Grey Knights vs Harlequins

"Nothing personnel, kid."

This week I once again played against the hyper-lethal boats and bikes of the Rillietann. We played Front-line Warfare from the 9th edition Eternal War mission pack and had an absolute blast. I was still reeling from the horrible defeat my Exorcists suffered at the hands of these murder clowns, and my opponent had yet to face my Grey Knights since they went super saiyan with the release of Ritual of the Damned. We each brought 2000 points of tuned elite armies. This was going to be a bloody grudge match.

I'm going to take a minute and talk about my thoughts on 9th edition so far.

I love it. On paper it doesn't seem like a whole lot has changed. But in practice, the granularity of choosing your own secondary objectives and navigating involved terrain has made choice more important than it ever was in 8th. Not once this game did I feel like I just got fucked because of how powerful the Harlequins list was. I always felt like there was something I could do, some option for me to overtake him. There's a lot more to keep track of, more bookkeeping, more to wrap my head around, but the result is a game that is less dependent on what models you brought and more dependent on how you play them.

It's great.

Terrain feels a lot more purposeful, as well. Obviously that was one of the big selling points of this edition, but in practice it is really true. I set up the board to be dense with a lot of different types of terrain to try out the new rules. There are a few barricades, plenty of ruins, craters, ruined walls, etc. I studied up on the terrain rules before the game to try and utilize them to the full effect.

My list isn't hugely different from what I was bringing before the points increase. To my great surprise, a barebones Grey Knight Terminator only went up by 3 points! Negligible compared to the hits that other armies took. For comparison, Tau Fire Warriors went up by 2 points and Intercessors went up by 3 points. Relatively speaking, my Terminators took a gentle hit. The increase is less than 10% of their total price. I was already going to be running 25+ TDA bodies so seeing them go relatively unscathed was very heartening.

Additionally, I'm finally going to have a chance to really drill out some games with the Ritual of the Damned rules and adjust my playstyle accordingly.

Matthew's Harlequins also avoided the brunt of the blast from the Ninth Edition Points Increase Nuke (N.E.P.I.N.). He lost a character and three bikes, but his list remained largely the same. In recent months he also received some new Psychic Awakening rules, so this was going to be a learning experience for the both of us!

We both chose our secondaries, and from them a narrative was formed. We both chose Assassinate and Line Breaker (two board control focused armies with six characters each), but where it got interesting was that we each chose a Warpcraft secondary as well. He chose the Ritual objective, and decided that his Harlequins were on this Imperial world to create a psychic beacon that would draw a Tyranid Hive Fleet away from a nearby Eldar maiden world. I chose the Mental Interrogation objective, because my Grey Knights were eager to learn what the fuck these twisted xenos were planning to do to this planet. Additionally, points could be scored for grabbing objectives like in any mission from the core book.

We followed the you-go-I-go deployment that all the new missions demand (which I am not a fan of). As is his tradition, Matthew placed everything at the edge of his deployment zone in preparation to fling everyone across the board.

Now, the last few games I've played against Matthew he has seized the initiative. Multiple times in a row! And each time I got absolutely dunked on as a result. Fortunately 9th edition has done away with seizing entirely, but unfortunately first turn is now decided by a straight roll-off. I suspected that Fate would not permit me to go first, so I put half of my boys in space and hid the others behind a large wall. We had Gate of Infinity and Astral Aim on a few guys in there, so we weren't entirely without options.

As expected, Matthew rolled a 6 for the roll-off.

He moved his boats and bikes up to try and get an angle on me, and ran his sorceress Morrigan to the center of the board to start conducting her dark ritual.

Fortunately my castling was pretty effective and only a few of his units could draw line of site to my Paladins. He didn't remove a single wound in his shooting phase and had nothing to charge.

He did, however, ping my Paladins with one of his Death Jesters, and just by hitting he reduced their movement to 3". So on my turn, my Paladins weren't going anywhere. I could have Gated them out, but then he'd have some clean targets on his next turn and I couldn't bring in my reserves next. The position I was in was super defensible, so I stayed put. We blasted a few bikes away with psychic bullets.

On his turn two he poked the hornet's nest. He was hesitant to move in too many forces because my Paladins were a giant seething ball of swords, but he moved in one Starweaver within fusion pistol range. Later he would realize that this was the transport that contained his Solitaire and two Death Jesters, and not the one containing a Troupe like he thought. I had Assassinate as a secondary, and he hand delivered me a transport full of characters. Each character killed is worth 3 VP. It seemed like a disastrous mistake. I looked forward to capitalizing on it.

Some bikes taking a few wounds off of Honored Brother Ewan

Eldar witches conducting their ritual.

"Fine, I'll do it myself."

The thing about the Warpcraft secondaries is that they require a psyker to give up his entire psychic phase to attempt them. This is a big ask from my Grey Knights, who have some really valuable powers. But Inquisitor Felencia is also a psyker, and she decided to take matters into her own hands since none of her powers really benefitted my Paladin castle. She strode out into the street to mentally interrogate the fell witch Morrigan. She succeeded, and discovered the truth of the Harlequin's nefarious plot.

That same turn I dropped in my three Terminator Squads and my GMNDK. I was still in Tide of Shadows, so I wasn't too worried about leaving so many guys out in the open. Matthew didn't have any ranged weaponry with more than AP-1, and I was hedging my bets that he would be too nervous to engage this ball of death in melee.

This was also the first time he saw the now classic Grey Knights combo of Dynamic Insertion, Powerful Adept, and Inner Fire. Apothecary Gideon received the psychic signal of Inquisitor Felencia and knew that now was the time to silence the Eldar witch. He teleported into the center of the Harlequin wagon circle and Kamehameha'd Morrigan into oblivion.

Felencia herself made a daring charge into a Starweaver, but failed to do any damage since she is a normal human and this was a flying boat.

I wanted to kill this Starweaver in my shooting phase, but I missed it by 1 wound. If it had died to shooting, all of the juicy characters would have been ripe for the chargin'. Alas, that wasn't possible. I settled for charging the Starweaver and tearing it apart. Those 9 VPs would have to wait until next turn.

Lo, when the Starweaver was destroyed, Matthew rolled two 1s as the characters all fell out. At first I was ecstatic--that was 6 free VPs for Assassinate for destroying 2 characters! But then I remembered a blurb in the core rules for 9th edition, and a very explicit defnition of 'destroy.'

The key phrase there is "destroyed by a mortal wound inflicted by a rule that a model in your army is using." Technically, the models weren't destroyed by my unit, since they were killed as they fell out of their own transport. So... VP denied. It actually turned out better for Matthew than it did for me.

He kept his Solitaire alive by popping him onto the other side of a wall. I thought about consolidating into him, but I didn't want to give him a free fight phase and he could jsut fall back and charge again with Rising Crescendo. I left the Solitaire unmolested.

On the Terminator side of the field, my GMNDK was the only one to make his charge (incidentally, the GMNDK was my Warlord and had First to the Fray, so I failed 9 out of 10 charge attempts with those 5 units), but he killed an entire squad of bikes on his own. The Overwhelming Assault stratagem is so clutch.

His new Troupe Master, Cian the Changeling.

Alas, my GMNDK could not stand up to the even more overwhelming assault of Haywire Cannons, even with his 3++.

Two Starweavers moved into my Paladin castle, desperate to kill the Paladins before they Gated somewhere else.

But bolter fire and Nemesis force weapons tore the Starweavers opened and shredded their passengers. With the way clear, I moved my Paladins into the streets at last to finish off the clowns and stop the ritual.

By this time, Morrigan's disciple Maeve had moved in to finish the ritual in the wake of her mistress's obliteration. Squad Viscerion cut through the remaining jet bikes to put an end to her.

Unfortunately, my Sons of Titan wouldn't end up making it to her in time to stop her from igniting the psychic beacon that would draw the Hive Fleet. All they could do was exact vengeance.

The last Starweaver moved into my zone to try and take the objective there. Matthew had very few units left and he knew that he needed to scramble for points. My Chaplain was currently holding that point, so he charged in his Solitaire to take him off of it. My Chaplain had already taken some fire before now and was currently sitting at 1 wound.

My Chaplain tanked all fo the Solitaire's attacks like a fucking champ. He held the point and prevented the Solitaire from scoring the objective. This dude earned himself a name.

Taking suggestions on names, if anyone has any ideas.

In one glorious final act of wrathful defiance, my Chaplain perils'd on his attempt to cast Smite and took out the Starweaver with the righteous fire of his own exploding head.

All that remained of his forces were two bikes in the far distance and this little assemblage of T3 bodies.

My Paladins absolutely ruined them.

The match ended at round 5. We gave each other +10 points for fully painted armies and then tallied up. In the end, Matthew's early board control and completion of the psychic ritual won him the game. But I didn't feel bad. I felt great, in fact. I didn't lose a single Terminator the entire game! The Harlequins have flayed me alive in the past, and it was amazing to return the favor. But the game never once felt unbalanced. Because of modifier caps, terrain complications, and the incredible tweaks to how scoring works, we both felt like we could do something effective the entire game. It effectively leveraged my strengths and exploited his weaknesses, even if I ultimately lost.

I also want to stress again that I didn't lose a single Terminator. They were relatively inexpensive, survived everything that was thrown at them, and killed anything they looked at. I genuinely think that Terminators are going to have a place in Grey Knights lists this edition, which is great for me because those are the only lists I want to run!

Grey Knights vs Thousand Sons (9th Edition!)

My brother and I were scheduled to play a game today, our first one in four months. We planned on playing an 8th edition game because that was all we knew, and then lo and behold the rules for 9th edition were leaked this week! We figured this was a great opportunity to get our toes wet before the big release later this month.

Over the last few days I've pored over the rules. I've read through them three times, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of the changes from 8th. There's a lot! And not only are there a lot, but they are detailed, extensive, and full of examples and bullet points to ward off the demon that is Rules Ambiguity. There are still a few things that are up in the air (alleged Terminator/Storm Shield 1++ saves, psykers casting Smite multiple times each phase), but over all I am really pleased with how extensive these rules are. I'm very excited to start down the path of fully grokking this edition.

My brother wanted to try out the new Eternal War missions, complete with secondary objectives. It was an hour and a half before we started playing -- changes to deployment and the aforementioned secondary objectives took us a bit to hammer out. One big change that I found interesting is Step 10 of the Eternal War deployment. In a nutshell, all units in Reserve and in transports need to be declared before deployment even begins, and this is done secretly, which adds a whole new tactical layer to deployment. No longer will I decide who's going into the teleportarium chambers on the fly. I think I like this change. It'll lead to some unexpected situations and make me balance my armies in a different way.

1500 points of Grey Knights! Land Raider!

I brought a Land Raider Crusader this time! Throughout 8th the LRC has suffered from the same ills that plague Terminators: mass quantities of high AP and multi-damage weapons. With the new Big Guns Never Tire rule, I was hoping that the LRC would have new life breathed into it. It certainly can't get tagged and made irrelevant anymore, which was always a sad time.

Elsewise, I brought three squads of Terminators, a five-man squad of Paladins, a Nemesis Dreadknight (I love these things and am so desperate to make them work), Grand Master Simandus, a Brother-Captain, and Inquisitor Felencia. Most everyone knew Gate of Infinity, with a few defensive spells like Sanctuary scattered throughout. I wanted to maybe utilize that wonky new Smite technicality and have my characters maybe cast 2 damage Smites a couple times each. See how that worked out.

Thousand Sons

My brother thought the same thing, unfortunately, and brought Magnus the Red. His Smites are base 1d6 mortal wounds, upping to 2d6 when he super smites. He also has 3 casts, 3 denies, all with +2 to cast. So... on average 11 mortal wounds to my guys every turn if I didn't deny anything.

Before the game, my brother pointed out that the rule that previously omitted GK and TS from the cumulative increase in Smite's Warp Charge is in one of the 8th edition BIG FAQs. No where in the 9th ruleset does it spare our psyker-heavy armies from the penalty for successive Smites. So, sad times there.

He used a stratagem to scout-deploy a squad of Rubrics.

I had a total of two drops: my NDK and a Land Raider full of people. Everyone else was in space.

That is a lot of psykers.

He brought some Forgefiends along. I know that their guns are pretty much designed to cut down Terminators. I won the roll-off and got first turn. I began with the time honored tradition of throwing something big and killy up the board to eliminate a unit I don't like.

My Nemesis Dreadknight wasted the Forgefiend with a spectacular display of shooting, but I don't know if that was to my benefit or my detriment. I had intended to charge the Forgefiend and threaten his psyker congregation with the presence of a NDK, and hopefully draw his ire from my Land Raider. But at least the Forgefiend was dead.

My LRC somehow killed only 1 Rubric in the shooting phase, despite my impressive number of hits. I charged them and killed nothing more. But I was closer to the objective! Also, here is a fun change: Psykers cannot cast spells if they fall back in 9th edition. By tying down his Rubrics, I was forcing my brother to make a choice. Either give up a power, or sacrifice shooting my LRC for his whole turn.

Before moving, my Bro-Cap hopped out of the Land Raider and snuck behind a building. I chose the secondary objective that asks me to keep guys in each quarter of the battlefield. My Bro-Cap would spend most of the game sitting here and gaining me points. Which, you know, do your job, my guy! Way to be!

My brother's turn came around, and Magnus started pouring on the hate. Through Smites he brought my Land Raider down to one wound. Oof. The remaining Forgefiend finished off the Land Raider with a storm of hellbullets.

I lost a Paladin in the wreckage (43 points!), and to my sadness I could not reroll the 1 that killed him. The changes to the Command Re-roll stratagem prevent such a cunning play! It also means I can't reroll explosions, so that is good to know for the future.

Wobbling closer to Magnus on my second turn.

I deepstroked Simandus and all of my Terminators into the midfield. Through Smites and storm bolters we erased the second Forgefiend. The way I saw it, I needed to nullify his shooting first. I believed that I could deny a good portion of my brother's lethal psychic powers now that all my Knights were on the table. Later I would find out that I was wrong.

He sent one Daemon Prince to face my NDK. I used the new Overwatch stratagem here (a good change, I think) and took off 6 wounds as he charged. Unfortunately, that axe cut clean through my 2+ saves and killed my Dreadknight.

oh lawd he comin

 Magnus strode over to my deep striking Terminators and just obliterated them all in close combat. With Smite and stave, he killed a whole squad and Simandus himself.

Well damn.

Bro-Cap, no!

The next few turns were just Magnus flying around the battlefield and killing literally everything.

Inquisitor Felencia, no!

In a desperate move, I Gated my only remaining squad of Terminators into cover. I was ahead on points, but I wouldn't be for long. I gambled and hurled them back out into the center of the battlefield to claim the center (another one of my secondaries) and maybe kill Ahriman.

We succeeded in this! Mind bullets and regular bullets cut down the arch-sorcerer. But the following turn Magnus just walked up and dealt 10 mortal wounds in the psychic phase, killing my last unit. My brother outraced me on points and won.

Yoiks, that was a rough one. I didn't bring any anti-armor and did not expect to be going up against Magnus the Red. I tried to deprioritize him and handle other units/objectives, but that obviously didn't work. Every time I ignore a Primarch they just run up the board and fuck all my guys to death. Magnus casting three Smites every turn is unreasonably brutal. I am pretty sure that interpretation of the rules will get errata'd in the first month.

Thoughts on my first 9th Edition game:

• Charging is even harder for Grey Knights now, and I didn't think that was possible. the Command Re-roll stratagem can't be used to reroll a single dice--you must reroll the whole test. This is unfortunate and something that I'll have to find a way to work around. I only got one unit into melee the entire game.
• List building is going to be very different than it was before. We mustered our armies and then chose our secondaries, and both me and my brother realized at the same time that we should have been constructing out lists with our favored secondaries in mind. Obviously we didn't have the foresight to do that this time, but it made us both think about how we will alter lists for the future.
• The terrain rules are very fun. I like how versatile and multifaceted they are. I love building battlefields, and I can see myself using these rules to great detail in the future and making some really dynamic maps. We didn't fuck around with terrain rules too much this time around.
• Honestly, this particular game probably didn't sample a lot of the new 9th edition stuff. It was mostly me and my brother Smiting each other for two hours, with the occasional spray of bolter fire in the mix. I'm very excited to play against other armies and really figure out the nuance of this edition.

This was great fun, and I am so stoked to keep playing. Gah, I love Warhammer, and I love my Grey Knights. Maybe I'll paint that Vortimer Land Raider I've had sitting around.