This month is bringing a massive host of updates to Age of Sigmar as the setting transitions to Ghyran, the realm of life. Each army is getting two whole pages of additional rules and optional alternative warscrolls for you to use in your games and we are very excited about all of it! Before we get stuck in, a thank you to Games Workshop for providing us with these rules as an early release to review.
Sons of Behemat are an interesting force. They have a very limited roster to pick from and since they’re an all monster army you’re pigeon holed into a very specific playstyle with some real downsides. Let’s take a look at the new Ghyran rules and see if they shake things up.
Battle Formations
First up is my personal favorite new rule in the pack, the formation Manskittle Mob. In the shooting phase you select 2 Mega-Gargants within 3” of a terrain feature and Gargant within 3” of a terrain feature and those units double the attacks of their ranged weapons. If the target doesn’t have ranged weapons, you can instead pick an enemy within 12” and do d3 mortals on a 2+. Gargant gunline is not something I had on my bingo card but I’m absolutely here for it. With the ability to target an entire Mancrusher Mob with this ability, you can put out some deceptively lethal shooting from your giants before wading into combat.
Your other pick is Big Toes which aims to support the manlets in your army. In deployment you select your favorite Mancrusher Gargant to be in charge. While other Gargant units are wholly within 12” of him and not wholly within 12” of any Mega-Gargants they get +1 to hit in combat. This is really fun and a neat way to play, but its a shame you still have to take Mega-Gargants since they’re the only characters. It would’ve been neat if this formation let you instead upgrade a Mancrusher to a character with this ability so you can do an all Gargant force.
Heroic Traits
You get a full extra three Heroic Traits to choose from to help round out your options. Grabby gives your unit +1 to hit as long as it’s contesting an objective you don’t control. It’s important to note you don’t check objective control until the end of the turn, so as long as you charge onto an opponent’s objective it doesn’t matter that you’ll probably out control them, making this a pretty good pick.
Mega-Grump is up next, giving your Mega-Gargant a 5+ ward when it has more than 25 damage points. Again, this may work differently than you think thanks to sequencing. You only get damage points after all the attacks in the sequence have resolved, meaning if something does 11 damage to you while you’ve taken 24 damage, your unit will die before getting to benefit from the ward. Due to its awkward timing and the fact that it can be somewhat bypassed, this is less good than it may seem at a glance.
Lastly there’s Terrifying Hulk which is a bit of a doozy. Once per turn when an enemy unit within 12” declares a charge, if you’re not in combat you can, on a 3+, change one of the dice of that charge to a 1. This can absolutely blunt your opponent’s offensive and set you up for a brutal response next turn. This is also an auto-include in Manskittle Mob to keep your giants shooting.
Warscrolls
There’s just the one Warscroll here and its a remix of the Kraken-Eater Gargant. Stat wise, it picks up an extra point of damage on the Shipwrecka Warclub, a welcome change but not earth shattering. The dramatic change is in the abilities where it keeps all the standard abilities present in all Mega-Gargants but also gets the ability to go into reserves during deplyopment and come up in your movement phase more than 9” away from enemy units and wholly within 9” of a board edge. Keep in mind your base is a little over 5” wide so at most you’ll be getting about 4” away from the edge, making your opponent screening you out a real issue. That said, if your opponent is screening their backfield to stop a gargant from hitting them from behind, they’re not up front dealing with the rest of your army. This is an interesting piece which will be interesting to see once it hits wider play.
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot to like here. It far from fully solves the issues present in Sons of Behemat, but it provides some neat ways to play with the army, giving you new ways to think about how you use your models. Like I mentioned above, I’m particularly excited to see if Manskuttle Mob sees play and already have a test list I want to throw on the table to see what it can do.
