TACTICA: Black Templars Introduction
Guest Tactica by Darkwynn:
Hey guys today we have a quick and dirty primer on the Black Templars by one of the best Crusaders around, Darkwynn. This article will go into the basic strengths of the army and common buildouts you can both try out or expect to see on the 5th edition tabletop. Darkwynn, take it away…
Hi guys, Today let’s go over the Black Templars, one of those armies that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention and has a lot of hidden strengths in 5th edition. The article is going to go over a brief breakdown and cover the basics of the army. The Black Templar army is currently one of the strongest hitting armies out there if not the strongest, hands down!
Vows
With the current set of Vows an the changes they underwent in 5th edition, the army can just be brutal. They have four vows to choose from but I am going to go over the main two you will se seeing:
-Accept any challenge no matter the odds: This is the bread and butter vow of the Black Templars. In 5th edition, this allows your whole army (except neophytes) to have the Preferred Enemy USR! This vow only gets better when you have more marines on the board. The vow is 50 points but well worth it if you have over 40 marines in your army.
-Abhor the Witch: This is the second vow that is very good and a lot of people don’t give it the proper credit. This vow can come in very handy as it can allow your squads a d6 inch move (which you can reroll with Crusader Seals) before the game to close the distant towards an enemy psyker. Basically this allows you to get into thier lines one turn earlier which usually can turn the game around for you. Do you remember any games where you knew you could have used that extra turn in assault to turn that close defeat into a victory? Enemy psykers are more common that most folks realize.
List archtypes:
There are three basic styles of list that the Black Templars excel at, but these work best if you use them in a “pure form” and don’t mixed styles. Remember for all of these styles, your opponent is hard pressed as you can now run in the shooting phase, and any fire into your infantry usually only get them Righteous Zealing into assault even faster…yikes!
-Crusader Horde: Perhaps the most powerful list. This is really a tough army for anyone to play. It can beat down Orks and overwhelm marines. The only people who are going to give you a rough time are Jwolf’s IG >.< ( the list hates battle-cannons; and any other heavy ordinance list). The basic idea behind this list is to have so many bodies the foe can’t cut through you fast enough because you are running multiple 15 man squads. You are also staggering your charges so if one of your units charges or gets charged you are able to support them with two other units. Run your units in an interlocking chain. The con of this list is very little anti tank. I usually equip my squads with a powerfist and a metla gun and I can handle most of the tanks on the board. You just won’t have any long range hitting power. -Mechanized Crusaders: I Think mechanized lists are going to be growing in 5th edition quite a bit; especially with the growth of Orks in the tournament scene. The Mechanized list is usually one or two land raiders with rhinos cruising alongside for all your squads. This list is extremely fast and hard hitting. The best thing about this is it is fast enough to allow you to use divide and conquer tactics as you have much more ability to focus your efforts on isolated elements of the enemy. The list’s problem however is once you start losing one or two tanks it can go downhill very fast. This list is the most flexible for any player and probably a good starter setup for new Black Templar players.
-Crusaders from the Sky: The dreaded drop-pod list. First off, I want to say for 1500 points or more you really need to get 8 or more drop pods in your list. Otherwise the army will be to hit or miss. The more drop pods the better as you can reliably get at least two or three drop pods per turn and not come in piece meal. Again this has some very good abilities with the army and fights in a similar way as the mechanized list does. You hit one side of the enemy army and overwhelm it.
~Thanks for reading this far, and keep your eye’s peeled. I will be putting up sample armies for the three Templars Archtypes listed above soon for you all to play around with. lets hear what you think about the Black Templars and what you’ve seen on the 5th edition tabletop.
