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!