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Like the proverbial dog with a tail between its legs he has returned to Fantasy.

I was sitting with Aura a few nights ago discussing Christmas gift options for one another, and the missed feeling of Fantasy came up after we walked out in early 8th. During our discussion it became clear that perhaps it was not issues with the new big crazy units, strange contraptions (although some are still a little zany) or the potential spiralling out of control magic phase, but perhaps our army choices.
I took on Skaven via the Isle of Blood and she High Elves. Neither of us where that happy with the army style/look we found ourselves with, and on second thought it was obviously doomed to failure. Thus we took that disgruntled feeling and somehow twisted it to lets leave Warhammer. With no other armies to fall back on, her want of a Wood Elf army with actual Elves in it, and my decision to drop Druchii until plastic Witch Elves where available in the months previous to 8th's arrival left us in the lurch.

So here we are, nearly two years later, and waiting for a very large parcel to arrive from GW tomorrow. We've gone for Vampire Counts v's Tomb Kings, and that is the real reason behind what is rapidly becoming a long winded post.
We are going to play mostly for fun, but we already witnessed what happens when Druchii have minimal Treefolk to worry about in a Wood Elf army, it wasn't pretty, and although we can play no matter who wins or loses, I was just wondering for those out there who have now experienced two years of Warhammer. How good/bad of a pairing are those two. We are hoping for a close match most of the time, disregarding freaky luck of course, but I am hoping that neither has a massive advantage over the other.

Can anyone fill me in if that is the case, and if it isn't, what is the weakness that needs to be plugged into the weaker army, potentially with Allies/monsters via Storm of magic?

Of course If we have chosen two evenly matched armies, rock on, and I'll look forward to some hard fought battles between the damned shortly.

I play tomb kings and I've played VC about 5 times since their new book hit, only lost once. But I run generally pretty character snipe heavy, and they tend to use a lot of terror ghiest, which almost auto die to the casket of souls.

But tomb kings don't use a lot of magic weapons so etheral is bad.

VC vs. TK could be like never-ending games depending on what strategies you use. Because you can basically use the exact same strategy. Obviously the game will end at whatever turn, but if you're just regenning everything, it might not feel like much is getting done. So I'd just make sure you don't both go mass horde healing.

They still play very differently. TK is about the army - you have large blocks of skeletons with kings and princes in them to buff their weapon skill. Magic is there to again buff those units, with minor healing and unit regeneration from the lore attribute, backed up by some fairly solid infantry shooting and rock hard constructs (literally).

Vampire Counts is all about the characters, supported by a rather generic shambling hoard of random undead and monsters. Vampires take center stage, and heroes as a whole eat up a lot of your army (it's easy, between lords and heroes, to quickly eat up half of your army). Because your units are weaker than the buffed TK units, you'll be doing a lot more resurrecting and regenerating - so much so that unlike Tomb Kings where it's done via the lore attribute, Vampires get two dedicated spells (one for raising new units and one for expanding them) as well as the lore attribute adding further wounds to individual models.

So while both will be doing regenerating, Vampires are more focused on it, while Tomb Kings are meant to act like a normal army, with resurrecting on top of it to counteract crumble rather than continually replace lots of fallen.

Vampires are often cited to be the stronger book of the two, in fact one of the stronger books of 8th edition, with Tomb Kings at the bottom of the power pile. However, that doesn't mean as much as it does in other games, obviously, with Fantasy. It just means the TK player will be a bit more restricted in what they bring to make a solid army, while the VC player has a lot more freedom in their army selection, since just about the whole book will be viable.

The great thing is these two armies make up one of the great Warhammer Fantasy rivalries. Tomb Kings and Vampires are the bitterest of enemies, so there's a lot of scope to get some great campaigns going.

You'll find a relatively fair balance in terms of options. Big scary things like the Terrorgheist/Dragon/Vargheists can be dealt with through lucky Catapult shots or a Necrosphinx.

While Vampire Counts can certainly raise more individual models and create more units than you can (and can potentially raise them beyond starting size) having access to catapults and buffed units certainly levels the playing field.

Ultimately the Magic phase will most certainly be a large part of both your games, as you'll be focusing on using it to buff/ressurect your units/models, which means poor rolls on the winds of magic can result in very "meh" games.

However, Loki's nailed it perfectly, and his post sums it up perfectly. I'm a huge fan of the setting, and seeing two bitter rivals (especially Lahamian-esque Vampires) on the field is always something cool to see.

Cheers for the comments, and that sounds quite promising overall on the game play front. The package arrived this morning, so lots to put together.

Oh and 100% with the big rivalry, that was one of the main draws for the forces in question. I'm going to be fielding Lahamian Vamps, Aura has Khalida to lead her Tomb Kings.

The only shame is Neferata didn't make the new VC book, but I can always hope she'll be back eventually and in the meantime a Vampire Lord will with her name will work fine.

Now having four armies, you can face off with a lot of different combos!