Mortenebra, Numen of Necrogenesis
|
Mortenebra, Numen of Necrogenesis |
 How usable this model is in Mk IV depends on the Faction:
You can view the Mk3 models that made it into a Legacy Army at this page. |
Mortenebra is the dark mistress of the Cryxian war industry. With her cold and penetrating mind, she has worked behind the scenes to further the development of the Nightmare Empire’s necromechanikal horrors. Driven to seek insights through the crucible of combat, she has continued to augment her own physical form through iterative reimaginings of her mechanikal frame. Now, with the chance to observe her creations in battle, Mortenebra’s dark mind has been stirred to new and greater heights.
Basic Info
| Mortenebra2 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Warcaster - All warcasters come with a stack of standard special rules - most notably being awesome. Click here for a newbie-friendly recap, or click here for the full rules.
Feat : Mechanism of Destruction
While in Mortenebra's command range, models in her battlegroup gain Reposition [3] & Flank [Another model in Mortenenbra's battlegroup]. Mechanism of Destruction lasts for one turn.
- Reposition [3"] - At the end of an activation in which it did not run or fail a charge, this model can advance up to 3", then its activation ends.
- Flank [ Battlegroup model ] - When a model with Flank makes a melee attack against an enemy model in the melee range of another battlegroup model, the model with Flank gains +2 to attack rolls and gains an additional damage die.
Abilities
-
Construct -
Pathfinder -
Undead - Salvage - When a warjack is destroyed while in this model's melee range, remove d6 damage points from this model. If the destroyed warjack was a heavy or a colossal, remove +3 additional damage points from this model.
- Field Marshal [Salvage] - Warbeasts/warjacks in this model's battlegroup gain Salvage.
- Soul Taker: Cull Soul - This model can gain soul tokens. When a living enemy model is destroyed within 2" of this model, this model gains the destroyed model's soul token. After this model replenishes its focus during your next Control Phase, replace each soul token with 1 focus point.
- Steady - This model cannot become knocked down.
Weapons
| Claw (x2) | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
RNG | POW | P+S | |||||||||||
| 2 | 6 | 14 | ||||||||||||
Spells
| COST | RNG | AOE | POW | DUR | OFF | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arcantrik Bolt
|
2 | 10 | - | 12 | (★) | Yes | |
| A warjack damaged by this attack becomes stationary for one round. | |||||||
| Curse of Shadows
|
3 | 8 | - | - | Upkeep | Yes | |
| Target model/unit suffers -2 ARM and cannot make free strikes. A model can advance through an affected model if it has enough movement to move completely past its base. | |||||||
| Fail-Safe
|
2 | 6 | - | - | Upkeep | No | |
| Target friendly Faction warjack gains +2 ARM and does not suffer the effects of crippled systems. | |||||||
| Energizer
|
2 | SELF | - | - | - | No | |
| Each model in the spellcaster's battlegroup that is currently in its control range can immediately advance up to 2". Energizer can be cast only once per activation. | |||||||
| Spellpiercer
|
2 | SELF | Control | - | Turn | No | |
| While in the spellcaster's control range, the weapons of friendly Faction models gain Blessed and Damage Type: Magical. Spellpiercer lasts for one turn. | |||||||
Theme Forces
- Other Factions
- Infernal players can use her in the Hearts of Darkness theme.
- Mercenary players can use her in the Strange Bedfellows theme.
- Convergence players can use her in the Strange Bedfellows theme.
Thoughts on Mortenebra2
Mortenebra2 in a nutshell
Mortenebra2 is still what she was in her prime incarnation: a jack caster. Even though her army support now extends a bit beyond killing her own warriors for free focus, she does the most for her battlegroup. The presence of a strong de-buff spell, and a feat which is tied to her CMD zone pushes her toward a more active presence in the frontline, than she did before. Though she lost Deryliss (and the jack tuning abilities with it), she beefed herself up quite a bit. She has the second highest ARM+HP behind Terminus, plus being Undead and a Construct in the same time allows her to be healed by Necrosurgeons and/or Necrotechs. Steady also makes pop&drop assassinations a challenging task. Her increased resilience means that she can be played a bit more safety than the average Cryxian caster, but that still shouldn't encourage you to be overly bold. Her defensive stats are on par with a light warjack, and whatever can trash a light, can trash her too.
Feat thoughts
Mortenebra's feat gives you amazing damage output. This is however limited to the warjacks within her respectable 12" command. With heavy warjack just within 12", a Slayer can trigger this ability on targets about 15" away from Morty. Remember the warjack triggering the flank doesn't actually have to be in control range, so bring some light warjacks to trigger it, Stalker and Scavengers come to mind as they already have pathfinder, but if you are charging heavies with heavies, it might be worth committing an arcnode just for the flank.
Reposition is of course handy for setting up other flankers.
Spell thoughts
- Arcantrik Bolt - Average attack spell with good range. Ideal starting point for assassinations, if you have jacks to throw/slam your stationary victim.
- Curse of Shadows - Yet another tool for assassination, and universal ARM de-buff. Feel free to move into the back arc of the affected models to strike them with increased accuracy. Stacks nice with Dark Shroud.
- Fail-Safe - Cast it on your heavy hitter, or on a warjack with special attack, and watch them going on the rampage, until they're completely destroyed. Works in tandem with your field marshal: if you destroy another jack, heal up the crucial systems, then re-cast it on another target.
- Energizer - Amazing spell. Use it to increase threat range or pull back for hit and run type tactics. Out of activation moves are extremely valuable. Considering this spell and her feat you actually have a reasonably good personal assassination game with her.
- Spellpiercer - The final word against pesky upkeeps like Arcane Shield or Defender's Ward. Also very handy in Cryx mirror matches, or whenever you expect lots of Incorporeal models.
Drawbacks & Downsides
- Having a feat that is tied to her CMD, instead of her CTRL, is really limiting. Also if you push forward to get more enemies in range, you're likely to leave yourself exposed.
- Flank with another warjack in your battlegroup isn't as useful as it looks; because warjacks activate one at a time the first warjack to melee a target doesn't get to flank.
- This is made worse by the fact the only Cryx light jack to have more than an 0.5" melee reach is the Stalker, and even that only has 1"; it's difficult to use one light to help flank two or more foes.
- Marginal support for your army outside your battlegroup
- Large base makes screening difficult, and Grievous Wounds will stop any healing on Morty's frame
- Cull Soul is almost a null rule on her card, living enemies will rarely come close enough to collect their souls (except to assassinate her).
- Salvage is useless against Hordes (you are only getting it when your jacks die near each other), and only moderately useful against gunlines.
- Opponents that know what Salvage can do, will rarely leave your warjacks half dead waiting to be healed.
- As with most Spellpiercer casters she can utterly annihilate certain trick lists but that counts strongly towards her power and when Spellpiercer isn't being useful she's only got a small game.
Tricks & Tips
- Salvage can trigger on multiple warjacks simultaneously. The 'jack that heals doesn't need to be the one that destroys it, or even the closest one.
- It doesn't even need to be an enemy jack friendly warjacks can trigger
- If Morty is low on health, you can kill your own jacks to heal her via Salvage.
List Building Advice
Strategy
Morty2's game remains largely the same as Morty1, but with different tools. Mechanism of Destruction allows you one awesome turn, when your jacks can tear up anything they get close, and swing the war of attrition to your favour. You can also engineer assassinations with Curse of Shadows and your feat, though not nearly as many-folded, as with her prime incarnation. The Field Marshal ability steers you to toward committing your jacks early on to the fight and not holding them back.
Mortenebra offers very little to the rest of her army, so self-supporting units (or those, who have readily available solos to do the job in her stead) are strongly advised.
Cryx Theme Thoughts
Black Industries
Carapace on your heavies (which you ought to take in abundance anyway) counters your weakness against gunlines, and the extra deployment zone adds to your aggressive gameplay. You can spare on an arc node too, which should be in your lists anyway.
- See the #Battlegroup section for some advice on non-character jacks.
- Barathrum is a great Fail Safe target.
- Kharybdis loves extra threat range from Energizer and the 2" tentacles are great at setting up Flank.
- Malice is a great target for Fail Safe. Energizer is also useful to help Malice aim or get out of melee and spell piercer + feat makes up for her pillow fisted melee output. Dragging something to you is often a safer way of using her feat if Mortenebra wants to personally get involved in the fighting.
- Though there is something to be said of the Reaper, even though it's not as good of a fail safe target it's bigger melee range , sustained attack and extra initial do a lot .
- Necrotechs, to keep the jacks going
- Warwitch Sirens, to Empower the jacks and take focus burden off Morty.
- Black Ogrun Ironmongers - +2 to hit and repairs.
- Soulhunters are a self-sufficient flanking unit, who work well with Curse of Shadows.
Gang Fighter on jacks is excellent for cranking damage and you have all the support necessary to run a whole bunch of them, sans Necrotechs. Run a flock of Scvangers, Barathrum and the usual support under her and you come close to a semi-decent list.
- Warwitch Sirens and Ironmongers are also here and double as Gang Fighter triggers.
- Barathrum & Kharybdis are as well.
- Satyxis Blood Priestess -The only attachment that works well with her spell list. A free Fail Safe is an extra focus and Sucker keeps her safe from harm. Dispel can remove pesky upkeeps.
- Satyxis Gunslingers - They do pretty well as supplemental shooting against Curse of Shadow targets and can set up Finisher for Scavengers.
- Black Ogrun Boarding Party - They can Drag enemies into your birds and potentially set up Gang Fighter for them.
- Asphyxious4 - A much needed damage buff. Fail Safe on a Toro is a good use of the spell.
- Princess Delores - Curse of Shadows sets up things to be blasted apart by her and she loves a Fail Safe Toro as her bodyguard.
- Talon/Buccaneer both have reach and are cheap exactly what her feat and Energizer wants the Vanguard can also function in the same way be isn't as cheap.
Infernal Theme Thoughts (Hearts of Darkness)
Morty2 is written about in more detail on the HoD article, but the short version is: she's not competitive in Hearts of Darkness.
If you already have either Infernals or Cryx, and you definitely want to start collecting the other Faction, then you can have fun casual games with her in HoD until you get more models. But if/when you have enough Infernal models to play a different Infernal caster, then you should do that. And if/when you have enough Cryx models to play Mortentenbra in Black Industries, then do that.
Merc/Convergence Theme Thoughts (Strange Bedfellows)
Strange Bedfellows is a convergence theme which has the chief benefit of allowing Mortenbra to take Convergence Vectors with their induction nodes and focus efficiency. She also gets access to mercenary jacks with long weapons (especially the Talon and Vanguard) that make it easy to trigger Flank.
Given that the bonuses for this theme help solos that she does very little for its not the best theme for her but it does have some stand outs.
- The Conservator loves the arm bonus from Fail Safe and Hand of Vengeance stacks nicely with flank.
- The Talon is cheap hard to kill and has reach to help other models get flank.
- The Corollary although she gets less from this than other casters +2 range of spell piercer and ‘free’ focus is always useful.
- The Negator Reposition 3 lets it set up flank on feat turn for other targets, Flank doesn’t stack but one turn where the Negator flanks with any Warjack rather than its own kind is useful.
- The Soul Trapper gets slightly better in this theme, as the Swift Vengeance move can help alleviate it's order-of-activation problem.
- You use the Swift Vengeance move to get in a position to collect souls, then you activate your army / other swift vengeance models to kill the enemy and feed the Soul Trapper, then you activate the Soul Trapper and pass the souls to something useful.
- You could pass the souls to the normal soul-using Cryx options, or the Void Archon (although the Void Archon is probably the closest soul collector-already) you also have options like the Enigma Foundry.
At worst you can give them to Mortenebra and she can use them as focus next turn.
Battlegroup
Mortenebra likes her jacks, that goes without saying. But ones of particular note are:
- Scavengers a whole flock of them in fact. Energizer them all forward and then feat so they get two additional die on their damage rolls and peck the enemy to death.
- Inflictor, to keep her alive while she gets into the frontline.
- Seether, to countercharge anything that wanders too close to her. Energizer lets her turn it around if it has been TK'd or Domianted.
- Kraken is a good target for Fail-Safe, keeping it operating at maximum performance until it's completely dead.
- Leviathans make good use of Energizer and Failsafe. Native Pathfinder is also valuable on Morty as she lacks the means to provide it to her battlegroup.
- Stalker - Either for triggering Flank under your feat, or benefiting from it, this little bugger gets really dangerous under Mortenebra's care.
Starting a 25 point Brawl list
In 2020.11 Phillip Melvin, one of the LOS authors, put together this list for the Brawlmachine format. It was then updated for the 2021.10 errata. He even wrote about it's playstyle and expanding it beyond 25 points, which you can read here.
Theme - Hearts of Darkness (Infernals)
- Mortenebra2: [+27 WJP]
- Slayer: [10 pts]
- Stalker: [8 pts]
- Scavenger: [6 pts]
- Shrike: [5 pts]
- Deathripper: [5 pts]
- Umbral Guardian: [Free] (6 pts)
- Nicia2: [4 pts]
- Pistol Wraith: [4 pts]
- Warwitch Siren: [3 pts]
- Griever Swarm (Min unit): [7 pts]
For more Brawlmachine list ideas, see Category: Brawl List
Other
Trivia
Released 2017.03
Other Cryx models
Rules Clarifications
|
Rules Clarification: : Magical Damage (Edit) |
* The "Damage Type: Magical" is not inherited by "secondary" damage from a weapon. That is, stuff like arcs (Electro Leap) or hazards (Scather). (Infernal Ruling)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification: : Warcaster (Edit) | ||||
|
Rules Clarification : Construct - None yet. (Edit)
|
|
Rules Clarification : Pathfinder (Edit)
|
Rules Clarification : Undead - None yet. (Edit)
|
|
Rules Clarification : Salvage (Edit)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification : Field Marshal (Edit)
|
Rules Clarification : Cull Soul - None yet. (Edit)
|
|
Rules Clarification : Steady (Edit)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification : Flank (Edit)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification : Arcantrik Bolt (Edit)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification : Curse of Shadows (Edit)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification : Energizer (Edit)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification : Fail-Safe (Edit)
|
|
|
Rules Clarification : Spellpiercer (Edit)
|
- Cryx
- Model
- Does have Mk4 rules
- Warcaster
- Reposition
- Reposition 3
- Reposition Feat
- Flank Feat
- Construct
- Pathfinder
- Undead
- Salvage
- Field Marshal
- Salvage Field Marshal
- Soul Taker
- Cull Soul
- Steady
- Magical Damage
- Arcantrik Bolt
- Curse of Shadows
- Fail-Safe
- Energizer
- Spellpiercer
- Black Industries
- Dark Host
- The Ghost Fleet
- Scourge of the Broken Coast
- Hearts of Darkness
- Strange Bedfellows
- Brawl List
