vs Lamenters

This week I played against an army I've seen around the club for years, but that I've never had the pleasure to play against until now. The Grey Knights took to the field against the unluckiest of Chapters, the Lamenters!

My opponent was a lovely dude who I've seen around a lot. His group typically plays narrative games and I've never really mixed with them before. However, a couple weeks back, the Lamenters player approached me on a Thursday night and asked if I wanted to get a game in. I said, sure! I've never played against Blood Angels, let alone this specific successor. I knew that the Blood Angels had received an update recently and that I'd have to be facing Combat Doctrines and a host of abilities I couldn't predict. To my surprise, my opponent let me know that he was nervous to face me; he'd heard about my games at LVO with pre-RotD Grey Knights and he was intimidated! I felt very humbled.

When we met up, we jumped right into it.

My opponent brought a ton of Primaris bodies, which always makes act like a cat on hot bricks. He had a Redemptor (oof, so many AP-2 shots in turn one), Stalker Intercessors (Imperial Fists flashbacks), Eliminators (God damn them), and six Aggressors. This really bothered me! He also had a ton of Rievers, a Death Company Dread, Jumpy Dudes with plasma and bolter loadouts, and a Librarian Dreadnought. He talked a big game about the Libby Dread, stressing the thing's speed and melee effectiveness, enough so that I thought, "alright, I need to kill that guy immediately."

I wanted to try something new. This was my first game in the wild* with the new Psychic Awakening rules and I felt like mixing some things up. I brought my typical Terminator battalion and my ten-man Paladin bomb, but I decided I was going to deep strike my Dreadknights today. This required some shifting of my list so I could attach the Dreadknight Teleporters to my battlesuits, which left me with an awkward 23 points to fill. I threw in a squad of Servitors for screening and called it good.

When I was making this list, I realized something: the two Dreadknights plus the GMNDK only came out to 518 points. With my Paladin bomb, I usually only have the room to add a few characters into the mix to support them. I'd resolved to keep my Paladins on the board so that I could Gate them across the battlefield turn one, so what was I to do with the remaining 482 points? Joyously, I found I could fit two Terminator squads and my Apothecary in deep strike and come in just under 1000 points.

Dreadknight/Terminator bomb. Respect to Lawrence Baker, but fuck the internet's meta lists. Let's try something different.

We settled on playing The Four Pillars from CA19. I secured first turn. He deployed very aggressively.

I deployed very cagey, in contrast. I planned on starting out in Tide of Shadows in case he seized the initiative, but he didn't. So instead I started out in Tide of Convergence. I had a plan.

My Chaplain chanted the Invocation of Focus on my Paladins, and then I gated them across the board. Grand Master Simandus and my yet-unnamed Chaplain stayed in the home base to gain me some CP and switch the Tides if I needed them.

My Paladins touched down just outside my opponent's deployment zone and cast Sanctuary on themselves. In my shooting phase, I popped Psybolt Ammunition on them. In conjunction with Tide of Shadows and the Invocation of Focus, this meant my boys were pumping out 40 S6 AP-2 D2 shots at whatever they felt like. But I opted to split my fire and then I rolled below average. They only killed 4/5 of an Infiltrator squad with 20 shots, but then the other 20 shots killed his Death Company Dreadnought.

That lone Infiltrator is preventing my entire deep stroking force from touching down on in that corner of the table.

On his turn my opponent decided that he absolutely could not let those Paladins live. He emptied a lot of shots into them, but cover and the Redoubtable Defense stratagem meant he only killed one Paladin in his whole shooting phase. I chose not to deny Wings of Sanguinious and then waited for him to move his Libby Dread in. He did, and I was elated. He'd brought my prey right to me.

We took two wounds off the Dreadnought in overwatch, and then my Warding Stave Paladins soaked all of his attacks with Transhuman Physiology and the 3++ that the Warding Stave permits them when coupled with Sanctuary. I didn't lose a single Paladin on the charge. We fought back and obliterated the Libby Dread.

A fun note here: Invocation of Focus gives psi and Nemesis weapons an additional -1 AP, which means that Nemesis Daemon Hammers have AP -4! His Dread didn't even get a save!

On my next turnI dropped in my Dreadknights, my GMNDK, and two Terminator squads on his right flank. I honestly wasn't sure how well these guys were gonna do, but, man, I thought it looked so cool to drop them in like this.

I dropped in my Apothecary with Dynamic Insertion right in the middle of his commanders. In the psychic phase, I first used Inner Fire couple with Psychic Channeling to have my Apothecary assassinate his Ancient with the Blood Angels relic banner that grants everyone around him FNP. Then I switched over to Tide of Escalation and went to town smiting away his Aggressors.

I'm showing this picture again because I need to illustrate something. When my guys first touched down, there were six Aggressors in front of them. After smiting and shooting, there were zero Aggressors. We got through 18 wounds at T5 and however many points that is with almost no difficulty. My opponent made stayed true to his Lamenters and made some particularly unlucky saves against a Gatling Psilencer:

But still. This big deep strike force of mine ruined the foes they encountered. I was very happy with how this plan worked. A guy playing Gaslands at the table next to us leaned over and said, "someone sounds real pleased with their army."

Grey Knight Tactical Note: When casting smite with a squad, the smite can be drawn from any model in the unit. You don't have to choose the closest guy to the enemy. I was able to leverage this so that all of my smites from the Terminators went at the Aggressors, even though the unit might have been closer to those Intercessors on the left in that photo. I've utilized this knowledge to some effect recently and I think it is a surprisingly powerful and subtle piece of tech.

I only made one charge out of deep strike (because we'd killed everything else in charging distance). My Terminators got stuck in this little logjam with some Intercessors for literally the rest of the game. Falchions are nice when they go through, but only having S4 means that a lot of attacks simply don't hit home. His Sanguinary Priest kept reviving the dudes that I was killing, anyway.

Look at how lovely these Rievers are.

Flanking my castle.

On his second turn he deep stroked his Rievers and his Jumpy Dudes. The Rievers failed their charge (to my supreme fortune), and the Jumpy Dudes mostly whiffed their shots. The plasma guys took 3 wounds off of my Ven Dread, by my opponent was reticent to overcharge their shots so they didn't do as much damage as they could've.

Through shooting and fighting he whittled down my Paladin squad to just three guys. I didn't have the CP to spare them this gruesome fate, but honestly these guys had already done their jobs in drawing his focus and eliminating some of his major threats.

Dreadknights moving in to mop up.

In my third turn I opted to use Warp Shaping to switch to the Tide of Fury. So far I've mostly considered this Tide garbage, but I wanted to try it out. My opinion didn't change. I think I got two rerolls out of it for the remainder of the battle round, and only one of those rerolls actually translated into a wound. But who knows, maybe that swung the game for me.

At this point my opponent was in the Assault Doctrine, which was where he wanted to be. Blood Angels get an additional attack in that Doctrine, and I couldn't let those Rievers engage my Dreadknights and tear them apart with a thousand cuts. I moved Squad Fortis in and hacked apart the entire ten man squad of Rievers. I don't care what anybody says, Terminators are awesome.

A combination of smites and lucky bolter fire removed the threat that the Jumpy Dudes posed.

On my opponent's turn three he killed some of my Terminators holding an objective and then moved his Redemptor in to try and finish off the Paladin squad. He only had like seven or eight models left at this point. When his Redemptor was brought down to 1 wound after I fought back, he decided to concede.

Honored Brother Hector never fell, though. His lemon-yellow chassis remained standing.

This was a very fun game and a very reaffirming experience. I have played so long with a substandard army and tried so hard to actually master the rules of the game. In the last year I played at least one game every week, just to get in my reps in and squeeze out whatever tiny advantages the Sons of Titan had. I love my Grey Knights so much and I only want to see them do good. Now that I have some competitive rules the skills I've learned are really shining. I'm very excited to play more games and try out new strategies.

Shoutout to my opponent who is a super fun dude and who has a beautiful army. He free-handed all of the checker patterns and bleeding hearts on his Lamenters, on top of painting an entire force yellow. I'm always pleased to face off against skilled painters.

Bonus Content: My brother (Thousand Sons) was playing at the table next to me and got absolutely dunked on by Harlequins.

*"the wild" just means a game against someone who I haven't known for twenty years.