Dragon Dice: Frostwings

I mentioned that some Dragon Dice were coming in. I got my three kickers of Frostwings. I opened them, indexed them, and now, I want you to join me as we go through the process of building myself a 36-point army out of the three kickers. There.... will not be much that is fun for non-Dragon Dice players and/or gamers. Except for this picture of my current collection.

Melee on the left, maneuver/missile in the middle... magic on the right.

So, let's break that down for those of you at home. We have a total of 45 points, we need to get ourselves down to 36 points.

Monsters:  1 Wolf Pack; 1 Remorhaz; 1 Cryohydra (12 Points)
Melee: 3 Vindicators; 2 Defenders; 4 Advocates (17)
Cavalry: 2 Wolf Master; 1 Hound Master (5 points)
Missile:  1 Assaulter; 1 Dispatcher; 3 Destroyer; 2 Attacker (9 points)
Magic: 2 Apprentice (2 points)

With that, it is very easy to get ourselves down to 43 points, leaving us up by seven points. Goodbye Apprentices, we hardly knew you. The next thing to do is to see if any of those monsters can go. We're pretty solid on maneuvers, but the Wolf Pack also gives me a fairly dangerous unit that is going to be critical in winning us the first turn or terrain picking, so it has to stay (though, ideally, it will trade out for two other 2-point dice in the future.) Howl is less than stellar, but we also have Rend, which makes attacking into the Wolf Pack dicey. Plus, they are a group monster. Keep.

The cryohydra is a monster in melee, but Frost Breath isn't reliable enough (one face compared to Rends two). It makes up for it with Double Strike. We're going to be relying on our melee to win the day with three vindicators, so, I'm going to reluctantly keep it in for now. That leaves us with the remorhaz. It has Swallow. This trades out hefty hits for a high chance of eating something. If I target an enemy monster, then it is almost assuredly dead. It can let me target annoying or pesky things, but I really feel that my goal needs to be to overwhelm with forcing save results. For now, the remorhaz is gone; we'll see if I think that was a smart idea after playing tomorrow.

Now we have 39 points; we need to get ourselves three points. We obviously do not want to take it from our cavalry; they lack fly, but they have versatile faces, something we need as we aren't able to really tailor our army quite yet. The Vindicators need to stay too; the Smite and Fly faces make them just too darn dangerous to pass up if we're going to be locking ourselves into melee. The same is true of the defender; those fly saves are going to be what gives us the flexibility to power past missile/magic faces on terrain to where we can bring our Vindicators to bear.

Now we have to look at our missile troops. The assaulter and dispatcher both need to stay; without them, we are not going to generate reliable amounts of missile hits to threaten anyone. My initial instinct is to drop one destroyer, the hound master and an advocate, which is what I'll do to get my three points. So, our army now is:

Monsters:  1 Wolf Pack; 1 Cryohydra (8 Points)
Melee: 3 Vindicators; 2 Defenders; 3 Advocates (16)
Cavalry: 2 Wolf Master (4 points)
Missile:  1 Assaulter; 1 Dispatcher; 2 Destroyer; 2 Attacker (8 points)

I don't have terrains, but given what we've got, I think we clearly want a City for the Frontier and a Tower for our Home. The goal is to try and establish control of home to get a tower so that our shooters can start to threaten the board. Meanwhile, the rest of our forces need to lock down the opponent. Especially since we lack mages to make use of our magic negation, we're kind of limited in what we can do. So, how do we divide out our forces?

Clearly, our shooters are going to Home; they'll take one of the wolf masters with them, as well as a defender. Next, let's worry about our Horde army. That is a perfect place to put the wolf pack. It has the possibility to give us some excellent maneuvers to keep our opponent from doing the same thing we want to do. We'll give it the other wolf master. That leaves us with a lot of melee to divide up. We need some maneuvers there, so we'll give Team Wolfy two vindicators and an advocate. So, here's the breakdown:

Horde: Wolf Pack; 2 Vindicators; Wolf Master; Advocate
Campaign: Cryohydra; Vindicator; Defender; 2 Advocate
Home: Assaulter; Dispatcher; Wolf Master; Defender; 2 Attacker; 2 Destroyer

One things I may consider doing if I feel like I'm not rolling enough dice is dropping the wolf master at Home or Horde for the hound master and extra destroyer. But, for right now, I feel like this is a good, aggressive build for what I opened. I could also move the wolf pack to Home and move the hound master and defender to the horde if I want to get to my eighth face faster. Anyway, we're testing the game out tomorrow, so let me know (and quickly!) if you think I've made a mistake.

Black and white Charrlie thinks I've made all the mistakes.

----

P.S.,

Do you have a Google account and do you read the blog? Don't forget to give us a +1 and become a follower!