Dark Seduction is a criminally underrated spell in the Infernals toolkit. It exists in two places in faction, on the lesser master Regna, and on the master Agathon.
Spell requirements are:
- Target is a Warrior
- Target isn’t a Warcaster/Warlock
- Target hasn’t been affected by Dark Seduction already this turn
- Target isn’t inscrutable
A model hit by dark seduction makes a full advance immune to free strikes, and gets to make a basic attack. That basic attack can be melee or ranged.
Lets examine a few uses of the spell, starting from the most basic:
1 – Targeting models with Powerful Basic Attacks
There are some really great examples of models with great basic attacks. Your goal is to really make the opponent suffer by using the best basic attacks in their list. Lets take a look at a few:
- Eiryss1 – If your opponent is playing Eiryss1 they will never ever forget the game she is hit by dark seduction, turns around and nails their own caster with a disruptor bolt
- Archons – Yes, Archons! the angels sent to fight the infernals are weak to this spell. Some have straight dispel you can use to knock upkeeps off, others have critical blind and high chances to roll it. The Thamar Archon’s bow has 3 great shots to steal, imagine if your opponent has a soul collector shot by Thamar’s Teeth, or leaving an eruption of ash in the path of their infantry
- Gorman/Hutchuk – Models with debuffs on their basic attacks are killer targets!
- Lord of the Feast – his bird and teleport is a basic attack, you can use this to reposition him somewhere easy to kill, or somewhere irrelevant, for example shooting the enemy objective to port him to it.
- Trancers – Models with a rule like smite are hilarious targets
That’s just the beginning though! let’s look at some other use cases
2 – Targeting Unit Leaders
This one is really evil against unsuspecting players. Infernals give an opponent many reasons to spread their models out, from the shrines gun to hellmouth, to the threat of blackspot sprays. But, when a unit spreads out it becomes vulnerable to you grabbing the unit leader and full advancing them away from their unit. This gives you the effects of:
- Models left out of CMD no longer contest zones
- Models out of CMD have their activation ruined unless the opponent goes out of their way to kill the leader and promote a new one, which requires effort
- It allows you to turn off some Granted: effects which require formation
- Spell buffs no longer work on models out of formation
It’s bad news for the opponent when this happens! Now, lets look at our final use case:
3 – Moving key models
Moving key models can be really strong depending on who they are and what they do, lets look at a few examples:
- Moving models with Soul Ward – One powerful example of this is Clockwork Legions only anti soul collection technology is a void archon. One dark guidance later and a heap of the army is exposed to simply having their souls collected by the infernals rather than going to the enigmas
- Moving models that gain buffs for being b2b – Imagine grabbing a Harbinger initiate and walking it back towards her on feat, not only does it take a pow 14 (6 on 2d6 to kill!) but it leaves the other initiates down 3 armor
- Moving tough contesting models – Why deal with that hard to kill model when you can just walk it away and score anyway?
- Reposition models with auras – Mortal Fear from Darragh got you down? Steady from Jussika making clearing trolls annoying? One dark seduction later… You get bonus points if you dark seduction a krielstone to walk away from all the models it can self sac to before hitting it with a regna hellfire, taking away tough and RFPing it. Ouch!
In summary, the uses of Dark Seduction never end. Regna often is free to play with a lot of Essence, afterall, her battlegroup is fuelled off cultists. In matches where deceleration isn’t critical she can comfortably be boosting hellfires or dark seductions. Other than that, Agathon is amazing at the job.
i hope i’ve given you something to think about in your future games
The Infernal Gateway 