Goatboy’s Grimdark List : We Need to Talk About that Arks of Omen Super Detachment
Goatboy here to talk about that new Arks of Omen “Super-Detachment” and what it means for the future of 40K.
It’s New Year’s Eve weekend, aka when parents try to get to sleep and hope fireworks don’t wake up the kids. Thankfully GW gave the world a nice preview of the new updated Detachment to look at – thus allowing me to talk about it a bit. First of all – I do like it beyond all the “skew” options it gives you. If you haven’t been living under a rock and still like competitive 40k – the Skew List is here to stay no matter what you do. You live with it, build your lists as needed, and then whine when an Objective secured unit steals your candy.
The big fat detachment is a good thing in general, as it just makes building an army very easy to do. You know you need an HQ and at least 3 group choices to create the initial detachment. This is simple to do, and if you look at how starter boxes are created, it works fine. It also means GW could create more unique offerings to try and save the player some money beyond just throwing 2-3 troop choices in a box and hoping those choices are good.
What Does It Mean for 40K?
But really, what does this mean for the competitive 40k? Is a skew list bad? I think the bigger issue in all of this is the whole battle-brother option. The secret sauce that might be an issue is giving some armies access to very deadly options from another brand-new shiny codex. The Leagues of Votann, for example, are probably a faction that could be cherry-picked to add firepower to allies – who for example might either already have heavy firepower, or really need some. We’ll have to wait a bit to see, but I can easily see a bunch of Leman Russ’s with A Land Fortress or two in the future of 40K.
Chaos Knights are Happy
On the Chaos side of things – Chaos Knights are extremely happy as all their current good builds get more CP. There is also some love given to being able to hide a big Tank and allow it to come on for free. This could free up some bigger Knights to show up surrounded by the War Dog friends. A Castellan coming from the backfield edge and throwing out some serious firepower might be good enough of an option. You make it a Dreadblade and do some fun tricks, like letting it get a +1 to hit versus some of the bigger things. The removal of some of the CP drain will be helpful and let you keep some things protected in Round 1.
Daemons are OK With It
This goes for a lot of other armies too – just having some of the early game CP they could use for some protection options. Daemons could go all skew into Flamers, Exalted Flamers, and whatever other options they have. They do get screwed a bit about trying to fit in “two” warp tables but we’ll see how much that is needed. The simple Patrol side of things is an issue for a lot of armies as they can’t just take a skewed cheap detachment to fit in all the Flamer options. We also have again the “locked-in” you can’t take not matching marked daemons for those armies with specific god matches. We knew it wasn’t valid but the RAW vs RAI argument just continues until we get a locked-in answer.
Poor, Poor GSC
The poor GSC though. They again get hit in the business as they can’t take extras of their special “character” elite options. I don’t know who hates those models, but it would have been sweet if the HQ like requisition Strat let you take any extra Character you might get locked out from. It just feels like another kick to the business side of things for GSC. It makes an expensive and hard-to-play army – even more, hard-to-play.
Points are the Wildcard
Of course, all of this is without the other updates coming in the name of the Dataslate update and Points. We’ll see how much of a shake-up we end up getting. My feeling is it will probably be big. Will this create a nice crazy factor of Skew lists and brand-new “best” armies? I hope so, as it is always good to have a big game refresh and make players rethink their strategies. It does feel like LVO is going to be a crazy time as a bunch of new stuff is going to come out, change up how you play, and make you rethink. I just hope they don’t hit Chaos Knights too badly as that was the army I ended up deciding on as I need to redeem myself and my terrible usage of the Dread Mechanic.
~Who do you think are the big winners and losers of the new Super Detachment?
