In all aspects except physical, I am a Night lord.

I’ve spent the last year reading through the Dread Talons detachment again and again, and again, and each time I realize how absolutely dog shit it is.

But the picture associated with the detachment on the Warhammer 40k app has blue Chaos Marines with jump packs, blue, jump, packs.

Which legion of Chaos Space Marines has blue armour, and is most commonly associated with jump pack units?

N I G H T L O R D S

Please, refer to the first line of this post and ask yourself, how can I, the author, possibly play a detachment that doesn’t represent my truest self?

Is it true that you could take any CSM list in the Dread Talons detachment and run it in the Chaos Daemons Shadow Legion detachment and just straight up have a better time?

Yes.

But I’m not here to have sexual intercourse with spiders, I’m here to wear my cool Night Lords shirt that Aidan bought me and brag on the internet about how ‘I could totally win right now if I was playing a good detachment, but I’m playing this one instead’. Take a leadership test, idiot.

It’s 2 years into 10th edition, I had a great year playing Sisters, wasted a year of my life playing Ad Mech, and now I think it’s time to waste the rest of the edition playing Dread Talons CSM. Having a good time 1/3rd of the time is a pretty good statistic.

So, where do I start?

I should probably start by painting some Chaos Bikers. They are cheap and do an excellent job of spreading the aura ‘Terror Descends’ across the board for the cheap, cheap cost of 70 points. But none of mine are painted and they all have the wrong loadouts. This mostly involves glueing a Meltagun onto the side of each bike so I can say they’re equipped with one and swapping the Astartes chainsword on a few bikes to Powerfists so I can be O P T I M A L. Shit that doesn’t even sound hard, I might do that.

For now, this is what I’ve decided to start with:

List:

• Chaos Lord – Classic, solid, big dam, free stratagem – all the Dread Talons strats are shit house
• Chaos Lord in Terminator armour – will make more sense when you see the 10x terminators
• Chaos Lord with Jump Pack – Would it be a NL list without one?
• DP w/ wings – Would it be a NL list without one?
• Vashtorr – More like Gastorr, he’s really good rn
• 10x Cultists – Paying the Chaos tax
• No Legionaries? Not in this list unfortunately, I’d like to change a few things but this is what I’m going with for now
• Forgefiend – Str12 with Vashtorr baby
• Maulerfiend – Babysit Vashtorr and walk up the board
• Havocs – I love dudes with big guns
• Nemesis Claw – Obviously
• Rhino – For the Nemesis claw and Havocs
• Raptors – Obviously
• Warp Talons – Obviously
• 10x TERMINATORS BABY

Let’s start with the Terminators. This unit is more or less, the only unit that I will start in DS. Warp Talons start on the board, with the hopes of using their ability to go back into reserves after they kill a unit, but the terminators I want to rapid ingress as wide as possible. This to take advantage of two stratagems.

Merciless Pursuit, allowing you to charge a unit – that fell back this turn – at the end of your opponent’s movement phase. This protects your Terminators from shooting, and pushes your opponent back.

Relentless Terror, allowing you to declare a charge after you fall back, letting your terminator unit swap between targets and stopping it from being tied up. NB. It does NOT allow you to shoot after falling back.

As well as this, the Raptor unit is led by a Chaos Lord with the Warp-Fuelled Thrusters enhancement, letting you go back into reserves at the end of your opponent’s turn if it is not within engagement range of any other units.

These aspects of the list allow you to play the mission, threaten deepstrikes throughout the game forcing your opponent to screen and utilize all of the stratagems the Dread Talons detachment has to offer.

This definitely isn’t the final iteration of the list that I will be playing for this dataslate, but it works for now and includes models that are painted.

The first victim

Fresh off a team’s event last weekend, Tysons usual weekly game opponent is busy building Inceptors to run Vanguard Space Marines, so I have stepped in as the seal for which he will club.

I’m running Dread Talons, and he is running Aeldari. Unfortunately, they more or less have 6+ leadership across the board. Dead Talons is bad enough, but when you get to play into a LD 7+ army your army becomes slightly more reliable.

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I wrote all of the above before my game with Tyson, this is me now, post-game.

Dread Talons is dog shit. My list is dog shit.

Onto the game.

Thursday night game – Tyson’s Aeldari

Hidden Supplies, Search and Destroy

Tyson’s list (Seer Council): Eldar bullshit

As much as I don’t wish to run any cultists, as I believe my Chaos Warband would be better without them, they are in this list. I think I’ll take them out in the future as I want my Night Lords to taste like real Night Lords, and unfortunately cultist cucks don’t make the cut.

I deployed fairly conservatively, staged to move out to control and contest objectives.

Tyson was going first.

He drew no prisoners and bring it down, immediately repositioning a unit of Dark Reapers let by Maugan Ra and killing my Daemon Prince, big sad. Realistically, I don’t think I could have deployed anywhere productively where he wouldn’t be able to do this to my vehicles turn 1 on this deployment and terrain but it was still a little bit poo.

On my turn 1 I staged up, took my expansion objective and scored extend for 4.

Tyson went HAM turn 2, pushing up his unit of Windrider’s to kill 3 Raptors thanks to some good saves, and his unit of Dark Reapers taking the Forgefiend from 12 to 7 wounds, a bit of a whiff that I was feeling good about.

He also yeeted the Warpspider unit with Lhykhis forwards with an attempt to charge my home point, I guess? On hidden supplies. I then rapid ingressed the big terminator brick on the bottom half of the map able to heroic into the cultists if required. The Warpspiders instead, charged and killed the Warp Talons unit staging in the building.

I felt as if my turn 2 was pivotal, if I managed to remove the Windriders and Dark Reapers there wouldn’t be much to contest the Terminator brick on the far side of the map, alas, I once again forgot about the no shoot 18″ stratagem and the Forgefiend was left shooting into the wind (it actually shot some rangers holding a middle objective). Vashtorr charged and killed 4/7 of the bikers, and what remained of the Raptor unit – after being overwatched by the wind riders – charged the Dark Reapers. The unit was forced to take a battleshock test at -2, and passed, allowing Tyson to give them -1 to hit and wound, I think I killed 3 Dark Reapers in the end. The unit mostly surviving allowed Tyson to reposition them towards the bottom of the map in the following turn, allowing the Banshee unit to finish them off in the fight phase.

From here it was more or less clean-up for the Eldar, however, Vashtorr made 6 or 7 4+ Invuln saves to live against the Fire Dragons, which was very funny, but then died the next turn when Fuegan used an aspect token to auto-hit in Overwatch and I failed my 4+ invuln, with a re-roll.

It felt very difficult to play CSM after the shenanigans Renegade Raiders has. Ultimately, it was still a close game as the Eldar were unable to contest primary, I probably shouldn’t have moved Vashtorr, but if I made my 4+ it would have been funny.

Lessons

The detachment is bad.

4/6 of the Stratagems are only accessible to Infantry units, 1/6 is for Jump Pack units, which are only infantry, and the last one forces all units within 12″ and visible to take a battleshock test after any Heretic Astartes unit in my army destroys a character unit, very circumstantial considering CSM has no units that fight first.

Where to from here?

I think this detachment benefits from MSU, Infantry, Transports and shooting, but I also this it benefits from a large brick of Terminators and/or elite infantry learning into the Merciless Pursuit stratagem.

Ironically enough, this detachment is perfect for Obliterators, despite the slow movement and no way of speeding them up, unlike in Renegade Raiders where they have advance and shoot built in, as well as a stratagem to advance and charge. But we’re not here to play good detachments, apparently. Despite this, Obliterators don’t really fit the vibe of what I’m trying to achieve in a Night Lords list right now.

Units to bring moving forward:

• Chaos Bikers
• Nemesis Claw
• Rhino
• Terminators
• Raptors
• Havocs
• Chosen
• Warp Talons?
• Predator!

I think the above would work better compared to what I have been running. By including multiple units of Havocs with varying loadouts I can flex into different match ups and effectively attempt to utilize my 2CP stratagem combo’s that are dependent on my opponent failing a battleshock test…

Chosen are to help me speed up my engagements out of a rhino, allowing my Chaos Lord to get where he needs to be and the Nemesis Claw unit is just cool, man.

What I am happy about is that running this detachment and off-kilter CSM lists will lead to different, interesting games with people and lists I wouldn’t normally have the opportunity of playing against.

I guarantee you at one point I will have a single Nemesis claw model living in the middle of my opponent army only to battle-shock 7 units or something ridiculous like that.

Right now, I have quite a few CSM models to build and paint, however, I’ve locked in the above list for an RTT on the 2nd of August, and I am not looking forward to it. I might drop, we’ll see.

Thanks for reading x