The holidays have me scatter-brained and all over the place. Kicking off 2026 and continuing the semi-recent trend of miscellaneous rebasing and blabbering, up now is a rebased Zuinok Iceblood for the spooky Undead! ...or maybe it's Ziunok? The new edition seems to have swapped some letters around. Considering the webstore has the old spelling, I think we'll stick with that for now.
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| Zuinok, back, and now with more fog! |
Zuinok was introduced in 3rd Edition, as a neat little loner spellcaster. If you took him, you couldn't take any of the other unique Undead heroes, and he got a neat suite of spells with a funky Fireball, Surge, and Veil of Shadows. He was interesting, but not popular. I tried him a few times and was underwhelmed. His Heal was conditional, healing non-Revenant skeletons, thought it looks like I misread it then, and the spell did not have an original cap on the healing. Ooops.
Now, he fills a very coveted Warlord slot , with tweaked stats (lower Def), and just Fireball and Surge for his spells currently. The Heal via Fireball is less conditional now (all "Decaying Horde" units now, so a wider variety of things, including Zombie Trolls and all Revenants!), but now firmly capped at 3 for the healing. I struggled to get any heals at all with him in 3rd Edition, so we'll see how impactful this actually is on the table.
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| From the side. |
Leaving 3rd Edition, I had around 12,000 points of Undead. And the army suffered some casualties in the transition. Mhorgoth the Mandatory is gone, and honestly, that's totally fine, and really frees up competition for Warlord slots and more interesting builds. Unfortunately, the Liche is gone as well, though Spellcasting levels also look to be gone, so this isn't a huge deal as other spellcasters (like Zuinok) can more easily step up to cast the cool spells now. My Teuronic Mummies and Pharaohs are all voided, losing around 750 points, but they still exist in the Empire of Dust, and might find alternative uses, or could be allies in casual or narrative games. Most importantly for me was the voiding of Skeleton Warriors with two handers. I really liked them in 3rd edition, and seeing some of the rules spoiled for 4th, like sticky combats, I was hyped to get them on the battlefield. I had invested pretty heavily in them, and now lost 7 regiments in the transition, or about 600 points. That would have been almost 2 battalions wore of core stuff without even trying! Alas. Hopefully that returns as an option in the future, as I did like the hobbying challenge for them, and was proud of those converted units. The last casualties were my Deathpack, which I also liked, but had only hobbied up two small units of so far. All in all, it's something like 1700 points voided for the Undead.
Losing my go-to unit of skeletons, the edition transition is a bit of a bummer, but I think things will be manageable. I have a good base overall to start from, and can always build a little more of whatever I need going forward. Despite my personal unit losses, I am still very bullish on the Undead for 4th as they can field a bunch of very durable units and with the overall reduction to CS throughout the game, look like they can grind things out very well still!