Training Grounds: Vol. 1

Getting my High Elves ready for September Slugfest 2025

Welcome to volume one of Training Grounds! In this segment I'll be explaining my thought process as I fine tune my army list for an upcoming 2000pt tournament in September, as well as summarizing my practice games along the road.

As I've already outlined in previous articles, I think going into Old World 1.5 there are going to be more infantry blocks in general, and thus more BSBs and high combat resolution units so I knew my list was going to need to be able to deal with units like those. Additionally, I know that the tournament will be using the matched play guide, so I'm going to need some core units that can score points by holding objectives. Adding to my list building paralysis, I recently acquired a beastmen army and I was sorely tempted to use them, despite having exactly no experience at all using them. In the end, however, what remains of my sanity prevailed, and I chose to stick with my beloved High Elves this time.

This was the first draft of my army list:

Characters

-Prince on Moon Dragon 472 (general)

Blood of Caledor, full plate, shield, dragon slaying sword, 2x opal amulets

-Archmage 220

Sea guard, warbow, Level 4 (elementalism), silvery wand, seed of rebirth

-Noble 250

BSB (banner of resilience), armour of caledor, sword of hoeth, earthing rod, loremaster (takes glittering robe)

Core

-20 lother sea guard 297

Full command, razor banner

-5 archers 50

5 Archers 50

-5 silver helms 132

High helm, musician, shields

Special

-20 swordmasters 378

Full command, war banner, sacred incense 

Rare

-5 sisters of avelorn 75

-5 sisters of avelorn 75

The thinking here was that it would be a take-all-comers list, with a big block of infantry in core, some ranged threat, and some more hard-hitting combat units in the form of the prince and the swormasters. Thankfully I was able to play a couple practice games before locking in my choices...

Practice Game 1: Versus Vampire Counts

I don’t remember the exact list my opponent used, but he had a big block of skeletons, zombies, and tomb guard respectively, supported by a few units of fell bats, a unit of blood knights, a banshee and a necromancer on a mortis engine, along with a wight BSB and a foot vampire lord that went into the grave guard and ran illusion magic as a level 3. To fit with the tournament we were both practicing for, we played using open battle plus the table quarters objective from the matched play guide. 

The brave high elves face down the undead hordes.

Going into this game I knew it would be an uphill battle as I had nothing that could reliably wipe out the grave guard before they could be brought back to full strength with the three resurrection rolls of the necromancer and the vampire. My hope was to set up a multi-charge on the grave guard with the swordmasters and the dragon at the same time and that my shooting would be able to take out the blood knights. Let's just say things did not go to plan... 

My biggest mistake in this game I think was playing too cagey, hoping my opponent would step into my kill box. Unfortunately for me, the count was a shrewd tactician and he kept the flanks of his grave guard protected at all times, advancing all three blocks together as a unified front. Meanwhile my shooting units failed to do anything and were quickly overrun by blood knights and bats.

In retrospect I probably should have played much more aggressively to capitalize on the slow nature of the undead and flown my dragon into the back ranks much earlier. Instead I ended up focusing down the regular skeleton block, and while this did allow me to kill the bsb, it left me open to two screams, which took out the silver helms and whittled down the swordmasters while the graveguard crashed into my sea guard. In the end my backfield was decimated while I killed just the skeletons, the zombies, and the banshee, we didn’t even need to calculate the points to know that I had lost decisively with just my dragon and my swordmasters still alive at the end of the game. Victory to the vampire counts! 

Game 2: Versus Bretonian Exiles

While I could tell from the first game that my list probably needed to be tweaked (the main thing being that the wizard and the seaguard did almost nothing), I decided to give it another try. Meanwhile, my opponent brought a fairly standard exiles list with a kitted-out duke and BSB, both on royal pegasi. They led some pegasus knights, a couple units of regular knights, the green knight, some archers, some brigands, and some men at arms, along with a trebuchet and a bombard. 

The silver helms face off against the knight's errant.

I felt more confident going into this game since my high initiative swordmasters love fighting elite cavalry units. However, I think I played a bit too defensively again though, and I relied too heavily on doing damage at range rather than setting the terms of engagement. The first couple turns were fairly slow going, with my sisters and my seaguard whittling down the knights a bit and the green knight ambushing my archers and cutting them down. Once combat was joined things went a bit more smoothly for me though, and the swordmasters held their own against the pegasus knights. The highlight was my prince and his duke, well... duking it out for the last 2 rounds of the game, with neither general managing to kill the other. In the end it was a bloody game and much closer than the last, but I ended up losing by a few hundred points due to the table quarters objectives we were playing with. Victory to the Bretonians! 

In conclusion

Over the course of these two games, I realized that with such low survivability for their cost, High Elves need to strike hard and strike fast, sitting back and shooting doesn’t work, and level 3 and 4 wizards just aren’t worth it anymore. Additionally, I think I was a little too cautious, both in terms of how I played the prince on dragon and how I kitted him out. My thinking was that with a dragon slaying sword he could take out a rival dragon and with two opal amulets he would be safe against monster slayer, but he just didn’t need the second amulet, and without a decent weapon he whiffed more than I would have liked against other targets. On the other hand, the swordmasters were amazing in every game I’ve fielded them in, and the loremaster BSB was the key there, buffing them just enough to make them very hard to deal with.

Stay tuned for volume two of Training Ground where I explain my thinking in redesigning my list and take the new and improved version out for a spin at a local game day!