Detachment Focus: Traitoris Lance

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 Traitoris Lance from the Chaos Knights Codex.

The new Chaos Knights book is here and with it comes a brand new shiny Army Rule. The old rule wasn’t much to write home about and the new one, while an improvement, has some things to be desired. The Traitoris Lance detachment aims to juice that rule up and let it flex its muscles. Is it enough to carry the army? Let’s take a look.

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

Detachment Overview

Traitoris Lance is your jack of all trades Detachment that focuses on the Army Rule. This won’t really change the way you were going to play, as there are stratagems here for everything, but it lets you double down on the things you wanted to do anyway. It still has a Battle-shock focus, which isn’t ideal, but with a few more tools to make Battle-shock happen you can be a bit more consistent.

Detachment Rule: Paragons of Terror

At the start of the first battle round you can select an extra Dread ability to be active for your army. This may not sound like a lot at first but it actually changes the roll vs selection calculus quite a bit. Usually most armies will pick Darkness and call it a day, this lets you roll 2, get a gameplan together, and then either select Darkness after or the missing piece to a combo you can put together. -2 Ld, forcing Battle-shock below starting, and +1 to wound against Battle-shocked units can go a long way to help you punch up. 

Enhancements

Since your only characters are big knights now, these can only go on bigs.

• Nightmare’s Master (20 pts): At the start of the fight phase, everything in engagement range of this knight must make a Battle-shock test. Usually this would be a bad enhancement, but in Chaos Knights this moves all the way to mediocre. While you get a chance to activate your buffs, you really want to be shocking your targets in the shooting phase if you can.

• Tyrant’s Shadow (25 pts): This is your normal sticky (keep it under your control with nothing on it) objective enhancement but it also makes markers you sticky have the Deathly Terror (-1 Ld) ability. The sticky part of this is great, Knights are gonna be light on the board and maintaining control while you go do more important stuff is a very valuable asset. The Deathly Terror part is not. Similar to the Death Guard’s similar ability, you’ll probably be in dread range of things that would be in range of these markers and if not, they’ll take it before it matters.

• Malevolent Heraldry (30 pts): This enhancement lets you reroll any dice when generating Dread abilities. This is a must take in this detachment. Rolling doubles on the first turn is not a risk you can take here and it really helps you juice the army rule.

• Veil of Medrengard (35 pts): Gives a knight a 4+ invulnerable to shooting and a 5+ to melee. This is a great upgrade but hot damn is that expensive. For that cost you can take another unit of Nurglings, which in most situations is more valuable than over investing in a fragile platform like the big knights.

Stratagems

There’s a wide swath of abilities here, with a couple having a Battle-shock focus and the rest being general buffs to your knights.

• Pterrorshades (1CP): One of the few useful stratagems from the index detachment. When an enemy unit fails a Battle-shock test within 12” of one of your knights, you can roll 6d6 and on every 4+ do a mortal wound and heal that knight. This is a fantastic way to both punish your opponent and keep your knights topped off. For some reason this is now restricted to once per battle round however, which curbs some of its usefulness.

• Conquerors Without Mercy (1CP): In the fight phase, pick a knight that charged this turn, and it gets +1 AP in melee. If you kill anything, all enemies within 6” must take a battleshock test. This is great for making your sweeps more deadly, especially on the Warpstrike Claw, or even just making sure your Slaughterclaws rip through armor. The 6” Battle-shock thing is more situational, but can be good for getting your debuffs active nearby.

• Disdain for the Weak (1CP): Gives a knight a 6+ Feel No Pain in the fight phase, or a 5+ if the attack is from a Battle-shocked unit. This is really only worth doing if you get your Battle-shocks off, otherwise save your CP.

• A Long Leash (1CP): Pick two War Dogs and an Abhorrent knight and those dogs are treated as being in range of the Abhorrent’s abilities. This is great for making sure your far ranging karnivores keep their Rampager buff.

• Imperious Advance (1CP): Another returning star from the index detachment. This allows either two War Dogs or one Titanic unit to move through terrain or models in either the movement phase or charge phase. This is an amazing ability, letting you stage charges or react to your opponent’s movements with ease.
• Storm of Darkness (1CP): In your opponent’s shooting phase you can select a knight targeted by an attack and it gets Stealth and Cover. This is a great defensive stratagem, although it overlaps a bit with the Darkness ability a bit. That said your opponents will often be within 18” and the cover is a nice bonus.

Playing This Detachment

This detachment doesn’t really demand a specific gameplan, you can take whatever and get some value out of it. That said, stuff that can force Battleshock tests will be helpful for making sure your abilities can stay active. Abominants and even Executioners can help here, and there is plenty of Daemon support that can help that.

Strengths

• Lets Your Army Ability Shine – Most of the time, the Chaos Knights army ability is not the most impactful in the game, with this detachment ability it can really get where it needs to be.

• Great Stratagem Support – There’s a great suite of stratagems here, especially if you can get things Battle-shocked.

• A Flexible Detachment – This detachment doesn’t lend itself to any specific loadout of knights, so as points and abilities change, this will always stay an option. 

Weaknesses

• Battleshock Focus – No matter how you slice it, Battle-shock is still a bad ability to hang your hat on. If you can get the -2 Ld going it becomes more consistent, but you’re still rolling to see if your abilities do anything.

• High Variance – Since this relies on you rolling on your Army Ability table, your gameplan is very reliant on getting average luck. If you roll doubles on turn one, you’re effectively removing any benefit this detachment has. 
• Nothing Outstanding, Just Solid – While this is a solid detachment, there’s nothing eye popping here like the 21” move stalker in Infernal Lance, the Uniqueness of Lords of Dread, or the obvious skew Houndpack. 

A Sample List

This list aims to have the Abominants force battleshocks where their needed and otherwise just throw knights at your opponent until they stop moving. There’s not really a ton of nuance here outside the fact that you absolutely want Malevolent Heraldry so you can keep your army ability consistent.

Final Thoughts

While not the flashiest, this is a pretty solid detachment and a great one to start with when learning the army as it’ll teach you a little bit of everything. I wish there were more ways to get things Battleshocked here but what can you do? Even without that, there’s a great toolkit here to stomp some loyalists with.

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