Picking my AoS army

So you may have read that I’m attending an AoS event in October (81 days away from today to be precise).  I don’t have an army to take so I need to pick one quickly.  Here are my criteria:

1. I’ve got to love the models.  This comes first over everything.  I’m only really in this hobby for the building and painting – the tournaments are just an excuse for a good time with my mates.
2. It needs to be low model count.  I don’t have long and I still want the army to look good(ish) so low model count is definitely a thing
3. I want it to be aggressive.  My 40K army (you can read about that here) is quite fast and shooty and tricky (it’s Eldar, it’s just how they roll).  I’d like something a bit more, umh, straightforward for AoS.
4. I don’t want lots of metal panels, I’d like the army to be organic.  This is because I’ve just painted lots of metal (you can see some of that here) and I want to do something different.

So I’ve been through a quick check of the armies on the GW website and scored them against this list as follows:

Grand alliance Order

Criteria	Aelves	DoK	Dwarves	Empire	Fyreslayers
Models	Y	N	Y	Y	N
Elite	Y	N	N	N	Y
Fighty	N	Y	Y	N	Y
Skin	N	Y	N	Y	Y

Criteria	DK	KO	Lizards	SCE	Sylvaneth
Models	Y	Y	N	Y	N
Elite	Y	Y	N	Y	N
Fighty	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Skin	Y	N	Y	N	Y

Grand Alliance Chaos

	BOC	BOK	DoT	EC	HoS	Nurgle	Skaven
Models	Y	N	Y	N	Y	N	N
Elite	N	N	N	Y	Y	N	N
Fighty	Y	Y	N	Y	N	Y	N
Skin	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	Y

Grand Alliance Death

Criteria / army	FEC	LoN	NH
Love the models	Y	Y	Y
Low model count	N	Y	N
Aggressive	Y	N	N
Organic aesthetic	Y	N	N

Grand Alliance Destruction

Criteria / army	BCR	BS	GSG	GB	IJ
Love the models	Y	N	N	Y	Y
Low model count	Y	N	N	Y	N
Aggressive	Y	Y	N	Y	Y
Organic aesthetic	Y	Y	Y	Y	N

So my slightly shorter long list is:

Order	Chaos	Death	Destruction
Deepkin	BoC	FEC	BCR
KO	HoS		GB
SCE

Right, let’s start whittling these down.  A few of these I’ve had armies for before (in WHFB 8^th) and so I feel like I’d be missing a chance to do something new if I went back to them. So for that reason out go:

• BoC (even though these are my true gaming love and I will do an army in the future)
• FEC (painting ghouls can, 100%, FEC off)

The nest step is carriage.  I travel internationally and might do so with the army so, actually, I want something fairly robust that I don’t worry about snapping.  That means goodbye to:

• Deepkin
• KO
• HoS (another shame because I think these are really tasty)

So I’m down to three.  Stormcast, BeastClaw Raiders and GutBusters.  I’ve had a SCE army in AoS before (I painted it horribly) and whilst I could do a great job now there’s not the organic aesthetic I’m looking for.  So now we’re down to two.  Both BCR and GB are great looking armies.  I loved them in 8^th ed (my best mate played them competitively so I never collected them).  I now have the opportunity to run an army with a very, very low model count.  Not sure how they’ll stand up to international travel but hello to my new AoS army…BeastClaw Raiders!