Detachment Focus: Brotherhood Strike

The new Grey Knights Codex provides the Knights of Titan with five detachments to play with. In this article, we’re looking at the Brotherhood Strike detachment.

Every Codex needs an all-rounder detachment that leans into what the Army Rule offers, and the Brotherhood Strike detachment provides that for Grey Knights, rewarding you for using Gate of Infinity to teleport around the board unleashing the Emperor’s fury upon the foe. In this article, we break down what it offers on the tabletop.

We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for Review purposes.

Note: Where this article references points costs, these are provisional costs provided to us by Games Workshop to support our review, and may be subject to change until they are published on Warhammer Community.

Detachment Overview

Brotherhood Strike wants you to stay mobile and bring lots of firepower, offering you buffs to units that have just arrived from Deep Strike, which are going to most consistently work for shootier threat, but are also very strong in melee. There are also some bonuses to help you hit combat out of Deep Strike, and ways to keep your most important units alive in the face of the foe’s attempt to strike back. You stay mobile, make sure you clear screens so the enemy can’t zone you out, and practice rolling 9” Charges like your life depends on it.

Detachment Rule: Fury of Titan

Each time a unit from your army is set up from Deep Strike they re-roll hits and wounds of 1 until the end of the turn. This applies to both shooting and melee attacks, though obviously to use the latter you’ll need to successfully make a charge after arriving.

These are solid buffs, especially as there aren’t too many ways to get hit re-rolls in the army by default, and to get the most out of them you’ll want to bring heavy hitters like Dreadknights and Paladins. You’re obviously capped in how many units can benefit from this each turn (though there is an Enhancement to let you pick up four units rather than three, but just a trio of Dreadknights teleporting around blasting away with this is a fairly considerable threat. You will find that there’s some tension between pressuring the board and maximising this ability, since picking units up tends to reduce your ability to control space, but the flip side is that if you need to refocus your efforts to counter your enemy’s plans, you’re going to hit hard while doing so.

Enhancements

• Banishing Wave (20 pts): Each time the bearer is set up from Deep Strike, they get to roll against each enemy unit within 12” and deal a Psychic Mortal Wound on a 2+, or d3 on a 6. This is a somewhat cool idea, and there’s a 6” Deep Strike Stratagem to go with it, but it’s wildly variable by matchup in how useful it is, which may keep it on the bench..
• Blinding Aura (10 pts): When the bearer’s unit arrives from Deep Strike, enemies cannot Overwatch them for the rest of the turn. This is priced to move, and because of that is likely to appear on either a Leader for Paladins or a solo Character being used for scoring in many lists with this Detachment. It’s a shame that where you really want it is on Purifiers, but they’re going to be all Crowe all the time.
• Purity of Purpose (15 pts): Re-roll Charges when you arrive from Deep Strike. Take this on a Grand Master in Nemesis Dreadknight 100% of the time.
• Tome of Forbidden Ways (25 pts): Add +1 to the number of units you can Gate of Infinity. Probably not 100% required as your drop count is quite low, but the trend on similar Enhancements has been that they’ve consistently ended up being useful, so expect to see this selected in builds at least initially.

Stratagems

As you’d expect from this kind of Detachment, you have a mix of generically useful tools and some options that lean into the Army rule. Some of these are pretty great!

• Truesilver Channelling (2CP): An Infantry unit gets Devastating Wounds in the Fight Phase. Most powerful on Paladins with high damage and Purifiers with Wound re-rolls, but the 2CP price tag is fairly prohibitive in a generally CP-hungry detachment, so probably won’t get activated that often.
• Combat Manifestation (1CP): A 3” (so 6” with the Dataslate) no-charge Deep Strike. Always, always useful, and a very good reason to take Purifiers as a theat scary enough that the foe has to play round this 100% of the time.
• Purgation Pattern (1CP): Sustained Hits on Shooting after arriving from Deep Strike. Great on a Dreadknight with either psycannon/psilencer or psycannon/sublimator, and also spicy on Purifiers thanks to their mind bullets. Paladins and Purgation Squads bedecked with psycannons also get some utility from it, and this is just a generically fine Stratagem all-told.
• Duty Unending (1CP): After an enemy unit Falls Back from one of your units with Deep Strike, if your unit is no longer engaged then they can be placed into Strategic Reserves. While this is mostly a slightly weaker version of the Index Mists of Deimos, it’s still a useful tool, and also removes the edge case get-out where a fast foe might be able to fall back from your unit and end outside 9”, leaving you exposed. Make sure you’re planning ahead to get the most from this – it encourages you to try and leave one unit with a solid charge on the board each turn, and makes planning your Consolidation to tag other enemies very important.
• Shining Veil (1CP): Gain Stealth for a phase against Shooting. Fine. Not exciting, but fine.
• Expeditious Exit (2CP): At the end of the Opponent’s Fight Phase, you can pull one PSYKER INFANTRY unit into Strategic Reserves. As a designer’s note helpfully explains, this can either provide an extra slot over and above Gate of Infinity’s quota or can pull a unit out of Engagement Range, which you normally cannot. That can be helpful if the opponent has tried to lock down one of your premium units by bumping them with an expendable hull, since that tends to be a fairly effective way to pin Grey Knights in combat. Sometimes you just need this, but it’s a shame it’s 2CP.

Playing This Detachment

Pick your biggest, nastiest three shooting threats and bounce them around the board, while using a few on-board pieces like regular Dreadknights and various Infantry to actually push. Not a super complex plan, but it’s what you’ve got to work with.

Strengths

• Strong mobility and scoring from the improvements to the army rule.
• Good support for the best units in the book.
• Access to re-rolls is at a premium for the army.

Weaknesses

• Vulnerable to armies with strong screening.
• 2CP Stratagems both feel overpriced.
• No augmentation to stuff that’s already on the board, which can make pressing forward a challenge.

A Sample List

I’ll be the first to put my hand up and admit that this list isn’t going to look especially unique to this detachment – so much of Grey Knights power is concentrated in a few units that you end up with a lot of overlap. Still, there are going to be some unique things for each Detachment, so let’s break it down.

Brotherhood Strike - click to expand

Not too many surprises here, really – the plan is that most turns you’re bouncing Crowe, the Paladins and the Purity GMDK, as all these units provide strong value when shooting with re-rolls, and if they get to hit melee too then even better. To give you enough heft to also push up on the board, you supplement that with a couple of regular Dreadknights for Advance/Charge threat, and a staging Rhino full of Purifiers to give you some ability to handle targets in ruins.

Final Thoughts

Zapping around the board is cool, and while this detachment probably loses out to some of the others on offer it does provide a solid grounding in what the Grey Knights’ deal is, and has a few strong tricks of its own.

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