Countering Your Meta

[AlxRaven]

This is inspired by a post from another User in the Rules Question section.

I thought it would be good to have a thread to talk about the various locally dominant teams we’re seeing, and ways to counter them. Whether laid back or competitive play, it could be interesting to shift the focus from “What’s the best build for Faction X?” to a potentially broader “How do I counter play style Y?”

One is like to start off talking about, because it was mentioned in this other User’s post, are Activation heavy lists.

Personally, I see the weakness of this build being the over-all effectiveness of the individual units. They may be great paired up. Or when they can activate unopposed, due to you having run out of units. But unit for unit, stat for stat, they should be weaker than those that are less Activation heavy.

Sometimes these spam/horde lists can have a strong unit or two to act as a distraction. I’ve always done better focusing on the weaker units first. Doing so can take away the activation advantage pretty quickly, versus getting bogged down against a tougher unit.

Anyone else have tips for these types of lists?

Anyone have other dominant builds you have or need counters for?

[DevlinBrightblade]

Played a Free Folf army recently, 50pt, had 5 Giants and a unit of Cave Dwellers, I had more activations but still lost miserably, those Giants are lethal.... What would be the best way to fight off 5 giants?

[King_Kraken]

Giants are best avoided unless you can kill them in one (maybe 2) activations. Best advice is to retreat from them whenever possible and avoid doing damage that won't kill them before they get to attack.

Walder + any other abilities that ignore attacks' abilities also help, basically make giants a big ole stick poke. And if the FF player is using all giants then a lot of his tactics cards cannot work since they specify that the target unit must be infantry so there's also that to consider.

[AlxRaven]

I agree that Giants are best avoided, if possible. Which may be much more difficult to do when there are so many of them.

I also agree that Walder, if you have him, is a great choice against giants. Or really most anybody.

Units or Tactics cards that deal automatic wounds would be great. Units that chuck a lot of dice, preferably with rerolls, would also be good.

With this many giants, you’ll want to try and limit how many you take on at once. Keep to the buddy system when deploying and moving your units. Pick your moments, and gang up on 1 maybe 2 at a time. Hit them with multiple attacks in a round, preferably after they have activated.

The most important thing is to try to avoid being put in a situation where you’re taking them on 1v1.

[Gallahad]

What faction are you playing Devlin? Anything that does auto wounds will work, you've got scorpions if you are playing Night's Watch.
Daario Naharis in a unit with crit blow could really chomp a giant.

[DevlinBrightblade]

What faction are you playing Devlin? Anything that does auto wounds will work, you've got scorpions if you are playing Night's Watch.
Daario Naharis in a unit with crit blow could really chomp a giant.

In this particular Game, I was playing 4 units of Wardens, each with a Noble, and one with Stannis, a unit of Stormcrow Archers, and 1 unit of Flayed Men.

Managed to Kill 2 out of the 5 giants, one with a continued attack from the Flayed Men, and one with a combined attack of 2 Warden Units, but there was simply too many of them.. and with their wounds plus wounds, and buffed up Tactics cards they were nigh on impossible to kill with what I had, I simply didn't have enough units to gang up on them..

[The_RVAlands]

In our local meta, dominated by Starks as it is, we've found Rodrik lists w/ Archers and Sworn Swords to be highly effective, almost ludicrously so... Lannister (and LN/BN) lists that rely on Vicious and Panic, as opposed to the Tywin/Jaime attrition versions, are often smaller in activation but hit like the proverbial truck (aka, Ser Gregor), when they aren't picked off and suffer from being outnumbered 2:1 on activations... Night's Watch was Sworn Bro spam for a bit, and then tapered off -- the upcoming changes to points should see more use out of them, and varied lists, rather than just Jon healspam... We haven't seen enough FF to make more informed statements, other than mass giants are rough, and Harma w/ horde spam is expensive both in cost and social goodwill.

We have a few Baratheon players, but their lists are often strictly limited in scope, and easy to plan for... A couple Neutral players are split about what they're using: either Flayed Men feature prominently, or they don't... Targs have yet to be seen on the battlefields of Westeros, and in regards to Starks, oof. So, there's the Umber berserker cosplayer, the Cavalry guy, the Tully dude, the wolf spammer, and that one general who knows best how to combine forces to beat nearly any list confidently but the faction mirror.

We see some horde/spam, for sure, and very little "herohammer" style lists -- it's often more a case of: what few, cheap UAs do I need to run to make this particular mechanic operate? I've noticed it's more the case we often see clones used in nearly every list as far as NCUs (always Sansa, always Bowen, always X Y or Z). What are some of y'alls thoughts on the overall meta presented here, as compared to that surrounding your own warcamps?