29) Scuddy Buddy's Playtime Pals: The Cheese Grinder

First off, I want to explain a few things. The players interviewed on that particular podcast are all excellent players, with a lot of experience. They have all won tournaments. They are all important voices in the community. They are much more skilled than I am. They are also very competitive and as such are prisoners to efficiency and the pursuit of perfection. When they have a three hour roundtable discussion about the viability of different units, monsters, and characters in the army list, they are actually crunching numbers, calculating probabilities, and figuring out if investing points on a particular unit will likely net a worthwhile return. That's how technical these guys are. They don't really care how FUN a particular unit is to run in a list, or how awesome the models are. They want to fine tune their army list like a race car engine to squeeze out that tiny marginal bit of extra horsepower that can make the difference between matching a world record and setting a new one by 1/10^th of a second.

Me? I'm just out here in the parking lot doing donuts in my shitty old 5-speed Ford and blasting power metal on a bluetooth speaker because the factory radio doesn't power on anymore. The gas tank is held up with a cargo strap, but it's probably ok. Anyone want to learn to drive a stick? Hop in! It's fun! Be careful, though. Sometimes that door pops open.

So I listened to a podcast featuring the best Ratkin players in the world, and they said that there were certain units they didn't like to use because they weren't very good, or didn't synergize well with the rest of the Army, and this caused me to have a "Hold my beer" kinda moment. I made an army that included the monsters that they said not to use, and excluded a character that they said was mandatory in favor of two non-scoring individuals. I took it one step further by leaning hard on cheap expendable infantry and taking absolutely zero shooting. No warmachines, no clawshots, no weapons teams.

So here's what I DO have:

Three hordes of Spear Rats with plague pots

Two regiments of Spear Rats with plague pots

One regiment of Rat Warriors

The Tangle

Two Warlocks with Heal 4 and Hex 2

One Birthing Daughter with the Saint's Shroud for Heal 3

One troop of Hackpaws with the Orb of Towering Presence

Two Mutant Rat Friends

Two Brute Enforcers, one with Inspiring and the other with Blade of Slashing

Big Scud

There's not much in the way of hammers, here. Basically just the three titans. The list has sixteen drops and 32 US, though, and it is very grindy.

Astute observers will notice that I don't have a Brood Mother. This list has been an experiment in running three small healing individuals instead of one big healer mama. I've played ten games with it so far, and I actually think I prefer the three small healers. I get eleven dice of healing magic every turn with no strings attached. I don't need a battery pack/blood bank unit. My Brood Mother models have both been repurposed as Brute Enforcers,which are an excellent addition to the list.

Rat infantry struggles to actually kill things, but having Brute Enforcers around to hit flanks, offer a few quality attacks with CS2, and adding "Brutal" to combats is really great. They are also good delaying chaff when they need to be.

My two main frontline hammers are the Mutant Rat Friends. Yes, they are only DE4, but they are -20 Nerve when rallied, and they have regeneration + radiance of life. Out of the ten games I have run them together, they have proven very hard for my opponents to kill. In fact, I think I have only had one game where both of them died before turn six. It helps that they are HT6, so even if they whiff their regeneration rolls my healers can always get line of sight to heal them. I have to be mindful of what units they are up against, because certain berserker units could absolutely shred these guys with sheer volume of attacks. Because of this I sometimes nest them between other units and keep them just a few milimeters out of reach to guarantee that my Rat Friends are the ones who get to charge. This is also something that a Brute Enforcer can help with. Mutant Rat Friends have "Strider", so they love to threaten from within terrain. They kill things. It might take a while, but they do it.

There's not much to say about Scud. Everyone knows how dangerous he can be. I have to be patient with him, though. I can't throw him away. Learning to anticipate what will be in his arc AFTER my opponents next turn is the trickiest part about using him. I turned a win into a draw by not pivoting him properly after a move, and allowing my opponents line to move forward out of his arc and then behind blocking terrain HT9. Scud essentially lost two turns and I lost two tokens because of this. Scud's lightning bolt is the only shooting in my army besides the Tangle's fireball. Every once in a while it shoots off a unit of gargoyles or dogs, but unfortunately Scud seems perpetually "hexed" because he is so tall. If positioned well and timed right, Scud will turn the tide of a battle by flanking an enemy unit that's stuck in a grind. If things are going well, this is usually late in game and it is disastrous for my opponent. As funny as it sounds, people actually kind of seem to... forget about him? Because he hasn't really done much up til that point? It's weird. He's the biggest model on the table.

Speaking of forgetting about units, my Hackpaw troop is my reserve unit. They sit behind my lines and protect my rear from flyers. If they don't have to do that they can relay tokens, finish off wounded enemies that punch through the lines, and otherwise protect my characters and the Tangle. Oftentimes they are fresh and uninjured at the end of the game, at which point they can be my "Hail-Mary" to move US2 to where it needs to be for the scenario. They can nimble march 18" and that's no joke. Again, people seem to kind of forget that they are back there behind my lines.

The Tangle is just a great support piece. I put it in every list. It is very versatile, and the "Fury" aura has won games for me. All of its spells are useful depending on the situation. It's got good reach for "Rally" and "Inspiring" It has US2 and it can carry tokens. I love it.

So finally we have the Birthing Daughter and her expendable infantry units. The key to my list is that I have a lot of infantry that takes a long time to grind through. The humble rat spear infantry is just as good at holding ground as the much more expensive Shock Troops. If only they could hit back as hard... Well, with the Birthing Daughter's "Strider" Aura for expendable troops plus a banechant from the Tangle, they basically do. I used to run Shock Troops, but the players in my local meta are very good at using terrain to make sure that big unwieldy hordes are always hindered. The Birthing Daughter is the answer to that. I don't mind walls or forests anymore. In fact, I love them. Effectively, my anvils and my hammers both have "Strider" now. Not having to worry about terrain is amazing! I've heard people say that terrain is a struggle for the Rat lists. Not this one. We thrive in it. Parking a rallied spear phalanx horde with plague pots at the ready behind a wall or in difficult terrain is great, because even a multicharge might not break it. When it's time to go over the top, that aura kicks in and the spear rats don't have to worry about being hindered, themselves. It's great because it actually makes me look at the battlefield differently. I don't know how else to explain it. Most of my opponents deploy to avoid terrain, but I do the exact opposite.

This army does a lot of delaying and defense. It isn't good at killing stuff, but it can win a grind and therefore win a scenario. It is currently 7-2-1, but one of those losses was really a draw (My opponent and I both misunderstood how the scenario worked. Oops!) The actual draw happened because of my own tactical blunder, and had nothing to do with my list. My only really big loss was against Jeff Schiltgen's lightning spam Ogre list, which was easily the worst matchup this list could have gotten, piloted by a Masters level player, so it is what it is. I controlled the left, he controlled the center and the right. He beat me 5-2 on scenario, and probably had about 1k attrition over me. I still had rats on the board, though!

So that's my Cheese Grinder list with Scuddy Buddy's Playtime Pals. It currently has a winning record. It will probably struggle at a tournament, because it doesn't cause a lot of attrition. It just survives well and wins scenarios without really killing a lot of enemies, but so far it has given my local meta some strategic problems to figure out, and I am having a lot of fun commanding this ground-pounder of a list.

I have enough rats to field pretty much any army list imaginable. If I were to field it all at once, it would be about 6000 points. A standard tournament sized army is between 2000 and 2300 points.