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One of the things I like to do when I pick up an army is to develop a relatively modular collection so that I can quickly field a list that is appropriate for the level of competitiveness that my opponent is looking for. I've been trying to collect Tomb Kings while I still can, and would like to discuss my sense of what might be appropriate in different context.

Lets say I want to be able to field armies for each of four different "difficulty" levels: Soft, Friendly, Competitive, Brutal

The soft category is an army that is intentionally weak used mainly for introductory games against new players or players who have very limited collections. Also good for games against silly lists that are built for theme/flavor with no thought to effectiveness.
The friendly category is an army against general competition who doesn't take things seriously
The competitive category is intended to be fielded against others who have designed their lists to be effective and are looking for a challenge
The brutal category is for opponents who want to face the toughest lists or field utter cheese themselves

GUIDELINES

Soft: No behemoths (except maybe casket of souls?), no settra, no necropolis knights, no tomb herald. no more than 1 unit (each) of: chariots, sepulchral stalkers, carrion, tomb scorpions, ushabti, screaming skull catapult. No skeleton units larger than 20.

Friendly: No necrosphinx/warsphinx/royalsphinx, no settra. No more than 1 unit of necropolis knights. No more than 2 units (each) of chariots, ushabti, screaming skull catapult, tomb scorpions. If you field Khalida, no taking multiple units of 30 archers. Supporting two catapults with a necrotect also a no-no.

Competitive: No more than one necrosphinx. Settra ONLY if 0-1 other models with a command ability.

Brutal: You're going to get Settra'd, and you're going to like it.

I'm pretty confident that these general guidelines will hold up with a few tweaks around the margins. A semi-competitive list might field a Royal Sphinx or Warsphinx, for example. No Khalida might be worth adding to "Soft" rules but I'm not sure. Without units >20 I'm not sure she'd even be that effective. Khalida plus 2x20 archers might be OK since you only need to kill one model to turn off hail of ancient arrows, but any more than that is probably a no-go.

Any thoughts/suggestions/additions/subtractions?

If you're going to house rule anyway I'd just use PPC to put everyone on a roughly equal playing field. At any rate, Auticus has a site running with letter grades for all the different units in matched play. I lost the link so hopefully he or someone else can pop in with it.

Last I checked that site didn't have tomb kings, and it also doesn't take into account synergies. This isn't really house rules. It's more of an attempt to self-comp my own lists to make them appropriate. I just want to check my gut instincts about what in the TK pdf fits into what category in terms of competitiveness. That said, I'm definitely happy to use alternate point systems if my opponent is advanced enough to do such a thing!

Synergy is kind-of the issue regardless, or in this instance perhaps list composition would be a better term. Two lists could have the exact same warscrolls yet be completely different in power level based on how points are distributed between those choices. The best alternative, imo, is rating each warscroll individually. Last I heard Auticus was working on giving an 'interpretive' rating to each warscroll that roughly took into account factors that can't be quantified mathematically.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I think he has a good resource going there and it would be better to unite the community's efforts.

In regards to you self-comping personally I think a good benchmark is how many of your games you win. The 40-60% zone means things are probably balanced enough, while outside of that means lists should probably be tweaked. Flat-out asking your opponent if your army was fun to play against is also a surprisingly obvious method that many overlook. PPC* is a points-comp that has been around for over a year and has much tighter balance than the GHB with the extra advantage that it is now tuned to work as an 'upgrade' to Matched Play (I've even played a number of games using PPC lists vs GHB lists and it works fine).

*full disclosure: PPC has been and still is my preferred method of AoS and I wouldn't consider myself an unbiased source.

Just looked through PPC a bit and find the changes to be generally solid with a couple of somewhat confusing exceptions . It seems that generally troops are cheaper while characters and behemoths are more expensive. I was surprised by a few specific things though:

Morghast Archai are actually the same cost for a unit of 2 and actually cheaper if you go for a larger unit size

Mourngul is cheaper than Necrosphinx

Nagash got cheaper while Alarielle is a lot more expensive despite both units deriving quite a bit of value from summoning (summoning units seem to be cheaper in general)

Some of the TK changes make sense (Necroknights and chariots more expensive, icon bearers are expensive), a few had me scratching my head. I was surprised at how much more expensive Sepulchral Stalkers got. Carrion and, to a lesser extent, Ushabti also went way up in cost.

Morghasts, and many other units, provide a bonus to other models that is independent of unit size. A unit of 1 Morghast provides the same bonus to summoning spells as a unit of 3, thus the additional models had their cost reduced to accommodate that.

The Mourngul cost is indeed too cheap and I know it's being looked at right now, suffice it to say the point cost will be going up soon.

Alarielle's price isn't summoning-based; her ability isn't particularly good for that (you have to reserve points that a random ability spends) and she can opt to heal every sylvaneth model 30" for d3, including herself, instead. Like many monsters/heroes she is simply worth more points than the GHB value.

Looking at the Tomb King models you mentioned I think you have a point (pun so very intended), it looks like the Ushabti and Sepulchral Stalkers have carry-over costs from pre-GHB but need a reduction due to the new summoning/rule of one altering how models can be added to their unit via the spells on their warscrolls. I'll let Attilla know about those.

Carrion have a weird loop-hole in that they can take/contest objectives while remaining untargetable so Id guess the cost is because of that.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Morghasts, and many other units, provide a bonus to other models that is independent of unit size. A unit of 1 Morghast provides the same bonus to summoning spells as a unit of 3, thus the additional models had their cost reduced to accommodate that.

Carrion have a weird loop-hole in that they can take/contest objectives while remaining untargetable so Id guess the cost is because of that.

Ohh gross re: carrion. Yeah that is pretty silly and IMO should just be included as an errata rather than increasing the points cost. Even at their higher cost they aren't even close to fair in an objective based scenario.

Regarding Morghasts, I understand the logic of the cost reduction for further models, I'm just surprised that the overall cost is the same or lower than GHB given that they seem pretty undercosted in the GHB compared to something like the Necrosphinx (whose cost went up).

www.louisvillewargaming.com/AOSStats.aspx has the letter grades of units based on statistical calculations and percentile ranking.

Yeah, I have used your tool before. It's fantastic, but sadly does not feature the Tomb Kings (yet).