Jstove here and last weekend was the Bay Area Open. Today I’m talking about Don “Dark Horse” Hooson and his stacked Knight and terminator Death Guard list.
Knights in the Top 5
The top 5 armies in the BAO were all Knight lists of one kind or another. Most of them with the familiar guard CP battery. After that, it was flavor to taste with your choice of problem solvers like Blood Angel slam Captains or Custodes.
What we can see here is not just the list of an evil genius who out-thought a stale fat robot and blob infantry meta. it’s the work of a calculating mastermind who has precision engineered a list not to win by sitting on conventional objectives or killing his opponent.
Call it a meta shift? Yes and no. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of hordes, especially not while Imperial Soup is still farming up the points on Kurov and his 30 mortars. Hordes still look pretty good for board control and CP generation, but Imperial Soup and Chaos soup now has the tools to win an arms race with big fat giant robot models.
3 Winning Principles: BAO’s Blightlord Knight 40k List
Hooson’s list was quick and dirty if you haven’t seen it.
In an age where nobody likes Terminators, Hooson wondered why. What’s not to like about 10 fat boys with good invulnerable saves, Feel No Pain, and T5? Well, they’re expensive and they get shot at, but as we’ll talk about in a minute here, trying to shoot anything in this list is a losing proposition.
There are three things that make this list great.
Threat Overload
This is the number one thing that Don understands that a lot of amateur generals don’t. I think when he wrote this list, he fully expected that every unit in it could just get picked off. Ten Nurgle Terminators are hard as nails, but they’re expensive and slow. One Knight is only 1/3 of the Knights that the other top 5 Knight lists took to BAO.
Plagueburst Crawlers, Daemon Princes, and the baby Knights are all individually pretty robust. But they still crumble under concentrated fire. So when you look at it from the perspective of an amateur general, you think it’s every model’s job in the list to kill something. That’s amateur talk though, and that’s not the point. The expert understands this- this list is built to have no right answers.
If you focus on one thing, something else kills you. Spend all your effort killing the Blightlords and the Knights chew you up. Kill the Knights, and you’ve still got 10 Blightlords in your lap. Kill all of them? That’s great, but there’s still 3 Plagueburst Mortars sitting behind a brick wall dropping bombs on you for six turns.
Don expects that you will kill something, and he’s ready to sacrifice it. There are no right answers in his list. You put your effort into killing one thing, something else jumps on you.
Nurgle Isn’t Thirsty
This list only hits the table with seven command points but it doesn’t need them. Every unit in this list is super self-sufficient. Helverin autocannons are high-performance weapons with a lot of shots that hardly need any help. The dual gatling traitor Knight rolls 24 dice a shooting phase on top of Heavy Flamers if he’s close enough.
All of the Death Guard units generate their own re-rolls. The Daemon Prince has a re-roll one’s bubble, and all the melee weapons on the Blightlords and the guns on the mortar tanks are plague weapons. That means they reroll 1s on wounds. The spitters on the crawlers and the heavy flamers that come with the Knight also auto-hit. The end result is that all the models in this army are super self-sufficient and don’t require a lot of wombo-combo stratagems and CP investment to perform well.
Without a mighty thirst for CP, Don is able to run his army into your face without any care about his resources. He can save the small handful of CP he does have for crucial 1 dice re-roll stratagems to do stuff like land a critical save or hit roll.
Everything is a Porcupine
Fighting anything in Don’s list is awful and that’s one of the things that I love most about it.
First of all, ten Blightlord Terminators are a tough customer for anyone. They’re all carrying power weapons that re-roll 1 on the wound and two of the guys are also packing plague fails. These gnarly power flails not only pick up ones just like the rest of the boys, but they also spread damage like mortal wounds.
Any excess damage from a flail isn’t wasted on a kill. It carries into the wound pool of the rest of the target unit. That means that flails are lethal for carving through 1 wound chumps and for spreading butter on more elite enemies that would normally require more pressure to pull down.
The unit also had two blight launchers. A powerful utility weapon that can chuck S6 hits down the field at pretty much anything. The blight launcher is a Nurgle staple that is always useful. Even the chumpiest Blightlord still had a twin bolter capable of heating four dice a model.
Nobody in the unit is a slouch.
The Daemon Prince with the suppurating plate is just a bastard. He can smite spam and the suppurating plate grants a 2+ armor save and a chance to bounce a mortal wound onto your opponent in combat whenever you pick up a save. That can be ANY save. Even his invulnerable save.
Trying to close the distance on the rest of Don’s army is also a bad idea. While it’s obvious that the Blightlords are champs, what’s not as obvious is Don’s choice of backup. As I mentioned earlier, all the Plagueburst Crawlers took spitters and the gatling Renegade Knight has a pair of heavy flamers. A lot of DG players swear by the entropy cannon on the Plagueburst because it’s basically a low budget Lascannon.
Well, obviously Don figured out that with his tiny super hard army, his opponent could attempt to outmaneuver him to avoid the fat Terminators and a Knight and try to pick off his support elements in the parking lot. This is where the true majesty of the list shows up. Anything that tries to skip the Terminators and chew on the Crawlers is in for 2d6 heavy flamer shots, 6d6 Plague Juice shots, and another smoothie full of awful auto-hits from the foul Blightspawn sneaking around.
Every attempt to get into Don’s back line is repulsed by a spray of auto-hit gas that re-rolls 1s to wound.
No Right Answers
This is how Don’s list won. Everything in the army is a wrong decision for an opponent. Trying to spread the damage around piecemeal will never work because the large targets are tough nuts to crack with high toughness scores and saves for days.
Almost every model in the army has an invulnerable save, and most of them also have a 5+++ Disgustingly resilient backup. Concentrating your firepower on a single unit is also a wrong answer. Whatever you don’t kill jumps on you while you’re killing something else.
Don’s army also doesn’t need help. Everything either rolls a ton of dice or picks up ones. Removing any single element doesn’t reduce the combat efficiency of the whole.
The Grand Finale
Finally, attempts to get into Don’s backfield with typical problem solvers like Blood Angel slam Captains and Custodian bike Captains will get to DRINK FROM THE FIRE HOSE! Knights are allowed to extricate themselves from combat and still behave normally. Meaning that any attempt to rush a backline unit will not only meet a ton of overwatch from extremely painful auto-hitting sprays, but when the victim unit backs out of combat on their turn, the knight can immediately take a walk, turn his burners on, and then stomp out whatever’s left.
Fighting Don’s backline with all the sprayers is actually worse than the bombs the plague mortars are dropping on the front end.
What we can see here is not just the list of an evil genius who out-thought a stale fat robot and blob infantry meta. it’s the work of a calculating mastermind who has precision engineered a list not to win by sitting on conventional objectives or killing his opponent.
He instead gave his opponent no right answers through a hand-picked spread of tough and self-sufficient units that sustain themselves.
About the Author: Jack Stover
