I was digging through my old bands, and I can across my Marut band that I had shelved when Belchers came out. I always agonized that it was only 198 points, and that I could not make any better use of those 2 points.

Then I noticed the DHoD was exactly 2 points more than the Warforged Bodyguard, fills exactly the same roll, and grants immunity to an energy type.

True, it is slightly redundant with the Couatl, but against belchers it seems to give the band a nice bump.

Aramil, Adventurer
Cleric of Yondalla
Couatl
Dragonmark Heir of Deneith
Marut
Standardbearer
Timber Wolf
Warforged Scout
----------------
8 activations, 200 pts.

Thoughts?

A Marut is a lot of eggs in one basket these days. Faced with a Solar's slaying arrow he has a 50/50 chance of outright being removed.

A firegiant forgepriest can really put a dent in the Marut's day too.

Shoot and Scoot bands are becoming more prevelent as well....

You really arent seeing many Belchers anymore, especially not in multiples. Any other band that has an Heir will probably put Immune Sonic on their main hitter, and you are doing 20 dmg on your turn, and then 20 dmg on the Couatls.

You're right.

With a clear shot (hsould be possible to get with fly 8), the Solar has a 60% chance of hitting, with a 50% chance of success. 30% chance of losing outright = bad. Course the bodyguard could take the attack, but that is only a little bit better.

So is Solar the Titan of choice these days?

The Solar is finding very little play so dont read into the example too much. The Dragonmark Heir, and a lot of new non-energy auto dmg is keeping the Marut down.

The Solar is pretty weak, actually (AC 19 and 105 HP for 105 points).

I would try it out and see how it works.

Speculation was that the Dragonmarked heir would keep the marut down, but the dragonmarked heir hasn't actually been showing up in large numbers from what I can tell--CG bands seem to be the flavor of the day (and that's CG bands without the dragonmarked heir) and people even seem to be having success with forgepriest bands that don't use the dragonmarked heir (recently, I think there were two winning bands that were Forgepriest, wartroll).

The other banes of the marut--arcane ballista bands and Korducopia also seem to have taken a backseat in current tourney reports.

So, a lot of the marut's old nemeses are on the way out. On the other hand, the new bands present some challenges to the marut. A 3x bralani band, for instance, would probably leave the marut at 35 hp through their non-elemental lines before engaging and, on many maps (dragondown grotto, for instance) might never give you the option to engage them. A multidancer band might similarly shadowjump in, score an easy kill or two and then shadowjump out, leaving the marut to pointless trudge across the battlefield in the vain hope of ever getting a swing off. (And even if it did, defensive roll would let them ignore the first swing).

So there would be challenges to overcome in order to run the marut successfully, and probably the biggest problem is that you cannot mitigate all of those challenges with the same map (the maps without walls tend to also be unfavorable to non-flying speed 6 large bases, for instance), and in any event, you commander 3 is not high enough for you to depend upon map selection as your primary defense against the currently popular bands. If you think you have strategies that would give you the leg up against those bands, then by all means go for it, but MCB (marut/coatl/bodyguard) isn't my fist pick for the current environment.