TheChirurgeon's Road Through 2024, Part 23: Post-Con COVID Blues

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing log of personal, hobby, and competitive progress for Warhammer 40,000. Last time around I talked about the results of my trip to the GW US Open in Tacoma and lessons learned. This time around it's gonna be a light update - I spent most of the weekend delivering the Goonhammer annual shareholders presentation and having COVID, which I almost certainly contracted at the Tacoma event.

Having COVID sucks. I wouldn't recommend it.

Planning My Next Moves

In the wake of the event, I have other, non-disease-related decisions to make. I was originally planning on joining the Astros Militarum team for a team event in mid-August but I will unfortunately be traveling on the day of the event and unable to attend. So that and COVID put the squash on any competitive play I'll have going on for the next couple of weeks. If I start testing negative by the end of the week I may be able to get something in next week.

Until then, however I'm confined mostly to my office at home, working on hobby stuff and thinking about where I go next. From an event standpoint, my list of remaining events this year is essentially:

• Warzone Houston (September)
• GW US Open Tampa (October)
• GW Grand Narrative (November)
• One or two RTTs in-between

That's not a ton, but it does give me a trio of big events to plan for. With regard to Warzone Houston, I'm probably going to be playing Thousand Sons again for that unless something drastic changes. I may look at running Renegade Raiders if I can get enough of my Night Lords done by then, but even then I'll be leaning heavily on Rubrics to make that work because well, they whip ass and running them as AP-2 flamer kill squads in Renegade Raiders is amazing.

If I run Thousand Sons, I'll likely look at painting up at least one more Mutalith Vortex Beast. It's not really an army I'm excited about but it's significantly better to run 2-3 MVBs than it is to run Scarabs and painting one more isn't the end of the world. I doubt I'll have my Night Lords done in time but if I'm feeling frisky I may let them out of the cage for that one and run with some older models.

Hobby Progress

While I still have a few Rubrics to paint here and there - and I may paint a few more in my Black Legion scheme to act as Raider Rubrics down the line - my big focus now is turning back to my Night Lords. I've been working on assembling and painting the Legionaries for my army, and so the current plan is to get those cleaned up and painted over the next two or three weeks, then get them a rhino or two to ride in. I'll come back to the Rhinos next time around - I probably need two or three of them and I'm not 100% sure yet if I want to use the ones I've already painted or just make new ones.

In the meantime, I've been focusing on the Legionaries. And I've had *just* enough time to get one of them done - this happy gentleman with a Chainreaper cannon.

Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

I honestly don't even know if he'll make the final roster. He's probably a shoo-in for Atlanta because I can go lighter on that list, but for competitive play he may not be the correct call. I definitely need two units of Legionaries though, and they'll have a heavy weapon in each. Right now my current paint and hobby list for the Night Lords looks vaguely like this:

• 3 Chaos Lords
• 1 Chaos Lord with Jump Pack
• 2 Masters of Executions
• 2-3 Rhinos
• 9 Legionaries
• 10 Chosen
• 10 Raptors
• 5 Terminators
• Cultist mob

There's definitely other stuff I can do - such as painting more Rubrics, potentially in Night Lords colors? That might be neat, but I don't think it's something I want to do as the long-term value is limited. More than likely I'll paint up another 5-10 Black Legion rubrics with Warpflamers and end up using those instead, since they'll fit the bill visually and match my bases for the Night Lords. The rest of the stuff is pretty straightforward, and I'll probably also look at a unit of Havocs in the mix and doing some visual updates on at least one of my Heldrakes before Tampa. I have a few other things that need to be done as well but I'm going to focus on these infantry first before I start really digging into the vehicles and expanding the army. I have a ton of Night Lords already painted but they're all a mix of 2nd and 3rd edition models and I'm not super big on replacing that with newer models, even if the new models do look rad as hell. So stuff like the rhinos present an interesting challenge because I already have two painted and converted and I'm not sure if doing another set of three on top of those is what I want.

The goal here is to more or less emulate Josh Roberts' list from the recent Sheffield GT, which uses Rubrics in the Renegade Raiders detachment, supported by Chosen and Legionaries and Rhinos. This is something I called out in our initial review - Rubrics make the ideal models for Renegade Raiders. They do not benefit at all from Pacts but really, really benefit from having ASSAULT weapons and the additional AP on their warpflamers, where they damage they can do shooting a unit on an objective is just staggering when you factor in the re-rolls to wound and the extra AP on 6s from the icon. This turns them into a very mobile, very deadly unit for a relatively cheap price. I also still like Plague Marines in the role as well but I have to admit, the Rubrics have the edge here just based on ranged output.

Anyways my goal by next week is to kick COVID and get a game in with the raiders to see how they feel with Rubrics in the mix. So check back next week for more game and hobby updates as I trundle along, and hopefully I'll have more clarity on what I want to do with the list by then. I'm not done testing CSM concepts, anyways, and I may still look at the insane 3x MVB Thousand Sons list before Warzone.

That's it for this week but I'll be back next Thursday with more! In the meantime if you have any questions or feedback you can drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.