken to it's ultimate extreme, is evilidler's point of whether it'll be worth putting in other units at all, given some of what we've seen of the Necron units themselves.

Initially, when the idea for Necrons was first put out, there was major concern about Necrons being able to cherry-pick the best units out of all the factions and put them into one deck. Now that we know about the enslavement dial and the limits it puts on what you can do with the cards in your hand, the major concern I am hearing, like evilidler, is whether the whole mechanic of enslavement might end up being a defining characteristic of a faction that ends up not actually defining them.

It looks from the FFG articles like the enslavement dial only controls what you can play, so you'll be able to have all sorts of units in play eventually. One of the Necron warlords can play units from any discard pile, and it might not be limited by the dial (taking the text literally, there seems to be no limitation).

There is another little detail which gives me hope of the enslavement mechanic being useful, though: You can use non-Necron warlords, and some units gain benefits from that.

wich non-loyal units would you splash into a necron deck?

Whilst (with a necron deck) the enslavement mechanic is always "a thing" nothing forces you to use it.

Stuff like Awake The Sleepers and Harbinger of Eternity want a primarily (even purely) necron deck, so Anrakyr doesn't 'need' to rely on other factions as a crutch necessarily.

Naumekh is essentially built around enslaved allies, but he's a specific warlord - the enslavement dial is his 'thing' in the same way allied vehicle units are Gorzod's.

TBH when I picked up Legions of Death it was without knowing about enslavement, I picked it up because I play Necron's in the tabletop so wanted to do the same in conquest, upon reading about the enslavement dial and some of the cards I was initially put off, Necron's manipulating races to fight for them is a fairly small part of their fluff. I didn't pick Necron's to play Dark Eldar.

Then I found Anrakyr and Mind Shackle Scarab's

I don't dislike the dial any more, I set it to my opponents race and ignore it for the rest of the game while using my pure Necron discard deck, Legions essentially comes with two deck types, those who want to enslave and those who don't and I like that I have both options

Yeah well done of FFG. I'm still used to oldcrons where tehy just wake up and kill everthaaaang! But I'm slowly getting used to the newcrons and I gotta admit, them going "I am mumraaah the ever-living! You will fight for my amusement and the extinction of your species bwahahahaaa!" Actualy several factions would be down with that:

Imperium, Eldar and Tau: "Nooooo!"

Dark Eldar: "Ok. Fine!"

Chaos: "Yes! Blood for the blood god!"

Orks: "Oooowwww yeah! WAAAGH!"

I got the box yesterday (insert rant about laziness of mail personnel here). Only had time for a cursory glance at the cards, but there is so much to like already. The warlords have nicely varied playstyles, and there are enough GOOD cards to make deckbuilding a series of hard choices. There are a couple of cards I think are my favourite cards ever, but it doesn't look overpowered (when the special events are over, they're over - at least the second time).

But yeah, mind shackling will be quite a nuisance for a while now

Personally, I like "Newcrons" over the older ones. While I dislike the doing away of the C'tan Void Dragon meta plot, Old Necrons were Robo-Space Zombies. And that ran into the problem, with all the literature, that exists in things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or The Walking Dead. In zombie outbreak films, zombies are a threat because they are new, scary, and unknown, but ultimately the true theme of movies is the break down of society. However, in P&P&Z, or The Walking Dead, the zombie outbreak has already happened, and people have to exist with the changes to the world. At that point, zombies become a background threat, they are still there, and still dangerous. But the real threat is other people*. Necrons having no personality means they can literally never be anything more than a background threat in 40k, Tyranids are more of an active presence in the books, because they have personality albeit an animal mind driven to consume, the only thing Necrons had were the C'tan, and the odd Pariah here and there and you really can't write a book where the intelligence is a C'tan every single time before they become less of a threat simply because they are beaten so often. New necrons having personality, it makes it possible for the Necrons to be more horrifying and terrible than anything else in existence. Trazyn the Infinite is truly more awful than Vect, because Vect has only been alive for thousands of years, and making people suffer for thousands of years. Trazyn has been collecting people for billions in his bizarre dioramas. And every living being in those dioramas is very aware of what is going on around them, and can't do anything about it.

that and they can now make statements such as these:

Necron lord: *points at tesseract vault* "You know what's inside, little mortal? A C'tan. A star god. Believe me, it's as close to a physical god as you can get. Untold aeons ago they ruled the galaxy. And guess what? We killed them. We broke them. We shattered them. We shackled and weaponised them! Inside that vault waits an angry god for us to unleash upon your world. Let me ask you- What have you got?"

*Drops gauss-microphone*