10 year check: where is Bring the Cheese now?

[vegietarian18]

Note: this article will talk about meta including VC and meta excluding VC. This in my opinion is the way the Heroscape community has developed with meaningful scenes in both directions.

Heroscape was cancelled about ten years ago and mostly coincidentally competitive Heroscape majorly changed forms around the same time. After dok won the Main Event in 2010 with Major Q9, Raelin, Fen Hydra, Rats x3 (plus Rats x1 and Krav added for Day 2) the Main Event format permanently switched away from “bring the strongest army” to Reverse the Whip. Wave 13 wasn’t even out by this time, and the D&D waves were certainly not fully explored. When “bring the cheese” is available as a tournament format now it usually isn’t taken in full earnest and most people tone their armies just a bit. It’s widely assumed that the Major Q9, Raelin, Fen Hydra, Rats x3 is a head above other strong builds at 500 points, with Hydra maybe being a debatable piece vs. Kaemon or Krav or Airborne but the general concept being the same. Anyways. My thesis is that: the Bring the Cheese meta is not fully explored, even with the static set of figures in original Heroscape, and certainly not with the ever-expanding VC set of figures.

We have a “Bring the Cheese” VC inclusive event going on now, and dok took his same 2010 Gencon winning army and lost first round to a full suite of C3V figures (Zettian Deathwings x6, Arktos Van Nessing), none of them rated higher than B+ in his C3V inclusive power rankings. The point of this article isn’t to harp on dok for losing this game or to say that customs are actually OP but really to ask a couple questions:

1. What is the best army in competitive Heroscape, but more importantly:
2. What makes an army good at winning competitive Heroscape games?

In competitive Heroscape, you have to win multiple games to win an event. And winning the event is what I’ll consider the meaningful goal, not going 4-2. Not that there’s any shame in going 4-2, it’s a good record, but just that when you sit down to build your army, your goal is to be the tournament winner.

Because in order to win an event you need to win multiple games, being able to win in a variety of matchups is important. 4th Mass are great at smashing bad armies into the dust, but they have some truly bad matchups of Phantom Knights and Q9. They have no special attack, no way to crank their dice up high to kill big heroes. If you run into either of those builds you’re probably going to lose and thus not win the event. On the flip side of matchup smoothing, figures like Phantom Knights that have some truly good matchups do not need to be played in large quantities. 4x Phantom Knights is enough to win any matchup with the 4th Mass, so it’s better to spend the rest of your points in a build like that getting the Phantom Knights the help they need against their own bad matchups (special attacking heroes). Basically, when it comes to matchup variance, it’s better to have a 50% chance to win 100% of your games then a 100% chance to win 50% of your games and 0% chance to win the other 50%. Especially because typically the 50% wins of 100% of your games armies have more ways you can tip the scales in your favor each game.

Matchup variance is only relevant to a certain point though: Q9 Raelin Rats will frequently lose to a 5x Repulsors + anything else but 200 points of Repulsors is a massive handicap in other games and is unlikely to be competitive against other armies so it doesn’t have to be a concern at high level events.

Q9 Raelin Rats Hydra has pretty smooth matchups though. It has special attack with Q9, hero killing with Hydra, Rats to tie down squads. Where Q9 Raelin Rats Hydra struggles a little more than other armies is game variance. It’s nowhere near as bad as Greenscales so I’ll talk about that build. Greenscales x3 Nilfheim and Raelin is a powerhouse build with a lot of the same matchup strengths Q9 Raelin Rats has: special attack, solid screen, hero killing. Where it loses games is just in the variance of individual die rolls. The range of outcomes of attacks on Nilfheim is wide, and if he goes down you’re going to lose. The same thing is true for Q9 Rats Hydra to lesser extent: Rats are a way better screen than Greenscales so you’re going to take less hits, but if Q9 dies, the army can be in similar trouble. In dok’s 2010 Day 2 first round game Q9 died to Stinger Drain (the Krav he added with the Day 2 reinforcements turned the game around). It’s really just not out of the realm of possibility. On the other side of smoothing you have 4th Mass again: they have very smooth games. Nothing can ever go super wrong once the game starts with 4th Mass, a few turns of bad dice doesn’t matter when you have a startzone of figures.

I don’t think any of these concepts should be super new to anyone. Matchup smoothing is a very very commonly employed concept for Gencon main event armies in Reverse the Whip. Orcelfarmyone’s 2018 build brought Phantom Knights x2, Warriors of Ashra x2, Concan, Jorhdawn, Kyntela, and Arkmer. This army has everything you could possibly want to beat particular armies: anti-melee, anti-range, special attack, hero killing. But it just doesn’t do any of it particularly well, because it has so many pieces and the pieces are weak. Gencon Main Event actually allows for more matchup smoothing because it’s Reverse the Whip: top tier armies have to be able to compete against other top tier armies so they sacrifice smoothing for sheer firepower.

The argument in favor of Q9 Raelin Rats is that the Q9 death possibility is low enough that it shouldn’t happen in the ~six games it takes to win a tournament normally and that other armies have things that can go wrong enough to lose one in six games too. I think that’s a reasonable point, but I do think there are builds available that can take out Q9 often enough but have smoother variance. Traditional squad based armies have lower in game variance because a squad figure can only die once while a hero can take multiple wounds in one hit.

There’s also some great counter figures in the late D&D waves that I don’t think were fully explored before Heroscape stopped having Bring the Cheese tournaments. Phantom Knights and Mezzos and Cutters primarily. These figures have some great matchups, and some utility against their okay matchups, but most importantly they leave you space to play other things with them. Will not forget General Wars 2016 when Major Q23 swept to an event victory (including beating me) with Mezzos x4, Phantom Knights x3, and Fen Hydra. I had Zelrig, who’s a great counter to both, 5x Redcoats, who are pretty good against both, and Marcus, but he was able to find the right places and times for each piece of his army to go against mine and pull out a win. Obviously general wars made it so he didn’t have to go against Raelin often but still, the form of the army is more interesting than the specific build. There’s some other very solid DnD figures like Frost Giant and Eltahale that can consistently threaten Q9 and other heroes that sit behind a rat screen.

Now I’m going to make some wild generalizations about what I think the forms of successful bring the cheese format armies are:

When it comes to melee at top levels, Heavy Gruts > Knights. Maybe even Axegrinders > Knights. Knights are awesome at smashing in ratless armies, but as soon as the Rats get involved they just have to rely on their high stats and hope they can smash through the Scatters. It’s not impossible. I believe in 2010 Matthias came really close to beating ManTrainChooChoo’s Rat Raelin Q9 using a Knight build. But Heavy Gruts are simply much better at this task and aren’t that much worse against other things. Axegrinders don’t have Chomp and disengage, but they can have 6 move and most things behind a Rat screen will give them Fearless Advantage. (Axegrinders have the secondary benefit of being able to matchup smooth: the most points you should really ever spend on Dwarves is 400, for Dwarves x4 Mogrimm. Dwarves x3/4 Darrak is very solid too. This leaves plenty of points to add in another piece to help in other matchups.)

When it comes to Greenscales at top levels, bring something else. Either a different army or take something else alongside them to help you win games if your dragon goes down. I won’t ever play more than 2x Greenscales now because it’s just too painful to lose your dragon and it’s better to have more support when you do. Quahon bonding with Spiders I think is substantially better than with Greenscales for this reason. Spiders have worse base stats but their stats don’t get neutered when their dragon dies, and you have more points to bring more support (including a second bonding option for the Spiders).

When it comes Wait Then Fire squads at high levels, 10th > 4th. Your first response may be: wait, aren’t 10th just 4th but better against melee but worse against range? And 4th already beat melee so you don’t need the boost against range? But that’s just a little simplified by comparing them strictly side by side. One big reason the 10th are the better choice is Phantom Knights. 4th Mass are very bad against Phantom Knights, as I’ve mentioned multiple times in this article. But the Bayonet makes the 10th slightly favored in trades every turn: four attacks of 3v4 is better than three attacks of 3v3, and winning that matchup is a big deal for a ranged squad. Second is the Valiant restriction. You can pack Raelin or a special attacker or both with 10th Reg and help their bad matchup against Rats and Q9. It doesn’t matter that 10th themselves are slightly worse against Q9 if you can pack a bigger counter to Q9 with the rest of your army and smooth the matchup in that regard.

I don’t feel super qualified to speak on how VC has impacted the meta over its own 10 years simply because there are so many fewer VC tournaments especially at high competitive levels of bring the cheese. That’s why I’m so excited about this Bring the VCheese tournament that we’re doing now and hopefully running more of in the future, to see what actually is good now. Cathar and Quahon are the clear additions to the canon of A figures, but there’s some possible contenders like Incendiborgs and Cultists that possibly just haven’t found the right builds yet, and some newer figures like Marutuk and Rygarn that I think have serious potential as well. At the very least, in a VC meta, bringing melee is substantially different solely because of the possibility of Cathar.

I spoke maybe a little too authoritatively than I meant to here because I really just wanted to get the conversation started. I don’t think anyone really is an authority on tournament level bring the cheese Heroscape at high levels just because the format hasn’t been played in a while.

I also don’t know why I wrote nearly 2000 words on a Heroscape format that hasn’t been super seriously played in 10 years but it was fun.

[OEAO]

Excellent write-up. I’ll probably comment something more substantial tonight, but you hit it on the head with matchup-smoothing: it’s the thing I value most.

[dok]

I generally agree with your main points, which if I may attempt to summarize them, are:

• The best armies are ones that have very few truly bad matchups, at least among the set of other "strong" armies that one would expect to see in a double blind prebuilt event. It's better to have a small edge in a lot of games than a huge edge in some and very little edge in others.
  
  
• An army that can weather a run of bad luck (low variance) is generally a better choice than one that can be undone by just a few bad moments.

I tend to agree that Rats/Rae/Q9/Hydra isn't optimal in that variance sense. Having all your offense tied down to two pieces is pretty tough and forces you to make a lot of hard decisions about how to best keep them safe. Of course they are both extremely hard to kill, particularly Q9, so you have some margin. But if, say, your opponent disengages with a Deathwing and goes 4/5 skulls, then wins init and dives in for 5/5 skulls, and you go 5/18 on defense, well, yeah that's not good.

Part of the reason I played that army in 2010 main event was that it gave me room to add a lot on day 2. I could have gone Krav instead of Hydra on day 1 (playing 30 points under instead of 10 points under™) but Hydra helps in more of the difficult matchups like Dragons or Heavies while Krav mainly reinforce already strong matchups, with the only big exception being stingers. Fortunately for me I won my only stinger match on day 1 (which was stingers/Nilf so Hydra was still helpful) and had Krav when I really needed them on day 2.

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

When it comes to melee at top levels, Heavy Gruts > Knights. Maybe even Axegrinders > Knights. Knights are awesome at smashing in ratless armies, but as soon as the Rats get involved they just have to rely on their high stats and hope they can smash through the Scatters. It’s not impossible. I believe in 2010 Matthias came really close to beating ManTrainChooChoo’s Rat Raelin Q9 using a Knight build.

He did indeed although he got a first round kill of Raelin and Kaemon with the Airborne. When we played the day before he also got first round drop, but I led with Q9 instead of rats, which worked better to neutralize the Airborne before they became a threat. (That game slowed down a ton after that. It was the first time Ken and I ever played and I imagine he might have expected me to become impatient and expose my units a bit more. I never even got to the reach-over-rats-with-Hydra stage, although I was only a couple turns from it.)

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

But Heavy Gruts are simply much better at this task and aren’t that much worse against other things.

I think the main advantage knights have over heavies is much less dependence on putting their heroes up front. It's a lot easier to target and kill Grimnak than Gilbert. This means Heavies have significantly higher variance than Knights, which as you covered up above is an issue. It also means that Heavies are significantly worse in some matchups, most notably against stingers, although in general Heavies have smoother matchups because they handle Raelin/screens so much more easily.

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

Axegrinders don’t have Chomp and disengage, but they can have 6 move and most things behind a Rat screen will give them Fearless Advantage. (Axegrinders have the secondary benefit of being able to matchup smooth: the most points you should really ever spend on Dwarves is 400, for Dwarves x4 Mogrimm. Dwarves x3/4 Darrak is very solid too. This leaves plenty of points to add in another piece to help in other matchups.)

Agreed with most of that; there's a lot more room for creativity in Axegrinder builds. Although back in the 24 figure days, rats & stingers was a popular build, and that pretty much eats Axegrinders for lunch.

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

When it comes to Greenscales at top levels, bring something else. Either a different army or take something else alongside them to help you win games if your dragon goes down. I won’t ever play more than 2x Greenscales now because it’s just too painful to lose your dragon and it’s better to have more support when you do. Quahon bonding with Spiders I think is substantially better than with Greenscales for this reason. Spiders have worse base stats but their stats don’t get neutered when their dragon dies, and you have more points to bring more support (including a second bonding option for the Spiders).

Honestly, saying "I can win 4 games in a row without Raelin-backed, GSW-fronted Nilfheim going down too soon" seems like about as reasonable a gamble as anything else. You can always follow with something cheap like Marro Warriors. No, we haven't seen a ton of lone dragon + bonding squad tournament wins, but we also haven't seen a lot of bring the cheese events since they were released.

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

When it comes Wait Then Fire squads at high levels, 10th > 4th. Your first response may be: wait, aren’t 10th just 4th but better against melee but worse against range? And 4th already beat melee so you don’t need the boost against range? But that’s just a little simplified by comparing them strictly side by side. One big reason the 10th are the better choice is Phantom Knights. 4th Mass are very bad against Phantom Knights, as I’ve mentioned multiple times in this article. But the Bayonet makes the 10th slightly favored in trades every turn: four attacks of 3v4 is better than three attacks of 3v3, and winning that matchup is a big deal for a ranged squad. Second is the Valiant restriction. You can pack Raelin or a special attacker or both with 10th Reg and help their bad matchup against Rats and Q9. It doesn’t matter that 10th themselves are slightly worse against Q9 if you can pack a bigger counter to Q9 with the rest of your army and smooth the matchup in that regard.

The big thing with 4th is they are more sensitive to the army point total than other builds are. If you are playing below 400 with full startzones, massed 4th Mass is really good, and can generally even handle obnoxious defensive ranged pods (which are usually not able to be properly fleshed out at that point total).

At higher point totals, 4th loses some shine until you have enough points to consider suicide dragon builds. At 535, ignoring a rampaging Nilfheim is often tough to do, and can take down a lot of the bad matchups for 4th Mass. But then every point above 535 or 540 makes it start to get weaker again. (In the same GW event you mentioned, I managed to beat Zelrig/10th with 4th x5, Nilf, RotV Drake. That was despite RotV Drake being relatively crappy filler. I lost to the same Q23 build you mention, in part because we were on a jungle hill map that is terrible for the 4th, plus everything in Q23's army is tricky for the 4th except arguably the Hydra - which is great against Nilf. Plus Q23 played an uncharacteristically flawless game .)

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

I don’t feel super qualified to speak on how VC has impacted the meta over its own 10 years simply because there are so many fewer VC tournaments especially at high competitive levels of bring the cheese. That’s why I’m so excited about this Bring the VCheese tournament that we’re doing now and hopefully running more of in the future, to see what actually is good now. Cathar and Quahon are the clear additions to the canon of A figures, but there’s some possible contenders like Incendiborgs and Cultists that possibly just haven’t found the right builds yet, and some newer figures like Marutuk and Rygarn that I think have serious potential as well. At the very least, in a VC meta, bringing melee is substantially different solely because of the possibility of Cathar.

Spearmen are definitely legit. They're probably weakest against Greenscales, which makes for some interesting matchup loops, and might mean the overall VC metagame is less degenerate than the non-VC one.

Quahon is basically higher variance Nilf, which is usually bad from a "win the tournament" perspective. Her special is harder to manipulate by single-engagement than Nilf's is, though, which is really great in some matchups. On the flip side she needs to get 1 space closer to unleash, and often closer than that to line up the optimal lightning breath, which means more agressive/dangerous placements in general. (This is part of why she pairs better with spiders, who are faster and cheaper and can be used more easily to support that style of play.)

Incendiborgs are definitely good; they are somewhat overshadowed by Q9 most of the time, but are lower variance and better against some melee builds. They're a highly competitive piece for sure but not very metagame-altering.

Marutuk is interesting as a fairly strong counter piece. Your paring of Maratuk with Cathar in the current event is pretty logical given what I just said about the greenscale/cathar matchup. I'm not totally sold on the big Dragonspawn but we'll see.

Microcorp Troopers are A- in my rankings and I think they deserve that. They are a lot like weaker 4th but with the addition of a special attack that smooths some of the bad matchups. Trading a bit of power for less matchup variance.

Aside from that I think VC is mostly just B+ sorts of stuff, which can be very good but are not really going to shift a double blind meta. Rygarn in particular is interesting because he helps a TON in techy/splashy armies, so he seems super good when you play him in reverse the whip or other lower meta sorts of games. But if you are bringing top tier armies, I think he's pretty clearly worse than Raelin, or another squad of whatever. The big construct army with Talingul is also an absolute masher against lower-tier stuff, but can get kind of manipulated and taken down by elite common-heavy armies.

[mtl1998]

Originally Posted by dok

Marutuk is interesting as a fairly strong counter piece. Your paring of Maratuk with Cathar in the current event is pretty logical given what I just said about the greenscale/cathar matchup. I'm not totally sold on the big Dragonspawn but we'll see.

I'd be interested to hear what people think about Heracles too. In my mind, Heracles fills a similar role as Marutuk. I like Heracles better, personally, but I've only played Marutuk a few times.

I suppose Marutuk is better if you only have 195 points left. :P

[dok]

Good call, Heracles is also an A- in my rankings I think. Perhaps I should have looked at my rankings before I posted here.

[superfrog]

Heracles and Marutuk do share a lot of similarities. The double turn potential with Heracles makes him stronger, I think.

[vegietarian18]

On Marutuk vs. Heracles: I think Marutuk is substantially better for a couple reasons. Biggest one is that she can climb over screens. It's the Jotun effect for Heracles: he has the stats to kill Q9 or whatever hero he's supposed to, but he can get stuffed before he can get there. Marutuk is much harder to stuff because she can hop a screen. Also, all of Marutuk's negative powers and handicaps against small medium don't really compare to Heracles not getting to attack on his Labors turn against small or medium figures. But Labors is pretty good period and Marutuk has nothing like that. Marutuk being a huge figure is also nice although I guess not against Dwarves or Heracles or Marutuk.

dok summarized my points well in case anyone wants to read dok's 1000 words instead of my 2000.

Originally Posted by dok

I think the main advantage Heavies have over knights is much less dependence on putting their heroes up front. It's a lot easier to target and kill Grimnak than Gilbert. This means Heavies have significantly higher variance than Knights, which as you covered up above is an issue. It also means that Heavies are significantly worse in some matchups, most notably against stingers, although in general Heavies have smoother matchups because they handle Raelin/screens so much more easily.

Fair point here. Grimnak is very susceptible to an early death with only 5L 4D and 5 move and needing to be on the front lines. Nerak helps a little and Raelin too if you can fit her in but, but Heavies don't have the same tank bonding heroes the Knights do. I think in general as a bonding squad it's better to have your heroes susceptible to an early death than the squads? Because even if Grimnak dies you have a ton of Heavies left. But Grimnak has to do some damage if that's how it plays out. I played Grimnak and Heavies vs. Deathchasers matchup in the Main Event this year and played Grimnak super cautiously because I needed Grimnak alive more than I needed Chomps, so I could use the 4/4 Heavies to protect Grimnak and take kills on Deathchasers. But you can't really do that against Stingers or whatever.

Speaking of Stingers they're probably the big missing meta piece from my article and I don't know what to say about them. Their stats are solid but not great, and they don't have any great matchups and a few really bad ones. However, they can be used for matchup smoothing since there really isn't a critical mass of Stingers required for success with them. Even 2x or 3x Stingers is serviceable in top tier builds. They're probably like Phantoms in that 4x Stingers is the best sort of build. Hey maybe Kaemon Raelin Stingers is good.

Originally Posted by dok

Spearmen are definitely legit. They're probably weakest against Greenscales, which makes for some interesting matchup loops, and might mean the overall VC metagame is less degenerate than the non-VC one.

Marutuk is interesting as a fairly strong counter piece. Your paring of Maratuk with Cathar in the current event is pretty logical given what I just said about the greenscale/cathar matchup. I'm not totally sold on the big Dragonspawn but we'll see.

Greenscales are a brutal matchup for Cathar because you really want to engage the dragons to limit their offense but Cathar hate moving into engagement. I do hope that Marutuk can make that matchup winnable but it's yet to be determined and yet to be determined if I'll even get far enough to face Greenscales.

Originally Posted by dok

Microcorp Troopers are A- in my rankings and I think they deserve that. They are a lot like weaker 4th but with the addition of a special attack that smooths some of the bad matchups. Trading a bit of power for less matchup variance.

Troopers are great imo. They have okay stats, and a squad special attack is amazing. I think Dysole's trooper spam build probably would have been better served with a big hero as it will have 4th Mass bad matchups against dragons by virtue of not having any high attack. But hard to say what hero.

Another C3V figure with potential I think is the Nhah Scirh Cultists, as they can just completely ignore Major Q9 who is one of the best figures in the game and no one else can do that. I struggle a bit with them because the problem is you don't really want to ignore Q9, you just want to kill him. But I think there's potential if you can find a good pairing for them that can help them win normal games, because they really struggle against just melee bonding.

[dok]

Cultists are absolutely in the PK bin of helping in specific matchups. The problem is that you can think of the meta, very broadly speaking, as a mix of three things:

• Multi special attackers with a screen
• Melee bonding
• Ranged commons

Cultists have the same problem as PKs, which is that they are really only a good counter to one of the three. (To be fair, they, like the PKs, are not a waste against the other two. Just not as good.)

Basically everything we think of as the core of a strong build is good against 2/3.

[Matthias Maccabeus]

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

1. What is the best army in competitive Heroscape, but more importantly:
2. What makes an army good at winning competitive Heroscape games?

1. Knights with Gilbert, Heavies with Grimnak, Dwarves with Darrak or Mogrimm.
2. It bonds with melee.

That was easy. Any other questions?

[superfrog]

Marutuk can walk through screens but still takes leaving engagement attacks. That just makes it a maneuverability thing, which Heracles has an advantage on by virtue of being single-spaced and not having denial issues.

[vegietarian18]

Originally Posted by Matthias Maccabeus

1. Knights with Gilbert, Heavies with Grimnak, Dwarves with Darrak or Mogrimm.
2. It bonds with melee.

That was easy. Any other questions?

I'm curious what the Matthias take is on these two armies for 500:

Knights x4, Gilbert, Alastair
Knights x5, Gilbert, Eldgrim

My dad and Chris Perkins are both running with the first, but I'm pretty sure you'd choose the second. Or Airborne instead of Alastair.

[Chris Perkins]

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

I'm curious what the Matthias take is on these two armies for 500:

Knights x4, Gilbert, Alastair
Knights x5, Gilbert, Eldgrim

My dad and Chris Perkins are both running with the first, but I'm pretty sure you'd choose the second. Or Airborne instead of Alastair.

For what it's worth, I went with the former (x4 + Alastair) because I thought it gave me a better chance against the Raelin/Q9/Rats matchup (avg up to 5.3 attacks per turn potentially into the Rats to open holes in the screen faster). And I expected to see more Raelin/Q9/Rats than just the one army.

I also liked the matchup against Dragon + screen better with Alastair for similar reasons (plus more dice to try and kill the dragon with).