Be’lakor, 10 Control, and the accidental Chaos Shovel Knight
Sometimes army-building starts with pure disbelief
Every now and then, list-building doesn’t begin with a careful spreadsheet, a grand faction plan, or even a proper rules deep dive. Sometimes it starts with somebody dropping a screenshot into chat and the rest of us collectively going: what on earth is this nonsense.
That was exactly the vibe when Michał started looking at Be’lakor in Slaves to Darkness.
The first thing that hit us was not even the model, the lore, or the usual “big centerpiece daemon” energy. It was one number:
10 Control.
And honestly? That number alone was enough to derail the conversation for a while.
Ten. Control.
We’re so used to objective play being shaped by bodies, positioning, and trading units efficiently that seeing a model with Control 10 just feels rude. Michał’s reaction was basically immediate disbelief — he said he didn’t think he had ever seen a unit with that much Control.
And yeah, same.
In objective-focused games, that kind of stat changes how you look at the whole table. If that big guy is alive and standing where he wants to stand, suddenly armies that normally rely on swarming objectives — and yes, Skaven were immediately mentioned — may have a very different problem to solve.
It’s not just “how do we score here?” anymore.
It becomes:
how do we remove that first?
Then we looked further down the warscroll
As if the Control value wasn’t enough, Dubry chimed in with the classic warning:
look at these stairs :)
Which, naturally, meant there is more nonsense below.
And that really was the mood of the whole exchange. Not calm evaluation. Not measured analysis. More like slowly scrolling through the rules and realizing the model keeps being a problem in new and exciting ways.
That’s one of our favorite parts of army-building, honestly: that moment when a warscroll stops being an abstract entry in an app and becomes a real battlefield concept. You can suddenly picture the role immediately.
Be’lakor isn’t just “a strong character.” He’s the kind of piece that starts asking questions of the opponent before the game even settles into its normal rhythm.
The unexpected hobby twist: winter color schemes
Then the conversation took the kind of turn that feels extremely familiar in our group: from rules panic straight into painting inspiration.
Michał dropped some winter-themed versions of Be’lakor, and that completely changed the energy.
And yes — those schemes absolutely wrecked our brains.
There’s something about a winter palette on a massive Chaos daemon that just works. Instead of the expected hot reds, hellfire glow, and classic infernal look, you get this eerie icy contrast that makes the miniature feel more alien and more mythic at the same time.
It also immediately pushes the army-building brain in a different direction. Once you see a centerpiece model painted like that, you stop thinking only about what goes into the list and start thinking about what kind of army identity could grow around it.
Would the whole force lean into cold blues and desaturated steel? Would the basing go snowy and bleak? Would the rest of the Slaves to Darkness range support that frozen, cursed look?
These are the dangerous questions. These are the questions that end with a new project on the desk.
From Be’lakor to… Shovel Knight?
And then came the breakthrough.
Michał was trying to remember what the winter-themed version reminded him of — some indie platformer, very recognizable, but just out of reach for a moment.
Then it landed:
Shovel Knight.
And once that connection was made, it was over. Especially when Michał noticed that somewhere on Reddit the idea had apparently already been recognized and effectively labeled “Chaos Shovel Knight.”
Perfect. No notes.
Honestly, we love moments like this because they capture the whole hobby in one short chat thread:
- a terrifying rules discovery,
- immediate list-building implications,
- painting inspiration out of nowhere,
- and finally a completely unserious but extremely accurate pop-culture comparison.
So what did we take away from this?
First: Be’lakor looks like an absolute monster in Slaves to Darkness.
Second: Control 10 is the kind of stat that instantly makes us think about scenario play and objective pressure in a different way.
Third: a cool paint scheme can do as much for an army concept as a strong warscroll. Sometimes more.
And finally: if we ever see a cold blue Be’lakor across the table, there is now a very real chance that our brains will not say “Dark Master, First Prince, ancient daemon lord.”
They will say:
there he is, Chaos Shovel Knight.
Which, to be fair, is also a pretty strong army-building direction.