I wanted to try and stick a dragon in a 40 point fleet and came up with this.
Shal Bala is 20 points by itself but offers a powerful ability. The ability to trash opposing gold runners with ease. This will go hand in hand with the rest of the fleet.
It's really hard to make a gold runner fleet out of the overly-expensive Cursed but this one pulls it off.
Nightmare is as good as it gets for cheap within the Cursed's inventory so it is the first ship in our gold runner fleet. At 4 points it's a decent bargain. Add a Helmsman and it gets a decent speed out of it also. It has decent cannons if it comes down to shooting, but it's not set up for it.
Fallen Angel will be the forerunner though with it's speed of S+S+S, it will reach the islands before the Nightmare and have them explored for it. That speed is also a defense as I'll explain below.
The idea is to send out the gold runners and just plain avoid the opponents gunship completely going only for the gold. Shal-Bala will go in to attack the opponents gold runners and send them sinking. Considering it's a 40 point game they usually won't be large ships and should be easy prey for the huge Sea Dragon.
The other two ships head in to take the gold. Fallen Angel takes the lead and uses it's explorer to explore the islands for the Nightmare. Considering they can't hold much relies a lot on the Dragon being able to take out the enemies gold runners to hinder his ability to win the game.
If the opponent happens to have a fast gunship that can catch up to your gold runners you double pin the Fallen angel into him to buy some time as a last resort. Being safe in S range can do a lot.
Divers is there to steal any gold the opponents gold runners may have gotten before you sank them. It's actually not a bad idea to let him get to an island first just to steal it. Every bit counts.
Favor of the gods is ever-present to prevent the annoying Mermaids/Becalmed. It may be only a turn on the gold ships, but it's still a tight enough of a game to make a large difference.
It's so rare to see a Cursed gold runner fleet, I thought I would give it a shot and it's not all that bad. I know it's not uber good, but I wanted to be original and I think I managed that. You definitely won't see it everyday. Not to mention the look on someone's face when you say you're going to play a 40 point game and slap a Dragon on the table is priceless.
Miniature Trading
