TheChirurgeon's Road Through 2026, Part 16: Testing the New Layouts

Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of hobby and competitive progress through 2026. Last time around I was talking about my hobby progress and making an 11th edition terrain layout to play on. This time I'm playing more test games - both with Death Guard for 10th edition Defiler tests and some quasi-11th edition games. And there's a little bit of hobby progress, too. I've been busy.

Testing New Defilers in Death Guard

First on my list was getting a test game in with the new Defilers. I've painted three of the old Defilers and based two, and that honestly feels like the right number at the moment, so I wanted to test them out in a Death Guard list. At 250 points, these are a lot, and they're not as durable as I'd like - 18 wounds is plenty, but only being T11 hurts them quite a bit. Stripping cover just doesn't matter that much to me, but maybe it will mean more in 11th edition when those rules change. Two also feels like a number which is reasonable to hide - putting three behind cover on turn 1 is a tall ask on most layouts.

This basically means there are two ways I'm considering the Defilers in Death Guard:

Option 1: Mortarion's Hammer

The idea is that the Defiler is a better unit for its points here than the Plagueburst Crawler, so I take out the three PBCs and replace them with a pair of Defilers. This opens up about 100 extra points I can spend on something else.

The game here is still about tagging units to hit with Deathshroud, and this list probably needs three units of Deathshroud and a more melee-focused approach. That said, units can only be tagged if they're far away, and that isn't a good match for the kind of dual role Defilers have. The Stratagems in this Detachment are also pretty bad, and moving through walls via a Stratagem doesn't matter to Defilers, who just do that natively now with their new datasheets.

Option 2: Virulent Vectorium

Here I'm leaning on better Stratagems, like being able to drop Disgustingly Resilient for -1 Damage or Leechspore Eruption when I'm locked in combat. Here the change is more transformative - if I'm doing this I'm going for a skew list of big, nasty threats. Mortarion + Daemon Prince + three Defilers as the base, and three units of Poxwalkers. That's 1540 points, and on top of that I'd add three Bloat-Drones and either a Fleshmower or Blight-hauler to hit 2,000 points. That gives the list a bit of additional ranged oomph to go with its big beefy threats, and I suspect it'll feel a bit like a knights list running all of that.

The downside here is that the list needs a third based Defiler, so I'm going to test it after I test Mortarion's Hammer.

Game 1: vs. KC's Ultramarines

KC hit me up out of nowhere asking if we could get in a game last week - he needed to practice for an upcoming teams event and I was up for a quick game. So I put together a Death Guard Hammer list that looked like this:

• Lord of Contagion
• Lord of Virulence + Tendrilous Emissions
• Tallyman
• Deathshroud x3
• Deathshroud x3
• Defiler (Ectoplasma + Scourge + Flamer)
• Defiler (Ectoplasma + Scourge + Flamer)
• HBL Bloat-Drone
• HBL Bloat-Drone
• HBL Bloat-Drone
• Poxwalkers x10
• Poxwalkers x10
• Poxwalkers x10

Here I'm basically swapping out three PBCs for two Defilers, a unit of Poxwalkers, and a Tallyman. KC's list is running Gladius Task Force with Calgar + Aggressors, Titus + Victrix, Wardens, and Ventris + Victrix, plus a Hammerstrike Storm Speeder and two Vindicators and a few of the regular marine units - Scouts, Combi Lt, Intercessors.

The Mission: Linchpin + Tipping Point, Layout 1

I'm going second in this one, which is OK from a scoring standpoint but I tend to prefer going first with Hammer... or at least I do when I have PBCs. Not having them means KC's Scouts get to live and I have to wait a turn to activate my remote contagions. KC is an aggressive player and pushes up early and I set up to take him out. He plays a bit cagey and I try to get into position to kill his Combi-Lieutenant after he shorts his reactive move. Then KC completely spikes his saves and FNPs, and somehow the Lieutenant survives an entire Defiler's worth of shooting. Adorable.



My general notion here is to play aggressively with the Defilers, hoping their new combat profiles can get them there, and use the Deathshroud to split KC's units and countercharge key threats. This doesn't go as planned when KC puts Titus and Co on the top objective - I ingress a unit of Deathshroud to intervene into him after a charge, then roll a double 1 (re-rolled into a 4) on the intervention charge, forcing my unit to watch. Hilarious.



Things more or less fall apart on the following turn. One Defiler gets completely evaporated by a Vindicator after surviving on one wound, while the other punches a Hammerstrike out of they sky but gets killed by Bladeguard Veterans. Generally speaking I underestimated the power of the Assault Doctrine Stratagem and KC's ability to just have 6 Command Points every turn in Calgar Gladius. The Defilers for their part felt pretty anemic and struggled to kill things with their claws and the scourge. I was pretty unimpressed all things considered.



Ultimately I felt like I'd have been better off with Vectorium in this game, even with this list, and in doing so I'd have had the points to swap out the Tallyman for something more substantial. The Defilers really didn't impress me, either with their shooting or their melee. The shooting was fine but PBCs would have given me just as many guns and the ability to dig out targets which are out of line of sight.

This one's over going into the final round, and while I held OK on primary, I've lost most of my ability to scrap and KC has just drawn incredibly good secondaries all game, pulling 9-10 per turn.

Result: 5-15, Loss

I think with Vectorium this goes much better, as a Defiler won't go down to the 2-damage Bladeguard and I can afford to play a bit more aggressively when I can use Leechspore Eruption to regain wounds. I think there may be play in a non-heavies version of the list that uses Defilers instead of Mortarion, and that's worth consideration. For now though I think if I ran Hammer again, it'd be with PBCs.

Playing Pseudo-11th Edition

Games Workshop have been releasing more and more rules previews for 11th edition and as they have, it's become more and more possible to play around with some of the concepts they've shown off. And since I already had an 11th edition layout set up, I figured it was worth trying to do some games of "Pseudo-11th," or games using that layout, 11th ed primary missions, and as many rules as they've revealed. I played one such game against my friend T on Friday, and another against my friend Andrew this week. The experience was informative, and it's worth talking about how things went so far.

The Rules We Used

We've already covered what's been revealed through last week. You can find those articles here:

• 11th ed 40k, Part 1: The Adepticon Reveals
• 11th ed 40k, Part 2: 11 on 11th

We also had two missions we knew were paired, and we ended up playing those. We know that Death Trap is the primary for Disruption vs. Take and Hold, which will get Determined Acquisition, and we have two layouts for that pairing. We also have an idea of how terrain works, with the benefit of cover being -1 BS for the attacking unit.

There's still a lot we don't know in the mix - we're kludging this as best we can with existing information. We're using 10th edition secondary objectives, for example - and we don't know how things will change for the game's core Stratagems, point values. But it was really fun to test these out and see how things went.

Game 1: vs. Army of Faith Sisters

For both of these games I was running Renegade Raiders, in a list with Huron and his boys (Masters + Chosen) in a Land Raider, plus two units of Noise Marines in Rhinos and a unit of Lascannon Havocs. The general thinking behind my choices was that ignoring cover and getting +1 AP against targets on objectives was that "this is a great ability when objectives make up half of the table."

Unfortunately, T had similar ideas with his Army of Faith Sisters of Battle, who have lots of heavy bolters and a literal Stratagem to ignore modifiers to Ballistic Skill for everything within 3" of a JUMP PACK unit, plus Immolators to turn off cover. What followed was an incredibly deadly game in which units hit hard and were hit hard back, and most of the board was dead by round 3. Hidden did much less than we expected given how easy it was to get across the board turn 1, especially for my units with [ASSAULT] and the ability to auto-advance 6".

Game 2: vs. Combined Arms Astra Militarum

This game felt even deadlier, in part because Andrew went first and half his army had Scouts. Most anything I deployed on the line was a target turn 1, Hidden rules be damned - a crucial lesson to learn for the actual edition start. This one was just as deadly as the game against T's sisters, where Andrew's hellhound stripping cover did similar work and sheer volume of shots was enough to take down my tanks even at -1 Ballistic Skill. Unlike my game against T, where the melee units did work however, Andrew was relying more on a lot of tanks, against which my melee threats weren't nearly as good. I was more or less tabled by the end of 3 on this one.

Thoughts

• The game feels super deadly, but this may be in part because of the terrain layout we used - that Hammer and Anvil layout has massive firing lanes, and it felt very open when you were actually out in it. Being on objectives basically means being exposed to enemy fire, and that was tough to handle.
• Lascannons and single-shot weapons feel really bad; they were already going through most light armor but now they hit less often and feel much worse into targets with an invulnerable save.
• The Lascannon Havocs should have been solid thanks to their ability to ignore modifiers, but every time they shot they failed their pact and lost a model, then whoever they shot just rolled saves. At one point I put three wounds on one of T's rhinos, at AP-4 and he rolled triple 6s to save with the Rhino's invulnerable save.
• Hidden mattered once or twice in our games, but less than I expected. It was helpful for protecting units arriving via Rapid Ingress.
• Not having to declare a charge target before charging was nice.

I'm interested to see more on how terrain works and the missions - in both games Disruption felt like a better mission into take and hold, where a player could booby trap objectives early then spend all game killing things on them and not having to hold them. But neither of us built explicitly for those missions.

Hobby

I'm plugging away at my Red Corsairs at the moment, working on them as they're likely to be my CSM army for a little while longer and I want to actually finish them before I jump into Iron Warriors.



I decided to bite the bullet and do up the Predator Destructors for them and the third Rhino. It's all work I've needed to do for at least one of my CSM armies, but which I've been putting off. Given the aesthetic I'm going for with my Red Corsairs, it was time to go ahead and assemble + paint the three Deimos Predators. Renegade Raiders seems like a really fun way to play the army.

Final Thoughts

That's it for this week but I'll be back next week with more hobby progress and maybe another game or two - we'll see. My goal is to finish at least one of those tanks in the next week as well, plus a few more infantry to shore up those guys. I may also redo the arms of some of my old "just holding a bolter" Red Corsairs and convert a trio of new bikes, because everything points to needing six of those for some reason.

See you next week.

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