Carving up the pitch like a Christmas ham: The Butchers

Good day to you fellow Guild Ball fans and welcome to another exciting post about the different teams in the game!  I certainly hope you all have been having a great time with hobby stuff lately.  As for myself I’ve got some things going on but right now I will continue to focus on the teams and today’s is none other than the polar opposite to the Fishermen but the Butcher’s Guild.  Once again cards can be found right HERE.

So the Butcher’s guild is, as the name implies, composed of those responsible for hacking up and carving your daily cow/pig/chicken/rat/whatever.  As far as lore goes I am not sure how old of a guild they are but I would imagine they have been in the game long enough.  For game-style purposes the Butchers are a pretty straight-forward team to play but that does not equate to being bland or boring.  On the contrary there are a couple choices once can take to alter the direction you want to take with your team.  So without further ado let’s take a look at those players shall we?

Dat Guild Crest

Starting off with the captains we have season 1 Ox and season 2 Fillet.  Ox is a burly sort of gent who likes to get in there and with his giant ham-hands beat people up!  His stats back up this notion with a solid TAC of 7 and a decent charge/sprint of 8”.  Ox’s character plays can help with some solid armor boosting and can also help bring down the armor of an opponent.  His final character play, also his aura character trait, and legendary play all equate to giving the team raw damage potential and in tandem with each other can give teammates a solid +3 damage to one target (who also is at an additional -1 armor).  Fillet while labelled as a striker is more akin to a nimble razor blade who wants to make everyone bleed.  She is all about playing around with bleeding conditions being able to charge farther against someone who is bleeding as well as dealing extra damage to that target.  In a 6” aura around her bleed conditions do not expire in the Maintenance phase and continue to exsanguinate targets.  Her legendary play causes models already bleeding to take some extra bleed damage instantaneously, whereas her character plays can cause enemy models to start bleeding while taking some mild damage.

Your starter box left to right: Boiler, Ox, Brisket

Boar is an interesting sort of meathead.  His INF stat is a 1/1 meaning that he can only ever get 1 to use, but he gets a lot of use out of the only point he can get.  For one he charges for free and if he damages someone with an attack he can make one attack for free!  It helps that he has a TAC of 8 and he stays in the game with a regenerative ability healing 2 hp per turn before taking off conditions.  Boiler is a nice winger model in that his speed is decent and he can cause models he damages to gain the bleed condition.  One of his character plays causes models to charge against his target gain a +2” to the movement lending some utility to the team.  Meathook is a solid lady to get some bleed conditions out there with solid damage.  She has Tooled Up and if used on herself while able to secure 5 hits she can then cause all models in her 1” melee range to suffer 4 (3+1 for tooled up) damage.  Oh and when she damages a model they are bleeding.  Go figure right?  Shank has the ability to move around the field a bit more than usual with his character play giving him a 4” dodge for 1 INF.  Should he gain 5 hits on someone he can cause them to debuff their defense by -2 and take 1 damage.  Really useful to get Shank into a flank to gain that -2 defense debuff off for the rest of the Butchers to carve up the target.

From left to right: Brisket, Boar, Ox, Shank, Princess da puppy, Meathook, and Boiler

Tenderiser is one of the few goalkeepers in the game and he’s a big ole brute of one.  He has the Rush Keeper and Goal defense traits making it harder for the opposing team to score goals.  On his return kick however he’s got some interesting quirks.  For 1 INF his kick cannot be intercepted and furthermore models in the path of the ball receive the knock-down condition.  His other character play costs all 4 INF that he can receive but in a 3” pulse he will push models 2” away and knock them down with some damage.  Brisket season 1 is a striker true and true and her abilities reflect that.  She has a self-buffing character play to her kicking abilities while also gaining a movement when an enemy moves into her melee range.  Against male models she has a +1 to defense which can help her out a little bit.  Otherwise she is a striker with a solid 18” goal threat range and 4 dice to roll (when buffed).  Brisket season 2 traded her striker role for a winger and she’s a pretty solid one at it.  Her stats remained largely untouched save for a slight increase to her TAC.  Each time she scores a goal she gains a permanent +1/+0 to her INF.  In addition when she is within 8” of the pitch sidelines she reduces the cost of her charging by 1.  Her character play options help with some mobility but one that catches my eye is Ball’s Gone which lets her tackle someone for the ball and immediately pass it off to a friendly within 4”.  Coupled with her old striker role stats she is certainly a model to keep an eye on when forming a team.

From Dark Iron Studios

Finally let’s give a quick peer to our two mascot options, Princess and Truffles.  Princess is a mobile attack dog who can cause bleeding or give someone a -4/-4” and poison.  She has the Loved Creature trait so if you take her out then the already nasty TAC values on several Butcher models will get a buff and they will move faster for a turn.  Truffles trades in some offensive/condition placement for some defensive capabilities.  He has Tough Hide and Sturdy adding some damage mitigation and the ability to ignore the first knockdown.  In addition he has Smell Blood which gives him some mobility and extra damage against targets with bleed.  He will pair up quite nicely if you plan on going with a bleed team.

Found this on twitter @BigJonBucket

So there we have it, the Butcher’s Guild in a nutshell.  They tend to deal a lot of raw damage so you can definitely get some nice VP’s in with takedowns but there are some models in the guild that can also give you a goal here and there as well.  I myself would be interested in trying a bleed team in the future and I think it would be an interesting game to have.  Until then fellow guildballers take care and happy gaming!