This week, Rob analysed one of the strongest, but also more fun lists we saw at a recent event, run by Michael Rausch, currently ranked #4 in the world with his Ossiarch Bonereapers army.
The Exploding Skeletons List
Michael’s list utilises a lot of strong pieces from the Ossiarch Bonereaper’s Battletome, Arkhan the Black featuring, and with a Liege-Kavalos being general for the army. He also makes use of 2 units of 20 Mortek Guard and 15 total Kavalos Deathriders. The lynchpin of the army, though, is the Gothizzar Harvester, and we’ll explain more about that later:
How it Works
The list is quite defensive in nature, shutting down enemy combat by disrupting their ability to charge while also offering a pretty strong counter-punch themselves:
Unit Overviews
Doing the Math
The gimmick of this list stems from the Gothizzar Harvester, in particular it’s Bone Harvest ability, and the Crematorian sub-faction ability Immolation. This works to manipulate the wound process, with the Immolating Mortek Guard dealing out mortal wounds to enemy units, followed by the Bone Harvest enabling those exploded skeletons to get right back up again. Combining this with their ability to fight back and potentially repeat these steps makes for a formidable one-two punch and some incredibly resistant skeletons. On average, 96 damage-1 attacks would be required to wipe out a single unit of 20 Mortek Guard.
Army Strategy
This list could be played in a number of ways. We think there are 2 main options.
- A 2-wave melee castle, making use of the Kavallos Deathriders to push up the board and pin back the opposing army. The support pieces in the army would focus on healing the Deathriders and then subsequently dole out mortal wounds. The rest of the army would be able to push up behind this and claim mid-board objectives.
- Hammer-and-Anvil. This approach would involve moving all your units to the midboard, with the Kavalos Deathriders flanking on the outsides. Your opponent would be forced to come to you to attempt to claim objectives which allows your Deathrider ‘anvil’ to strike.
Here are a couple of deployment suggestions for the army:
List Variations
We Think this list is pretty optimised to carry out it’s devious plan. But there are some other options we’d consider, particularly providing a bit of resilience through redundancy for the Gothizzar Harvester.
Thanks for reading! We really want to make more videos like this and explore, in-detail, some of the best lists and generals in Age of Sigmar, and try to provide the details to you to help understand how they work. Let us know what you think below, or on our social media channels. Or shout at Rob when he stream every weekday over on Twitch.
