Finding my path - An Ancestor Keyword review

Hey folks, it's been a minute. I've spent much of these early days of 4th Edition playing my Outcasts, building up to a big tournament here in Australia called CanCon in January, and despite playing a couple of games a week I wasn't really mustering the enthusiasm to capture my experiences in a blog post. I really like 4th Edition, but something about the experience of playing Outcasts in the new edition wasn't doing it for me. I still liked almost every Outcast master, many of them more than I did in 3rd, but none of them were grabbing me the way that Hamelin and Tara really captured my attention last edition. I'm the type to find something I really enjoy and then play that one thing over and over and over until I have mastered all the complexities. I get a lot of satisfaction in that. Unfortunately for Outcasts, all of them felt like the sort of Master I would play as a "palate cleanser" rather than my mainstay. So after five or six years and an entire edition, I made the painful decision to start a new faction.

This doesn't come lightly to me. As you might be able to tell from the above, I am not a person who idly starts a new crew every other week. I agonised about the decision for a long time and was torn a bit between the Explorers' Society and Resurrectionists, factions where I already had Masters thanks to them previously being Outcasts in 3rd Edition. I was initially so drawn to Nexus that I actually bought the whole Keyword, but it never felt like the right time to put them together. I played a few games with Jack Daw, had a good time, and realised I actually had a lot of random Resurrectionist models squirreled away that I'd picked up either for unusual 3rd Edition Outcast crews (I had Asura Roten and the Mindless Zombies because I needed the zombies for the Dead Rider, and I needed the Dead Rider for the Leveticus Horseman and four Riders list, I had Rafkin because I bought his box for the Nurses to use with Silas, etc.) or just because they'd come in Mystery Boxes in tournament prize support.

My plan, looking at what I already owned, was to put together Redchapel and Forgotten crews to pair with my existing Tormented and slowly expand through the rest of the faction as their 4e boxes released. Then someone at CanCon offered to trade for the 2nd edition Dreamer box I'd pulled from the prize support table and offered in return the entire Ancestor Keyword. Yan Lo was originally so low on my "to buy" list that I hadn't so much as glanced at the crew in the app, though I had heard he had quite a negative reputation. Still, he was a Resurrectionist, and it was effectively free from my perspective since I was never going to use the Dreamer models, so I said yes and spent the flight reading over the crew and getting a feel for them.

And honestly? I really liked what I saw.

First steps upon the path

Ok, so the main thing to know about the Ancestor Keyword is that they are an Upgrade crew. There are four upgrades, each Limitation (2), and they have a very interesting design language in that they are all one-use-only benefits that passively improve some part of the game's general actions. The Path of Spirit makes you faster, the Path of Ash lets you Interact at a greater range, the Soul Restoration upgrade lets you take non-Walk, non-Charge Tactical Actions as a signature (which given how few non-signature Tactical Actions exist in the Keyword, mostly translates to allowing you to Interact or occasionally Prepare/Slam as a Signature action), and the Path of Bone sort of bucks the trend by making your models kinda sticky and preventing enemy models from getting away from them. Each upgrade is discarded once you use them, and they mostly help directly or indirectly with the scheming parts of the game. Which is, incidentally, the parts of the game that score you points. And points win the game, so I'd consider this a pretty big asset to the crew.

Both of Yan Lo's titles use this same pool of upgrades, and each of the crew cards grant a different benefit for using them. Yan Lo, Pathseeker's crew card grants his Keyword an insanely useful ability called "Foot on the Path". Whenever his models attach an upgrade, they get to place 3". This, naturally, doubles down on the strengths of the upgrades and creates a Keyword that is phenomenally good at mobile, interact-heavy pools. There is technically other text on the crew card, but it's mostly pretty bad or niche-at-best text so we won't worry about it in this write-up.

The other title, Spiritwalker, is less interesting. His models get to make a melee attack when they attach an upgrade, but he doesn't put out as many upgrades and being in melee runs counter to what most of the upgrades actually give you (Path of Bone excepted). Spiritwalker has some interesting tricks, but I mostly won't be discussing him in this blog post. If I want to play a brawly Master, I can play Jack Daw. But if I want to win a game on something like Plant Explosives or Boundary Dispute, Pathseeker is a perfect fit.

Old men with new tricks

In my times encountering Yan Lo in 3rd Edition, I never really walked away thinking he felt like much of a schemer. He's certainly changed a bit in the entrance to 4th.

This old man is fast. He's verging on Captain Zipp levels of fast. It's a bit insane. When he activates, he attaches an upgrade. That upgrade is usually going to be the Path of Spirit, with the way I play him. That means he places 3", and then he can immediately discard the Path of Spirit on a walk or charge action to get +2 Speed and ignore models or terrain. By the end of his first action, therefore, he can be a bit over 12" away from when he started (not to mention freely placing out of engagement with his activation, making anything short of Don't Turn Your Back ineffective at keeping Yan Lo from scheming). It's not unreasonable to expect him to move twice that distance and still have an action left to Interact at the end if he has to.

As for the back of his card, it's all based on the turn number. His attack does damage equal to the turn number, his heal restores health equal to the turn number, and Treacherous Paths moves a model 2" plus the turn number while dropping some scheme markers as a bonus in the later turns. These aren't good actions on the face of it, but they can be shockingly efficient in unexpected ways.

Instil Youth is the obvious one. It is Yan Lo's signature action, and it attaches an upgrade in addition to the healing it grants. This means you'll get to place a model 3" and that model will now be a bit more efficient at moving or interacting in its next activation. That's honestly quite a lot of value out of an action and largely guarantees you'll be able to get big chunks of your crew across the centreline on the first turn with the actions to spare to do whatever interacting you need to do.

Darkest Magic, meanwhile, is a bad attack. It's a magic attack with a pitiful range of 2", somewhat made up for by having text that allows it to be generated by the charge action. But it can't benefit from raises and the only suited trigger is fine but not crazy impactful, so you're never doing more damage than the turn number. At least the 2" range means that while Yan Lo is running around and scheming to score you points, he'll be able to make the occasional attack as a free bonus. There is one giant "BUT" hanging over all of this though, and that is the two Soulstone, once-per-game trigger Rebuild Corpus, which replaces a target on 2 health into a unique Ancestor model. This bucks so many conventions of the game. It's not a summon, so the new model can interact and generally participate like a full member of your crew. You don't kill the model, so no Demise effects get to trigger. You get around Hard to Kill and similar defensive rules for much the same reason. It's hugely swingy on Plant Explosives, where you can turn an enemy bomb carrier into a friendly bomb carrier, and on Informants where you can go from being outnumbered two to one on a strategy marker into outnumbering two to one on the marker.

The reality is that Yan Lo isn't going to get a model down to 2 health on his own, but Turns 2 and 3 will usually involve him stalking the table like a predator looking for the sick member of the herd. When you see an enemy model drop low enough that 1-2 attacks will leave them on 2 health, that's when Yan Lo comes rushing by on his way to score some points and also incidentally converts them into an Ancestor model. A Damage 2 attack on Turn 2 doesn't feel so bad when it removes a model on 4 health in one swing and adds a model to your crew. The new model will be on 1-2 health so it will likely require a bit of healing from Instil Youth to stay alive for very long, but the Ancestor models have a variety of annoying defensive rules from Hard to Kill to Serene Countenance to Extended Reach to stay alive a little bit longer on low health, and combined with the extra movement granted to them by Instil Youth you can often get them somewhere safe enough for them to contribute rather than immediately die.

Finally, Treacherous Paths is an action I usually forget exists until late in the game, but from Turn 3 onwards it can basically guarantee that you score any scheme marker based scheme you could care to name. For a TN of 5, if targeting a friendly model, you get 5-6" of movement and two scheme markers. This action alone encourages me to pick scheme paths that will lead to a big marker-based scheme on Turn 3. It also has a trigger that grants Yan Lo himself a full action's worth of movement, albeit terrain dependent. Like Yan Lo's other actions, the name of the game here is efficiency. This single action can generate a normal model's full activation's worth of value for a low TN once it comes online, and makes for an easy way to close out your final points.

A lil' guy to share the load

Just in case you thought Yan Lo would be doing all the heavy lifting in terms of handing out upgrades and scoring points on his own, the Soul Porter comes swanning in to help out. While he has a pretty solid little melee attack, in reality this model centres completely around his Dark Bargain signature action. Dark Bargain is awesome. An extra interact action leans exactly into what I want this crew doing, but it's made even better by the Funeral Leavings trigger that allows the Soul Porter to attach an upgrade to the target.

Order of operations is important here. Dark Bargains generates a new action, the Interact action, which is generated but not declared until after the Dark Bargain action is fully resolved. This means that you do the damage from Dark Bargain, then you resolve the Funeral Leavings trigger and attach an upgrade, then you place 3" from Foot on the Path, and only then do you declare your Interact action. This lets you bounce models out of melee or over the centreline or wherever you need them to get the perfect Interact for your points. This is so integral to the Soul Porter's game plan that I will almost always Prepare for an Adaptable token in order to guarantee the trigger. A very common Turn 1 play will be to Prepare, Dark Bargains, and then Prepare again to set up for next turn.

And all of this is made even better by the fact that one of the upgrades you can attach, the Path of Ash, can increase the range of your Interact actions. And one of your Ancestor models, Sun Quiang, has Don't Mind Me in case opponents are standing on markers to protect them. With Funeral Leavings and the Path of Ash it leads to a 7"-ish zone around Sun Quiang where no scheme or strategy marker is safe in the Soul Porter's activation.

The family gathering

I'm not going to give an exhaustive rundown of the rest of the Keyword, but the main thing I want to stress is that with so much scoring power provided by crew card, Master, Totem, and upgrades, you don't really need to build a crew that feels designed to run schemes in order to be good at scoring. Ordinarily I wouldn't consider it efficient to try to compete on something like Plant Explosives with models that are only fast once given an upgrade versus crews that are just naturally fast, but in Yan Lo's case the actions that give out upgrades are shockingly efficient about it. You're not just gaining an upgrade to make your own model capable of competing with the opponent's, you're also getting free movement and some other useful effect like healing or the free interact action. As a result, I feel free to build crews that are designed to brawl with several damage dealers and a healer or two than traditional "run fast and interact" crews, and yet I feel fast enough to compete with those faster crews when it comes to scoring.

At the high cost end of the crew are Izamu and Toshiro. I must admit, I haven't been impressed with Cost 10 models in Resurrectionists. Izamu is definitely on that list of unimpressive. He uses Heroic Intervention as a signature to get his third attack each turn, but it's pretty awkward. The Ancestor crew has multiple frontline models that I specifically want to be close to or engaging enemy models to apply effects like the Path of Bone, Don't Turn Your Back, or Diversion, and Izamu ends up sending them away to get a third attack with fairly unimpressive triggers. For a point less you get Toshiro, and this guy is a far more competent all-rounder.

A lot of the time I want to hire Toshiro for his Unending Fealty action, which feels doubly efficient when I give him the Soul Restoration upgrade to do it as a signature action. But even when I bring no source of Remains markers for him and end up needing to wait for models to die to use his summon, he feels great. Daimyo's Gift has three great triggers, and his melee attack is solid as well. I consider Toshiro the first "must hire" model in the keyword.

For additional damage dealing, the Ghost Eater is also a must-have. He's Cost 8, and while I have generally viewed Resurrectionist models in the Cost 10 bracket as being below par for their cost, Resurrectionist Cost 6-8 models seem phenomenal. Coming from Outcasts, I usually expect Cost 8 models to make two Damage 3 attacks and have a utility signature, or else have weaker attacks and improved utility. This is the formula followed by Maurice, Hans, Lazarus, Gracie, the Fumigator, the Hodgepodge Emissary, etc.

For some reason, Resurrectionist models in the Cost 8 bracket pretty consistently average closer to 9-10 damage in an activation than 6-7 (provided their attacks hit), and the Ghost Eater is no exception. He's pretty straightforward himself, getting a 12" range magical attack that does Damage 3 and has some triggers for a bit of extra damage. He can also discard a card or suffer damage when he activates to make Ghost Lights, who are an added bit of bonus value.

Move a model, or charge an enemy and try to blow up, or be sacrificed to restore Soulstones. Given you make these things without even expending an action, they're a phenomenal freebie.

And while we were discussing the absurd value of Resurrectionist mid-cost models, we have to bring up Sun Quiang.

In the pools where Pathseeker excels, Sun Quiang is a legend. He's cheap. He has Don't Mind Me. He has a signature action heal that also has a trigger to attach an upgrade, which therefore means he can place my models 3". If I have an unspent upgrade on Sun, he can expend it to heal for an additional +2. He has a great attack and yet is so good at scheming and healing that I hardly ever use it. He even has the ability to reactively pull friendly models out of danger in an emergency. So long as you can keep him alive, and an 8" range on that heal can often make that relatively easy, Sun will perform far above his measly price tag.

Finally, I want to shine a spotlight on the Gokudo. Like Sun, they're only Cost 6 while providing a considerable amount of value for their price tag. Unlike Sun, this value is basically all on their front of card. Their back of card is a bunch of Skl 5, low damage attacks that get a little bit interesting if you fluke into some raise effects. They're also emblematic of this weird little sub-theme in Ancestor where you have tons of ways to put out Burning tokens but hardly anything in the Keyword interacts with Burning. But then you look to the front of card.

I'm sorry, Diversion?! On a Minion?! Genuinely nuts. A Gokudo's presence in a brawl can be game defining. They don't seem like they should last long in a brawl, but it turns out Df 5, 8 health actually goes a pretty long way when enemy models don't have signature actions. By shutting off the most common means of generating a third swing, you start fairly reliably surviving the activations of even dedicated beaters and then Yan Lo or Sun Quiang top their health up and give them an upgrade and place them out of melee range but still in Diversion range and whatever was trying to kill them gets bogged down with Path of Bone models and the Gokudo keeps on trucking.

Sometimes that doesn't work, but never fear. Even in death the Gokudo is obnoxious. If they die with an upgrade on them, they get to turn into any Cost 8 or less Ancestor model and survive on 2 health. Which isn't a lot, but as I mentioned when discussing Yan Lo's Rebuild Corpus trigger most of the models in Ancestor have an obnoxious rule that makes killing them at 2 health a little bit difficult.

My main rule of thumb is that I don't want my Gokudo to be the model that my opponent hits with their alpha strike (too many ways to use a signature action from outside of 4" to set up the Gokudo to die in a single activation), but rather I want them falling in behind the brawl once it begins. Force my opponent to fight Toshiro and summons and the like without the benefit of signature actions. Sometimes they chip in with a few attacks late in the turn when speculative swings might lead to random raises, sometimes they just scheme around the edges of the brawl, and sometimes they die and get to decide which other piece of utility available in the Keyword would provide the most benefit in just in this instance.

A fun aspect of the Gokudo (and Rebuild Corpus), is that even the other members of the Keyword that don't usually make my starting roster will regularly get to see table time. I bring out Manos the most often, he's a little like the Ghost Eater except he gets a TN 7 Leap as his signature. He can still make three Damage 3 magic attacks in the activation, since apparently 9+ damage is just something Cost 8 Resurrectionist models can be expected to do as a baseline, but he needs some Adversary to be in play when he activates to do so. Chiaki meanwhile has Serene Countenance to keep her alive when she comes on the table in these low health situations, and she brings incidental card draw with Nefarious Pact. I would hire Chiaki in every game honestly, but I think both her and Sun Quiang is a little bit too much investment in support. She's a bit more of a tech hire in practice for when I need token removal. And Ashigaru mostly see the table via Toshiro's summon, but they have Hard to Kill and Don't Turn Your Back so they're honestly a pretty viable Gokudo Demise when you want to cut down on enemy scheming options in the late game. Either way, they're regular fixtures for just tying down enemy models and absorbing attacks while I score my points.

Sadly, I don't yet own the Obsidian Statue or Terracotta Warriors. They are in a similar bracket to the Hard to Kill models in that they're a little bit annoying to finish off even on 2 health, but I haven't particularly missed them in any of my games so far. On paper they don't seem enormously impressive, though I could see myself hiring a Terracotta Warrior as a cheaper alternative to Chiaki. At some point I'll add them to the collection and play around with them, but I'm not champing at the bit to do so.

The path's end

I like a bit of added complexity in my crews, and I think that's what was missing in my Outcast games. Even Von Schill, who is arguably Yan Lo's equivalent as an upgrade-based crew, feels a bit more linear in terms of how he actually plays. What Yan Lo has given me, what I think I was missing in 4th Edition Outcasts, is a juggling act. I feel constantly engaged balancing where I need my upgrades to be against the game state and scoring needs, figuring out which Ancestor model that isn't in play would add the most to my game plan when a Gokudo dies or when Yan Lo is lining up an attempt to Rebuild Corpus, and so on. The ability to build my own schemer at any stage by just attaching an upgrade or two makes the moment-to-moment gameplay feel super fluid. Ancestor has been a big shot in the arm in terms of my enjoyment of 4th Edition, and that in turn has made me interested in scouring Resurrectionists for "palate cleanser" crews on the same tier as those that had me feeling a bit dissatisfied with Outcasts. It's time to rob a few graves and see what I can dig up. Until next time folks!