If you’re a Conquest player, your eyes are either already on or will soon be drawn to the World Championships taking place in Chios in early September. The qualifiers from across the world have been selected following many extremely strong performances in the last competitive season, with list submissions for the event due on the 1st September and the event proper beginning on the 7th.
Even qualifying for an event like Chios takes a tremendous amount of hard work and skill, and every player present will be one of the best in the world. Going on to win an event like the world championships takes a tremendous amount of skill, at least a little bit of luck, and an understanding of and plan of attack for the prevailing metagame.
In this article we’ll be looking at that metagame and talk about how each faction is positioned to perform in competition generally and with a particular eye toward Chios. We’ll begin with the major contenders and then discuss how other factions might rise to challenge them.
| A Caveat
This is partially a predictive exercise, and partially a meta wrap-up for the current season of Conquest. What factions we’ll actually see at Chios will certainly be informed by what’s strong in the metagame and what counters that strength, but many players attending will be faction ‘mains’ whose experience with their chosen faction outweighs any advantage they might get from jumping to something more powerful but less practiced. |
A Yoroni-Dominated Meta
Since the last balance update, Yoroni have emerged as one of the two most powerful factions in Conquest at a mechanical level. While they have some subtle strengths in their faction’s unique card mechanic, at their core, Yoroni presents an army that has a lot of big numbers: a high wound count, high damage output, high durability and strong ability to concentrate force across a narrow frontage.
While releases like Domaru have enabled Yoroni high-activation count lists with many smaller regiments, the list archetype that has emerged as most dominant to the competitive metagame has been a focused, low-model count list built around extreme resilience. While there are a number of possible variations that exist to the list, including adjustments that can be made to help it perform better in the mirror match, the core elements comprise something like the following:
== (Warlord) Kitsune Bakasu [110]:
- Modular Regiment (4) [240]: Origami Warriors (L), Origami Warriors (3)
== Oyabun [135]: Trial of hakari-ishi
- Modular Regiment (5) [400]: Kami Ayakashi (L), Kami Ayakashi (4)
== Jorogumo Mahotsu [300]:
The core element here is the Kami Ayakashi regiment, which presents an enormous wound count, excellent resolve, and Tenacious [2] against all incoming damage, which makes trying to attack them with multiple smaller regiments extremely challenging. Couple this with defensive and healing buffs from the Jorogumo Mahotsu and a dangerous and durable early-game presence (by the standards of light regiments) from the Origami warriors, and you have a mix that’s able to bully its way onto the board and hold the space it takes. This kind of list has disrupted the game’s force economy in a way that not every faction can easily adapt to, which has put a floor under Yoroni performance that has propelled them to the position of one of two meta boogeymen.
| What’s a Force Economy, and Why Did Yoroni Break It?
The idea of a force economy is a way of thinking about how much force a list needs to be able to apply to accomplish its objectives (usually, killing the things it’s fighting). If you’ve ever looked at a list and thought it was a little toothless, or didn’t have enough cleave, or could do a lot of damage but with a high risk of overkill, there’s a strong chance the list wasn’t bringing the tools it needed to deal with the demands of the game’s force economy. Before Yoroni stepped up to the plate, Conquest was drifting toward a high activation count metagame, with many small units being increasingly something a list would need to think about killing efficiently. This rewarded multiple small, efficient offensive options that could kill many small enemy units without wasting damage on overkill, which is exactly the kind of force economy that a 35-wound Tenacious [2] regiment absolutely blows out, because Tenacious is maximally effective against a list designed to allocate damage efficiently in multiple smaller quantities. It’s important to note that metagames adapt to changing force requirements over time. Yoroni are considered very powerful right now as existing strategies are disrupted by them and players are trying to find their footing, but it’s not uncommon for even extremely skilled players to mistake a faction requiring adaptation for a faction being inherently overpowered. |
While they’re by no means unbeatable, a lot of armies are positioned based on how well they can handle the Yoroni matchup. We expect Yoroni to be out in some force at Chios, and their success will be primarily down to how much effort other factions put into gatekeeping them.
The Other Contender: Sorcerer Kings
Receiving a significant overhaul in the last balance update (followed extremely quickly by a ‘whoops we overdid it’ emergency patch that has done only a little to restrain their core strengths), Sorcerer Kings have emerged as the game’s other most powerful faction alongside Yoroni. While Yoroni function as a gear check army, Sorcerer Kings aren’t possessed of big-numbers strength but can absolutely spike in performance thanks to special rules, force-multiplying spells and rituals, and triple action activations, leading to a faction capable of just blowout levels of power that runs away with a game if they aren’t tackled in exactly the right way and kept under control (a task far easier said than done).
The most powerful Sorcerer Kings lists right now lean overwhelmingly toward Court of Fire lists led ubiquitously by a Maharaja, with core elements like the following:
== (Warlord) Maharajah [130]: Shu’laat, Court of Fire, Court of Air
- Dhanur Disciples (3) [140]:
- Efreet Flamecasters (3) [170]:
== Raj [135]: Court of Fire, Bound to the Elements
- Efreet Sword Dancers (3) [170]:
- Efreet Sword Dancers (3) [170]:
These core pieces are supplemented by more Fire characters, and whatever mix of additional infantry, brute and monster elements best fit the Sorcerer Kings player’s preferences. Local testing has suggested that as powerful as the first Flamecaster unit is, further units are generally better as Sword Dancers which are more self-sufficient (as the second Flamecaster unit, while good, will always be left without the force multipliers that make the first so strong), but there are ultimately multiple directions to build out from this core.
Once expanded out to twelve or thirteen cards, this list is capable of controlling activation counts against most other factions (as rituals expand that up to fifteen or sixteen activations) and leverages the rituals and the inflamed and fire elemental rules interactions to put out huge bursts of hits at extreme threat ranges. While it’s easy to look at the strengths of individual regiments like Flamecasters or the Raj’s Sword Dancers under the effects of various rituals and buffs, the underlying strength of the faction comes from its ability to out-activate the opposition and leverage extreme threat ranges to make extremely powerful proactive plays, backed up by sheer value that rituals can generate over time in a list led by a Maharaja.
However, while there have been a lot of anecdotal reports of significant overperformance from Sorcerer Kings Court of Fire lists, they haven’t necessarily translated that into consistent event wins, and it’s worth thinking about why. As powerful as they can be, Sorcerer Kings are still a little bit complicated, a little bit fragile, and develop their board state and surges of power about a turn more slowly than some factions, needing time to get rituals online and with no early scoring mechanics to keep scenario score equal against aggressive factions. This means they need to play conservatively until they can set up to secure a decisive advantage with their power spikes and score in the late game.
This produces a faction that, while very strong, can be susceptible to not being able to recover if they lose their balance. In short, they can fall victim to the ‘everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face’ effect, and Yoroni are a faction that are extremely good at punching you in the face. The resultant matchup isn’t a sure win for Yoroni, but it’s just fragile enough that Sorcerer Kings players will be either building for the Yoroni matchup or hoping that the Yoroni players get knocked out by some other faction that gatekeeps them before they have to worry.
Gatekeeping Yoroni: The Hundred Kingdoms
Given the strength of Yoroni and Sorcerer Kings, it’s reasonable to consider most other factions in terms of how they match up into these factions, and to a general metagame slowly adapting to deal with them. This brings us to the Hundred Kingdoms, who have emerged as one of the few factions natively able to deal with Yoroni. Hundred Kingdoms are operating from an extremely sound baseline following their rework in January this year and are capable of building toward a well-rounded mix of damage, threat range, activation count and just a little bit of durability.
This means that most Hundred Kingdoms lists are able to bring enough force to bear in the right ways to clear the ‘you must be this tall to ride’ threshold to tackle the Yoroni gear check, while out-activating and out-ranging them in the process. This is the key to their success in the matchup (and in fact in most matchups); they can answer the core mechanical problem, and also have some advantage of their own that they can leverage to pull the game in their direction.
While there are a number of possible configurations that could make the cut for a Hundred Kingdoms player traveling to Chios, there are two sets of building blocks that are worth mentioning as interesting recent developments:
== Priory Commander (Crimson Tower) [180]: Caledburn, Tip of the Lance
- Order of the Crimson Tower (3) [210]:
- Order of the Sealed Temple (4) [270]:
Most likely to be combined with a Feudal dynastic ally who makes good use of the Orders rules, this Sealed Temple wedge aims answer the Yoroni force economy question by cracking the hard targets directly with a unit that uses high native speed, unstoppable and fluid formation to hit them from outside their own practical threat range. The Crimson Tower are necessary to unlock the Crimson Tower priory commander, who adds Terror to the Sealed Temple unit, but in a pinch if points were tight they can be dropped to make the Priory the slightly weaker Sealed Temple version
While the simplicity, speed and direct offense of the Orders positions them to be the offensive backbone of the type of list we’d most expect to see from Hundred Kingdoms at Chios, ultimately the faction is wide enough that any of the major alliance combinations could easily be represented and see success. On the infantry end of the spectrum, something like this also bears mentioning:
== Imperial Officer [100]:
- * Gilded Legion (7) [320]:
- * Hunter Cadre (5) [260]:
One of the best performing US players, Karl Swanson, recently ran a Hundred Kingdoms list to an undefeated result at a 40-person event in Michigan built specifically to hate-list the Yoroni and Sorcerer Kings matchups using a core of a Gilded Legion block and two large Hunter Cadre regiments. The full list (titled ‘This Machine Kills Yoroni’) runs two five-strong Hunter Cadre regiments across two separate Imperial Officer warbands, trading heavily on the fiend hunter ranged and melee potential to engage more medium-sized Sorcerer Kings and Yoroni brute regiments while the Gilded Legion handle the most difficult fights.
Local experience confirms that lists of this type work very well into Yoroni, but is just a touch more fragile against Sorcerer Kings. The Hunter Cadre only enjoy a threat range advantage only against units with a fair and normal number of actions, and the capacity of a homing winds triple action Flamecaster unit to inflict twenty hits from downtown puts a risk on these unit of being broken end of round and potentially shattered top of round by the activation advantage most Sorcerer Kings lists will have over a relatively tall Hundred Kingdoms build. Ultimately, the pilot makes the difference; Sorcerer Kings can only push that kind of force through one unit at a time and having two such Hunte Cadre units and Water Mages behind them presents a threat saturation that they can’t necessarily respond to except in ideal circumstances, and the ability to reconstitute forces after they’ve mopped up any over-extended units means the list significantly punishes any missteps.
The Lost Lifeline: Dweghom
It is December 2024 and I am waiting for the Dweghom rework. It is July 2025 and I am waiting for the Dweghom rework. It is August 2025 and-
With long delays surrounding the Dweghom faction update, you could be forgiven for thinking that the faction are in something of a malaise. The Tempered Creed remains a strong sub-faction army rule with equally strong limitations (imposed by the need generate and subsequently maintain position to spend the tokens) and these limitations coupled with the compromises necessary to access centerpiece striking regiments like Ironclad Drakes have pushed some Dweghom players toward experimenting with wide, scenario-centric lists that abandon the tempered creed in favour of either the Ardent Creed or the Hold Raegh’s scoring supremacy as a means of finding an edge in event play. Neither approach has produced consistent success, leaving most Dweghom players in a holding pattern with eyes on the future.
However, notwithstanding the position of Dweghom as a faction being edged to the point of agony by the constant delays to a long-promised faction rework, the current point-in-time performance of Dweghom needs to be assessed in terms of the potentially transformative new releases – the warband of the Lost Ancestor and his associated Lost and Found brute squads. These releases (particularly the Ancestor and the Lost) offer real power, with Lost representing a durable, dangerous and affordable mainstay melee regiment whose defences are based on wound count rather than resolve, keying perfectly into the Tempered Creed token mechanic which is further enhanced by the fact that the Lost Ancestor is a spellcaster and therefore capable of generating tokens that the army can spend.
This warband isn’t necessarily a cure-all; the Ancestor’s spells are offensive and need enemy targets in range to generate tokens (although they’re excellent spells), and the list still needs Tempered characters present to be able to spend the tokens. But if there are Dweghom present, we strongly expect the Lost Ancestor and his booty shorts brute squad to be present alongside them at maximum strength.
Theoretical Theokrator: the Old Dominion
In a similar vein to the Dweghom, the Old Dominion are in a state not so much of malaise as discombobulation. The most recent balance update included a number of changes that have upended conventional builds and left relatively little to replace it, leaving most Old Dominion lists in a position of scrabbling from first principles for whatever efficient pieces they can find to form the basis of strength in a list. This has led to Athanatoi dominating list construction, as they’re extremely offensively efficient, not contingent on Dark Power to perform, durable enough (they are still Old Dominion models after all), fast, medium weight class, and reasonably easy to access in a few different warbands.
What’s been missing from these lists is a coherent theory of victory, because ‘Athanatoi good, ???, profit’ only carries a list so far. Archimandrite and Xhiliarch warlord selections have been trying to fill the power gap left by the Strategos warlord nerf, and while there has been an uptick in ‘hey chat how do I survive a Xhiliarch supremacy turn’ discord posts, neither has fully stuck the landing yet as a clear competitive choice. Into this environment, the Theokrator arrived.
Then arrived again. And then arrived again, for real this time, no further rules updates, we promise. The challenges of balancing a model of this scale during the preorder release window was exceeded only by the challenges managing the perceptions of a community determined to leap to decisive conclusions about it without any game experience to back those conclusions up but by Hazlia were we gonna be loud.
Suffice to say, this moveable feast of a regiment profile hasn’t done much to rectify the discombobulated state of Old Dominion list construction, but the Theokrator itself is a model with fascinating strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, it’s a 280pt Heavy Monster that can’t score (although it contests zones like a champion). That’s bad! On the other, it is such a tremendous pile of value, efficiency and resilience that it potentially promises operate as a miniaturised disruptor of the game’s force economy in a manner similar to the Yoroni faction but on a smaller scale. That’s good! Can you kill a Defence 3, 30-wound model that doesn’t take resolve damage and can’t be engaged by more than three stands from the front? No? Well, bad news.
Unlike the Dweghom’s Lost, even though it’s legal for play at Chios, I don’t think we’re certain to see a Theokrator in Old Dominion lists; it has considerable dark horse potential, but more consistent and practiced OD lists will have more experience behind them and are positioned to potentially skate under the notice of factions building aggressively to try to counter Yoroni force concentration and Sorcerer Kings’ intercontinental ballistic threat ranges.
It’s also worth noting that Old Dominion are also not positioned too badly into the two meta-boogeymen; they can just about hold their own against Yoroni in a long grind (the major issue being that they have to win the grind, not just hold their own, as Yoroni will be on zones more quickly than they will), and the Old Dominion vs Sorcerer Kings matchup has always been one where the fact that Sorcerer Kings take perhaps a turn longer than other factions to spool up their power plays causes issues, as any time at all that Old Dominion have to crank the wheel on their dark power engines can cause issues in the late game. These at best constitute faint praise, but are edges that might propel Old Dominion to some performance at Chios.
Perfectly Balanced: Nords
There’s less to say about Nords than many other factions, as they’re generally in a good state, competitively viable, and capable of doing quite well around a few core setups with plenty of potential to flex lists depending personal preference and meta demands. The only typical auto-include in Nords is a Volva warlord, who is an extremely valuable spellcaster in her own right and whose army-wide +1 Evasion supremacy can generally be relied on to produce consistent mechanical value the entire game and synergises particularly well with many of the best or most commonly taken regiments in the army, but even she will occasionally be displaced by other options in more experimental or avante-garde list constructions.
From there, Nords can potentially branch out into any of their other warbands, with the most common choice being a Blooded warband trading heavily on Trolls with Dread (mostly in minimum sized unit configuration as they scale up inefficiently, but a brick is possible and just such a configuration won Tablecon in Singapore very recently) but with plenty of space around that for further customisation. With ample high-quality Linebreaker units in the form of Steel-Chosen and Goltr, Nords are positioned well to prey on any Hundred Kingdoms players hoping to bring down Yoroni in attendance, and the general early-game power of the Nords with light scoring raiders and ample Forward Force characters, Nords have a sound gameplan and are a broadly well-rounded faction for competition play.
The biggest issue Nords are likely to encounter is that they lean generally toward a dispersed force, with most of their regiments performing best at minimum size, which leaves them in a position where they can struggle a little into tenacious Yoroni regiments. Their saving grace here is that even a minimum size Nord unit usually packs enough of a punch to deal some damage, although they will generally be in a position of hoping to win the trading war against the smaller Yoroni units before collapsing en masse on the large ones.
Power Word (Dinosaur): W’adrhŭn
W’adrhŭn are in a similarly balanced state to Nords, although with a list-building meta that’s fallen back to safe ground after the nerf to the durability of Chosen of Death, who were causing significant issues in casual play where they were more liable to connect with all stands intact and do absolutely blowout damage thanks to their massive offensive output. This damage potential still exists, but at Evasion 2 Resolve 3, and plenty pricey, they’ve fallen off in competition play.
Fortunately for W’adrhŭn players, there are ample options to fall back to. While the W’adrhŭn infantry game is very sound and could see play even at an event like Chios, our pick for top of the W’adrhŭn meta is a speakers-centric list running a Thunder Chieftan warlord. This list plays to the old W’adrhŭn strength of powerful early game mobility, and a generally sound reinforcement curve that terminates in flank heavies with a lot of damage and very long threat ranges. This is a risky prediction, but something like this as a starting point would be particularly interesting to see at Chios:
== (Warlord) Thunder Chieftain [170]: Kiss of the Dilosaur
- Thunder Riders (3) [220]:
- Thunder Riders (3) [220]:
- Raptor Riders (5) [300]:
== Winglord Predator [210]:
- Hunting Pack (3) [120]:
== Winglord Predator [210]:
- Hunting Pack (3) [120]:
While the flexibility and power of Winglord Predators isn’t really in dispute, the Australian tech on display here is the Thunder Chieftain in Raptor Riders. This regiment is amongst the most powerful and threatening of all early-game units, and is entirely capable of breaking Yoroni Origami Warrior formations or pressuring Sorcerer Kings while they’re trying to wind up their punch. The hunting pack round out the list’s early presence in a bid for activation control during the early turns (in addition to being psychotic little bastards themselves, with the Speakers supremacy in particular pushing them into el pollo diablo territory), which is a necessity to maximise the positional potential of the raptors. It’s not for the faint of heart, but with the meta trending toward a slightly lower activation count that it can race ahead of and a strong, aggressive gameplan, it’s well-positioned if anyone takes it. The only thing it doesn’t want to see is tables dominated terrain like Forests that stymie impact attacks and blunt the ranged poke, but there’s definitely no historical precedent for that at a Conquest worlds event.
While we’ve proposed Kiss of the Dilosaur (the game’s most overperforming artefact) on the Thunder Chieftain above, another significant contender for both general inclusion and the warlord position is a Chosen of Conquest. While he was most attractive in the Chosen of Death meta (who didn’t benefit at all from the Thunder supremacy), he’s still a powerful option, a prime candidate for Kiss, and a very possible appearance in any W’adrhŭn lists at Chios.
Struggling to Adapt: City States
At the far other end of factions positioned to perform in the Yoroni and Sorcerer Kings meta, we have the City States. Normally a faction reasonably well-positioned to adapt to changing metagames, modern City States lists are nevertheless dependent on War Chariots to exert pressure and control the flow of the game, and those Chariots have crashed hard into the wall of Yoroni regiments with Tenacious [2] and Sorcerer Kings regiments who can one-shot them from downtown and utterly trivialise their ranged pressure with multiple casts of the Fiery Dominion ritual each turn during the game’s early phases.
While City States are capable of performing very well in a general sense, the fact that their most powerful and common unit has become maladaptive in the two most threatening matchups have left them in a position where they’re very unlikely to repeat last year’s performance at Chios. They can’t be ruled out – and in any case, players win events, not factions – but if City States outperform at Chios it will be by some combination of lucky matchups, raw player skill, or a readjustment in list construction that significantly departs from the current meta in search of something new. Or who knows, maybe the solution is even more Chariots.
Maybe Next Year: Spires
The only army we don’t really expect to see at Chios, Spires have some strength to them but are, for all practical purposes, in ‘incomplete faction’ status until about February next year when their rework hopefully arrives. They’ve been hit almost as hard as City States by the emergence of tenacious defence against volleys, and while the Pteraphon is an outstanding force-multiplier and very fun monster to play, there needs to be some force there to multiply. Ultimately, Spires right now represent a sufficient struggle with an insufficient toolkit that we would be surprised to see them out in force at Worlds. Maybe next year, Sovereigns.
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