CB42

Grashrak has the Great Bray Shaman keyword and it is unclear to me whether he is part of the depraved drove battalion or not.

The unit as a whole must move closer... which means that you measure the closest part of the unit to the mirror. If that distance shrinks, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the unit did - the unit moved closer. If that distance expands because the closest model moved away slightly, it doesn’t matter if every other model in the unit shuffled closer - the distance between the mirror and the unit increased, so it moved away.

Keeper, Epitome, 2 x 30 Bestigors, 1 x Great Bray Shaman, 1 x 40 Ungors, 2 x 10 Ungors, Depraved Drove, Cogs, allied Grashraks Despoilers. 4 drops list. The idea is that the Bestigors are for killing anything with 10 or more models, or any hero who has a relic. To do so, you want to use the Epitome to cast Cogs. The Bestigors deploy 24” wide (which means 9 or so Bestigors won’t be near your front line of besties), either on the line (if you’re going first) or right behind a screen of Ungors (if you don’t know but you don’t think they can charge you) or 3.5” back from a screen of Ungors. One Great Bray shaman sets up so that one unit of besties is wholly within 12”; Grashrak sets up to get the other one wholly within 12”. On your turn, the Ungors open the gates and move to the side, you get Cogs up, your Besties are now going 12”+1d6 and then they’re charging 2”+2d6 (rerolling If within 12” of an enemy with an artifact). Keeper deploys at the line or 3.5” back from an Ungors screen. Keeper runs forward and charges a monster or something. Feel free to charge a screen, have the Bestigors kill the screen, then the keeper piles in 3” and is now in range of something tasty behind the screen and then fights twice. Either have one unit of besties fight first and the other unit of besties fight a locus’d unit. Or have one unit of besties fight first and the other unit of besties charges one model into combat and then strings things back and then sets up 4.1” away from the enemy unit so that if they pile in 3” they can’t swing with 1” weapons for most of their stuff, so when you activate either they’ve piled in uselessly and you crush them or your besties pile in 4” and crush them. Grashrak can be dropped for another GBS and to get the list down to 3 drops, but I like grashrak’s spell and the despoilers give another set of bodies for screening or holding things.

Pretenders can be interesting. I think it works well for either depraved drove or large groups of Daemonettes. Epicurean just generally isn’t worth it. If it were 100 points? Maybe, yeah, but it would still be a weak battalion - but cheap enough it wouldn’t be a costly expenditure. If it were additional mortal wounds instead of replacing damage with mortals? It would be a strong choice at 180. But replacing a third of our successful -1 rend hits with mortal wounds just isn’t that good unless against a save of 3+. Or ethereal 4+. In the absolute best case scenario (30 Daemonettes fighting twice), it turns 60 hits at -1 rend into 40 hits at -1 rend and 20 mortal wounds. That matters against, what, Sequitors? 2+ save buffed up monsters that you won’t even be able to wrap all 30 Daemonettes in range? And grimghast reapers? It’s just not a big enough buff to make massed Daemonettes into a tournament winning list. And massed Daemonettes are only points efficient anyways when fighting twice with a keeper - they’re otherwise somewhat mediocre for their points even with the exploding 6s. Add in the logistical issues with getting 3 x 30 Daemonettes into range of the fight twice aura and you’ll see why even top tournament lists that bring more Daemonettes than normal might do 30/10/10 and no battalion rather than 30/30/30 Epicurean. I’d say to make massed Daemonettes work, don’t bring Epicurean and instead bring one 30 block per Keeper (say, 2 keepers and 2 x 30 daemonettes) and then use Hellstriders as the remaining battleline.

But also it doesn't need to be! I know 3 keepers is all the hotness, but I run Depraved Drove Slaanesh with 113 models on the board turn 1, and I've seen a ton of success with that - I've yet to do worse than 4-1 across 5 or 6 tournaments and I managed to go 5-0 with the list at the BWG GT. People should feel free to live their large model count dreams with Slaanesh, regardless of what the meta is!

They're a mobile screen. You take them not because they can shoot but because they get their 6" move turn 1. This allows you to screen your forces while deploying effectively on the line. As an example: Let's say you're fighting against FEC and FEC will have choice. 24" apart. If you put your keeper with thermalrider cloak on the line within 3" of your screen, the terrorgheist can charge your screen, kill your screen, then pile into your keeper and kill your keeper. So you need to place your keeper 6" back from your screen, not 3". But that means you're out of charge range turn 1, so FEC will just give you first turn and life will suck for you. With Ungor Raiders, you place your keeper basically on the line and then move your screen forward. Now your keeper is screened with a 6" gap, which means that the TG can't charge your screen and pile into the keeper, but your keeper could cross the 24" gap and threaten a turn 1 charge. (There's also an element of putting models in the way so that the TG can't just jump over your screen and fight your keeper anyways, but the logic holds up - you can do things like move 6 ungor raiders up and use the other 4 to fill some of the space in between to prevent the TG from shooting the gap). Also: On focal points and a few other maps, you can get your raiders within 6" of an objective with their 6" move. This forces the other player to dedicate resources to killing them turn one or to getting 11 bodies onto the objective, which dictates part of their turn 1 strat. Also: Against some enemies, it's crucial for denying deepstrike (think eels coming in from ambush - if you can put raiders 6" foward on one flank, and deny the ambush with hellstriders behind you, you free up a lot more room for you to position your keepers near that flank without getting alpha'd by eels). Also: they can screen out gnawholes that are placed near your forces, so a skaven player turn 1 can't skitterleap, WLV, then gnawhole back to safety. Makes it a one way trip for any enterprising grey seers. Ungor Raiders are the best unit I haven't managed to fit into my list. I may bring them back if I switch from 30 Slaaneshtigors / 20 Seekers to 60 Slaaneshtigors.

1) List wouldn't fit a regular Keeper. You'd need to drop an Exalted Champ or endless spell or ungor raiders or something to make room, which would make the list worse. 2) Shalaxi is REAL good at killing heroes and behemoths - which is good in a meta heavy with heroes and behemoths (the Slaanesh mirror matchup, Bloodthirster spam, GUOs, verminlords, terrorgheists, Archaon, etc). 3) Since you'll be moving Shalaxi wholly within 12" of a regular keeper anyways, Shalaxi doesn't suffer from losing the command ability because you'll just use the other keeper to make Shalaxi fight twice. 4) Shalaxi can get built in rerolls for fighting certain enemies (and so doesn't need to sacrifice to the Fane) and doesn't need / can't take an artifact or command trait, which compares well with a naked Keeper, which would be yet another hero who wants to get rerolls from the Fane.

Yeah, fair. I was running the math assuming you can get 20 in (which kills him about 45% of the time), but you can probably only get 12-15 in. At which point you’re more likely putting 4-6 wounds on him than 8. But that does get him into kill range for a Bladebringer on Exalted to finish him off. The right move is absolutely to just avoid him, but on many maps thats not viable - not just duality, but also you often don’t want him burning your objectives in scorched or valor, you don’t want him near where the objectives drop in starstrike, you don’t want him sitting on the crucial middle objective in focal unless you can take all their backline objectives, stuff like that. I think it gives Slaanesh armies a reason to take more chaff. You need those bodies to serve as speed bumps.

Things that could potentially kill Gotrek: * 30 Daemonettes fighting twice * A bladebringer on exalted chariot fighting twice as well as 5 hellstriders fighting twice Things that will not kill Gotrek, no matter what: * Keepers of Secrets Gotrek, especially at tournaments with Duality of Death, means we need to be able to do two things. First, we want to be able to outdrop armies with Gotrek (to take top in Duality), as otherwise Gotrek moves onto the objective in Duality and scores for the whole game and a single unit moves onto the other objective and scores for one turn, and we lose (if we get top of 1, we can do the same thing to them - put 10 daemonettes on one objective where Gotrek is and our whole army on the other objective and just win). Second, we want to have enough chaff units to slow Gotrek down. Alternate ways to accomplish this include endless spells such as Shackles or Prismatic Palisade that could be used to block his path or slow his movement. Besides duality, the biggest concerns will probably be armies that want to castle up and can bring Gotrek to defend the castle. Seraphon armies that summon skinks to clog up the board and have Gotrek punch anyone who comes near the Slann or EOTG. Shootcast plus Gotrek. Free Peoples shooting plus Gotrek. For these armies, we play the mission rather than try to crash the castle, or if we do try to crash the castle, accept that anything that goes near Gotrek will die a horrible, horrible death. Castles tend to stay put until turn 3-5, so hold all other objectives for 2 turns, set up surviving models as a screen around Gotrek and co, and make it hard for them to push out onto objectives turn 3. My Depraved Drove list with 130 bodies will be fine; my Ungors will die to Gotrek, but they'll slow him down while my Seekers and Bestigors kill everything else. But people running 3 keeper lists will have to simply abandon the part of the board that Gotrek is on until they can start summoning Daemonettes to hold him in place.

I went 5-0 at BWG’s Summer Slaughter with my one Keeper / Epitome / 20 Seekers / Depraved Drove / Cogs list. One Keeper is less of a point of failure when you can run and charge and have cogs up. The extra 7” (or 10” with a cp) allows you to keep the keeper further back than normal and still be the first one to charge.

You could make a competitive Depraved Drove pretenders list - you don’t take sybarites in that and it gives your Bestigors reroll 1s against non-order lists. You lose out on making your keeper run and charge and on Cameo, which reduces your turn 1 effective threat range, but you gain the super keeper and reroll 1s, You could probably take Sliverslash on the Keeper, Sword of Judgment on the Epitome, a Bladebringer on Exalted, 30 Ungors, 60 Bestigors, 2 GBS and Cogs, which would be a solid tournament list.

Is Mythicos OctoCon AoS tournament (October 19-20) an ITC event? I don't see it on FLG's ITC calendar page yet.

Yes and no. If you take them in a Depraved Drove battalion, they get the exploding 6s and generate depravity and you can summon from them or have them sacrifice to the Fane, but they don’t get the fight last locus or any spell lores, and can’t be selected to fight twice.

Stormcast ballistas and longstrikes; Seraphon Thunderquake Starhost; Skaven warp lightning cannons or jezzails (or both); Kharadron overlords with a unit of 40 arkanauts buffed with an aetherkhemist and using only light skyhooks; Bonesplittas arrowboy spam in a Kunnin Rukk (see Team England’s lists at ETC this year) (likely to be changed soon); Freeguild crossbowmen with Tau Overwatch (see Team america’s roster at ETC) (likely to be changed soon).

1. Yes, both can 2. Keeper whose turn it is fights twice, then Keeper whose turn it is not fights twice

I run a list that isn’t built around summoning (it primarily summons over the course of the game 1-3 MSU Daemonettes for holding objectives). I’ve won a GT and placed top 3 at 4 other events, so I’ve had a lot of success with it competitively, but it is definitely not how the vast majority of people play slaanesh. And it’s VERY hit or miss - if you mess up at all in deployment or who you charge or who to locus, you kind of just lose the game. But the point is... with nerfed summoning, Slaanesh can still hang with the big boys, but lists need to be reformed into things that aren’t just hero hammer. And there’s no safety blanket if the Slaanesh player makes a mistake.

I've been playing Slaanesh since well before the battletome. The problem is not that there is summoning, it's that summoning is too cheap. Putting arbitrary restrictions (once per turn, must use or lose it, etc) is a bad way to address it; ask Khorne players how they feel about losing blood tithe points. If you can get to the same outcome (more balanced summoning) by either adding arbitrary restrictions or changing relative efficiency by changing costs, it's preferable to change costs than add restrictions. The right way to address it is to increase the depravity costs for summoning, I'd estimate by about 50%. If a new Keeper of Secrets cost 45 points instead of 30 points, it would mean that killing a Keeper generates 30% of the points to get a new one rather than now, where it generates 50% of the points to get a new one. Someone who takes 3 keepers and generates 10-15 depravity from other sources (charging as godseekers, summoning near the fane, etc) generates about 44 depravity points when those keepers die; right now, that person could get 2 keepers of secrets having done no damage, but with an increase in summoning costs, they'd be able to get 1 keeper and 10 daemonettes. And that would be for a list built entirely around generating depravity. Killing 3 keepers of secrets and them getting 1 back feels way less oppressive than killing 3 keepers and them getting 2 back. This makes Slaanesh lists that are not built around summoning more viable as there's less opportunity cost. Yeah, maybe that 1 keeper / 1 epitome / 90 daemonettes with mortal wounds on 6s to wound battalion list isn't really viable right now because why not just take more heroes, but if the relative efficiency of heroes is reduced because of summoning cost nerfs, non-heroes are relatively more impactful to take in a Slaanesh list. And honestly, once summoning is nerfed a little bit, the rest of Slaanesh is still strong but nowhere near as overpowered. The locus is especially harsh for certain armies but can be played around - it's mostly bad when people are getting introduced to the game or are otherwise somewhat new to playing around fight first / fight last / fight twice stuff, but that's also true of FEC, FS, Khorne, Idoneth, new Sylvaneth, and anyone else who plays the "activation wars" game. And @Swampheart is right - a Keeper who fights twice is good for their points, and a Keeper who fights once is really bad for their points. Their entire efficiency right now is based on summoning and how much CP the slaanesh player can funnel into them. Which is part of why taking multiple keepers isn't actually that efficient unless you can feed all of them cp to fight twice... except for how much depravity generation they have, which is why summoning should be nerfed.

If you hit hard and have a lot of bodies, you can also kill the heroes on one half of the board and then just clog up movement to slow the surviving / summoned Slaanesh units from reaching the half of the board you now control. I’ve done this with my alpha strike Slaanesh against summoning Slaanesh using my Ungors and summoned Daemonettes to screen off the newly captured left side of the board, and I’ve also seen it done by seraphon, just summoning or teleporting tons of skinks into multiple layers of screens cutting off the right side of the board. Heavy shooting armies with good screens can just keep killing keepers as they get resummoned. You can also out drop them, give them first turn, screen hard with your army more than 3” back from your screen (since Slaanesh can only activate a second time if they’re within 3” of an enemy), then hit them hard on your turn. This works especially well if you have some form of strike first on your turn or make them strike last or activate to fight from 6” away (FEC, Khorne, Daughters, Sylvaneth, BoC with Taurus, Nighthaunt with spell), but you can work around the locus, like charging a small unit and staying 3.1” from the Keeper, and then piling into the Keeper when you fight. Then, of course, there are missions like Scorched Earth and Better Part of Valour where you can burn objectives and win the game if you get ahead early, or Relocation orb where if you get lucky with priority rolls turns 3-5, it can be impossible for someone to come back. Obviously slaanesh is strong, but between playing the mission and playing around the locus and summoning, there are ways to beat them with most armies.

Shalaxi kills keepers real well and the 6" pile in to tie up from 3" away presumably works quite well against 30 daemonettes. The list also has enough CP to continue fighting twice throughout the game, whereas some Slaanesh lists have enough CP to fight twice with several units turn 1 and then once a battle round after that, which means that when both sides summon a keeper and some daemonettes, Rhellion's list will be able to continue fighting twice.

Rhellion's list has both battalions.

How do you use Syll'Esske? It sounds like you've got Keeper/Shalaxi/Chariot/Syll'Esske as a deathball grouping, with the Epitome staying back to provide a CP farm and backup summoning platform, and the Hellstriders w/ battalion and The Masque serving to hold enemy units in place or take lightly defended objectives. Is that correct? Also, what are your go-to summons? Do you tend to bring back Keepers, or do you summon in blocks of Daemonettes? Or other heroes?

It's worth noting that 30 daemonettes fighting twice does the exact same amount of damage as 30 Bestigors on the charge without fighting twice... but if the Bestigors are attacking 10+ models, or heroes with artifacts, the bestigors now outdamage the Daemonettes fighting twice significantly (by 20% against units with 10+ models, or by 50% against heroes with artifacts. Bestigors are also 4 inches faster than daemonettes and can pile in 4 inches instead of 3, which has come in handy for me in the past. And you can solve most of the issues with fighting in one rank by spreading out in deployment and using Cogs to get them even more movement so that they can spread out 30 models wide from the 19 wide during deployment.

I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is that the bestigors will feel underwhelming if you can't get all of them into combat, but absolutely dominate when you can spread them nice and wide and get them into a whole bunch of enemies. It's part of why I use Cogs even when I don't need to cast it to get the bestigors into combat - the extra movement and the extra charge distance allows for more spreading out to get from about 19 models wide (to stay wholly within 12" of my GBS) up to 30 models wide. Let's take an enemy bloodthirster with an artifact, plus 20 Blood Warriors (4+ save, 2 wounds each). A Keeper of Secrets fighting twice will average 17 damage to whichever one it charges, but it can't really effectively fight both at the same time - 17 damage is enough to kill a third of the blood warriors or enough to kill a bloodthirster, on average, but there's a pretty solid chance the thirster survives with 1-5 wounds and hits back hard enough to cripple or kill the Keeper. And the surviving unit can continue to do terrible khorne things. 10 Bestigors into the bloodthirster and 20 bestigors into the Blood Warriors will average 21 wounds onto the bloodthirster (14 wounds if the bloodthirster doesn't have an artifact) and 27 wounds onto the blood warriors - almost 2/3 of the blood warriors. And because bestigors throw so many dice at the table, they have less volatility - they're more likely to be hitting their averages, and their averages absolutely destroy enemy units. This forces the Khorne player to CP their blood warriors to avoid losing the unit. Basically, I think Bestigors should ideally be swinging into 2 units, not 1 unit, and they'll be able to wipe both units. A keeper has a much, much lower damage potential than the bestigors, but can easily get all of it into combat; the bestigors need a lot more planning and movement support (GBS, cogs). But the payoff is way higher from an alpha strike perspective for the bestigors. Final note: Taking Depraved Drove means you can get to 4 drops without taking Sybarites or Epicurean, plus you can take 3 x 10 ungors for 180 points, which are some of the cheapest sources of screening and objective holding that we have access to. And while the Great Bray Shaman is a 100 point tax to make Bestigors go fast and get access to the battalion, the GBS can hang back and guarantee that your heroes don't all die before you can spend your depravity points. The GBS also can stay out of unbind range for spells like Cogs. If the tradeoff is taking 730 points in 3 x 10 Ungors, GBS, Depraved Drove, and 30 Bestigors than taking 810 points in 3 x 10 Daemonettes plus Supreme Sybarites plus a second Keeper, I think the first works a lot better in an alpha strike heavy list and the second works better in a hero-heavy summoning focused list.

I run my 40 Ungors with swords and clubs. If I charge them in, I can get 2 rows of 20; if I get charged while they’re screening my army, enough of them will die that they won’t fight in 3 ranks.

In general, the Great Bray Shaman stays fairly far back (20-28 inches from the enemy’s front line) and is the primary source of summoning if things go poorly. Note that the GBS counts as a Chaos Slaanesh Hero due to the Depraved Drove.