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Me and my partner are looking at playing AoS, and want to play death. I prefer the old vampire counts style of vampires and skeletons, she likes the spirits. How awful would it be to start with a coven throne, 5 knights, three hosts and the nighthaunt half of the £50 starter?

with that spesific model setup you can not play matched games(points), only open and narrative games, and that stuff is so un regulated that you need a big amount of house rules to make it even work, thats why 98% of AoS games are matched play.(or matched played house ruled with narrative games)
in matched play there is restrictions you must follow in addition to points.

for matched play, your mentioned selections would be as following:
your soulblight is 520p(provided you ment blood knight and not black knight), the NH is 480p but you have 1 stalker too mutch and 6 reapers to few.
(if you ment black knights then your mixed skelly/vamp is 380p)

in low point games (max 1000p) allied faction can be max 200p. in standard range games (1001-2000p) allies can be maximum 400p.
the rest of the army has to be the main faction, so either heavy on the nighthaunts or heavy on the soulblight.


if you can find some regular opponents and house rule inn some limitations, you can play open games with everything you and your partner wants to start with. if you want to go to a club or games workshop drop in games and play agasint random strangers, you need to make a matched play army.

so the choise is basicly up to you two. hard to give more advices before you two have discussed this further.

So what is the best way, if there is one, of playing "old school" vampire counts. She's decided she doesn't know whether she wants to play, but wants to paint and build, so I'll probably play vamps/skellies and she'll just build and paint the odd spirit model.

well legions of nagash is a pretty strong battletome so there aint realy a way to do things wrong unless the dices curses you.

but basicly, 40 model blobs of skelly warrios with spear(prolly need about 120 for a solid core of skeletons), vamp lords and necromancers.
use that as a core and you can add more or less whatever you want, even some of the NH stuff.

Legion of Nagash will get you an army that doesn't fall down easilly and is definitely the most defensive build. Personally though I prefer the more aggressive Legion of Blood. Not only does it make Vampire Lords and Blood Knights better, it gives us the ability to drag bravery down on our opponent's models by up to -5 when stacked correctly. Paired with abilities like the Mortis Engine's ability to hit unit multiple units in a bubble and roll against their bravery to do mortal wounds and we can do up to 11 mortal wounds at a time (12 if you can push them to bravery 0).

The army is fairly slow at its core though and with only Deathmarch giving us additional movement to the core it can be hard to really be the one dictating the board state. As such you'll largely be on the back foot and need to play a longer game where you take hits but ultimately (counting in all the healing you can stack) lose less models during the game than your opponent.

Just watch out for the DoK as they can wipe whole units in a single turn due to quantity of dice which means you may want to play more defensively against them with your general and count on resurrecting units to keep in the game.

Shooting can be a problem for us as well, especially since people instinctively want to shoot the big things and all of our best combat options are pretty big model wise.