AoS How to deal with Sons of Behemat?

I'm going to a tournament in October and one of the top armies there is going to be Sons of Behemat with their classic 3 big Giants and one squad of 3 small ones. I'm not sure what list to bring yet, but what are some general advice people can give me? What should i be wary of? Should i tailor my list in such a way to be able to try to kill one big Gargant per turn?

 

I'm interested in this topic as well. My friend and I have discussed this a bit but I don't have any game experience on it. While I suspect that we can outmaneuver them with starborne and summon skinks to clog up the board so it's hard for them to get around, or we can survive their attacks well enough with TL's scaly skin damage reduction, we might struggle to pass their "dps check." I think you need to kill a mega per turn to win the matchup and that might require specific lists that wouldn't be as good against the broader meta. Either heavy amounts of salamanders in starborne, or stegadon heavy lists in TL relying on bows and steg charges to get the job done. Their magic isn't anything worth noting so I think we can reliably get our spells off so a starseer would be necessary I think to counter AoD and let the sallies rend get through.

I'm excited to hear other people's takes on this though!

 

What the player in question told me was that the 10 man Skinks are no problem and actually really poor screens, from his view. When Mega-Gargants charge they can put out MWs, then take the monster action for even more MWs, so in average they kill 7-8 skinks on the charge alone, and they do have a shooting attack to kill even more to clear our screens. Also because of their rules they can charge over the screens to the targets in the back.

I think the same way about how to put them down. A Starseer is sooo good with his 24" range spell, and then multiple Salamanders and 1 Bastiladon could roughly do the trick. A fully buffed up Skink Chief roughly kills a Mega Gargant alone, but that is shooting and then Melee with 2s to hit and wound, rerolling 1s to hit and the extra Attack from the Asterisk, Command Trait and CA. Even more important is that a Skink Chief with Mystic Shield, All out Defense and the Crest survives the return attacks from a healthy Gatebreaker Mega Gargant, which are the ones best against Monsters.

 

My thought with the skinks was less in the conventional sense of screens and more to just take up space and make it so the gargants can't fit where they want to charge. I'm not sure how big their bases are, but for my example let's say they're 6" diameter. I would position my skinks so there is 5" between the back of their base and the front of the unit I want to protect, so that the gargant literally can't fit since they can't end a move on top of a unit.

 

From their Errata, Longshanks works on move, run and retreat. Not charge. So, my understanding is that they still need to manually kill the screens to get past them, if you play and position correctly. Yes, the mortal output before the close combat phase can clear them, but just stating the skipping over the screen part.

As for how to actually handle them, I don't really know. I played versus a Kragnos SoB player a month ago in a league format, and I won with extreme lucky rolls. Kragnos died to Curse and volume of knight attacks, Mancrushers died to 3 Salamanders and a Carno, I ignored a Mega.

 

Sons is my other competitive army. When playing as Sons, my general game plan is to take the grand strategy where I have a battleline left alive by end of game. Its pretty much gonna always give me 3 pts. Then Turn 1 Ferocious advance for automatic 3 pts. T2 I savage spearhead for another automatic 3 pts. T3-5 ill chose the best options between kill a battleline unit, kill a monster, or take over an objective depending on how the game is playing out. This gets me 3 pts every turn and puts me at 18 vps for the game just by being sons. Very few armies in the game can stop me from doing this. Its pretty much guaranteed,

So as seraphon players I would say this is the area to focus on. I am starting 18 pts ahead of you. So you need to plan a way to catch up on 18 pts while also contesting my Taker tribe gargants sitting on objectives.

Best way Ive found to beat this is Dracothians tail with 3 salamander units and a bastiladon, Drop all of them within 9 of a gargant and delete it, This will likely require charges, but just in case you crank the shooting, try to kill with the bastiladon for the bonus. You dont get extra vp for killing multiple gargants in a turn, so you wanna focus 1 down a turn to maximize your points, the goal is to tie the opponent in objectives as soon as possible so that they arent still building a pt lead as you attrition them down.

Because of that point lead you absolutely cannot fail to get your secondaries each turn. So be really careful with your choices. Safe pts are best. As the game proceeds use rally and summoning to replace lose units in order to keep the grind going. When I beat people with my sons I usually lose 2 megas and my mancrushers and have 1 gargant while they have run outta steam. summoning will help big with this.

It is a hard but fun matchup for seraphon. I feel like we are able to do it but you have to commit to that style of list.

 

Played vs sons today. Can definitely do enough wounds into them with spells/shooting/bastilodon firing twice + skink chief. I was able to overkill one each turn and sons player conceded turn 3.

Really recommend a screen unit such as a unit of knights. U can opt to go second and take more artefacts vs gargants since they're not to dangerous turn 1 if u deploy properly. The arcane tome did work buffing the chiefs stomp attacks to 3 damage each and engine of the gods curse was also quite good.

The starseer is kind of an auto take too. His spell control fate is a pretty big upgrade over hand of glory since it benefits all the units in your army.

 

Nice Job! Im also finding that shackles shuts them down hard. Without charging sons cannot do any meaningful damage.

 

But isn't it too easy to dispell shackles? you only need to beat a 7 since it doesn't scale with casting

 

For most armies yes. For sons they have maybe 1 wizard, and if they fail the dispell you shut down 1/4 of their army for a turn. Its not like we are short on spells so I dont consider that a bad deal. And like you said, we can kill 1 gargant easy. Kill their wizard and shackles the hardest hitter, abd you are pretty good shape. Its a total meta call of course, but shackles is popular right now and proving to be really good in almost all matchups.

 

Is the effect of shackles applied to your own units as well? It does look like a powerful addition to certain lists.

Worth mentioning that our curses just got way easier to pull off now with the recent white dwarf update. EoTG with 3+ curse is a big boon when up against gargants. Will result in quite a few mortals with all your armies attacks lasered in on a target.

 

Yep!