[Chris Perkins]

Originally Posted by heroscaper2010

Appreciate the comments Chris. Whether it changes anyone's mind or not about Ebol, I don't know, but they are useful for my regardless.

I do want to touch on this army type that Ebol can boost mostly because Vydar and I did play it and I think I can add something new to the conversation.

The problem with Ebol + Rats + Junk w/ or w/o Raelin is that the goal of the army is the same as it is without Ebol, and your Order Marker activations pretty well mirror that. It is rarely worth it to spend a whole activation on Rats mid-game, Ebol or not. Vydar was mostly attacking up front with Knights with the occasional Nilfy OM to maybe thin out the Rat screen without the Scatters replacing the ones the Knights did kill. I really don't think I spent an OM on the Rats or Raelin once I got into my setup. It was all on Q9 until the Knights ran into my screen and then I used the Hydra clear the Knights. Wash, rinse, repeat. (Except my dice were struggling a little bit so it wasn't quite that easy. )

While it's nothing to scuff at, Ebol + Raelin + Rats can be deceptively powerful in the sense that, as Vydar mentioned in his post, it is only once you start having 3+ cards to manage that you start to consider adding Ebol. I really would not count Raelin or Rats as one of those 3 cards as nothing about the Raelin-Rat combo really changes with Ebol. Raelin still loves to use the first OM of the game to get into position and stay there until she dies and the Rats still love using 2-3 OMs before leaving it up to Scatter to do the rest.

Now of course who you activate behind the Rat screen and inside of Raelin's aura can be affected by Ebol, but with menacers like Q9 and the Hydra, you could easily do without Ebol as well. I would think swiss-army knife, RTW-esque, builds would benefit much more highly from Ebol than the sit-and-shoot army that this post has been about.

To an extent I agree with this - I do think that Ebol improves weaker hodge-podge armies more than Ebol improves A+ junk armies. But I still think the improvement to the A+ armies is more important in point allocation (not saying 80 is right or wrong) than the affect on hodge-podge because improving A+ armies (even slightly) is the bigger effect on the meta.

I do want to expand on one thing though from the A+ pods: Hydra. The biggest benefit of Hydra in the A+ armies is to have a huge heavy hitter ready and waiting for the right moment (threat against Cyprien, Grimnak, etc. closing in on your pod). But the hard part is guessing the right moment to switch from your ranged game to your mele game without burning an OM when Cyprien doesn't rush in because he's scared of hydra. And Hydra hurts the most from OMs after taking a few wounds (unlike Q9 or Braxas). I think Ebol's affect on improving Hydra's ability to: (1) react at the perfect time, & (2) avoid taking turns after losing 2 heads, is probably the single biggest effect on the A+ armies Ebol would be in.

There are times to move rats midgame with Ebol that you would otherwise lose out on, which is definitely nice, but having a 100% threat of 4x4 if your opponent gets close enough to attack Q9 in mele via swapping to Hydra for a turn is huge.

For clarity, I'm considering an army such as: Raelin, Ebol, Q9, Hydra, Rats x3 (580 pts).

This is again where I think Ebol affects the meta at 550+ pts more, because at less points you probably can't get Ebol, Hydra, & Q9 into the same army, at which point the OM switching is far less valuable.