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Inquisitor Dark Fire wrote:Currently I am doing a lot of competitive 40k playing - entering tournaments etc. - with my Uber-Council Eldar list - and doing fairly well for myself.

I did start the hobby in Warhammer Fantasy - but devoted my limited time, as a GCSE student, to 40k - after all - 40k involves (generally) painting and modelling less models.

However, some time I would like to return to Fantasy - and as a reasonably competitive player.

Regards, Dark Fire

As some of you may have seen in my 'update me...' thread (opening above), I am looking at returning to Fantasy for a challenge.

At the moment I am relatively set on either doing High Elves or Dark Elves - mainly because of the speed and magic ability, and the low (relatively) model count - key for me, as one doing A-Levels next year, so I can spend more time on the army (painting wise) - and spend less time putting it together. Because I do a lot of music and hockey, in addition to all my studies, time is precious.

Anyway, this thread is really to ask: What are the most competitive builds for High Elves?

Currently, flicking through the codex in the store, and looking online, it looks like Star Dragon builds are up there, MSU builds, and Teclis plus Banner of Sorcery and much shooting are up there.

Which has been doing the best at GTs, or just normal RTTs, Adepticon?

And one final thing - what characters (and maybe units) would you take to support a Star Dragon Prince ? Scroll caddies, offensive spell casters, BSB? Suggest a few builds of character sections please, if you would.

Thank you for any replies, Dark Fire

I'd rate the effectiveness of High Elves lists to Star Dragon and then Teclis. Not rating MSU since both of these lists usually implement MSU anyways. The 2008 Las Vegas GT was won by a Star Dragon list - you can easily Google it to get an idea of what he ran. IIRC, he opted heavily to provide Fear/Terror protection for his main combat units.

Given the current meta-game, I'd say that these are really the only two consistently competitive lists, since the Star Dragon provides you a very resilient Terror-causer and Teclis is a reliably dangerous magic caster. Still, the prevalence of Fear causing armies leads me to suggest that Star Dragon lists are slightly superior.

As far as support characters, @ 2000pts, I'd say a level 1 Scroll Caddy would be a must. You won't be able to fit anything else, though, since those two characters alone will be taking up more than 1/3 of your points already. At 2250 points, BSB's with the Battle Banner and Dragon Prince kit are highly recommended.

In general high elves aren't the top teir army. They require a great deal of skill to compete at the highest levels. The reason for tis is that they will have at most 2 units on the table that are immune to fear in a normal list. This means that the top two armies will have a significant advantage over them. Combine this with their paper thin armor and it means that anything that survives to attack will kill elves.

The Star Dragon/BSB combo works well against most armies but it falls short aganst vampires. Against them you will need swordmasters for the continous damage output against multiple targets. But remember that the second they wiff you are gonna run away.

The other problem is that the star dragon char is the only char in the entire army that can go toe to toe with enemy chars. Even heroes will ocationally get waxed by unit champions (has to be a good champ but you get the idea).

The best armies are ones that involve either large ammounts of magic (2+ mages and banner of sorcery) or the start dragon/bsb combo backed up by a couple bricks of 10 or so swordmasters and smallish blocks of spearmen (without the separmen your swordmasters will eat death from flank charges and redirects) .