BLUNDERDOME_Wide_Banner — Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to the sacred battlegrounds of the second BLUNDERDOME. For those of you who missed yesterday’s announcement on this year’s Blunderdome, you can find the article with more info on the event here. The short version is, this second Blunderdome is going super casual: We’re building 8 lists with none of the nonsense or complications caused by things like “FAQs,” “Balance Dataslates,” or “Points updates.” Just books used exactly as printed, for the most fun, casual 40k experience possible.

For this event, we’ve had our murderer’s row of competitive sickos build lists for our casual funhavers to play with. Each two-person group constitutes a team for the purposes of winning this team, and each competitive player is on the hook for teaching their casual how to play the list. In this article – and the next three – we’re going to cover the eight lists in this BLUNDERDOME two at a time, along with notes on the lists and the documents handed off to their pilots.

Leagues of Votann

The new kids on the block and arguably the faction that started this whole mess, with a book that was insanely busted right out of the gate. The Votann boast incredible durability and some of the game’s best shooting, along with mechanics that all but guarantee anything in their sightlines will be destroyed. On top of that, they can be highly mobile thanks to bikes and transports, and their units are some of the game’s most efficient purely from a points-per-value standpoint.

In that regard, Danny P was perhaps one of the players most vocally on the side of “Votann are overrated” before the nerfs, and said as much in our roundtable. As someone who had played a large number of games with them pre-nerf, he was on board for building a degenerate list with them, knowing it’d be going into some of the most heinous lists ever conceived.

Generally speaking, Votann don’t need some of the boosts that come with this format – their stratagems all seem costed for Nephilim as opposed to the early days of 12 CP lists from Eternal War. And they may struggle on the GW terrain layouts which tend to limit line of sight to 24″ in a lot of cases. That said, one of their biggest problems – mediocre secondaries – will be fixed by having access to the Eternal War missions, where mission secondaries can compliment the wildly unbalanced secondary objectives in the Eternal War book. In particular, a model-based To the Last, Domination, and Bring it Down are all what you might consider “good eating” in this format.

The List

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Player: Rocco the Magnarail
Factions used: League’s of Brokann
Army Points: 1998
Reinforcement Points: 0
Number of Units / Killpoints: 11

Pre Game Stratagems: 2x Warlord Trait, 1x Relic
Starting Command Points: 3

Secondary Objectives Information
No Prisoners: 74 (8VP)
Bring it Down: 9
Assasination: 7
Abhor the Witch: 0
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== Leagues of Votann – Greater Thaurian League – Battalion = -3CP, [104PL 1996pts] ==

HQ1: Uthar = [7PL, 140pts] (Warlord)
– – – Warlord Trait – Experienced Eye, Ancestral Bearings (-1CP)
HQ2: Brokhyr Ironmaster [4PL, 105pts] Forge-master
– – – Warlord Trait – Master Armourer

TR1: Hearthkyn Warriors [7PL, 144pts] 10x Ion Blaster, Magna-rail Rifle, Medipack
TR1: Hearthkyn Warriors [7PL, 144pts] 10x Ion Blaster, Magna-rail Rifle, Medipack
TR1: Hearthkyn Warriors [7PL, 139pts] 10x Ion Blaster, Magna-rail Rifle

EL1: Cthonian Beserkers [10PL, 176pts] 8x Concussion Maul
EL2: Einhyr Hearthguard = [18PL, 350pts] 10x Volkanite Disintegrator, 10x Plasma blade gauntlet
– – – Relic: Warpstryke (-1CP)

FA1: Hernkyn Pioneers = [5PL, 110pts] – HYLas Rotary Cannon, Spectral Scanner, Rolibar Searchlight

TS1: Hekaton Land Fortress [13PL, 230pts] Magna-rail
TS2: Hekaton Land Fortress [13PL, 230pts] Magna-rail
TS3: Hekaton Land Fortress [13PL, 230pts] Magna-rail

Danny P’s Notes

Secondaries:

TTL
then whatever other secondaries you want

Other Play Notes:

Simply throw Land fortresses onto objectives and pewpew with the magnarails – they will kill anything you look at.
GTL is about stacking to 2 tokens on as many units as possible, Uthar needs to sit near land fortresses with decent “firing lanes” so he can see units and give them tokens. Spend 1 CP every turn as well to give 1 unit 2 tokens at the start. You don’t ever need 3.
Einhyr just throw on chapter master re-rolls and watch their volkite decimate anything, and their grenade launchers.your beserkers are for anti charge only
Play a passive game, don’t over extend
The bikes can give 1 Judgement Token onto a unit they shot for 1 CP

Combos:

Uthar – turns a hit, wound, damage, or save into a 6 – this can be really good for a magna rail to auto wound, or to hit with a magna rail in Overwatch, or simply to ignore a failed d3+3 damage save etc. Always use on land fortresses
Brokhyr – can turn a failed save into 0 damage, use for things like meltas etc. He can also do advance & actions, or actions & shoot, good for things like banners
Brokhyr – can heal a fortress for 4 wounds in the movement phase
Brokhyr – can make a wargear strat -1CP for a unit within 6″, very good for ion storm with the hearthkyn nearby, or the auspex strat for the land fortress
Einhyr – can get a free teleport, great “get of jail free card” out of combat etc, or for a turn 1 aggressive push

The Casual Player: Rocco

Helming this list is Rocco, who you may remember from the occasional Yu-Gi-Oh article he’s written for the site. Normally Rocco plays space marines, and was an active uh, participant, and team captain in the Goonhammer Open Narrative event earlier this year. Rocco has never played Votann, but is eager to kill things with magna rails.

Iron Hands

On the other, more ferrous hand, we have the Iron Hands, who haven’t been particularly relevant since 9th edition dropped but have a few nasty surprises waiting in store. While yes, they aren’t the faction they used to be when they could sit in Devastator Doctrine all game, their 8th edition supplement still has a number of nasty tricks it can pull that have since been nerfed substantially. Being able to halve incoming damage on dreadnoughts and reduce damage by 1 in a 6″ aura with the Ironstone are both nasty abilities, and being able to hand them off to nearby marines can lead to some very silly outcomes, even when Magna-Rails are involved.

On the whole marines fare pretty decently when they get to use the Codex version of Oaths of Moment, and while the army doesn’t have a ton of damage output, what it does have is the ability to just not die and hopefully deliver a haymaker in response to an opponent trying to kill it off objectives.

Here we’ve tapped John Lennon from The Art of War to step in and build a list that modernizes the “Broviathan” builds of old. John’s as good as 40k players get, and very much misses when it was possible to play non-Blood Angel marines and win events. The Iron Hands get a lot of mileage out of the extra CP allotment in Eternal War missions, and can put it to good use.