TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 34: Votann Road Tests

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing hobby and competitive progress series for 2025. Last time around I was stuck at home, working on my painting as I waited for my house to stop being afflicted with the plague so I could once again responsibly go out and get in games. This time around I have some games to talk about and some list/event planning coming up.

Testing Against Votann

We had the review for Codex: Leagues of Votann come out last weekend and as is usual for these reviews, that means playing test games with the new book to understand how they actual feel on the table. You can easily get deep into too theoretical a headspace when reading a book without really appreciating how it all comes together with terrain and real opponents and so it helps to actually have those reps. And this goes not just for armies and codexes but also units. In our early test games with Votann, we generally discovered that YP were much more plentiful than we’d expected and staying in Acquisition was often the play, particularly in the Brandfast Oathband.

My most recent game was a practice game against Shane Watts testing the new Votann. For this game I ran my Tacoma Death Guard list, which you can find below:

My Death Guard - Click to Expand

It’s regular Mortarion’s Hammer with triple PBCs. It’s wonderful at chewing through 3W bodies, but has a ton of melee support with three units of Deathshroud.

Meanwhile, Shane was on Brandfast Oathband, playing the list he wrote up for the Detachment focus article we published:

Shane's List - Click to Expand

Shane’s got a lot of interesting units in his list but the ones that scare me the most are the Thunderkyn with conversion beamers – those 4+ crits are very nasty and even a unit of 3 Thunderkyn can kill a PBC in one volley, particularly if I put it on an objective. Likewise the Hekatons are pretty nasty – there’s quite a bit of shooting here.

That said, this isn’t really a fair fight – Death Guard just have waaaay too much shit for the points. This is more a game to understand how Votann can and should play into this matchup. The real problem for Shane is going to be the units of Deathshroud – Shane has decent shooting and some durability, but no real answer for those when they hit the table. They’ll delete anything they touch, stick around if he doesn’t invest a ton into killing them, and then nothing in his army can really handle melee threats.

The Mission: Scorched Earth + Tipping Point

We’re playing layout 5 and I’m going second. Which is great, I want Shane to come out and deal with my nonsense. I put all three units of Deathshroud into deep strike and opt for -1 to his saves as my Contagion. I’ll need that to push through damage on the land forts and Sagittaurs, and the Sagittaurs and Kapricus are my first targets, as the Dedicated Transports that make his detachment rule happen. Shane ambles up, draws No Prisoners, and shoots one unit of Poxwalkers to death but isn’t able to kill the other and ends up leaving it alive – a mistake that will cost him later.

On my turn I dump all of my shooting into his land forts and other vehicles, killing a Kapricus, one land fort, and injuring another Sagittaur. This turn generally didn’t go as well as it could have in shooting as I was hoping to get both land forts, but that’s a big ask generally. On his turn Shane dumps two units of Thunderkyn out of his living Hekaton and deletes an MBH and a PBC with them, and uses a third from Strategic Reserves to kill a bloat drone. He picks up my Chaos Spawn with Buri. That’s a solid turn, but it’s not nearly enough – on my next turn I drop two units of Deathshroud, kill Buri twice, kill both Sagittaurs, wipe two units of Thunderkyn, wipe a unit of warriors, a unit of Beserks, and the other unit of Yaegirs, and kill most of his Steeljacks.

By the end of round 2 I’m only down two vehicles, chaos spawn, and a unit of Poxwalkers, while Shane only has a couple of vehicles left, some Thunderkyn, melee Steeljacks, half a unit of shooting Steeljacks, and Uthar. I haven’t tabled him, but I’m going to. We can call it.

Was this a fair fight? Not at all. This is pretty much the Death Guard story right now – you just get too much at the current point costs. I expect the next dataslate is going to pull as much as 300 points out of this army, though I expect to see something more like 250. If I had to drop a unit of Deathshroud and an MBH, this would have been a more fair game though still tilted in my favor given how Shane played. In that regard he went a bit too “full send” but that’s sometimes how these practice games go.

On the whole I was impressed with Thunderkyn shooting – I think I’d take 18 of those guys in any given army – and less impressed with Steeljacks, though Steeljacks are horrible into Death Guard and a better play into say, GSC or Sisters of Battle.

At some point I need to stop playing these Death Guard. They’re absolutely going to get wrecked in whatever dataslate is coming down the pike, though at this point that’ll be after my next event. Speaking of which, my next GT is later this month – the Tabled Talk GT on August 30th is pretty close to me and exactly the kind of smaller GT I’m looking for. I’d normally be trying to figure out a best painted list for it but at the moment my Emperor’s Children are nowhere near ready and the Death Guard are too good not to play again while they’re like this so it’s back to the well for another round.

At this point I don’t expect we’ll see a dataslate before the cutoff for Challenger’s Cup in September, and it’d be insane not to run Death Guard at that given where everything is at, so I’ll be running them there as well, most likely.

Hobby Progress

On that note, this week it’s Noise Marines. I’m trying to get at least half the squad knocked out by next week, plus the Lord Kakophonist. Painting these guys is not going anywhere near as fast as I would like and I need to just sit down and force myself to put an hour or two of work into them each day to ensure I’m capable of hitting deadlines. There’s just so much work that goes into each model and while I love the effect, it causes the final steps to drag so much.

As a reminder, you can find the full detail on how I’m doing these guys in my section in our How to Paint Everything article but here’s the general scheme I’m using:

Final Thoughts

That’s it for this week but I have a game lined up for Friday and may get in another next week. It’s time to start testing my Emperor’s Children at some point and not just getting reps in with Death Guard. I’m 50/50 yet on whether I want to run Fulgrim in the list. I don’t love him but if he gets a points drop it’ll be hard to keep ignoring him and painting him would take a lot off my plate in terms of model counts… but he’d also be a lot of work to paint. Real double-edged sword there.

See you next Thursday.

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