Thinking Cap: Privateers

I love my pirates and now that the local Warmachine/Hordes league is winding down, I'm really excited to get back to painting these guys (although I have to finish grading first...).  Lately I've been poring through the Mercenaries book trying to find some hidden gems that I might not have noticed before.  My studies have been focused particularly on building synergy for my Fiona list, to see if there are any ways in which I can tweak it and make it stronger.  Ideally, I'd love to use this list in a tournament but character restriction makes it difficult for me to take models that I might want to take in another list instead, and that has made decisions more difficult.  One of the reasons is that the privateer models are notorious for their potential synergy with all of their solos.  Each solo is respectable on their own but the fact that they all offer some benefit to other models is what makes the pirates competitive.  However, I've brought up before in my list building that I think that Press Gangers are superior to Sea Dogs in many ways and today I want to illustrate why, by looking at some of the synergy 'packages' offered to them.

List Building: Zerkova 35 points

I only just realized today that I don't actually have any list building articles posted for Khador.  I knew that I wrote one up for 3++ but I never actually posted it here.  So, I apologize, but today I will be officially posting the article I wrote on building a 35 point list with Zerkova.  Zerkova has a special place in my heart and I think she's pretty fantastic and cool, offering a unique playstyle to Khador.  Unfortunately, she struggles to come up with easy answers to some common problems, so she's often left behind in favor of the flashier warcasters like Sorscha or Butcher.  That said, I think that she will be a satisfying warcaster in the hands of a dedicated general.  Let's start - as usual - with looking at her feat.

The Gentleman's League

So for the last 5 weeks my local game club has been running a Warmachine/Hordes League that has been escalating.  While it took some ideas from the Privateer Press Journeyman League, it had very different and separate rules for it.  It was really simple: you received 3 points for a victory, 1 point for a loss, and -1 if you didn't get a game in for that one week, and each person could only submit 2 game results per week (max).  This week is the last week of the league and when I was in there on Friday I felt some real malaise about the end of the League since the player at the top had such a huge lead over everyone else (he had 10 points more than I did) and with only 2 games allowed, there's almost no incentive for anyone to play anymore.  This got me thinking about the goals behind these escalation leagues and the goals behind them.  With those goals in mind, might there be, perhaps, a better way of doing it?  And thus, I propose: The Gentleman's League!  But first, some background.