List Building Advice: Fiona

I recently received another request for some list building advice on the facebook page, this time regarding Fiona the Black.  I love Fiona and if she didn't require such specific synergies and characters, I would bring her to more tournaments.  I always have fun with her when I play her but she's missing something to make her more of a tournament-viable warcaster.  That said, I was eager to provide some advice on building a list with her since I've spent many hours playing her and building lists for her.  While I'm satisfied with the list that I play with her, it's nice to design a list for someone else.  In addition, this particular person wanted me to work within the models in their collection, which I'm always happy to do.  Here was the message:

Showcase: Fiona and Taryn di la Rovissi

 It takes me a long time to get models painted.  It's not that I'm a slow painter.  In fact, I think that I paint models fairly quickly.  No, it's that I am obsessive about finishing the model and since that takes around 3-5 hours, and I have a job that consumes most of my time, that means that even when I get bit by the painting bug, I still can only get a couple of models done per week.  Last weekend I was inspired by my recent successes with Fiona the Black and I decided that I should just sit down and get painting.  The most daunting part for me, was trying to nail down a paint scheme.  Why was this so difficult?  It's because I have such a hodge-podge of models that I use with my Mercenaries, including the recent addition of the pSkarre theme list.  This means that I want my models to blend with Cryx, but I also want them to make sense if I want to play the Highborn Covenant mercenary contract.  This left me with some difficult decisions for my palette, but ultimately I decided to use two of my favorite colors: purple and green, accented by white.

The Adventures of Fiona the Black

So I've been trying to get as many games as possible in with Fiona now that I have some models to work with.  Each game has been very close but even those where I've lost, I've had a really good chance at the win, I just forgot about a particular rule (beware a satyxis captain keeping Skarre from getting knocked down!).  Today I want to share the list that I've been using and reflect on what I've learned about Fiona the Black - the least liked of the privateer warcasters.

Debriefing: Fiona

Yesterday I wrote up a battle report for my first time playing Fiona.  It was a lot of fun and was a really close game considering that I was matched up against eHaley, who is traditionally considered a top-tier warcaster for Cygnar.  While there was a couple 'Oops' moments we realized after the game where both me and my opponent forgot some rules (that you can't headbutt a larger base, Storm Striders have 360 LOS, etc.) the dice were really on my side and I shouldn't have won.  Even still, the experience itself was valuable and I was able to reflect on the list as a whole and how to use it in the future.  So now I'd like to debrief the battle report and reflect back on what I learned from the experience.

Battle Report: Fiona the Black

I finally got a game in with Fiona the Black!  I've had the model for over a year but I've finally had the opportunity to play a game with her, after all of the list-building I've been doing.  It was against a friend of mine and he has been playing around with the list he brought but he admittedly jumps around between armies fairly often (it's a local joke that we all buy his stuff on clearance).  This was the first time that I have played with Fiona and I had a really bad match-up against me, but my army performed quite admirably.  Without further ado, I will share the two lists and then as close as I can to a blow-by-blow of the battle.

Fiona the Black - 35 points

I've been on a pirate kick lately.  This always seems to happen when I play my Circle too much.  Don't get me wrong, I love my Circle army and I love the way they play!  I just feel the itch to play my pirates because they bring back something... a childlike nostalgia.  I loved pirates when I was younger and loved drawing pictures of pirate ships and the like.  One of my favorite computer games growing up was Pirates Gold!, a game for Windows 3.1 where you would assemble a crew, hunt for treasure, capture other ships, and it was a blast to play, but I digress.  I'm feeling the pirate twitch once more as while my usual standby was Broadsides Bart, I never seemed terribly satisfied with him and always seemed to have a more difficult time than I should.  I wanted a shooty pirate list and you'd think that Bart would be good at it, but 6 POW 14 AOEs can only take you so far when most of the lists you face are warjack or warbeast heavy.  Naturally, I've gravitated towards Fiona the Black.

List Building: Fiona the Black (50 points)

One of my other factions that I play is Mercenaries.  Specifically, I play the privateer mercenaries, and I started with Broadsides Bart.  There is one warcaster who has always piqued my interest and that is Fiona the Black.  She's a badass goth pirate chick that's not Skarre.  I love her artwork in the Mercenaries book and I love the idea of a manipulative denial warcaster, but I have struggled for a long time to figure out how does she win?  I have not played her yet because I have not felt confident in a list yet.  Her tier is kinda "meh" and I don't think it takes advantage of the many tools she has available, and the benefits from her tier list don't make up for that, in my opinion.  Last night I had a revelation, and I began building based upon my other list building articles, and I think I have a list that makes me feel a bit more confident.