10th Edition Competitive Faction Focus: Chaos Knights

In this series we’ll talk about each faction, what they have to offer, how they play, and talk about a few list concepts to consider. You can find all the Faction Focuses that we’ve published here.

We’re almost a year into tenth edition and Chaos Knights have been ever present on tables since the beginning even if the game plan has changed. What hasn’t changed is Chaos Knights are your one-stop shop for a hyper-elite vehicle skew army which can still flood the table with models. 

Update Log

• Updated (Latest): 2024-05-06 for the Q2 points update
• Initial Publication: 2023-08-14

Why Should You Play This Faction?

Chaos Knights provide you with a lethal combination of speed and durability while also giving you access to some amazing datasheets for both the shooting and fight phases that can be taken en masse. If you’re looking for an army that focuses on applying as much pressure as possible and saturating the board in threats, look no further. In addition to that, it has the coolest models and the opportunities for the coolest kitbashes. No I am not biased, this is an objective fact.

Rob: If we were doing a hobby track or paint score meta, I’d put Chaos Knights firmly at the top – they give you lots of big models to work with, featuring lots of nice, open areas for freehanding, and the Chaos nature of them lets you get as gross or wild as you like when doing conversions. And at most you’ll be painting a dozen models.

Six Things to Know

• Your Army Rule and Detachment Rules are Bad. These rules all revolve around Battleshock with Harbingers of Despair handing out -1 to the tests and bonuses against those who fail it and Traitoris Lance forcing the tests below starting strength. The thing is, even with the debuff it’s still too easy to pass these tests. An overwhelming majority of units you’ll see on the board are Ld 6 or Ld 7 with a character that’s Ld 6. This means with the -1 they are still more likely (barely) to pass the test than to fail. You can never bank on these rules to win a game, but when they do come up they can swing the game in your favor.

  Your stratagems are similarly highly situational. Things like Dread Hounds or Pterrorshades can save your butt when you need them but will absolutely not be used every game. It’s also worth noting that you shouldn’t use diabolic bulwark unless you think you’ll be taking more than 3 shots that force your 5++ and can kill your knight easily, otherwise just save the cp to reroll a save if you really need your knight alive. The exception to this is Knights of Shade. The ability to go through walls takes away one of the major downsides of an all vehicle faction and you should utilize this early and often.

• Your Datasheets are Good. You get access to some of the most efficient and effective vehicle datasheets in the game. While most of the big knights are largely over costed and too fragile, you have access to Karnivores and Brigands some of the best melee and shooting profiles in the game.
• You Don’t Need to Take Big Knights. The only list building requirement in 10th edition is that you need to take a character, and luckily the War Dog Stalker has that keyword. This means you can take a horde of angry little robots to flood the board. This is currently the dominant gameplan so plan on getting a ton of War Dogs if you’re looking to compete with this faction.

• You Are Pretty Durable… Until You Aren’t: As you might expect, playing an army of all vehicles can present a very tough nut for your opponent to crack. The only problem is there’s this universal special rule in Warhammer 40,000 Tenth Edition called Lethal Hits. almost every faction has a way to access this or high strength weaponry en masse and they will likely be bringing these units anyway (see Aggressors, Sword Brethren, Incubi, Breachers, the list goes on) so you’re knights aren’t going to stick around nearly as long as you’d like. That T12, 22-wound Desecrator might look like a beast to take down, but with only a 3+ save and the sheer volume you’ll be rolling against, expect it to go down in one turn against a well planned attack. And in melee you won’t have an invulnerable save, making you much more vulnerable to chip damage from the likes of power fists.

• Daemons are Your Friends. Daemons are your primary method for accomplishing secondary missions. Your action economy is going to be very precious so you’ll need some cheap bozos to deploy teleport homers or cleanse objectives. With the change to how daemons can be allied into armies (you can’t include more non-BATTLELINE units than BATTLELINE), Nurglings are your go-to pick for activity idiots. You’re gonna want two or three of these.
• You’re very vulnerable to Bring it Down. On that note, pretty much any army can take Bring it Down against you and expect to score 15+ VP off it. Each of your War Dogs is worth 3 on its own, and any big knights you bring are worth 5. This can make going up against armies capable of downing knights even tougher.

What Are the Must-Have Units to Start This Faction?

There are three units you’re going to need when playing this faction and two of them come in the same box. Brigands and Karnivores do everything you need the list to do and do it as efficiently as possible. Brigands are your ranged fire support, covering anti tank and anti infantry in one neat package, and Karnivores are your fast moving melee bullies that generally have a gameplan for everything. Both of these models hit on twos when doing the things they want to and are your most consistent units.

The third unit, as I mentioned above, is Nurglings. While they aren’t a chaos knight datasheet, the army barely functions without them. They can screen, do objectives, and apply a nasty debuff in melee, the phase where you’ll be at your most vulnerable. They’re also deceptively annoying to remove with 12 wounds in the unit. 

As a bonus mention, you’ll want a Stalker. Not because it’s good, it’s not, but because it’s the cheapest Chaos Knights character and you’ll want to save as many points as possible for more war dogs and scoring daemon allies. Just magnetize your War Dogs and this shouldn’t be difficult to get.

How Does This Faction Secure Objectives?

Scoring and denying primary is where knights reign supreme. The minimum OC you get in the faction is 8 on all the War Dogs. War Dogs have fantastic movement and can use the Knights of the Shade Stratagem to move through terrain, allowing you to flip objectives pretty easily while you often have the toughness to hold on to them for at least a turn. When playing Chaos Knights you want to overwhelm your opponent’s key objectives by throwing as many cheap War Dogs on them as possible. Your models also have huge bases which means you can easily move-block opponents from being able to move onto objectives during their turn.

Secondary missions are a bigger problem. It used to be you could count on a Fixed strategy using something like the Blue Scribes to deploy homers but these days that’s not an option. The good news is that you still have access to Daemons for support – and that’s where Nurglings are your go-to answer. At 40 points per base they offer cheap, semi-durable units which can deep strike, screen, and infiltrate, allowing them to be everywhere you need on the table to deploy homers, investigate signals, or cleanse. That said, you can supplement these with other small-base characters from the Daemons army like Poxbringers if you want more options for something like Behind Enemy Lines.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

The short answer is Chain Cannons. These can be found on Brigands and Stalkers and sit at profile of 12 S6 AP-1 D1 shots. It comes on cheap platforms and at the perfect strength for dealing with most infantry toughness profiles. The AP 1 is a bit regrettable due to cover being so plentiful but the Brigand can pump that to AP 2. The Havoc launcher can also help in this department since it throws out D6 shots and blast and is available on every platform (yes also the Brigand, you may be seeing a pattern). The most useful part of this weapon is that it can be fired indirect, but havoc launchers can provide some real extra power into chaff units no matter what the context. Past that, most of your melee threats have sweep attacks which can help finish off a larger unit, though they tend to excel more at wiping out heavy infantry.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

Good news: Almost everything in your army can handle tanks and monsters. Every knight platform has access to a weapon over Strength 10 except the Executioner, and even that war dog can still punch up fairly reliably through sheer volume. The most common tool you’ll be using to crack vehicles is the Brigand’s Daemonsbreath Thermal Spear, which throws out 2 shots at S12 AP-4 and D6 damage with Melta 4. Taken en masse you’ll have plenty of opportunities to kill vehicles. On top of that you’ve got very solid melee options at your disposal.

What Combos Should You Build Around?

One of the big differences between Imperial Knights and Chaos Knights is that you don’t really need combos in Chaos Knights. All of the unit abilities work independently outside of the big knights giving minor buffs to nearby War Dogs, the most useful of which being the Desecrator giving nearby dogs the ability to re-roll 1s to hit in shooting. That said I would pass on all of this in favor of just getting more good datasheets on the table. Most of the time you’ll be playing an attrition game with your opponent when playing this army, so you want as many high quality solo actors on the field at the same time as you can muster.

Some Sample Lists

There isn’t a ton of variety to the Chaos Knights right now when it comes to list building. That said, there are a couple of different options to try and it’s worth talking about how those vary.

Trenton Bates’ Rampager List

Trenton took this list to a 5-0, first-place finish at the Squig City Casino Royale GT in late April, beating two Black Templars lists, Adepta Sororitas, Votann, and Drukhari to claim the top spot. Trenton’s list runs the six brigands you might expect, but includes a single Knight Rampager as its big knight.

Trenton's List - Click to Expand

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: You want to get that Rampager across the table and into combat as quickly as possible, doing damage and tying up enemy units. The once-per-game Advance and Charge is a big part of that, and the Panoply of the Cursed Knights is just there to help you survive up to that point. The other big benefit of the Rampager is improving the Karnivores by giving them the ability to re-roll hit rolls of 1 within 9″, and if you consider the Rampager’s base size that can cover a pretty big area.

That said, if there’s a glaring weakness to this list, it’s Necrons – and Trenton was lucky to have avoided them. A Hypercrypt Legion list will just perpetually kite your melee threats, preventing you from ever charging anything you want to charge while putting you on a five-turn clock dumping teleport homers in your deployment zone. And against wraiths you’ll likely wish you had more OC on hand for holding objectives.

Finn Decker’s War Dogs List

This is a version of the more common Chaos Knights list you’ll see at local RTTs and GTs. Finn took this list to a 5-0, 2nd-place finish at the Warp Wars 2024 event in Late April, beating Astra Militarum, Thousand Sons, Aeldari, T’au, and Chaos Space Marines on the way. The fun wrinkle here is that Finn has traded out two units of Nurglings for a Poxbringer. The Poxbringer is harder to screen out and can give an additional -1 to leadership tests within 6″, which can sometimes be a fun extra push.

Finn's List - Click to Expand

The gameplan is simple: flood the board with as many idiot robots as you can, all of which are equally scary and need to be removed. Meanwhile the Nurglings do secondaries so your knights can focus on killing. An advanced Chaos Knights player will learn when they need to apply full pressure or slowly trade with their opponent and push when the time is right. This is something you’ll learn to feel out over time, but it’s a fun list to play either way.

You’ll likely see some permutations of this list even if the core stays the same. Sometimes you’ll see a beast of nurgle thrown in as a cheap backline objective holder. Sometimes you’ll see the Aura of Terror enhancement to help keep objectives under control when your model pool gets low. Occasionally you’ll see a Great Unclean One make the list for a great debuff and durable but effective mid table holder. I’m currently playing with a list that brings a Cerastus Lancer instead of the stalker, since it has more wounds than your standard big knight and always has the 4++, but mostly because I’ve been playing all dogs for a very long time and I’m bored. That said you’ll always see Karnivores and Brigands.

Wrap Up

That about covers it for Chaos Knights. They provide an incredibly effective, elite, and lethal army that can often out pressure your opponents if you commit your units right. While it may seem very one note for now, I can promise you this game plan is fun and when other gameplans become available I will be running in here to update this article and talk to it. For now though, grab those War Dog kits and start slamming them on the table

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