Wood Elves do have it a bit rough in the current edition, but I'm finding them really rewarding to play with so if you want to give them a go I'd say absolutely go for it, don't let people put you off.

For a 2K list, I'd be inclined to go with the following, which also has some brief explanations as to why I'm going with certain choices and how they could be used:

2000 Pts - Wood Elves Roster - 2K no comp

Total Roster Cost: 2000

Spellweaver (1#, 310 pts) Lore of Beasts
1 Spellweaver = (Level 4 Upgrade)
1 Dispel Scroll
1 Moonstone of the Hidden Ways

I'm a really big fan of Lore of Beasts compared to Lore of Life for several reasons. The first is that unlike Life, you get the one of the best spells in the deck (and in my opinion one of the best spells in the entire game), as the signature spell in Wildform. It turns Dryads from very good units into absolute monsters (WS4 S5 T5 2A I6) that can obliterate almost anything that doesn't have a 3+ save, and it can also keep your stuff alive from a distance. In a lot of situations, it's like getting a Mindrazor that makes you harder to hurt and you're guaranteed to get it. Amber Spear is really good for getting rid of monsters, and if you can get a flank shot it ruins cavalry.

Curse of Anraheir is another great spell, as it essentially kills a third of an enemy unit any time they march, charge, flee, pursue or over-run (casting it on a frenzied unit that is then forced to charge, then over-run, is amazing), as well as the -1 to hit which can be used to keep your units alive in combat and from shooting. With that in mind, a goodly amount of the time it's a Dwellers that you can cast more easily and from further away- of course, if your opponent doesn't activate it by marching then nothing will die, but on the flip side even that is good as it slows them down and there is also the option for it to activate multiple times from one casting.

Savage Beast and Pann's Pelt are also useful every now and then as they can make even the mage pretty killy and tough- SB really comes into its own when you also take the Bow of Loren/Arcane Bodkins lord. Another consistent feature of Lore of Beasts is that all the spells are pretty easy to cast- the hardest you're likely to try with any frequency is a boosted Amber Spear which needs a 15 which is pretty secure on a 4 dice cast, so your mage won't miscast much and die. Savage Beast also has great synergy with Curse of Anraheir against heavily armoured armies that give WE lots of trouble- Curse draws out dispel dice, then the Lorenlord with Savage Beast kills 3 T3 knights a turn, or a single Demigryph.

Another more recent use for Pann’s Pelt and Savage Beast that I have found is as defence against Death magic, which is especially useful in an avoidance army where ward saves or MR on characters is often a wasted investment. Boosted Pelt is pretty easy to cast which is also good, the boosted Savage Beast less so though.

On the other hand, Lore of Life doesn't really add as much to my style of MSU play. Even with the regen or additional toughness, it all still dies very easily indeed. Dwellers is a good spell, but unless you're very close it's pretty hard to cast which means you'll need to be chucking 6 dice at each turn which increases the risk of your mage dying and giving up a load of points. Throne of Vines does lessen the risk, but if you're taking Lore of Life just for Dwellers then you really need Throne as well to keep her safe, and it's not that rare that you'll either not get them both on spell selection or have the power dice to fund them both. Also, by now most people know how to play against Dwellers- you just don't let your squishy characters get in range without making the Life mage come to you, which draws your expensive and easy to kill mage closer towards the enemy which is where she does not want to be. Overall, I find Life to be a very feared Lore of the internet but in reality to be a “noob-killer” lore. Once you have a bit more experience against it, it’s very easy to play against unless you’re against a Life Loremaster- which WE can’t get.

Both Lores have their merits, overall I think Beasts is just a better lore for WE especially for my style of list and that it has a lot more potential.

With regards to her item selection, I always go with the Dispel Scroll over the Wand of Wych Elm as it's better for stopping that "if I cast this I win" spell that comes up relatively often- the biggest one I'm running into atm is the bubble +1 toughness/regen for Ogres or a bubble Pha’s, as if they cast that on the turn when I have to deal lots of shooting damage then it's pretty much game over. The Wand is good for stopping the smaller spells your opponent casts, but against the big spells that can end games the Dispel Scroll is just in another league altogether. I tend to think that the Wand is better for not losing models, but the Scroll is better for not losing games.

The Moonstone is basically just a get out of jail free card, it's not something to build a strategy around but if it gets the level 4 and a unit of Glade Guard out of trouble just once out of every dozen games or so then it is worthwhile. Not being able to use it in your opponent's movement phase does mean that you have to make sure that if they get into the mage's unit whilst she's in the forest it's via an over-run and so on, if it's via an outright charge then she's dead.

When it comes to anti-magic, by and large you can be pretty sanguine about letting hexes and augments go a lot of the time, especially combat related ones- it doesn't really matter what they're fighting, the vast majority of the time Glade Guard will die regardless of their reduced WS or their opponent's boosted strength. Instead, focus on stopping direct damage spells and magic missiles. RiP spells can also often be left and instead gotten rid of in your own phase. Whilst I find this to be a generally good rule of thumb, you do need to make sure you're not missing anything- for example, it's sometimes better to let the Fireball go instead of having your flaming unit reduced to BS 1 on the turn the hydra is poised to eat you.

Noble (1#, 140 pts)
1 Wood Elf Noble (Battle Standard Bearer)
1 Asyendi's Bane
1 Dragonhelm
1 Hail of Doom Arrow

Very simple and common BSB load-out, Asyendi's Bane is just so that he can fire the Hail of Doom Arrow. The timing of when you use it varies a lot depending on the match-ups, for example vs Lizardmen I tend to use it very early on to get rid of the salamanders whereas in other match-ups I'll leave it until later to mop up any units that have just a couple of models left, being able to get the S4 at long range is very very useful in that respect. There's no real hard and fast rule, but if you identify a threat that can be solved by the HoDA then it's worth using, otherwise hold onto it for later. If in doubt, it's better to use it than not though. Something to watch out for is that you have to decide whether he's going to use it at the same time as the rest of his unit fires, so it's often worth not having him in a unit so that he can fire it later than them, or at a different target. Sometimes it's amazing, other times it is very disappointing, but it usually balances out over a tournament as being worthwhile.

Being in units is a very safe place for the characters to be, but it is not always necessary- if your opponent can't kill the characters at range, then having them out on their own is usually a better idea, especially in the late game, as it means that should your opponent pull off the double 6 late game charge they will get either the character or the unit, but not both. One thing to be aware of is that your characters should only ever go into the same unit if they absolutely have to- I used to be quite cavalier about what units the characters went into, but the first time my big unit with both characters in got 13th'd of the board that stopped. Don't feel bad at all about running the character out on their own if it will keep them safe, it's far better that you run them out and redirect with their former unit than you leave them in the unit and lose twice as many points. As always though, if they do leave the unit make sure you've considered whether they're safer that way or if they need to- exactly the same process as working out which unit they go in, if they go in one at all. If it's not safe for them to be out on their own, you can bounce them from unit to unit redirecting with the previous unit as you go, keeping the real points safe.

There is one quick side note when it comes to putting your characters in units that is very simple but often overlooked, and is not specific to WE at all. When you put a character into a unit, there is absolutely nothing in the rulebook that allows you to expand that unit’s frontage (excluding occasions with irregular footprints), you cannot reform a unit by adding a character to it. So, if your Glade Guard are 5 wide and you put a BSB in there, they must stay 5 wide and 1 will create rank which he cannot shoot from- this can also lead to situations where a character cannot join a unit because doing so would push a model into the third rank within 1” of another unit or building. So, think about where your characters will go when you deploy your units, and deploy the unit 6 wide instead of 5 if you want a character to go in there.

Dryads (8#, 96 pts)


Dryads (8#, 96 pts)


I used to run 4 units of Dryads, then I cut down to 3 and now down to 2 and I'm finding them to work just as well. If I could I'd run them in units of 6, but 8 is the minimum sadly. If I need them to hit harder or live longer I can Wildform them or Anraheir my opponent, and in a lot of situations 1 Dryad works better than 8 as she still redirects just as well but has a smaller footprint.

As to their uses in the game, they have several that I use on a regular basis. They make for good redirectors as they're cheap and can bleed my opponent a bit, or if they go into the flank they can do some really good damage to lightly armoured stuff- as a general rule, try and get them into combats where they're hitting and wounding on 3s and your opponent will only have a 5+ save, or at least 2 out of those 3- without re-rolls or ranks it's not that hard for them to fluff a round of combat and die. Also, as with any light combat units, only charge them into combats where you expect to win easily or you expect to be completely wiped out- the last thing you want to do is charge into an enemy, do a couple of wounds but lose combat overall and give them a free Pursuit roll towards your army with your opponent’s turn to follow- for this reason, flank and rear charges are your friend.

That said, Dryads are also pretty good at sniping characters, specifically heroes or mages- they can't do much to armour though. It is well worth risking a unit of Dryads if you can kill a hero mage or especially a level 4, and as long as you are careful and plan ahead you can often work around the Pursuit issue I mentioned above.

Dryads are also pretty useful for screening your own archers if you come across a mirror-match or someone else with a lot of shooting. T4, Skirmish and the 5++ means that they just don't die to S3 shooting at long range, so use them to give hard cover to your own shooting in deployment so that if your opponent gets the first turn they can't do much, then on your turn the Dryads jump out of the way and you smash whatever they tried to shoot you with. Because they don't die vs S3 shooting, Dryads are also very very good at simply running at opposing archers as they soak up a lot of firepower- this lets you focus your shooting on their nasty combat units whilst they have to either focus on killing 96pts of Dryads or get ripped up in combat. This is especially good if your opponent uses archer units to bunker characters. On the same note, if they can get in behind the enemy and you don't need them to redirect, Dryads make very short work out of war machine crews.

I'm also starting to use mine to redirect less earlier on and instead work as more of a flee buffer- you put a couple of Glade Guard units opposite an enemy combat unit to bait them in with the Dryads 4-5" behind you (this works even better when you have both GG units blocking their unit from moving past). When the Glade Guard are charged you flee, and again when they redirect into the second unit, and you don't need to roll very high to bounce through the Immune to Psych Dryads behind to safety. Then, in your next turn, you rally the Glade Guard and either do the same thing again or sacrifice the Dryads or an eagle to buy more time. This works especially well with Glade Riders because they're fast cav, so as long as you keep rolling right they can do this pretty much indefinitely. One very important thing is to make sure you're careful with the distances, I usually go 2" closer than the average roll, maybe 3" so that I don't get caught out by one bad dice roll. Every now and then you'll run 4" away when 5" would get you to safety, but that's just dice for you Wardancers can also do this moderately well, but whichever unit you use as the buffer make sure they are >Movement+12” away from whatever unit you’re baiting so that the Dryads can’t get pinged with a double 6 charge.

Glade Guard (15#, 214 pts)
Musician + Standard Bearer
1 Lord's Bowman
1 Banner of Eternal Flame

The bigger unit with the flaming banner is pretty much just to turn hydras and abombs into free points. Without this unit, I can't really touch any big regen monsters and they'll shred me. 16 flaming shots at long range gets 0.67 wounds on the hydra (hitting on 4s, wounding on 6s then he has the 4+ armour), and a good deal more at short range so taking 15 then having your mage in there works pretty well. You could take fewer and just plan on shooting it at short range, but most DE/Skaven players will see the flaming banner coming a mile away and smash this unit quickly, so you need to have a few extra bodies in there for redundancy. If I have points left over at the end of writing a list, I usually dump them into this unit and get it up to around 20 but if I can fit more than 5 more bodies in, I can often make cuts elsewhere to get another full unit of Glade Guard in.

Glade Guard (10#, 126 pts)
Musician

Glade Guard (10#, 126 pts)
Musician

Glade Guard (10#, 126 pts)
Musician

Glade Guard (10#, 126 pts)
Musician

Glade Guard (10#, 126 pts)
Musician

Glade Guard (10#, 126 pts)
Musician

Overall, I have to say that I consider Glade Guard one of the best units in the game on a point for point basis. In my opinion they are 100% fairly costed, but unfortunately they lose out because not many things of a similar nature in the game are- the first that jumps to mind being Dark Elf xbows. Getting the hang of them is tricky, but they are very rewarding. There are 2 rules that really bring them into their own, and to make them excel you really need to combine both of them- moving and shooting with no penalties, and S4 at short range. With a 30" long range, this means your S4 killzone extends to 20" which is a really big deal- it's far enough away that you can get into short range and still be pretty safe and if your opponent wants to get to you they have to spend at least one turn in the killzone- in a nutshell, the best way to use the Wood Elf army in my opinion is to maximise the amount of time your opponent spends in this killzone. Throw your chaff in the way or double flee charges, but keep multiple Glade Guard shooting at one unit each turn at short range until it dies. Focus your fire.

There's not really a hard and fast order with regards to what you shoot in each match-up, as long as you focus your fire and kill it. As a general rule though, lightly-armoured monsters and chaff are amongst my first targets as they can die fairly easily, then I deal with the blocks at short range when my shooting is more effective. Getting rid of enemy chaff also makes your fleeing more effective, the less units they have the less they can charge you which means you have to flee less. There are a few things though that are always on my "Make it die NOW" list, which are salamanders, abombs and hydras- they're just too fast and too dangerous to leave until later on. There will also be things that you simply cannot kill with Glade Guard, for example a Bloodthirster is incredibly hard to bring down- you can commit 2-3 turns of just shooting this and nothing else and only get a couple of wounds off it, and neglect shooting at stuff which is less threatening or worth less points but will die. When you run into these sorts of things, you either have to commit to killing it and hope for the best (these things are usually worth a game-winning amount of points), or you ignore it, let it eat your chaff and instead kill the rest of their army then turn to it when there is nothing else to shoot. If you commit heavily and you don’t get it, however, you're in a world of trouble (as I found out Game 6 of Call to War).

There are a few things to look out for especially when working out what to shoot, and it helps here if you can judge 6" and 12". If you see any units with poor ld that are within 6" of a small enemy unit (really common examples of this are Mournfang within 6" of Sabretusks, or chaos hounds within 6" of anything), shoot off the chaff and force the panic tests- after all, you don't need to kill entire units if you can just panic them off the board. The same goes for units that are outside of their general and BSB range, work out roughly how many models you can kill and if it's enough to force a panic test without spending too many Glade Guard to do so ("too many" here is entirely relative to what you're shooting and what you could instead shoot, for example panicking off 20 spearmen isn't worth spending very many GG on if you roll badly, whereas a level 4 in a bunker absolutely is worth the risk), and if you think it's worthwhile then go for it. The current trend of everyone having ld 9 at least with the Standard of Discipline is a real pain, but more often than you think people are just careless with their ld ranges. Just don't measure the distances until it's your turn and make sure that you keep a good poker face during their turn even if you see them do something that you will be able to capitalise on, if people twig you've seen a mistake they'll double check everything.

Something that can be overlooked is focusing your Glade Guard fire. In most games where my shooting has done nothing, it's because I either physically spread my units out so much that I couldn't get many within short range of the same target or I shot at too many different units. As a result, what I tend to do is castle quite heavily in one corner or the other so that my opponent either has to sit back a long way (which is fine, if people want to play a ranged game vs Wood Elves they will lose more often than not), or run into all 70 odd Glade Guard for 2-3 turns. Castling also has the effect of making your opponent spread out a bit quite often- if they deploy heavily in one corner, I will usually just go in the opposite corner and they'll never get into my points. With so many drops, you can usually force your opponent to commit before you do- I usually deploy an eagle first in either corner, then a unit of Dryads in either corner and then a unit of Glade Guard in either corner (be sure to keep the GG more than 6" away from the eagle, the last thing you want is for the unit that's away from your general and BSB to be panicked off early on because the eagle gets killed by a cannonball). At this point I have 6 units down but I can still castle into either corner or split my army half and half or go in the centre of the board, whereas my opponent usually has to have something important down by this point which is when you decide where you want to commit.

However, it is important not to be too defensive with your Glade Guard early on- in order to get the best out of them, you need to get into short range quickly and start taking off models. When I first started playing with Wood Elves, I often put most of my stuff either on my board edge or in the middle of my deployment zone, which does mean that it takes your opponent a bit longer to get to you but has 2 massive pitfalls- the first is that you're not getting your S4 bonus for very long, and the other is that you have nowhere to flee into. Instead, a better way to use Glade Guard is very quite aggressively- run them forwards and get into the short range. This often feels quite counter-intuitive, especially the first few times you move 5" towards the Mournfang units bearing down on you, but it gets your bows into their optimal range and gives you more space to flee back into, rally and then carry on shooting. By double-fleeing charges and redirecting you can have an odd situation where your opponent is quite close to you for several turns but never actually gets into many of your points- this will happen a lot if you tend to play vs armies that are 2-3 massive blocks without much chaff, you just double flee all their charges and keep shooting. The difficulties start to come in when you play against armies like Ogres that have multiple threats that you need to redirect/flee from, such as triple Mournfang + 2 Ironblasters + the Gutstar + something else, so this is by no means a definitive, foolproof, "do this and you will win" tactic but is instead in my opinion a good way to think about what you're doing.

Eagle (50 pts)

Squad (50 pts)


Eagles are very useful indeed, they can get the last wound off the mage that miscast earlier or hunt chaff or they can redirect. I tend to spend my eagles early on quite often as most people will identify that when playing against MSU Wood Elves killing off the redirectors early on is a good plan, and so they attract lots of war machine/magic missile fire in the early game. If my opponent can't kill them (VC, for example, don't have a good way of dealing with them at range) then I keep them alive floating around the back of the board ready to jump in where they need to be, but a lot of the time they redirect turns 2-3 if they're still alive so that I get at least some use out of them before they die. Also, you want to be spending your redirectors in the order of ascending points, the cheap stuff goes first, then you use the Dryads to protect the Glade Guard, then the smaller units to protect the big unit then the big unit to protect the characters if needs be. Essentially, what you're trying to do is trade more favourably than your opponent as you will eventually run out of room to flee into- they get 2-3 units of Glade Guard and your chaff, you get their chaff and 1-2 of their big units.

Any time you redirect, whether it's with eagles or something else, you have to be very careful the you're not offering up any over-run paths or pursuit avenues into more of your units- you can get into hot water very fast if your opponent is able to catch multiple units this way, not just because it means they kill more but if they over-run into more stuff in their turn it means you can't shoot them in your turn. This is absolutely one of the most important things to watch out for, and can be tricky when playing against really wide units.

Waywatchers (6#, 144 pts)


Waywatchers (6#, 144 pts)


They're very expensive, but I am a big fan of Waywatchers as they do something that nothing else in the list can do- that is, threaten things like Scar-Vets, WoC disc characters or Dark Elf pegasus heroes. Without the risk of Killing Blow, there's not really much you can do to stop these things running roughshod over you. The Scouting is very useful as it gets them to where they need to be, and they're near invulnerable to BS shooting (just be wary of Lifetaker). However, they do attract a lot of magic missiles.

Because of their ability to march and shoot, they don't always need to be committed far forwards in order to work. Instead, if my opponent has something that I really need to use the KB to get rid of, I will keep my WWs in my deployment zone (or just outside) so that they stay safe, but can still do what I need them to do. They also make for good chaff killers, getting rid of things like Sabretusks that you wouldn't want to spend a whole unit of Glade Guard on, and when you have a unit in your killzone make sure to fire the WWs last- use the Glade Guard to kill the rank and file, then the WWs to step in and go for the Killing Blow on any characters that may be in there.

Overall with Wood Elves, the most important thing is to always look on the positive side of the game regardless of the result- I can guarantee that there will be games that you lose where you outplayed your opponent but made one small mistake, but the best thing to do in my experience is to identify what went wrong and just don't do it again. Also, just be very very careful and think through everything that you do. There's no safety net with Wood Elves, and even small errors can cost you dear. However, once you get the hang of them, they are a very fun army and can be pretty competitive- not top tier, but a lot better than people give them credit for. Personally, I've had more fun playing with them this year than at any other time with any other army whilst I've been playing the game.