Do you love seeing a unit of highly-trained, skilled soldiers executing tactics on the battlefield? Do you prefer to play as regular humans in absolute peak condition? Do you think the Death Korps models are just a bit cringe? Then the Kasrkin may be the Imperial Guard kill team for you! First introduced in the Shadowvaults expansion of Into the Dark books, the Kasrkin give us another look at Imperial Guardsmen, representing the legendary Cadian elite operatives.

Team Overview

Kasrkin, the elites of Cadia. Many tales have been told about how the planet broke before its people did. In the Kasrkin we see those tales made manifest, as the Kasrkin give us a team of highly efficient shock troopers ready to take the Kill Team world by storm. Kasrkin teams make use of a special pool of Elite points to adjust dice values, shifting a good day to an unbreakable one and a bad day into a playable one, while their vox links ensure that no trooper goes to waste. The team got off to a rough start initially, but thanks to some buffs in the most recent dataslates (Q3) & (Q4), the team is now more able to compete, using a unique, shooting-centric game plan.

Strengths

• Powerful Dice Manipulation – Elite points fudging dice deterministically allows your key plays to be relatively reliable. There’s a lot of planning you can do when you know that a melta gun should ALWAYS kill a marine, the plasma will never get hot, and your key plays can generally be forced when you need them. Taking out this variance gives Kasrkin players a lot of agency.
• Gunners, lots of Gunners – Four gunner operatives chosen from six options means you can sculpt your ranged options for any spread of match ups. While the plasma and grenade launcher are autotakes, there is plenty of room to adjust based on playstyle.
• Reactive Initiative Play – Kasrkin teams have tons of agency when it comes to managing initiative. Between Reposition’ing and initiative re-rolls, advanced players can adjust to the situations at hand dynamically.
• Flexible Tac Op Selection – Having access to three of the four Tac Op archetypes allows you to adjust your strategy to the map to open up scoring opportunities and shape your game plan accordingly. Whether you’re just trying to weather an elite team or be the storm against an opposing horde, you’ve got options to handle both.

Weaknesses

• Plain Operative Selection – The types of operatives on offer are fairly vanilla. Each one carries some weaponry, and there isn’t much complication. This can be a plus for players looking to play a simpler team, however.
• So-So Melee – Being primarily a shooting team, Kasrkin have only passable melee options. Your sergeant is generally going to be using a plasma pistol, so 4-5 damage is about all we can depend on. Luckily we can really rely on the first 5 damage, so it could be worse.
• Not that tough – Ten operatives with 81 wounds total isn’t much, but at least the team has a medic. It does mean Kasrkin players are walking a tight rope on efficiency, and you won’t have room for too many mistakes. However, Elite points can make up some of the difference when injured so it’s not as bad as it seems.
• Bland Ploys – Many Kasrkin ploys are niche, so you’ll probably be spending CP on tactical re-rolls to make up for your 4+ WS/BS.

Team Structure

A Kasrkin team consists of one sergeant with nine Kasrkin. Kasrkin teams have wiggle room on activations, but what they do have is the best comms in the game. A Kasrkin team is allowed to select four gunners and sharpshooters combined. It’s a simple team, with plenty of room to swing around that efficiency. Additionally that simplicity allows players to tailor their gameplay for the opponent at hand.

Ability – Elite

Elite points are the team’s primary ability. Each time a Kasrkin operative shoots or fights during the Roll Attack Dice step of that attack you can spend 1+ Elite points to modify one of your dice, adding 1 to the result for each Elite point spent. You can only modify one of your dice this way per attack normally, but thanks to the balance dataslate, after you modify your first dice, you can discard one of your attack dice to spend Elite points to adjust an additional an additional dice, but only to turn a failed hit into a normal hit.

This means you can take a retained 1 and spend 5 points to turn it into a guaranteed success. Teams start at 10 points, but gain 2 points at the beginning of each Strategy phase. Additionally, while your Kasrkin Sergeant is alive, you’ll gain an extra 2 Elite Points per Strategy phase, meaning you effectively start the game at 14 points and will get 2-4 each turn after the first. Considering you’ll average two successes in a typically Fight or Shoot action, that generally means scoring three overall success with a floor of 2. Importantly you can adjust even a re-rolled dice, which is a critical distinction from the Novitiates’ Acts of Faith ability.

Additionally as of Q4 after we’ve adjusted our first dice, and discarded another, we can take a remaining failure up to a normal success. Post Q4 we can reliably land 3 hits early game, which helps us in every kind of match up.

Operatives

Kasrkin Sergeant

The Kasrkin team leader, and a mandatory selection for the team. Comes with improved WS/BS and an extra wound over his fellow operatives. The Sergeant’s special ability is Leadership, which gives you an additional 2 Elite points each Strategy phase.

• One of our melee pieces, the sergeant’s Leadership is critical to generating elite points while alive. You generally aim to keep him around through tp2 if possible, though post buff losing him isn’t the worst case scenario. The reward of 2 elite points can make all our operatives that much better throughout a game.
• Ceaseless chainswords can reliably tango against 8-ish wound operatives while doing enough to knock out weakened elites.
• On the other hand our plasma pistol is critical because it allows the sergeant to make a clean 2:1 activation against any opposing team. Hitting on 3+ with Elite points means there aren’t too many profiles that can stop an aggressive sergeant.

Kasrkin Trooper

The humble trooper is surprisingly usable. Their basic ability is Elite Trooper, which gives them 1 free Elite point each time they make a Shooting action, which can make them very reliable and also makes them great grenade carriers.

• Watch out when a trooper chucks a frag grenade! Getting a bunch of 3+s with a free elite points means you can reliably get 3-4 hits per enemy operative, on ITD it’s even scarier!
• There are a surprisingly number of situations where a regular trooper can come in over the demo trooper and vox trooper. As the free elite points let your gunners do even more lifting.

Kasrkin Vox-Trooper

The Vox-Trooper is of our best operatives, but a silent one. Comes with the Battle Coms (1 AP) ability, which gives a friendly operative in the Killzone +1 APL. You can do this twice per activation, but can’t do it while you’re within Engagement Range of an enemy.

• Park him on an objective, or in the safest spot possible as losing the Vox-Trooper is worse than losing the sergeant.
• Global apl shifting twice a turn lets you invest in the present turn or the future in equal parts. Many of our best plays revolve around smart usage of the Battle Comms. When backloading APL you can invest in the future, or use our ready activations to push a shooter up in the present.
• An example would be an operative sitting behind a door with extra APL for a later turn. Allowing the first play of a turn to be some door-busting action hero nonsense.

Kasrkin Combat Medic

The Kasrkin team’s standard medic operative. Comes with the Medic! ability to revive downed operatives the first time they’re taken out (once per Turning Point), and Combat Stimms (1 AP) to heal 2D3 lost wounds on a friendly operative, but not one revived by Medic! during the same Turning Point.

• Our medic is probably more important than most other teams’ medics. When paired with our demo we can set up medic! traps that screen out objectives or recover items.
• Additionally, against any team with reliable shooting threats we use the medic to break activation parity. With the adrenaline shots the medic can maintain movement and shooting ranges. Critically you can keep a shooter with adrenaline shots in range of a medic to ignore the eventual APL penalties. Sure you keep the injury on our Medic!’d operative, but elite points can generally help us get some value out of that shoot action.

Kasrkin Demo-trooper

The grenade operative for the Kasrkin. Comes with a Melta mine which can be planted to act as a proximity bomb, and comes with Blast Padding, which lets the operative re-roll defence dice against ranged attacks with the Blast special rule or which hit everything in a range (like melta mines). It also makes them immune to the Splash X critical hit rule unless they’re the initial target of the shooting attack.

• When it comes to picking your operatives, the demo-trooper is among the most likely operatives to get swapped out for a standard trooper. With only a 6” hot-shot pistol on open boards the demo can be a liability. You’ll never not take the demo against elites, but the range of our pistol is a big minus in comparison to hot-shot lasguns against wider teams.
• Against elites an aggressively placed melta mine can screen out a marine on any midboard objective. Definitely a worthwhile trade of the demo-trooper in those match ups.

Kasrkin Recon-trooper

The forward scouting operatives for the team, these operatives have the Reconnoitre Killzone ability, which lets you resolve an additional Recon option during the Scouting step. They also have the Warden Auspex (1 AP) ability, which lets you pick an enemy operative and for the rest of the turning point that enemy target is not obscured. This guy was more likely to stay home before the Q4 dataslate, but the change to making targets not obscured makes him more likely to show up on the table.

• Another replaceable operative as sometimes we won’t have a use for the Warden Auspex or Reconnoitre Killzone. Both abilities are powerful but if you expect your elite points to be taxed on some maps you can do without. On ITD that free dash from reconnoitre killzone is probably too good to give up as it allows you to get in range of doors quickly.
• Meanwhile Warden Auspex can enable some powerful plays. Granting ignores obscurity to any opposing operative enables our strat ploys, while also making our shooting steps more deadly. Especially relevant season 3 terrain as obscurity plays a much bigger deal here.
• The recon trooper is one of our better time wasters and objective do-ers, as the warden auspex gives him global reach from the backline.

Kasrkin Sharpshooter

The team’s sniper comes with an upgraded marksman rifle – it can fire at BS3+ on its normal mode or switch to its Snipe mode, which makes it BS2+, 3/3 damage with Heavy, Silent and MW3 on crits. This operative comes with a Camo Cloak, which lets it retain an additional dice as a successful normal save as a result of cover if it is in cover.

• The Sharpshooter is important operative as hitting on anything on better than a 4+ allows elite points to do some crazy things. Generally the silent Snipe profile can reliably put out one crit and three hits backed up by some fudged dice. Those free mortal wounds do a ton of work against pretty much everything. However the Heavy can be a detriment on later turns so we don’t always rely on the snipe profile. Early on it’s a great threat!
• With two separate firing modes on later turns you can adjust the order for the situation sometimes depending on a 3+ to get you where you need to go. In those situations where we go to an engage order our camo cloak makes our cover saves much more reliable. Blocking anything with low AP with relative ease.

Kasrkin Gunner

A regular trooper, but trading out that Elite ability for a bigger gun.

• There isn’t any more than what’s on the tin when it comes to gunners. You’re allowed 4 selections between the gunners and the sharpshooters, basically letting you adjust to your opponent. I would always take the plasma and the grenade launcher. The last two choices would be based on the board and the opponents. Clearance Sweep with a frag grenade remains a powerful thing to remember to do. Each target gets a free elite point so the 2/4 blast punches up nicely.
• Meltas come in against more elite teams and on ITD. Where the ap2 and mortal wounds delete the astarte warriors. Meanwhile the 6” range isn’t a hindrance in the tighter confines of ITD.
• Flamers come in against operatives that you aren’t exactly aiming to incapacitate. Primarily against fellgor where you want to disincentivize them starting fight actions. Additionally on ITD against huge teams maybe there are reasons to bring the flamer in.
• The Hot-shot volley gun is a surprisingly solid profile, as throwing 5 dice does a fair amount to fix the 4+ ballistic skill. Since elite points can guarantee a crit you can expect to land 3-4 hits with AP1, which means the volley gun threatens almost anything.

Ploys

Strategic Ploys

Our strategic ploys are a mixed bag. With one incredibly useless ploy, a few situational ones, and an excellent one. Luckily our situational ploys are both usable so knowing when to activate them will distinguish commanders on the field of battle.

• Elimination Pattern [1 CP], A- – This is where the Recon-trooper shines especially against elites. Granting P1 to the sharpshooter and the generic hot-shot lasguns against operatives not in cover is contextually powerful. Since your elite points almost guarantee the first crit lining up three successes against two defense dice pushes damage quite reliably. This is another reason why the generic trooper has play against the Demo-trooper, as long range hot-shots can put threat down anywhere.
• Safeguard [1 CP], F – If a friendly operative is in cover, you get ceaseless on your saves. Unfortunately needing to be in cover is pretty easy to stop, so the cp is better off used offensively. I haven’t seen any good situations to use this and I suspect those situations are vanishly rare.
• Clearance Sweep [1 CP], C+ – Place a token anywhere on the killzone. As long as your target and our shooting operative are within 4” of that token you get a free elite point. This is powerful to zone out parts of the killzone as the 4” radius and is an appreciable power bump during a shooting action.
• Reposition [1 CP], A – Our most powerful strategic ploy. Select an operative and all friendlies within 3” can take a free dash. Being able to tactically retreat when losing initiative, and push operatives forward when winning initiative is an incredible ploy. Additionally reposition let’s you actively play around ploys, and is critical to scoring our Vital Objective tac op. We’ll go over some examples in our play patterns section.

Tactical Ploys

Half of our tactical ploys are easily usable. While the other half have too many restrictions to be easily usable. Knowing when to pop cover retreat and neautralise target is important. Though those situations will be rarer. I’d budget 2-3 CP for Seize the Initiative and For Cadia! in most games. Though tactical re-roll is the other ploy we expect to use regularly when we hit on 4s.

• Cover Retreat [1 CP], C – While an operative is within 6” and visible to a friendly operative. Our operatives can take a 1AP fallback action. This is a powerful ability but considering that we aren’t beating melee operatives we won’t end up having openings to use this. Against 7-8 wound teams without melee operatives this can be used to slingshot operatives into backline objectives, so keep an eye out for that.
• Neutralise Target [1 CP], C – If you’re shooting against an unready operative that is either engaged or not in cover you get relentless. The conditions make this hard to activate, though against elites our AP2 guns really sing. This is the other plot that works with our Recon-trooper but it’s not reliable enough.
• Seize the Initiative [1 CP], B+ – Re-roll initiative. A clean powerful ploy that means you can take second chances at initiative. This is definitely one of the plots we save CP for as getting a second bite at the initiative apple can break open games with good positioning. Between this and reposition Kasrkin have a fair amount of play where most teams have 0.
• For Cadia! [1 CP], B – A friendly operative gets a 5+ feel no pain through the turn, and critically an extra damage in melee. Notably this only works with gun butts and combat blades. Making any operative with those blades fairly solid in melee. Elite points guarantee you a single critical, so anyone with a blade can put down 5 damage without blinking. Great en masse against any 7 or 8 wound teams. Boosting the APL of a gunner with a blade can make for a truly miserable time for an opponent as you can grab a melee charge and a backline shoot action! Scary stuff.

Equipment

We’ve got a nice spread of equipment with a fair number of situational choices. That means you should be paying attention to what works for any given match up. I’d probably steer clear of decoy grenades, but we’ll call out the pros and cons for each equipment.

• Foregrip [1 EP/2EP], B+ – Datacard ranged weapon profiles ignore overwatch penalties. One EP on basic hotshot lasguns, 2EP on our specialist gunners. On ITD where we expect to do some Guard actions we can use this to set up death rooms with our newer Elite points. This is relatively pointless on our hotshots, and on open. Pretty solid otherwise.
• Long-Range Scope [2 EP], C – Hot-shot lasguns and our sharpshooter can take the scope to grab the No Cover rule, as long as we have a critical. With elite points we can generally guarantee that we’re getting that benefit, though no cover is most powerful against horde teams. When it’s useful, take a couple of these for our basic troopers or sharpshooter as it makes a meaningful difference against 5+ saves.
• Adrenaline Shot [1 EP], B – Once a battle when activating an operative ignore APL penalties, and movement characteristic degradation. When paired with our combat medic, we can ignore the downside of the -1APL. For 1 EP this is one of the better tricks on our team. I generally always take a shot on our MVP gunner and the combat medic when I bring a medic.
• Frag Grenade[2 EP], B- – The classic frag grenade. Great on a trooper against hordes, and somewhat middling against anything tougher than that. A kasrkin trooper with a clearance sweep token can really punish clumps while keeping your elite bank full.
• Krak Grenade [3 EP], A – The always taken krak grenade. Upgrading from a 4+ BS to a 3+ is huge, along with the incredible 4 or 5 damage profile. With elite points we can threaten to remove almost any operative, and we absolutely should be.
• Decoy Grenade [2 EP], F – Unfortunately there are few and far between reasons to spend EP on this equipment. On ITD guard actions are reasonably easy to get around with obscuring, or intelligent positioning. Against elites you can already punish hard enough with our mass of AP2 weaponry. Unfortunately those two use cases are the point of the decoy, so its not something I’ve reached out for.
• Stun Grenade [3 EP], C – Select a point within 6” and all operatives can conditionally lose an APL. At the end of the day this is usable against things like Cults or Gellerpox where the -1APL can be the difference between life or death. However it’s probably not a reliably powerful pick so it gets the situational grade.
• Combat Blade [1 EP], B+ – At one equipment point these 4+ blades are quite useful at one thing. Allowing For Cadia! to threaten anything in the 8-9 wound range. Since elite points roughly equate to a free critical you can pop a CP to get a free 5 damage dunk. Pair this fact with an operative with boosted APL, to get the classic charge, fight, and shoot that elites use so often. I’ve generally taken to equipping these on any operatives getting close to the opposing lines, as getting a clean 2:1 is very powerful.

Faction Tac Ops

We’ve got solid tac ops, especially paired with our spread of generic archetypes. We can switch between cheesy board control, or proactive objective play. Along with a dud in the Secure Zone tac op. Crafting a game plan for the board and opponent is critical for success with the team.

Tac Op 1: Vital Objective, A – During turns 2-4, you can select any objective that operatives do not currently control. If you control that objective at the end of the turning point you can get one of the two points. Importantly you can use reposition with tac op 1 to cheese these tac op points. As you can hop off an objective in your backline, then jump back on later in the activation order. Importantly enough this calls out friendly operatives so a captured objective can still have this play pattern done to it. This is easily one of our easiest tac ops, and the cheese means you can generally get this pretty safely if necessary.

Tac Op 2: Stand Fast, B- – Unfortunately for us, Stand Fast is much worse on Kasrkin in comparison to vet guard. Our more elite operative count means it’s much harder to reliably fight over turns 2-4 as getting more is hard against hordes. You could probably get away with this against elites as battle comms can force an elite player off of midline objectives pretty easily. A solid pick up against teams we out activate by more than 2, and unplayable otherwise.

Tac Op 3: Secure Zone, F – Each turn select a point more than 6” from our dropzone, and within 4” of an opposing operative to drop a Secure Zone token. At the end of the turning point if 0 enemy operatives are within 4” of that token, and you are within 4” get a point. Unfortunately this gives your opponent far too much control over scoring this which means I suspect you should almost never take this.

Notable Generic Tac Ops

Recon: Recover Item, B- – While most teams love this one, we’re not quite as well situated to contest these early. The demo trooper is my general go to when attempting this, but it’s not nearly as guaranteed compared to other recon teams.

Recon: Secure Room/Vantage, B – Contextually powerful, though I suspect I’m looking to take Secure Room much more often than I try to do Vantage. Secure rooms lets you play proactively on ITD removing opposing pieces, while Vantage requires you to spend some activations, probably playing more passively. If you have 3 mid board options for Vantage it’s probably a solid enough option.

Recon: Courier, C – When playing teams that can push the advantaged state, courier has some nice play. Where you can push one flank extremely hard then run your courier into a reasonably safe corner of a board. Unfortunately for us, with 10 operatives we’re hard pressed to give up an activation to score this. When facing down elites, or harlequins we might have more time, so we can aim to do this. Otherwise I’d probably skip it.

Seek and Destroy: Eliminate Guards B- – Incapacitate a selected opposing model that ended the target reveal step within 2” of an objective. So long as players keep their models near objectives this will continue to be reasonably scorable. If players start playing around guards more this rating may go down. When playing the Kasrkin you should actively play around opposing eliminate guards with reposition.

Seek and Destroy: Rob and Ransack, C+ – Incapacitate an enemy operative in combat, and live to tell the tale for 2 VP. We’re not guaranteed to grab this against elites, but against horde-ier teams we can aim for this. Combat blades mean most of our guys can reliably take down a single human-sized operative, and our mass of guns means we can sometimes live to tell the tale.

Seek and Destroy: Assassinate Target, B+ – We’re quite good at this, so long as opposing activation counts do not vastly outstrip us. Against elites who must get in to do their dirty work we can abuse our own elite points to snag a relatively easy 2 points.

Security: Central Control, B – Starting on turn 2 get some dorks in the center to grab that VP. Pretty solid as it forces enemy operatives to come out and play, which allows us room to get shots in. It can be a pitched battle so keep an eye out for times where you can battle comms later in the turn to surprise the enemy!

Security: Protect Assets, B+ – We’re quite good at eliminating targets on almost anything. Don’t take this against elites as there aren’t enough operatives to generally get the second point. However if you’re taking security against hordes this is generally going to go the distance.

Security: Seize Ground/Access Point, B – Situationally good when the terrain/access points look good. I’d expect seize ground to get more play than access point, but getting an opponent out of their defensive positions is a net positive for us.

Example Roster

1 Kasrkin Sergeant, Hot-shot Lasgun; Gun Butt

1 Kasrkin Sergeant, Hot-shot Laspistol; Power Weapon

1 Kasrkin Sergeant, Plasma Pistol; Chainsword

7 Kasrkin Troopers

1 Kasrkin Combat Medic

1 Kasrkin Demo-Trooper

1 Kasrkin Recon Trooper

1 Kasrkin Sharpshooter

1 Kasrkin Vox-Trooper

1 Kasrkin Gunner, Meltagun; Gun butt

1 Kasrkin Gunner, Flamer; Gun butt

1 Kasrkin Gunner, Plasma Gun; Gun butt

1 Kasrkin Gunner, Hot-shot Volley Gun; Gun butt

1 Kasrkin Gunner, Grenade Launcher; Gun butt

This roster takes 1 of every thing that matters. Critically we skip over the bolt pistol sergeant load out as it is strictly worse than the hot-shot laspistol due to the elimination pattern ploy. The rest of the roster is filled out with troopers, though honestly there is no reason to have seven on the roster. The most you’d take is probably 4, that said we have the space so why not.

Gameplans

In this section we’ll talk about building plans for taking on different enemy teams based on the type of team.

vs. Elites (6 activations)

We were made to delete elites. With up to four AP2 attacks between plasma guns, pistols, melta guns, and melta mines we are nightmare for would be space marine players. Save those four AP2 operatives for the end of tp1, and hit them with the battle comms to punish any elite players willing to make a midboard play. Getting those early punishes makes further turns much easier while you play around with Vital Objective in your backline forcing opponents to come to you. Security and Recon archetypes are my preference here as you can goad an opposing elite into coming out to play. Additionally on ITD make sure you set up defensive positions that force opponents to enter rooms, so your foregrip‘d gunners can reliably delete a marine.

vs. Semi-Elites (8-9 activations)

These matchups are all about cracking open the activation count. If you can get 1-2 activations from an opponent early, you can really delay the most punishment for the ends of turns. Truly keeping the semi-hordes boxed in. Combat blades are generally going to be great against the eldar semi-hordes as For Cadia! allows our humble kasrkin to get clean 2:1s with some level of reliability. These are teams where Seek & Destroy begins to look good, as you can spend time gunning people down and scoring points, though Recon can also give positional play more time to shine. Letting you spend later activations shooting, and early activations scoring.

vs. Semi-Hordes and more (10+ activations)

When an opponent out activates you, you’re looking to even out that activation disadvantage. I’d expect the Combat Medic to come out in most of these games. As keeping a gunner alive through a shooting attack, adrenaline shotting to ignore the apl the matchups where repositioning can also be used to bait out opposing moves, especially when measuring out charge threats throughout your opponent’s turn.

Important Tricks

• Play around tac ops with reposition! Eliminate Guards is the easiest example as you can set up midline objectives only to flee at the first sign of difficulty. Playing keep away can open up a 2 point differential which is very hard for seek and destroy players to climb out of. Additionally you can proactively score Vital Objective on a backline objective with the recon-trooper, who can do his job with his warden auspex safely in the back.Additionally, repositioning allows you to react to winning or losing initiative. This means you can make positional choices to bait opponents into doing certain things. Take for example putting a ball of operatives in a position to get charged the following turn. Only to reposition just outside of range after losing initiative. Alternatively if you win initiative, you can send someone forward while others retreat. Since you are able to re-roll for initiative, you can generally get some big value out of this area.
• Use elite points to make good shoot actions into incredible ones. Don’t try to chase bad luck with elite points. You are likely to save some CP for our 4+ BS shots. If you can line up 3 successes it’s often worthwhile to dump elite points to get 3 successes and a critical. Generally using elite points early to secure big advantages versus saving them all for later turns. Since we’re fragile our best defense is a good offense.
• Save the vox-trooper for later in the turn order when you have the activation advantage, and earlier when you don’t. Battle comms is the primary way we take our bland operatives and turn them superhuman. Remember that you can backload things if players play extremely defensively, and you can even line up 4 operatives on tp2 with 3APL.
• Don’t forget about critical retain rules. Even when the sharpshooter or meltagun’s whiff, we can still grab a critical to force some mortal wounds through. Against 7 wound operatives even a single melta critical is enough to get the job done, so don’t sleep on those mortal wounds.
• Your rules are relatively simple so focus on shaping your strategic choices around your opponent. Tac ops and operative placement should be influenced by your opponent. Especially when our operatives are all so similar in function.
• On ITD the foregrip now makes your AP2 weaponry almost impossible to assail. A melta guner that is on guard in a position to force an opponent to come into the room to ignore Obscurity is now guaranteed to remove an opposing operative from play at almost no risk. Against evenly sized teams this will give kasrkin players a huge leg up on ITD. Thanks Q4!

Final Thoughts

While Kasrkin remain a somewhat fragile team, on a normal day their ability to lay down the hurt is almost unmatched. Players who find success will need to actively play around opposing teams to find success as the kasrkin toolkit is somewhat narrow. However if you are paying attention you’ll find the team a rewarding one. As you have agency in almost all phases of the game, especially during initiative a spot people famously complain about. If you’re able to position operatives into good reposition bubbles you’ll often be able to react to winning and losing initiative. An enviable spot for many players for bemoan poor initiative rolls. Additionally the team is relatively simple, letting players who master them learn how to adapt to opposing gameplans. Hopefully kill teamers can take the kasrkin models back from the 40k players and show off some truly elite plays!

Realistically the Q4 changes are going to massively upgrade the viability of the kasrkin, so get in while the gettings good!

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