TheChirurgeon’s Road Through 2025, Part 43: Pivoting to Night Lords

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing hobby and competitive progress series for 2025. Previously on Road Through 2025, I was looking at my painted Emperor’s Children and making the difficult call to keep them back for the World Championships, instead opting to go back to my Night Lords as an army I could conceivably actually finish. But that means I need to re-acquaint myself with the army and well, it has a lot more rules to learn than the Death Guard I was running. I spent the first quarter of the year playing Chaos Space Marines, so there’s some experience there but man, this is just not an army I think has the same punch as Death Guard.

With that in mind I needed to get in a practice game so I called up my buddy and Ottawa teammate Garrett, who brought his Space Wolves over for a practice game with the list he was planning to run.

My List

As a refresher, I’m testing Liam VSL’s Veterans of the Long War list from the London GT. I’ve seen friends try and run this before and it never seems to get there. Let’s take a look:

Liam's List - Click to Expand

OK, so I see some of what’s happening here. The Destructors are cheaper than a Vindicator and points are tight, and they’re pretty good with Sustained Hits or Lethals anyways. The Chosen brick with Bile is a mainstay of lists, and you need Cypher to help them stall momentum in the midboard. The Obliterators can happily drop down out of Line of Sight and use their once per game Indirect Fire with the Oath of Moment Detachment ability to push through damage, though against big targets those D3 shot meltaguns are very inconsistent, to the point that I suspect you should just never shoot that mode.

The Warp Talons… are weird. They feel like more expensive Possessed and at cross purposes with the list. I can see how you cycle the Noise Marines back into the Rhino after the Chosen get out but I’m probably going to have to watch more of Liam VSL’s games to get a feel for how it plays.

The bikers are good utility, but I question putting plasma guns on them since overcharging with them seems like a recipe for disaster. This leads to a specific back-and-forth in our Discord when I suggest doing a dark pact and Hazardous is too much risk:

Let’s put a pin in this conversation.

Garrett’s List

Garrett’s list is basically what Team Poland ran at the WTC:

Garrett's List - Click to Expand

Those Predator Annihilators are absolutely devastating with the Rapid Fire butt pat from the Iron Priests. Those give the list quite a bit of ranged output to supplement its nasty melee units – that ten model Wulfen unit with the attached character is very nasty, even if they no longer have the Feel No Pain. I need to pop the Repulsor early if I want to have a chance in this game.

Practice Game: vs. Garrett’s Space Wolves

Garrett comes over on Sunday afternoon and we get started. This isn’t an amazing matchup for me but it’s winnable. We’re on Crucible of Battle + Scorched Earth and I end up going first, which I really don’t want – I’d rather Garrett have to come out and expose himself first, and I double my problems by drawing Area Denial turn 1 and needing to throw out a sacrificial unit turn 1. My goal here is to still stay out of range of Garrett’s units, and the Chosen can sit around and rely on the ability to fight first as a way of staying out of trouble.

Garret has a pretty good shooting turn, picking up my Rhino and one of my Predators getting a clutch damage re-roll on his Hunter Killer to take the Predator down. Then I shoot my Chosen at his Repulsor and, getting some gross dice, fail to kill it – it stays alive on 2 wounds. That’s devastating, as it means Garrett can basically trap me into a bit multi-charge the following turn that limits my ability to punish him with fights first.

At the top of the battlefield, Garrett crashes in with a unit of three Thunderwolves. I need to kill those, so I fire up Sustained Hits pact with my bikes and their meltaguns (I went with those over plasma), and promptly roll a 4, then a 5 for their test. Then three mortal wounds, killing one before it can shoot.

That’s more or less what I expect to happen every time with those fucking bikes, and so far they haven’t let me down(?). The Wolves live when I just biff the melta wound rolls and that ties up the northeast objective. The dice weren’t insane in this game but they were weird enough to create some very bad outcomes for me early that snowballed later.

That said, I also way overextended with my Chosen, and they end up dropping on round 2 to the combined forces of Bladeguard, Headtakers, and Ragnar’s Blood Claws. Had I felled the Repulsor a turn earlier, this likely turns out better. I also kept my units in the Rhino on my point too long – the Wulfen end up killing the Nemesis Claw but mostly die to the Chaos Lord and his supercharged hammer.

The big dice failure that cost me though was those Noise Marines, who came in from reserves and killed basically nothing. Just didn’t get a single Wulfen. Insane shit, and they’d mostly die the following turn.

I’d eventually get them with Grenades and the other Predator. The Obliterators came in and did some work, but not enough and they dropped too many saves. I just didn’t have enough stuff by this point and the Warp Talons didn’t get enough done, either. I’m not sure how to use those yet. I’m likely still bringing them because I have them painted, but the question that kept running through my head here was “Why am I not playing a different Detachment?” Creations of Bile and Renegade Raiders and Pactbound Zealots all feel better and have solid tools as well. The real juice in Veterans is that Fights First stratagem but keeping 2 or even 3 CP (Grimnar dropping the +1 cost aura is rough) around to use it means you aren’t getting value out of the other Stratagems. Much as I like what’s here, having another Advance and Charge + stat boosts in bile just feels better.

Oh, and the second time I fired those bikes? The died again to a failed pair of pacts before shooting.

Result: 68-90

This one might have been closer had I draw better secondaries but I think I needed to just play more reactively, letting Garrett come to me and using the army’s units more as tools to remove things than charging forward like I might in Bile. That’s difficult, especially against Space Wolves, where the plan can be to overwhelm you and put you in jail with melee units early.

If you want my running commentary for the game, well, here you go:

And look: Liam VSL is a much, much better player than I am. No doubt about that. But it’s been more than a year now and no one else really seems to be able to make this list work. I feel like I’m better off taking Creations at this point, since I’ve at least played them and minor tweaks to that will feel better to play with.

That said, I’m definitely at a point where the models I have painted are partially dictating this. Let’s jump over to the Hobby side.

Hobby Progress

The last week has involved a ton of assembly and tweaking, but here’s where I’m currently at, with a set of models that I need to run regardless of whether I go Veterans or Creations:

Cypher isn’t up there, but he’s in the mix too, and I have the Predator if I decide to run that. Right now I’m thinking that the Noise Marines may not make it into my final list, and I can use the points from them to turn the second Predator into a Vindicator and buy some other utility pieces, or a unit of something like Plague Marines. I’m not entirely sure yet, honestly.

I need to paint five Chosen, and I’ve been converting those with Nemesis Claw bits, and having fun with them. For the champion I’m doing one with the Aspiring Champion model:

On a similar note, I’ve been doing small conversions to the remaining five Warp Talons. For these I have a bunch of Heresy Night Lords heads I’m planning to use, to give them a sleeker look than the Raptors I did last year, and make them look a bit different:

And for the Obliterators, I’ve added a few minor touches to make them stand out. Mostly Night Lords heads:

Oh and that’s an old Terminator Reaper Autocannon up there. The Chaincannon broke off or was cut off at some point before this – I got this Obliterator on a sprue from Goatboy so it’s likely he took it – and this was an easy replacement that also helps hide that the Obliterator kit only has two poses.

It’s still quite a lot to paint, but I’ve gotten pretty efficient at painting Night Lords so I think I can manage it, plus a few of those are already in mid-painted states, and that helps.

Next Time: Hobby Panic, Probably

That wraps up this week. I’ve got a lot of hobby work done but a ton more to go and that’ll likely mean this weekend is paint-heavy. I want to get in another game or two and will be trying to find opportunities to do that but if I can get three games in before the World Championships that’ll be pretty lucky on my part. Switching to a Creations list similar to what I ran earlier in the year will help a lot with that.