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Saturday, July 18, 2009

2,250 Vampire Counts - Army of the Dead

So I spent a majority of this week's hobby time painting up my first Vampire for my newly started (in December) Vampire Counts army. I have been putting off assembly of a 2,250 list to focus on my Ogres, but with them mostly completed (base coats count right!?) I have been itching to get my Vampires up to tournament strength.

Here is my current VC draft list. I am still not 100% on this list and I am thinking about scaling back the magic a bit to make way for a little more utility. I was going for a not "cheesy" Vampire Counts army by avoiding the commonly seen items (Drakenhof, Dreadlance/Red Fury, FROSTBLADE!) in favor of a Skeleton-centric/casting list. A smashing hammer of Black Knights on an anvil of Grave Guard. Not sure how well it will work out in practice, but this is the basis.



2,250 Vampire Counts - Army of the Dead

LORD: (360)
Vampire Lord - Dark Acolyte, Dread Knight, Lord of the Dead, Balfefire Spike, Helm of Commandment, Wristbands of Black Gold, Black Periapt (360)

Level 3 caster lord - plan is to ride this fellow around behind the main line and pump up the Skeleton Warriors with his dice. After this is done he will switch over to support for the heavy hitters of the Wraiths and Black Knights/Wight King. Not a very combat orientated guy but hopefully he will do okay. In a perfect world I would find the points to give him Fly and buy him a level 3 upgrade but that would mean dropping Banshees from my Wraith units and I don't want to do that yet.

HEROES: (468)
Vampire - Nightmare, Dark Acolyte, Lord of the Dead, Walach's Bloody Hauberk (198)
Wight King - Skeletal Steed, BSB, Accursed Armor, Sword of Kings (165)
Necromancer - Additional Spell, Book of Arkhan (105)

The Level 2 Vampire goes in with the Grave Guard for troop support and march enabling. Wight King with the Accursed Armor goes in with the ranked Black Knights. Necromancer is just there for Van Hel's and extra dispel dice. He lives in one of the Skeleton units.

CORE: (440)
Skeleton Warriors x 15 - Champion, Musician, Standard (140)
Skeleton Warriors x 15 - Champion, Musician, Standard (140)
Zombies x 20 - (80)
Dire Wolves x 5 - (40)
Dire Wolves x 5 - (40)

Very minimal core. Makes me nervous having such small Warrior blocks but I assume my Lord and Vamp will be able to beef these guys up. Will likely run the Dire Wolves in one block of 10, possibly with the Lord inside. Considering dropping the Zombies for another unit of vanilla Skeletons (no command or banner) but I think the crappy dead guys have there place in a list.

SPECIAL: (529)
Grave Guard x 15 - Great Weapon, Champion, Musician, Standard, Banner of the Barrows (274)
Black Knights x 9 - Champion, Musician, Standard, Standard of Hellish Vigour (281)

The workhorses of the army, these guys will do the majority of the killing. Considered dropping the Black Knights down to 5 but I want to see how this mini-deathstar of mounted skeletons can do first.

RARE: (450)
Cairn Wraiths x 4 - Banshee (225)
Cairn Wraiths x 4 - Banshee (225)

I love Wraiths! Probably the most "un-friendly" thing in my list, these two units of 4 should be pretty devastating, especially against armies with little to no magic offense. I just recently got a box of Blood Knights so I may swap out one unit for those in future iterations of this list.

Total Points: 2,247 (of 2,250)

So there you have it - a list full of vampires and skeletons (nevermind that Necromancer and Zombies, they are skeletal enough to count). Would love to hear comments, thoughts, and suggestions on this list. I have only played about a dozen games with my VC so I am always learning something new about the bloodsuckers.

3 comments:

Bloomfield Cricket Club said...

Nice write up and interesting to see your thinking behind the list. I'm playing my first big game with VC this week and its been hard working out what to take - with Dwarfs its easy, but VC have so many choices

Randroid said...

Tell me about it! OK have two, maybe three, truly viable builds. With the VC book you can take all kinds of stuff!

In the end I settled on the models I like and those are the Skeletons. I know I could make a "better" force using Ghouls and Bats but if I have to spend time painting and assembling all this stuff it has to be something I like the look of.

Bloomfield Cricket Club said...

Yeah I really like the Skeletons to, its why I have two blocks of 20 models. You see so many VC armies now that are nothing but Ghouls, Bats and Wraiths. Personally I think they should be chock full of Skeletons and Zombies.