This Is How They Get You | contemplating this year's Christmas 40K boxes
Amidst the attempt to make "Warhammer Day" a thing, Sir James Workshop (of the Nottinghamshire Workshops) announced the annual bucket of bounty: value boxes for players of five lucky armies.
I... sort of want three of them.
Hypercrypt Legion
Obviously, the Necron box was the first to draw my eye. There's been a lot of moaning and myrtling on the subreddit about how we all have a hundred and eighty Warriors already and Triarch Praetorians aren't even good and yes, fine, but from my point of view this is a box that contains the cool new Overlord figure I don't own, the ten Lychguard I would never pay RRP for and can never find second hand, ten Warriors to finish my Reaper brick or begin a new Flayer squad, and an incidental Void Dragon. Given how much these things tend to go for, that's probably going to come out close to "buy all these infantry, get a free C'tan." If I have any money when these come to pre-order I am SLAMMING that button, absolutely diving onto my keyboard, full elbow drop.
Additional: this post was drafted before the recent balance pass made dramatic improvements to the Obeisance Phalanx by cutting the cost of all the Triarch units. I absolutely want those ten Lychguard and shrouded Overlord now. I knew three Triarch Stalkers weren't a mistake!
Necrons
Incursion (1000 points)
Obeisance Phalanx
CHARACTERS
Overlord (110 points)
• Warlord
• Staff of light, resurrection orb
• Enhancement: Eternal Conqueror
Overlord with Translocation Shroud (100 points)
• Overlord’s blade, resurrection orb
• Enhancement: Warrior Noble
BATTLELINE
10 Immortals (150 points)
• Gauss blasters
OTHER DATASHEETS
Canoptek Reanimator (75 points)
5 Deathmarks (65 points)
10 Lychguard (170 points)
• Hyperphase swords and dispersion shields
Triarch Stalker (110 points)
• Heat ray
Triarch Stalker (110 points)
• Heavy gauss cannons
Triarch Stalker (110 points)
• Heavy gauss cannons
Inner Circle Task Force
But then I looked at the Dark Angels box. I don't play loyalist Space Marines by long tradition, because then who would all the loyalist Space Marine players I know have to fight against? But I did have some Space Marines in my very first 40K starter box, all the way back in 1996, so I did have to make the decision about which Chapter they would be, and I'm a sucker for bottle green and mysterious pasts so I picked Dark Angels and bought the casual A-posing Captain with his greatsword and giant helmet wings to lead them. I'm sure Aly Morrison's cool Predator in the first White Dwarf I ever bought had nothing to do with my purchase of a Predator by the end of the year. I never had more than that - not even the Techmarine it would take to field a legal army - and within three years all but the Predator had gone the way of the dodo, and the Predator had been repainted blue and was a Night Lords support element.
Most Space Marines don't appeal to me. Tacticool Phobos are my colleague's thing, and I respect that, but it's not my scene. Clean, potent Tacitus armour is too plain, though I can't deny that the Gravis models have an attractive chonkiness to them. But the Space Marines I like are knights in space. Swords and boards, maces and lances, swung with all the heft power armour can provide. Hubris, secrecy, symbolism, mysterious quests they themselves don't fully understand, and a "once and future" beat that's straight out of the Arthurian legends I devoured as a pre-teen, pre-hams precocious reader. Gothic mythopoeia is where I'm at, lads. The Dark Angels are my jam. And this box has Deathwing Knights and Inner Circle Companions and the Lion, who is a fantastic model. Of course, it's a squeak over 1000 points, and modern 40K doesn't allow you to simply drop a model, and anyway... I don't play loyalists.
Valourstrike Lance
Then there are the other Knights. The... big ones.
I've made no secret that I like the Knight Households. It was the release of Chaos Knights that drew my interest back toward actively playing contemporary 40K, but I talked myself out of it - irregular games, very casual scene, would I make friends if I showed up with something as skewy as Knights? And I ended up building out my Chaos Space Marines instead, and then bargain Necrons kept throwing themselves at me, and I never acted on that first impulse.
The value box for Knights is a 1000 point army, in a box. Technically, it's two, as the exact same models Renegade up for a very off-meta Chaos Knight force. I wouldn't really like to play it that way - there's apparently a sprue conveniently left out of the set, the one that builds the carapace weapons (no big loss, I've always thought they look a bit daft, spoil the line of that lovely beetle back) and half the arms, including the second battle cannon that makes me salivate at the thought of a Knight Despoiler, which is an actual dealbreaker.
For the Imperium, though...
Imperial Knights
Incursion (1000 points)
Noble Lance
Knight Paladin (430 points)
• Reaper chainsword, Questoris heavy stubber
• Enhancement: Mythic Hero
• Warlord
Armiger Helverin (140 points)
• Questoris heavy stubber
Armiger Helverin (140 points)
• Questoris heavy stubber
Armiger Helverin (140 points)
• Questoris heavy stubber
Armiger Warglaive (150 points)
• meltagun
I shan't lie, this last one's sitting with me. I absolutely have a 2000 point version that adds a Castellan (the absurd walking armoury with the plasma cannon the length of a tank) and a Castigator (my favourite long-leggy Knight, it's got nothing to do with the eighteen shot gatling heavy bolter, honest guv). Somewhere out there in the wyrming ways of the fifth dimension, parallel universe tourneycorn Von is already warming up. I could possibly play Knights at 2000 points: it's only seven models, even I can probably parse that.
Value packs for *four* lucky armies perhaps. The sad incoherent assortment of big 'bots cobbled together into a Tau 'battleforce', without so much as a single core unit so I'm told, has outraged even hardline battlesuit fans in the reddit pit. And frankly I don't blame them, coming as I do from the GOAT King of Battleforce box sets that is the original Tau Battleforce box.
ReplyDeleteGlad you're excited about the Necron one though, I can't help but feel like the Necron reddit gripers might have misunderstood the assignment somewhat with it - those things are (on paper at least) supposed to be for the people with *zero* Necron Warriors or Necron models of any kind first and established Necron players second (the aforementioned Tau reddit gripers do seem to at least acknowledge this, with their griping mostly centred on their box lacking a critical keystone for new players to actually use its contents in all but the most casual of games).
I will say about the Knights that size can matter when it comes to painting workload. Once upon a time I thought it was only one castle that was mostly drybrushing and I could parse that for at least a little terrain, but it turns out four towers, three walls and a gatehouse's worth of drybrushing gets tedious before the home stretch of getting everything finished.
I will also say that it's perhaps unwise to never say never with loyalist space marines. I used to not play loyalist space marines by long tradition, and even now I technically still don't, but I'm still starting to accumulate loyalist space marine sculpts and my nominal plan for making use of them has ballooned from just one Chapter to a coalition of three (which I blame entirely on my oldhammer fairy godmother).
Sooner or later they have a way of creeping into model backlogs. Besides, I'm sure Tourneycorn!Von is no stranger to the value of a small detachment of space marine allies for camping on divots and making use of those sweet sweet marine strats that I am sure exist in their timeline (if only because they scream on reddit about it after GW took those toys away this edition).
My colleague, a recovering Tau player and full time mech head, has expressed similar sentiments regarding how useless the Tau box is. Army in a box it ain't. I feel it represents the end point of the "people play Tau for battlesuits" misapprehension by Sir James and his hangers-on: there's no point in putting two handfuls of Fire Warriors in there because "nobody wants Tau infantry."
DeleteIt does work if you consider it in combination with the Tau Combat Patrol (the other Commander build, Fire Warriors, Pathfinders and a Devilfish, rounding out the collection quite nicely) and/or that all-Kroot splash box from earlier in the year, but as a self contained project it's just a bit sad.
Fully in accordance with the comment re. Necron crate.: I've said as much to their faces. I think some of the joyless twerps would benefit from a couple of Praetorian squads, whose legume enumeration factor has dropped to a degree where even the most miserly Phaeron should consider them worth a punt - but if you already own those or the C'tan, this is Not For You. Buy yourselves a Tesseract Vault instead, chaps. You deserve it.
Talking of absurdly sized models - it's a fair point. Fortunately, having now scaled up my process to multiple vehicle hulls this year, I am confident that I can get the underguts of an Armiger down in good order. The hard part, I suspect, will be doing a satisfactory job of work on the carapaces and heraldry.
I shall continue saying "not now" with regards to the Astartes. I am settled in my heart that if I did, it would be Dark Angels, or a silly tribute to the cast of Dawn of War II (I am not immune to the Heavy Intercessor lifestyle: they're just satisfyingly chonky). That'll do, for now.
Tourneycorn Von is still sulking that there isn't a way to dragoon some Adeptus Mechanicus infantry into a Knight army. I wouldn't want a whole army of them - Guardsman performance at supraMarine prices per figure can get stuffed - but a loyal bloc of Skitarii doing ground work for their associates would please me in a way that Arbitrators or Voidsmen or other Imperial Agents that don't fit as well would never be able to match.
I would add that not only does it represent the end point of the "people play Tau for battlesuits" misapprehension, it also represents a final form of the "Little Jake just wants to throw down with big stompy centrepiece models and doesn't much care to paint a pile of dudes first" concept that Sir James likes to pander to. Which would be fine if it, y'know, actually built a fully functional detachment for that out of the box like the Knight one does.
DeleteIt's been observed that the various Tau value boxes released for 10th do indeed fit together into a very cromulent army - if you managed to catch 'em all you would end up with two healthy piles of Fire Warriors, some Pathfinders and a Devilfish, one of each HQ Character option, a meaty mass of Kroot support, a small band of Stealthsuits and a Gostkeel, which this Christmas bundle would round out nicely with some big heavy hitting pieces and would be a really cool path to starting up a Tau army if GW had actually kept those boxes all in circulation.
But even then there still wouldn't be any Crisis Suits anywhere, which is odd for how much they're pushed on Tau players, and their conspicuous absence is a key gripe amongst the Tau reddit folk. Swap in a frame of Crisis Suits for that Broadside or Ghostkeel, or even both for two Crisis Suit frames (and by extension enough surplus bitz to build the rigid predefined loadouts from the 10th army book), And it would be a brilliant package that worked as both a standalone bundle and an addon to one of the earlier box sets.
That's the real tragedy of the Tau box. They came so close with it, yet fell so far short.
But I digress.