The Dreamer Summons Thee

[Whiskey Golem]

New list I tried last night. I can't remember the entire Scheme pool, but:

Strategy: Squatter's Rights
Schemes: Make them Suffer and Breakthrough-revealed (I think Distract, Line in the Sand, and I can't remember the other. The flip was 7M and 2M, and I'm too lazy to go look right now.)

 

The Dreamer with Dreams of Pain and On Dreaming Wings

Candy with Best Behavior and Mimic's Blessing

Baby Kade with Depression

Teddy with Mimic's Blessing

3 Terror Tots

 

Turn 1
All about positioning. My opponent was running Lilith with 2 Insidious Madness, 2 Mature Nephilim, A mercenary Trapper (I think. Something with a sniper), Lilitu, and of course Lilith and I can't remember the upgrades.

He went hard after claiming scheme markers for Squatters while I just sprinted the field with my Terror Tots, moved Teddy close to a Nephilim, put Baby Kade in a LOS lane with Teddy, and used The Dreamer to summon Copellius (Awesome. Wound up with the 12M in my starting hand so I ran with it).

 

Turn 2
The Dreamer started off by summoning a Stitch and healing Copellius and the Stitch each once. Teddy obliterated an Insidious Madness holding a Squat marker so that a Terror Tot could take it over. Another Terror Tot grabbed the far left Squat marker so I would have the two and I successfully engaged everything threatening those two markers. I started to run the other Tot into my opponent's deployment to start Scheming. I got the point from Squatting and from Make them Suffer as did my opponent for killing a Tot (He had Make them Suffer and LiS).

EDIT: After examining more closely, I realized that I shouldn't have scored on turn 2 here, as Teddy is an Enforcer, making the score 1-2.

 

Turn 3

Stuff got scary for my opponent. I maneuvered and healed a little with Copellius and my stitch, and then summoned a second Stitch and two Daydreams, summoning the terrifying Lord Chompy Bits. By this time, my decoy, Candy, had led Lilith and the second Mature Nephilim off away from everyone else so Chompy was free to destroy the Trapper. Just as my opponent thought he had Candy in his sights, I used her "Run Away Home" ability from Best Behavior and he was left with two heavy hitting models as far away from the action as they could be.  I planted a scheme marker for Breakthrough with Copellius and a Tot and grabbed 2 VPs again, my opponent destroyed my brand new, one wound stitch (tear) and getting 2 as well. Teddy also died at some point here. 

 

Turn 4

Kind of boring turn here, I worked toward killing the last Insidious madness but couldn't manage it. I whacked Lilitu with Chompy and changed him back to The Dreamer here for more summoning. My opponent killed several of my peons and minions, but still hadn't placed and LIS markers and clearly didn't have the model power to do so because I had killed Lilitu, so all he had left was Insidious Madness, Mature Nephilim, and Lilith. So he pulled ahead in this turn with his two heavy hitters engaged in a corner by 1 VP. Current score 4-6.

 

Turn 5

Clean up time. I knew I would get full Breakthrough, and all I had to do was kill the last Insidious Madness to get full points for the Strategies and Schemes for this game, so I killed Lilith too for good measure. 

EDIT- I was able to score twice here as well as denying the Strat to my opponent, ending the game as a Tie 6-6


All in all a really fun game. I just had too many models for my opponent to deal with. He brought lots of stuff to achieve Make them Suffer and to kill me tons, but most of my movement was based on pushed and crazy maneuvers so it wound up being way to difficult for my opponent to gain any sort of board control. 

Summoning Point Count-24

Moral of the story is-never bring a real 50SS list to a 50SS game. Bring around 75!

[StuffedKiwi]

Outflank would be the other scheme option on that flip.

Those seem like odd lists (both of them) for taking Make Them Suffer -- it's not clear to me how Summoning Dreamer + Candy (used as a decoy) are scoring points for you, here, nor why it would be a good option for Lilith without any other Henchmen. You remembered that you only score a Make Them Suffer VP if a peon or minion is killed by your Master or Henchman models, yes? Having lots of other kill-y models (Teddy, Mature, etc.) doesn't directly help with that scheme, though of course they're good at softening things up for Lilith/Candy/Dreamer/Chompy to kill.

Other than that, yes, as someone who often runs Lilith against summoners, until you get your head around how to disrupt the summoning or work around the outnumbering problem, summoners are always tough for non-summoning crews to go up against, especially if the pool is marker-heavy. Distract, on the other hand, is potentially a good option, and Make Them Suffer can be super-easy against crews that summon in a lot of already-damaged minions, if you take the right crew.

[Whiskey Golem]

Yes, I did remember that about make them suffer. I took a pretty big gamble and hoped that all the enforcers I took, plus whatever big scary things I could summon would distract all the heavy hitters so that The Dreamer and Chompy could do their worst on the field and it just happened to work out that he only had a few models for me to worry about and he positioned them so that I could easily reach them with my walk of 8 (from On Dreaming Wings) and then a 6" summon on Chompy.

[Shadowdragon]

50SS vs 74SS, wow. So much for playing 50SS games. Why would anyone ever not play a summoning army when you can end the game with a larger crew than when you started?

[asrian]

50SS vs 74SS, wow. So much for playing 50SS games. Why would anyone ever not play a summoning army when you can end the game with a larger crew than when you started?

For me, Shadow, it's because I find summoning boring. I'm fine playing against a summoning crew, but whenever I've tried to play one myself I end up just ready to quit 1/2 way through due to boredom, no matter if I'm winning or losing. The same holds true for me for aggressive, in your face, masters for the most part (Lady J, Viks, etc). It's a play style preference, really.

[Adran]

50SS vs 74SS, wow. So much for playing 50SS games. Why would anyone ever not play a summoning army when you can end the game with a larger crew than when you started?

 

Because this is actually a lie hidden in the details.

 

The cost of summoning models is often hidden in other ways.

So here, The dreamer summoned 24 ss of models. He spent some of that on buying the upgrade that allowed him to summon.

He also spent 5 decent cards to summon. And several AP, and probably some of his daydreams that were summoned were sacrificed to allow other summons.

He alos then spent time healing those models up as they were summoned on 1 wd.

 

And when your opponent is trying to do make them suffer, summonign a 1wound model is making it very easy for them to score VPs.

A lot of crew will use the good cards in their hand to achieve their aims, typically killign the enemy, or surviving.

Once you are plnnign on using 2 or more of the 7+ cards to summon, you probably aren't going to be able to cheat many attack, defence or damage flips.

Wait, I here you say, There is Wings of Darkness to allow you to draw better cards. But thats yet more SS spent on your summoning engine, so you're probably spending 10+ soulstone to get those 24 ss of models.

Still sounds good doesn't it.

 

But a model summoned on the first turn is typically only 90% as effectiive as one hired (Its slow, so it only generates 9 AP over a 5 turn game, rather than 10).

Something generated on the 3rd turn will only generate 5 AP over the course of the game, so is only 50% as effective as it would have been if it was hired. (You probably can have gained 1 or 2 Ap, as it hasn't had to walk to get to where it is, but you also have that turn when it can't interact).

 

Summoning is Good, but there are a lot of hidden costs. Some models can mean the 3 AP your Dreamer spent Summoning is lost for just 1 Ap if they do area daamge.

 

Thank you for the report. I can't work out how you got Make them suffer in turn 2. since he only appeared to have 3 minions, and one was killed by Teddy (so not scoring)and you didn't kill the last until the 5th turn.

[Whiskey Golem]

Reading over the report again, you're right, It would have been a tie game in the end because he didn't score turn 5 at all.

I guess I should have read through it again before commenting earlier as well.