Detachment Focus: Rubricae Phalanx

In our Detachment Focus series we take a deep dive into an army’s Detachments, covering what’s in them, how they play, and how they’ll fit into the broader meta and your games. In this Detachment Focus we’re looking at the Rubricae Phalanx from the Thousand Sons.

If you’re looking for a Detachment that focuses purely on Rubrics and Scarabs, this is the Detachment for you. Rubricae Phalanx gives you a powerful suite of buffs and utility tools for your army’s marine units, turning them into the implacable phalanx of your dreams.

Detachment Overview

Rubrics and Scarabs! This Detachment buffs both by giving them extra durability in the form of +1 to saves when damage 1 attacks come in against them. That helps insulate them from smaller arms fire and chip shots, beefing them up against the likes of Genestealer Cults and most melee attacks. You’ll still need to worry about bigger hits, but the durability buff gives you the ability to survive melee attacks a bit more easily.The buffs here are all focused on your Rubricae units, pushing you into a build that goes heavy on power armor and terminators.

The Video Version

If you’d like to watch a video version of this Detachment Focus, we’ve got you covered here:

Detachment Rule: All is Dust

Turns out that when your entire army is made up of heavily-armored lint traps, weapons that are intended to kill living beings are significantly less effective. To represent this, All Is Dust adds 1 to any armour saving throw made by a RUBRICAE model from your army so long as you’re making it against an attack with an unmodified damage characteristic of 1.

The RUBRICAE units in your army are Rubrics and Scarab Occult Terminators, and both benefit from this in different ways. The biggest benefit is for melee, where 1-damage attacks are much more common, but anyone trying to shoot scarabs in cover with 1-damage weapons will pretty quickly find out that they need AP-3 or better to make a dent in your save. It’s worth noting that this only applies to unmodified damage characteristics, so you can’t combine this with Implacable Guardians to reduce incoming damage and then get a bonus to saves if they end up at 1. It also won’t help you against variable damage weapons.

One important note to keep in mind: this Detachment rule is triggered when the model in question has the RUBRICAE keyword. It doesn’t care about the unit. That means that attached characters get no benefit whatsoever from this Detachment rule. Keep that in mind if you’re facing an opponent with easy access to [Precision] weaponry. On the flip side, the “unit champions” in your squads–Scarab Occult Sorcerers and Aspiring Sorcerers–do have the keyword, so those models will get the bonus when attacks are allocated to them.

Enhancements

If you expected enhancements that buff your Rubrics and Scarabs, you (mostly) won’t be disappointed, as that’s what you get, with one exception. Arcane Thralls is priced to move, but while Risen Rubricae and Lord of the Rubricae are a bit pricier, they’re also the two you’ll probably be looking to build for.

• Risen Rubricae – Need some forward deploy, but the Tzaangor’s 6” scout move isn’t enough for you? Look no further: this enhancement allows you to give the Infiltrators ability to your choice of two RUBRICAE BATTLELINE units or one other RUBRICAE unit. In other words, pick either 2 units of Rubric Marines, or 1 of Scarabs, and give them Infiltrators. Combined with the durability buffs elsewhere in this Detachment, it’ll provide you a couple of very useful forward-deployed units. Note that the timing of this means it will happen before you assign characters to a unit, so you can’t infiltrate a unit with an attached character. Still, infiltrating a unit of ten Scarabs can be huge, especially if you combine it with a redeploy like Ahriman’s.
• Arcane Thralls (Aura) – This lets you re-roll Battle-shock tests for RUBRICAE units within 9” of the bearer. Not really a “must-take” enhancement, but it’s cheap, so you might wind up bringing it if you’ve got the points.
• Lord of the Rubricae – RUBRICAE models in the bearer’s unit get +1 to hit. Simple, straightforward, and reasonably strong, especially with the glow-up inferno bolters got with this book. Slam this on a Terminator Sorcerer to get as much value out of it as possible between the high volume of combi-bolter shots and the heavier-hitting special weapons. The biggest thing about this is that it gives you +1 to hit in melee and not just with ranged attacks – this is one of the very few melee buffs in the army, and as a result helps you turn your Scarabs into a unit that can reliably kill things in melee. 
• Stave Abominus – INFANTRY only, this enhancement adds [Sustained Hits D3] and [Devastating Wounds] to the bearer’s melee weapons. This means you can’t slap it on a Daemon Prince, but they already have Devastating Wounds on their melee attacks anyway. 

Stratagems

These stratagems offer a nice combination of defensive- and utility-focused buffs to your various RUBRICAE units. There’s also an interesting offensive boost in the returning Infernal Fusillade stratagem. It may not be as obviously useful as it was in the index Detachment, but it can still come in handy in the right situation.

• Ardent Automata (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – Allows a RUBRICAE unit to shoot and charge after falling back. Neither Rubrics nor Scarabs are at their best when locked in combat, and this stratagem lets you punish your opponent with a nasty counter-punch for overextending into melee with a unit they weren’t going to be able to kill.
• Inexorable Advance (Strategic Ploy, 2 CP) – Used in your Movement phase to ignore modifiers to your Move characteristic and Advance rolls for a RUBRICAE unit and their ranged weapons gain [ASSAULT] until the end of the phase. If your opponent thinks your Rubrics are slow, this Strat will make them think again. This will improve the mobility of a key unit even without a transport, potentially opening up some clutch plays in key moments. It’s especially great on Scarabs, who could use the extra movement and don’t really want to charge that often.
• Infernal Fusillade (Wargear, 2 CP) – This one’s returned from the index, but has moved to a different Detachment. Choose a THOUSAND SONS PSYKER unit, and not only will you set the Strength of all its “inferno” weapons (boltguns, combi-bolters, and the like) to 5, you’ll also give those weapons the [PSYCHIC] ability for the rest of the phase. And while there aren’t as many triggers for this as in the index–moving the strat to a different Detachment means your unit can’t benefit from the Grand Coven’s Kindred Sorcery rule–it does pair nicely with the Thousand Sons’ Rhino’s Sorcerous Support ability.
• Revenge of the Rubricae (Strategic Ploy, 1 CP) – This stratagem allows a RUBRICAE unit to shoot back at a unit that just destroyed one of your PSYKER units within 6”. It’s very situational, since you’ll either need to have lost a character to [Precision] shooting or have a RUBRICAE unit near another Psyker, but having the ability to shoot out-of-sequence is always worth keeping in mind.
• Implacable Guardians (Strategic Ploy, 2 CP) – If you need a little extra durability on a squad of Rubric Marines, this stratagem will come in handy. It subtracts 1 from the damage of all incoming attacks allocated to non-PSYKER models so long as there’s still a PSYKER in the squad. Thankfully, your Aspiring Sorcerer has that keyword, so you won’t need to have an attached character to make use of it. Just keep in mind that All Is Dust triggers off of the attack’s unmodified damage characteristic, so you usually won’t be able to use this and the Detachment rule against the same attack.
• Unwavering Phalanx (Battle Tactic, 1 CP) – Use this in your opponent’s Charge phase on a unit of Rubric Marines that got charged to make that unit -1 to be wounded for the rest of the turn. Useful to keep a unit of Rubrics around a little longer when you really need them. Great on a unit of ten with an Exalted Sorcerer. 

Playing This Detachment

Welcome to Rubrics and Scarabs: The Detachment. If you’re playing this, you want to run Scarabs. Rubrics are fine too, but the real juice here is in Scarab Occult Terminators, who really get the most out of Stratagems like Implacable Guardians, Infernal Fusillade, and Inexorable Advance, and are the best target for your Infiltrate Enhancement. This is the Detachment that wants 20-30 terminators, and I suspect the correct count is 20 running 10/5/5, and infiltrating your unit of 5. While it’s tempting to infiltrate 10, not being able to pair that unit with a character means that you won’t be able to give them the benefit of the Lord of the Rubricae Enhancement, and you really want +1 to hit on your terminators. 

When it comes to playing this Detachment, you can get a lot of value out of staggering terminator drops on your “go” turn, dropping in a unit of 10 scarabs from deep strike with a terminator sorcerer attached, moving them into position with Temporal Surge, then using them to tag a key unit in the shooting phase with split fire for other units to take down.

This Detachment is also a great place for the foot Daemon Prince, as it’ll be both heavy on Infantry units to give him Lone Operative and a great place to stack Stealth on top of their other benefits. A unit of Scarabs with -1 to be hit, -1 to be wounded, +1 to their saves and the benefit of cover is a real bastard to take down.

Strengths

• Scarabs. This is the best place for Scarabs. They love the durability boost you get from the Detachment rule and get more out of the Enhancements and Stratagems here.
• Durability. This is as tough as your Rubrics and Scarabs are going to get, and anyone trying to come at you with a high volume of 1 damage attacks is going to regret it.
• Mobility tools. You have some good mobility tools here, from Infiltrate on Rubricae to Fall Back and shoot and gaining Assault on your guns. That’s a nice little suite of tools that can help you stay mobile with units that are otherwise a bit slow.

Weaknesses

• CP thirsty. With two important Stratagems here that each cost 2 CP, you’re going to feel the pain of Thousand Sons not having a reliable way to generate additional CP.
• Very elite. Terminator- and Rubric-heavy armies tend to run low on model counts and activations, and once you start losing units you’re going to feel very exposed. You need to play coy, even with your durability buffs.
• No crystal. You have some good mobility options, but they’re not amazing. You’ll want to supplement your plans with Rhinos and some faster units that can help you get around the table. But Scarabs really want the Umbralefic Crystal. If that was in this Detachment, it’d be the best.

A Sample List

Let’s build around some Scarabs. I’m going 10/5/5 here as I mentioned, and I think that’s a good starting count to test, though if you want to be a sicko and try 10/10/5 I won’t stop you.

Sample List - Click to Expand

The plan here is to put the Lord of the Rubricae Terminator Sorcerer with the 10-man unit of Scarabs and put the other with a 5-man, then infiltrate the other 5-man unit or two units of Rubrics, with the opponent and mission dictating which. The Terminators will usually want to deep strike in, though against faster opponents you won’t want to risk getting shut out. You’ll need to play a bit coy here – your game is brawling at midfield, but doing your damage with mid-range shooting.

Final Thoughts

If you were always trying to make Scarab Terminators work in the Index days like I was, your time has finally come – mostly. This is an interesting way to run Thousand Sons that offers an alternative based more around running the animated suits of armor which constitute the core of the army. 

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