Detachment Focus: Devoted of Ynnead

Codex Aeldari equips the Asuryani (and friend) with eight powerful new Detachments to choose from. In today’s articles, we’re breaking down what each and every one of these has to offer Aeldari aficionados.

The Ynnari have had a chequered history since first appearing at the end of 7th Edition, oscillating wildly between being ultra-potent and borderline irrelevant depending on what their current rules have let them get up to. Aeldari players dream, in particular, of a glorious return to the days of early-mid 8th Edition, where extra actions via Strength From Death let the Ynnari terrorize all before them. Since their fall from grace in later parts of 8th, they’ve mostly skimmed along as a curiosity or a way to add efficient Drukhari units to an Aeldari force, but after all that time something sinister is whispering in the Webway.

A new Aeldari Codex brings with it a new set of rules for the Ynnari, and after a whole edition off, the studio have finally dared try and create a “fixed” yncarnation of Soulburst-style mechanics, which combine with the Battle Focus army rule to create a uniquely reactive and lightning fast Detachment that will utterly eviscerate the unprepared. Is it a return to the boring 8th Edition double-shoot nonsense? No. Is it plausibly the most powerful thing in a very powerful book anyway? Yes, probably vying with the Windrider Host for that crown. There are costs to playing Ynnari, but the rewards you reap are spectacular, and give you options unlike anything else in the current game, and in the hands of top players this is going to be a whirlwind of destruction.

We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.

Detachment Overview

The Ynnari thrive as a melee force launching devastating strikes on the foe, leaning on the reactive capabilities of their Strength From Death Detachment rule to exert relentless pressure. They also get the option to include a small sub-set of Drukhari units alongside Aeldari mainstays, and this tends to encourage them to include a good number of transports, as lots of small units help set up their big plays. There’s also value in including a small number of high-volume shooting threats to leverage some of their Stratagems, and pick off anything that’s too big for the melee threats to handle

Detachment Rule – Servants of the Whispering God

Playing as Ynnari comes with some army building options and constraints. You can include YNNARI units in your army, which covers the named Characters and Drukhari add-ins, and any Asuryani you include become YNNARI as well. You also must include at least one of Yvraine or the Yncarne, one of which must be your Warlord. In turn, because of the Avatar/Servant of the Whispering God rule on those two Datasheets, that means you cannot include any Asuryani Named Characters, so no Phoenix Lords (which is unironically the single worst thing about this Detachment).

You can still include Harlequins, but these do not become YNNARI in this edition, so do not interact with any of the Detachment’s rules.

If you haven’t already, it’s worth scanning through the Ynnari section of our look at Datasheets in the main review.

Note: There is also what has to be a mistake on the Falcon and Wave Serpent Datasheets, which in attempting to stop Ynnari Drukhari riding in them, accidentally makes it so that Ynnari Asuryani can’t either (but explicitly still allows Yvraine/the Visarch). Given the exemption for the two Leaders, this seems likely to be changed, but it’s not in the day 1 Errata, so I’ve left them out of the list just in case.

Detachment Rule – Strength From Death

Dying is good again, awooo.

Strength From Death provides Ynnari with three special abilities, each of which can be used once per turn (two only working in the opponent’s turn, one in both Fight Phases).

The first of these is Lethal Intent, and this feels like the real flagship for the detachment. At the end of the opponent’s Shooting Phase, if any Ynnari units were destroyed, you can pick an Ynnari unit (excluding Titanic) to make a Normal Move. Not, let’s be very clear, any of that Normal Move of up to 6” nonsense that most out-of-phase moves give, just a full Normal Move. This is, obviously, exceptionally strong.

Being able to significantly reposition a key unit once the opponent finishes shooting lets you do either or both of setting up a vicious counterattack or completely messing with their Charge Phase plans. Aeldari units are fast, and a full Normal Move can get something that was very securely hidden into a staging position, or often pull something clean out of charge range, especially Infantry scampering away from stuff that can’t charge through walls. If you’re playing a more cagey game, it also provides a way of locking in some scoring on Primary – if you need to guarantee holding a mid-field objective your opponent can’t reach for a charge, just put some cheap chaff out on it, then a better unit hidden nearby, and swap in once done (and combine with a Stratagem we’ll look at later to lock in two objectives).

This is good everywhere, but it stands out even more on Transports, Shining Spears and the Yncarne. A loaded Transport provides a way of maximising the amount of stuff that’s getting moved with this, and makes it easier to stage threatening charges out of larger hulls like Serpents and Raiders. Now that Shining Spears can fly over terrain with no penalty, their strike range if you trigger this and Battle Focus on your turn is a 30” Move followed by a charge, which puts huge swathes of most tables under the lance. Full six model units might still be too unwieldy to use, but this is the place to try them, and even a three is a big enough threat that just having them lurking behind a wall is going to cause serious headaches.
Finally, the Yncarne loves this because it can be executing it after either Rapid Ingressing or zapping to a dead unit with Inevitable Death. Like with the Spears, that projects threat extremely far into the opponent’s lines, and significantly escalates where it’s risky for them to kill your stuff.

The second ability is Lethal Surge, which gives you a special version of the Fade Back Battle Focus Manoeuvre. You still move the unit d6+1”, and it still counts as your use of Fade Back, but now you can move within Engagement Range of the unit that triggered it. This helps melee units keep the foe tied down, and is especially good with Howling Banshees lead by an Autarch, as the re-roll on Battle Focus abilities kicks in to make this extra reliable. The Yncarne can also get good use out of it, once more, though remember that as a Monster they can still be shot if they pull something into combat, so going big with this too early in a phase can be risky.

Finally, Lethal Reprisal lets you pick a unit (excluding Titanic) that’s below Starting Strength to gain Fight First at the beginning of each Fight Phase. Broken record here, but this is pretty good with the Yncarne since they only have to have lost a single wound to do it, and it’s also fun with Archon/Incubi units, as if they’re below Starting Strength they’ll also have full Wound re-rolls.

Obviously Lethal Intent is what holds this all together, but the other two abilities complement it nicely, helping maximise the number of bad or risky choices that are in play for the opponent at any given time. As well as the stuff above, Intent and Reprisal feel pretty strong with Wraithlords and Wraithblades (even though some of the Stratagems here exclude them), particularly as you’re almost always going to have multiple Psykers working mid-board here to buff them up. Your biggest challenge with all of this is just making sure you’re planning correctly around these each being once per turn – though your opponent might still have to plan around multiple options if you play your cards right. Incredible stuff and one of the better Detachment Rules in the whole game.

Enhancements

The Enhancements are probably the weakest part of this Detachment. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some decent ones, just that they’re not as fantastic as the Detachment Rule and Stratagems, and there’s no detachment-defining option here.

• Gaze of Ynnead: Gives a Farseer’s eldritch storm the Devastating Wounds ability. One of the very few ways in the book that you can still flip a guaranteed 6 on a Devastating Wounds attack, as long as they’re leading a unit, and sticking a Farseer in a Defender unit with this seems like a high-value harassment tool.
• Storm of Whispers: Upgrades a Warlock so that after they shoot in your Shooting Phase, one enemy that got hit has to take a Battle-shock test. Cheap, but unreliable and you don’t really want Warlocks in this detachment.
• Borrowed Vigour: Gives an Archon +2 attacks in melee. Sure – you take this on your first Archon. Cheap and cheerful
• Morbid Might: You can re-roll Wounds in melee for the bearer. It is a mark of how staggeringly atrocious the Succubus Datasheet is at her nominal role of “melee threat” that full Wound re-rolls still doesn’t make her even slightly scary.

Stratagems

Yes, haha yes. All of these, obviously, only work on Ynnari.

• Pall of Dread (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP): Use in any phase when one of your units that controls an objective is Destroyed to make it sticky to you until your opponent controls it. A fantastic ability wherever it turns up because it makes it really hard to flip primary with shooting, and that’s doubly true here because of the potential ability to use Lethal Intent to move something onto an objective as well, potentially securing two objectives against armies that don’t want to get close to you.
• Macabre Resilience (Battle Tactic, 1 CP): -1 to Wound for a phase for an INFANTRY or MOUNTED unit (excluding Wraiths) against Shooting or Fighting. Again, just a generally good ability to have, though slightly weaker than it might be in some armies because nothing eligible has a natural T higher than 4. Still entirely welcome.
• Emissaries of Ynnead (Battle Tactic, 1 CP): Re-roll 1s to Hit when an Infantry unit Fights, or full Hit re-rolls if they’re below Starting Strength. Fine at the base mode, this Codex has surprisingly few natural re-rolls so any source is welcome, excellent if you get the big mode. Also great for Banshees, as they just hit on 2s anyway.
• Parting the Veil (Strategic Ploy, 2 CP): Guaranteed Fight-on-Death at 2CP. This is really good with units of Incubi with an Archon, as units Fighting on Death always count as below Starting Strength, so you’ll get full Wound re-rolls (and can use the Archon to discount it). Also notable that this does work on any Ynnari unit, so in extremis you could throw it on the Yncarne if you think they’re about to get punked out by something valuable (and you couldn’t set up Fight First on them for some reason).
• Soulsight (Battle Tactic, 1 CP): Gives a unit that’s shooting both Ignore Cover and Lethal Hits. Quite a few possible targets have one or the other of these already, but this ends up making Dire Avengers look pretty interesting in this detachment even without being able to take Asurmen – ten with an Autarch is a fairly spectacular amount of damage with this, and if the opponent makes a poor choice in dealing with them, they then benefit from the next one as well. Surprisingly decent with the dispersed profile of Fire Prisms too, if you decide you want some hefty shooting. Does also, maybe, make this the one place you could consider scatter bikes rather than shuriken cannon ones, as this gets them to some extremely respectable killing power if a War Walker helps them out, without needing to commit a Leader.
• Death Answers Death (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP): At the end of the opponent’s Shooting Phase, a unit from your army that lost one or more models can shoot. The final piece of the “fixed 8th Ynnari” puzzle here, giving you extra shooting if you can set up a situation where your opponent doesn’t wipe a whole unit immediately. You do, of course, have some levers to press, most notably Fade Back, another incentive to set up a Guardian Defender unit with a power Farseer. You could even add a D-cannon into that squad, which is a bit of a casino move, but is going to cause extreme pain when it works. Quite often in general you’ll be able to Fade Back from shooting threats to set up shots on enemy melee stuff, which can be nice, and this can also be a huge punish on an opponent trying to whittle stuff down. The other thing is that this is going to need a very clear clarification on how events with simultaneous timing work if one of them is an activated stratagem, because obviously what you’d really like is to use Lethal Intent then this, but both happen at the end of the opponent’s shooting phase, so we need to know if “the opportunity to use this” is a thing the opponent gets to pick the order for, or if this doesn’t “exist” as an effect till it’s activated. Still some great uses without that (which is probably how it’ll get ruled pending official clarification, as most TOs tend to be sensibly cautious), suddenly some really nasty possible plays with it.

Playing This Detachment

Your game plan with Ynnari pivots around Lethal Intent, an incredibly powerful move that lets you either defend your assets and objectives extremely well or launch incredibly swift strikes into the heart of the foe as the situation demands. In most games, it’s probably a bit of both. You stack that with the fact that you get better access to cheap board control than the other Asuryani detachments, a few deadly hammer blows, and an additional option to lock in an objective with Pall of Dread makes it ultra challenging for a foe to unpick your plans. I love this detachment with all of my heart, and it’s going to be the first I put on the table (particularly as I can field it while still finishing up new Phoenix Lords for all the other options).

Strengths

• Unparalleled ability to react in your Opponent’s turn.
• Great melee pressure tools to keep the opponent on the back foot.
• Access to a pool of additional units providing cheap, flexible board control.

Weaknesses

• No access to Phoenix Lords.
• Requires sacrificing units to get maximum value, so a careful balance to strike.
• Heavy demands on Battle Focus to keep stuff alive, requiring expert planning.

A Sample List

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Your big tools here are the Drukhari units and War Walkers for early board presence, the Farseer/D-cannon brick for attrition shooting, and the Shining Spears as a very long-ranged Lethal Intent counterpunch threat. You potentially start the Dire Avengers in Strategic Reserves, opponent depending, and almost always Deep Strike the Yncarne with a plan to Rapid Ingress and then go ham from there. Make sure you keep CP up so you can Fight on Death with the big Incubi brick, as that should take a lot of stuff with them. I am unreasonably excited to play this army.

Final Thoughts

We may not be fully going back to The Horrors, but watching what top players can do with Ynnari once the optimal list has been sussed out is going to be very fun indeed.

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