Hello Spikey Bits, its time for me, Jstove, resident jerk that doesn’t play in your shop that you’ve never met who writes sarcastic editorials about 40k for Spikey Bits that sometimes get recycled onto BoLS, to add my own contribution to the big, stinking pile of conjecture and speculation that is the 7th ed rumor mill.
Now, there’s a lot of talk about the psychic phase and the demon lores, and everyone is pooping their pants over how us chaos players are going to be able to crap an entire army onto the board for free, just pulling boxes of demons off the shelf and throwing them on the table until you quit and go home.
Well, I’m not interested in talking about that- 2 big reasons. 1, the psychic phase is going to borrow a lot of rules from warhammer fantasy’s magic phase. 2, if you’re familiar with warhammer fantasy’s magic phase, you know that its very unhealthy for wizards and the number one cause of failure, disappointment, and untimely death via brain melting for anyone wearing pajamas and pointy hats.
Then there’s the unbound garbage- Yea, that’s largely defused too. We’ve seen the rules for battleforged armies and pretty much everything scores, and troops get the OBJECTIVE SECURED rule from Skyblight nids. In case you don’t pay attention to all the PDFs and what have you that GW is prone to throwing at us lately, Objective Secured is a rule that means the unit can’t be denied, contested, or jerked off the objective by anything except another unit that has the Objective Secured rule. Its like being in a kindergarten argument and saying, “Oh yea, well I’m scoring… +1!”
Since unbound armies can’t score, and everything in battleforged armies scores and/or has mega scoring, it means that unbound armies must table and effectively can’t win without a clean sweep. Giant blobs of gaunts in synapse range, guard blobs with commissars, helcult cultists… Any big blob of fearless bodies… They aren’t going anywhere. So don’t worry so much about your WAAC friend who is trying to figure out which unit to spam to make nobody play him. He won’t do it. Winning armies will need troops in 7e.
What I do want to talk about is things that I think are going to be big in 7e that you should watch out for.
HEAVY METAL RULES!
One of the big deals in 7e is that sweeping advance into ongoing combat is back. This means that punchy chaos marines are back too. This is something that Kenny from Forge the Narrative and I agree on completely- If I shove maulerfiends down your throat fast enough, you will lose. Go fast and punch is back in action and you are going to see dirge casters on land raiders, spawns, and a whole butt load of Man’O’War album covers coming at you from across the table looking for turn 1 and turn 2 charges that will tie up your whole army for the rest of the game. Whatever they don’t get into a fight with is getting heldraked. Add that to the fact that we’ve got 3 books worth of artifacts to kit a walking murder machine with, and some interesting new options for helbrutes with the formations that might actually get them into a fight or provide good scoring units, you should expect a table near you to start looking like a Judas Priest concert.
THE LAND RAIDER IS BACK…
One of the things that’s going around is that the vehicle rules are getting stiffened up to be tougher, and that there’s going to be a damage chart re-write. Naturally, this benefits all vehicles, but it benefits vehicles that are already tough to kill exponentially. At the start of 6e, Rhinos fell off completely and Land Raiders collapsed as well, for fear of hull points and tanked investments on big tanks that blow up quick and give away first blood. Now, AV14 vehicles did come back a little after we got the tau and eldar books and the meta favored volume of fire and S6 and S7 guns over real anti-tank weapons, and that made a big enough hole for a cunning opportunist to drive a land raider through. But with the 7th ed changes to assault, and a shoring up of vehicle rules, the land raider looks like its in a pretty good spot to make a come back as everyone’s favorite rolling brick to poop assault troops out of.
…THE RHINO IS COMING WITH IT.
Here’s one you probably didn’t think of. Dedicated transports count as whatever they were bought for, so if you put a tactical squad in a rhino, its a troop, if you pull the jump packs off of an assault squad and put them in a rhino, its a fast attack, etc. The point is, if you put a rhino in troops in a battleforged army, it becomes troops, and all troops get Objective Secured. This means that you have a little metal box you can hide behind a rock, and on the last turn of the game, put the hammer down, book that little wagon 12″ and turbo it 6″ to put it on an objective, and steal that objective or contest it against another unit that has Objective Secured. Even better, you can motor it up on dirt cheap troops like conscripts or cultists that don’t have S4 weapons or krak grenades, and toot the horn at them. Of course, this also applies to wave serpents, deldar raiders, chimeras, and any other troop transport bought for troops.
HAVE YOU HEARD OF THESE NEW GUYS, THE MINOTAURS?
The black templar rhino rush is probably still dead, and good riddance, but punchy marine armies in general are looking pretty good. Blood Angles getting Objective Secured on their troop jump infantry is pretty sweet, and vanilla marine books already had some pretty ballsy punch action with stuff like raider crusaders and the shield eternal chapter master. My pick for best in show however is the Minotaurs, who got their chapter rules from Forgeworld. They never fall back from shooting, and they get the powerhouse chapter master Asterion Moloc. Like most big jerks, Moloc has eternal warrior backed up by 4 beefy wounds, and he’s packing terminator armor, a storm shield, and an AP2 spear with a one-shot lascannon in it. The best part? His warlord trait is always “I get free points for killing dudes in challenges” Now just imagine Moloc stepping out of a crusader with his 5 best friends in the middle of your opponent’s army, and just start calling people out. He pretty much can’t be killed by anything short of a mindshackle scarab or a black mace to the face, and he’s going to poop a point every time he blows out a unit leader.
ROBOT PUNCH
Conventional Necron wisdom is that you should fill every heavy slot with annihilation barges, get a Dlord and a pack of wraiths to run up the table and cause trouble, and then take however many points you have left after that and get as many croissants as you can fit warriors or immortals into.
However, with assaults getting ramped up again, why not have more of a good thing? Mindshackle scarabs are an instant win against any other character geared for punching, and preferred enemy combined with invulnerable multi-wound jump infantry is pretty beastly. If one murder-cloud of spooky whip robots and their friend that hates everyone is good, surely 2 are even better. Especially if they can sit in combat forever and never get shot.
TYRANIDS OUT OF LEFT FIELD
After the rise of the CSM Gwar concert army, this is probably the biggest dark horse come-from-behind I see in 7e. Expect to see tyranid players wake from their slumber and start eating everything. Here’s why.
1- Any nerf to battle brothers and their abusive shenanigans is a relative buff to bugs, who don’t have friends anyway. Almost everyone loses something with a battle brothers nerf. Tyranids can only win.
2- The addition of a psychic phase that allows you to throw dispel dice at your opponent’s army is an extra layer of protection tyranids fundamentally didn’t need. We don’t know what Shadows of the Warp will do in 7e, but we know one thing- its always bad. In addition, this means that zoanthropes will always fire their lasers in the psychic phase instead of the shooting phase- You can commit them without having to worry about committing other shooting, because you’ll see the results before you shoot.
3- Vehicle rules getting buffed doesn’t really affect tyranids at all. Not only because they don’t have vehicles, but because Carnifex don’t care. Carnifex just punch. No matter what they do to vehicles, running into one with a monstrous creature is probably still going to end with an insurance claim.
4- Tyranids have winners in every slot of the FOC in the new rule changes. Need to blow out big mobs of scoring units? Tfex with that S6 AP4 torrent is looking mighty fine. Want piles of fearless scoring troops? You’ve got plenty, and your tervigon can make more. Flying Monstrous Creatures? Sure, they only take one grounding test per phase now.
Checkout what else I have to say HERE!
About the Author: Jack Stover
