TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 12: Testing the Shadow Legion

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2025. Last Time Around I talked about the results of the Clutch City GT, with a few thoughts on what’s next. Whatever plans I had then immediately had to pivot to working on write-ups for yesterday’s big March 2025 Balance update. The good news is that I had time to get in a test game with the new rules while writing about the Detachment. This week I’m going to talk about that game, my other game, and some more hobby progress, this time across a mix of armies.

Shadow Legion

In case you missed it yesterday, the Shadow Legion is a new Detachment for Chaos Daemons which allows you to combine your daemons and an upgraded Be’lakor with some units from Codex: Chaos Space Marines. This seemed rad as hell, so on Thursday I assembled my Be’lakor and primed him for a game against T the following Friday.

There are a few things I want to look at in Shadow Legion. Specifically:

• Be’lakor. I think you gotta take the upgraded Dark Prince.
• The Scouting 9″ Bloodthirster. I have a thirster painted already and the prospect of moving 21″ before an advance and charge on turn 1 is just too good to pass up.
• Flesh Hounds. The new datasheet gives them uppy/downy and it’s hard to argue with that, so I want to try a couple of units.
• A Warp Talon mode Chaos Lord. The fade back into darkness Enhancement on a Chaos Lord seems great – doing a free ingress, charging and killing something, then going back into reserves seems great. I may also want to test this on Chosen at some point but right now I want the re-rolls you get from Legionaries.

Based on that, here’s the list I came up with:

My Shadow Legion Test List - click to expand

This has all the dumb tricks I want. The Possessed are there to fill the thing out and more realistically I think I want Warp Talons instead since five Possessed rarely do anything.

Test Game: vs. T’s Genestealer Cults

T’s running a Brood Brothers Detachment list, combining neophytes in Rock Grinders with a ton of Kasrkin in Tauroxes to get some nasty +1 to hit buffs for his army. It’s a rough matchup for my list, in part because I’ve spent a lot of points on a Bloodthirster who can cross the board first turn and the most expensive unit he can kill is a Rock Grinder. That’s not great, since he’s liable to just die the following turn. My plan is to charge in and put pressure on T right away, but I recognize that’s not a great plan given how he can just recur units and outflank me. The good news is that this particular mission is all about the middle, so I just need to hold those.

The Mission: Supply Drop / Hammer and Anvil / Smoke and Mirrors

I win the roll-off and after Scout moves, T’s in a good place for me to charge into him. My plan is to do as much damage as I can early and just hope to take a big enough bite that he can’t recover. It uh, doesn’t work. The Nurglings push froward and charge T’s tanks, the Bloodthirster rolls a 4 on his Advance and goes 25″ before charging, and the Bloodcrushers push forward for their own first-turn charge with a 5 on the Advance. Unfortunately, the Bloodthirster and Nurglings combine for zero wounds on T’s Saboteur and she lives, so I huck Assassination on T1 for CP. I do kill a few units and a Rock Grinder, but that’s not some big accomplishment.

On T’s turn he claps back pretty hard, killing my Bloodcrushers and the Bloodthirster. I pretty much expected the Thirster to die after his charge, but it’s still not great. The upside is that hopefully I’ve drawn enough fire that my turn 2 charges can cause problems, but I think next time around I need to put more work into prioritizing the Ridgerunners and mining lasers.

I drop my Flesh hounds in turn 2 and use them to screen T out of my backfield, though one of the units catches a rough round of combat with Genestealers, bouncing off and losing four models. At mid table Be’lakor and the Soul Grinder press forward and get off some good charges – Be’lakor switches to re-roll 1s to hit mode – and I kill more of the vehicles, but I’m definitely feeling the lack of shooting. Be’lakor’s a monster at killing acolytes and the like, but those just keep coming back, and T passes all of his rolls to get back Kasrkin.

That’s not great for me but at one point I do get to live the dream – the Chaos Lord and his Legionaries deep strike in, charge a unit of Jackals on the south objective, then teleport out and free Ingress in on T’s turn, kicking off a cycle they’ll repeat. It’s pretty fun and I might also consider doing this with the Jump Lord and unit of Raptors.

I stay roughly in it and capture T’s home point right before he draws Defend Stronghold and that’s when things go sideways, as I have a disastrous turn of failed saves that lead to me losing both Be’lakor and the Soul Grinder from full health at the same time – not something I expected given what T had left and it basically closes out the game as I no longer have enough stuff left to handle him.

Result: 44-78, Loss

The turn 1 scouting, charging Bloodthirster, while fun, was 100% the wrong call and if I cut him I can easily fit in two more Soul Grinders instead and that feels like a better play, and I like both having more shooting and the -1 to hit on them from being Tzeentch. I can shift the 9″ Scout Enhancement to the Bloodcrushers and make them even more deadly, and trade out the Chosen for another unit of Legionaries while trading out the Possessed for Warp Talons. That gives me even more up/down and a lot of movement, and I think it gives me more big threat saturation. That’ll be the list I try out next time around, anyways.

Overall I like the new Detachment a lot. There are a lot of cool parts to it and while you lose what Slaanesh Daemons bring to the table the updates to Khorne and Nurgle Daemons really work, and do so well enough that I could see this army having some legs. That said, there are a lot of ways to build it and finding the correct way is probably something that a better player than me will solve.

Dadhammer Progress

Bryce and I have been slowly working our way through the Hobby Bingo challenge this year, heading over to the local Warhammer store to periodically update Max on our progress and get new stamps on our cards. Over the weekend we added a few new stamps to our cards. I’d previously played a game of Kill Team to get my Skirmish stamp, reading Warhammer Adventures with Bryce, and introducing him to some Warhammer+ shorts (he’s lukewarm on them).

This week is Spring Break for Bryce, so we have some time to get in some extra hobby. On Saturday we head into the store and while my plan was to get in some hobby, Bryce wanted to play, so I agreed to sit down and do a game of Combat Patrol with him so we could knock out that particular stamp. And also because we don’t play very often.

Bryce has been working on his Knight, so I’ve added a page to his notebook so he can play with the big guy:

If you don’t remember, a while back I made a special Notebook for Bryce to act as his rulebook for the game. Warhammer 40k is complicated and while Bryce is a pretty strong reader – I think he’s above average compared to his friends – the rulebook language is difficult enough that I see grown-ass men struggle with it. So I’ve streamlined the rules down to words and concepts he’ll have an easier time with. Before our game I set up the table and I tell him to review his rules in the notebook.

This game I’m going to introduce him to Objectives, or at least get the concept in there so he can start to see it in games. Right now he’s laser-focused on killing my guys and uh, protecting his warlord. Which is adorable, but he doesn’t really get that protecting your warlord kind of doesn’t matter.

We’ll get there.

Game 2: vs. Bryce’s King Warriors

Okay so it wasn’t exactly Combat Patrol. I brought my Emperor’s Children – I’ve been wanting to test them out for a while anyways, and Bryce brought his Space Marines. He told me before the game that he wanted a serious  I told him we’d have to pare his army back and he told me he wanted to play with everything he had. So I rolled up to the table with about 500 points of guys – a Rhino, Noise Marines, 5 Infractors, 5 Tormentors, a Sorcerer, and a Lord Exultant – and he brought… *checks notes*… Canis Rex, five Terminators, a Terminator Captain, an Invictor Warsuit, a Stormtalon Gunship, five Assault Intercessors, and three Sanguinary Guard.

Well, we’re still learning concepts, so I’m OK with letting him win until we get to a more serious place.

As you might imagine, Bryce wins this game by tabling me, using Canis Rex after I blow up his flyer to charge the middle of the table and yeet my guys into the sun. I get some good shots in, and I like the movement on the Tormentors with advance + charge – it gets me some early melta and plasma shots on the Stormtalon – but I’m not really testing anything here. I kill the Invictor and the Assautl Marines but that’s about all I can handle.

We come back in on Tuesday to do some additional hobby work and Bryce gets some washing and drybrushing done on his knight, plus we get the base covered. He’s calling it done now and so Max gives him his stamp for finishing a centrepiece model. I’ll make him finish it this week proper, adding a drybrush of bone to the base, plus some plants and a black base rim.
We also need to drybrush those coils. Getting Bryce to actually finish a model or project can be like pulling teeth sometimes, but I can usually pick and choose some times he’s more keen and give him a gentle nudge to get over the finish line.

Hobby Progress

I did my own work to secure a couple of stamps this week. First off, I painted my first Tormentor for the Emperor’s Children, knocking this guy out on Sunday night in order to get him into the updated How to Paint Everything: Emperor’s Children.

I supplemented this guy with an Emperor’s Children Sorcerer. I kind of ran out of gas on this model and forced myself to finish it off. I’m not super happy with the result, but I can come back and add more detail and finish him off properly later, so this is good enough for now.

On top of this, I’m also now working to get my Chaos Daemons updated and painted for a Shadow Legion army. I’ve got quite a bit of work to do on that front, starting with painting Be’lakor. I’m not there yet, but I’ve started to drop some basecoat on him. This is a little more blue than I’d like – I may want to come back and do more of a purple/gray for his skin.

The other big part of this project is rebasing my Bloodcrushers. I got these guys more than a decade ago, back when they came on 50mm bases. Those are terrible, and I need to clip them off their bases and rebase them on 90mm oval bases. So that’s also in the works.

In addition to those three guys I’ve also picked up the Chaos Daemons Combat Patrol. It’s got a lot of the pieces I’m looking for, including more Flesh Hounds and another set of Bloodcrushers – I think Khorne Daemons are the best served in this new update – and in addition to having to rebase my Bloodcrushers I also need new Flesh Hounds to replace my old resin ones on 40s. If World Eaters end up getting to use this version of Flesh Hounds, I’ll be using them a lot in World Eaters lists.

Next Time: A League Game, Probably

That wraps it up for this week, but come back next week when I’ll have more hobby progress for my Daemons and Emperor’s Children, plus I’ll likely have squared away my first League game in the Ettin League. We’ve moved on to the second phase and I’ve been moved into a new bracket, but I haven’t gotten any games in with them yet. So my goal is to get in one of those games before next Thursday’s update.

See you then.

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