A couple of days ago, I finally sacked up and took TomBom to a tournament, something which I had been meaning to try for a couple of years now. I figured I'd start a new topic (I didn't want to resurrect the old one from last year, mainly because it had just become a discussion about how you can kill him) to share my findings and see if anyone else has tried him.

The big question is, is he worth his points? Would I have been better off taking Durin, or a Dwarf Captain and 10-11 Dwarves, instead of him? I still struggle to answer that one, he gives your army lots of tricks to use, he's a safety net whenever you need it, and he's very difficult to quantify.

My army had Gimli, Floi, a captain, and a bunch of Dwarves at 650 points. The army did fairly well, a couple of losses but all were down to the wire, while my wins were also close but mostly comfortable. Basically, the army was built around tricks. Floi and TomBom neutralize big threats, the warriors hold their own and I can feel safe knowing that I won't lose many, and Tom keeps Gimli fresh all game (meaning free heroics and shaking off wounds).


He was fairly effective in his healing role, I only lost one hero throughout the tournament and that was Floi against a Dragon in a game where I had to worry about too many other threats to be able to contain them all (it was a doubles game and I had a dying Ent to heal).
I will say that his highlight was completely destroying my opponent's deployment strategy just by existing. The board centred on a bridge, my opponent set up a ridiculously powerful block to spearhead his attack (two trolls backed up by a Shade and some spellcasters), so I plopped Tom right in front of them, and suddenly they had to waste about four turns going around the bridge while I was able to regroup and get in a better position to break through.



Overall, did he single-handedly win me any games? Not at all, but I do think he was powerful and gave me a lot of luxury with my playing. Worth the points? Maybe, maybe not. Worth using again? Absolutely.


Anyone else try him and have some stories to share?

I think you summed it up nicely in the beginning. Tom is hard to quantify

I was thinking about this some more today, how can one optimize this kind of model?

Problem is, he suffers from Sauron Syndrome, that is to say he has many talents, most of which don't intuitively complement one another, and he's too expensive to just focus on one job. If you want him healing, your heroes had better be butchering everything in their paths to make up the points (which is why I love him so much with Dwarf heroes). If you want him to use his invincibility, he'd better wreck your opponent's entire plan with it.

My verdict on him remains the same, incredibly powerful, just takes so much finesse to use before he can really start paying for himself.

He can come hand on a full heroe army like the white council... as he even pays off when the council is fighting magic and get drained and need to keep it up fighting...