DEEP THOUGHT: Those Units You Just CAN’T Leave at Home
Deep Thought Time – Today we take a look at those units you never leave at home.
Morning, afternoon and evening to you good denizens of the internet. Dr Love here to talk about something I’ve noticed more in my list writing – those units you just don’t want to leave at home.
Every codex has more options than you could ever take in a normal army. Even if you weren’t bounded by the FoC, you just run out of points long before you can fit everything in. But I often find there is at least one unit you just don’t want to leave at home. These units usually aren’t the really good units in a dex. They’re alright, or better than alright, but never show up in any netlists.
And yet you just don’t want to leave them behind. You field one. Or in my case usually as many as you can take. Maybe its a love of the model that drives your collections and you just want to use them. Maybe they’re just fun to play.
For me the latest iteration of this behavior is units of Chaos Spawn in my Chaos Space Marine army. Traditional net talk on chaos will tell you Fast Attack should only be used for Helldrakes or cheap Bike Squads. It will also tell you the assault is dead in 6th edition. So it shows that when I play 15 Chaos Spawn on the table at a time its not because its the most efficient way to play the codex. Its because I love playing them. My love of Spawn things continues to grow, adding in a Giant FW Spawn when I can (even though it generally does nothing) and converting mutating cultists to back them up. My enjoyment of playing Spawn has spawned (no pun intended) a fluff driven army just to play them more!
This used to show in my Eldar army with Wraithlords. I used to use as many Wraithlords as I could. A particular favorite was running 5 Wraithlords in an army (Wraithseer and Bel-Annoth for a 4th Heavy) just for fun. Although hard hitting they were never very effective. Internet wisdom says Wraithlords are a waste of points that could be spent spamming Wave Serpents or War Walkers, but I refuse to stop playing them. Because I love the unit.
So to you out there I ask this – are there any units you automatically include in an army list. Not because they’re good, or because they always make their points back. But because you wouldn’t want to play that army without them.
