Dark Eldar 2k List “Real Space Boot Scootin’ Boogie”

That’s the line up for this weekend, I have been looking forward to playing with this list for a while, I managed to get a practice game in with my buddy Cody and his Genestealer cults. That list had Harlequins instead of all the wracks and Haemonculus. With majority of the list being rather annoying to remove, and lots of really big hammers to throw at my opponent, Super Mario Style.

The idea of this list is to stall your opponent with all the feel no pain rolls until you can get your trade pieces to finish the job. However, the large wrack squad can deal out a nasty surprise to an unexpecting opponent, have Archon close by to just delete almost anything in the game. We achieve this by using the stratagem to reroll failed wounds on our poisoned (4+) after we made an obnoxious amount of attacks with exploding 6s. The Archon provides the rerolls of  ones, can drop the Animus Vital to increase power from pain by one, and most importantly the fight last. This is the trap, we want to be charged and get a Heroic Intervention with the Archon and have the wracks deal enough damage to reduce their chance of being knocked off the table in one turn.

It’s not as strong as the harlequins punch, but the harlequins punch is pretty much a one time thing per game, and we already have enough of that in our list, so let’s make stuff that doesn’t die and takes up lots of room on the board.  Controlling the state of the board is the key to winning with this list and going first can almost mean victory against some armies. If we take Herd the Prey then we need to be careful about going second, if our opponent rushes to deny us points we need to just go all in and try and wipe him. However I do believe that this would be against melee armies and I don’t think Take them alive would be a wise choice anyways. Engage might be okay, and behind enemy lines is still better. 

Melee matchups will just be trying to stall all their big hitters with my cheap crappy units until we can clear with our hammers. Hammer and Anvil at its finest, we will have our hammers crash a flank and have our anvil just walk up the board and hopefully we can survive a round or two of being peppered.

Ranged armies will be a little bit more of a trick, more than likely Herd the Prey is the best choice unless they have a bunch of points into deep strikes or fast units. The idea being that we blitz up the board with everything we have just to deny the area for our opponents to travel to. Blocking out two table quarters will just put the time on the opponent, they have to push out or we will be pushing them in. With good rolls you can probably be in their deployment zone turn 2 or 3, Animus is the king for the charge in. Banners is also really good here too, as you can score 3 points a turn from it that is going to bring you 5 points a turn and then whatever you kill throughout the game. 

Positioning here is also going to matter, we want our opponents’ big guns going into the wracks or haemonxicites, for as long as we can manage. Hellions can get into back lines to try and tie them up while talos and grots come in from the front and absorb overwatch, they can also stay back and our big wrack blob will advance up the board no issues.

Well that’s it folks, that’s my though process behind the list, well it’s just the tip of the iceberg, I had about 5 or 6 pages written in my google docs for this, but the list went through some changes during this write up. I miss doing this, and it really makes the list building process more enjoyable when you can go back to ideas that you had and visit them again. Please let me know what you think of everything, too much info, not enough info. I know I need more pictures, I plan on taking close ups of the different units to fill them in between walls of text.

Stay Classy,