The "Counter-Punch" playstyle

This article was inspired by a couple of comments exchanged with someone on a Bell of Lost Souls review of the Woldwrath.  I thought that the review was pretty solid (although without much play experience) and I generally like the Warmachine/Hordes writers for BoLS.  In the comments I mentioned my experiences with the Woldwrath for some additional feedback and I had an interesting exchange there discussing Circle's playstyle.  In fact, I've had similar thoughts from reading Lamoron's articles on his experiences with Circle over on his blog.  I've always been interested in Circle and they're my first faction since Mk. II (although it might have been Cygnar if they had released the Firefly model sooner for that eNemo theme list).  I'm not going to suppose that I'm an expert on the faction or that others are incompetent, but the purpose of this article is to try to explain the playstyle of the Circle Orboros and why many find the faction to be so challenging outside of just a handful of warlocks.  I believe the best way to describe this playstyle is something called "Counter-Punch".

List Building 101: Playstyle

I've been seeing a lot of articles on the internet lately discussing list-building.  What I've been finding most interesting is that these articles are popping up on web sites that have traditionally been focused more on Warhammer 40k.  Perhaps it's a sign of the extreme growth that the Warmachine/Hordes community has seen in the last year, but I think that one thing that is often neglected in these list building articles is the issue of Expectations.  What do I mean by that?  I'm talking about both what you expect of your own style of play, which I mentioned yesterday when I was talking about faction loyalty.