TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 35: Death Guard Adjustments

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing hobby and competitive progress series for 2025. Previously on Road Through 2025, I was testing my army against the new Leagues of Votann… and re-confirming that the Death Guard were, in fact, still wildly overpowered.

Well, good news! That won’t be the case any more! Thanks to yesterday’s points update, they’re now merely very good, forcing me to grind out victories the old-fashioned way, using units that are still very good but more appropriately costed.

So it was pretty funny that my most recent game – played two days before the point changes – was a Death Guard mirror match against Steven Salazar. Steven’s a good friend and the fourth-place finisher at GW’s Tacoma Open event last month. He was on Knights for that event, but has been playing Death Guard a bit recently, and planned to take it to an event this weekend.

For this game I ran my Tacoma Death Guard list, which you can find below:

My Death Guard - Click to Expand

Steven’s running the same list, only he has a second Lord of Contagion and a third unit of Poxwalkers rather than the Chaos Spawn and an additional MBH. So it’s more or less an exact mirror match. I think the second Lord of Contagion is overkill, and he’s first on the chopping block in Steven’s list with the point changes anyways – Steven’s list can afford to just drop a unit of Deathshroud and a Lord of Contagion and still play like it did, and I honestly think that’s a fine list to run.

Steven’s testing for teams, so we did a WTC layout for this game using the FLG terrain. I hadn’t seen the terrain yet but it’s pretty cool – it’s got a lot more detail than I usually expect out of MDF terrain.

The Mission: Scorched Earth + Crucible of Battle

This wasn’t a super eventful game. Steven deployed aggressively early and I got the first turn, punishing him for deploying too close with a bunch of mortar volleys and picking off one of his drones. The goal in this game is to get the first big drop, and when Steven moved out to pick off my Chaos Spawn on his turn 1, he gave me that opening. Plus going first means I can drop my Deathshroud sooner and kill parts of his army. That meant dropping in front of him this time but when it comes to killing drones and PBCs while still being on a midtable objective, that’s an acceptable risk. This one was mostly over by turn 4, as I’d managed to kill most of Steven’s vehicles and while his Deathshroud were a problem, he was rolling horrible saves with them, allowing me to clear through them late.

Also it turned out there was a new store cat at Dragon’s Lair:

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He’s adorable, and spent most of the game on the next table over, batting around a stray die from my dicebag.

Result: 90-53, Victory

The big question at this point is what to do with my list, particularly given that I have a GT coming up in two weeks. My current Hammer list has gone up by 230 points, so something needs to change.

I essentially have two options here:

1. Cut 230 points and run Hammer anyways. This is super easy. I can drop a single unit of Deathshroud Terminators for 160 points, then I need to find 70 more. That means I can either cut the Chaos Spawn or a Myphitic Blight-Hauler. Much as I love the Spawn, the Blight-Haulers do more work overall. The net result is a list that feels almost as good to me – there were plenty of games where the spawn and that third unit of Deathshrouds were superfluous and while I’ll miss them, I think I can win my share of games with the revised army all the same. This requires no painting on my end and is an attractive prospect two weeks out.
2. Build a new list, likely around Virulent Vectorium. Mortarion didn’t go up at all and if I look at my Virulent Vectorium list from Dallas, that one is only 150 points over. Finding those points is a bit harder – I think I’d have to drop a Lord of Contagion and probably run heavier on Plague Marines – but I’m also just not as comfortable running it. I’ve played games with it, but honestly I didn’t love how it felt compared to my Hammer list. Derek’s list from the Lone Star Open only needs to shed 135 points, which I think ends up being the Chaos Spawn and one Poxwalkers unit. The other sub-option to this option is that I don’t run Mortarion at all, and instead run heavy on the Infantry. There’s a version of Alban De Polignac’s Vectorium list where I cut a unit of Poxwalkers, the Tallyman, and a Fleshmower Bloat-Drone to make it work.

If I run Vectorium, it probably looks something like this:

Possible Vectorium List - Click to Expand

That feels a bit better than the list I was running in Dallas, though I’m not sure about the lone MBH – feels like he could be another unit, like Chaos Spawn, and then I get an Enhancement on top of that. That said, I’m also not as excited about this as I am just running Hammer with two fewer units – this feels like it will lose to that Hammer list, and I think it’s worth just sticking to what I’ve got. But Mortarion looks good and if I do some work on my Daemon Prince, I can potentially sniff best painted at this event, and that’s a compelling reason to consider him in a list.

Dadhammer

A few weeks ago when I did my mid-year check in on my goals, I noted that I was running behind on my goal of playing games with my son, Bryce. That one’s still a tough nut to crack – we don’t play much at home so I need to get him over to the store and with school starting back up that’ll be harder – but what we have done a lot of this year is play HeroQuest. In particular, we’ve been doing regular weekend meet-ups with some of his friends where I run the three of them and their dad through weekly adventures.

We usually get together on Sunday mornings and there’s a brunch spread to go with the adventures. Bryce – the youngest – takes the role of the barbarian, while his friend is the Dwarf, his friend’s older sister the Elf, and their dad plays the Wizard. When

I’ve fully painted the basic HeroQuest minis from the Avalon Hill/Hasbro re-release a few years ago (review here), and I’ve been slowly collecting and working on all of the expansions. I really like how they have male and female versions of all the characters/minis now – it’s super appealing to the girls when they play.

On that note, this past weekend my niece got in on the action and replaced the dad as they took on the “Race Against Time” quest from the main rulebook. She took on the role of the Rogue, which is more complicated than the barbarian/dwarf, but not as complicated as the wizard. She’s a couple of years older than Bryce so it worked out.

They’re farther along than that makes it sound – I’ve been interspersing missions from the original campaign and the First Light campaign. This is both good for mixing things up – the First Light board gives an alternate cave layout that I think really works well to make things feel unique – and also works better for the story. While the original HeroQuest tells the story of the Witch Lord’s escape, the First Light campaign does a better job setting up Sir Ragnar’s downfall later on. But at the same time, they’re meant to happen around the same time, so it makes more sense to jump back and forth between them, which is what we’ve been doing.

These games can sometimes be like herding cats, but they’re getting better at it. At some point I’ll write an article about the games we’ve run and some tips and tricks for running games with kids. It’s been a blast and they seem to really be getting into it.

Next Time: GT Prep and Hobby Work

That does it for this week’s update but come back next week when I’ll be doing some final prep for my next GT, getting some hobby work done and figuring out my plans for Challengers Cup in September.

See you next Thursday.

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