Challenge Accepted: Nemo

Nemo is one of the few warcasters out there who has been lucky enough to have 3 different versions of himself.  He's always been one of my favorite warcasters conceptually and his models (at least the newest versions) all look pretty great - dynamic while maintaining his character and personality.  While I began playing Cygnar with his epic form, I've recently been revisiting the idea of playing with the prime form: Commander Adept Nemo - one who is mostly considered one of the worst incarnations of Nemo, let alone the worst Cygnarian warcaster.  Naturally my response has been, "Challenge Accepted!" and so I've decided that I want to make him work.  It also helps that I already have a solid tournament warcaster for Cygnar in Kara Sloan and so I've been looking for a good, complimentary warcaster to run in a 2-list tournament with her, so maybe with some time and practice Nemo can make the cut!  Let me share my list with you and some of the justifications, as well as some other ideas I've tossed around and potential tweaks I might make if playtesting doesn't go so well.

pNemo (+6)

- Stormwall (19)

- Lancer (6)

- Squire (2)

Alexia and Risen (5)

Aiyanna and Holt (4)

Journeyman (3)

Rhupert (2)

It's a small model-count army for sure and it has some limitations, naturally, but consider that this is supposed to complement the weaknesses of my Sloan list and bear with me.  I imagine that this list will be my anti-warmachine list while Sloan is very definitely anti-Hordes.  With the pending arrival of the Convergence of Cyriss, I think that pNemo will become much more relevant as you start to see more warjacks hitting the battlefields.  While his feat might seem kinda "meh" at first, it can make warmachine players think twice as even if they have only one or two warjacks.  Those players who swear by their character warjacks (looking at you, Deathjack) will be sad when they suffer disruption, and even if there's someone able to give Power Booster nearby, it will still at least prevent them from receiving focus at the beginning of the turn.  I'm also hoping that with Aiyanna tagging a key model with Kiss of Lyliss I could do some serious damage as a boosted POW 16 is quite capable of doing some damage to a warjack.

Before I continue, I feel like I must discuss the Colossal in the room.  While Locomotion seems like it's wasted in this list since it can't benefit the Stormwall, there are some other great spells Nemo has available to offer the beast.  Being able to bump up his STR by 2 with Disruption Field is nice to bring the Stormwall into territory where it can potentially wreck other Colossals in one round.  It's also nice because now his Sweep power attack will hit at a whopping STR of 19 so he can hit multiple warjacks hard and disrupt them.  Yikes!  Electrify can also be beneficial since it will force your opponent to charge into the Stormwall with multiple models or position himself so that he can actually stick around to hit you.  It won't save him all of the time, but I could see some great opportunities for making my opponent facepalm.  Lastly, Voltaic Snare is going to be awesome with the Stormwall because you can hit him with it after his activation is over and after he's engaged some enemy warjacks (or at least got close to them).  Now they can't move away from you and who cares if the Stormwall takes a DEF penalty (it's already DEF 10) and can't advance anymore when it's already activated anyway?  Nemo can turn the Stormwall into a mini black hole and I love the option it provides for screwing with my opponent.  Oh and I almost forgot: Nemo can give the Stormwall 5 focus points if he wants.  With Disruption Field on him, the Stormwall could almost trash an undamaged Conquest on average rolls in one round of combat.

One of the features of this list that's also important is feeding Nemo's Arcane Accumulator with power tokens from his own models instead of hoping that the opponent will get close enough to cast spells.  Alexia, the Journeyman, and Aiyanna will all be able to cast spells that will mean that Nemo can fairly reliably sit on 10 focus per turn, meaning that throwing those 5 focus points into the Stormwall will hurt less and allow you to still do other things on your turn.  While I might drop the Lancer for another unit (like full Sword Knights), I think that having an arc node for Nemo to cast Chain Lightning through will be more useful than another unit, although playtesting might prove that not to be the case.  My hope is that through Alexia and her unit being a great tarpit (especially with Rhupert making them Tough) and the Stormwall's Covering Fire templates, I'll be able to keep most enemy infantry at bay while I carve them up with my ranged attacks and spells.  It seems like it'll be a surprisingly simple and straight-forward list to play around with, without many complex synergies or special activation order, and I think that'll be a nice change.  This list theoretically will shut down my opponent fairly well and ping them with more damage over time than they will be able to return until I can draw a bead on the opposing warcaster and shoot/magic them dead.

Like I said at the beginning, I have tweaked with the list for some time now and originally I had planned on not even taking the Stormwall, instead I would take a Stormclad, a full unit of Sword Knights, and Runewood.  I realized, however, that I might have a harder time dealing with Colossals than I thought and figured that the Stormwall would offer me better board control - very valuable with Nemo since he's literally the squishiest warcaster in the game.  I need to keep enemy models far away and not many models do that as well as the Stormwall.  Some testing is required, however, and maybe I'll be able to get some in this weekend...