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So, I finally have a good source of permanent income and I would like to enter AoS.

The trouble is, I am completely unsure of what to choose for my first AoS army. Everything looks awesome, but the number of different factions spread across the 4 alliances is insane, it's hard to tell what goes where.

One such "faction" I am interested in are the Everchosen. However, they have only two models. How exactly are they played?

But how do I navigate all of these different factions? Any advice for a newbie who feels overwhelmed at the selections of units?

Do you have a local community that you will be joining? If so, see if you can borrow miniatures to play with so you can get a feel for things. The difficulty in offering suggestions for complete newcomers is that you don't yet have a sense of what you enjoy playing.

However, to actually answer your question I would say to look at GW's selection of start collecting boxes and picking out the few you are most drawn to. Post again with which ones those are and people will have a much easier time of suggesting where to go from there.

 Togusa wrote:

But how do I navigate all of these different factions? Any advice for a newbie who feels overwhelmed at the selections of units?

As long as you stay within an alliance you can really mix factions, I don't think most factions are designed to be played "pure" (though there are some).
It's probably best to mix the Everchosen with Slaves to Darkness (which is the "generic" chaos faction, forms a nice backbone to any chaos force).

 Togusa wrote:
So, I finally have a good source of permanent income and I would like to enter AoS.

The trouble is, I am completely unsure of what to choose for my first AoS army. Everything looks awesome, but the number of different factions spread across the 4 alliances is insane, it's hard to tell what goes where.

One such "faction" I am interested in are the Everchosen. However, they have only two models. How exactly are they played?

But how do I navigate all of these different factions? Any advice for a newbie who feels overwhelmed at the selections of units?

Basically you can group all of the factions into one of two groups: major factions and minor factions.

Major factions are generally well fleshed out and have rules that encourage you to play an army composed entirely of that faction's models. This includes but is not limited to:

Stormcast Eternals
Seraphon
Sylvaneth
Fyreslayers
Bonesplitterz
Ironjawz
Beastclaw Raiders
Flesh Eater Courts

In addition to this, Chaos as an alliance tends to have a more complex faction system. You've got Mortals, Daemons, and Skaven. Of these, the following have pretty fleshed out rules:

Mortals - Slaves to Darkness, Khorne Bloodbound, Nurgle Blightkings (or whatever it's called)
Skaven - Clan Pestilens
Daemons - Khorne Daemons, Nurgle Daemons

In addition to these, you can often cross factions without losing synergy if you stick within the same chaos god. Nurgle mortals, skaven, and daemons all work well together, for example.

Slaanesh and Tzeentch don't have super well fleshed out rules yet, but you can still make armies built around these gods that cross factions between mortals, daemons etc.


Beyond these major factions, there are scads of minor factions which have varying degrees of development. I'm loosely going to group these into two subgroups:

1. Legacy factions
2. Subfactions

Legacy factions are old armies that haven't gotten thorough updates yet. This includes stuff like Wanderers, High Elves, Dark Elves, Tomb Kings, Free Peoples, Duardin, etc. They tend to have some internal synergy but not a fully fleshed out set of rules and faction synergies. You can field them on their own or in mixed grand alliance lists pretty easily.

Subfactions are usually small factions within a larger faction or grand alliance. Some of these can be fielded by themselves as a subfaction based list (and indeed there are tournament caliber lists like this, such as Clan Skryre) but some are too small or lack key unit types. Assuming the subfaction in question has the necessary unit types you can make an army of just that subfaction, but for most subfactions this will get boring quickly as your unit variety is severely restricted. You can do this with Everchosen, for example.

I'd be happy to provide more examples or answer other questions if you have them! I hope this helps!

My advice is to go through the games workshop catalogue, find whatever model grabs your attention the most, and then build that army.

ERJAK wrote:
My advice is to go through the games workshop catalogue, find whatever model grabs your attention the most, and then build that army.

Agreed. Unless you're planning on being a hardcore tourney player out of the gate, almost any army works, there are very few things that are just bad. Even if you are planning on being a tourney hardhead, the game is still forming and there are plenty of combos out there that work that aren't the meta yet.

Well, one mixed Chaos Army and two mixed Destruction armies were in the top 5 last Blood & Glory: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2016/11/29/top-5-lists-from-blood-glory/

The Everchosen can use battalions with mixed Mortal, Chaos factions, as show both in their battletome and the GHB, not only Varanguards and Gaunt Summoners (on disc or the miniature from ST).

So you can deploy Khorne Bloodbound, Nurgle Rotbringers, Tzeentch Arcanites, Hosts of Slaanesh mortals, and Slaves to Darkness with marks.