In our Faction Focus series we take a look at the game’s factions and talk about their rules, their units, how they play, and what competitive lists for the faction look like. This is part of a larger series of articles in our Start Competing series. In this article we’re looking at the Sons of Russ, the Space Wolves.

Why Should You Play This Faction?

After a bit of a rough start to Tenth Edition, the Space Wolves have slowly gained steam and become one of the top space marine factions. They lost a little bit of that with some of the Pariah Nexus mission changes – Wulfen and wolves being unable to do actions really hurts the faction – but changes to the Champions of Russ detachment have really helped the faction, giving them a second viable way to play beyond just taking Stormlance Task Force. They’re not the top faction in the game but they have the tools to succeed against most threats and having access to strong, fast units in the form of Wulfen and Thunderwolf Cavalry give Space Wolves a lot of play. If you’re looking for a melee-focused Space Marines army with a lot of speed and some cool Viking-inspired imagery, Space Wolves are for you.

Army Rule: Oath of Moment

Space Wolves are a Space Marines subfaction and so have Oath of Moment as their army rule. At the start of your Command phase, pick one unit from your opponent’s army and until the start of your next Command phase, your marines can re-roll hit rolls against that unit. This is a very solid ability and really lets you focus down key threats, punching up with sheer volume of hits. It’s a great ability to combine with Saga of the Warrior Born or Saga of the Beastslayer, where the ability to re-roll hits will let you fish for either Sustained or Lethal Hits against key targets.

The other Army Rule at play here is Space marine Chapters – if you’re taking any Space Wolves units, you can’t take any units from another Chapter, so there’s no mixing Space Wolves and say, Black Templars.

Five Things You Need to Know

• You Have Two Options for your Detachment. Building a Space Wolves army starts with a key decision: Stormlance Task Force or Champions of Russ? Both of these are powerful Detachments, and recent changes to the Champions of Russ have made it much more playable and competitive as a choice. We’ll cover this decision in detail later on, but there are upsides and downsides to both, and tanks to some improvements made in the June 2024 Balance Dataslate the Champions of Russ Detachment has a lot more play.
• In Champions of Russ You’ll Need to Learn How to Pick Sagas. If you’re not going with the Stormlance Task Force a big part of your game is going to be picking the saga you want to start with. This can be tricky and whether you go Beastslayer, Warrior Born, or Bear will depend heavily on the opponent and mission. Become familiar with each and how they change the army so you can make smart decisions about which one to activate pregame.
• Thunderwolf Cavalry are your rockstars. If you’re taking Space Wolves over another Chapter, it’s to use the army’s special units and among those the best options are Thunderwolf Cavalry. These guys are some of the game’s best units, combining 10″ Movement with T6, 4 wounds apiece and a 4+ invulnerable save which makes them an absolute nightmare to try and chew through, particularly when paired with a Wolf Guard Battle Leader and Wolf Lord. When you’re building Wolf Jail, three units of six of these make up the walls.
• Your Epic Heroes add solid value. Whether you take him on his sled or on foot, Logan Grimnar’s ability to call a once-per-game semi-Waaagh for the Space Wolves is huge, helping you secure your charges and giving you a huge boost to your melee output with re-rolls to hit for the entire army until the end of the turn. Most Wolves armies include Grimnar, regardless of Detachment. And if you want to add a few other key characters? You’ve got some options. Ragnar Blackmane’s a melee blender, and giving his unit the ability to Advance and Charge is a huge boost, while Ulrik’s Slayer’s Oath can make him an interesting play if you’re taking Wolf Guard. Harald Deathwolf has plenty of play as a replacement for a Wolf Lord, and Bjorn the Fell-Handed has started showing up in more competitive lists, where his durability, damage output, and CP disruption make him a nasty threat.
• You need a plan for scoring secondary objectives. Whether you’re running Stormlance Task Force or Champions of Russ, you need a plan for how you’re going to score objectives – doing actions and holding objective markers – while your Thunderwolf Cavalry and Wulfen surge forward and crash into enemy lines. Given your Thunderwolf Units will make up nearly half your army’s points, that means you’ll want to look at a number of small, mobile throwaway units you can use to jet around the field and score those points. Scouts, Infiltrators, Incursors, Callidus Assassins, and Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs are all reasonable considerations for hits, and you’ll need multiple.

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

Let’s start with the big one: Space Wolf lists rely heavily on maxing out on Thunderwolf Cavalry. They’re the best MOUNTED units in the Space Marines armory, and with T6, 4 wounds each, and a 3+/4++ save and Armour of Contempt, some of the most durable threats in the game. You want to have three units of six, and you’ll be adding two characters to each of those. The standard is a Wolf Guard Battle Leader for each, two Wolf Lords, and Grimnar on his sled, but Harald Deathwolf has shown up here and there in a successful list. If you’re running a Stormlance Task Force one of your Battle Leaders will have the Hunter’s Instincts Enhancement to allow his unit to arrive from Reserves on turn 1, and that’ll usually also be Grimnar’s unit.

After the Thunderwolves, most Space Wolf armies also run 2-3 units of Wulfen. The Wulfen aren’t as good as they used to be now that they can’t do actions but they’re still extremely dangerous melee threats, capable of advancing and charging, tanking some hits, and fighting on death when an opponent tries to take them out. They’re a good secondary part of the wall in your Wolf Jail, and it’s not uncommon to see a unit of 10 in a list. They typically always have storm shields and hammers with Stormfrag auto-launchers to give them a surprising amount of shooting.

From there you have options. Not a lot, as the Thunderwolf Cavalry and characters eat up half of your army’s points, but you have some. Bjorn the Fell-Handed has shown up in successful lists, outfitted with a variety of weapons (the Helfrost Cannon is the most versatile). Bjorn’s got a solid combination of damage output and resilience thanks to halving incoming damage and his aura increasing the cost of enemy Stratagems by 1 within 12″ means he can dive into the enemy lines with the rest of your forces and wreak havoc on their ability to use Stratagems to dig their way out. Bjorn’s an interesting piece of additional tech and works well in either Detachment.

In a traditional Wolf Jail list you’ll need other units to move around the table scoring and protecting your own backfield while your vanguard crash into enemy lines. Scout Squads and Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs make great complements in this regard, as fast-moving units which can get around the table and score secondary objectives easily. The former’s ability to go up and down makes them a versatile scoring threat while the latter offer versatility in that they can be turned on an opponent as a melee threat in a pinch. A single Infiltrator Squad for your backfield objective can help screen out opponents looking to deep strike behind you, while one Intercessor Squad with the ability to sticky objectives can also create a lot of value.

We’ve seen some recent lists running the Stormlance Task Force adopt a more mobile shooting strategy with Space Wolves, supplementing Thunderwolf Cavalry with mobile shooting units who can throw out large amounts of firepower. Grey Hunters are a great fit for this, with the ability to Advance/Fall Back and Shoot and a squad of five being able to carry four chainswords, a power fist, and two meltaguns. Inceptors are also very solid here, and a squad of 6 can use Relentless Assault (Champions of Russ) or Blitzing Fusillade (Stormlance Task Force) to drop shots after Advancing.

That’s really the core but the Space Wolves have a lot of great units and we’ve recently seen the likes of Wolf Guard Terminators and Long Fangs in successful competitive lists, and Murderfang has been known to show up once or twice. The core of the list may be 18 Thunderwolves and six characters, but you’ve got plenty of canvas left to play with if you want to mix it up, and you can swap out Wulfen for a number of other fast melee units or shooting threats – if you’re building a jail list the key is having fast, semi-durable units which can effectively block enemy movement.

Allied Units

The Callidus Assassin is still worth consideration in the army as her ability to go up and down and interfere with enemy Stratagems makes her both a good secondary objective scoring unit and a good compliment to Bjorn. The Eversor is probably a bit too expensive and does what you can already otherwise do with Thunderwolves, but is a pretty funny add as well.

We’ve also seen lists drop most of their non-TWC units for Canis Rex to solid effect, trading out versatility and movement for a single strong and durable weapons platform that can punish an opponent for not focusing on the wolves immediately in front of them. Canis can also shoot while performing actions as a Knights character.

How Does This Faction Secure Objectives?

With a small number of leftover units, usually. This will be Scouts, Intercessors, Infiltrators, and Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs, units left behind to act as objective scorers and action doers while the rest of the army rushes forward. If you can score Saga of Majesty in a Champions of Russ detachment, that will open things up for your Wulfen to take the role as well but usually by then they’re already engaged in murder-related activities deep inside enemy lines. Scouts are the best option for this, as relatively small footprint models capable of leaving and returning to the table. Otherwise at the front of your lines your TWCs will be contesting the opponent’s closest objectives and preventing them from moving out and scoring.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?

In melee, mostly. While they’d rather fight marines, Heirloom Weapons give Thunderwolf Cavalry four attacks each at S5 and AP-1 and when you add buffs on top of that, it gives a unit of six plenty of ability to chew through a horde unit before you factor in the two characters attached to the unit. Wulfen also do fine in this regard and their Stormfrag auto-launchers suddenly become very lethal when you’re firing them into a unit of 20 cultists or Boyz and each one is dropping out D6+4 shots before you charge in. You’ve got no shortage of attacks capable of cutting Infantry of all sizes down.

How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?

This is a trickier proposition – While you’re likely to have some thunder hammers in your army, those are much better for tearing through elite or heavy infantry than they are taking out heavy vehicle targets. That said, actually destroying enemy tanks and monsters isn’t necessarily the point – your units are very effective tar pits, and if you can lock an opponent’s big vehicles and units down for multiple turns while your units score, that’s a perfectly acceptable outcome. If you absolutely have to kill some of those big units though, the best way to do that is by combining Oath of Moment on your target with either:

• Saga of the Beastslayer and Go for the Throat in the Champions of Russ Detachment to get Lethal Hits, an additional AP, and Lance on your unit
• Shock Assault in the Stormlance Task Force Detachment to get Lance on your Mounted units.

This gives Champions of Russ more play into big threats, but that’s not necessarily something you always need on hand, especially if you can just tank those threats over multiple turns. Generally speaking however big threats can be a problem if they can just jump over you and get out, and you’ll want to take them down on your “go” turn.

Playing This Faction

How this faction plays depends a lot on whether you’re taking the Stormlance Task Force or the Champions of Russ Detachment. The Stormlance Task Force is at its core a Thunderwolves Detachment – it can support other units but Thunderwolves are really the only good melee MOUNTED unit in the Space Marines’ arsenals. Your lists with this Detachment are always going to revolve around big units of Thunderwolves. And generally every unit of Thunderwolf Cavalry in your army wants a pair of characters to join it, one of which is a Wolf Guard Battle Leader on Thunderwolf. You want to give one of them Hunter’s Instincts in a Stormlance Task Force army and pair him with Logan Grimnar. This gives you an incredibly dangerous unit you can place into reserves and bring onto the table either from a neutral edge on turn 1 or your opponent’s edge turn 2, and is an ideal target for Rapid Ingress if you’re going second. They can get free re-rolls to charge from Grimnar if you activate his ability, helping them close the gap arriving from reserves.

Your other two units can use Wolf Lords, or you can swap one of those for Harald Deathwolf, who’s also mounted and able to join a unit of Thunderwolves. In this format, the list often sees support from Wulfen in what’s common referred to as a “Wolf Jail” list. It’s called that because the general game plan is to rush across the table early with Wulfen and Thunderwolves, using the Advance and Charge ability to guarantee first- and second-turn charges, pinning an opponent in their deployment zone. While they’re stuck fighting their way through 150 super tough wounds, your remaining units score VP holding the table’s other objectives and completing secondary missions. Even if the opponent tables you, you’ll generally get a big enough lead early that they can’t catch up late.

On the other hand the Champions of Russ Detachment is much more a Space Wolves Detachment, and gives you a lot more stratagem versatility and support for other units – this is a good place to play with Ragnar Blackmane and other Space Wolves units. Here your biggest asset is the ability to choose one Saga to be automatically completed at the start of the first battle round, and all three viable options – Bear, Warrior Born, and Beastslayer – have value against different threats, though it’s worth noting how they supercharge your Stratagems. Here your biggest loss is not having access to Hunter’s Instincts, and none of the Champions of Russ Enhancements make up for that loss. You make up for it with Stratagems, however, and there’s a ton of value in being able to activate any Saga for a turn, in part because it works with other Stratagems and in part to make your OC 0 Wulfen scoring for a turn.

Sample Lists

There are two big list concepts we’re going to look at. It’s worth noting that you can make a Thunderwolves list with either the Stormlance Task Force or Champions of Russ. Let’s look at recent lists for those:

Jay Mann’s List

Jay took this list to a 4-1, fourth place finish at Krootcon 2024. It’s a pretty standard Wolf Jail list, running a Stormlance Task Force Detachment with 18 Thunderwolf Cavalry and two units of ten Wulfen.

Jay's List - Click to Expand

Koen Klien’s List

Koen took this Champions of Russ list to a 4-1, fourth place finish at the Karnage at the Keep event in August. It’s another wolf jail list, running very similar units.

Koen's list - click to expand

Dakota Pfeiffer’s List

This list went to a 4-1, finishing in second place. It’s notable for its lack of heavy weapons and the use of more standard “Space Wolves” units. The list trades out some Thunder Wolves for Wolf Guard Terminators and even manages to fit Arjac Rockfist. The list is supported by Razorbacks filled with lascannon Long Fangs and uses a massive brick of Wolf Guard Terminators to hold a valuable midtable objective, taking a much more “death star” feel than Thunderwolf lists – though it still packs a unit of Thunderwolves for good measure.

Dakota's List - click to expand

Final Thoughts

The Space Wolves are among the strongest Space Marine factions right now, having bespoke units suited to a number of different tasks and armies. Whether you want to go heavy on Thunderwolves with a Stormlance Task Force or mix it up with more Infantry, you have multiple relatively competitive options to choose from. It’s a good army and now’s a great time to be playing Wolves.

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