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This past Tuesday I played my first game at a shop and loved it. I played using my Cygnar battlebox and next week will use my Khador battlebox. (Love painting them). However I was able to see a Cryx army up close and I loved how they looked. Since I am new he kept it simple on explaining them saying they attack hard but are fragile (glass cannons) and the casters debuff. How accurate is this explanation? I'm going to see if anyone has some models I can try and based on that get a battlebox.

So how do they play? Are they fast or slow speed wise? What makes Cryx unique? Whats the "typical" way Cryx is played?

Thanks for any replies. Cant wait to try out my Khador and maybe Cryx next Tuesday.

That is a decent enough basic answer. If you've had a couple games or looked around a little bit, every faction has a myriad of casters that each bring a new skew to the infantry and 'jacks that the army has available. Even seemingly straight-forward armies like Khador are actually full of depth; they're written as slow, heavy warjack, heavy handed army but their best lists include mass infantry and some finesse units with plenty sneaky tricks overall.

Many of the Cryx casters do debuff, though nowadays we have two or three buff-centric casters and a couple more solo-tank-murderer type casters. Many of our models, especially the warjacks, are glass cannons but some are more glass than cannon and others are more pistol than cannon. We don't typically run very jack heavy and we do have a few of the better infantry units in the game, borderline some of the best.

For the Cryx battle box you'll get three arc nodes and a Slayer. The warcaster that is included, Warwitch Deneghra, is borderline abusive to opponents. She is a debuff queen and a top tier caster against nearly any matchup outside of Menoth. Because of that, she is very frustrating for opponents to play against as they watch their army crumble or be denied their basic functions. For instance, her spell Crippling Grasp applies a -2 SPD, STR, DEF, and ARM. Because of that -2 SPD, the model/unit can no longer charge and warjacks cannot trample. Drop this on a Khadoran heavy warjack and reduce it to SPD2 and cannot charge. It's very sad and frustrating when you're the opposing player and a key model has been reduced to useless. Her feat is terrifying, appling a -2 to nearly all stats including an enemy warcaster's FOCUS value. So a warcaster with a nice focus stat of 7 gets dropped to a 5. They only generate 5 focus on their turn, and their control radius is dropped to 10". If they were playing with a warjack that was on the outer range of their control radius, it now doesn't get to be allocated focus.

That all being said, she's extremely frail and doesn't put out much damage on her own and doesn't participate in battle much beyond slinging spells through Arc Nodes from half a board away. Because of this, she isn't the best caster to learn the game, or even Cryx, with. pAsphyxious is a much better to learn with. He has debuffs, buffs, movement shenanigans, and is a powerhouse in melee in his own right. He's not unbreakable, and if caught in the open will die, but he can camp hard for a high armor value for turns you want to leave him a little more forward than usual.

The difference between these two casters is also throughout Cryx. The "typical' way they play depends entirely on the warcaster you're taking. Most infantry units do things decently, so we use warcasters or support units to make them do things very well. Some warcasters like Deneghra and the Coven of Garlghast depend heavily on their army to do all the work. Other warcasters like Terminus and Venethrax don't care about the rest of their army; they buff themselves and camp high armor and butcher things in combat on their own. Most of our casters fall somewhere in the middle, being able to handle things on their own when necessary and being able to support infantry in one way or another.

Silenoz wrote:
This past Tuesday I played my first game at a shop and loved it. I played using my Cygnar battlebox and next week will use my Khador battlebox. (Love painting them). However I was able to see a Cryx army up close and I loved how they looked. Since I am new he kept it simple on explaining them saying they attack hard but are fragile (glass cannons) and the casters debuff. How accurate is this explanation? I'm going to see if anyone has some models I can try and based on that get a battlebox.

So how do they play? Are they fast or slow speed wise? What makes Cryx unique? Whats the "typical" way Cryx is played?

Thanks for any replies. Cant wait to try out my Khador and maybe Cryx next Tuesday.

I would characterize them as melee infantry heavy, with good offensive spell support. Said offensive spells most often 'debuff' opponents. Warjacks are usually in a supporting role, either for spell-threat-extention with arc nodes, or as scalpels for 'hard' targets.

They tend to have stronger war casters than most other factions, probably because the have so few 'real' ranged options.

I think glass cannon is a bit of a misnomer. While their warjacks certainly fit that description, their infantry tends to have /excellent/ built-in survival mechanisms, such as high defense, immunity to blast damage, stealth, extremely low cost, etc.

Great points there Boardroom! It's definitely true on the comment about ranged support. Our best ranged infantry are Nyss Hunters - a Mercenary unit that works with nearly every faction.

That said, Nyss Hunters are absolutely brutal with pDeneghra. Pop and drop ends games. On the other hand, we're often perfectly happy without a ranged infantry unit on the field.

Thanks for the replies. It's sounding more and more like the style I want to play. I like the hard hitting Ironclad Cygnar has but I like the idea of debuffing them even more.

Kirbinator you said pDenagrah, what does the P mean?

p in front of a name = "prime", i.e. the original version of the warcaster and the first one to be released.

Far back in the mists of time Privateer Press decided that as the storyline advances certain warcasters will be released again with a new model and abilities to represent their continued character development. These were originally known as "epic" versions of the caster and were always more powerful than the original versions, but they could only be played in larger games (or something like that, it was before my time back when it was still mk 1 rules).

When the current rules came around they decided to keep the prime and epic distinction, but make them all be equivalent in power and available all the time. So basically think of "prime" and "epic" (and sometimes "super epic" since some warcasters have been released three times now) as just different versions of the same fluff character that can all be taken whenever you want depending on which one fits your army better.

Now, gamers are lazy, or it could just be that assembling models, learning rules, and painting models takes up so much time they can't be bothered wasting it on other things, but at any rate players wanted a quick and easy way to differentiate between different editions of the same character. So instead of writing "War Witch Deneghra" and "Wraith Witch Deneghra" they would write pDeneghra or eDeneghra (or simply "pDenny" when they're feeling really lazy).

Short version: prime version has p attached to the name, epic version has e attached.

Cryx are generally fast and hard hitting in melee. They tend to run a lot of infantry and only a couple of jacks (usually arcnodes).

They do tend to die easily, but this is offset by the ability to things back to life and debuff the enemy so they are not as good as they think they are. And lots of things like stealth and incorporeal.

But as with all the factions, Cryx has multiple playstyles.

If you think that Ironclads hit hard you´ll love Cryx
Their basic stats look pretty meh most of the time (which they are) but due to the heavy focus on debuffs [not only on your warcasters spell, basically everything has some kind of debuff or buff, like -armor) they are in a very good spot.
Cryx also might have the best Battle Box. Deneghra is crazy strong, has a fun gameplay & the two arc nodes will reapear in a lot of your lists. The Slayer not so much but it still isn´t bad. 3 initial attacks, very cheap & as fast as most light jacks.