In our Detachment Focus series we take a deep dive into an army’s Detachments, covering what’s in them, how they play, and how they’ll fit into the broader meta and your games. In this Detachment Focus we’re looking at the Death Lord’s Chosen from the Death Guard.
Death Guard have always had an identity of a hyper elite force with really tough infantry. If you wanna lean into the toughest and strongest infantry in the army, Death Lord’s Chosen is for you. Think Deathwing, but gross.
Detachment Overview
This is your Terminator Detachment for the Death Guard. All of your Enhancements are for Terminator characters and all your stratagems only work on Terminators. Luckily, you have two types of Terminators to work with and two Terminator Characters and all four of those units are perfectly playable, if not great. The only problem is how expensive they are.
Detachment Rule: Deadly Vectors
In your opponent’s command phase you roll 2d6 for every Afflicted enemy unit (with a -1 to the roll if they’re below half strength), and on a 6 or less they take D3 mortal wounds.
This is a bit of an odd duck ability. You may have noticed above when I was talking about how the Detachment is Terminator-themed, I didn’t mention the Detachment rule. This is because it doesn’t exactly work with what your Terminators want to be doing. My guess is the play style they envision you grinding in melee with your Terminators and slowly wearing your opponent down, but in reality your Terminators are good enough to just kill what they go into and with enough concentrated effort can die as easily as any other unit.
What this Detachment rule really works with are things like small units of Plague Marines, Bloat Drones, and PBCs. The Plague Marines and Drones provide ways of Afflicting things outside your Contagion Range and the PBCs can add to the mortals and work better against Afflicted stuff. Mortarion can also do well here since his passive ability also does mortal wounds to nearby enemy units.
Also, why is this the only test in the game where you want to roll low? Tenth edition has done a great job of making good things high numbers on dice and bad things low numbers. This feels like you’re forcing a weird Battle-shock test and should be treated as reliable as that. It’s only gonna pop off half the time, and D3 mortals won’t exactly cripple a unit.
Enhancements
So what do we have for enhancements? Like I said above, these all only work with Terminator characters.
- Face of Death – At the start of the fight phase, force a Battle-shock test with a unit in engagement range. This is pretty not great, pass on this one
- Vile Vigour – While they’re leading a unit you add 1” to the move characteristic of models in the unit and can reroll advances. This is pretty good, helping your footslogging guys get where they need to be early.
- Warprot Talisman – Now we’re getting to the good stuff. Once per battle, at the end of your opponent’s turn, you can go up into reserves if you’re out of combat. This is great at a baseline, but also can enable a first turn deep strike if you’re going second which can be devastating with Deathshroud.
- Helm of the Fly King – While this model is leading a unit they can’t be targeted with ranged attacks outside 18”. This is fantastic. Most of the time your opponent will need to bring a lot of their shooting to bear against each unit of terminators to deal with them and this makes it much harder to do that. On top of that they have to get closer to interact with you which is exactly where you want them.
Stratagems
Similar to the Enhancements, these all only work on Terminators.
- Blooming Pestilence (Epic Deed, 1CP) – Used at the start of any phase, add 3” to the Contagion Range of a selected unit for the phase. Great for getting stuff in range for Deadly Vectors or even just making sure your Deepstriking Blightlords have their target Afflicted.
- Grim Reapers (Battle Tactic, 1 CP) – One unit can reroll all hits in the fight phase as long as they’re targeting non-Monsters and Vehicles. This is pretty good, but Deathshroud already hit on 2’s so its really for Blightlords or if you’re getting some negatives to hit.
- Undying Spite (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – Your classic 4+ fight on death strat. Always nice to have and your Terminators all hit very hard so this is really nice to have in your back pocket
- Signal Pox (Epic Deed, 1 CP) – Pick an Objective Marker a Lord of Virulence can see, everything in range of that objective marker is Afflicted until your next turn. This is one of the best stratagems here for a variety of reasons and can make your PBCs dish out a lot of mortals if your opponent is grouped up on a objective.
- Mortarion’s Teachings (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – In the shooting phase, one terminator unit gets Assault and Heavy. Really nice for Blightlords either rushing to get in Rapid Fire range or just to improve their shooting.
- Sickening Impact (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – This may be the best stratagem of the bunch. After you charge, you select a unit in engagement range and roll for each model within an inch of that unit and do a mortal on a 2+ to a max of 6. With a full health Terminator unit you’re very likely to just do 6 mortals on the way in.
Playing This Detachment
This one’s a bit of an odd duck. I wouldn’t build a list in this Detachment without at least 2×5 Plague Marines and 2 PBCs, but they won’t get support from anything else going on in this Detachment outside the Detachment rule. At the same time, your Terminators aren’t cheap so there’s not exactly a lot of options after you shove three units of them in. Overall though, you wanna get stuff in Afflicted early and often and you want to get your Terminators stuck in. You’re looking to hit your opponents with brick of Terminators and slowly ping them with mortal wounds here and there to make things that much more difficult for them.
Strengths
- Great Enhancements. Helm of the Fly King and the Warprot Talisman are great additions to the Terminator gameplan. Although these are appropriately expensive, you wanna make some room for these when you can.
- Leans Into Some of the Army’s Best Units. Terminators, particularly Deathshroud, are amazing in the new book and this Detachment gives them support to be even better.
- Some Great Stratagems… With Sickening Impact and Signal Pox in your back pocket, there’s a lot to like here.
Weaknesses
- …But Only If You’re a Terminator. There is absolutely no support for anything else, except the detachment rule. Speaking of which–
- The Detachment Rule Wants You to Take Other Tools. There are plenty of ways to get stuff Afflicted in Death Guard outside of just Contagion Range, the bad news is this Detachment doesn’t support any of them.
- The Detachment Rule Is Unreliable. Rolling a 6 or less on 2d6 is less than a 50% chance so this rule will not trigger consistently. Even with the -1, it brings it to slightly more than 50% which still isn’t enough to get it there.
A Sample List
If you want to run Terminators, this is your jam.
”Sample
This list aims to bring a little bit of everything. Both units of Deathshroud get a Lord of Contagion to help them be more universal problem solvers. Meanwhile the Blightlords hang with the Lord of Virulence in midboard, forcing your opponent to come to you and being a pretty potent shooting threat. Meanwhile the Plague Marines work to Afflict targets that are hanging in the back and the Plagueburst Crawlers capitalize off of that.
Final Thoughts
It may not be the strongest Detachment in the book but Death Lord’s Chosen has some interesting stuff going on. Mortal wounds are really good and this Detachment gives you some good ways to dish them out. Do we expect it to win a GT any time soon? Probably not, but there’s plenty of fun to be had here.
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