Competitive Innovations in 9th: Battle for Survival

9th Edition events continue to gently, carefully roll along, and that’s giving us a drip feed of precious, precious data about what sort of armies are performing as people’s familiarity with the edition increases. A few weeks ago we looked at the results from the Vanguard Tactics Grand Series and the Adelaide GT, yesterday we looked at the overall results from tournaments we’ve collected, and today we’ll be zeroing in on another UK event, Battle For Survival. While a relatively small 2-dayer (24 starting players), like with any UK event at the moment the top tables were a brutal shark tank, with some names that’ll be pretty familiar to anyone who follows the scene. With the 24-player count, that neatly gives us a top four consisting of a 5-0 list and three 4-1s, so we can pretty much just dive straight in and start looking at what’s new.

The only other pre-amble required is to confirm, in-line with what we covered in the previous one of these, that we have confirmed that proportionate COVID-19 safety measures were in place for the event.

On to the lists!

Alex Harrison’s Salamander Successors – 1st Place

Please do not adjust your web browsers – this is still today’s article, Alex has just managed to take down the event again, this time going undefeated. Luckily for us, the list has actually changed substantially, so there’s still plenty to talk about.

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

The Standout Features

• Salamanders on top again – and growing evidence from other events suggests it isn’t just Alex making them work.
• Flamestorm Aggressors still here, though fewer than before.
• Lots of Land Speeder Tempests. We’ll get to them.
• Two squads of Scouts riding Land Speeders Storms, providing an extremely cheap objective grabbing option that’s got a bit more durability than Scouts alone.
• The 3×3 Eradicators and Grav Pod that you’re going to get rapidly tired of seeing in every Marine list.

Why it Works in 9th

Salamanders continue to prove extremely strong, a complete 180 from their position at the bottom of the Marine tier list in 8th, and at this point it’s important to start really considering why that might be. My suspicion is that a lot of it comes off the back of three key abilities from their book:

• Never Give Up, which lets them make anything objective secured once per battle round.
• The Crucible of Battle, letting them get a key damage spike on demand.
• The doctrine, which makes their Eradicators even more deadly than anyone else’s

To consistently win games of 8th, especially in ITC, you often needed to aim to control a large portion table for a significant proportion of the game, and nothing Salamanders had going on especially helped with that. While full-board domination will (obviously) still win you games of 9th it’s no longer mandatory, and much harder to pull off. Instead, applying surgical pressure to flip the right objectives at the right time is now a very viable route to victory – and the abilities outlined above mean Salamanders excel at this, and that’s at least my working hypothesis for their strong showing in the new edition.

Something new in this list that leans in to two of the three abilities above is the buzzing swarm of Land Speeder Tempests, a Forge World variant of the normal Land Speeder. Let’s start the Forge World drinking game! They got a point cut in Chapter Approved thanks to the shuffling of their weapon costs (drink), they have an oddly-statted unique gun that happens to combo unusually well with wound modifier abilities in bulk (drink), they randomly have slightly higher toughness than normal Speeders (drink) and they have an incredibly badly worded unique effect that you can abuse with Never Give Up (down the glass).

Specifically, on top of just being a straight up nasty gun platform in units of three once you layer on Crucible and the 6+++ from the Obsidian Aquila, whenever these Advance they effectively become an AIRCRAFT till the end of turn, gaining a minimum move, -1 to hit and being unchargable by non-fliers. Well. Technically they “cannot be charged in the fight phase” by non-fliers, but I’m assuming most TOs will give the benefit of the doubt in these working as intended.

Given you can also give them a 3++ against shooting with Skilled Riders, that sums up to you being able to chuck ObSec (via NGE) Land Speeders with a ranged 3++ who can’t be charged by ground units onto an objective in an emergency. Unless your opponent has flying melee threats they’re very unlikely to be able to clear that, and while you might be able to work around the ObSec partially at the battle round transition if they’ve strayed too far from the captain, it’s an extremely powerful way of controlling the scoring in 9th, and handy for a number of the mission secondaries.

That’s the biggest innovation here, though not the only one – heck it’s not even the only Land Speeder based one. Adding Land Speeder Storms for scouts to ride in is a major nod to just how powerful troop transports are in 9th, and they make an interesting alternative choice to Infiltrators for Marine flavours that don’t turn basic Primaris into melee killers. The models are (obviously) less durable once on the table, but having the option to choose between deploying in the transport or scouting, depending on what your opponent has, adds flexibility. Additional fast, throwaway models opens up secondary options, helping make this list almost impossible to deny them against.

Finish all that off with the solid core of FNP-toting Gravis melta dudes and you have an extremely potent recipe with the results to prove it. I am extremely not thrilled that yet another Forge World nasty has arisen from the grim depths of the old Indexes to haunt the living, but at least they’re finally changing soon. Maybe. Please GW, announce a date, every week I have to do this is killing me.

Mani Cheema’s Iron Hands – 2nd Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

The Standout Features

• Iron Hands would like to remind everyone that they are very much still really, really good.
• Three squads of Bladeguard, who are a nightmare to shift thanks to Father of the Future and give the list some real melee bite.
• The Ironstoned Leviathan that you all know and “love”.
• Maxed out Eradicators and a Grav Pod again, this time with an option on two dev squads in the pod.
• A cheeky squad of Plasma Inceptors to add some extra emergency bite.

Why it Works in 9th

Compared to Salamanders, the re-appearance of the Iron Hands is vastly less surprising – while the Brohammer list that dominated LVO is dead and buried, after that the rumbling new hotness was to go hard on bodies with Father of the Future to dominate the game, and this is something of an evolution of that. It trades the quantity of “all the Intercessors” for the quality (and three-wound profile) of Eradicators and Bladeguard, with the latter also providing some assault threat, and backs them up with an Ironstoned Leviathan, which is still both brutally dangerous and extremely hard to kill.

There’s honestly not a massive amount to say about this list compared to some of the others here – while it features new units the way it plays isn’t going to shock anyone – it can use infiltrators and its drop pod to make sure it tags some objectives on turn 1, and then the rest of the army can roll up the board like an unstoppable force deleting anything that resists in proper Cyberman fashion. It’s extremely difficult to fully take off the board, gives up little in the way of Secondaries, and can kill pretty much anything, what’s not to (depending on whether you own an Iron Hands army) love/hate?

Thomas Douch’s Adepta Sororitas – 3rd Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

The Standout Features

• Mixed Valorous Heart and Bloody Rose, suggesting that the durability of the former does pay for itself in 9th.
• Zephyrim making it into lists in force despite their significant point increase.
• The Triumph and Celestine leading the charge, which is likely to be a staple of lists.
• Rhino Repentia are just as horrific as ever.

Why it Works in 9th

Sisters were looking strong at the end of 8th, and it’s good to see them on the podium. One of the questions I had while writing out Sororitas Faction Focus was whether the army would end up on pure Bloody Rose for the sheer, brutal aggression or mixed Bloody Rose/Valorous Heart to mix up damage dealing and objective holding. I was marginally keener on the latter, and that seems to be borne out here, with the sheer resilience of Valorous Heart Sisters buffed by Tale of the Stoic finding a place as the “anvil” of this list.

Where I was apparently significantly off base was that Zephyrim still seem to be good. Their new cost is very steep, but it would seem the sheer power of dropping them in and auto-charging thanks to Acts of Faith and the Triumph is still sufficient to have real play. The early metagame has skewed pretty heavily towards more elite units, so that’ll definitely be having an impact here, as they don’t need to catch much to make their points back quickly. The shorter games probably help too, as they mean you can shrug it off a bit more if your opponent spends a turn removing them – as long as your objective holders are still in place, it’s much more wearable.

I’m less surprised by the way the Seraphim are configured – one big unit to squeeze the most value out of the stratagems (especially with the ability to open up drop zones for Zephyrim) and a small unit as a precision, trade piece seems pretty optimal, and a good addition to most Bloody Rose lists.

Elsewhere, the most interesting specific nod to 9th is bringing two Imagifiers for the Valorous Heart contingent. This clearly telegraphs an intent to split up into two smaller groups to secure two mid-board objectives, something that will reward the list on maps like Sweep and Clear where you can’t chain the units into a central buff provider. By bringing two banners, especially at their knockdown price, you can ensure that you can always move durable bodies onto an objective. It is worth saying that this gets punished pretty hard by high rate of fire AP-3 shooting, which the Land Speeder Tempests can provide, so if they stay popular this strategy might get a bit weaker.

Finishing out the list, we see Celestine and the Triumph and some Repentia in Rhinos. There’s not a lot to say here – you should basically not be writing a Sisters list at the moment that does not contain these things, they are the biggest draw to the faction.

Overall, this list provides a great template for anyone looking to update their 8th edition army for the exciting new world of 9th, and I’m keen to see how the faction evolves from here.

David Horn’s Chaos – 4th Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

The Standout Features

• Huge numbers of Disgustingly Resilient wounds that aren’t vulnerable to Blast and don’t give up secondaries.
• An Exalted Lord of Change flapping around blasting stuff.
• A Contorted Epitome to keep things bogged down in combat with the beasts.
• The looming threat of the 20-Plague Marine blob, which if ignored will at some point unleash the Blight Bombardment combo and liquidate everything nearby.
• Daemon Princes to act as roving troubleshooters/secondary scorers.

Why it Works in 9th

A continuing story of early 9th Edition is the power of SWARMS or SWARM-like units (which the Beasts of Nurgle definitely come under). Big slab of cost-effective wounds that don’t open up any vulnerabilities to either Blast or Secondaries are extremely powerful with the focus on objectives, and if I had to guess are going to be one of the first things that any upcoming tweaks to the missions address – at the moment they feel like they get too much of the best of all worlds.

For now, however, making use of them is a smart move, and this list leverages them extremely effectively. The Nurglings and Beasts present a huge speed bump that will hold on to objectives long enough that the rest of the list can get itself into position to rain hell on whatever need to be removed. Thanks to their new stratagem from Engine War, the Beasts can also be surprisingly dangerous, with the ability to spike some Mortal Wounds in a way that will frustrate anyone relying on elite forces with good saves. In addition, while a dedicated opponent probably can shift the frontline Daemons if needed, doing so probably means they aren’t taking out either the Lord of Change or the big Plague Marine squad.

Both of those will do horrendous damage once they connect, and need more than just incidental firepower to take down, meaning that most opponents end up in an awkward position of having no great options to push back. Combining that with the list being relatively resilient on Secondaries (some are scorable, but they involve killing some hefty targets), many opponents are going to end up ground into the dust before it, unable to find a way to get a foothold on the game.

Nurgle’s minions seem to be one of the best options Chaos players have available to them at the moment, as anything that can provide a strong “anchor” on objectives is high value. Paint those Nurglings, kids.

Wrap Up

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at another round of lists, and we’ll have more for you as results continue to roll in. My plan is to keep looking at individual lists for a few more weeks, then once we’ve got a bit more of an overarching snapshot to start seeing if we can draw some conclusions. Obviously there are already some themes emerging, but we’re in an exciting time where every week promises the potential of a big surprise. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, give us a shout at contact@goonhammer.com.