Bit of a busy back of the card this, and we’ve plenty to talk about. So, top to bottom, Fangtooth has a rule called Broken Ties which means he cannot be targeted by Rage’s Red Fury Character Play. Something that we think is obvious looking at this model is that it is intended to be largely played within The Order, rather than the Union. While the Order will only become legal at the beginning of Season 4, their focus on football means that they need a big slugger to deal out some heavy damage to help push their win condition if the opponent is shutting down the ball, and that’s old Fangers here. However, to make the transition easier, Spigot and Fangtooth are Union models until the release of Season 4. Fangtooth is balanced around making a small number of high value attacks, and Rage allowing him to continue making more attacks through the use of Red Fury was causing imbalance. Rather than drastically change the model, only to have to change him again in three months when Season 4 is released, we went with the method here, simply disallowing the use of Red Fury on him. We don’t tend to put rules on model cards which are a negative for them, but in this case we felt it was justified. This rule will of course be removed when Veteran Fangtooth becomes a purely Order model in Season 4.

Moving onwards, we have Flagellent. This rule allows Fangtooth to suffer 4 damage in exchange for removing all conditions from a friendly model once per turn. This maintains a thematic link back to original Fangtooth’s Heroic Play, and also taps into Fangtooth’s new holy crusader lifestyle. He’s willing to take the hurt for someone else, although he can also target himself with this ability. Sometimes it’s worth the pain to scratch that poison away, you know?

Next up is another brand new Trait (he has three, don’t’cha’know) called Potbellied Pass, which incidentally is our favourite Trait name in quite some time. The visual of this rule is truly beautiful, and it helps Fangtooth fit into the Order quite smoothly, allowing the bulk of the Order’s fast, football oriented players to use Fangtooth as a ‘wall’ to bounce the ball off of on their way past. Whenever Fangtooth receives a Pass, instead of making a Teamwork action, he can spend 1 MP to make a Pass instead, allowing the model who originally passed to him to Dodge twice, or allowing him to move the ball further away from a threatening enemy player. This is a very flexible rule, which has a lot of potential to really change up the state of the Pitch on any given turn.

Fangtooth’s final Trait is one for which the text will be familiar, but the name is different. Resilience is the new name for Gluttonous Mass. This is due to situations where, over the last couple of years, we’ve repeatedly wanted to put the Gluttonous Mass rule on players, but found that the name simply didn’t fit with the physical model or artwork. As a result, this is a minor change in Season 4, simply so that we have the option to put this rule on more players without having to make them larger people.

While Veteran Fangtooth is coming out in Season 3, he’s really a Season 4 model, and we didn’t want people’s tokens to become irrelevant in 3 months time. As a result, naming this rule Resilient on his card seemed like the right thing to do.

So there we have it, Veteran Fangtooth in all his fangy, toothy, crunchy glory. Let us know what you think of the biggest smelliest boy (although to be fair he doesn’t smell nearly so bad now) on our forums and social media, and if you reckon he looks like a straight baller, you can pick up the Faithful box here

Check back next week for another Faithful spoiler, when things will be taking on a distinctly chemical tinge…

Till then, happy Guild Balling!