Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing series cataloging my competitive and hobby journey through 2023. Last time around I quickly ran through the rest of my games at the KC Open. Then 10th edition released and since then I’ve been playing that, getting accustomed to the new edition, and doing some (very loose) prepwork for Tacoma, which is… *checks calendar* …next week. Ah, fuck.

Finding My Footing in 10th Edition

With the first balance update out of the way last week it’s a pretty safe time to finalize an army. And while I know I said I was done with the Thousand Sons a while back well, they’re really good in 10th edition. They’ve got some great tricks, lots of maneuverability, tons of mortal wounds, and good Overwatch output. Plus, I already have the entire army of them painted and they look pretty good. So for the time being I’m playing Thousand Sons again.

Rather than go into any big, detailed game reports I’m going to give a quick overview of the last six or so games of 40k I’ve played and talk about what set them apart and what I learned from each of them. These were all more or less practice games and you can rest assured that each of them likely had some kind of rules error somewhere in the mix.

List-building

Generally speaking, I’ve been playing with some different lists but they usually start with Magnus and Ahriman, 10 Terminators, and a bunch of warpflamer rubrics. From there I’ve been playing with the right number of rubrics/terminators and adjusting the characters around the margins, and slowly realizing that the Mutalith Vortex Beast isn’t quite good enough, though I still love his movement.

As I head into the final week before Tacoma, I’m starting to hit the “make list-building decisions based on available models” stage of things, which is never ideal but getting a new plastic terminator lord/sorcerer to my house, assembled, and painted in 2-3 days is just realistically not going to happen. And without another Terminator Sorcerer I’m not sure I want to take another unit of Scarab Terminators. So it goes – one of the more interesting/weird consequences of 10th edition’s Leader rules is that many units are basically defined by what their Leader options are.

Anyways I’ll come back to my Tacoma list in a bit. Let’s talk about the games.

The Games

The past month has been a mix of at-home practice games on the new terrain layouts and one very casual in-store doubles event at my local GW. Mostly I’ve been learning 10th edition and testing against different opponents.

Game 1: vs. Genestealer Cults

This first game was against my friend T, who recently made the switch from Chaos Daemons to Genestealer Cults. That’s looking like a smart move in 10th, where GSC are really good – they have a lot of nasty tricks and their ability to bring units back is pretty great, especially if you don’t have the movement to prevent it.

This game starts off rough as T wins the first turn roll-off and bombs the shit out of my Terminators to kill 6 of them. Then I struggle to chew through T’s aberrants – their 4+ invulnerable save is nasty – before finally opening up a bit and taking out more of his units. Overwatch in particular is a problem for T here and I’m able to use Temporal Surge to push around the table a bit and stop GSC units from recurring. it’s a fun, close game and I pull out a narrow win.

Things I Learned:

• GSC can toss out a lot of mortal wounds on their own! Particularly Jackals, who can bomb you up to three times in a Battle Round – they can do their mortal wounds bomb trick every time they make a normal move, and that means after their move, plus they can move again after shooting with a character, and they can move again in your movement phase if you move within 9″ of them. That’s pretty nasty!
• Movement is key against GSC. Being able to move onto blips to remove them from the table is a huge part of keeping them from bringing units back and depleting their forces.
• GSC can toss out a huge amount of hurt the turn things arrive from reserves, and when you combo that with their indirect mortar to boost the AP of everything in the army against whatever it hit, it means they can bring down a target like Magnus pretty quickly when they have multiple units shooting him, even with crappy guns.

Games 2 and 3: Doubles Games

My next two games were at a casual doubles event over at my local GW. Every player brought a thousand points, and we were randomly assigned partners. Luckily, I was paired with Custodes. Unluckily, we were paired up against lots of marines and Desolators.

Game 2 Things I Learned:

Game 2 had us up against Space Marines and Chaos Marines, with the Chaos player running a brick of Terminators and Abaddon plus a bunch of Obliterators. The marines player was tragically running a unit of 10 Reivers. We were able to hold on through their firepower and win this one.

• Even at 1 wound, Magnus can dish out a lot of damage. It helps that all his attacks are PSYCHIC so he gives himself his own +1 to hit and wound. At one point in the game I was able to keep him alive using the Cabbalistic Ritual to re-roll a save, then zeroing out another attack with the Stratagem. Then Magnus promptly killed six terminators before the Warpflamers near him killed Abaddon.

Game 3 Things I Learned:

Game 3 had us up against Thousand Sons and Space Marines which is a much deadlier combo – being able to drop Twist of Fate and Oath of Moment on a single target is really, really nasty! That said, we were still able to control the middle of the board when our opponents didn’t play much of the mission, leading to a nice little 2-0 day.

• Trajann is a goddamn beast. Custodes are pretty much the only army in the game right now that I feel have melee play, and Trajann is part of that. He tanked a ton of damage that would have otherwise gone to Magnus, allowing Magnus to be a problem all game.
• Temporal Surge is really great for avoiding Overwatch since it happens in the Shooting phase. This was how I was able to push my Warpflamers into range against the opponent’s without getting shot in the process.

Game 4: vs. Aeldari

Look it was bound to happen, and it was something I needed to do. I’m up against my buddy Erik’s Aeldari list, and that pretty much means it’s a game I’m going to lose. He isn’t even playing the best version – his Wraithknight hasn’t arrived yet – so he’s using an Avatar. Paradoxically, that makes it better against Thousand Sons, since the Wraithknight is easier to kill with mortal wounds thanks to having TOWERING. This one is pretty much over by the end of turn 2 (I lost badly), though there was a fun moment where the Avatar killed Magnus with a shot from his spear, only to take 6 mortal wounds from Magnus’ Deadly Demise and die itself.

Things I Learned:

• D-cannons were still fucked. I loathe those goddamn weapon support platforms, and whoever keeps deciding Eldar need good indirect fire platforms which can just control the table from behind a wall 24″ away needs to fucking retire. It’s just a loathsome play pattern when you combine it with Fate Dice. Thankfully both have been nerfed and the army still has tons of other options to play with.
• There isn’t a ton to say about this game now – most of the worst parts have been toned down a bit, and hopefully it’ll be more manageable in the future. Not being able to tank everything coming in at the Avatar or a Wraithknight or trivially push through 18+ damage in a turn is a big change, and so most of the things I learned here just don’t apply any more. Which, good.

Game 5: vs. Space Marines

For the final game in my set I had my buddy Andrew come over with his Space Marines. Andrew “Hero of the Imperium” Corban is a very good marines player and I was interested to see how a full army of marines bullshit would do. Andrew’s army only had 10 Desolators but plenty of other problems, like a unit of 6 Eradicators and a pair of Redemptors.

Andrew wins the first turn roll-off, lights me up with Desolators, and I’m playing catch-up most of the game. I’m able to take a good chunk out of his army and kill the Desolators when I’m able to drop a unit of 5 terminators behind him with Rapid Ingress, but it’s not enough. This one’s a loss.

Things I learned:

• Deployment in 10th, especially on the new maps, is really hard. It’s hard to hide well and you have to deploy fairly aggressively if you want to be able to reach the No Man’s Land objectives on turn 1 with anything short of 11″+ Movement. That also puts a lot of pressure on your army to go first. I ended up having some visible Rubrics turn 1 and that killed me – it meant the Redemptors got to shoot them and Andrew scored max shots on his first volley, killing seven of them in one go.
• Speaking of which, going second against powerful indirect fire options sucks ass. I lost an entire squad of rubrics and some terminators before I got my first turn, and was just lucky enough to avoid Ahriman dying.
• I’m not sure about the Exalted Sorcerer. He’s neat, but I don’t think the 4+ invulnerable save matters that much and I’m likely better off with an Infernal Master. The shame of it is that the Infernal Master’s torrent psychic attack works better with Warpflamers but his Leader bonus does nothing for them.

The Tacoma List

After some consideration and going back-and-forth fighting with the list-building process in 10th, this is what I’ve ended up with. I cannot stress enough how bad list-building feels when the smallest level of granularity you have is essentially 60 points (a Tzaangor Shaman), as I don’t think it’s worth trying to build a list without some of these Enhancements. On that note the Exalted Sorcerer is sticking around for a bit because he’s already painted and he’s a good body for another Enhancement I need.

My list for Tacoma - click to expand

This gives me a nice 19 Cabal points to work with each round and lots of bodies to control the board with. I’ll end up using my Black Legion Rubrics as the five-man squad, which should work out just fine. The rest is pretty straightforward – each character goes with one ten-man unit, and Ahriman joins the Warpflamers to ensure they’re always re-rolling all wounds, and they’re the unit that will go in the Rhino most games. This feels like a better play than running a second 5-man Terminator unit, but it does mean I need to paint 3 more Warpflamer Rubrics this weekend, which I don’t love. Fortunately I think I have them sitting around already assembled.

Hobby Progress

There’s also plenty of other hobby work to be done. Yeah, I’ve got to paint three Warpflamers but I’m also trying to touch up some of my other units and prep them for Tacoma. My Thousand Sons look great but they could look even better if I’m being honest, and there are areas where I can afford to touch up some things. Plus their bases keep flaking off in transit and that sucks so I need to correct it.  I will also need to touch up Magnus this week as well. He’s still impressive, but he could absolutely stand to be better and there are some quick things I can do on him to improve the model visually.

Doing better OSL between the Exalted Sorcerer’s legs

Adding panel lining to the Chest

Doing a second layer of edge highlights and the other shoulder insignia

I’ve also been making slow continued progress on my World Eaters, starting with this converted lad I’m very happy with.

And finally there’s this guy, part of a big secret terrain project I’m working on for the Goonhammer Open Narrative event. If you haven’t read about the Narrative yet, check out my article from this week on it, and look for another on Tuesday – I think it’s going to be our best yet.

Next Time: The GW US Tacoma Open

After waffling a bunch about attending the Tacoma Open I finally decided to just go ahead and attend after a room opportunity opened up. So I’ll be flying out Thursday evening with a plan to hopefully go 4-1 in the first five rounds or end with some kind of 6-2 finish. I won’t be leaving early this time. I’m going out more to hang out with GH peeps than anything though so how I finish isn’t as important to me as it usually is.

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