A Few Thoughts on Karchev

Yesterday, I made this video to honour Christopher Davies' amazing achievement of winning the Iron Gauntlet, WTC -and- Warmachine Weekend Invitationals. It is of course a tongue in cheek video, and I don't want to take anything away from Chris' win (he must be an amazing player, besides he didn't run Mad Dogs for neither the Iron Gauntlet nor the WTC). I just thought it would be funny. Indeed, today the twitter-verse has more or less exploded following a tweet from William Cruickshanks which you can see here. Since we are talking about twitter you can find my account here: Courage of Caspia on Twitter.

Anyway. Karchev! I first faced this beast of a list at Iron Moot. You can check out my reports #271 and #274 on the battle reports page to read about those encounters. Right off the bat it was clear to me that this list was potentially a meta breaker. It is just too much of too many things for a lot of the factions in the game to handle. Truth be told I feel very lucky to play Cygnar and actually have some sort of answer. In my opinion most factions to not without tooling excessively. 

The merits of the Karchev + Mad Dog spam lists were impressive even before yesterday. Johan Dyrlind came in second at the Iron Gauntlet Qualifier at Iron Moot and then finished 2nd in the Nordic Invitationals the next day, losing the finals when he was list-locked to his second list. Jocke Rapp then went on to win Danish Masters. Johan and Jocke both took this list to the WTC this year. Sweden was the best nation at the WTC so they certainly faced their fair share of tough opponents. To my knowledge both of them exclusively played Karchev throughout the event, coming up with a staggering record of 11-1 against some of the best players in the world. UPDATE: In the commens below Torbjörn pointed out that Canada also played Mad Dogs and the total record at the WTC this year was 13-1. The only loss occured when Johan forgot to move a Mad Dog to block LoS to Karchev in a game against Haley2, one of the few casters in the game with some angles in this matchup. 

On top of all this, Chris Davies now qualifies for Warmachine Weekend Invitationals through the Last Chance Qualifiers and simply wins the entire event! I do believe that all of these Karchev-piloting players are amazingly strong, but these insane records speak of other factors at play here as well. It is in my opinion quite evident that this list needs a serious nerf and I hope Privateer Press addresses this issue come January. 

In closing, I would like to note that I love a challenge. I love trying out various lists and games against the hardest opposition out there. Haley2 is one of the better answers to Karchev and my current list has all the tools I need, I think. However when assessing what breaks the meta we have to consider the big picture and this is just too much. It reminds me of the Haley2 list I played towards the end of Mk. 2: Roughly half the factions in the game felt like walk-over matchups. Haley2 has been greatly toned down from that (she arguably needs another hit with the nerf-bat but her power-level is nowhere near the 9000+ it used to be), but that doesn't help the meta that much if something else takes her place. I think PP did a great job with Mk. 3 and I hope the January errata will improve the amazing warmahordes experience even more.