I’ve been a borderline puritanical Eldar player for the entirety of 8th edition. During quarantine I’ve toyed around with picking up a new army.
A couple of months ago, I was pretty into the idea of playing Tyranids and covered that in this article. I’d been interested in Nids for awhile. They’ve got badass models (Swarmlord) and are all about close combat, which I love. They were also a horde and their game was based around janky maneuvers. The Nids, probably more than any other 8th edition army, embodied the crazy plays you could pull off in the combat phase.
I envisioned my bright green horde of bugs swarming the tabletop; I would chomp heads, suck brains, and tri-tip everything in sight with my giant units of Hormagaunts. In 9th edition, this style of play has been hit pretty hard. I’m sure it’s still doable in some capacity, but not in the way I had originally envisioned. I’m not interested in the giant bugs. With the changes to combat, and especially the changes to how coherency work, the type of bug list I wanted to run seems dead on arrival.
So I boarded a bandwagon.
The Adeptus Custodes are cool, man. I was a huge fan of Eldar Hero Hammer. I played double avatar lists, fielded armies with multiple Phoenix Lords, and spammed the hell out of Harlequin characters. Custodes are literally an army full of character type models. Every model is basically a Space Marine Captain! There’s even that goofy strat to separate the Allarus Terminators into 1-Custode squads. They’ve got Trajann, giant robots, and access to a whole new superfaction to play around with. I’m looking forward to fielding assassins for the first time in my life. I’ve had so many headaches from Culexus and Callidus Assasins. It’s going to be nice to inflict some of that misery back on my foes.
I’ve got a badass plan to create an Eyes of the Emperor themed army. The Eyes of the Emperor are Custodians who have become a fraction too slow to be considered perfect avatars of the Emperor they were created to be. Instead, they stealth out into the galaxy and basically become something between spys and inquiistors, wear big black cloaks, and have Trajann on speed dial if they see something sketchy. So, my army is going to be the last line of defense the Imperium has if everything goes sideways.
There’s something terribly exciting about rubbing your hands together listing out what you need to buy for a new army. Custodes are also incredibly different from Eldar in terms of playstyle. They dont need a bucket of buffs to be really effective. Everyone just hits on 2s and rerolls ones to hit and wound with character support. HItting on 2s got a massive buff with the new -1 to hit cap, and there’s a very satisfying feeling to being so accurate without clenching over a psychic power roll. Sure, they aren’t able to deal nuclear-scale amounts of damage in a single turn, but the Golden Bois also have the advantage of durability in a new mission set that requires you to spend a whole turn sitting on objectives.
At the end of the day, I’m primarily a tournament player. I’m not the type to start a new army if I think it’s hot garbage. Am I about to join the ranks of other people who saw shiny new rules and decided to buy some new models? You bet I am.
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