Welcome back Rangers, today we are going to jump right into our subject matter, which is how to pick an army in Warhammer 40,000. There are so many different armies and this is a hobby that will drain you of your time and money! Newer players may feel overwhelmed by so many options and which army is going to carry them to victory! The first couple of things we need to establish is what we are looking for in an army, and it’s going to take some time to learn how to play with that army.

You could just google what is the best army list in the game right now and start there. This wouldn’t be a bad idea if this was a video game, and you could just start practicing with everything immediately. Unfortunately instant gratification is not a fix that this hobby is known for, everything we learn in this hobby is trial and error. If you don’t get it right the first time, don’t worry because you will eventually get it, even the pros had to lose a bunch of games before they started being any good at the game! If you are constantly pushing out models to get them built and painted before the next nerf bat hits them you are just going to enter a loop that will burn you out! This is why we need to just establish the core rule of picking your first army, RULE OF COOL.

Rule of Cool Always Wins, even for these two.

The rule of cool is the best rule in the world, because it’s entirely your opinion and no one should have any influence on your army choice. Even if your best friend is already playing the army that you think is the coolest, still pick them up because you are going to have to spend a lot of time looking at these guys. The main idea to avoid burnout is to reduce the chances you will have of being bored with your models, this is going to come down to individual resources. I’ll use myself as an example, if I was going to get into 40k right now, I’d still stick with Drukhari, they just look so cool, and they are Dark Elves, which is my favorite Race out of all the nerdums. I would pick up a combat patrol and start building everything, if I get board building boats, I can build some dudes, and so on. The point that I’m trying to make is that it takes a lot of time and effort to get an army ready, if you pick one because they are winning right now, by the time you get them ready for the table, well they may not be the top dogs anymore. This can cause a downward spiral to where you don’t feel like any of your hard work gets paid off.

So now that you have found an army that you think is really cool looking, you should read into their indexes, or codices whatever is available to you. We aren’t really going to be looking for rules, we are just going to look for one keyword, the Character Keyword. When building a list you have to have one character to be your warlord, so you will need to pick up at least one character. Then with the beauty of 10th edition, everything else that you pick up for your new army you should be able to put into your list with little thought.

Once you start collecting you need to get these guys assembled and painted so we can take them out for a spin. While you are building and painting, I would recommend listening to army breakdowns, and battle reports for your selected army. This will help you remember some of the rules, and give you a good idea of how you should play this army. Once you get the basics down and get some models put together, you need to just get them on the board as much as you can, either by yourself or with friends. Move them around, have them shoot imaginary targets, the more you learn the more you will grow as a player. Just always remember everyone had to crawl before they could walk, could you imagine babies walking just a few days after entering the world? Yeah that would be weird, but they will eventually learn to walk, run, be functional members of society, just remember that our society is the game. 

The most important lesson to learn here is when you are just starting out and getting into the game for the very first time, odds are you may not play that army to its full extent. This is okay, this is the natural progression to finding the army that suits your play style. Fall in love with your models, every single one of them is an expression of yourself, don’t sell me on your meta list, sell me on your uniquely painted and model army a reflection of you, and not what everyone else is playing. There is overlap, and the better an army does the more you will see it out in tournaments, however these guys have had their army for a long time or they are borrowing a friend’s army. You can also pay someone to paint your models for you, this will save you some time but you still have to wait for them to come back to you! There will always be a way to get you around the things that you don’t want to do, but sometimes the growth of painting is the ultimate reward in my opinion.

Hopefully this was enough jargon to help you wrap your head around, I will push out some more faction focus articles to help even more, that is the inventions of this blog, help everyone with anything no matter what. Feel free to read through the couple of Faction Focuses I have already done, and let me know what you think about those! I’ll link those down below. Also, I am planning to write a series of articles to help someone get from unopened box to playing on a table with some nice terrain! All from help here with articles, now this will take time and I’m pecking away as fast I can with the free time that I have, but it is coming!

Drukhari

Necrons

Stay Classy Rangers!