Daemons at Adepticon

For those who do not follow the GT scene, Bill Kim took his Daemons to the final 16 in a field rife with Grey Knights (they must have known he was coming).  I want to talk a little about the list he brought.  Taken from Blood of Kittens it is...

HQ
Fateweaver
Skarbrand

Elite
6x Fiends of Slaanesh w/ Unholy Might
6x Fiends of Slaanesh w/ Unholy Might

Troops
14x Bloodletters w/ Icon of Chaos
5x Horrors w/  Bolt of Tzeetch , Changeling
5x Horrors w/ Bolt of Tzeetch
5x Horror w/ Bolt of Tzeetch

Fast Attack
16x Seekers of Slaanesh w/ Icon of Chaos



I was a bit skeptical when I first saw Bill Kim's list too (not that it did not work, it clearly does but WHY does it work).  Here are my thoughts...

It is pretty standard in a Fateweaver list to bring along a Bloodthirster with Unholy Might and Blessing of the Blood God.  That costs somewhere around 275 points (from memory).  For another 25 points you can bring Skar.  You lose wings (gain fleet), gain Breath, and Instrument and Lose Blessing.  Skar also has a built in Might so that upgrade is there.

More importantly, you can reroll your attacks against everything in CC, which means you can re-roll your attacks against transports (effectively you double the number of hits against those moving at cruising speed and add 25% more against hose moving at combat speed).

The next real choice in a Daemon army is to bring either Crushers or Fiends.  Expecting a large number of Grey Knights there is really only the option of Fiends, since they can DS outside Warp Quake and still make it into combat the next turn.  Unholy Might is the natural upgrade here for some wound allocation and to ID the occasional T3 chump.

How many Fiend units to take really depends on the rest of your list - I am not sure the total motivation to take two units and Seekers rather than three units, but I will speculate in a moment.

For troops, Horrors with Bolt are a solid option to drop back and take some pot shots.  In most games you need to sit on at least one or two objectives at range from the enemy and having some shooting at AP 4 is useful.  These are pretty standard and I agree with needing 4 troop choices overall (especially when you have 15 T3 models.

The unique choice is the large brick of Bloodletters.  These guys carry the one of two Icons in the army and are dangerous to get to know better - they need to be a bit larger to carry an icon and they are the slowest CC unit in the army.  I look at this as a unit that comes down midfield (or in a key location) and threatens anything nearby while weathering any shooting.

Finally we get to the unit of Seekers.  These guys are killing machines in combination with Skar and can rip vehicles apart.  I think there are four reasons to take these over a third unit of Fiends.  (1) They can carry an icon - otherwise you need a more durable troop unit other than the Bloodletters, (2) They have assault and defensive grenades so they can pry units out of cover, (3) They put out 80 attacks on the charge... (4) a unit of Fiends leaves you with about 100 spare points laying around.  You can add another troop unit or add bodies to one, but otherwise you have no good way to spend those (maybe 3 flamers but they do not really have the same synergy that Seekers do).

Overall I really like this list because it does some things that most Daemon lists cannot . It answers the Transport question with Skar, rather than by pushing in a bunch of sub-par shooting, it has a lot of speed and it can pry units out of cover with the Seekers.  Further, its speed means it will get the charge on GK (which is absolutely critical in that matchup due to psyk outs) and Skar is only a force multiplier for the Daemon player in those games too.

As for wave splits, I did not see any of Bill Kim's games, but the generic option was probably something like...

Fate, Skar, Fiends x2 Seekers
Horrors x3, Bloodletters

Like all Daemon lists, if Skar and Fate stay out for a while after getting a non-preferred wave it could be bad (that is 1/3 of the army) but in a format with a lot of KP missions, this list can win games with only one or two models left on the table.