Hey, Troll player! Do you want to make your opponent miserable? Want them to cry “Bullshit” and consider quitting the game? Do I have the caster for you!

Calandra is on the new Active Duty Roster and this should definitely be a reason to rejoice. A master of all facets of Troll, she is happy playing for attrition, scenario or Assassination and will do so with beast bricks, gunlines or infantry swarms. We know she is better than she was in MK2, after all she gained a fury and bullet dodger got MUCH BETTER! She was good in MK2, so she must be great now, right? Calandra does it all, because she polishes whatever she takes and there in lies the problem. How do we build a caster when we have so much choice?

The simple answer is that you apply limitations to yourself and ADR does this wonderfully. You can pick a caster and use Calandra to cover the rest of the matchups. This gives you clearly designed goals for your list and will help you structure it, because starting a pairing, from scratch , with Calandra is almost always a mistake.

So who do we have on ADR? Ragnor, Doomy2 and Grissel2. The good news is that all three of those pair with Calandra fine, because everyone pairs with Calandra fine. Two of those are probably best with Beast heavy Armour skews: Doomy2 and Ragnor. Grissel2 builds well almost any way just like Calandra, but lets assume you use her as an infantry caster so we can get some variety.

Ragnor (Power of Dhunia)

Runebearer (Free)

Mountain King

Glacier King

Axer

Bouncer

Min Krielstone + UA

Dhunian Knot

Janissa (free)

Whelps (Free)

Ok, quite a few people like this list or something similar. It asks a question and a lot of people can’t answer it. I have a knot in the list, because when you have so few attacks you need to make every one count. Janissa is there to clear jam. You throw it into heavy armour skews and anything that can’t handle two gargantuans with a time walk. So we need to build a Calandra list that can cover it’s weaknesses. With ADR it can swap one King out, but that still leaves the list vunerable to mass weapon masters and Denny1 Ghostfleet. So let’s try and build a Calandra list that can play into mass infantry!

Calandra (Band of Heroes)

Bomber

Earthborn

Max Krielstone + UA

Min Champions

Min Champions

Min Warders

Min Warders

Max Fennblades + UA (free)

Fell Caller Hero (free)

One of my favourite things about it, is that you can afford to run Max Stone with infantry, which is super rare for Trolls. That means the Fennblades are lot more survivable, especially with star crossed. The list lacks a hard hitter, but the feat would mostly take care of this, especially when combined with specialists, which might look something like:

Mauler

Stone Scribe Chronicler

Fell Caller Hero

Earthborn

The idea here is that you can swap out the bomber and both units of warders and replace them with a Mauler, Earthborn and Stone Scribe Chronicler.

Calandra (Band of Heroes)

Mauler

Earthborn

Earthborn

Max Krielstone + UA

Min Champions

Min Champions

Max Fennblades + UA

Fell Caller Hero

Stone Scribe Chronicler

So we drop the two units of warders and the bomber, which gives us 39 points. We lose the Fell caller Hero as we no longer qualify and so we have to have a second Fell Caller in ADR to swap in. This list should be legal, although the rules on how free solos interact with ADR are anything, but clear. People will question the Earthborns, but they really do hit hard enough with Calandra and the DEF shenanigans make them a real issue. The SSC should be subbed in against things like Ghost Fleet as their rat 4 guns hate Def 14 Fennblades.

So lets look at this from the other side: How do you pair Calandra with Grissel2?

This is my old Grissel2 List

Grissel2 (Power of Dhunia)

Mountain king

Bomber

Axer

Storm

Swamp Troll

Min Krielstone + UA

Dhunian Knot

Janissa

Whelps (Free)

Shaman (Free)

Shaman (Free)

I adore this list, so much. It works well against many things and it is just so fun. I don’t play it currently, because of the meta and the big events being two list, but ADR gives me the chance to play it again. You can swap the Mountain King out and have a chance verses things like prey on a colossal. We want the off list to deal with Armour skews and anti shooting lists. This means Retribution, Convergence, Legion, Circle etc.

Calandra (Power of Dhunia)

Runebearer (Free)

Mountain King

Bomber

Earthborn

Axer

Storm

Max Krielstone + UA

Janissa (Free)

Whelps (free)

The list is a great beast brick. It tries to control you with befuddle from the Runebearer it hits like a ton of bricks and the Mountain king and Bomber can sit back, because the Earthborn can anchor with Starcrossed on it.

ADR could look like:

Bomber

Mauler

Dhunian Knot

Swap them in and we get:

Calandra (Power of Dhunia)

Runebearer (Free)

Bomber

Bomber

Mauler

Earthborn

Axer

Storm

Max Stone + UA

Dhunian Knot

Whelps (Free)

Shaman (Free)

Suddenly we have a 4 heavy, double bomber list that threatens huge amounts of assassination. The earthborn is still the strong anchor with starcrossed and the mauler can make any heavy into a pow 18+ powerhouse. The Storm troll is nice for both assassination and to fish for that crit disruption. The list also plays into dude spam surprisingly well as it has two bombers and a storm troll. It doesn’t want to see blast immune, but it can still deal with lots of different lists.

So there we have it. A look at how Calandra can be solve either matchup. This is only scraping the surface, as there are many things you can do with her. She’s definitely worth your consideration however, especially if you are playing 3 list ADR