Starting Age of Sigmar, Cheap and Easy Style!
Hey everyone, Reecius here to talk about some easy and affordable ways to pick up Age of Sigmar!
As you can tell by my stream of articles about the game, I have the Age of Sigmar bug in a big way! The game–with some structure–is brilliant and such good fun. I had a chance to read the impending General’s Handbook (which you can pre-order through Frontline Gaming at a nice discount!) and I am even more excited for the game. It brings some of what we most wanted to see: structure and points! Nice one.
The cool thing is that you don’t have to use the points if you do not want to, it comes with tons of cool stuff like narrative campaigns and ladder campaigns but as a tournament lover, I am stoked for matched play! There’s so much more going on in this book, but we’ll cover that another day. For now, let’s talk about diving into the game!
Crunching some numbers, I came to quickly see that you can make an army in Age of Sigmar for not too much money, which is awesome! The models are pricey but you really don’t need too many of them to make a 2,000pt army, which is what GW is presenting as the tournament standard. What this means is that the cost of entry is actually quite low, and you can get a force together with a relatively small investment in time, too. This is a quantum leap in improvement over the previous editions of Fantasy which required massive bricks of troops which were mega expensive and took ages to build and paint.
As I was writing up some lists, thinking about Warbands I’d like to put together, here’s one I came up with.
Slaves to Darkness 2,000pts
- Godsworn Champions of Ruin Battalion 1,000pts
- Chaos Sorcerer Lord on Manticore
- Daemon Prince
- Chaos Sorcerer Lord on Chaos Steed
- Chaos Knights x 5
- Chaos Knights x 5
- Ruinbringer Warband 1,000pts
- Chaos Lord on Daemonic Mount
- Chaos Knights x 5
- Chaos Knights x 5
- Chaos Knights x 5
- Chaos Gorebeast Chariots
- Chaos Chariot
31 models! That’s it, wow! Plus, everything is mounted so you have a cool cavalry themed army of super bad ass models. Every model in this army looks amazing. So, assembling and painting it will be a lot of fun. Also, it’s relatively cheap. $395 retail is not bad for an entire army. If you order it from Frontline Gaming, you can get it at $316 or $296.25 as a part of our new release specials.
If you really want to save some dough, you get 5 extra Chaos Knights in the above army so you can convert two of them into the Chaos Sorcerer Lord on Chaos Steed and the Chaos Lord on Daemonic Knight, bringing the total down $40 MSRP. You’re talking about an entire tournament army that looks bad ass and would be good on the tabletop, too for a very reasonable price.
As for playing the army, it is fast, hits hard, has lots of powerful spells to call on and did I mention it looks amazing?! All those Chaos Knights, sooooo rad! Your two Battalions gives you two heroes to get magic items in the new General’s Handbook, and the Chaos Warband army benefits rock. You will get a ton of use out of them with this army.
The Battalions themselves offer a lot, as well. The ability to assault and deal mortal wounds in the Hero phase with the Ruinbringer Warband is awesome, and the Godsworn Champion likewise get extra attacks in the Hero Phase, maximizing this army’s melee punch. If you get that double turn while stuck in…good night!
The Daemon Prince with Slaneesh is awesome as it allows you to interrupt the flow in the melee phase, meaning you can attack with two units before your opponent gets one if its your turn. I really dig that. You have a wide variety of choices for your general, but I’d go with the Chaos Lord on Daemonic Mount. The ability to buff a unit of Knights on the way in to melee is pretty awesome.
If you wanted to not go all cavalry, you could use the Start Collecting! Slaves to Darkness boxes to make a 2K army even cheaper! And those Chaos Warriors at 180pts for 10 are a very good deal for what you get.
But that’s just one way to slice it. My friend Alex is in the process of making a Flesh Eater Court army (Zombies, Ghouls and such!). By taking advantage of some of the bundle deals, you can make an army for just a few hundred bucks that not only looks cool but is good on the tabletop, too! His total ticket for a 2,000pt army was only $220! Wow.
The tournament format for the game is going to be very accessible for these reasons. While you can make a bigger, more expensive army if you want to, you don’t have to. This means you can take the plunge into the game with a relatively small investment of time and money to see if you like it. If you do, branching out and collecting multiple Warbands with an awesome theme is relatively easy to do. For example, the Sylvaneth Warband I am baking only has 35 models and damn, those tree people are dead easy to paint and look incredible! I am already thinking about multiple Warbands to collect and model, haha. Those Orruk Bone Splitters look sooooo awesome! Might have to do that, too.
~What warbands are you thinking about collecting?
And as always, Frontline Gaming sells Games Workshop product at up to 25% off of retail, every day!
You can also pick up some cheap models in our Second Hand Shop. Some of these gems are quite rare, sometimes they’re fully painted!
