Lizardmen vs. Vampires pt. 2

I forgot to mention that he moved back with his skeletons for fear of the swamp killing them on a charge from dangerous terrain tests. This was so helpful because it allowed my little skink skirmishers from literally tar pit his skeleton block so that it was unhelpful in attacking the tower. I moved the depleted saurus block to kind of guard the tower, at least psychologically, from the blood knights, whom I did not want charging the watchtower. My skink priest casts the reroll ones spell on my saurus in the tower which keeps them alive a little bit longer. My salamander just nicks his vampire lord, who fails his look out sir again! But in a way, this made it even harder for me to get a wound.

So he charges his blood knights at my skink priest, who runs away. Then he redirects into the saurus warriors who take the charge only to be wiped out. He overruns into the skink skirmishers. I saved all my dispel dice for the nasty unit-killing spell which he managed to still get off with a miscast. Again, the miscast bounces of the vampire. So in magic, he managed to heal up his ethereal swarm, give them first strike and seriously deplete my saurus unit in the tower. It looks like curtains for me.

On my turn, I rally my skink priest, move up with the salamander, and dispel the death spell on my several saurus in the tower.

He assaults the tower with his blood knights killing the final saurus warrior but the scar veteran remains alive and passes his break test. I should say that he has passed he break test 3 other times with the fantastic rerollable cold-blooded leadership.

The scar veteran stays alive, guarding the watchtower and we roll to see if the game is over and it is. Victory to the Lizardmen. I've never experienced a victory wherein I only had 3 models left on the board. As a prize for surviving my Salamander gets +1 strength in the following games and his guys get all sorts of boosts.

In retrospect, I'm always going to take a magic weapon on a scar veteran even if it's just 5 points, just in case I come up against this sort of situation again. I'm not sure if I'll take the cupped hands strategy again. It was 45 points and I never once miscast AND he miscast twice and was utterly unharmed for it. But it did enable me to roll lots of dice for spells unafraid of the consequences. And I've seen plenty of miscasts go horribly wrong. I think it was a good gamble especially in 8th where armies are frequently led by a magic user. I just long for better rolls on the heavens magic chart. I thought about offsetting this my instead of taking cupped hands, to instead take rod of the storm and plaque of tepok. But what do you think?

Also, I switched my list at the last minute to replace 3 kroxigor (dying to try out stomp attacks) with the salamanders. Which do you think is better in an all comers list? I think the krox would have been able to hold up and possibly kill a bloodknight or two. But what do you think?