Now, I know skill spam experiments have been done before, more interesting and better. Tentacle spam skaven and shadowing first Chaos Dwarf Blockers, for example. To name just two I've seen and admire immensely.

But after a guard-starved Dark Elf trophy run, I decided to take advantage of the cheapest S-access player in the game, the Chaos Renegade Lineman. I mean, 70k for a guard (piece)player? That is a steal!

And so Guard the Claws was born. Yet another Renegades team setting out to minmax it's way to victory, abusing the insane skill access potential of the lowly lineman. But I can ease my conscience by telling myself that this is different, better. I'm not clawpombing my way through rookie teams, I'm merely trying to guardlock nearly-rookie teams! Look, I'm bloating up with Rerolls and Big Guys and everything!

Come to look at it like that, and with some recent games in mind, I'm not sure that's much better. But you'll have to ask the opponents to be sure.

Lost/tied some games due to mispositioning, to a gnoblar toss and to the inevitable 1/9 blocks. But nothing near as bad as I expected. Maybe I've just been lucky. Small sample size of games, after all.

The couple of games I had after the first Ogre died were the beardiest, I guess. 1180TV, 12 players and 3 RR's... and 7 guards. I was tempted and advised to drop the troll as well, really work the minmax angle. But I decided against that in the end. Having a couple of str 5 guards to anchor the line sounds just too useful. If they decide to cooperate, of course. Would like to hear some more views on this.

But that brings me to my main point/question.
Step one has been achieved, everybody who can, has guard. (except the ogre, but I hope he'll follow soon. always the 1/3 mvp chance if he goes the usual boneheaded route)

What is step two?

Didn't really consider it before, because I didn't think it would work out this well, I guess.

Do I just Block up? Take the regular, solid, boring skills? Nothing wrong with that, at all.

Or do I keep walking the different path, keep abusing the strange skill access? That is to say, go Foul Appearance next on all the guard pieces? That would make getting advantageous blocks just a little bit harder for the opponent, but would probably also require cutting RR's and expensive players, to stay lean enough where that would work. And there's always that 1/9 risk lurking...

Anyway, just wanted to ramble for a bit, get the thoughts out of my head.