Thanks. So compared to the Orc/Skaven list Clamatius and I have tuned, you are:

+3 Followers of Mork, +3 Squig Herders, +2 Rock Lobber, +1 Basha's Bloodaxe, +2 Waaagh, +3 Veteran Sellswords, +1 We'z Bigga

-3 Deathmaster Snkitch, -2 Rat Ogres, -3 Greyseer Thanquol, -3 Clan Rats, -3 Orc/Chaos Alliance, -1 Chaos/Dark Elf Alliance

In general, your deck will be slightly faster on average in this matchup (though less explosive - more on this in a moment), and substantially more vulnerable to Flames of the Phoenix.

Your upside is you are more likely to be able to eschew building up a resource/draw engine in favor of aggression, because your 2-dorks can be played to the battlefield, whereas we're running alliances in those spots. On the flipside, you will have draws that flat lose to an early Flames of the Phoenix, and it will be very difficult for you to recover from a mid-game Flames as well without a lucky multiple-Warpstone/Village draw.

Regarding explosiveness though, I think cutting Greyseer/Clan Rats actually dramatically hurts your win % in this matchup. Playing Greyseer and swinging for 8+ on turn 3 is a major reason for our build's wins vs. bolt thrower, and even though I think your deck has the potential for slightly more aggressive draws on average, aggressive consistency is not what you want vs. thrower - you want high-variance, overpowering aggression. Point is, if you are goldfishing kills on turn three or four 50% of the time and slow as molasses the other 50%, that gets you a pretty good shot at a ~50% winrate vs. thrower. But the curve drops off fast... consistently goldfishing on turn 5-6 gets you a roughly 5-10% winrate vs thrower (your wins coming when all 3 of their flames are in the bottom 10 cards of their deck, etc.)

So, have you tested this vs. a well-piloted, well-built thrower deck or is this just theory? Because we have tested most of these cards, and while I will grant you Sellswords is a nice plus vs. bolt thrower (though pretty bad in an Orc mirror match...), I am not really seeing anything else here that offsets the loss of the Greyseer/Clan Rats Skaven package. Rock Lobber is interesting tech we havent tested, but seems beatable with good development management if the thrower player is aware you have it. Definitely something to try.

Not to mention, your lack of Deathmaster or an answer to Deathmaster anywhere in your 50 makes this... not a deck I would choose to play...

You mentioned having an updated list though, so maybe...?

I think you are confused. The first list of the thread is not mine. That is the one that won a regional in sheffield I think. My lists are a little lower in the thread. I also already gave a pretty precise rundown of what happened between my orc/skaven and the BT deck in this thread. Flames of the Phoenix was pretty impotent in the matchup.

I think the big thing there is Rock Lobber and we haven't tried that for quite a while. I suspect that will be the card that actually makes the difference since you can force through a burned zone eventually and you have quite a while to do it against the Thrower deck.

Another note. I am not theorycrafting. I was playtesting. We even rotated decks and talked to each other as to best possible plays. I am the better player in my group and I know the in's and out's of every deck as I have built and played them all.

My orc deck I try to build as explosive as possible. I forgo the Pillages and Troll Vomits and the excess stuff for more cheap dudes that can attack the other players base as fast as possible. I find that Pillage is pretty pointless when you can win by the time it could hit anything relevant. I get turn 3-4 wins quite a bit more than 50% of the time btw.

Sorry for the spam posting (would be easier if there was an edit button). I will just post my current lists for the sake of ease.

Orc/Skaven Rush

Units: 36
3 Clan Rats
3 Gutter Runners
3 Clan Moulder's Elite
3 Deathmaster Sniktch
3 Greyseer Thanquol
3 Veteran Sellswords
3 Followers of Mork
3 Spider Riders
3 Crooked Teef Goblins
3 Snotling Pump Wagon
3 Squig Herders
3 Lobber Crew

Support: 9
3 Choppa
3 Contested Village
3 Warpstone Excavation

Tactics: 5
3 Innovation
2 Waaagh!

DE/Skaven

Units: 27
3 Clan Rats
3 Gutter Runners
3 Clan Moulder's Elite
3 Deathmaster Sniktch
3 Greyseer Thanquol
3 Poison Wind Globadiers
3 Vile Sorceress
3 Walking Sacrifice
3 Shades

Support: 8
3 Contested Village
3 Warpstone Excavation
2 Har Ganeth

Tactics: 15
3 Chittering Horde
3 Hate
3 Innovation
3 Call the Blood
3 Chillwind

If you need any specific card choice reasons, just ask.

Sure, sure... I get all of your card choices. The DE build seems fine.

Orc build... I dont see how you can play Sellswords if you expect rush to be part of the meta. Orc build w/ sellswords gives up a big % to a mirror without them. I do agree its a plus vs. bolt thrower but I'm skeptical of the inclusion.

As above, your build loses hard to unit-based disruption, particularly Firestorm, Vile Sorcs, and Flames of the Phoenix. Thats why we opted for a much higher support density. You're certainly embracing the "high variance" plan for the bolt thrower matchup, but doing some quick math... they're going to see the Flames often enough to make me nervous, considering you are just about stone cold to the card. That's assuming they mull any hand without one, and to be fair, some players may not.

Your build is cold to Mountain Legion too.

So basically you're tuning orcs to "beat" bolt thrower (I still doubt whether you are even 50/50 without Mob Up! honestly) and lose to more midrangey Orc/Skaven builds, DE/Skaven builds, Dwarves, and Chaos. I don't really like the plan, but I get where you're coming from.

And even though you're not playing it, I think Rock Lobber might well be worth testing vs. bolt thrower...

ddm5182 said:

I will repeat myself for the third time in hopes that maybe this time you will read it. FLAMES OF THE PHOENIX IS DEAD AGAINST THE ORC DECK. It does nothing. Reread my post above to get why if you need to. By the time you can play the flames, it wont be enough because I can play enough attackers on my turn to win anyway. The orc deck also does not lose to Dwarves or Chaos because they are too slow to stabilize. Also, a good player will know the best time to play the sellswords if they are going to hurt you when the opponent gets them.

Again, this is not from theorycraft, as you seem to be doing by assuming my builds weaknesses. I have actually played these matches quite a bit.

My DE/Skaven build is built to combat Orc Rush and the mirror match. The Globadiers are usually really strong when they hit play. The number of cards dedicated to handling units makes the DE deck a dog to the BT deck though. I think thats ok as I don't feel the majority of players will know how to play the BT deck good enough and I may get wins just because of that.

The Manchester Orc deck is the Orc deck that was linked to (and has since had Thanquol added). The Bolt Thrower deck we have is here: www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

The onus is always on the HE player to have an answer. Orcs can explode very easily and once one zone is burnt the HE player has to stop every single attack (and there aren't enough fogs for that level of consistency). Flames doesn't stall the Orcs as they can replay 8+ power in their own turn from four resources in so many ways that a zone will still burn in the next attack. Rock Lobba is worth playing. It lets you sneak in damage in response to a fog and again in the HE player's phase zero, which has burnt a zone (and won the game) more than once.

I'm surprised that you've put DE/Skaven in as tier two. They're tier one as far as I'm concerned.

@darkdeal, I don't think we're going to gain much from talking about this further. You just arent playing against the same bolt thrower opponent I am, clearly. I don't understand how you think a deck with a grand total of 6 supports for resource/card draw is not susceptible to Flames of the Phoenix in the early/mid-game. What are your opponents doing in testing to make you think that? Must be nice to live in xmasland where you always have 3 spider riders by turn 4.

Too, as I pointed out above, the inherent weakness of the "all unit" plan vs. other disruptive decks, particularly chaos and DE, makes it pretty hard to justify playing your build. We have tested with Followers of Mork/Squig Herders very extensively, and come to the conclusion that it is just worse than Alliances in those spots. That's why I consider DE/Skaven tier 2 - it loses consistently to Orc/Skaven and, at least so far in testing, it has performed worse v. bolt thrower due to scouts not offsetting the slower setup time without pillages to hit abandoned mines. (w/ pillages the bolt thrower matchup is probably favorable to DE/Skaven but that seems pretty poor in virtually every other match...wtb sideboards...).

Also, just as a side note, we're been testing Troll Vomit as a 1-2of in the Orc/Skaven build for an edge in the Skaven mirror and vs. dwarves and it has been going very well. I've never liked Waaagh! (it feels very win-more-ish to me), and Vomit has been quite good to have as an out to a unit-based controlling board presence, particularly from a DE/Skaven deck.

@crowdedmind - I'd be interested to hear your common lines of play with the thrower deck. In our testing, finding fogs has never been a problem; I think the deck has lost perhaps one or two games at most (when it survives to turn 4+) due to not finding a fog. I wonder if you are investing in quest enough, using abandoned mines/city gates, etc?

Obviously there are two Orc/Skaven archetypes here, not just 1. For labelling purposes, I'm going to call the Sellswords listing Manchester Skaven and the Seduced by Darkness version that we use Seduction Skaven. I think Manchester Skaven is weak to mass removal but it may get away with it via pure speed and also just because most of the competitive archetypes don't have any mass removal at the moment. I don't think I would play it because I would be worried about random opponents who happen to run 3x Troll Vomit or 3x Nurgle's Pestilence or both.

I don't rate DE/Skaven as low as ddm5182 either - while it is lower than 50% against Seduction Skaven, I don't feel like it's unwinnable by any means. The difference between my DE/Skaven list and darkdeal's is that he has Call the Blood instead of We Need Your Blood and Gutter Runners where I have Rat Ogres and another Har Ganeth. Call the Blood seems like it would be ok but in practice I always found that it meant that you were really relying on getting the Globadiers on the table and otherwise it's nearly dead.

I also don't rate Dwarves quite as highly as ddm5182 although I love the deck. I do not think you can run High Elf's Disdain in that deck either without sideboards, since it's double loyalty and pretty weak against all the competitive archetypes except Order Thrower. I would say that the current competitive meta is more like:

Competitive archetypes:

Orc/Skaven (Manchester or Seduction)

DE/Skaven (and there are quite a few varieties here but the core cards are the same)

Mono Dwarves (I'm going to write up a post on these guys)

Order Thrower

Other "standard" archetypes that I don't regard as competitive right now although they may have decent matchups against 1 of the competitive archetypes:

Anti-unit Chaos

Anti-unit DE

HE Units

HE/Dwarf Units

Kingdom Shrine Empire

Volleygun Empire (or Dwarf/Empire, that works too)

Destruction Thrower

In probation:

Anti-unit Orc control (I'm still working on this one but it seems like there might be something there)

The reasons Flames wasn't a problem is because I did the opposite of what you said to do in your write-up of skaven v bolt thrower from the skaven point of view. As an Orc/Skaven player, I would attack on my turn one or two (depending on if I went first or not) against the bolt throwers quest zone. I usually don't burn it but get around 6 damage consistently. My next battlefield phase, If I have enough power to hit for 8+, rather than waste all the extra damage burning a zone that has only 2 or 3 HP left, I will burn the clean battlefield zone unless they have a Master Rune. At this point, the Bolt Thrower deck is still trying to develop. If they hold back too much to keep a fog effect online, then they are only hindering themselves. If I do get the battlefield burnt, I only have a few more points to deal to the quest zone. That is why Flames doesn't matter, because I can use my 3 or 4 resources post flames to replay some units and attack for the win anyway.

Side note 1. I agree that Waaagh! is pretty win-more and will probably trade it out for Mob Up or Troll Vomit depending on how testing goes with both.

Side note 2. I agree that Orc Control is right on the edge. With an answer to every type of card in the game except for quests (who plays those anyway), they seem well situated. I think their problem right now is they need just one more early defensive card against rush or they need a way to ramp faster into their epic spell.

You're basically in agreement with my writeup actually I didnt say mindlessly attack a single zone until its burning - rather, I suggested that for the bolt thrower matchup you want to put yourself in a position where a single un-fogged attack wins the game, as soon as you can.

So, lets say you're attacking for 7 instead of 8 on that next turn - the best strategy against many decks is going to be attacking a clean zone with your 7, in order to force them to block with their quest guys on your next attack and limit their outs - meaning you are basically always either going to disrupt them or threaten a one turn clock. But vs. Thrower, it would actually be better to attack into the already damaged zone for 7 to be able to subsequently threaten to win on any following turn (assuming you have a reasonable enough draw engine to build your offensive force above the "burn in 1 attack" threshold on the next turn, but thats down to deck composition as well).

Make sense?

@Clamatius - I think you're underestimating how good the dwarves are man! That list is scary as hell to play against on the Skaven side of the table. And while I agree the High Elf's Disdain splash is poor assuming Orc/Skaven as the dominant tier 1 deck, that changes if you assume Bolt Thrower is the most played archetype (admittedly a stretch given the reports we've seen so far, but this is theoretical metagaming).

I guess I'd phrase it as... if I was going to a major pro tour level tournament tomorrow, if I wanted to play the best deck, I'd play bolt thrower. if I was afraid lots of people would be packing thrower and I wanted to avoid endless mirror matches while maintaining a decent rush matchup, I'd play dwarves splashing High Elf's Disdain. If I wanted some game against the dwarves and bolt thrower but assumed the majority of the field would be other jank, I'd pack Orc/Skaven (what you called Seduction Skaven).

That's where I got my tier listings. The other decks are reasonable choices, but dont really do anything better than the tier 1-1.5 decks I listed above, at least IMO... certainly worth further discussion...

Looking at the thrower deck that crowdedmind posted, I am not surprised that the British contingent don't think much of the Thrower archetype. I think I would try mine if I were you. Key cards that are missing in the list you posted:

• Contested Stronghold (I'm assuming that this is just a mistake and crowdedmind meant this over Contested Fortress)
• Abandoned Mine (it's much harder to beat Dark Elf without this - if this is your version no wonder you think that scouts are a big problem)
• High Elf's Disdain (this avoids some unpleasantness in the critical turn and has some general utility)
• Reap What's Sown (this and Abandoned Mine work around the I-didn't-draw-into-fog problem in the midgame)

and replaces them with things like Asuran's Cleansing and Will of the Electors, which does not seem like a good idea.

I made the Manchester Orc deck (the one with Veteran Sellswords) and beat that 3-1 yesterday. Obviously not a big enough sample size to say for sure who is favoured in the matchup, but clearly our Thrower deck is not the pushover you seem to think it is. The Orc matchup is definitely close and I suspect that Rock Lobber would make it much harder to win albeit not impossible. I'm actually tempted to a Pilgrimage from my list and add a Demolition, but I'm not sure yet. Anyway, playing against the Seduction Skaven deck (which I've done a lot) is harder from my perspective:

1) The starts are only slightly slower than the Manchester version - and in fact the self-inflicted Sellswords damage in the Manchester matchup made it significantly easier to win the late game.

2) SS has more supports to make it easy to play out 6+ power after Flames, as well as We'z Bigga! for cheaper Elites.

3) Pillaging Abandoned Mine or Contested Stronghold is extremely annoying, not to mention a Pillage on 1st turn City Gates is usually very bad news.

So there you go. YMMV and in fact is highly likely to.

Yea, I wanted to come in here to say that I was wrong. I made a different BT list a couple days ago. Clamatius's list. It was by far superior to the original BT list I had. Reap Whats Sown is insane. The orc list still won a good amount of the games, but it was closer to 50/50 ( a lot depending on who went first). It is now my opinion that the Bolt Thrower deck is the best deck of the 3 tier 1 decks. DE/Skaven still beats the Orcs, but DE/Skaven is really terrible against the BT deck.

I also tried to make a Destruction BT deck and it seems like it would really beat the Order BT deck, but I don't know how it would do against rush. The mass removal isn't as good as the Order list, but there is a ton of spot removal.

I eagerly anticipate everyone joining the "bolt thrower is the best deck" bandwagon, so we can rapidly transition to the "ban the bolt thrower" bandwagon. The deck is seriously degenerate and bad for the game.

FWIW Darkdeal, I'd recommend you try our Orc/Skaven build vs. your DE/Skaven, and I think you may come around to that as well. Ours isnt that much slower than your orc build and it is *much* more resilient. Obviously a lot of the matches just come down to boring "last Deathmaster standing" fights, but the early Pillage/Lobber Crew disruption of our Orc/Skaven list as well as the support count make it a pretty rough matchup for the DE list. Not to mention, in that match I definitely want to be on the side of the table that can cast Troll Vomit. Filthy card in the Skaven mirror. Almost as dirty when they know you have access to it and slow-roll their threats (esp when you have Pillage to punish slowrolling) as it is when they walk into it and get blown out.

Current Orc/Skaven build is:

25 Units

• 3 Spider Riders
• 3 Snotling Pump Wagon
• 3 Lobber Crew
• 3 Crooked Teef Goblins
• 3 Clan Rats
• 3 Clan Moulder's Elite
• 3 Greyseer Thanquol
• 3 Deathmaster Sniktch
• 1 Rat Ogres

12 Tactics

• 2 Seduced by Darkness
• 2 Troll Vomit
• 3 Innovation
• 3 Pillage
• 2 We'z Bigga

13 Supports

• 3 Choppa
• 3 Contested Village
• 3 Warpstone Excavation
• 3 Orc/Chaos Alliance
• 1 Orc/Dark Elf Alliance

Also, currently experimenting with adding 1-2 Rock Lobber for some combination of Rat Ogres, Troll Vomit, Crooked Teef Goblins. I suspect -1 Rat Ogres, +1 Rock Lobber is going to end up being right.

I sleeved up darkdeal's DE list today, so we'll see how it does tonight vs. Seduction Skaven (which we like a lot more than the Manchester version). The main reason why we expect the Seduction list is better against DE than the Manchester version is that you can play supports to Quest, which the DE can't shut down unlike a random Squig Herder or something. If they are drawing a bunch of cards they can just play dorks and hit you with them before the Sorceresses kill them and that's how the Orcs usually win. We shall see. Previously, my DE list was a little bit worse than 50%, probably something like 40% vs Seduction Skaven.

I thought a lot about a Destruction thrower deck and I can't see how you would get it to work. Some of your good stuff like Troll Vomit is your turn only, right after they hit you and burn your zone - and you have no fogs to stop the attack, just point removal or corruption. Fighting their 20+ units with point removal seems like it is destined for failure, but if you don't do that every creature will get to hit you before you kill them.. On top of that, the Destruction supports are not helpful, unlike City Gates or Keystone Forge. In a game where the incoming creatures sat there for a turn before attacking then sure, the Destruction plan might work out, but from a pure theory perspective I just don't think Destruction has the tools to pull it off.

darkdeal: anyway, glad to hear that your experiences are starting to match up more with our group on how the competitive deck matchups play out. We are not happy about the Thrower deck being the best deck in the hands of a good player (a) because we can see it stifling a lot of otherwise viable midrange decks in the future that have to play lots of defense vs. rush and (b) it is deathly boring to play against since the player interaction is so limited.

I do think that you can hate the Thrower archetype to death with a lot of decks if you have sideboards. Destruction rush can play Mob Up! and Rock Lobber. Order can play High Elf's Disdain. Both can play more support destruction. The Order Thrower archetype is exactly what ddm5182 and I were talking about in the sideboard vs. no sideboard argument - in a world with no sideboards, very linear, inflexible strategies like the Thrower are quite possibly the best plan. If you have sideboards, they are a tier 2 pick at best.

The Orc/Skaven list I posted in this thread is not the one I playtested against my DE/Skaven list. I used the Orc deck that was the sheffield winner. That list is a lot closer to your list than the one I am currently using.

Ah, this one ? It may be better against Thrower since it has Rock Lobber and Pillage, but I am not shocked that a Orc rush deck with no Deathmasters or Greyseer is rolling over to a DE deck with Deathmasters. In any given tournament, I would be really surprised if there are more Thrower decks than DE decks, so that would not seem an ideal metagame choice.

Mob up is ok as a way to combat the BT decks, but I think going back to Rip Dere Eads Off is better. If you play Grimgor into the Kingdom and Rip it when the Bolt Thrower deck gets a lot of board presence, it is really destructive. Rip can also be used to get rid of random developments or to push through a little more damage if you put your grimgor in the battlefield. I think it may be time for that to make a comeback if the BT decks become popular.

Doesn't work. Grimgor only triggers when he enters play and he's already in play if you Rip him. I think that's in the official FAQ but if not it's in my collected rulings thread for sure.

Rip is useful for getting a Bloodthirster attack in though.

Bah, I hate when I misread stuff like that. Grimgor would still be backbreaking to just play though. It would be tough for the current builds of Orcs to get to 6 resources though.

Ripping a Bloodthirster wouldn't be any better than Mob Up because they could just Disdain the Rip and it takes twice the cards to do the same effect.

I think Ripping is better because it's useful in more matchups.

edit: But I don't think I would do that in the maindeck anyway - and I don't think Mob Up! would make the maindeck either unless I expected to play against a lot of Thrower decks - I'd just run Rock Lobbers. I guess in a sideboard of Skaven/Orc you'd just run Mob Up! anyway. So I suppose I'm wrong, ripping isn't going to happen unless you're playing a slower build where it's part of your anti-rush strategy.

Clamatius said:

I am curious if you ever got around to playing with my DE list very much. I would like to know how often Call was good against orcs just because of We'z Bigga!.

I played maybe 7 games against Seduction Skaven one day last week. I won a couple but lost the rest. Troll Vomit was pretty brutal - that was a big problem. Pillage meant I had less supports than the Orcs and I needed a bunch of guys on the board to get control of the game, so Vomit wrecked me a whole lot. The other problem was just that the DE deck is so much slower than the Orcs - without a Greyseer you really do not do much damage - so it gave him more time to set up Quest and just overwhelm me. The joke in our group about DE generally is that playing against it feels a lot

The Globadiers were pretty decent, since they can kill an attacker straight away unlike the Sorceresses.

Call the Blood was almost always a dead draw. I think I killed maybe one Elite once and after that he just played around it. With the Seduction Skaven list, one of the reasons you play We'z Bigga is for a cheaper Deathmaster, and when you're trading Deathmasters it doesn't matter if it would die to Call the Blood too.

edit: I posted all my current decks on deckbox.org. Most of them were on the forums already, but if you're interested, you can find them here .

Just reinforcing what Clamatius said... my strategy rapidly became "play supports, apply token pressure and bide my time til I draw troll vomit, then wipe his board and win". One of the strengths of the orc deck is the ability to commit a reasonable amount of power to the board with very few cards. I could often apply a game-winning clock with 2 attackers, forcing him to overcomit, then end up ruining him with a Vomit, leaving him with no draw/resource engine to speak of while I am in position to put 8+ power on the board the following turn.

Call the Blood is a decent "getcha" when you don't know they have it, but it isnt really hard to restrain myself from playing We'z Bigga and it doesnt have that many targets to begin with. It has a nice interaction with the Globadiers, but those guys kill most of my offense by themselves. I am generally not attacking you until i find a Vomit/Deathmaster to deal with the Globadiers anyway, and if you're trading Call the Blood for a Moulder's Elite, I am getting the better end of that deal - my elite can be played any time and start beating face, while your CTB is only active in a very narrow circumstance. Virtual card advantage at its finest. I am generally much more scared of We Need Your Blood (and in fact I was playing around WNYB for a couple games til I realized he didnt have it).