In our Competitive Faction Focus series we look at the factions of Warhammer 40,000 through a competitive lens, talking about who they are and what they can do, and how they play competitively. In this article we’re looking at the Sons of Magnus, the Thousand Sons.
Changelog
Changelog - Click to Expand
Why Should You Play This Faction?
As an army the Thousand Sons offer a massive and versatile toolbox of abilities and options and while the number of units you have to choose from is small, almost all of them have value. On top of that, there are a large number of ways to assemble those units into something that is competitively viable on the table. There are things the Thousand Sons can do which no other Chaos army can do, and they can be a challenging (in a good way) and fun army to play.
Since the release of their tenth edition Codex, the Thousand Sons received a much-needed shot in the arm, with new mechanics that give them the ability to easily focus down large targets with a variety of units, shoring up one of their key weaknesses. The army relies on a mix of psyker characters to toss out rituals and units of cheaper Tzaangors and Rubrics to control objectives and take down targets, with support from Mutalith Vortex Beasts, Magnus, and Vehicles for good measure. When it all works, it’s a wonderful symphony of pure pain. When it doesn’t, you lose a few too many units too soon and things spiral out of control. Right now games tend more toward the former.
Army Rules
Thousand Sons armies have two rules: Cabal of Sorcerers and Pact of Sorcery.
Cabal of Sorcerers
This is the replacement for Rituals from the tenth edition index, and it’s a huge upgrade in terms of fun and flexibility in list-building. Your army has access to four Rituals that you can do at the Start of your Shooting phase, each with its own Warp Charge value. One or more models from your army can attempt to perform a Ritual from the list below. When they do, you pick a model that hasn’t attempted a Ritual yet this turn and one Ritual that hasn’t been manifested yet, then you take a Psychic test.
To take a psychic test, you roll 2D6. You can then choose to roll a third d6 as part of the Psychic test (this is called Channeling the Warp), and if after that roll you have any doubles or triples, the model’s unit takes D3 mortal wounds. If the model isn’t destroyed, you then combine those rolls to get your final result. If your Psychic test matches or exceeds the Warp Charge value of the Ritual you’re attempting, you manifest the Ritual and you resolve the Ritual’s effects.
So why channel? Well, each Ritual also has a second, more powerful effect that you can activate if you score a higher roll. For example, the Destiny’s Ruin Ritual gives your army the ability to re-roll 1s to Hit against a single enemy unit within 24” of the manifesting model. But if you roll a 10+ for your Warp Charge, then you get full re-rolls to Hit instead.
Note that rituals can only be manifested once but can be attempted multiple times, so you can keep trying to get off a key ritual until you get it. You’ll also know before you manifest if you’ve already rolled doubles or if getting the cast off is a long shot, so you can abandon an attempt and try again with another caster if you need. If you want to read more about the probability behind rituals, we covered the topic in detail in Hammer of Math.
The Rituals
There are four rituals. They only affect or work on Thousand Sons models when they act as buffs, meaning they won’t work on Daemons. As a reminder, these still all happen at the start of your Shooting phase, so you’ll need to run through them all right away.
- Destiny’s Ruin (WC 5) – Pick a visible enemy unit within 24” of the manifesting model. Until the end of the phase, Thousand Sons units in your army re-roll hit rolls of 1 against that unit. Added effect (10+) – Re-roll all hit rolls against that target instead. The old Terminator Sorcerer’s ability, now unfettered from that model. Re-rolling all hits is amazing, and this is a great way to focus down a bigger target. This is more or less your version of Oath of Moment.
- Temporal Surge (WC 6) – Pick a friendly Thousand Sons unit not within Engagement Range of an enemy unit and within 24” of and visible to the manifesting model. They can make a Normal Move of up to D6”. That unit is not eligible to charge until the end of the turn. Added Effect (10+) – they can move up to 6” instead. You can use this ahead of other rituals to push a unit forward with another unit, and then use that unit to manifest a ritual, extending your sightlines or range before you fire off Doombolt or Twist of Fate.
- Doombolt (WC 7) – Pick a visible enemy unit within 24” (excluding units with Lone Op outside of 12”). They take D3 mortal wounds. Added Effect (11+) they take D3+3 mortal wounds instead. A bit of a downgrade, but pretty reliable and always good to throw out mortal wounds.
- Twist of Fate (WC 9) – Pick a visible enemy unit within 24”. Until the end of the Shooting phase, when Thousand Sons units shoot that unit, improve their AP by 1. Added Effect (12+), improve their AP by 2. This is a bit worse than it used to be, even post-Dataslate, but when you remember that inferno bolters start at AP-2, it’s not as bad as it looks.
These are incredibly powerful abilities, even if they seem like a downgrade from the Index at first glance. Think about it this way: Your basic, easiest ritual more or less gives you Oath of Moment, the powerful faction rule for Space Marines. The rest give you solid reasons to stack cast buffs and channel the warp, and your main plan for taking down big threats is to stack Twist of Fate and Destiny’s Ruin on a single target – doing this suddenly turns Tzaangor Greatbows into vehicle-destroying volleys. A huge part of your game plan will be using these buffs to get the most out of units that otherwise have high volumes of decent firepower. Note that these are only helping you in the Shooting phase – your army has very little in the way of melee buffs.
Pact of Sorcery
Like the other Cult Legions, the Codex for Thousand Sons includes Tzeentch Daemons units, and these come with the SCINTILLATING LEGIONS keyword. You can’t add these to your army unless explicitly stated. This is here for the Changehost of Deceit Detachment. It’s not very good, and we aren’t going to spend a lot of time talking about it in this Faction Focus aritcle.
Five Things You Need to Know
- Rituals are the backbone of your strategy: Rituals give you four of the most powerful abilities in the game to play with – re-rolls to hit, double moving, mortal wounds at long range, and weakening enemy saves. These are powerful effects that hand you tools to deal with a variety of targets and you’re going to build and play around their use each turn.
- Mobility is key: Between extra movement from Magnus, the ability to double-move units with Temporal Surge, Aetherstride on winged daemon princes, discs of Tzeentch, and teleporting via the Umbralefic Crystal, the Thousand Sons have some powerful movement tech to play with. That’s great for an army that really needs to pick and choose its spots – while you can hit really hard and punch up into big targets, your forces aren’t super durable, and you’ll need to keep them safe from threats to ensure they activate more than once during a game.
- Mutaliths and Tzaangors are Key: Successful Thousand Sons armies are more or less built on Tzaangors – the base unit and Tzaangor Enlightened with Fatecaster Greatbows – and Mutalith Vortex Beasts, which give them powerful, undercosted units that can shore up gaps, move around the table quickly, and cause problems. You’ll need a lot of these to play the army competitively.
- Don’t get stuck in combat: Units like Scarab Occult Terminators aren’t necessarily bad in combat but you generally want to be shooting and unless you’re running the Rubricae Detachment there aren’t a lot of ways to get out of combat without Falling Back. Your units generally want to avoid being stuck in melee combat, so don’t get tagged unless you have to.
- You need to protect your Rubrics and Tzaangors: Rubrics are still a great unit – MSU squads with Warpflamers and a Soulreaper cannon do some great work and offer a ton of versatility. Having a unit of four flamers gives you a ton of board control, but the current meta is not kind to space marines, even ones with an invulnerable save. You’ll need a way to protect these pieces, particularly from the likes of Death Guard mortars – and that will typically mean a transport. Likewise, Enlightened are mobile and hit hard, but will go down quickly, so you’ll want to make sure they’re protected with an Exalted Sorcerer on disc.
What Are the Must-Have Units to Start This Faction?
There isn’t a successful competitive list that doesn’t run at least two Mutalith Vortex Beasts and 12 Tzaangor Enlightened with Fatecaster Greatbows. These are just two of the most efficiently costed units in the army for what they do. Mutaliths at 160 are a steal; they offer multiple good ranged shooting options – especially with re-rolls to hit and extra AP – and are one of the few good melee units the army has access to. They move fast, draw fire, and can be unpredictably durable with their 5+ invulnerable save and 5+ feel no pain. The ability to give you +1 to your ritual attempts when you Channel (i.e. roll 3D6) within 6″ can also help ensure some of those big effects go off, and tossing out mortals when they finish a move is just gravy on top of everything else. You want at least two and probably three in your army.
The Tzaangors are just flat undercosted, and the discount you get on taking six means you will only want to take six at a time. For 80 points you get six T4, 2-wound guys with bows that toss out 2 shots each at 30″, S5, AP-2, 2 damage each, with IGNORES COVER, LETHAL HITS, and PRECISION. When you combine that with Twist of Fate and Destiny’s Ruin for extra AP and re-rolling hits, they suddenly turn into a legitimate threat, able to fish for Lethals against bigger targets (do this when you’re wounding on 5+), and then punch through higher levels of damage against threats with no invulnerable save. The one downside? They’re fragile. The good news is that they have a reactive move built-in to keep them out of trouble, and most of the time you’ll want to pair them with an Exalted Sorcerer on Disc of Tzeentch, who prevents his unit from being targeted with ranged attacks by threats more than 18″ away. His ranged attack is only 18″, so you’ll seldom want to get that close to something unless you know you can kill it, but with 30″ of range on bows and 24″ on your rituals, that’ll usually be the sweet spot.
Standard Tzaangors are typically going to be your backfield objective holder unit. They’re durable enough to withstand most mortars, and have the built-in ability to go back into reserves late in the game. This is particularly good in missions where holding your home objective has little to no value.
From there, how you build will depend heavily on your Detachment. If you’re running the Grand Coven – the most competitive option as of this writing, you’ll likely want Magnus the Red. Magnus isn’t *quite* the force multiplier he used to be, but his built-in +2 on ritual attempts and the ability to do two rituals per phase instead of one is huge for getting off the big effects when you need them, and he offers some of the army’s best ranged damage output. His Crimson King abilities are still relevant, and getting extra movement early and -1 incoming damage late is a big help in those early staging turns.
Rubrics are the backbone of your army. You’ll want at least ten of these guys, and possibly as many as twenty in various arrangements. Warpflamer Rubrics are great for board control and short-range skirmishing and have very good damage output. Bolter Rubrics by comparison are a lot less popular, but have an edge in terms of range and the extra AP on their guns and the benefit of [IGNORES COVER] from the Icon of Flame makes them at least a more competitive choice than they used to be. Rubrics’ biggest asset is their ability to re-roll wound rolls of 1 against enemy targets or full re-rolls to wound against enemies within range of an objective marker you don’t control. It’s generally good on warpflamers but where it really shines is on the attached characters, who suddenly get a big boost to the damage output of their souped-up psychic attacks. This can be particularly solid if you’re trying to score Devastating Wounds.
Infernal Masters tend to make the best character pairings for Thousand Sons as they have the best ranged attack of any of your non-Magnus characters, though regular Sorcerers have some value – their biggest downside is that they give their unit [LETHAL HITS], which is something you just kind of don’t want on a unit of flamers and a Dev Wound chaingun. Their shooting attack however is very solid, and the ability to once per game up the strength and attacks on it by 3 can lead to some nasty output with the Pandaemonic Delusion Psychic Attack.
Generally you’ll want to run rubrics in minimum size units (MSUs), and you’ll want two to four of them in your army, paired with characters. Larger units can be done, and that’s the only place you’ll take a standard Exalted Sorcerer, but this isn’t the best way to run them. As we mentioned earlier, you’ll almost certainly want a Chaos Rhino to protect them.
Credit: Robert “TheChirurgeon” JonesFrom there we get to our fringe options. The Daemon Prince with Wings has some solid damage output from its shooting attacks and can drop in close to enemy units with the Aetherstride ability, helping you contest some key objectives and setting up a surprise threat or ritual piece before your Shooting phase starts. It also helps that he’s one of the army’s more durable units and another of the very few capable melee threats in the army, able to help out with a counter charge or heroic intervention.
Scarab Occult Terminators have some play as well, not just in the Rubricae Detachment but also the Grand Coven – while not quite as durable as Death Guard Terminators, Scarabs still have that -1 to wound on incoming attacks to help them stay on the table and with the support of a Sorcerer in Terminator Armour and rituals can put out some very solid hails of AP-2 bolter fire. You always want to take the Soulreaper cannon and hellfyre missile rack on these guys, maxing out your counts.
As a final points filler, don’t count out Chaos Spawn – while regenerating 3 wounds in each Command phase isn’t the strongest ability Chaos Spawn can have, it does make these annoying to kill, and yours also come with a 5+ invulnerable save that Spawn typically do not get, making them great for being cheap action doers/objective holders that can range wide and hide as needed. They’re also better at fighting than Rubrics.
Daemons of Tzeentch
Unfortunately for the Changehost of Deceit, the Daemon options and their detachment just aren’t very good here. Kairos offers one of the few ways the army has of getting more CP during a game, but the fact that daemons can’t benefit from rituals more or less kills them dead in the water.
Allied Units
In a similar fashion, while chaos knights and knights generally are pretty powerful right now, the need for more ritual casters and the fact that knights don’t benefit from rituals means that there isn’t much room for Chaos Knight allies in competitive Thousand Sons lists right now.
How Does This Faction Secure Objectives?
Typically with Rubrics, though if you’re running Tzaangors/Enlightened/Chaos Spawn you’ll use those to move quickly around the sides of the table and capture objectives early and pick off targets from a distance. If you’re running Mutaliths and Magnus, they’ll likely be part of your strategy for holding the middle of the table, though that may not be part of your strategy at all in most matchups – holding the other two objectives will likely do just fine. Ultimately your biggest concern most games will be staying out of combat and picking off enemies from a distance, whittling them down before they can really take a bit out of your forces.
Staying out of combat means playing it smart with ranges and distance, using Warpflamers to control the board, and controlling access to your units, preventing multi-charges and using Magnus and Mutaliths to intervene when necessary.
How Does This Faction Do Actions?
Actions aren’t as tough as they used to be, given how cheap and effective Tzaangors and Chaos Spawn are. You want to generally save Enlightened for shooting, but being able to go up/down with regular Tzaangors solves a lot of problems, and Chaos Spawn make just fine cheap objective holders.
How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Hordes?
Hordes are easy to handle when you have warpflamers, and inferno bolters are just as good at melting through the likes of Genestealer Cultists and Guardians. You’ve got great volumes of S4 AP-1 shooting to work with before you start adding in buffs on top of it, and re-rolling wounds against targets on objectives will let you melt through even big horde units fast.
How Does This Faction Handle Enemy Tanks and Monsters?
This is a tougher one – the Thousand Sons don’t have a lot of anti-tank weapons, and so taking down big targets like knights and tanks is going to rely on a mix of shooting from Mutaliths, Magnus, and Predators, and massed damage from smaller units like Tzaangor Enlightened and Rubrics paired with Ritual buffs and debuffs to turn them into something much scarier, with [LETHAL HITS] tossed in on some of those units for good measure.
Often the playbook for taking down big threats will be to soften them up with Doombolt and mortals from a Mutalith, then hitting them with Twist of Fate and Destiny’s Ruin and drowning them in shooting from Tzaangors, Rubrics, and Characters. Tzaangor Enlightened need the re-rolls to hit to push through their damage, particularly if you’re fishing for Lethal Hits (do this when you need 5+ to wound), and your Rubrics can use their built-in wound re-rolls to get extra damage through, particularly on characters. This is where Grand Cabal helps as well, giving you either Devastating Wounds on your psychic attacks or +1 to wound.
What Combos Should You Build Around?
Thousand Sons armies rely on characters more than most, and the unique abilities your characters bring to the table coupled with the built-in abilities of those units to get the most out of both. For Rubrics, the key ability is re-rolling wound rolls, which helps you get the most out of powerful character psychic shooting attacks – the best of these are on the Infernal Master and Sorcerer, the former of which gives you an additional TORRENT weapon to work with. These do their best work in Grand Coven, where psychic attacks are at their best.
As we mentioned, the other key combo is Exalted Sorcerers on Disc + Tzaangor Enlightened. This was a new addition in the Codex and the key here is to make them untargetable outside of 18″, so they can comfortably snipe targets from a distance without being targeted in return. Tzaangor Shamans also work fine with these, giving them +1 to hit. This changes their role a bit, and turns them into more of a forward threat, and it’s not uncommon to see two Exalted Sorcerers and one Shaman-led unit of Tzaangor Enlightened in a list.
Detachments
The Thousand Sons have a number of Detachments which change how they play fairly dramatically. You can find articles covering each of those below:
Right now Grand Coven is the obvious choice for the best Detachment for Thousand Sons. It offers the most versatility, some fantastic Enhancements, and the ability to sticky objectives with characters. If you’re playing competitively, this is the option you want, and it’ll push you into varied lists with lots of psyker characters for damage output and additional effects.
Detachment Focus: Changehost of Deceit
This is your combined Thousand Sons/Daemons Detachment. While your Thousand Sons Psyker units are near Daemons, they get a 4+ invulnerable save against Ranged attacks. While your Daemons are near Thousand Sons Psykers, they get Cabal of Sorcerers. You can take up to 1,000 points of Tzeentch Daemons.
Detachment Focus: Hexwarp Thrallband
The Grotmas Detachment is still here. It’s still not great, mostly because Rubrics still give you re-rolls to wound. It has a little more play now that Cult of Magic isn’t around to give you Devastating Wounds all the time, but it still feels outclassed by other Detachment options here.
Detachment Focus: Rubricae Phalanx
Did you miss All is Dust? Me too. This Detachment is all about Scarabs and Rubrics – every time they take a 1-damage attack, they get +1 to their saves. This one pushes you into heavy usage of marine bodies and has some fun tricks.
Detachment Focus: Warpforged Cabal
This is your Vehicle Detachment – every time a vehicle in your army shoots or fights, it can re-roll one hit roll, wound roll, or damage roll. But if it’s within 6” of a friendly psyker, you can re-roll one of each instead. Also when your vehicles die, they explode on a 5+ if they’re within 6” of a friendly psyker.
Detachment Focus: Warpmeld Pact
This is the Detachment for the sickos who want to run the mutants – Tzaangors, Chaos Spawn, and Mutalith Vortex Beasts. Every time one of your enemy units attacks a mutant, you can take D3 mortal wounds to give them -1 to their wound rolls, and each time you shoot or fight with a Mutant, you can take D3 mortal wounds to get +1 to wound rolls. Also Tzaangors become BATTLELINE in this Detachment.
Final Thoughts
Thousand Sons remain a powerful army, albeit one which can be difficult to play effectively. The army’s basic units are still very strong, and you’ll need to use a mix of them in specific ways to generate effective results. The Codex has made them one of the game’s better armies, but they have some natural predators in the meta that keep them from emerging as a clear best contender. They have some good matchups and can be one of the most rewarding armies in the game to play when it all comes together.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
