-By: Cody H.

I wanted to provide a little write up of how to beat Grymkin for all my locals because I was surprised at how many other Grymkin players were there. They will likely become more common in the future. I think there are a few essential elements in playing into any matchup, an effective list, preventing big mistakes, and exploiting weaknesses.

An effective list. Fortunately, I don’t think you need to change your list pair too much if it is currently well written. I think there are many parallels between grymkin and menoth. If you have a good list into menoth, it is likely serviceable into grymkin. Every grymkin player will likely have at least 1 dark menagerie list (the beast theme) because it is easier to play and has fewer weaknesses than an infantry list, especially with current releases. Here are some elements to consider when deciding which list to play:

• To play into dark menagerie, you HAVE to be able to kill the 4 gremlin swarms. They are stealth and incorporeal, so you need magical weapons. If you can’t deal with the gremlin swarms, you opponent can brick very hard and you will need to play with about 70% of your army into 100% of the grymkins.
• You will need a list that can deal with 2-4 very tanky heavies and 1 round those heavies (see sacrifice arcana below).
• Models that can produce rough terrain are very effective against grymkin.
• I don’t think RFP is that valuable into grymkin. It is very hard to rfp enough models so that the skin and moans do not get powered up. Almost all your attacks have to rfp to pull this off.
• Denial elements are very strong into grymkin.
• Grymkin have tons of rfp, if your list relies on returning living models it may be a bad matchup?

Prevent Big Mistakes. Arcana can force you to make huge mistakes, but there are many models in the faction that are designed to exploit your mistakes. The opposite side of this advantage is that the models are situational and outplayable. In general, the biggest mistake you can make is under or overcommitting to the grymkin brick/swarm. The faction has very few tools to force action, you need to be sure that when you decide to take an attritional advantage that it will actually pay off. When in doubt, don’t engage. Here are some big mistakes you can make:

• Ask your opponents to provide you with their selected arcana. Review them at the beginning of your turn and decide what is the worst-case situation when they trigger. Don’t get tilted when they do trigger. You shouldn’t get salty when an opponent pops a feat, same logic when arcana trigger.
• Crabbits have shield guard, your most valuable ranged attacks are less valuable.
• Don’t give a huge sacrifice! Sacrifice heals all grymkin models in control after you kill a model. If your opponent chooses this it could be because you lack punching power or brought a lot of guns. Crabbits can be punched down to low health to trigger sacrifice after you leave a heavy very low.
• Ill omens give you -1 attack and damage rolls, it can make a decent plan a bad one.
• There is almost no reason to attack piggybacks unless you have to for scenario purposes. They are only mat 6 pow 13 if they shield wall. Once they charge they die to everything. Minimize the usefulness of a charge and you are golden.

Exploiting Weaknesses. The biggest weakness of the faction is speed. Child can speed up the beasts, dreamer can play mirage, but still threats are generally very static. Going first into Grymkin feels strong because you can set a forward line of battle and give them one less turn to set up crucial elements like corpses on the skin and moans. Cage ragers are khador jack slow and very easy to stay away from. Dread rots threaten as far as hammer dwarfs! Here are some big weaknesses of the lists.

• Very little pathfinder! Wanderer can provide some, but very little on the models. SnM have to animus for pathfinder. Pigs, dreadrots and cage ragers have no options.
• Kill the lantern man on the hallowmen. This removes recursion and concealment for the unit.
• If you can kill the death knell, without over extending, before skin and moans get corpses, that can be game winning. If you over extend to kill it, you will likely lose. This generally means if you can kill it with guns, it is worth it. If you have to commit a valuable heavy early in the game it is probably not worth.
• If you are playing a gun heavy list, target selection is very important. I think the right choice is to try and kill a snm before it gets corpses. If they have sacrifice, shoot high powered shots first, then low powered. Ideally you get it low, they shield guard a low powered shot and it does not kill a crabbit for sacrifice. If they have twilight sisters, killing infantry just because you can may hurt more than help.
• Your caster can get away with a lot of stuff. Grymkin are a weak assassination faction, if you have a caster with an oppressive ability like lamentation, you can play it far forward just staying out of static beast threats.
• Kill the glimmer imp. There are few other fixes for high def in the faction.

These are just some of the things I have learned about them and am absolutely not an expert. But, hopefully these points will give you a leg up enough to avoid a couple of silly losses. I think once you get some games into them you will see that they are not the gotcha faction any more than Menoth are.