Teleporty Tubbies

So as part of the perpetual “what the hell am I doing?” quandary I gave Savage a run out yesterday, a game that you can see here, should you wish 

I’ve long had thoughts about Savage and this seemed like a good opportunity to give them a run out, and did so in a game that was both very enjoyable and frustrating at times. A real chess match in many ways, which is of course a good thing. 

Spoiler alert, I probably won’t take Neverborn to the June tournament, there’s just too many other local Neverborn players. The search continues.

That said Savage are a keyword where you will often hear people describe it as “fragile for what it is” or “too many big bases so gets in their own way a bit” or “not very mobile” etc etc or my personal favourite “Euri2 is ok but the other one is trash” or of course the time honoured “it’s not a very good keyword”.

Now Wyrd is, by and large, pretty good at utilising the errata and the digital age to make changes when things aren’t working. Even back in the old Ratjoy days (gather round kids as I tell of the days when Killjoy was actually worth taking!) Wyrd was pretty good at utilising the print on demand services to make sweeping changes to models as required. More recently we saw the wholesale changes to the Big Hat keyword but what we have never seen, with the exception of the humble Bultungin (that’s fun to say, try it now), is an errata to a Savage model.

And it got me to wondering as to why. Why is this big beefy burly ball of bashing viewed so poorly but yet unbuffed? And then it struck me:

They’re not bad at the thing we think they meant to be good at, we’re just wrong about the things we think….about them.  I probably could’ve worded that better.

Long story short I think that Savage are actually a very solid and highly mobile crew and this is in part to two things.

1) Ice Pillars

2) Shattering Surprise

We can all agree that leap is a pretty good ability. Whether it’s suited or unsuited we all value it. Obviously suited leaps are better but either way we like leaps.  Now imagine if you will Leap had an 8”+30mm range (seriously? What’s with this marriage of imperial and metric measurements?) but as a requirment for it you had to target a resource? Say a sz4 terrain piece that some models in your crew make? I think you’d be pretty interested in them, I know I was. And this is largely how I started to view the Shattering Surprise trigger and it changed my whole perception of the Savage keyword for the better.  

“But what about the Ram?” I hear you say? And that’s a fair question. And that’s where The Old Ways comes in, which if you’re unfamiliar looks like this:

What this means for shattering surprise (or any trigger in keyword quite frankly) is you need to be reactive as you will be presented with opportunities to have a ram on top of your discard pile. Maybe you just flipped one on defence, or there was a suitable ram in a double neg dmg flip you just did, or you flipped one on initiative, or you cheated one from your hand for defence, or you just discarded one from your hand because Candy was nearby, whatever, you need to be more conscious of your discard pile, of what’s going in to it and critically the order you are putting things in to it. You control this, take advantage of it.  All of this means you have an additional resource to find and utilise the suits that you need.  What you’ll use to pay for this, is timing. You have to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves or to make the judgement call of how and when you use your discard pile as a resource, all for the low low cost of 1hp.  The old ways is for my money one of the best keyword abilities around as you can use it a great deal without significant in game setup and it has a direct interaction with one of the games core mechanics; the fate deck.  Tl;dr: master The Old Ways and you’ll have much better access to the suits you want.  Finding a 5 of Rams for your gigant to teleport 8”+30mm+base size across the board is not as hard as you think.

But wait, that’s not all. Our old friend the Puke snake has Arcane Resevoir so our hand is bigger giving us better odds with our cards. That alone makes it a great totem, let alone the whole pulsing unresisted dmg from ice pillars and making models incorporeal. 

Lastly on Euripides himself, one of the models with the Shattering Surprise trigger, there’s intuition. So we get a solid scry out our cards before flipping. And if you really need, soulstones. 

But how much mobility does this really get you? Well allow me to demonstrate with one play from my most recent game linked above, with the pairing of a Crookskin and a Gigant. (Crookskins I could probably write another blog on, love those little guys).

So here we are at the beginning of a game, I have a Crookskin and a Gigant deployed on the left hand side of my deployment zone in the top left corner of the map.

The Crookskin moves forward and uses his Craven Imitations ability to drop an Ice Pillar marker. The suit is built in for this and I think I used The Old ways to do it as there was a 6 on top of my discard; and because the ability heals you for 1hp you effectively don’t even pay the Old Ways tithe. Such a good ability.

The Gigant then activated, targeted the Ice Pillar with cave drawings, found the 5 of Rams from somewhere using the method described above, popped out the other side of the Ice Pillar and then double walked towards the corner and that Cloak and Dagger marker. I make this roughly 22” of movement very early on in the game.  Next turn the Gigant was able to grab an intel token from the marker and then teleport back to a new ice pillar marker made by the Crookskin to avoid having the intel marker stolen from him.

 

So there we are, some quick thoughts on Savage and why they may not be what you think they are and how by utilising Ice Pillars you can actually get a ton of movement out of them and why I may end up playing them at tournament after all!

All hail the Battle Fatties! The Combat Chubbs! Teleporty Tubbies!