Pirate Queen Mortenebra?

As you might have noticed, I've fallen in love with Bonejacks. This also means that our infamous Infernal Machines list, is less attractive, since I'll be bringing two Harrowers as my only heavies. After putting in two Helldivers, Scavengers, Stalkers, and Harrowers, I find myself with 12 points left over. I could add another 3-4 Bonejacks, but I got to thinking about units I could bring instead.

The Privateer Press forums had a few articles about this, but the ones I found all discussed Bane Thralls or The Withershadow Combine. I can see that Bane Thralls with recalibration would be devastating, and the WSC is always worth bringing, but neither of those choices really gave me synergy in a light jack assassination list. Suddenly I remembered I had quite a few Satyxis Raiders in my pile of random stuff, and sure enough I found a full raiders squad, with Sea Witch and Captain. Now why would I bring them?

• Gaining ground; Mortenebra lists are actually rather slow when it comes to a general advance. Sure we can slingshot individual jacks across the table, but the rest of the army is doing a lot of walking. Satyxis Raiders may advance deploy, engage from ridiculous distances, and are Pathfinders. In a normal game this means, that if your opponent advances more than ten inches in the first round, he's within Raider range. This could prove valuable in zone control games, or simply to push back an enemy army to deny them control of the table.
• Models.Actions.Focus; is the resource I work with on this blog, and a Mortenebra list is low on everything. It has low model count, low actions/round, and is strapped for Focus. This means that introducing a unit with a high amount of models (something like double the number of a tier list), a high number of actions (again due to numbers), that operates without spending Focus, is a great boon.

 There are also a host of minor benefits that Satyxis Raiders bring to a Mortenebra army.

• Feedback; A point of damage on the Warcaster means Finisher on the Scavenger.
• Knockdown; This will really mess up an opponent if triggered on a free strike.
• Defense; Even more defense sixteen models, that care little about blast damage.
• Damage; Power swell and Recalibration, makes for a lot of damage that round.

Satyxis Raiders engaging his lines, also require huge amounts of M.A.F to remove. He can't really shoot them when they're engaged, since they're at defense twenty, and with good placement he will mess up his own lines and activation sequences, in order to get rid of them. I'll be trying it out tonight if I can get a game, and I'll let you know if this actually works in real games, as well as the ones in my head. In any case it was a nice excuse to get my Satyxis Raiders stripped and based.

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