Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: New Harlequins are Mean!
Goatboy here and whoo boy do the new Codex Aeldari Harlequins look pretty dang rough!
The Harlequins army is fast, priced competitively, and hits like a ton of bricks. In fact – it even has a bunk of nutty defensive buffs to add to all of this. I think the biggest concern from the Craftworld book isn’t all the powerful datasheet that are regular Aeldari. The real question is whether in fact it’s the Harlies that we all need to watch out for.
It is always interesting how a set of rules with a limited number of units seems to be a powerful choice. You can see how the Custodes are set up in the same way and the Harlies in fact feel like the coming of Custodes 2.0. The rules make them very fast and very deadly. I expect most Aeldari armies to be mixed with some Harlies and maybe will just see pure Harlie armies come out on top. Time will tell as better Aeldari players mess with the new rules.
Harlequins 101
Let’s start from the top a Harlie detachment gets to choose a Saedath to be from and there are 3. Consider them to be the roles they might play in one of their plays. You have the Light option, the Dark option, and the Twilight option. The best one is the Light option, which you will see most of the time. It grants you some powerful defensive abilities that are pretty obnoxious. The main power is that hits of 1-3 just miss for anything over 12″ away. Then it also gains the ability to always count as stationary in the following shooting phase as well. On top of all of this they even have a Stratagem that lets them move 6″ away when selected as a target of a charge. All of these things means this army is going to be very difficult to engage with if they don’t want you to.
Oh – and according to the rules a lot of things seem to stack with their light-based rules with increasing ranges or making people act like they are farther away. This would be one of the Shadowseers pivotal role abilities called Mirror Architect. This is an aura that makes units shoot at one of their units as if they are a further 6″ away. Did I mention how annoying this army is going to be?
Pivotal Roles… & Rerolls
The Pivotal roles are like the Exarch upgrades for your Harlequin characters. You have some fun Auras like adding 1 to charge roles with your Troupe Masters. Exploding hits for your Death Jesters which sounds lovely to play against. Heck the Solitaire even has some fun rules that let them charge easier or auto-advance with a role of a 6″. Since the army as a whole can advance and charge you are not escaping their dancing grasp of death.
On top of all of this they also get a batch of rerolls dependent on the battle size. They get this at the start of each battle round and they can just use them as a reroll so basically a fun extra batch of CP only useable for one Stratagem. This seems amazing as you can just bank your CP for some fun Stratagems that the book is full of for Harlequins. Oh and you can gain more as you roll up to 6 d6 dice to see if you can gain more. If ever dice is unique you gain as much extra Rerolls based on how many d6 you rolled. Just roll one you start off with 4 Rerolls each battle round. This seems pretty dang spicy.
Warlords & Relics
Their Warlord traits are limited to 3 basic ones and then one for the Saedath. I like the one that allows your warlord to treat one saving throw as a roll of a 6 as that seems handy. The Light one seems good for Shadowseers as it increases their Auras and spells as needed. Their Psychic is good as you have some movement abilities that won’t let you assault but you get to shoot. You have some more protection that can stack up with some of the Light powers that give you a form of Cloud of Flies. There is also the old 6″ FNP aura they used to have as a spell too. There is nothing that screams stupid broken but there are good ones to be had within this spell group.
Their Relics are a ton of weapons with an Auto Hitting sword that seems fun. They also get a nice 5+ FNP versus Mortal wounds relic Aura that seems pretty good. Overall they are not completely amazing but this is the Harlies and they don’t need anything much better than some sweet swords and aura options.
Stratagems
Their Stratagems seem pretty dang amazing and deep. There is a reason they stacked a ton of rerolls on them as they will burn thru these pretty quickly. You have the old standby of giving an infantry unit a 3+ invulnerable save during your movement phase. You get a +1 damage to melee weapons with a 2 CP stratagem that can just rip through units. It allows a maximum of 3 damage but getting your damage into that range seems pretty brutal. Heck, you can even do some fun combo strats to give 3 different characters 2″ of extra movement and a +1 to their charges. Oh – and there is nothing better than a fight again strat for 3CP. There are also a lot of ones based on the type of weapon they have with abilities to cause more mortal wounds or ignoring invulnerable saves.
Bounding to Victory
This army is designed to cut you up and it will get there in a hurry. There isn’t a bad dataslate as they are all useful for this army. It reminds me of Custodes again with a limited set of options but all of them are good. That is where the issue will be in that a regular Troupe squad can be just as deadly and a heck of a lot cheaper than some of the Aspect Warrior options. A 13 point troop unit that can just be a little murder machine is a pretty spikey pill to swallow.
Do I think will see this army overtake some of the Dark Eldar players? Maybe, as it feels like a nice change of pace but along the lines of what they were used to. It feels like this army is just going to be a rough one to face on the tabletop as you have to invest a lot to get there and do some damage as they cut you to death. Thankfully the old Fusion boats are gone and we are left with just a bunch of brutal Space Elf Juggalos.
*Laughing in mime*
