Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2025. Last Time Around I was back in the Ettin League, playing a game against Franklin’s Deathwatch and logging my second win of the league’s second phase. This week I’ll run through a pair of games, as I finish out my league games and get on to some testing with Emperor’s Children.
Some time about two weeks ago, I got a text informing me that the Ettin League only had one week left. This immediately sent me into a frenzy to schedule out the remaining games for the league so I could at least finish. I had a game in the first round I never got to play and the whole point of joining the league was to play more games against new people and also to hopefully win more store credit that I could use to buy sodas whenever I’m playing at Ettin. So I scrambled to get my final two games in, and was able to schedule one while the other couldn’t make it happen.
League Game: vs. David’s Bridgehead Strike
I didn’t know it at the time but this would end up being my final league game. After my game against Franklin I went back to my standard Creations of Bile list, i.e. this one:
My List - Click to Expand
David’s running Bridgehead Strike Astra Militarum. Because this second phase of the league started a week before the last balance dataslate, we’re stuck on pre-dataslate rules, which is uh, very fuckin bad for me. Pre-nerf Bridgehead is very good, with a ton of absurd damage output from various sources and a lot of mobility. He’s also running a pair of Rogal Dorn Tank Commanders and those are a big problem for my army as well.
David's List - Click to expand
This is a very rough matchup for me. The Dorns are the last tanks I want to see, as they have an assload of wounds and way too good a toughness/save value, plus they tend to only roll 5+ on their shot counts against me. The Engineers are going to do tons of damage to my tanks with pre-nerf mines, and the pre-nerf Scions are going to punch way above their weight. I need a little bit of luck to make this work and some favorable secondary draws.
The Mission: Linchpin / Search and Destroy / Raise Banners
Search and Destroy is good for me, but Banners and Linchpin are bad in this matchup, where holding my home will become more difficult as the game progresses and Scions are able to 6″ drop on top of my Cultists. Raise Banners is also something I usually do well on thanks to having a lot of Battleline units, but it’ll be a wash here. We’re also on Layout 1, which is horrible for me – there aren’t any good places to hide against Dorns and it’s easy to play keep away with the Vindicator until he can alpha strike it. I’m pretty sure I want to go first here to get into position for a good turn 2 go turn and to strike before deep strikers hit the table.
I’m going second.
For Bile’s buffs I pulled +1 WS and +2″ movement. The Movement’s great but not actually what I want in this matchup – David’s going to come to me, and quickly – and the WS is fine. My plan in this game is much more nebulous – I want to get onto objectives early and have David come to me, but he’ll be doing that by shooting me to death with Scions. In retrospect, I probably needed to play cagier, since putting melee pressure on him didn’t really work and the high toughness and 4+ invulnerable save on the Bullgryn makes them an absolute nightmare.
This was terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad game where almost everything went right for David and very little went right for me. On turn 1 he drew Locus and Area Denial and I was able to destroy one of his Sentinels with Vindicator Overwatch as it moved onto the point, and that and my turn 1 secondary draws were the last good thing that happened for me all game. He moved his other Sentinel to the point and scored 7 on Area Denial/Locus and killed my Vindicator with a Taurox and a pair of mines from engineers, crippling my anti-tank response.
Then on my turn 1 I drew Overwhelming Force and Containment, scored both and dropped four banners, and then proceeded to get my ass kicked from there – David’s dice were on fire with his Dorns, and every time he shot he hit 5+ shots and when Overwatching, usually got 3-4 shots off. This led to a horrible turn 1 where my Chaos Lord and his legionaries lost three models to Dorn overwatch working on their charge, then failed a charge and had to re-roll, leading to a cascade of issues. The Nurglings I needed to trap the Taurox I charged failed their 5″ charge, then the Lord and his unit failed to kill the Taurox as it stayed alive on 1 wound. This meant I couldn’t consolidate into the Dorn and the Taurox could just leave the turn after and drop off its scions to kill my Nemesis Claw unit.
That particular failure cascade more or less cost me the game, but failing most of my saves and pact rolls didn’t help either as I lost Bile and his unit and all of my Plague Marines on the southern point to Scion and Krieger shooting. David pulled Secure No Man’s Land and Storm Hostile on turn 2 for some easy points, though only manages 2 on Secure, and he’ll manage to keep me to 3 on Primary on round 2 and 8 on round 3, outscoring me in rounds 4-5.
Ultimately I never managed to take down either Dorn, as both just kept crushing their saves against my Lascannon and Obliterator shooting, and they kept lighting me up in Overwatch. Just a brutal game and it wasn’t as close as the score indicates.
Result: 66-80, Loss
That puts me at 2-1 in the League and with Ryan dropping before our final game I finish 2nd in my pod, earning some solid store credit to keep me in the soda money. David was a fun opponent and played a solid game and I’m very glad I’ll never have to play against unnerfed Bridgehead Strike again because that shit was a nightmare.
With Ryan out for Sunday’s game, I had a friend over – Alex – for a game to test out Emperor’s Children for real, running a heavily-proxied Rapid Evisceration List.
Game 2: Testing Rapid Evisceration
I did some last-minute scrambling to put together an EC list and ended up testing the list I wrote for the codex review last month. In case you missed it, you can find it below:
Rapid Evisceration List - click to expand
I’m doing a lot of proxying here, with Forgefiends standing in for Maulerfiends, Eightbound for Flawless Blades, Havocs for Noise Marines, and so on. I’ve put all three rhinos full of Noise Marines into Strategic Reserves and put the Land Raider on the table.
Alex is running an Auxiliary Cadre list with something like:
- Farsight
- Shadowsun
- Crisis Commander
- 2x Broadsides
- Plasma Crisis Suits
- Burst Cannon Crisis Suits
- Stealth Suits
- Stealth Suits
- Stealth Suits
- 10x Kroot
- 10x Kroot
- Kroot Rampagers
- Kroot Rampagers
- Kroot Rampagers
- Vespid
- Vespid
- Pathfinders
- Hammerhead
- Hammerhead
- Skyray
My general plan here is to take out the Vespid as quickly as possible and the chaff, forcing Alex to use good units for actions and scoring secondary objectives. Then again, I’m also just trying to jam into his army quickly and kill things with Flawless Blades and fire off a lot of Noise Marine fire. I don’t think bringing a land raider is the right call but we’ll see.
The Mission: Burden of Trust / Search and Destroy / Prepared Positions
I’m going second here, which isn’t amazing but I think the Land Raider can weather some early firepower. Alex’s plan is to try and box me in using his Pathfinders and Kroot, but if he shoots the Land Raider I can get out with the Flawless Blades using the reactive disembark Stratagem. He charges the Land Raider turn 1 and I heroic intervene with the Maulerfiend, running around to the outside of them and kill most of them – Alex spiked his saves and three Pathfinders lived. I legit forgot I had free Heroic here, but it’s fine. Up top he sends Kroot to cause problems, but they fail their charges.
So the next turn I get out and plow right across the table and into his units. Turns out the Emperor’s Children are fast as hell. Lucius and his blades run into a unit of the Rampagers while the Maulerfiend fails to kill Shadowsun and I watch her pass a silly number of saves. Really not sure about those guys, whose bigass anti-tank melee fists are only AP-2. The Blades are more than enough to kill a unit of rampagers, powered up by their having disembarked this turn from the Land Raider, and Lucius doesn’t even get to swing. On the top of the board I clear out some Stealth Suits and the bring in a Rhino early to kill the Rampagers, clearing room for my units to arrive via Ingress on turn 2.
Alex responds by promptly killing all of the Flawless Blades and dropping Lucius to 3 wounds and this will be how I learn that I really don’t need them and I should have just run Lucius. He also drops both Maulerfiends and clears me off the southern point. I rapid Ingress a Rhino next to his Deployment Zone and on my turn I punch a bunch of Noise Marines into his face, killing the broadsides and taking the fight to his home objective while on the other side of it Lucius kills the Crisis suits, starting by Precisioning out their Commander. Alex drops Farsight in via Ingress but their output proves a bit disappointing as I manage to weather most of it and then kill the unit with a unit of Noise Marines.
My plan to push into Alex’s home objective goes well, and Lucius presses forward, avoiding death by Overwatch to kill Shadowsun and survive another turn. At this point I’ve cleared most of Alex’s units off the table and I’m genuinely surprised at how this went. It was a bit of a sloppy game on both ends but I’m legitimately impressed with the Emperor’s Children. More thoughts in a moment.
Result: 71-39, Win
It was still an ugly win – Alex kept me off primary for a lot of the game with his fast movement, and I ended up taking the Unbroken Wall secret mission to score 34 on primary, though doing so meant I didn’t get any of my burden defense points on round 5. There was definitely a push on my end to not do so much scoring and just kill things with speed, and I could have played it better. Ditto on Alex’s part, and he folded relatively early.
Thoughts on Emperor’s Children
I will admit that on the table the Emperor’s Children feel much better than they look on paper. That said, I haven’t run into any transports yet, and I suspect that if those become more in vogue things will change a bit. Based on my last few games with them, I generally think the Rapid Evisceration list has legs (well, wheels), but I need to drop the Flawless Blades and also probably the land raider. That said I may be able to keep it in a pinch and will do so for the grand narrative later this year. The Maulerfiends were mostly disappointing, and I think I replace them with winged daemon princes, or at least replace one of them with a winged DP.
The army is fast! There’s a ton of speed here and the Noise Marines hit harder than I expected. The big issue with Rapid Evisceration is that it seems geared toward Infractors and not Noise Marines, and there’s no way to get back in the tank after shooting, which complicates things quite a bit. That said, the power you get is insane and there’s like a strategy where you stagger them or charge something to finish it off before hopping back in via Stratagem. In that regard I suspect I’ll want to go sword + pistol on the kakophonist to make melee more valuable.
I need to test some other builds in the coming weeks and that means looking at Mercurial Host, Coterie of the Conceited, and Peerless Bladesmen. I’ll have more thoughts as I play those games and test out new things.
Hobby Progress: [REDACTED]
I wish I had some hobby progress to share this week but right now I’m working on some TOP SECRET STUFF. Check back next week for more hobby progress on different stuff, probably. Playing with Emperor’s Children felt really good and I’m absolutely going to be painting more of them and getting more rhinos done. I also very much need to start assembling and painting a Daemon Prince.
Final Thoughts
That wraps up this week but I’ll be back next week with more Emperor’s Children practice as I gear up for team events happening in early May. So check back next week for more games and hobby progress as I figure out where I want to go with my Emperor’s Children.
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