New true mercenary rules – Constance and Gallant blaze into battle
Greetings, Morrowan followers. It’s Fraser from the Warmachine dev team here to shine Morrow’s light on the latest true mercenaries to enter the fray: Constance Blaize and her super heavy warjack, Gallant. As a reminder, true mercenaries play for every Warmachine army.
Coming to pre-order next week (or free with an annual Warmachine subscription), Constance doesn’t shy away from the front lines. Let’s take a look at how her rules make her Warmachine’s most aggressive journeyman warcaster to date.
There’s a few things to dig into here, but I’ll start with Sacrosanct Light which turns the typical journeyman dynamic on its head. What you might normally expect to see is the journeyman keeping themselves well behind your forces. The risk of losing them, and their cohort model as a knock-on effect — in this case, Gallant — is just too high.
Constance doesn’t play by those rules.
As long as she keeps close to Gallant, she effectively cannot be hit until Gallant has been destroyed. I’ll show you more of Gallant later on, but for now, let’s just say he’s ARM 22 and has colossal levels of “stay-put-ness”.
Now we’ve established Constance’s impressive front-line staying power, let’s look a little closer at what she’ll be doing there.
After gathering requiem tokens from Requiem for the Fallen, she can combine Divine Illumination with Invocation, her focus spend (remember, she has very little need to save focus for her power field when she’s protected by Gallant) to cast Flashing Blade an impressive six times on top of her two initial melee attacks, getting the favourable choice of die results on each roll.
This is an absolutely staggering amount of damage potential, even for a journeyman solo.
Before we even get into the support abilities Constance provides, the capacity to push their way aggressively across the table, and deliver a counter punch, already make this pair a formidable force.
Constance’s two other spells may be simple, but provide valuable defence and utility to any army they fight alongside.
As anyone who’s ever been on the other side of the table from a spectral Cryxian force will attest, having access to magical weapons can be critical. So, while you may not cast Morrow’s Blessing every game, you’ll be glad you have it when you need it.
And for those who have been subjected to Crippling Grasp one too many times (like every single one of my regular opponents, for instance), Aegis is your friend. Another spell that, while you may not cast it every game, is very useful to have in your back pocket.
Completing the pair is Gallant, Constance’s immovable bastion of a companion. Don’t let Constance’s impressive output fool you: there’s much more to Gallant than simply being Constance’s protector.
This ARM 22, 36-box super heavy warjack capable of fueling itself with focus, that's also SPD 7 cavalry/flight (those giant thrusters on his back have to count for something, right?), is an absolute mountain of stats.
As you can see, Gallant’s more than capable of standing guard right alongside Constance on the front lines. That’s not what I’m excited to talk about, though. Have a read of Atonement:
Atonement is an entirely new concept for Warmachine, and has the potential to turn a lot of list-building considerations on their heads.
Gallant actively punishes models that increase their ARM value with shields, bucklers, spells, feats, special rules… and so on. Anything other than a perfectly fair fight, as billed on a model’s stat card, and Gallant gets going.
(And I know what you’re thinking: yes, Gallant gets the extra die when it attacks enemy Gallants. We do sometimes love a bit of ironic game design in the Warmachine team.)
So, which army do you think will bid the best for the services of these true mercenaries? Update your Warmachine app now to download Constance and Gallant’s rules for free and start theorymachining those lists.
Will Constance Blaize & Gallant make their way into your army? Follow Warmachine on your preferred platforms to be notified when the pre-order goes live, or grab your annual app subscription now so you’re ready when the redemption code drops next week!
