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Hello, I have been collecting and painting 40k armies for awhile now, and I finally decided that I actually wanted to play some games. I am probably just going to play casually first, but I might want to play competitively in the future. I have a marine army that i painted like dark angels and with Christmas coming up I was wondering if I should get the Dark angles codex and run the army as actual DA's or if I should get the Space marine codex and run them as normal marines? Thanks

what kind of list are you planning to use?
get DA if you want to use deathwing
for other wings get vanilla dex

DA codex is pretty meh ATM. Go for Vanilla. Unless you really really want a load of terminators.

I will probably go vanilla then because I already have normal space marines and dont have the cash to get loads of terminators

As the others said: for Deathwing you can use DA, but it's not very competitive in most cases. For everything else you should use normal Space Marines because DA isn't at ALL competitive in ANYTHING ELSE. I use a DA because I run Deathwing and also because I don't want to buy a second book. Don't make the same mistake I did: go with the normal codex.

Lots of termies; DA/SW, lots of marines SW/SM

I was looking at the DA codex the other day and noticed a couple of advantages DAs still have over vanilla marines:

1. DA venerable dreads are about 20 points cheaper than vanilla venerable dreads. Also they get plasma cannons for free, making venerable dreads with plasma cannons a real bargain. True, they only have BS/WS 4, but that's the price you pay.

2. DAs can still take a meltagun or flamer in a 5-man squad. That means, like space wolves, you can make a razorback spam army with 5-man units. The squad costs more than space wolves overall, but 5 guys in a TL las razorback with a flamer is an excellent multi-purpose troop unit, if you could take 5 or 6 of them (or possibly the HB razor with a meltagun squad inside).

3. 5-point pintle-mounted storm bolters. At that cost, might as well throw them on all the vehicles that can take them.

4. Squadrons of speeders can have up to 5 speeders, if I'm reading this correctly

5. Unlimited range psychic hoods on librarians. The powers are kind of meh, but you gotta have an HQ.

So a DA razor spam army with 3 venerable dreads, 5-6 razorback squads, 3 dakka preds, a librarian, and a chunky squadron of speeders or two would be a highly effective army, even in 5th edition.

Noticed that the Techmarines are "Elite, but do not take up a slot", and they (and Servitors) can take transports... :-) Have to admit I'm throwing together some of my spare parts and other toys to try out a DA force myself...

Here's the ultimate DA techmarine army:

http://yesthetruthhurts.com/2009/12/critical-mass-salvation/

Interesting... A bit more extreme than I was thinking, but definitely an interesting little trick... Thanks for the link!