[Grey Waves]

My Blade Dancers/Dwarves hybrid army finally got a win against Shiftrex's shadows this morning. It wasn't a close game - he was rolling less than 20% defence dice, while my blade dancers were rolling closer to 40%. It was always going to be a tough matchup for Shiftrex anyway (on average, thanks to stealth armour, I have 15 BDs and 8 dwarves to play with plus darrak, while Shiftrex only has 12 shadows), but the dice well and truly put the nail in any chance he had of staging an upset.

While I don't think bringing blade dancers this season was a mistake necessarily, the meta was definitely a lot less kind to them compared to when I last ran them in season 44. The extra 55 points (S44 had a limit of 490) made gladblast a much more viable army and also helped people to fit ROTV Raelin in their builds. Rule of 9 also made armies like the elf wizards and wildwoods much more appealing than I expected as well. While stealth armour does allow them to essentially bypass the Rule of 9 and so gives the blade dancers good matchups into armies like Muskie's, SF's, and Megasilver's (basically builds that have 2 or more 'split' components and no Raelin), those armies weren't common enough that I had a realistic chance of making playoffs after I lost in round 1. Again, I don't think bringing BDs this season was an outright mistake, but they definitely didn't match up into the meta nearly as well as I thought they would. I'll have to do a better job next time.