Gunum’s Guns

Hey, everyone! Chase “Gunum” Garber here with my very first breakdown of a major since joining the team here at Goonhammer. I am a founding member of the Warhogs ITC team along with Cyle “Naramyth” Thompson. I am also the current, and maybe only, Best-in-Faction ITC Khorne Daemonkin player. I am also currently ranked 4th in the ITC rankings for Dark Angels players and recently piloted this Dark Angels list at the 2019 Iron Halo GT to a 4 – 1 finish. I’ve made the pivot to Dark Angels this season due to being a big Chaos player who wanted to get into the Imperium side of things, so the 100% innocent Dark Angels felt like an easy adjustment.

List Breakdown

I have played a lot – and I mean a lot – of practice games with Dark Angels. Since it was a new faction for me, I wanted to make sure that I flushed out all of my options. As I played though games and tried out units and interactions, I landed on the following list. You’ll notice right away, there are no Dark Angel-specific units in this list. When going into this competitive meta having a 300 point unit of 2-wound Black Knight bikes is more of a liability than something you can count on. To be able to survive in a world that is now overrun with armies pulling from the new Space Marine codex along with the White Scars and Ultramarines supplements, I could not rely on any of the Wings besides the Green Wing as a reliable option.

So as Dark Angels light, I decided to maximize my firepower and durability with board presence. I went with the two Aggressor squads so I would have a great backfield baby sitter and also an option for my Executioners’ transport capacity. Putting the other squad inside of the tank gave me an option to push up the table with an angry beehive. People could focus on the Executioner instead of the Leviathans and when it would die, suddenly there would be an angry squad of Aggressors starting down whomever just laid into the tank. I’d use the troops to essentially zone out my deployment zone using the Infiltrators to keep a nice 12’ perimeter out around my dreadnought and objective. I’d use my Close Combat scouts to as sacrificial lambs, jumping in front of knights as a move blocker, or putting pressure on bonus point objectives.

The Dark Angels’ Chapter Tactic, Grim Resolve, is notoriously good* (read: bad) but in this case it was honestly helpful for accomplishing the things this army wanted to do. Leaning into the Eliminators, Aggressors, and the Leviathans and their want to stand still and shoot things, having the ability re-roll hit rolls of a 1 for not moving helped, and it meant I could place snipers in forward locations where they are outside of the support of my Captain who’d be back babysitting my armor pile.

The Leviathan’s and the Executioner’s jobs were simple: Kill Everyone, which they did. One big benefit of being Dark Angels is getting access to two key abilities. The first one is Weapons of the Dark Age, which gives a plasma weapon +1 damage. Using that on the Executioners S8/9 -3 Dmg 1/2 gun was a blast (Editor’s Note: We talked about this way back in July, when we covered the Executioner’s points increase and talked about how the plasma variant stacks up to the Laser Destroyer variant in Dark Angels armies. You can find that mathematical analysis here.). Pointing at anything with 2d6 shots of Plasma usually should turn into around 12-15 wounds.

The next big trick in this list that I wanted to take advantage of was my Warlord Trait – Target Priority. At the time of this write-up, the Dark Angels are still drawing their Phobos choices from the Vanguard Space Marines supplement out of Shadow Spear. This allows for some slightly different interactions that my army can take advantage of that Codex space marines can not. Target Priority allows me to choose a unit within 3” of my warlord and give it +1 to hit against an enemy unit that the warlord can see. This worked out very well for both my overcharge plasma-cutioner and for my Leviathan dreadnought, which would be able to move and still fire at BS 2+.

The final thing that went into this list building was planning for ITC Secondaries, and you’ll notice quickly that there are very few options for easy secondary choices here. I have 3 targets for Big Game Hunter, those very same 3 targets are the only targets available for Marked for Death as well. I do have four characters so Head hunter’s an option, and I have just enough squishy units to encourage a Butcher’s Bill choice. Overall, annoying choices and a few 3-point choices made me feel really good about maneuvering my opponent into maybe choosing bad secondary choices.

There was no pregame for this list, as I did not need to purchase Chapter Masters or any of my terrible relics. So I had 9 command points for every game, and sallied forth with well-justified exuberance!

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