Court of the Archon

Hi guys,

once again it’s been a while since my last post. At the moment I’m occupied with a lot of other things to do and because of that I don’t always find enough time to write not to mention keep on painting on any of my armies. That is why I’m not able to feed you with any new photos of my models and have to keep this blog alive by writing an article or two. Without any time on my hands I wasn’t able to further playtest my DE army and can’t write another battle report at the moment, but at least I can tell you that my brother figured a rather cheap way to create Razorwing Flocks (which btw. look far better than GW’s “Hitchcock’s Birds” models) and by now finished building some of them. As soon as I’ve finished painting some of them, I’ll show you what he did and you can make your own decision which models you like better or tell me what those flocks should look like in your opinion.

Other than that, there’s not been much going on lately. GW currently releases lots of stuff for WHFB and their “Storm of Magic”-summer campaign and I’m not really psyched about that. Don’t get me wrong, all of those large monsters are, of course, stunning models and I do really like them,  but they remain WHFB models and are therefore not of any interest for me, because I won’t play this system. One of the next releases somewhere in August or September will feature new models of the DE range, to be more precise at least some of the models of the court of the Archon will be released. The pictures of those models (namely the Medusae and the Ur-Ghul) got me once again thinking, whether I could do something useful with this unit or not. Every model in the court seems to be good at one or another things (well … maybe the Lhamaeans need a looooot more thinking until they are really useful) and with four different unit types we immediately get four wound groups. Sounds great, but with 5+ armour, T3 and only one wound the use of this quickly fades away. Well, if wound groups are not the main reason to buy this unit, maybe the combination of different models will make the unit valuable. We get Lhamaeans, which are equipped with 2+ poison weapons and upgrade those of the Archon to 2+ as well. There are Medusae, which are equipped with stronger Liquifier Guns and get Ur-Ghuls and Sslyth, which are dedicated CC-fighter (one of them with S4, 3 A and FC and the other with S5 and 3 A). If you ask me what types of units support which other in this unit, I don’t know what to say. Of course the Medusae can shoot at an enemy unit and the unit can charge into CC afterwards, where the rest of the unit can fight. Sounds reasonable, but with the help of Venoms and Wyches or Incubbi I can get the same effect. Building a unit only out of Ghuls and Sslyths for two wound groups and lots of attacks would be great. Or a unit consisting only of Medusae in order to spam Liquifier Gun sounds quite funny. The huge problem here is that one is forced to buy at least one model of any type, so that the unit at least costs 70 points. Not really a good deal for a unit, which is mediocre at everything and doesn’t excel in any particular task. In addition to this, I’m forced to buy a Venom for the unit in order to get any use of them. If I want to enlarge the unit a bit in order to get some more punch, I even have to buy a Raider for them and the unit gets extremely expensive for a DE army.

To sum it up, the court of the Archon is a funny unit in the army book, but whether it is playable or not, I’m not really sure.  Most of the times I’m sure to find better things in the army to spend my points on and will therefore not buy those models or build some on my own.

Cheers Cleutin