This is the second article about the mighty thunderdome where I (Frankie) am going to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly lists to get matched up against with the space puppies.
I will talk about the good match ups first which would happen to be assault marine blood angels without Mephiston, which you don’t face too often but when you do it is glorious because they have to “come at me bro.” My tactics against an army like this is head towards them with the thunderdome and prepare for the assault or try to position myself to where I will get the charge and ultimately destroy the “assault army.” Poor little blood angels are not too great at assault compared to Thunderwolves, although they sure pay the points to be superior at it.
Another great list to get paired up against are shooting armies without strength ten such as shooting Space Wolves, shooting Blood Angels, and shooting Space Marines. Usually my tactics against heavy shooting armies is to keep the Wolf Star together for as long as possible so I can spread the wounds around so no one takes too much damage. The Wolf Star is so resilient as I have found out playing against Reece’s Bjorn wolves, with all the two+ saves and three++ invo’s plus the little wound wolves the amount of fire power needed to wither through them is ridiculous.
Moving on to the bad lists to play against, first one is tyranids as I have found out in my play testing the new list. They are a bad match up because I don’t have too much firepower to whittle them down before I make it into assault with them and their poison attacks ignore my high toughness which is what the list relies on a lot. The tyranid high weapon skill is hard for my wolves to get through as well which means a lot less hits for me. Sad day. My tactic against the Tyranids is to drop Logan into a defensive position and play back until I think I can snipe out one or two units of bugs with the Wolf Star before getting assaulted by the rest of the alien horde. Another bad match up would be anything with strength ten, like can wall orcs/ battlewagon orcs, or something with ridiculous fire power that ignores my toughness five such as dark elder venom spam. Against lists like Orks I usually separate the Wolf Star so they can’t hit the whole unit with strength ten. I haven’t faced them with Logan yet so that will be an interesting match with those five multi-meltas dropping down first turn. My tactic against the dark elder is to separate the wolf star so that there are a lot of different targets and just hope that I can roll a lot of two up saves.
Now moving on to the hardest match up for the thunderdome, which is the mighty mech imperial guard… two men enter and usually, the guard player leaves as the Master Blaster against the space puppies. The guard have too many tools to deal with the super unit, such as Psycher Battle Squads and maticores plus all the high strength weapons just eat through the wolves. My tactic against this bad matchup is to keep the unit together and hope I get first turn if I don’t then I have to hide the unit so that the psychers can’t see them. If I do get first turn then Logan shows his stuff in this match-up, dropping down from the heavens in a drop pod to make his two hundred and seventy-five points of awesome do work. I try to drop him in front of the Psyker Battle Squad and blow up two chimeras which should buy my wolves at least one turn of free movement which makes them survive a lot longer and allows me to bring the pain onto the IG mech with my strength ten. Another very ugly list to play against would be any grey knight list because they all have force weapons which means, cool story bro, I lose. I don’t think I would have too much of a chance against grey knights but I would give them a run for their money by shooting them down as much as I could and try to clean up with the superstar unit and just pray to the dice gods to roll a lot of threes.
Next week I will go over the modeling part of the army.
Here’s an update showing my custom Logan Grimnar
I think there is a potential necron list that could give you alot of trouble. Necron storm scyhte spam. Imotek hurts long fangs alot, doomscythes have s10 line attack and everyone has s7 weapon that kills your thunderwolf calv and regular marines the same and the whole list is really quick so your hit on 6’s and they fire everything. also, mind shackle scarabs usually murder individual things like a solo thunderwolf lord.
Yeah you bring up a very good point. The strength ten would hurt a lot i mainly just have to rely on logan to kill at least one maybe two of those when he drops in. I think that the strength seven would hurt a little but i think i could take it for a couple of turns of fire. And about the mind shackle scarabs yes they would hurt a lot but luckily when i have played against them i made three out of four of the leadership checks haha. Thanks for your input madival.
I thought the same thing until i saw those tesla destructors in action. I have seen 3 of the night scythes (no s10 murder) kill a 10 man tac squad (same as 5 regular thunderwolv calv) in a single turn of shooting. autocannons aren’t bad because they only put out two shots. These things are almost always getting 4+. I really want to play a list like this and see how mine does.
yeah for sure it would all come down to tactics and luck of the dice but i have faith in my pups.