Before we get to that, let’s look at why you might be
interested in making a Cave Drake work. The answer to this is that
it’s an absolute blender to match any killing piece in Middle Earth. Strength 7
is scary enough, but when you’ve got 4 Attacks and Monstrous Charge it becomes
outright terrifying. Almost anything that’s charged by a Cave Drake and loses
the duel roll is going to be facing a massive 10 S7 hits. Even its Fight value
of 6 is perfectly acceptable against most models, letting it easily win fights against warriors or basic Captains and rip apart battlelines with ease. It’s
got some neat side benefits— a cute Fearless bubble, a Brutal Power
Attack that’s almost always worse than attacking normally, and it can bring
along half a dozen Goblins in its warband for efficiency’s sake—
but primarily you’re interested in its capacity to hit an enemy line and kill
everything in its path.
No one wants this charging them (Sithious)
Unfortunately, as has been articulated all over the
internet, you’re eventually going to end up hitting an enemy hero with Strike,
who’ll get up to F7 or higher, win the duel pretty easily, and cut you into
neat little pieces of lizard. When we look at a hypothetical duel between the
Drake and someone like Elrond, the math seems to bear this out. If Elrond
Strikes, he has a roughly 2/3 chance of winning the duel, and the great
weakness of the Cave Drake is exposed. He’ll hack it down, crush the Goblins
you brought with it, the air will be filled with your lamentations, and —
Hang on. Looking a bit deeper at that math there, we see that our Elven blademaster is actually only doing an average of 0.46 Wounds per turn to the Drake. In fact, if we do some quick maths ourselves, we realise that the D7 of the Cave Drake means that Elrond is only Wounding it on 6’s, and his three Attacks with one reroll to Wound have barely over a 50% chance of scoring a Wound even when you have won the duel roll. This is made especially annoying for the Elf Lord by his need to save Might for Heroic Strikes, meaning he can’t spend it on inflicting Wounds. Given that the Cave Drake has 6 Wounds and 1 Fate, it will therefore take Elrond a full 15 turns of combat to kill the Drake —longer than most games! Moreover, this is assuming that he has F7 the whole time. Once he’s out of Might by the third combat, he’s actually down to 0.37 average Wounds inflicted per turn, so these numbers are actually optimistic. If he decided to wield his Elven Blade two-handed, his odds of winning the duel roll would go down so much that his average Wounds dealt would actually decrease, so that's out as a potential solution. The Drake would be in a bit more trouble if it got trapped, especially if there were lots of other Elves in the fight with Elrond. But given that it costs 20-40 points less than he does and will probably be embedded in a horde of Goblins, it should be quite easy for you to keep its flank secure and pull off any extra models that try and gang up on it. Assuming you can do this, then there’s little to no risk of a S4 hero like Elrond killing the Cave Drake in an ordinary game.
Elrond's not so big a fan of those numbers (Michael Martinez)
In fact, if we look a little deeper again, we see
that our territorial little lizard is actually doing quite a lot of damage back
to Elrond. It may only be winning combat every three turns or so while Elrond
is Striking, but it’s dealing so much damage back on those turns with its 4 S7
Rending Strikes that it’s averaging 0.84 Wounds back to him per turn (note that his Defence is listed as 4 because the Drake will be Rending). That’s
almost double the damage it was taking! Once Elrond runs out of Might and is
back down to F6 with an Elven Blade, the Drake’s average damage output
increases to 1.17 Wounds per turn, which is starting to get really scary for our
favourite Half-Elf. In fact, if Elrond Heroic Strikes for the first three
rounds of combat, then it will take him 17 turns to kill the Drake, while it
will have devoured him within an average of 5 or 6 turns. Those aren't great odds
for the Good player.
Yikes
As it turns out, things actually gets much worse once we
take into account charge bonuses. Assuming Elrond is mounted, him charging in
increases his average damage output to 0.51 Wounds/turn, or 0.63 if he’s
Striking, while also reducing the Drake’s chance of winning the duel and
inflicting damage by a little bit. However, when the Drake gets to charge,
things get messy. It ends up with an almost 50% chance of winning if he isn’t
Striking, and there’s every possibility that he doesn’t survive the 10 S7
Strikes he will take if he does lose the duel. Assuming that the Drake charges
every second round (probably reasonable, unless one side is burning much more
Might than the other on Heroic Moves), then on average dice Elrond will be dead
by the fourth or fifth round of combat. The Drake, meanwhile, will have
suffered around 2 Wounds and have expended no resources, ready to crunch
through the rest of the Elf shieldwall. Now is when we get to hear those
lamentations I was talking about earlier.
YIKES
Obviously, dice are dice, and they can be unpredictable
things. If Elrond rolls well and gets an early lead in Wounds, then it’s still
quite possible that he brings down the Cave Drake. Moreover, all of this math
changes substantially if we’re taking on someone like Bolg or Elendil, who have
native F7 and will be Wounding on 4’s rather than 6’s. As it turns out, those
matchups do still remain quite even unless the hero burns through loads of
Might, with the ever-looming possibility of the Drake charging in and killing
even these heroes in one turn. But they’re certainly a lot better-suited to
taking on a Cave Drake than Elrond, Lord of the West though he is.
Even Elendil is taking more Wounds than he's dishing out!
I am in no way advertising the Cave Drake as a hero-killer
par excellence, capable of outduelling any combat hero with ease. However, the
one-sided nature of this math makes it clear that the Drake is at least “pretty
good” at killing enemy heroes, even ones with Strike. The fact that it only
really gets countered by heroes with both F7 or higher and powerful bonuses to
Wound shows that the gaping weakness of the model is a lot smaller than it
first appears. It’s a monster that is perfectly suited to ripping apart
battlelines and crushing smaller heroes, that also happens to put in a good
showing against the vast majority of bigger combat pieces as well. If you back
it up with a couple of Bat Swarms or Blackshield Shamans, then the one
“weakness” of the model is totally patched over and you’re left with an almost
unstoppable combat piece. And of course, you can afford to do so because all of
this combat power comes at a mere 150pts. That’s around 100pts less than the
heroes like Azog and King Elessar that really pose a threat to you. It’s not a
perfect model by any means, and it can sometimes feel a bit crowded out by the
multitude of other monsters that Moria can bring (check back in a few week's time for a discussion on this!). But if you run it, you’re
unlikely to be disappointed. There’s even a chance that you’ll get that one in
a million situation where Gaping Maw is actually worthwhile, and then you’ll
feel properly smug.
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