Hi! So I've been doing a bunch of theorycrafting with the bloodwave warlord and I can't seem to figure out what he wants to do, where his niche is relative to other mages. It seems like the way other people use him almost never really involves the abilities on his ability card. No one seems to use battle orders or veteran markers in competitive warlord books, and all of them include arcane spells like dispel, plus plenty of enchantments, which makes cards like harshforge monlith a lot less useful. If he tries to compete with other mages on the enchantment game he has quite a few less points to spend elsewhere.
These strategies seem to only take advantage of the warlord's training and nothing else about him. He is the only mage who has this problem as far as I know. I have a lot of ideas about where the warlord's niche might be found and why, and maybe we can figure out why he hasn't succeeded in that niche yet.
Bloodwave Warlord has battle skill, so one of the options he should do well at is melee fighting. However, if he wants to fight on the front lines he needs to be able to deal with things like enfeeble and unfortunately dispels are expensive for him because of his arcane triple cost. While you could go for ballad of courage, the ballad is kinda expensive, only lasts two rounds and if you have enfeeble on you that effectively means you only have eight rounds of mage-made melee attacks with normal movement speed, and that's if you keep recasting ballad. Cheetah speed is less expensive, but the fact that it doesn't ever go away means that it gives +1 upkeep cost when you are within range of your harshforge monolith. Relying on lots of enchantments when you're up close meleeing makes the monolith kind of useless. So you probably want to use remove curse to deal with enfeeble.
Remove Curse, if used on a single enfeeble, has a net action and mana cost that is identical to using a disperse on that enfeeble.
Purify is also useful against some curses like ghoul rot and poisoned blood, and it's also a quick action to cast, which is a plus.
Harshforge monlith is better if you use fewer enchantments. If you're using fewer enchantments, than you probably want to use more incantations. And lo and behold, warlord has a ton of command incantations. While incantations are only one use, they also tend to be cheaper than enchantments and can't be dispelled. This is important for warlord because enchanter's wardstones cost triple for him so he's unlikely to want to run an enchantment heavy build regardless. Arcane Wards are useful for protecting whatever few important enchants that he does have though, since it's novice.
In addition to the harshforge monolith, there are other cards that seem like they were designed to compensate for the arcane triple cost: harshforge plate, armor ward, and champion's gauntlets.
Since warlord has arcane triple cost, he doesn't like using nullify very much. Armor ward makes it cost your opponent +4 mana to destroy your equipments. Harshforge plate makes it cost +2 to cast an enchantment or incantation spell on you. Champion's gauntlets make equipments in your ring shield and weapon slots impossible for your opponent to destroy unless they destroy the gauntlets first. And destroying the gauntlets cost an extra 2 mana.
So in this scenario, in order to destroy i.e. a warlord's weapon, you must dissolve the gauntlets for 8 mana, then pay the weapon's cost +6 to dissolve the weapon. Crazy large amounts of mana for a single weapon right? And that's if you only have harshforge plate, armor ward, champion's gauntlets and a weapon equipment. Armor Ward is probably one of those enchants that you want to stick an arcane ward on.
Harshforge plate takes 10 mana to dissolve, so if your opponent wants to go that route in order to destroy the weapon more easily, they're paying 10 mana to lower the cost of destroying two equipments by 2 mana each. That means the dissolve used to destroy your plate only pays itself back after they've casted 3 more incantations or enchantments on you. And you can always just cast a second plate.
Additionally, many soldiers have a weakness to lightning. Lightning often has a chance of dealing dazes or stuns (or staggers sometimes). The Bloodwave Warlord has two choices here: either stock up on clear minds or summon even more creatures, or some combination of the two. One of the benefits of swarming soldiers as the bloodwave warlord is that it makes the helm of command and horn of gothos more worthwhile.
The helm of command is like mage wand, except it only costs 3 mana, can only be used with command incantations, and costs only ONE mana and a quick action to switch the bound spell. Its extremely cheap, and the spell switching is only a problem because it takes a quickcast. Not a problem for your actions if your mage uses lots of creatures. Horn of Gothos is kind of self explanatory. It makes your 1 mana, 1 zone AoE battle orders into a 4 mana arena-wide battle orders. Arena wide buffs can be pretty useful, especially when you have lots of creatures in play.
Something else I thought of:
Goblin chieftain gives all goblins elusive, and goblins tend to be really frail. Comboing with akiro's battle cry could make for good rush potential if you can pull it off fast enough. Problem is, barracks opening can be kinda slow.
It also occurs to me that because goblins tend to be on the frail side, they don't really have enough staying power to kill enemy creatures much. If they're not fighting enemy nonmage creatures, they probably don't have much need for vet tokens. You could just have them charge the enemy mage instead. Goblin chieftain's ability allows him to push goblins closer so they can attack sooner. Combine that with charge on helm of command and to battle with horn of gothos, and then you have each goblin grunt hitting for 5 dice a piece.
If you want to focus more on killing enemy nonmage creatures, you might want to go with fewer more powerful creatures, like dwarves.
Another idea would be to stay in your corner zone and turtle, shooting at anything that comes near. If the opponent tries to stay back and uses deathlock and idol of pestilence, or if they're a Druid with a tree bond. akiro's hammer and ballista will wipe that smirk off their face, without needing you to venture far from your corner. You might need a goblin builder for this, not sure. If they cast their tree bond in their corner zone, and you shoot it with the akiro's hammer, that's 8 dice and then they heal it in upkeep. You could try casting garrison post to full cast goblin builder there, then force push the goblin builder to far center zone and have it cast ballista there, but that takes too much time to set up. You're probably better off having your bloodwave Warlord move into the fray while soldiers shoot your enemies from behind.
I'm not sure why no one seems to be playing warlord in the niche he was designed to excel at. Maybe no one's figured it out yet, perhaps there's some obstacle that we haven't been able to overcome. Maybe the triple cost to dispel is too much for him, and remove curse is not an adequate substitute because it uses a full action to cast. If this is the case, I would recommend using a swarm of medium size creatures like orc butchers, skeletal sentries and white cloak knights to compensate for the action cost.
This is the extent of the theorycrafting I have done so far. In practice, I am not very good at playing the bloodwave warlord yet, so take all this with a grain of salt. That being said, it really does look like the way people are playing him usually doesn't match his apparent niche. However, I am reminded of the wizard before his errata. Back then the way people played the wizard usually did not match his apparent niche either. I struggled to understand how to make good wizard decks besides the ones already made, until they errata'd him, and suddenly I started having ideas of how to play him.
That is what it feels like when I try to build for the bloodwave warlord. I can see the kind of things it looks like he is meant to do best, but I can't seem to get him to do those things very well, and neither it seems is anyone else.
Thoughts?
