Intro
One of only two warbands released during Wintermaw, the last season of the first edition, the Brethren of the Bolt appear primed and ready to translate a lot of their unique properties into the second edition. As the designers have termed them a Mastery warband, we’ll be covering some mechanics unique to the warband while simultaneously trying to assign them an actual playstyle (this joke will never get old for me) based on how those mechanics function. Those of you familiar with the warband from the first edition hopefully won’t find their rules to be too… shocking.
Warscroll
Inspire
Unlike other warbands, each member of the Brethren of the Bolt starts the game inspired, batteries fully charged, as it were. However, after one of your fighters makes a successful attack action, they become uninspired, which, cheating ahead a bit, will generally result in a significant downgrade in their accuracy and/or damage. Not to worry though, as fighters can re-inspire if they serve as a conducting fighter via the Holy Capacitors ability, which makes for its own natural transition…
Holy Capacitors
The most distinct mechanic of the warband is Holy Capacitors, which essentially allows you to chain your attacks through friendly fighters to reduce your distance from enemy fighters. Simply follow the shortest path from the attacker to the target, subtracting 1 from the distance of that attack action for each friendly fighter in the path (termed “conducting” fighters). This means that Brethren are the only warband in the game with the potential (seriously, the puns write themselves) to make attacks from further distance than their Range characteristic. This ability also generally scales with he range characteristic of the attack in question. For example, a base Range 3 attack action will give you more positional flexibility, in terms of bringing in conducting fighters, than a Range 1, meaning these sorts of attacks (and attacks in general) will be useful not only for their base effects, but also the ability to re-inspire fighters, which is key to the warband’s success. It is also worth noting that the ability says nothing about using the native weapon profiles for the warband, so weapon upgrades from your universal Rivals deck(s) will also be able to make use of this, which will be something for the designers to be mindful of as more of those are released.
Fulminating Hymn
Every round, you will be picking from one of three abilities with Fulminating Hymn which are usable as long as you have at least two friendly fighters on the battlefield.
The first of these is Charged Aura, which prevents friendly fighters from being flanked. Oddly enough, this wouldn’t prevent them from being surrounded too, but this can still be a neat effect in certain matchups, particularly against hordes which might want to leverage their movement economy to manufacture support on attacks. Note that this works both offensively and defensively as well, so it can also give youe pseudo-brutal without having to use that as your weapon ability in cases where you are only flanked. Great counter to Hidden Aid as well! Probably the most matchup-dependent of the options, but situationally very useful.
Next up, we have Reckless Abandon, which gives you the option to, when a friendly fighter would be given a charge token, instead elect to take 1 damage on that fighter. While not always useful in the first round, keeping the option open to double charge with a fighter is always intriguing, and will certainly increase in value as you start getting upgrades down and increasing the power of your attacks. With the range of outcomes narrowing as the game progresses, math starts to get fixed enough that I think you’ll find cases where this makes a lot of sense. I kind of wish this was what we got with Tunnelpack instead of More-More Power!
Your final option, and likely my go-to for the first round of most games, is Faithful Dynamos, which gives all of your friendly fighters stagger on their weapons. Given that you are already pumping out above-average accuracy when inspired, adding stagger tokens on top of that for potential further boosts is a great way to improve the consistency of 2- or 3-shotting fighters for the rest of the round. Once the stagger is down, it also increases your flexibility to use your weapon abilities on grievous rather than accuracy modifiers, which is a huge boon in the new addition,
Overall, all three of these abilities certainly have foreseeable use cases, even in a single game, so the flexibility makes me pretty ec-static (ok, that one did feel forced) to see this in action.
Crackling Burst
Our first once-per-game ability on the warscroll, Crackling Burst grants you a free move in the power step, with no restrictions on which of your fighters is eligible to do so. Once again, Tunnelpack players will be envious of what is a very solid ability. In addition to the generically useful aspects of free move actions (positional scoring, setting up support, etc.), this warband even gets further value here through the potential setups for Holy Capacitors, particularly in cases where you are setting up an uninspired fighter who may have already charged in order to get them re-inspired. Another great ability here.
Heaven’s Charge
Keeping with the trend of good warscroll abilities, Heaven’s Charge allows you to, after your action step, uninspire a friendly fighter and then deal 1 damage to an enemy fighter adjacent to them. Given that there are no restrictions about whether that fighter had taken damage already or anything like that, this seems perfectly reasonable as a finisher. However, I do think we need a couple of FAQs here, as it is not clear from the rulebook that already being uninspired would actually prevent you from choosing a fighter for this ability, as an uninspired fighter becoming uninspired is not a “cannot” but rather a “nothing happens.” While the intent seems to be to use an inspired fighter and uninspire them, I think the RAW interpretation is you can choose one who is already uninspired. Additionally, we need clarification on timing relative to inspiration off Holy Capacitors. If the fighter picked to use this ability was also just a conducting fighter via Holy Capacitors, would they inspire before using this ability or after? I would assume I get to choose the order in which they sequence, but something that could definitely use clarification. Once again, if only there were some kind of chart or diagram we could consult that laid out exactly the order in which everything happens… Apologies for the tangent on rules text there, but I do think the power level of the ability is going to be quite dependent on the answers to these questions. Assuming my RAW interpretation, I think it is quite strong, but even in the opposite interpretation where you need to uninspire an already inspired fighter, it is still decent.
Coruscating Revival
Last, and perhaps least, ability on the warscroll is Coruscating Revival, which allows you to heal a conducting fighter immediately after the action step. While heal is certainly fine, the warband is largely frail enough that heal will not always be an option if you are consistently getting one-shot (besides your leader). Additionally, there is no guarantee of overlap between a fighter you need to conduct being a fighter you need to heal, That said, there is some notable synergy here with Reckless Abandon, and I think you’re still decently likely to have an opportunity to do this in a game, which is not something that can be said of all of the warscroll abilities we have seen on other warbands. That being the case, the “worst” of Brethren’s abilities still being totally serviceable really puts into perspective how good I think the warscroll is as a whole.
Fighters
As usual, we’ll start with the leader in Pater Filius, which always makes me chuckle because the direct translation from that is “Father Son,” which encapsulates the model in a delightfully literal manner. Since each fighter in the warband starts the game inspired, that’s the profile I’ll focus on first. At 3 Move, 1 Shield, 5 Health, and 2 Bounty, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that your leader is the most important piece in the warband. You’ve got a couple of pretty solid attack profiles at your disposal as well in 1R/3H/2D and 3R/3H/1D, both of which are exceptionally accurate and, keeping mind the Holy Capacitors ability, could very easily hit targets from further away than their Range characteristics. As you might expect, the “punishment” for successfully landing one of these hits and uninspiring is that both weapons get notably worse, dropping to 1R/2S/2D and 3R/2S/1D, respectively. These drops will often cut your accuracy approximately in half in most cases, making Pater Filius one of the most critical fighters to get re-inspired, as you are able. Still, a great fighter by most metrics, sitting on effectively Stormcast bulk with comparable attack profiles in a warband that contains 5 fighters.
Next up we have my personal favorite model in the set with Friar Galvic. His physical profile is a bit more lackluster at 3 Move, 1 Shield, 3 Health, and 2 Bounty. Sadly, he is remarkably fragile to be yielding 2 Bounty when you compare him to like Farasa Twice-Risen, but such is the nature of the beast with 7-Bounty standardization. Thankfully, he at least gets a pretty nice weapon profile to make up for it, starting on 1R/3H/2D and uninspiring to a still serviceable 1R/2H/2D. The fact that his uninspired attack is still decent gives you a little bit of leeway in terms of getting him re-inspired, though of course we want to be making that 3H attack as frequently as possible.
For our first 1-Bounty fighter, we have Soror Tazat, who clocks in at 3 Move, 1 Dodge, and 3 Health with a weapon profile of 1R/2H/2D. This is respectable, but nothing too crazy, yet drops to a very anemic 1R/2H/1D when she uninspires. I just wish they had found a way to make her a bit more unique. I would have liked to see something like 2-Dodge when inspired or something to make her feel alternatively useful to Galvic without stepping on his toes in terms of offensive potency (which she certainly does not, given these weapon profiles). She’s fine, but I can’t help but feel like there was an opportunity here to make her more interesting.
Then there’s Scorched Yakob, a danglebro if there ever was one at 3 Move, 1 Shield, 2 Health, and 1 Bounty. His weapon starts on 1R/3S/2D, the least accurate (in a vacuum) of any in the warband. Things get far worse when he uninspires, dropping to 1 Dodge instead of 1 Shield while also putting out an abysmal 1R/2S/1D attack. In a 5-fighter warband, they can’t all be bangers, but I think there’s not really a much better candidate in the warband to die for the glory of Sigmar.
Last, but certainly not least, we have Acolyte Arcus at a physical profile of 2 Move, 1 Shield, 2 Health, and 1 Bounty. He notably has the only Range 2 attack in the warband at a very solids 2R/2H/2D weapon profile (eat your heart out Zikkit). Sure, he uninspires to be similarly ineffective as Yakob, dropping to 1 Dodge in his Save roll and losing accuracy and damage to land at 2R/2S/1D. However, the flexibility on the positioning of that Range 2 attack will always leave him feeling useful if only to get folks re-inspired while having more desirable landing zones at his disposal. For what would normally be a bit of a throwaway piece in a warband like this, I think he will slot pretty nicely into your gameplan.
Conclusion
I have to say, this warband has got me pretty excited about the kinds of things we can expect to see in the second edition. While the creativity here makes me lament some of the warscrolls we have already received simply because they are not as cool, the translation of this warband from the first to second edition looks pretty darn near flawless to me. I’d go so far as to say that this is the only first-edition warband I have personally written a second-edition review for that I feel will be able to almost seamlessly cut and paste their play pattern and it’s the only one where I don’t feel that sting of “if only they still had a faction deck.” The warscroll abilities are all useful, flexible, and allow opportunity for unique skill expression while the fighter cards are serviceable enough that you’d expect them to be able to hang with more elite warbands.
In terms of competitive rating, the warband will certainly not be plug-and-play (last one, I swear!), but Mastery is at least an apt term in that there is additional complexity here from which a skilled pilot can extract a higher level of gameplay. Holy Capacitors alone leaves me inclined to play more of a Flex playstyle with them, as this unique mechanic opens up great opportunities to attack from tokens rather than having to always get up close and personal. That said, the warband is offensively potent enough that I wouldn’t want to limit them to just one line of deckbuilding to generate that playstyle. Their offensive stats leave them capable enough to play more aggro-leaning flex with something like Blazing Assault x Countdown to Cataclysm (CtC), but they could also lean on the more passive side of it with Emberstone Sentinels x CtC, with plenty of options in between. I genuinely believe that they could make do with most Nemesis permutations of the Rivals decks in the core set, which is not something that can be said of many warbands.
I’m excited to see how these guys land in the competitive scene this time around, especially because I felt they never really got to have that spotlight in the first edition. Anyway let me know if this warband sparks your interest (sorry, had to get one more in) and until next time we wish you the best of luck on YOUR Path to Glory!
