TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 14: Deathwatch Tests

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2025. Last Time Around I was hopping back into the Ettin league, getting in a game with my Creations of Bile list against Connor’s Siege Regiment. This week I’ve got another League Game, plus some hobby progress to talk about. It’ll be a pretty light update this week.

The Game: vs. Franklin’s Deathwatch

Franklin’s in my pod and running a Deathwatch army. I played a practice game against Shane’s Deathwatch before Clutch, and while that was a very different list – running just six big units, primarily of Gravis marines – I learned enough to know that the Deathwatch will hit you like an absolute freight train when they come in.

For this game I swapped back to my standard league list – I wasn’t sold on the extra Obliterators and my opponent in the prior game wasn’t keen on swapping lists, primarily because he had the pre-dataslate rules for Guard locked in, and I totally respect that. The upside is that this put the “no deepstrike within 12” Enhancement back in my army, and that could come in handy against uppy-downy shenanigans.

Franklin's List - Click to Expand

This isn’t too bad, all things considered. The Gladiator Reapers will kill any unit they fire into with an assist from Oath of Moment, and the Terminators are going to be an issue, but otherwise I can handle the rest pretty well. The Deathwatch’s biggest problem is its lack of units; there are thirteen units here and they’re pretty beefy and expensive, which opens things up for my units to trade up effectively if I can get the drop on him.

The mission: Linchpin / Raise Banners / Dawn of War

I’m Going First. 

That’s not ideal but this is a good mission for me – Plague Marines, Legionaries, and Nurglings are all BATTLELINE and while Nurglings are OC 0, they can raise banners if I have another unit on the objective to control it while they’re on it – Rhinos are great for this. I draw Bring it Down and Assassination on turn 1 (both are p dead), and decide the thing to do is drop banners on each objective with Plague Marines, so aI can get 4 down immediately. I managed to kill half of the Talonstrike team through th ewall with my Obliterators, but that’s about it for turn 1.

On his turn Franklin wipes out my Plague Marines on the right side of the table and takes out a few Chosen while on the other side of the table I lose some Legionaries and a fe more plague Marines. On my turn 2 I manage to get into combat with one of his Gladiators, making things more interesting as I dominate mid-table. Franklin has basically ceded that middle to me, and I manage to hold on to the objectives on either side of it pretty well.

There’s some early back-and-forth but this game ends up being pretty short – Franklin doesn’t have a ton of units and losing two or three starts to take its toll. Things come to a head on Franklin’s turn 3, when he goes to make a key charge with his surviving veteran squad and re-rolls his 4 into a 4, whiffing on a 5″ charge twice in a roll. That’s brutal, and basically the game. I was pretty far ahead at that point and he needed that charge to make something happen. When he didn’t we were pretty comfortable calling it.

Overall this was a fun game, if short. Franklin essentially ceded the middle of the table to me early on to avoid getting charged and carved up, but then split his army along the left and right side of the table. That’s not something he’s generally equipped to do with Deathwatch, as he just doesn’t have the unit counts he needs to split his army that way. He’d have been better off pulling back a turn and making the middle of the table a killing zone for his tanks. Even if he’d made that 6″ charge with his DW veterans on my Vindicator, I’d saved some CP to Heroically Intervene with the Plague Marines, where I could likely wipe his unit and keep my lead on primary scoring (it was 15-3 at that point and I was about to claim his home objective).

This was a game where the Plague Marines paid off, giving me the kind of flexible, deadly unit at 90 points that could do actions cheaply and trade up into small but deadly units of Deathwatch. Terminators are a real issue for me and this army – I need Obliterators and the tanks to handle them and if they stay out of line of sight they can pick me apart or use Oath to do some real damage before I spot them. I don’t think I’ll do well into the Dark Angels list in the pod when I have to play it, but we’ll see how it goes. That may be a place where I need to use the Nemesis Claw, who have a high volume of D1 AP-2 attacks and can get +1 to hit/wound and re-rolls.

Result: 88-58, Win

Hobby

The big hobby progress I’ve been making was on the new Goremongers unit for Kill Team. I had these in the works last week but couldn’t talk about them before Saturday’s review dropped. I talked about these models in more detail in our review of the Blood and Zeal boxed set, so go read that if you want all the details on how these guys were assembled nad painted.

The short version is that these guys painted up pretty quickly, though I still have three to go. They’re a neat unit and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of rules they get when they make the jump to 40k.

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In that regard I’ve chosen to give them all melee weapons as I don’t think there will ever be a world where I want to have dual pistols on a Goremonger in a game of 40k. Painting these guys reminded me that I need to go back and paint my World Eaters but I’ve still been working on my Emperor’s Children and they’re the priority right now.

Next Time: Finishing Up the League

That does it for this week’s update but I’ll be back next week with another update. The Ettin league ends on Sunday evening, and I have two games left to play, with one lined up today and another I’m trying to get in right before the deadline this weekend. Hopefully I can get them both knocked out and finish this thing off.

See you next week.

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