Warhammer 40K: MSU VS Anvil Units – Who’s the King of 10th?
Goatboy here to talk about MSU and Anvil Units. Which should you be putting in your Warhammer 40K 10th Edition army?
Goatboy here again with some thoughts on the current 40K meta play styles. It feels like 10th Edition is starting to split into two different directions that shoot your list down certain avenues of play. The title says it all – we got a bunch of anvils units and a ton of little units out there on the tabletop causing gameplay shifts. You either have to deal with a storm of gnats or a giant bulldozer looking to hold the middle. Which should you pick?
MSU – Many Small Units
For those not understanding what MSU stands for – it is Multiple Small Units. This is the idea that you field too many things for an enemy army to pay attention to. You always have action Jacksons’ who can “engineer” a mission card, and hopefully, a few of them can gang up and bully an opponent’s unit off of the table. It seems to be one of the things you always worry about in some armies that can have efficient units that are cheap enough and good enough to be an issue.
You can see this right now in how the Blood Angel armies seem to be working with a heck of a ton of equipment that other armies can’t always carry. You know a pile of Melta Pistols and Powerfists all in a nice tiny 5-man unit. It pushes the aspects of MSU to the brink and most likely will get a upcoming nerf to help – cleaning up all those Melta pistol holsters.
A few other armies show up a bit like this. But really most of the time, the MSU side of things is really just having a ton options on the tabletop. It is the ability to always have a chance to do something, show up with a unit everywhere, and maybe have enough damage dealers to wreck things. The bigger issue is that a slight breeze can knock over these MSU units. A lot of the time they fall apart – especially if they hit an Anvil unit that controls, bullies, and runs the center part of the table.
Anvil Units – The Tough Bullies
This leads me into Anvil unit aspects of an army. This army building theory lets you field some giant blobs of idiots push forward to the middle, control that neoprene center, and hopefully keep you from scoring with a No Prisoners draw or holding something in no mans land. I have seen some crazy anvil lists like the massed Feel-No-Pain-Shadow Greater Daemon builds and the Black Templar Terminator blobs. It is the idea that you present something that is just so hard to chew through, that it limits options for your opponent.
The Anvil strategy is one of the big things that is difficult for MSU armies to deal with, as it can move up and control a good portion of the board. This then limits what your opponent can do which is just as important as scoring your own cards. Anvil army lists normally can hold and score primary as it either shifts through secondary or just uses them to feed that lovely CP reservoir it needs to run well.
The one thing Anvil units do well with is usually dunking on Assault armies that have an issue chewing through something tough. If it moves up, holds that middle, and you can break through, it ends up being a rough game as they try to claw their way to points. It’s why old Custodes were such a problem, as they presented so many tough Anvils that fought first and struck so hard.
MSU vs Anvil – What Should You Pick?
The question then is, what do you really want to play or try to shoot for? With the game having a shifting meta, based on cleaning up some broken stuff via the Balance Dataslate, it gets hard to really jump into something that doesn’t have a codex. I get the feeling that better players gravitate towards MSU options – as that design always gives you a chance to play the mission deck. Or, at the very least, MSU with some mini-Anvils that can be rough to chew through.
Anvil units on the other hand may be easier to field and use on the tabletop, and are less fiddly overall.
Pick your poison carefully, and have fun out there!
