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Start Competing: The Six Best 40k Detachments for Beginners

By Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones and SRM
Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

Last week while I was at the friendly local game store, a relatively new player was stopping in and working on his first army, playing Dark Angels. He was asking for help on how to build his army, and what detachment he should go with. We talked for a bit and I and several others in the room gave him some advice, and at one point I suggested he avoid the Vanguard Spearhead Detachment starting out, as its play style and abilities may be a bit much for newer players.

This then got me thinking: What are the best Detachment options for new players? Are there choices which work better for new players wen it comes to how they play and how easy it is to work with them? What even makes a good Detachment for beginners? That’s a good place to start. Then I narrowed the list down to six because that’s better for SEO. Well, actually seven, but that last one will be an Honorable Mention candidate, as a fun bonus.

The Video Version

We made a video version of this article! If you’d like the cliff notes version, you can find it here, along with the dulcet tones of Campbell “fixed list” McLaughlin and some ska backing music.

What Makes a Good Beginner Detachment?

There are a few things I’m looking for when I think about what makes a good detachment for a beginner to tackle:

  • A straightforward Detachment rule. The Detachment rule has to be very easy to understand and remember. One of the big challenges new players are going to have is just remembering their rules, so we want something easy to remember. The Orks War Horde Detachment is a great example here – getting [SUSTAINED HITS 1] on your melee attacks is powerful and easy to remember, and it’s just always on. On that note…
  • Reasonably powerful. I’m not going to recommend a Detachment that sucks. New players don’t need more uphill battles.
  • Stratagems which are easy to understand and use. While there are a lot of cool stratagems which introduce fancy movement tricks and situational tools, I’m going to prioritize Detachments where the Stratagems have obvious uses, low costs, and are broadly useful. Again, the goal is rules which new players will remember and use.
  • The Detachment tells you how to build your army. There are so many units in 40k that even with smaller armies, putting together a solid force can be daunting. Detachments can help with that by pushing players in a particular direction.
  • Doesn’t require insane builds. On the flip side, I’m not going to tell a new player they have to buy 30 Possessed. I’m going to prioritize Detachments that let players build with a large number of units, and encourage building lists that are more like what you’d expect to see running that army. The goal here is transferability – if you build an army for this Detachment, you should be able to do a different detachment later without having to buy and paint too much new stuff.

I think this is a good list, and once I had this in mind it was pretty easy to come up with a small set of Detachments that fit the criteria across multiple factions. As I go through this list I’ll provide some additional thoughts and rankings for each detachment on power, competitive viability,

With that out of the way, let’s dig into the list:

Honorable Mention: Tyranids – Invasion Fleet

Detachment Focus: Invasion Fleet

The basic Detachment for the Tyranids just makes your best units even better, letting you pick one of three abilities to be “on” for your entire army for the rest of the battle. As a new player, the two you’re most likely to pick are going to be [SUSTAINED HITS 1] for attacks against Infantry and swarm units or [LETHAL HITS] against enemy Vehicles and Monsters. Your Enhancements give you some decent buffs for Hive Tyrants, and the Stratagems are pretty straightforward – most of the time you’re going to be using Rapid Regeneration for a 5+ feel no pain and Overrun, which gives you a longer consolidate move.

That longer consolidate move is one of the reasons this Detachment only made Honorable Mention – post-combat movement shenanigans are bit tough for new players, and having to pick an ability before the game isn’t ideal, either since it creates the chance for you to make the wrong pick. And if there’s a downside to making your best units better, it’s that you really need to know what your best units are to get the most out of the Detachment, so that keeps it out of our top 6.

Ryan Karrer's List - click to expand

Ryan’s list has a great mix of different Tyranid units, but focuses mainly on medium- and big-sized bugs (other recent lists like Kayu Orellana’s tend to include a few horde units as well).

6. Blood Angels: Liberator Assault Group

Liberator Assault Group

Detachment Focus: Liberator Assault Group

The “standard” Blood Angels Detachment, the Liberator Assault group gives your marines +2 Strength and +1 Attacks to their melee profiles in any turn they charge, supercharging your army to punch up into almost anything in the game. This Detachment gives you a ton of flexibility with its stratagems, giving you different ways to kill things and a way to supercharge those Stratagems by opting to Battle-shock your units for an additional effect. The whole thing lets you really lean into an aggressive, charge-first-and-ask-questions-later play style. That said, there are a lot of tricks here and Blood Angels are a fast army, so as you improve you can adjust your army and style to take better advantage of the army’s tricks.

That said, the “Battle-shock to get both effects” mechanic is a bit much for new players, though they can just ignore that part by only using the half of the Stratagem they like. If you just want to mash space marines into the opponent, this is the Detachment for it.

Borja FM's List - Click to expand

Liberator Assault Group armies tend to combine a variety of different units – you don’t need to go all-in on melee – allowing new players to build them without having to triple up on anything and overcommit. They also let you make good use of the faction’s sickest character models, and any Detachment that encourages you to bring Mephiston and Dante is a winner for Blood Angels.

5. T’au Empire: Experimental Prototype Cadre

Detachment Focus: Experimental Prototype Cadre

It’s difficult to call any T’au Detachment “easy to play” – the army typically requires quite a bit of care with positioning and sequencing to ensure you have the right spotters acting on each of your shooting units – but if there’s an easiest choice, it’s the Experimental Prototype Cadre. While the other Detachments only work in the first or second half of the game or require you to get perilously close to the enemy, the Experimental Prototype Cadre gives your units additional range to work with and supercharges your Crisis Suits, giving you some additional power on your shooting. It’s a powerful effect that plays into your key instinct with T’au: Staying the hell away from opponents and shooting them to death.

Noah Keeth's Experimental Prototype List - click to expand

Experimental Prototype lists aren’t the strongest way to run T’au – Mont’ka and Retaliation Cadre are both more powerful options – but a good Experimental Prototype Cadre list will employ most of the same units as those, so if you start off playing Prototype and want to switch later, you won’t have a ton of hobby work to do. As a new player your biggest challenge will be that it’s very easy to blow yourself up using your fancy new weapons, but the good news is you have a Stratagem to heal them.

4. Adeptus Custodes: Shield Host

Detachment Focus: Shield Host

The updated version of the Custodes’ Index Detachment, Shield Host received a lot of flack upon the book’s publication – and rightfully so – but has since been improved substantially by the Balance Dataslate. What you’re left with is the army’s best melee detachment, built to encourage armies of brutally efficient melee threats which charge across the board and blend anything they come into contact with, usually led by a Blade Champion. The most you’re asked to do with the Detachment is pick between Lethal and Sustained Hits for your army rule and +1 AP or Crits on 5s for the Detachment rule, and most of the time those have obvious answers (Sustained + AP against most things).

Joel Larsson's Shield Host List - click to expand

Shield Host lists are still very competitive in the current meta, and while most run at least one unit of Venatari, the model counts needed for these are pretty light. Some lists – like the one above – go super heavy on Blade Champions and Wardens, but with Custodes that’s a bit more forgivable. On the other hand, you don’t have to run the list this way – Stephen Box’s list earlier this year used more Vertus Praetors and Jetbike Shield-Captains instead.

3. Noble Lance

Detachment Focus: Noble Lance

The Detachment Rule for the Imperial Knights is simple and powerful, giving you a 6+ Feel No Pain that ups to 5+ if you’ve killed the enemy Warlord. It’s easy to remember and implement. And while knights aren’t the easiest army to play well – you need to pay a lot of attention to your positioning and make do with a small number of units – they’re a popular choice for beginners and only having a few units means not having to remember a ton of datasheets.

Benjamin Hauser's List - Click to Expand

Competitive knights lists today tend to run Canis Rex – the army’s best unit – and a bunch of Armigers, eschewing the builds with three big knights for something smaller, faster, and a bit more forgiving. In addition to the knights, you’ll typically want a smattering of Imperial Agents to help hold objectives and do actions, and that usually means a squad of Battle Sisters or Arbites and an assassin or two.

2. Orks: War Horde

Orks: War Horde

Your melee weapons get [SUSTAINED HITS 1]. That’s it. That’s all you need, really – the War Horde takes something that’s already good – Ork melee – and makes it batter, improving your output and helping you get over the hump when it comes to taking down bigger threats.

Jensen Goh's list - click to expand

Any War Horde list starts with Ghazghkull Thraka and some Meganobz to support him, but beyond that you have a ton of options – the Ork army is full of units that are good in melee and the newer Tankbustas unit only adds another solid entry. On the table, your plan is simple: Get stuck in with the punchy melee units and use a mix of Stormboyz and Grots to hold objectives and bounce around doing actions.

1. Space Marines: Ironstorm Spearhead

Detachment Focus: Ironstorm Spearhead

Finally we come to our top choice. The Ironstorm Spearhead isn’t the most powerful way to run Space Marines – that honor right now likely belongs to the Gladius Task Force – but it’s one of the easier ways, giving you a simple rule to re-roll a hit, wound, or damage roll each time you activate a unit to shoot or fight. This doesn’t explicitly push you into vehicles but it does do its best work on single-model units with a small number of high quality shots, and the Detachments Enhancements and Stratagems do very much push you into Vehicles supported by Techmarines.

The result is a Detachment that can run many different small marine units but also encourages you to take the faction’s tanks and dreadnoughts in large numbers to support them. And that’s both easier from a hobby standpoint (fewer, big models), and a lot more forgiving on the table – your army can be tough to take down and will be able to pick enemy units off at a distance. And your stratagems here are all about buffs to durability and shooting, or just spitefully firing off shots or exploding after you’re hit.

Narongsak Lumleatwiput's Ironstorm List - click to expand

On the generic marines side, Ironstorm lists like to run Vindicators and Ballistus Dreadnoughts supported by Guilliman and scouts, but it’s very possible to build them with Gladiators, Predators, or Repulsors. And as an added bonus, you don’t even need to run Ultramarines – there’s value here for the other chapters as well.

Clark Welch's Ironstorm Space Wolves - Click to Expand

Will you always need all of those vehicles if you decide to switch to another Detachment later with your space marines? No, probably not. It’s easy to go too hard on hulls with Ironstorm and get something with low transferability. But I’m also loosening up a bit on that criteria to account for the fact that this is Space Marines, and new players love to buy big tanks. Hell, who doesn’t?

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