TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2024, Part 29: Knights and Raptors

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Last time around I played another practice game with my Thousand Sons against Dan’s Renegade Raiders, and I started working on my first unit of Night Lords raptors. This week I’m back with more practice and hobby progress.

Practice Game: vs. Greg’s Imperial Knights

I didn’t have anything major lined up for practice last weekend so I went down to my local GW store with the intent of lining up a pick-up game against the locals, and Greg (no relation to the site master or Klobasnek) was happy to oblige – he’s one of the locals and an all-around swell guy, even if he has a weird obsession with Reivers. Greg’s playing Imperial Knights, and they’re a solid test for my Thousand Sons. While they’re not super indicative of the kind of list I’m going to see at Warzone Houston in two weeks, Thousand Sons can struggle with taking down lots of big units – when you’re wounding on 6s and your opponent has a 6+ feel no pain, things can get dicey.

My List - Click to Expand

Greg’s list is three bigs – A Preceptor, a Crusader, a Lancer, plus four Armigers – two Helverins and two Warglaives. Three bigs is a lot of beef, though I’m helped a bit by not having to go through 2+ saves – in some ways, handling three Rogal Dorns is harder.

How I can Take Down Big Knights

So what are my options here if I want to take down big Knights? I don’t have a ton of big guns, but I do have several options I can fall back on with Thousand Sons:

• Doombolt. Always handy, Doombolt is usually going to drop out 5 mortal wounds, and I can cast it twice if I have my Exalted Sorcerer on hand and the Cabal Points to do it.
• Magnus. Magnus has some decent shooting, and his bigger attack does 3 damage. Both of his attacks will wound on 4+, and I can give him re-rolls to hit and wound via a Stratagem.
• Infernal Master. The Infernal Masters can reliably put at least a few devastating wounds on a knight, and I’ll get more out of them if they’re near Magnus and the Knight’s on an objective.
• Scarabs. The big Scarab brick is very good for taking down big knights – I can drop it near Magnus and use the Ensorcelled Infusion Stratagem to give them S5 Psychic Bolters, then use Devastating Sorcery to give them full re-rolls to hit and wound. I call this “firing up the bullshit engine” – it’s expensive, but the output is huge. The Sorcerer Terminator helps here by giving the unit Lethal, and if I combine this with Twist of Fate I can guarantee the knight will be taking its 5+ invulnerable saves – though that will typically lead to rotating Ion Shields so I don’t pull that one very often. With 36-40 shots before I go to the missiles, soulreapers, and psychic attacks and Magnus nearby, I can usually push out a dozen or so wounds from bolters.

That’s a lot and it’s worth noting that it takes the better part of my whole army to take down one big knight. That said, doing this is a huge blow, and leaves the Knights player with much less to work with.

The Mission: Take and Hold – Tipping Point – Raise Banners

Greg gets the first turn and puts the bulk of his force on the southern objective. He puts a single warglaive on the north objective on my side, but wisely chooses to stay off objectives with his big knights, keeping me off easy kills with Rubric assists. He’s split his army in a way I can handle, though – by putting one big and one small knight up top, he’s given me an easily digestible piece of his army to take out turn 1, giving me the chance to alpha strike him and put him behind. So I Crystal teleport my Scarabs to midtable and move up with my whole army. The Rubrics and Infernal Masters are able to take down the Helverin on the point, after which the Scarabs and Magnus take down the Preceptor. This is pretty much key to my game plan – if I can remove the Lancer on the following turn without losing Magnus, this game will more or less be over as he won’t have anything that can reasonably threaten Magnus and he won’t have the units to contest the rest of the table.

Greg follows up by using the Lancer and his Crusader to pick apart my Scarabs, dropping them down to five models after charging into melee (I dropped 6 wounds on him with staves), then wheels his Armigers around to harass my Tzaangors on the home objective. This is pretty smart on his part – a unit of Tzaangors can’t handle even a single Helverin and with OC 8 it can trivially steal my home objective and force me to double back. Unfortunately I’ve got enough juice with Magus and Rubrics to kill the Lancer, killing it before Magnus had to charge.

Things snowball from there – my unit of Rubrics come in from Strategic Reserves and capture Greg’s home objective, and he doesn’t have the power to deal with the rest of my army at this point – Magnus can walk around more or less uncontested. Greg kept it close early, but got a bit too aggressive on the north side of the table, leaving himself open to an alpha strike that crippled him by removing a quarter of his army. I think he might have been smart to hold at least one Warglaive in reserves, forcing me to play more conservatively in case it showed up and wrecked my backfield, or came in from a board edge at a bad time. He also needed to force me to play more coy with Magnus – at no point was I worried about Magnus dying after I killed his Preceptor.

Result: 100-56, Victory

Hobby Progress

Not gonna lie; it feels great to not have much hobby prep to do for Warzone. I have a single Rubric with Reaper Chaincannon I can paint for the event – to replace a standard Warpflamer – but I don’t have to and if I do well, he’s already about 50% done. So I’ll likely hammer him out next week.

While we were at the local Warhammer store I brought Bryce along. He’s been making slow but steady progress on his army, though I can tell he’s losing a bit of steam when it comes to painting. I need to get him into a game or two so he can use his models and get some more motivation to paint new stuff.

This week he painted his unit of terminators, finishing them off with a little help (and motivational pushing) from Max and myself. For his efforts, he earned a paintbrush holder bag, which he immediately put all of his brushes in. Next up on his hobby journey is painting a Space Marine Lieutenant – I got him one for his birthday this week after he put it on his wish list.

On my end, I managed to push through and paint my entire squad of Night Lords Raptors:

I’m pretty happy with these guys, even if the final steps on them were a slog. The Night Lords heads look great with the Raptor bodies, and with the flesh shoulderpads they look properly reminiscent of the Heresy Raptors kit. Raptors aren’t great, and I probably want ten to go with my Haarken, but right now the plan is to run these five with a converted Haarken I’m planning to paint. He’ll probably be my project for this next week.

Final Thoughts

That wraps up this week’s entry but I’ll be back next week, probably with more hobby progress. Not sure about a game – I have a kid’s birthday party to go to both days this weekend, and that usually means I don’t have time to get in a game, but if that changes you’ll see a report here. Otherwise it’s going to be primarily hobby progress as I try to knock out my converted Haarken.

See you next week.

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