The new 11th edition Space Marines detachments bring three Codex options, four chapter detachments, and a reworked Heroic Intervention.
Games Workshop just dropped the Space Marines Faction Focus for the new edition, and it’s the deepest detachment reveal of the launch so far. The Codex side gets three brand-new options, while they also rolled out four chapter-specific detachments for Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, and Space Wolves.
Even if you’re not worried about Space Marines, the Heroic Intervention stratagem itself has also been rewritten with two modes that change how every Marine list defends an objective.
If you play any flavor of Space Marines (vanilla Ultramarines, Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, or Space Wolves), there’s a new toy in here for you, and most of them look like a fun way to throw your army on the table.
Fulguris Task Force Lets Land Speeders Drop In On Turn One
- Fulguris Task Force gives Speeders a turn-one ingress move: Land Speeders, Hailstrikes, Hammerstrikes, and Thunderstrikes all qualify, and you put them right where your opponent doesn’t want them.
- Librarius Conclave lets Librarians lock into a Psychic Discipline: Five disciplines from Biomancy to Telepathy buff every Librarian and the unit they’ve joined.
- Subversion Assets turns Phobos and Scouts into permanent ghosts: Detected enemies stay marked army-wide, and Strike from the Shadows keeps your shooters hidden after they fire.
- Chapter detachments hit hard across the board: Black Templars get a buffed Emperor’s Champion, Blood Angels get Death Company surge moves, Dark Angels get Strength 10 plasma, and Space Wolves get countercharging characters.
- Heroic Intervention now has two modes: Leap to Defend stays at 1 CP, Into the Fray pays 1 CP more for a guaranteed 6 to charge.
The Fulguris Task Force is built for anyone who wants to go all-in on anti-grav speeder shenanigans. With the new Land Speeder coming in the Armageddon Launch Box, GW is also making sure you’ve got plenty of skimmers to fill out the list.
The Skystrike detachment rule hands every Land Speeder, Storm Speeder Hailstrike, Hammerstrike, and Thunderstrike the SPEEDER keyword. In your first Movement phase, those Speeder units make an ingress move. That means a Hammerstrike can deploy directly onto your opponent’s heavy armor before they take their first turn. Tuck a Thunderstrike behind enemy infantry and let the Hailstrikes work the flanks while you’re at it.
- Bellicose Weapon Spirits is the damage upgrade: A non-character SPEEDER unit re-rolls Damage rolls and the A characteristic on weapons. Stick this on a Hammerstrike or a Storm Speeder squadron.
- Reactive Evasion (1 CP) bails a threatened Speeder D3+3″: Triggers on your opponent’s Movement phase when an enemy ends within 8″ of an unengaged SPEEDER.
Librarius Conclave Specializes Your Psykers Into A Discipline
The Librarius Conclave is perfect for anyone who wants their Librarian to do something more than chuck a Smite once a turn. At the start of every battle round, you pick a Psychic Discipline, and every Librarian and any unit they’ve joined picks up the matching ability for that round.
- Biomancy: +2″ Movement on the unit.
- Divination: Re-roll hit rolls of 1 and wound rolls of 1.
- Pyromancy: +1 AP on ranged attacks at 12″ or closer.
- Telekinesis: Ranged attacks against this unit are -1 Strength.
- Telepathy: Attacks ignore modifiers to BS, WS, and hit rolls.
Each discipline also opens up an additional psychic power. Telekinesis Librarians can pull off Temporal Corridor at the end of the opponent’s Fight phase, then Deep Strike back in next turn.
That’s also perfect for any unit to use to disappear from a fight it can’t win and reappear on an undefended objective too.
Subversion Assets Turns Phobos And Scouts Into Permanent Ghosts
If you’ve been sitting on a pile of Eliminators, Infiltrators, and Scout Squads, Subversion Assets is your detachment. This is the closest 40k has come to a true backfield-objective-grabbing detachment in a long time.
The Nowhere to Hide rule lets your PHOBOS and SCOUT SQUAD units detect a visible enemy within 12″ in your Shooting phase, and the detection sticks for the rest of the army, giving them +3″ detection range. So basically your Phobos and Scouts mark the target, and the rest of your list deletes it.
- Strike from the Shadows (1 CP) keeps you Hidden after shooting: Normally, a Hidden unit stops being Hidden once it pulls the trigger. This stratagem says no, and your Phobos or Scout Squad shoots and stays invisible too.
- Shroud Field enhancement gives Lone Operative AND Stealth: PHOBOS character only. That character’s not getting picked off by anything that isn’t already close.
This is going to make Phobos lists a little scary. A Phobos Captain with Shroud Field, escorted by a Scout Squad, can sit on an objective for the entire game, and there’s not much the enemy can do about it.
Lone Operative stays at a 12″ range in 11th Edition, but the big change is that Stealth now just always gives you cover from shooting. But in essence, it will probably be similar, because cover now grants minuses to hit rather than better armor.
Black Templars Anointed Champion Detachment Builds A Beatstick Emperor’s Champion
The first of three new Black Templars detachments builds the entire army around making the Emperor’s Champion himself an absolute terror.
The detachment rule re-rolls one hit and one wound roll on his melee attacks, and Anointed Champion enhancements don’t count against your enhancement total, so you can stack on top of the rest of the army’s enhancements for free.
The Guiding Omens enhancement is where it gets ridiculous. At the start of the first battle round, you pick three of these abilities for the Emperor’s Champion, and they are active until the end of the game.
- Instrument of the God-Emperor: Devastating Wounds against an enemy CHARACTER unit (once per battle, per army).
- Foreseen Paths of the Unholy: -3″ detection range. Combine with cover and your champion is ghosting around the board.
- Vision of Momentous Brutality: +2 Attacks. This is the one most players will pick.
- Augury of Retribution: Melee attacks against the champion get the HAZARDOUS keyword.
- Omen of Sacred Intervention: Heroic Intervention on this model is -1 CP.
- Harbinger of Judgment: When a non-monster, non-vehicle enemy engaged with the champion falls back, on a 2+, they take D6 mortal wounds.
Pick +2 Attacks, Devastating Wounds, and Harbinger of Judgment, and you’ve got a stat block that wins fights on its own. Now, the Black Sword finally gets to do what the lore says it does!
Blood Angels Wrath Of The Doomed Lets The Death Company Surge Anywhere
The Blood Angels are still mad about Sanguinius, of course, and Wrath of the Doomed channels that grief into manslaughter on the tabletop.
The Fanatical Celerity rule lets a Death Company unit advance and still charge, at the cost of D3+1 mortal wounds. On a 5-model squad, you’ll lose one; on a 10-model squad, it’s barely a scratch. Either way, you’re suddenly way further down the table than the opponent expected.
- Instinctive Interception drops Heroic Intervention by 1 CP: DEATH COMPANY model only. Free Leap to Defend, or just 1 CP for Into the Fray.
- Rage-Fuelled Response (1 CP) surges a Death Company unit D6″: Triggers when an enemy unit shoots them. Has to end engaged with the closest enemy if possible, which is exactly what the Death Company wants anyway.
Combine the detachment rule plus the stratagem, and your Death Company is moving on every phase of the game. They advance and charge on your turn, surge on the opponent’s Shooting phase, and intercept on the opponent’s Charge phase. Overall, that is a lot of board pressure for a unit that historically wasn’t supposed to leave a transport.
Dark Angels Dark Age Arsenal Cranks Plasma To Strength 10
This is one that will get people talking because the rule turns Hellblasters into the closest thing 40k has to a vehicle-deleter on foot.
- Invocations of Ancient Fury (detachment rule): Every plasma weapon profile in your army gets +1 Strength.
- Petition of Stability (enhancement): Plasma incinerators get +6″ of range, a 25% boost on the gun that already had the longest reach in the codex.
- No Sacrifice Too Great (1 CP stratagem): Your supercharged plasma gets another +1 Strength on the shooting attack.
Mathing it out: a plasma incinerator on supercharge is normally Strength 8. But with the detachment rule and the stratagem, and you’re shooting Strength 10 plasma at 30″ with -4 AP and 2 Damage. Hellblasters now wound Knights on 4s which is a potential game changes. Imagine what they can do against something smaller.
Space Wolves Champions of Fenris Stacks Up The Heroes
Champions of Fenris is the Space Wolves character-stacking detachment, and the math on it is wild.
The Great Wolf Watches gives every ADEPTUS ASTARTES INFANTRY CHARACTER a once-per-round Countercharge. They can be the target of Heroic Intervention even if you’ve already used it on someone else this phase, and that use doesn’t burn the stratagem for the rest of the army either.
So now, three different characters can countercharge in a single enemy charge phase, with their attached units along for the ride.
- A Giant Amongst Giants is +2 Wounds and +1 melee Strength: ADEPTUS ASTARTES INFANTRY model only. Wolf Guard Battle Leader with thunder hammer and storm shield is now Wounds 8, Strength 9.
- Stalk Between Worlds (1 CP) gives Stealth on the opponent’s Shooting phase: ADEPTUS ASTARTES INFANTRY CHARACTER only. A character standing in the open suddenly has the cover save when it needs it most.
Pair this with the Heroic Intervention rework below, and you’ve got a Wolves list that punishes every enemy charge in a way no other Marine flavor can match.
Heroic Intervention Gets Two Modes In 11th Edition
The Heroic Intervention stratagem itself got a rewrite in 11th edition, and it’s the one rules change that affects every Marine player regardless of which detachment you run.
- Leap to Defend (1 CP) is the original mode: Resolve a charge with the targeted unit, but you can only target enemy units that already charged this phase.
- Into the Fray (+1 CP, 2 CP total): Charge any enemy unit within 6″ and within max distance, and any roll above 6 (after modifiers) gets capped at 6.
The cap on Into the Fray is the interesting part. You can just charge anything within six inches, and it doesn’t even have to be the unit that was charged in the first place. With the Champions of Fenris counter-charge stacking, the Black Templars Omen of Sacred Intervention, and the Blood Angels Instinctive Interception all dropping the cost by 1 CP on the right model, this stratagem is going to be everywhere in Marine games this edition.
Final Thoughts on the New 11th Edition Space Marines Detachments
The new 11th edition Space Marines detachments are the deepest single-faction drop GW has done for the launch yet, and it’s going to take a while for Marine players to figure out which of these seven detachments is actually the strongest competitive pick for sure.
Subversion Assets and Dark Age Arsenal are the two that look table-ready out of the box, and the Heroic Intervention rework should reshape how every Marine list approaches the opponent’s charge phase as well.
Honestly, we won’t be too shocked when the next dataslate has to dial one of these back.
🔗 Related Reads:
- Armageddon Launch Box Guide
- Space Marines Codex Review and How To Play Guide
- Black Templars Codex Review
- Blood Angels Codex Review
- Dark Angels Codex Review
- Space Wolves Codex Review
- Games Workshop New Releases Roadmap
