Intro
Well, you either loved them or you hated them in the first edition, but they’re back! One of my favorite warbands aesthetically and mechanically in the first edition, it was just a shame from a feelsbad perspective that they had a, frankly, overpowered faction Rivals deck. Well, if there’s any silver lining to those being gone, it’s that you’ll never again have to get shot by the [
Retractable Pistol] or get dealt 6 damage by a single [
Woodcutter’s Strength] swing again. Still designated as a Strike warband in the second edition, we’ll have to see if that holds up once we review the mechanics. Time to get started!
Warscroll
Inspire
The intricate web of inspirations has been greatly streamlined for the warband in this iteration, which I can appreciate. Whenever a friendly Agent Azyrite (the 4 actual hunters) is slain, you simply inspire another one. Meanwhile, if Quiet Pock is slain, his dogs inspire. However, a notable change here is that there is no link between the dogs themselves, meaning that slaying one dog no longer makes the second more difficult of a target. As far as the condition goes, I actually kind of like the targeted inspiration. While, like we saw with Tunnelpack, your opponent has some agency in who they go after, you can dangle less important fighters with the goal of getting others inspired, and getting to pick which one is a nice boon.
Tools of the Trade
Maintaining a key feature of the warband from the first edition, you can cheat out some extra upgrade value with the warband by adding the Bounty characteristic of slain Agents Azyrite to your pool for the purposes of playing upgrades. While there will be cases where this can even translate to getting two free upgrades down instead of just one, I like how they were able to modernize this “no good choices” aspect of the warband, particularly in conjunction with the inspire condition.
Marked for Vengeance
Our next ability is also reusable in Marked for Vengeance, which “marks” an enemy fighter who slays an Agent Azyrite, granting you a re-roll on every attack targeting that fighter until another enemy fighter slays one or until that fighter is slain. Additionally, if you manage to slay that enemy fighter, you can either remove the move and/or charge tokens from any friendly fighter or draw 1 power card. While you no longer get the instant gratification of removing that token when one of the hunters is slain, removing “all” of a given fighter’s tokens is a noteworthy change, especially where you may be playing Reckless Fury and have stacked more than one on a given fighter. While it may take a bit of time to slay the marked fighter, at least you can have a better sense of when it will happen as well, allowing you to play around it a bit more consistently and even flex into drawing a card instead if you are not in a situation where the token removal makes sense. Who knows, you might even get an upgrade you can play for free! Between the re-roll, the token removal/draw, and Tools of the Trade, I feel like you’re actually getting even more when one of your main fighters die than you used to with Price of Victory, although the obvious caveat here is that it may be a while before you claim your ultimate reward with this ability, if you are even able to do so.
Tight-knit Pack
Another ability that should look familiar to folks coming from the first edition, Tight-knit Pack has you increase the Bounty characteristic of the second dog by 1 after the first dog is slain. Cheating ahead a bit, each of the dogs has a Bounty Characteristic of 0, so this just means your opponent will extract 1, but only if they can slay both of them. Being a 6-fighter warband that only yielded 5 Bounty in the first edition was always another sticking point for the warband, so this is one scenario where I’m happy to see the bump up to 7. Still I like that they’re baking that dog bounty into slaying both of them, as it is a nice mechanical incentive to do what you should want to be doing anyway.
Loyal Hounds
Speaking of which, the reason you should want to get the dogs off the table is Loyal Hounds, which allows you to react with a dog to move after a friendly Agent Azyrite moves. Notably, however, you can only select a dog that has no move and/or charge tokens, which now means the dogs won’t be sprinting around the board constantly supporting every attack the warband makes. This was a change I had clamored for in the first edition that never came, but better late than never I guess? We’ll see what the warband’s native accuracy and damage look like in a moment, but one thing worth mentioning is that, while the ability is limiting in this way, the dogs can hold treasure tokens now, so you can keep this in mind for that purpose going forward, not just as an accuracy mechanic.
Ward of Martyr’s Blood
The last ability on the warscroll is also the only once-per-game ability in Ward of Martyr’s Blood, which is a surge ability when an Agent Azyrite is picked as the target of an attack action. Doing so prevents your opponent from using weapon abilities for that attack, which is huge not only from an accuracy perspective, but also because the damage bonuses we’ve seen thus far are all locked up in granting grievous to the attack. While there are often cases where you want to be dying to unlock some of your other abilities, the cases where you actually need a fighter to survive an attack should be plentiful as well, and this is a great option to use as-needed rather than having to predict it ahead of time in the power step. One last point of clarification is that effects like re-rolls and +Dice effects are (at least from the cards we’ve seen so far) not weapon abilities and therefore will not be affected by this.
Fighters
Beginning with the leader, we have Haskel Hexbane, who has a pretty basic physical profile of 3 Move, 1 Shield, 3 Health and 2 Bounty. His weapon profiles are also not particularly encouraging at 1R/2H/1D with critical grievous and 3R/3S/1D. However, both become significantly more attractive when inspired, improving to 1R/4S/2D and 3R/3H/1D, respectively. Given that you can manufacture support with the dogs at a relatively consistent clip, I like the swap to 4S on the melee weapon, particularly because it comes with a flat damage bump that can be modified further by grievous. He’s a perfectly serviceable fighter for a 6-fighter warband, but you will likely not want him to be deployed too far forward, as you want to protect his 2 Bounty and also would prefer a different Agent Azyrite be slain first so you can get his inspired stats online.
Next up is Aemos Duncarrow, who shares the same physical profile as your leader at 3 Move, 1 Shield, 3 Health, and 2 Bounty. Unlike your leader, he lacks a ranged weapon, but does start on flat 2 Damage at 1R/2H/2D, inspiring to gain an extra die on the attack if picked when another friendly Agent Azyrite is slain. While this is a really nice accuracy boost for him, I’m not sure it’s quite enough to make me inclined to use my first inspire on him, as I think others get more out of it. He’s still a decent target for a Great Strength or such, at least, but he is a bit slow to make consistent use of it.
Brydget Axwold is our third fighter here, sporting a physical profile of 3 Move, 1 Dodge, 2 Health, and 1 Bounty. She has some fairly anemic damage output via her 1R/3S/1D with grievous and 3R/2H/1D attacks. However, she gets appreciably more useful when she inspires, bumping up to 2 Dodge, flat 2 Damage on her melee weapon. While she does swap from 2H to 3S on her ranged attack, we’ve already discussed how using the dogs can make that into a bit of an accuracy upgrade in a number of cases. Given how much she gets from inspiration and how much she really needs it to feel useful, I would be inclined to perhaps even use my first inspire chance on her (assuming her frailty doesn’t just get her one-shot first).
Our last Agent Azyrite is Quiet Pock, who is a bit of an odd man out to me in this edition, even more so than in the last. While he does have a decent physical profile at 3 Move, 2 Shields, 2 Health, and 1 Bounty, his weapons are pretty yuck at 1R/2S/1D and 3R/2H/1D. Sadly, he still doesn’t manage 2 Damage even when inspired, as his melee weapon swaps from swords to hammers and his ranged adds a die plus ensnare. While this makes him decently accurate from range, you’d think the guy whose crossbow shoots bombs might actually be the first to do 2 Damage from Range 3. As is, he is strictly a positional piece, trying to leverage his 2 Shields to stay on tokens or such while using his range to drive opponents off of them. Even then, his best use case might actually just be to die so you can inspire both dogs and Brydget or Haskel, then make use of your warscroll abilities. I’m not planning to inspire him unless all of my other Agents Azyrite have already been slain.
Wrapping up the warband we have Grotbiter and Ratspike, who are exactly the same in terms of mechanics. They each have 4 Move, 1 Dodge, 2 Health, and 0 Bounty with a 1R/2S/1D attack when uninspired. Of course, they do share that 1 Bounty yield between them from Tight-knit Pack, and that attack action is not particularly meaningful given that you want to be using them via Loyal Hounds for the most part anyway. They do inspire to 2 Dodge and 1R/3S/1D, but that is perhaps only further incentive to dangle Pock in the hopes that you can get the dogs inspired. This is particularly interesting because, as we discussed earlier, they are now capable of holding treasure tokens, and getting a couple of 2-Dodge fighters scrambled onto tokens while also using one of your higher value fighters to do something else is pretty solid action economy.
Conclusion
Some good and some bad here for me. On the good side, I think they pretty much nailed the warscroll here. The warband retains that unique characteristic of offering your opponent poor choices via the chain of events which unfold if they slay one of your fighters. I also like that the inspiration web has been streamlined a lot coming into the second edition, giving the Hexbane player a bit more agency in deciding who gets inspired as well, although I would like to have seen the dogs still inspire off each other getting slain.
That said, I think they’ve once again missed the mark with their designation as a Strike warband. They simply do not have the mobility nor the damage output to compete with more elite Strike teams in that regard, struggling to even put out 2 Damage before inspiration, with 3 Damage being accessible only via power card support. Pock feels especially problematic, as the warband is really only 4 fighters masquerading and 6, and his activation will not feel very impactful if you are looking to slay fighters. Despite the general death wish of the warband. Your only fighters of consequence combining for 10 Health in this edition feels way below market compared to other warbands we’ve seen so far, I think it would not have been outrageous to just give all of the humans 3 Health.
Still, the warband does have some unique tools at its disposal that I think could work in more of a Flex capacity. You can have as many as 3 fighters on the field at a given moment with multiple Save dice (barring power card support), and the economy of the dogs holding tokens is quite strong. You also have access to a lot of ranged attacks, which, while they might not help much in terms of slaying enemy fighters, can be used to blast away from feature tokens while potentially knocking your opponent off of their own. As far as Nemesis pairings, I would be inclined to lean towards a mixture of Pillage and Plunder with Countdown to Cataclysm. Scoring for delving often means you don’t have to be alive in the end phase to secure your scoring (something first edition Hexbane players are intimately familiar with) and CtC offers some great support on that front as well as some very good upgrades in Utter Conviction, Visions of Ruin, and Desperate Strength, which would go very nicely on Pock if you want to turn him into an actual threat. Blazing Assault would also be a perfectly reasonable fit here, as the extra damage and accuracy in that deck is sorely needed if you want to execute a gameplan which leans more into the Strike end of things, which is certainly feasible for them although I would not be relying on it as my core gameplan, as stated prior.
Overall, the warband feels like it will be competitively viable in the absolute bare minimum sense of the term, bolstered by its powerful warscroll despite underwhelming fighter cards, which is maybe a welcome sight for those terrorized by them since their first edition release. Let me know how you guys feel about their new incarnation, I’m curious to see if folks feel like they’ve landed about where they’d hoped. Until next time, we wish you the best of luck on YOUR Path to Glory!
