Warhammer 40K: How To Make The Most Deadly Canoness of All Time
The Sisters of Battle have a new book, and it’s got really powerful combos in it. Let’s look at a crazy one.
It feels like between Drukhari and Ad-mech the humble, but faithful, Sisters of Battle have been a little overlooked lately. They also got a new Codex, and expanded rules in the Book of Rust. While it might not pack quite the same punch as Ad-Mech in the meta, it’s still got some powerful units and great ideas. Today take a look at a combo that can turn a cheap Canoness into an incredibly deadly character.
The Base Unit
So in a shocking move, in order to make a deadly Canoness, we are going to start off by taking a Canoness. Didn’t see that coming did you? For equipment this one starts super simple, give her a power sword and a bolt pistol. She doesn’t need anything else for this build. Importantly it keeps her at a stunningly cheap 55 pts. That’s all the points you are going to spend on her directly, making this easy to fit into any army points-wise.
Combo time!
To get our gal up to speed, we’ve gotta do a few other things in army building. To start off she needs to be from the Order of Our Martyred Lady. Next up thanks to the stratagem Exemplar of the Order stratagem (from the Book of Rust) we are going to give her two warlord traits. The first is from the core Sisters book, Righteous Rage, allowing her to re-roll hits and wounds in melee. The second is from the Book of Rust, Martyr’s Strength, giving her +1 S/A (up to +2) for each wound she has lost. Lastly we are going to give her the relic Blade of Sacrifice from the Book of Fire. With that building our Canoness is done, she uses a lot of stuff, but will cost you a measly 55 pts and 1 cp.
Playing Her
On the tabletop we lastly need two additional things to really make her shine. The first is having the Passion active for her. This can either be by using it as your army-wide rule, or though someone using Verse of Holy Piety on her. In addition, we also want to get War Hymm on her for an additional attack. Then, throw her into combat and let her roll.
What She Does
So here is what this lady will do. In combat she can activate the Blade of Sacrifice, spending two wounds. This will then trigger Matryr’s Strength, bumping her up two attacks and wounds. With War Hymn she’s now rocking 7 attacks at S6. Thanks to Righteous Rage she re-rolls hits and wounds (and already hits on 2+s). With exploding 6s she’s looking at 8 hits average, but up to 14. Each of her wounds, which again she gets to re-roll, translates into 2 mortal wounds, giving her great carry over VS hordes, and letting her ignore armor and invulnerable saves. At max she can put out 28 mortal wounds a turn, which is pretty impressive. She can easily wipe out a squad of Guardmen, or a 5 man Primaris unit. She’s super deadly against characters that rely on armor or invulnerable saves or damage mitigation. On average she will kill Guilliman or Abbadon in one round, pretty deadly!
An Extra Buff and Some Downsides
Now one major downside of this build is that she’s pretty fragile, and is purposefully hurting herself. If you want to get more than one turn of combat out of her, and assuming she even lives for more than one round, you need a way to heal her up. The Adepta Sororitas book has lots of options for that. The easiest is to give her the Emperor’s Grace upgrade, healing her for d3 wounds in each command phase. This does make her cost more, 75pts instead of 55pt, but might keep her around longer. It’s going to be up to you if you think it’s worth it.
Another downside to the build is that it’s fairly restrictive for the rest of your army. With this build, you can’t also take Morvenn Vahl, since Vahl must be your warlord and must take the Righteous Rage trait (you could take her without the Righteous Rage trait, but it does cut down on her effectiveness a lot). In addition, you are locked into being Order of our Martyred Lady. 55 pts to kill a Primarch or Warmaster is pretty sweet, but it might not be worth the opportunity cost. She’s also pretty prone to dying and likely will need some help getting into combat, from Rhinos/miracle dice. Still if you are playing Martyred Lady and aren’t taking Vahl, this is probably a build to look into for some extra punch.
Let us know what you think about this combo, down in the comments!
