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Gettin' Tuff Like The Iron Rock

A Warhammer: Invasion The Card Game spotlight

Greenskin battle gear is an untidy but functional mix of whatever comes to hand. Much of it is stolen or captured, often mixed in with Goblin-made items and local totems. Each piece usually carries glyphs or personal marks to denote ownership, though stealing among the tribe is commonplace and the best stuff always seems to end up in the hands of the biggest Orcs eventually.
    –Warhammer: Orcs & Goblins, “Gablag’s Ladz”

The Orcs are coming. The Iron Rock brings the Greenskin hordes the new themes and mechanics from The Capital Cycle of Battle Packs for Warhammer: Invasion The Card Game.

Orcs are the spitting image of brutality. With their large heads, low brows, thick tusks, and broad, muscular bodies, these vicious Greenskins are built for bloodshed. Their hides are almost as thick as their minds, but even some of the dumbest Orcs can deduce the benefits of armor. Meanwhile, some of the savvier Greenskins can even suss the significant advantages of military defenses, though many of these craftier Greenskins happen to be Gobbos, who are smaller, weaker, and therefore better suited to the less interesting tasks such as fetching, cooking, and forming battlements.

Tough like tough thing!

While Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs (The Iron Rock, 45) ravage their enemies’ front lines, they benefit from their armor. The more your army grows, the more likely it becomes they’ll find stronger and more protective armor. Each point of Toughness cancels the first point of damage assigned to the unit. As a cancellation effect, Toughness is primarily a defensive mechanic, one particularly strong against indirect damage. Until your opponent can make his indirect damage uncancellable, a little bit of Toughness can go a long way, neutralizing strategies that fire little volleys of indirect damage over and over.

Each point of Toughness on a unit assigned to defend your capital is one fewer damage marker, but Toughness also offers a tremendous advantage for aggressive units in your battlefield. In fact, Toughness is arguably stronger on the offensive than on defense because you can choose which zone to attack, calculating ahead of time your opponent’s ability to defend, how much power he can muster, and how many units he’ll need to commit to the defense or watch his zone burn. Beside, no self-respecting Orc wants to worry about defense when he could, instead, focus on kicking in heads, chopping off heads, burning heads, and burning zones.

Accordingly, Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs make excellent attackers in your battlefield. They can ignore limited retaliation as they set fires to your opponent’s capital. Their two power are respectable, but not superb. However, the added resilience they gain from their Toughness can make them good targets for attachments like Martog’s Best Basha (The Iron Rock, 47), which accelerates your Orcs’ destructive prowess at the same rate your opponent can add developments to his zones. Against a Dwarf strategy, a troop of Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs equipped with Martog’s Best Basha can rip large holes through your enemy’s front lines.

Meanwhile, if you’ve already played Martog’s Best Basha or another powerful Attachment like Basha’s Bloodaxe (The Warpstone Chronicles, 91) or a Choppa (Core Set, 69) on a more vulnerable unit like the Spider Riders (The Skavenblight Threat, 8), you could also equip it with Thick-Skinned (The Warpstone Chronicles, 92) to protect your investment. Then when you attack a zone your opponent can defend, you can discard Thick-Skined to redirect the damage your opponent would want to deal to your glass cannon unit to your Ruglud’s Armoured Orcs. Instead of losing a fearsome attacking unit, you can simply shrug off the attack.

Gobbo innovation

…And it falls once again to the yammering Gobbos to take care of the loose odds and ends that don’t involve swinging weapons at opponents’ squishy places. In this case, that would be defending. While the Orcs are off routing their foes, choppin’ heads, and kickin’ faces, the luckless Goblins are stuck with the task of fortifying the Greenskin camps. The Iron Rock introduces the new Greenskin Fortification, Expendable Wall (The Iron Rock, 48), built of Gobbo ingenuity… and when need be, of the unluckiest Goblins themselves.

At zero cost, the Fortification can protect a zone as early as the first turn, though you won’t likely want to pay resources for its loyalty. Still, the Greenskins excel at dropping hordes of low-cost characters, and it’s likely you’ll be able to stick some Goblins into defensive position by turn two. It’s entirely possible, you’ll be able to play the wall for free on your first turn, but that would require an excellent opening draw.

Even though you can play it early, an Expendable Wall is best used later. Its action cancels allows you to discard the Wall to cancel all the damage that its section of your capital would be dealt. For a single card slot and zero cost, your Gobbos can cancel any amount of damage, but they can only do it once per wall, meaning your Orcs had better hack through your foes quickly.

Get ready to muster the might of the Greenskin hordes with the upcoming release of The Iron Rock! Until it hits a retailer near you, keep checking this site for updates.

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Source: Gettin' Tuff Like The Iron Rock (http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=2850)