With Chaos Space Marines 2.0 on the shelf and in our hands, let’s talk about who won the most in this book- Not the units, the players.
Jstove here, talking about the only important faction in 40k, the one you love the most, Chaos! The casual player is the one that holds the power!
Chaos 2.0 & Vigilus Ablaze are GW’s Gift to the Casual Player
A lot of great stuff happened in these books, but the most important thing that happened is that with Shadowspear, Vigilus Ablaze, and CSM 2.0, Chaos Marines now have an intangible benefit that the pros and the Saturday afternoon 40k players alike can truly enjoy.
That benefit is that Chaos is now the most playable faction in the game. At least for the up-and-coming 40k player that wants to level up his game and play big boy 40k.
The Hurdles of Being New
Nearly every faction in the game has a stumbling block. A barrier that prevents rookie 40k players from leveling up. When you first start the game and pick your army based completely on whatever you think looks cool, you are unaware of how your army choice will shake out later in your hobby life. It takes months of playing to truly understand what the hurdles in your faction that are keeping you down.
These are things that at first, you don’t understand or don’t focus on. Because you’re too busy gluing together and playing with your new toys. But as you get more serious about the game, you find out things like Tau, Orks, and Necrons being significantly kneecapped in the meta because they don’t have friends. Or how Space Marine armies don’t have any Space Marines in them, and Imperial soup relies on Guard for cheap bodies.
In Chaos 2.0, the hurdles that keep the rookie player on the freshman 40k team have been removed. There is now a clear path forward for the Chaos player. With more clarity and choice than any other faction’s learning curve, the amount of accessibility gained by chaos in this update is unprecedented.
If you’re an old Chaos player that’s been out of the game for a minute, or you’re just starting 40k and thinking about which faction to pick up, here’s why Chaos 2.0 is so great. It’s a good time to be the bad guy.
The Red Corsair Fix
Chaos Space Marines are now the only faction in the game that can regularly and viably use actual jerks with bolters in an environment of advanced players, thanks to the Red Corsairs and their extra command points and Tide of Power stratagem.
This is a big deal for new players, who will invariably or accidentally wind up with Chaos Marines in their shopping cart. Before CSM 2.0, I would have advised new players to steer away from vanilla Chaos Marines because they have no home in the codex. The Troops section in CSM was dominated by the dirt cheap Cultist and his Tide of Traitors backup.
The alternative to Cultists was to take the much cooler, much more fun, and more elite choices like Khorne Berzerkers or Noise Marines. Both of which have fringe benefits through combo and stratagem use. Now that the Red Corsairs are in action and viable, the pile of homeless vanilla Chaos Marines that every Chaos player will inevitably own actually has a seat at the table.
This goes double for returning veteran players that stepped out before 6th edition when the Cultists and Dinobots took over the army. And they never bothered to upgrade to the new t-shirt armor hotness. The era of the Cultist has finally ended. While they won’t be going away, they at least are no longer the only option. For all the Chaos players that had piles of Marines in entombed in foam, it’s a good day to betray.
The Master of Possession is 9/10ths of The Law
For the pro Chaos player that was already multi-codexed into Thousand Sons, the Master of Possessions and his lore of Daemon love didn’t do anything that the Sons weren’t already doing. Literally, everything the Master can do was already covered by one of the three lores available to the Sons. Which was why so many top-level Chaos players had the Sons on the team.
What the Master did do, however, was create a training wheels package for new Chaos players who can’t afford to or don’t want to branch into Thousand Sons. Want to improve your Daemonic invulnerable save or re-roll your Obliterator dice? Technically, the Sons already had tricks for that. It wasn’t new… But being able to do that with just one little starter box model and not having to splash a detachment of Sons into your army to get it, that is new. And that accessibility is a big deal.
Through the Master of Possessions and his updated malefic spell lore, Chaos players now have access to tools that previously were locked behind a price barrier that only advanced 40k players were willing to pay. This makes the Master a great stepping stone to help get Chaos rookies out of the minor leagues and up to the pros.
The Lord Discordant Combos With Everyone
The Lord of Discordant has every keyword synergy that a Chaos player needs to build combos and gets along with everyone. This is an intangible benefit that takes new players a while to realize. In 8th edition 40k, the most important stat line in the game is the one at the bottom of the datasheet. That’s where the keywords live. If you have good keywords, you get to hop on the combo fun train and make boss moves.
If you don’t have the right keyword, you don’t get to do fun stuff with your buddies. A new player can miss that very easily, and just buy the Lord Disco on coolness factor alone. Fortunately, the Lord Discordant has keyword insurance. So even if you didn’t know anything about how 40k works, you don’t get burned.
Swolebliterators Are Easier to Fit
By the time this article is published, I expect the honeymoon to be over and Obliterators will probably be 110 points again. As an errata to the 65 points that was likely erroneously copy/pasted from the old codex.
Some advanced Chaos players might tell you that the Obliterators weren’t buffed. They went up in survivability and firepower, but also escalated in cost, assuming the FAQ fixes them. However, what the Obliterators gained is accessibility to new players. We’re talking about a gain in firepower, resilience, and a collapsing of unit size down to two and one model units. This is a major benefit to new players on a budget who will probably be playing all the toys from their new Shadowspear box. Making Obliterators more resilient and independent, while doing nothing for the pro, helps the rookie manage his list building easier and helps him fill points and detachments.
Shadowspear Did More For Chaos Than We Hoped
When we first saw Shadowspear, we looked at what the Space Marines got and were floored by how good the scout hobo Marines and the sneaky Jedi Master Librarian are. But the judgments we made about the Chaos side of the box were based on old Chaos. For Chaos 2.0, Shadowspear looks bright for all the reasons mentioned above.
- Thanks to Red Corsairs, cheap bolter Marine bodies are now actually in demand.
- The Master of Possessions is an effective bandaid for plugging holes in list building filled by 1k Sons and can do double duty as a Sorcerer model later in his career.
- The new independent Obliterators give new and returning Chaos players greater list building options in entry-level 40k and gap filling on detachments.
- Mecha Charlotte’s Web (the Venomcrawler), while for all intents and purposes is just a skinny Maulerfiend, he will at least combo well with the Lord Discordant and help a new player on their way to building a Dinobot Daemonforge Chaos army.
This is actually way more value than Dark Vengeance. Which basically gave us pretty Chaos Marines that were useless, a Helbrute that was also pretty but useless, and a bunch of Cultists, which were at the time, the only source of Cultists. This is actually the third time that Chaos has been the villain in a starter box, but the first time every model in the box on the Chaos team could actually find a home in a developing player’s army. Chaos Space Marines is now the closest army in the game to being financially and list building independent. It’s able to make itself work within the confines of its own faction without branching out for soup.
