'TINK TINK TINK' goes the Blacksmith's Forge in Guildball

Hello there wargaming lads and lovelies and welcome to another fun blog-isode of Wargamer Ramblings!  I hope you’re doing well in your hobby time and you are making some good progress.  Now that things are settled and calm here I’ve been making some good work on my forever growing and changing line up of models.  That’s not what we’re talking about today however, nay verily instead let’s follow-up with the next guild in Guild Ball that’s relatively new, and that are the Blacksmiths!  As usually here be the cards.

So like the Farmer’s Guild they are currently available for pre-order in a faction start box made out of the same type of plastic it appears.  You get the 6 models, a goal post, a Blacksmith ball (which looks kind of cool if you ask me), and a forge terrain piece.  Right now it looks like the MSRP is going to be sitting at $50 USD, so you can get a full team for a decent price point.  Whether or not this is how Steamforged is going to progress with all of their future teams/models I’m not sure but it certainly seems to be looking that way.  So far in the roster there are 8 model choices to be had

The current box set line-up

So let’s talk about how the team generally operates, because as I mentioned before it has a couple of elements that make this team stand out amongst the others.  First off you will notice that two model types are missing: the captain and mascot.  Neither are present, but the former will not go missing for long.  What the team has instead are two types of models, Masters and Apprentices.  Second as of now there are no Union models available for the team, so you can only play with a pure guild team (personally I love that as I tend to run pure guild teams when I play).  Back to the model types, the team has to have an even split between the two, so 3 Masters and 3 Apprentices.  Additionally when you choose your team you pick one of the Masters to be your captain.  This model gains +0/+2 Influence and their Legendary Play takes on an additional effect.  Let me go on as to why this is pretty awesome stuff.

The Guild symbol and concept art of Alloy

So in other guilds you have 2 captain models generally right?  So one could argue that because of that your overall team strategy is largely affected by this decision.  Sure you could argue that you can have all kinds of team comps out there but ultimately you still have this binary (for now) decision to make about how the team functions with this captain.  The Blacksmiths currently have a range of 4 Masters, which mean there are 4 different option points for captain.  Your strategy, limited in other ways, are not going to be wholly limited by just 1 or 2 choices, but 4!  Need a captain with some speed boost? We have you covered.  Going for a more defensive, hold the line approach? That’s a potential as well.  A captain that puts all the suckas on fire?! WE GOTCHU FAM!  Essentially it means that when you make a team you have more captain options than the other guilds and that's always a good thing.

The physical embodiment of RPG "hold all my swords"

Which leads me to my next point moving on to the Apprentice models.  Most of the Apprentices have an ability that plays off of their Master being on the team and within a certain distance.  The one exception is Ferrite and Iron, Master and Apprentice respectively, which have the inverse where Ferrite gets a bonus being near Iron.  So this relationship between the models means that you will generally want to select the pairs in order to get the most benefit from them.  Now that’s not to say that you can’t take odd pairings if you wanted to, but you would lose out on some crucial and cool abilities by doing so.  For example if you take Alloy with his Master Hearth, then when you’re in 6” you get a benefit chosen from a list (i.e. 2” melee zone, +1/+0 Kick, or Anatomical Precision).  That seems pretty integral to Alloy as a player, so without Hearth you miss out on some abilities you could use for great benefit.  Overall it seems to get the best out of your Apprentices you need to match them up with their Masters.

Upcoming releases

To be honest I am going to avoid getting into too much detail about the stats and specific characters play with the Blacksmiths because I feel like just the guild itself being the way that it is can be enough to chew on for now.  Yeah there are some pretty good interactions between models, but the guild structure itself is interesting enough for me to talk about now.  Like I said, you have some flexibility in some builds with the Masters but some restricting options with the pressure in taking matching Apprentices.  It’s like Steamforged took the core of the nature of being Blacksmith as their concept for the team: like iron the team is malleable when being forged but rigid in its ending properties. 

So that's it for now, hopefully it has been a good chat with you all.  Until next time folks take care and happy gaming. 

P.S. This article was originally written back in October and reviewed today.  As a result some things have changed with the Guild, though I'm not 100% sure what (I think new players and whatnot), so keep that in mind!  Cheers!