The Lizardmen Paradox: Universally Praised, Rarely Played

Why Blood Bowl’s Most Feared Roster Is Secretly Its Most Fragile.

I’ve played 5 league games with Lizards and I’m struggling. Is it me? Is it the dice? Or is there something else going on? Here’s where I’m at.

The Lizardman Paradox:

You need the Saurus to protect the Skinks, but the Saurus can’t go where the Skinks need to go and can’t do what the skinks need them to do.

Lizardmen are designed around a strategy that their roster cannot execute out of the box.

The team is a closed loop of dependencies where every piece needs help from another piece that can’t actually provide it.

This is the paradox at the heart of the roster.

Even goblins blow raspberries at rookie Saurus

Why I care:

I’ve played three seasons of Blood Bowl and a handful of tournaments with Norse under BB2020. I did alright. I felt confident in my ability to Blood Bowl. For this new league, I wanted a different challenge, so I asked an AI to pick a team at random.

It gave me Lizardmen.

Instantly, I got grief — not from my league, but from the wider community.
“Top tier team.”
“Borderline OP.”
“Going into a T2/T3 league with a T1 roster.”
“Not confident enough to win with a weaker team?”

The implication was clear: I’d taken the easy option.

The reality has been the exact opposite.

The Controversial Truth:

Let us start with a simple statement:

Lizards are not a good starter team in BB2025. If you’re new to the game, avoid them — no matter how much you love the idea.

There, I said it, and I’m not taking it back, though I will explore both sides of this debate and we’ll get into that shortly.

Sure, plenty of coaches will tell me I’m wrong — a few of them might even play Lizards. Most don’t. That’s the point.

From across the table, the roster looks terrifying. Six Saurus — all that strength bolted onto Movement 6 bodies. A swarm of Skinks, darting around at Movement 8 with dodge and stunty. And looming behind them, a Kroxigor.

How do you beat that?

The answer is surprisingly simple. And that’s exactly what we’re getting into today.

Come on coach, you can’t be serious?

We’re going to unpack the four big problems that hold this team back:

The Saurus Problem — all that strength, none of the reliability.
Skink Dependency — your entire game plan balanced on AV8 stunty bodies.
Costs — the roster tax that punishes you for every mistake.
BB2025 Updates — changes that made their weaknesses sharper.

Each one of these issues on its own is annoying. Together, they explain why so many coaches praise Lizards… and so few actually play them.

At the recent NAFC, a 100 player event, there were 5 lizard coaches, they finished 12th, 25th, 81st, 82nd and 92nd. 60% of lizard coaches finished worse than 80% of the field. I salute the two that finished in the top 30, some exceptional lizard coaching must’ve been happening or the skills package recognised the spot lizards are in (probably a bit of both). League rosters at 1m gold pieces are tough.

Thank you to the reader that pointed out the NAFC had 312 players, not 100. I didn’t notice the “page2”, “page 3” and “page 4” links. My apologies. Well done to the two that finished top 30 - awesome coaching guys.

The Saurus Problem

Put simply, Rookie Saurus can’t do anything.

Not literally nothing — but nothing reliably, nothing independently, and nothing that justifies being the core of a team. And that’s the real issue: when your core pieces don’t function, the team doesn’t function. Play five games with them and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Let’s break down why.

This is one of my Saurus who at this point has played 5 matches.

So, in theory, Saurus move 6 (we’ll come onto why it’s ‘in theory’ shortly). St 4 looks good on paper. Ag 5, Pa 6. Strong armour at 10 but, that number is deceptive. Juggernaut, good once per turn perhaps. Unsteady.

Movement 6 (In Theory Only)

On paper, MA6 looks respectable, good even. In practice, it lasts exactly one turn.

After the opening move, your opponent knows three things:

• Saurus can’t dodge (5+)

• Saurus can’t reposition

• Rookie Saurus can’t punish being marked

So they mark them. With anything. A 40k Goblin, a 50k Lineman, a Snotling — it doesn’t matter. A Strength 2 piece has a reasonable chance of pinning a 90k Saurus for an entire drive.

Yes, any ST4 player can be marked. But with every other ST4 player, you’re not paying premium TV for movement they’ll never actually use — and they can fight their way free. A Black Orc coach laughs when you try to pin them down. A Lizardman coach weeps.

Saurus are MA6 on turn 1.
They are MA1 for much of the rest of the game.

The Combat Piece That Can’t Combat

Saurus have no functional combat skills. None.

A rookie Saurus throwing a 2‑die block has:

• 11% chance to fail outright

• 42% chance to get no knockdown

• Only 33% chance to break AV8+

• Only 17% chance to break AV9+

And because you have six of them, the failure rate compounds. You’re completely failing a Saurus block roughly every 1.5 turns — and you never know which one will betray you and you’re just pushing your opponent about for more than half the time.

There’s no Mighty Blow to reward hits.
No Tackle to punish dodgers.
No Block to stabilise the line.
No Wrestle to create openings.
No Break Tackle to reposition.

You get one blitz per turn.
Everything else is a prayer.

The result?
Your “combat” players lose fights to Goblins.

Unsteady: The Hidden “No Hands”

Unsteady is a tax that turns a bad situation into a catastrophic one.

Saurus:

• can’t pick up the ball

• can’t catch the ball

• can’t secure a loose ball in a scrum

• can’t be emergency carriers

• can’t even reliably catch a scatter

They might as well have No Hands.
They contribute nothing to the ball game.

Seven players on your roster (six Saurus + Kroxigor) cannot touch the ball.

SPP Starvation

All of this funnels into the real killer: Saurus do not skill.

Because they can’t reliably knock players down, they don’t break armour.
Because they don’t break armour, they don’t cause casualties.
Because they don’t cause casualties, they don’t earn SPP.
Because they don’t earn SPP, they don’t get Block.
Because they don’t get Block, they stay unreliable.

Meanwhile, the players they’re facing do get Block, Dodge, Wrestle, Guard — and suddenly your Saurus are even worse at the one thing they’re supposed to do.

From my first 5 games in league, the numbers tell the story perfectly:

• 5 games played

• 22 total SPP across 6 Saurus

• 1 casualty per game

• Most SPP coming from MVPs

• Only 2 Saurus with Block after five matches

This is not bad luck.
This is the design.

Armour 10 can only do so much

Here’s the thing even experienced coaches can overlook when looking at a roster. I was chatting with someone in the community I really respect, and he asked a simple question: “Which team has the best armour?”
On the face of it, that’s easy — just count the pips on the starting eleven. Highest total wins, right?

Wrong.

Armour only matters when you go down. You know what else counts as armour? Block. Dodge. Brawler. Steady Footing.
If you don’t go down, you don’t need armour.
If you do go down, eventually it’s going to break — and Saurus go down easy.

The Skink Dependency

As we’ve already seen, seven players on the roster (six Saurus + Kroxigor) pretty much can’t touch the ball.

Your entire game plan rests on three or four Skinks.

Skinks are amazing. Honestly, they’ve got to be one of the best players in the game, Dodge, Stunty, MA8, there’s nowhere they can’t go and nothing they can’t do, with just a small amount of assistance from Nuffle.

And your opponent knows this. Skinks are kill on sight.

You’ll start the game with a few skinks. You’ll end the first half with less skinks and you’ll be lucky to have 2 skinks on the pitch at the end.

As we’ve already discussed, the Saurus are stuck in the middle of the pitch, 90k traffic cones. Your skinks have to pick up the ball and they have to try and score. But as soon as they get anywhere near the halfway line they’ve got targets on their backs. Your opponent has used his cheap pieces to lock down your Saurus and now the better players are skink hunting. You’ve got to get out from behind the Saurus (you can’t stay there, your Saurus are going down) and somehow protect the ball carrier with a St2 piece that explodes on contact with just about every other positional in the game.

No General Access

Skinks only get agility skills. Which agility skills do they need? None of them. Alright, some people love Sidestep. I’m mid on it.

After that. Nothing.

No Sure Hands, no Kick, no Block. Nothing that keeps them alive. Nothing that pressures your opponent. I have to put Kick on a Saurus if I want to play the control game.

BB2025 Made It Worse

BB2025 quietly changed a few things that negatively affected lizards.

Saurus 90k - Saurus got 5k more expensive and got practically nothing to compensate for it. What’s the point of Juggernaut on a player that can’t blitz reliably because they can’t reposition? If you have 6 Saurus you’re paying 30k, that’s the elite skill tax, for a skill you can’t reliably use only once per turn, let alone on every block. 30k of TV for nothing.

Secure The Ball - brilliant for nearly every other team. Great, there’s now loads of St4 players picking up the ball on a 2+ but the Saurus can’t get to them, so we’re relying on St2 pieces with no Block access as our blitzers.

Combat Skills — most (not all) teams saw a general increase in the combat tools available to them. Saurus didn’t. They went from being on a roughly level playing field in the old edition — able to keep up, able to trade hits — to starting BB2025 already miles behind. And then they got a 5k price increase on top. Make it make sense.

The Cost Conundrum

There are only bad choices when drafting your lizardman team.

Saurus are expensive and you can’t afford enough of them.

The Kroxigor even more so — but at least Mighty Blow softens the pain. My Krox has 3 casualties in 5 games (and she missed one of them). My Saurus, on the other hand, have managed just 5 casualties between six players over the same span (admittedly Saurus 5 and 6 turned up in games 4 and 5). This is the point: they look like monsters, but their lack of combat skills turns them into kittens.

Skinks are expensive for St 2, explode and you constantly have to replace them and the skink tax is real.

Rerolls are the most expensive of any team at 70k/140k. You can only afford 2. Your Saurus are desperate for rerolls. You don’t have them at the start and the way skinks die, you won’t have them at the end either.

The Upside

If you stick with the team, Lizards do grow into monsters. Six ST4 Block pieces, all skilling into Guard and Mighty Blow, with MA8 stunties zipping around handling the ball — on paper, that’s glorious. That’s the dream. That’s the version of the roster everyone else is imagining when they call them “Tier 1.”

Maybe by the third league season I’ll get there.