A New Deal (The Coven MKII)

For those of you that don't know, I play the Cryx faction in Warmachine and one of my favourite casters in MKI was the Witch Coven of Garlghast. The Coven specialized in board control and spell assassination; this combined with their extremely high focus stat and the ability to get stealth by being in base to base (b2b) with the Egregore made them a challenge to deal with.

During the MKII Field Test I've been trying to treat every model and rule as if I had never used it before in hopes that I wouldn't miss some new subtlety or nuance in the MKII rules because of an old assumption. Nowhere in my faction (that I've played with so far) is there a greater need for this 'Clean Slate' approach than with the Coven.

The really cool thing about the Coven has always been their ability to adopt a formation called Perfect Conjunction (PC), which in MKI, gave the automatic boosted attack and damage rolls for magic attacks. In MKII PC has been changed so that it reduces the focus cost to cast a spell by one point. Whether or not this change is a 'buff' or a 'nerf' is a matter of some debate on the interwebs.

A part of the issue with PC is the fact that the Coven has to be deployed in a fashion such that all three witches have mutual Line of Sight with no intervening models (including the Egregore) with the Egregore completely within the triangle formed by the Witches. At first glance I think most people (note that I live in a very small place and there aren't any other Cryx players in the area) try to adopt an equilateral triangle with each Witch about 3" away from Egregore (see figure 1.). We'll call this Classic PC for now.

(figure 1. Classic PC)

As you can see this formation has a very limited line of sight and because at least one of the Witches must be back on to the enemy, thus she is open to back strikes that reduce her effective defence by 2. The defensive penalty combined with the availability of stealth for being in b2b with Egregore meant that in MKI you would only adopt PC if you were going for the Stygian Abyss assassination run, otherwise the Coven would be clumped on top of Egregore.

In MKII a couple of things have changed that significantly affect PC: no more granted stealth by Egregore, Egregore can now run, and PC reduces the cost of casting for all spells instead of boosting offensive spells. The fact that PC is reduces the cost of casting means that in many cases if the Coven is in PC it is just as cheap for them to cast Infernal Machine as it is for them to upkeep it, or they can cast ghost walk four times in one turn... whatever, you get the idea. The upshot of all this is that the only benefit of NOT being in PC is the loss of defence for the Witch who is back on AND being in PC is useful almost every turn of the game, not just the assassination turn.

So I got to thinking, "I want to be in PC more often in MKII, so how do I mitigate the downside?" After tossing it around in my head for a while, trying different orientations of the Classic PC, base-of-the-triangle-forward, base-of-the-triangle-back, base-of-the-triangle-to-the-side, etc... None of these orientation based solution seemed to solve the problem. The solution finally came to me when I realised that a model with stealth does not count as an intervening model when it is further than 5" away. This allows you to essentially form a line with two Witches and Egregore, as long as the Witches are at least 5" away from Egregore than they can still form PC. Figure 2, is a diagram of what I mean.

figure 2. New PC

As you can see from the diagram this formation allows the Witches to remain in PC and still not turn their back to the enemy, thus preserving their solid defence and coincidentally making them less bunched up for AOE spam.

As I mentioned earlier Egregore can run in MKII and that means that you can stay in PC most of the time and then run Egregore forward to increase the control range of the Coven by 12"; this is particularly useful on the turn the Coven uses its feat. The following turn Egregore can walk back 6" and the Witches can walk ahead 6" or Egregore can run back 12" and they would once again be in PC.

There has also been significant changes to the Coven's spell list, they have lost Puppet Strings, Imprison, Necrophage. Ghost Walk has improved, Stygian Abyss has been changed (I would say nerfed, but that would be editorializing) and Infernal Machine has gotten better. They also have access to a couple of new spell Curse of Shadows and Watcher. I could write a couple of pages on how the spell list has changed but to suffice it to say that the Coven can no longer control the enemie's movement with Imprison an hide in the back in the protection of stealth.

What the Coven can do is move their army (particularly jacks) almost anywhere with impunity. A Bonejack with Infernal Machine and Ghost Walk with Curse of Shadows on the right enemy unit can run 18" through anything, now that's mobility baby, yeah! Please note that with judicious application of Death Jack and the Skarlock, the Coven still haven't used any of their 8 remaining focus (only eight because you had to allocate 1 to the Bonejack for it to run). That means that if they are in PC, (which they should be, as discussed earlier) they can fire 4 Stygian Abyss spells through an Arcnode that came from 18" away, this should surprise the enemy in my estimation. :)

Another new option in MKII for the Coven is to allow their jacks do all the heavy lifting for them. This works particularly well when you consider all the love that jacks got in general in MKII. The Coven can allocate six focus and still cast Infernal Machine and Curse of Shadows, or Infernal Machine three times. When you consider what that could mean with a couple of Seethers, or Deathjack, or even a couple of Slayers it becomes something to really think about. I haven't even mentioned what happens when a Harrower that has gained 3 soul tokens gets an additional 3 focus and +2 Mat and +2 Spd from Infernal machine, let's just say it's not right...

Essentially the Coven have gone from being a "stealth turtle" with one sting (Stygian Abyss), to being a flexible jack boosting attacker. Earlier I was taking about how important it was to look at caster with fresh eyes, and that is very true for these ladies. The first time I used them I ended up so flustered I literally ended up trying to cast Venom (a spell that they don't even have) at some enemy troops. Now that I've changed my thinking about how they should work I rub my hands together with glee when I consider all the nasty possibilities.

Let me know what you think, or if I've gotten something completely wrong, like all of us, I'm still learning the new rules too.

Yours in Service,

The General.