Rules Focus: Zyrena, the Cinderforged Champion
The Kazyr are approaching! Leading up to their release at Essen SPIEL, we’ll take a closer look at some of their rules and how they will impact the world of Shroudfall. In our first Kazyr Rules Focus, we’re taking a closer look at Zyrena, the Cinderforged Champion.
As the Essence Weaver included in the Kazyr Skirmish Pack, Zyrena is designed to be a great entry point into the faction. She supports the Kazyr’s naturally capable warriors, rewards clever use of Cinders and terrain, and can be a serious threat herself when the opportunity arises.
Her game plan can be summed up quite simply: make your warriors difficult to attack in melee and make your opponent regret it when they try.
Defence is an opportunity
The Kazyr are an elite army. Their warriors tend to be capable and nimble fighters, protected by well-made armour. Zyrena leans heavily into those strengths.
It starts with her Leadership, Searing Accuracy. Keen observers will quickly notice that her Leadership consists of two parts: a general effect for all models in her army and a specific effect for friendly Kazyr models within 2" of a Cinder marker.
This style of Leadership will appear throughout the faction, with Cinder markers providing powerful but highly conditional effects.
And this introduces one of the fundamental decisions Kazyr players will face again and again: Do I keep a Cinder in play for its passive benefits, or consume it for a powerful short-term effect?
In Zyrena’s case, friendly Kazyr units within 2" of a friendly Cinder gain Duelist, further improving their defence against melee attacks. This makes the placement of your Cinders important beyond simply fuelling abilities. They can create small areas of the battlefield where your warriors become particularly difficult to engage in close combat.
But avoiding an attack is only half the fun. Duelist’s Riposte turns those misses into opportunities. While the ability is active, whenever a friendly model within 6" of Zyrena is missed by an enemy attack, that model may immediately make an attack against the enemy that attacked it.
Put the two abilities together and your opponent suddenly faces an uncomfortable choice. Commit to attacking a high-DEF Kazyr warrior protected by a Cinder, and a miss might not simply waste an attack, it might give the Kazyr an additional one.
The trick is positioning. You want your Cinders where the fighting is going to happen, your warriors close enough to benefit from them, and Zyrena near enough to threaten a Riposte, all while keeping your opponent from extinguishing those precious Cinders. If you can bring all of this together, attacking your battle line can become a dangerous proposition.
Who needs roads anyway?
Of course, high DEF doesn’t help much if your warriors can’t get where they need to be.
That’s where March Through comes in. Zyrena can choose a friendly unit within 6" and grant it Pathfinder until the end of the game round, allowing it to ignore the additional movement costs of terrain and opening up routes across the battlefield that would otherwise slow your army down.
There is a catch: each time Zyrena uses March Through, its Essence cost increases for the remainder of her activation. You can therefore help several units through difficult terrain when you really need to, but doing so quickly becomes expensive.
That creates some interesting decisions. Which unit really needs Pathfinder this round? Is there a piece of terrain your opponent assumes will protect an objective or flank? And is getting a second unit through worth spending the additional Essence?
There is another consideration: activating Zyrena early gives you access to March Through when your other units still have their activations ahead of them, but it also means that she will likely have less Essence available and contribute less offensively that round.
Still, for an army with valuable individual models, getting the right warrior to the right place can make all the difference.
More mobile than she looks
Zyrena herself has a MOV of M, so at first glance she might not look any more or less mobile than many other units. Her abilities, however, tell a different story.
Vengeful Advance allows Zyrena to react when a friendly model within 4" of her is destroyed by an enemy attack. She may immediately make an S MOV towards the attacking enemy model and then follow up with an attack against it. It fits perfectly with the way she wants to play. Zyrena wants to stay close to her warriors, supporting them as they hold the line. But when one of them falls, she can suddenly surge forward and bring the fight directly to whoever was responsible. Then there’s Dragon’s Tail. When Zyrena hits an enemy with it, she can push herself directly towards that model until she contacts a model or LINEAR TERRAIN.
Neither ability makes Zyrena conventionally fast. Instead, they give her situational movement. An opponent judging her threat purely by her MOV value might suddenly find the Cinderforged Champion much closer than expected.
The Cinderforged Champion
And getting Zyrena closer is not something your opponent should be particularly excited about. Zyrena is not a support piece that wants to spend the entire game safely behind the rest of your army. Her Burning Oath gives her a dangerous melee attack, while Dragon’s Tail provides a ranged option alongside its movement utility.
Her second card pushes that offensive role even further. Fiery Reclamation interacts directly with the Kazyr’s Cinders. Before paying the Essence cost of one of her Essence abilities, Zyrena can remove a friendly Cinder within 4" instead. Especially later in the game, this can help Zyrena keep using her powerful Essence abilities ot buy additional attacks via Essence Attack. And when Burning Oath connects, it hurts.
Snyergy Spotlight: Flareborn Skirmishers
If you’re looking for a unit that really enjoys fighting alongside Zyrena, look no further than the Flareborn Skirmishers. Their high DEF makes them ideal candidates for Duelist and Duelist’s Riposte, while Zyrena’s Honourguard Leadership grants them Critical: Devastating Blow. Miss them, and they might just hit back harder than you expected.
We will take a look at the Flareborn Skirmishers in one of the next blog entries focsing on the Kazyr rules.
Learning to play Kazyr
Zyrena introduces several of the faction’s core ideas without asking you to build your entire game plan around a single trick. Cinders matter. Positioning matters. Terrain matters. And your elite warriors are at their best when their abilities start supporting one another.
Use Cinders to strengthen your warriors with Duelist. Keep Zyrena nearby and turn failed enemy attacks into Ripostes. Use March Through to reach positions your opponent thought were difficult to access. And when the battle starts to shift, look for opportunities to propel Zyrena forward with Vengeful Advance and Dragon’s Tail.
She might start the battle at the centre of your formation. But she doesn’t have to stay there.
As Zyrena herself puts it: “Let them strike. Let them rage. Let them burn themselves against us. We are not the fire that consumes. We are the fire that remains.”
