TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2021, Part 18: Making the Jump to Space Wizards

December 1, 2021

Road_ThousandSons — Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing, weekly slog toward some level of competitive respectability in the 2021 ITC season. In my last update I wrote about finishing 36th at the Games Workshop Austin event, and the games I played across those three days. Since then I’ve been mashing the refresh button on the ITC standings page over and over hoping to see my scores updated (they haven’t), and contemplating what I’m going to play if I am truly leaving my Death Guard behind. Also, I got some more hobby progress done in between forkfulls of turkey and blackberry cobbler on Thanksgiving. There’s a lot to talk about.

Adding a Dice Tray to My Table

Let’s flash back two months to the GW New Orleans event: The event had just concluded, and James “Boon” Kelling, drunk on the high of having finished 3rd place at the event after a loss to Siegler on the top table in the semi-finals, suddenly found himself interested in attending Austin. The problem was that the 40k event had sold out. While he could have just shown up and hoped to get a spot – this was certainly an option that would have worked out, in retrospect – that’s not a particularly good way to go about things when you have to fly two hours and book a hotel. So I put out a call in my local campaign Discord for tickets and as luck would have it own Crab-Stuffed Mushrooms AKA “Joey Custodes” was interested in selling. He’d recently gotten over a breakthrough case of COVID and wasn’t keen to travel again. His only stipulation however was that he wanted the dice tray that came with the upgraded ticket. Boon agreed, and we set up the transfer.

Flash forward just under two months and I’m at the event looking at these dice trays. They’re nice dice trays. They have a nice finish and I like the size on them. Honestly it’s kind of bullshit that GW doesn’t just sell them. Anyways something my table really needs is a dice tray and I’ve been contemplating building one. So when Boon hands me Joey’s dice tray to mail to him my resistance breaks. I pay for the upgrade ticket pack to get a dice tray of my own (plus a t-shirt, both event models, and a minis case).

It’s a lovely tray, but the sides are a bit thin.

So now I’ve got a dice tray. And I like it! But here’s the thing: I don’t have room for it on my table. OK, I do, but it’d be in the spot on the sidebar where people put their armies. So instead I’ve decided to make life difficult on myself by mounting the tray on brackets so I can hang it off the side of my table.

This is a pretty simple process. I picked up two iron barricade brackets – they’re designed to hold a 2×4 across a door for when you want to barricade a door – because they were basically the only thing I could find that had the U-shape I needed to fit over the 2x4s that made up my table. Then I took a power drill, put two holes in the side of my dice tray, cleaned out the sawdust, and then ran two bolts through it. I went with bolts here on the chance I want to remove it later, and because wood screws would have required me to file off the pointed ends and that would have been more work than it was worth.

The end result is a dice tray that fits nicely anywhere on the table, and when it isn’t being used can be stored hanging over the inside of the table. This is important because it stops my son from inevitably breaking it or running headfirst into the obstruction on the side of the table as he runs top-speed on his circuit through the first floor of our house.

The tray in action. OK, not really – this is staged. I hate those GW dice. They roll like complete shit for me

It’s surprisingly sturdy, and can be moved around anywhere on the table with enough ease that you’d do it before any given game, but it also is hard enough to move that it isn’t sliding around. The tray worked very well in my first game playing with it. More on that in a bit.

Let’s Pivot to Thousand Sons

I mentioned this last time but I’m starting on my Thousand Sons now. I don’t know if I’m gonna like this army or not. I don’t know if I’ll have more success with them than Death Guard. But I do know that:

They will give me a break from my Death Guard
I need to paint up an army of them anyways since they’re one of the 9 traitor legions and my ultimate hobby goal is to build an army of each.

So I’ve been painting Thousand Sons. Because I’m a dumbass, I’m painting them with a more 2nd edition style scheme that uses a darker blue instead of the pre-mixed teal that the ‘Eavy Metal studio currently uses for them. I like how this looks but it means painting them is more work than it needs to be.

The process basically starts by priming them black, then coating them with Kantor Blue and doing a blend up to Caledor Sky, then edge highlighting with Lothern Blue. The yellow is Averland Sunset highlighted with Flash Gitz yellow, and the gold trim is just Retributor Armor washed with Agrax Earthshade. It’s a complicated scheme that takes forever but it looks OK. I’m pretty happy with the results for my first unit, which I finished about two weeks ago.

In addition to my first squad of Rubrics, I also painted up the Mutalith Vortex Beast. I’ve had this model for a long time. I used the slaughterbeast half to convert up a Chaos Knight and since then he’d been sitting in my bitz closet. So a couple months ago I pulled him out, dusted off the sprues, and assembled him. I went with a relatively simple paint scheme, doing mostly pinks and purples, with a bit of OSL for the flame. The tentacle maw is my favorite part, and was the most fun to paint.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the finished model, though it also seems a little simplistic to me. Getting a good angle on him was hard, but I’m mostly just happy with how gross the mouth on this thing looks.

Of course, once I’d painted it I immediately realized that it wasn’t quite good enough to include in my competitive list. I may try and make this guy work in the future, though – he doesn’t cost quite enough points to be something I can’t afford to add in as a wonky one-off. Also in my list of “cool stuff that probably won’t see play in the army” is a Sorcerer in Terminator Armor, converted from the Chaos lord kit:

The rest of my time has been frantically assembling models for the rest of the army. This means having ample soulreaper cannons and icons of flame.

It also means doing some magnetization, because while I know I’ll probably want to have Ahriman on a disc and at least one exalted sorcerer on a disc, I’m not sure that’ll always be the case, so I need a footslogging option:

So far my painted collection of Thousand Sons looks something like Magnus, the Vortex Beast, a Rhino, a Forge World dreadnought/Helbrute, and one squad of 10 Rubrics. I have a bunch of older Rubrics I can use in a pinch, but it’s not a lot. In contrast, here’s what I have left to paint at the moment, give or take one or two models like a second Infernal Master:

It’s a lot and I’m not looking forward to the sheer amount of work it’s going to be. If I really buckle down and make some hobby time, I might be able to knock out a playable army by LVO but that’s a hell of a stretch. I’ll cross that bridge when I have to start making bad decisions mid-January, though.

Playing a Practice Game with Thousand Sons

With my next tournament rapidly approaching – an RTT at Asgard games in early December – I need to figure out if I’m going to switch to Thousand Sons or swallow my pride and pack up the Death Guard for another go at things. But I’m not about to make an RTT my first experience playing a new army so that means getting in a practice game. So I invited my friend Erik over to do a test game. Erik is also testing some new armies, looking at evaluating Iron Hands. It’s not an ideal matchup for my Thousand Sons but then testing against ideal matchups is overrated.

My List

+++ Thousand Sons 2k (Warhammer 40,000 9th Edition) [101 PL, -3CP, 17 Cabal Points, 2,000pts] +++

++ Patrol Detachment 0CP (Chaos – Thousand Sons) [52 PL, 7 Cabal Points, 1,010 pts] ++

Cults of the Legion: Cult of Time

HQ +

Exalted Sorcerer [9 PL, 3 Cabal Points, 160pts]: 11. Gaze of Hate, 12. Glamour of Tzeentch, Athenaean Scrolls, Dilettante, Disc of Tzeentch, Immaterial Echo, Inferno Bolt Pistol, The Chronos Tutorum, Warlord

Infernal Master [5 PL, 2 Cabal Points, 90pts]

Troops +

Rubric Marines [12 PL, 1 Cabal Points, 220pts] . Aspiring Sorcerer: Inferno Bolt Pistol
. 8x Rubric Marine w/ inferno boltgun: 8x Inferno boltgun
. Rubric Marine w/ soulreaper cannon: Soulreaper cannon

Thousand Sons Cultists [5 PL, 95pts] . Cultist Champion: Autogun
. 18x Cultist w/ autogun: 18x Autogun

Elites +

Scarab Occult Terminators [21 PL, 1 Cabal Points, 445pts]: 2x Hellfyre missile rack
. Scarab Occult Sorcerer: 31. Empyric Guidance, Inferno combi-bolter, Rites of Coalescence
. 7x Terminator: 7x Inferno combi-bolter, 7x Prosperine khopesh
. Terminator w/ Heavy Weapon: Soulreaper cannon
. Terminator w/ Heavy Weapon: Soulreaper cannon

++ Patrol Detachment -2CP (Chaos – Thousand Sons) [49 PL, -2CP, 10 Cabal Points, 990 pts] ++

Cults of the Legion: Cult of Duplicity

HQ +

Ahriman [9 PL, 3 Cabal Points, 180pts]: 12. Glamour of Tzeentch, 12. Twist of Fate, 22. Weaver of Fates, Disc of Tzeentch

Exalted Sorcerer [6 PL, 3 Cabal Points, 100pts]: 21. Presage, 21. Temporal Manipulation, Inferno Bolt Pistol, Umbralefic Crystal

Troops +

Rubric Marines [6 PL, 1 Cabal Points, 115pts] . Aspiring Sorcerer: Inferno Bolt Pistol
. 3x Rubric Marine w/ inferno boltgun: 3x Inferno boltgun
. Rubric Marine w/ soulreaper cannon: Soulreaper cannon

Rubric Marines [6 PL, 1 Cabal Points, 115pts] . Aspiring Sorcerer: 23. Temporal Surge, Inferno Bolt Pistol
. 3x Rubric Marine w/ inferno boltgun: 3x Inferno boltgun
. Rubric Marine w/ soulreaper cannon: Soulreaper cannon

Rubric Marines [12 PL, 2 Cabal Points, 274pts]: Icon of Flame
. Aspiring Sorcerer: 23. Temporal Surge, Inferno Bolt Pistol
. 9x Rubric Marine w/ warpflamer: 9x Warpflamer

Fast Attack +

Chaos Spawn [2 PL, 46pts] . 2x Chaos Spawn: 2x Hideous mutations

Dedicated Transport +

Chaos Rhino [4 PL, 80pts]

+++ 2,000 Points, 101 PL, 17 Cabal Points +++

This list is based off what I’ve seen competitive lists running. It’s got one large block of Scarab Occult Terminators who can be buffed like crazy with different casters to control a large section of the board. There are two 10-man rubric squads in rhinos as well, one with Warpflamers and the other with bolters and a pair of Soulreaper cannons, who can do work and also enjoy a buff or two as a treat. I’ve decided to eschew psychic wound output – though it’s still an option – for mobility, and the 5-man rubric squads can capably do psychic actions like Mutate Landscape and zip around to where they’re needed.

What this list is probably missing is Spawn; they’re just very good in the Thousand Sons army and realistically I want at least 5 and probably 2×5 for testing. I’m also not sure about the number of rubrics vs. Scarabs, since I’ve seen some good arguments for running 20 scarabs recently. but at 445 points I’m not sure I want to go that deep on two units.

The big thing I worry about here is the sheer volume of shit to track. Even with cards it’s going to be a nightmare to remember who has what.

Erik’s List

++ Patrol Detachment 0CP (Imperium – Adeptus Astartes – Iron Hands) [34 PL, 8CP, 653pts] ++

Chapter Selector: Custom Chapter, Iron Hands Successor, Master Artisans, Whirlwind of Rage

HQ +

Primaris Chaplain on Bike [7 PL, -1CP, 140pts]: 5. Recitation of Focus, 6. Canticle of Hate (Aura), Chapter Command: Master of Sanctity, Litany of Hate, Stratagem: Paragon of Iron, Target Protocols, Warlord, Wise Orator

Troops +

Infiltrator Squad [6 PL, 130pts]: Helix gauntlet
. 4x Infiltrator: 4x Bolt pistol, 4x Frag & Krak grenades, 4x Marksman bolt carbine
. Infiltrator Sergeant

Elites +

Company Veterans [3 PL, 48pts] . Company Veteran: Boltgun, Storm shield
. Company Veteran Sergeant: Boltgun, Storm shield

Relic Contemptor Dreadnought [8 PL, -3CP, 175pts]: Cyclone missile launcher, Merciless Logic, Stratagem: Hero of the Chapter, Stratagem: March of the Ancients, 2x Twin volkite culverin

Heavy Support +

Eliminator Squad [5 PL, 75pts]: Bolt sniper rifle
. Eliminator Sergeant: Bolt sniper rifle
. 2x Eliminators: 2x Bolt pistol, 2x Camo cloak, 2x Frag & Krak grenades

Eliminator Squad [5 PL, 85pts]: Las Fusil
. Eliminator Sergeant: Bolt sniper rifle
. 2x Eliminators: 2x Bolt pistol, 2x Camo cloak, 2x Frag & Krak grenades

++ Vanguard Detachment -3CP (Imperium – Adeptus Astartes – Iron Hands) [67 PL, -4CP, 1,347pts] ++

Chapter Selector: Iron Hands Successor, Master Artisans, Minotaurs, Whirlwind of Rage

HQ +

Lieutenants [5 PL, -1CP, 90pts] . Primaris Lieutenant: Rites of War, Stratagem: Hero of the Chapter, The Vox Espiritum
. . Neo-volkite pistol, Master-crafted power sword and Storm Shield: Neo-volkite pistol

Elites +

Redemptor Dreadnought [9 PL, 185pts]: 2x Storm Bolters, Icarus Rocket Pod, Macro Plasma Incinerator, Onslaught Gatling Cannon

Redemptor Dreadnought [9 PL, 180pts]: 2x Storm Bolters, Heavy flamer, Icarus Rocket Pod, Macro Plasma Incinerator

Vanguard Veteran Squad [7 PL, 159pts]: Jump Pack
. Vanguard Veteran: Lightning Claw, Storm shield
. Vanguard Veteran: Lightning Claw, Storm shield
. Vanguard Veteran: Lightning Claw, Storm shield
. Vanguard Veteran: Lightning Claw, Storm shield
. Vanguard Veteran Sergeant: Storm shield, Thunder hammer

Heavy Support +

Devastator Squad [8 PL, 145pts]: Armorium Cherub
. Devastator Marine Sergeant: Bolt pistol, Boltgun
. Devastator Marine w/Heavy Weapon: Multi-melta
. Devastator Marine w/Heavy Weapon: Grav-cannon
. Devastator Marine w/Heavy Weapon: Grav-cannon
. Devastator Marine w/Heavy Weapon: Grav-cannon

Dedicated Transport +

Drop Pod [4 PL, 70pts]: Storm bolter

Land Speeder Storm [3 PL, 55pts]

++ Total: [101 PL, 4CP, 2,000pts] ++

Erik: After giving my Black Templars and my beloved oath of moment a send off in Austin I have been looking for my next list. In so doing I came upon Nassim Fouchane’s list which I copied pretty closely. Switching out the melta speeders for some eliminators due to model availability and because I genuinely like eliminators right now, in fact I had two in my Austin list as well.

The Mission: Surround & Destroy

We picked Surround & Destroy randomly from the day 1 missions from the Austin event. We’re still playing on the GW terrain. I think it’s a fine layout and I’m seeing it get adopted a bit more often at events.

My Secondaries:

Mutate Landscape
Stranglehold
Retrieve Octarius Data

Erik’s Secondaries:

Oaths of Moment
Stranglehold
Abhor the Witch

Abhor’s a no-brainer against me – too easy to max. In return, I need to make sure I score at least 12 off Mutate Landscape and outscore Erik on Stranglehold. I’m not 100% sure Stranglehold is the play here but I’m gonna do my best to snag it. Retrieve Octarius Data is another one I’m not used to scoring but I think I can use some of my teleporting units to snag two data pulls late-game.

I’m going second.

Deployment. Both units of Erik’s Devastators are in a drop pod

I don’t love that – yes, Oaths is better going second but this means I get one less turn of setup before worrying about Erik’s drop pod full of Devastators. I don’t think they have a great turn 1 play but their turn 2 punch is going to be nasty. Erik spends turn 1 moving forward and putting his land speeder on the middle left objective to snag a turn 1 Stranglehold score while pushing his Redemptors up. On my turn I unload five buffs on the Scarabs then double-move them onto the right middle objective while my two spawn move up on the left. The Scarabs do a good job wiping out one redemptor with their buffs but the spawn double fail a 6″ charge and end up losing me stranglehold for the turn and failing to get into combat, which is a pretty terrible outcome – it also prevents me from denying VP for Oaths next turn.

On Erik’s second turn he presses forward and drops his devastators down into the upper left ruin. With a combination of devastator and redemptor fire he’s able to crack open the rhino full of warpflamers and drop them to just 3 models – rubrics are just not great against D2 grav-cannons, it turns out. They also remove the Chaos Spawn and the surviving redemptor is able to take out the remaining warpflamers in melee.

Up to this point things are still in hand but I overextend bad on turn 2 and end up losing pretty decisively as a result. I Gaze of Fate Erik’s Vanguard Vets to leave them helpless against the Scarabs, but fail to kill the other redemptor in shooting and end up watching it kill a number of rubrics before falling back the next turn. Meanwhile I’m out of CP to intervene with my Scarabs, leaving Erik the ability to charge the sorcerers behind them with his other two vanguard squads. He wipes out 4 of my remaining pyskers in the following turn and the rest of my rubrics and that’s pretty much the game. I can salvage maybe a few points but talking it out it’s 86-67 for Erik. I’m able to pick up a few more units, killing the wounded Redemptor and Erik’s bike Chaplain, but without more psyker support my Terminators won’t last long.

Result: 67-86, Loss

Rob: Well, that escalated quickly. I had some bad rolls at parts, but ultimately I just didn’t play well. I tried playing my Thousand Sons like they were Death Guard and hoo boy was that a mistake. For one, I don’t have nearly the CP to work with when I’m not getting extras from the tallyman, and second the lack of -1 damage except via an expensive stratagem means I need to be much more diligent about where and how I expose my models, rather than assuming they can tank anything thrown at me. My models do more damage, but I need to make sure they have a chance to do that damage. On the army construction side of things I think the Cultists are a waste, and I definitely need to replace them with more Spawn.

The army is also as difficult to manage mentally as I’d expected, and tracking who had what powers to cast when was incredibly taxing. I need to start thinking about cheat sheets for future games and doing a better job tracking how I’m managing my psychic phase. The psychic phase took forever and I found out that once I cast powers with a character, I forgot who had cast them. I’m going to move to colored sleeves for different casters and potentially just label the backs or color-code them to bases in order to make it easy to remember who has what, though I suspect I’ll also need to create multiples of particular cards to handle where I have redundancy. I also just need to get smarter about planning those phases out and how and where I’ll need buffs. My plan is to hit up some of the discords I’m in this week and look for advice, and then check out the Hellstorm Wargaming stream of the Goonhammer Open UK matchup of Thousand Sons vs. Sisters for some study on how the army plays. Hopefully one or both of those will prove helpful.

The upside to this particular loss is that Erik’s Iron Hands list is very good, and losing badly to it on my first play isn’t particularly shameful. I’ll need to tune this up and figure out what I need to paint pretty quickly but I’m excited to learn a new army and figure out what’s possible with it. At the very least I’ve learned that they are not Death Guard and cannot be played the same way.

Erik: The list is intensely powerful – I was able to pick up big handfuls of models from range and make trading back hard. The counter punch elements of the small Van Vet squads were great especially with double exploding 6s. It is an extremely elite list so I struggled a bit to find enough pieces to play all my objectives and murder Rob’s dusty boys but the eliminators came in handy here as did putting the drop pod on an objective to hold it. I usually play more melee bully lists and I think it showed in this game I left my re-roll auras in not ideal positions for the shooting phase on turn two and pushing my dreadnoughts up further than was necessary but overall the list is strong enough that it did well anyway. I think in this game we both played our armies as if they were the last faction we had been playing but luckily for me my last faction was also black-painted marines and that my my life a bit easier than Rob’s.

Next Time: The Dallas Invitational

I don’t know if I’ll have a game update for next time but I’m going up to Grapevine this weekend for the final round of GW’s Open event series, the invitational at their Cafe/US HQ location in Grapevine. Both James “Boon” Kelling and Dan Boyd are going and it’s an easy flight for me so it’s something I can afford to swing by for a couple of days. I’m going to take an army (the death guard) up on the off chance I can get in a pick-up game but I’ll likely do some kind of live blog or recap of the event as my next update. So look forward to that and if you have any questions or feedback, drop me a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.