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.
The enhancements available to Stormcast Eternals armies have been a weakness from faction pack through to Battletome, with competitive play coalescing around Envoy of the Heavens for a heroic trait and either Quicksilver Draught if you built for it or a shrug and a Mirrorshield if you didn’t. Scourge of Ghyran provides new options for both, as well as a brand new warscroll for the weak Iridan the Witness. It’s worth reinforcing that all of these rules are optional – you can still choose from any of the original enhancements or even the original Iridan scroll if you somehow liked that.
Heroic Traits – Stormforged Qualities
One thing that’s worth keeping in mind across all of these new enhancements is that despite their enormous roster of heroes Stormcast have a relatively limited selection of heroes that want an enhancement. A lot of heavy lifting in the army gets done by either big expensive named characters, or very cheap buff pieces.
Legendary Tenacity
The first time the hero gets killed, on a 3+ no they don’t and they heal d3. It’s a decent ability but suffers a bit from the aforementioned issue of who it’s supposed to go on. For your limited big boy options there’s probably a better choice below. If you find your buff heroes get isolated and destroyed quickly, this might be a shout over Envoy but to be honest if you’re opponent is easily murdering a low-health model once, they’re not going to struggle to do it again quite quickly.
Hour of Glory
This is your “I’ve brought a Stardrake and want it to hog all of the limelight” option. The hero can use Their Finest Hour (+1 to wound and save, your turn only) as many times as they like in a battle, rather than the once they’re normally restricted to. In addition, they get +5 control whenever they use Their Finest Hour. The last bit there pushes your Stardrakes up to control 10, which is quite juicy for both a monster and Stormcast.
Exactly how useful this is will ultimately depend upon your army composition as you’re almost certainly going to have one or more other hammers that will benefit more than the Stardrake in any given turn from a Finest Hour (Stormdrake Guard, Dracothian Guard, Reclusians etc) – so it’s a question of how much use you’ll get out of this. If you’re averaging 2-3 uses on your Stardrake across the game, that’s probably worth it.
Intense Piety
In your hero phase you pick an enemy priest or wizard within 18″ and on a 3+ they subtract 1 from casting and chanting rolls until the start of your next turn. The most generic pick from the list here. It’s going to come up relatively often (though the range restriction means not so much on the early turns when crucial endless spells get cast) and the effect is pretty decent, especially for hampering Magical Intervention. The obvious downside is that with a 3+ roll and an effect that isn’t guaranteed to stop your opponent there’s a decent chance this just does nothing all game. Again, this is competing with Envoy and neither are really the right or wrong choice here.
Artefacts of Power – Relics of Sigmaron
These are all quite specialised, so nothing’s directly competing with the original set of relics. You’ll either want one of these for a specific reason or you’ll want none at all.
Banner of Sigmar
I’m not totally sure how I feel about this one, the ability is novel and reads as very strong but I suspect it might end up not being hugely impactful. Once per battle, in your hero phase, you can pick an objective within 18″ and until the start of your next turn your opponent doesn’t control that objective if they have no units contesting it. This lets you punish an opponent for walking off of an objective they already control, which will make people second guess their own movement phase and disrupt plans. That being said, once per battle is a limitation and the timing means if you pop it and then get a double turn it’s of limited use. Further, Stormcast are already pretty good at punishing opponents who leave objectives unguarded, having a few different means for teleporting.
Sigil of Morrda
This provides a once per turn reaction ability whenever an enemy unit in combat either declares a command or uses a rampage. On a 3+ the command or rampage doesn’t work and counts as being used and they still lose the CP for the command. This is hot stuff and will really screw with certain units that have key commands or rampages. The only reason I’m not recommending you staple this on every list is just a question of who is carrying it. As we said at the start, your options for heroes that actually want to be in combat and can hold an artefact are relatively limited. Your Stardrakes will like this a lot, but your Lord-Terminos’ and Lord-Celestants will probably still want to take the Quicksilver Draught as that is sort of central to their strike-first-fight-after combo working.
Beacon of Azyr
What’s that, you’ve taken Karazai and a wizard/priest as your only heroes and you’re struggling for a good relic? Here you go. Once per battle you can pick a friendly wizard or priest wholly within 12″ or the bearer and the next time they use a spell or prayer ability you can just use a value of 7 instead of rolling. For a priest if they have any ritual points, they lose them all after making use of this. Super handy. For a wizard you can still be unbound so it’s not a guarantee, but if you’re out of range for an unbind early then it is. Where this shines is on a priest, where it is a guarantee. You can use this ability in any hero phase, so the killer combo here is Magical Intervention into Translocation for a guaranteed teleport in your opponent’s turn.
Warscroll – Iridan the Witness
A gorgeous kit with an infamously poor warscroll on release, we’ve now got a ground up reimagining of Iridan, providing a new and strong suite of abilities to interact with Ruination Chamber heavy armies. The original warscroll was quite squishy, disappointing in melee and had a confused collection of weak abilities. The new warscroll seeks to redress every one of these problems.
First and least excitingly, Iridan’s picked up a 6+ ward. It makes the 12 wounds go a bit further, but the model is still relatively fragile for a centrepiece. For melee output, Iridan’s Axe of the Final Threshold is better (though, maddeningly, still worse than a generic Lord-Terminos) with a flat damage 3 and the big bird has traded out crit (2 hits) for charge (+1 Damage) which is a very good trade indeed. Iridan now hits in their weight class, with the new scroll coming in at 320 points. They don’t hit like the Celestant-Prime, but they do a bunch of other things and aren’t that far behind the Prime’s output anyway.
On top of this Iridan has four (count ’em) brand new abilities and each one is pretty impactful. The Flames of Hope is a passive 12″ aura that lets Ruination Chamber units reroll their resistance rolls. Rerolling a 4+ is nice for reliability but really sings with Reclusians, who will be rocking a 3+ roll most of the time. Tying in to this is Guardian of the Final Threshold which is just the Ruination Chamber ability to deny a non-core ability on a dice roll, but there’s a few important things to note here. Most obviously – this is a different ability that does the same thing, which means it doesn’t eat into your once per turn (army) use of Ruination Chamber. Taking Iridan means you now get two opportunities to deny an enemy their ability (or three, in the Ruination Brotherhood Army of Renown). Further, Iridan gets to resist on a 3+ all of the time and keeps the resistance roll language, so benefits from their own reroll.
The really duff healing after you fight prayer has gone and they now get a brutally effective +1 rend for a Ruination Chamber unit on a chanting value of 3 (a chant of 7+ lets you pick two targets for the extra rend). Both Reclusians and Prosecutors will benefit from the extra rend but Prosecutors really like it. If you can get this and Bless Weapons on a unit of Prosecutors, then with an All-out Attack and Finest Hour they gain an absurd statline: 4 attacks, hitting and wounding on a 2+, rend 2 and damage 2 on the charge. It sounds like a lot of steps to get there but it really isn’t, and even ignoring Bless Weps just the extra rend will turn a unit of 6 into a mini blender.
Finally, Iridan’s new rampage is On Wings of Death. You pick an enemy unit in combat with Iridan in the combat phase and on a 3+ you can pick Iridan up and put them back down anywhere you like so long as they’re still within 1″ of the target, then the target gets a flat -1 to hit rolls for the rest of the turn. It’s a nice ability, though the only part of Iridan’s kit that’s potentially less spicy than the old rampage, I’d still give it the edge for just working against every unit type and not requiring you to roll about a health characteristic.
Final Thoughts
Okay, so what does this all mean for Stormcast Eternals? The biggest changes from the enhancements are that Stardrakes got a whole lot better. The Lord-Celestant on Stardrake was already competitively viable so I’d expect we just see more of them, either alongside or supplanting Karazai. Otherwise I would expect Envoy of the Heavens and Quicksilver Draught to retain their current popularity, with the latter being effectively essential to the units it is run on. I also expect we’ll see Beacon of Azyr show up as the generic pick on wizards. It will be interesting to see if the new GHB will bring a downtick in the importance of manifestations, as I think the Beacon is good enough that not having to take a wizard would push more people to take Priests for the enemy-turn Translocation trick.
New-Iridan just seems quite good, and I expect we’ll see them. They’ve retained the crucial ‘any Stormcast’ regiment so I can see them slotting into a more traditional Stormcast list quite happily but I can also see more people experiment with the Army of Renown. Overall, a really interesting set of changes for Stormcast. It’s unlikely to blow the world of Stormcast list writing wide open, but it does provide some interesting new avenues of exploration.
