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Took this list to a tournament yesterday, which I managed to win. 5 games in one day...brutal schedule, but it helps that Deamon games tend to go quickly. Sorry for no pics, but I was feeling a bit under the weather, left the camera in my car, and didn't feel like running out into the snow to get it.

HQ: Bloodthirster /w unholy might, blessing of the blood god
E: 8 Bloodcrushers /w fury of Khorne, chaos icon, instrument of chaos
E: 3 Flamers
T: 12 Bloodletters /w chaos icon
T: 9 horrors /w Changeling, bolt of tzeentch
T: 7 Plaguebearers
HS: Soul Grinder
HS: Soul Grinder

Game 1: Space Marines
A fine example of a balanced space marine list, with a lot of different units. Unfortunately for my opponent, he really had no synergy between his units, so they weren't really designed to work together. With table quarter deployment, he spread his forces out to cover his entire deployment zone, and with capture and control, he placed his objective deep inside his deployment zone. I placed my as close to the center of the table as possible.

He advanced forward with some of his stuff, and then I hit the table with the grinders, bloodcrushers, and bloodthirster. Aside from keeping the grinders away from his multi-melta armed dreadnought, I simply tried to drop as close as possible, than ran towards the enemy. His army simply lacked the ability to do enough damage at range, he couldn't run away from the grinders and bloodthirster fast enough, and the bloodcrushers landed close enough to the Marines (thanks to the ridiculously large footprint of an 8-Crusher squad+a decent run move) that running away from them would have been a crapshoot.

My reserves really did nothing this game except hold objectives.

Game 2: Dark Angels.

Ravenwing and Deathwing, mainly. Another spearhead deployment, this time with kill points as the objective. Dark Angels castled up tightly, but held their terminators in reserve. I elected to go first, and landed with the grinders, crushers, and thirster. The thirster scattered far away, but the grinders and crushers landed relatively on target. When the terminators arrived, they found themselves without a lot of good places to land, because my crushers had run close enough to the ravenwing bikers that, combined with other DA units, he had to separate the two squads that came in. They shot, but really accomplished next to nothing. Bloodcrushers plus a soul grinder killed nearly everything in the DA army, a large portion of it through a multi-charge that caught a tactical squad, bike squadron, and deathwing squad. The third Deathwing squad got jumped on by horrors, flamers, and bloodletters. I only lost one model, one of the soul grinders, to a lascannon shot from a Dreadnought, which was then killed by the thirster.

Game 3: Iyandenish eldar.

This was the tie, and the player ended up in third. Eldrad, Maugan Ra, 10 Wraithguard, 10 Dire Avengers, Pathfinders, and 3 Wraithlords.

Crushers, bloodthirster, and grinders landed first, and moved to put pressure on the Eldar. My opponent focused everything he had on the bloodcrushers, and between doom, shooting, and assault, managed to kill off the bloodcrushers in one turn. Ouch. With that unit gone, I had to gamble a bit, and I when my flamers arrived, I deep struck them next to the wraithguard (which were somewhat bunched up after the assault), and landed on-target. 3 flamers killed off the wraithguard, and the game was on.

The game was full of wacky rolls going back and forth, and as we had identical unit counts, began a nice process of trading off units. My bloodthirster killed one wraithlord, then promptly whiffed against Maugan Ra, who managed to kill him in conjunction with another wraithlord. A soul grinder killed one wraithlord, while the other remaining wraithlord killed the other soul grinder. Maugan Ra managed to kill a wraithlord with shooting, then failed to run far enough (he needed a 2+) to get away from the bloodletters who were going after him. And plaguebearers killed the final wraithlord, then got stuck in with Eldrad. The dire avengers killed off the horrors, but found themselves weak against the plaguebearers, and the game ended in a tie after 7 turns, 6 KP to 6KP.

Game 4: Iyanden Eldar (again)
Similar list, although it dropped the dire avengers and a wraithlord for a full squad of warwalkers. He split his fire up, however, targetting one of my soul grinders with his warwalkers, and the bloodcrushers lived through the initial volleys (and more importantly, the icons lived). Wasn't helped by dawn of war, which probably made him a bit hesitant about shooting at the bloodcrushers, which were a bit farther away than my grinders.

Had some ridiculously good rolls for armor saves, which helped, and the bloodthirster redeemed himself by slaying the wraithlords with ease. The horrors also shone here, landing and shooting at the warwalkers, killing one with a bolt, immobilizing another (killing it due to the vehicle squadron rules) and stunning the other.

Ended up killing everything in the army except for Eldrad by turn 4...but the game went on to 6 before I finall managed to get enough wounds past the fortuned 3++ save.

Game 5: Mech Eldar
Thought this was going to be my toughest game yet (against Spencer of 40K Radio). Things seemed to go against me from the start...my secondary came in, he was fully mechanized, and the game revolved around holding multiple objectives.

I chose to go first, because my main concern was not giving him a chance to spread out and deny me landing zones. The bloodletters landed near a crater close to his deployment zone (about 8-10" away from his lines) the plaguebeaers landed near two objectives on "my" half of the table, the flamers landed behind the bloodletters on the other side of the crater, and I landed my horrors as close to his dark reapers (which were in the middle of his line) as I felt comfortable.

Horrors lit up the dark reapers and killed two of them. Everything else ran, with the bulk of the bloodletters moving into the crater for the cover save, while about 3 or 4 of them moved to create a conga-line that put an icon as close as possible to his forces, while keeping the majority of models in cover.

His turn, he split his fires between the bloodletters and horrors, killing about half of each squad, then charged in the avatar to finish off the horrors. Apparently, he'd gotten confused between the horrors and the flamers, and had fixated on the idea that I'd put 9 flamer templates right where they could reach nearly his entire army on the next turn if he didn't kill them.

He realized his mistake when I moved the flamers 12" the next turn, right next to two wave serpents and a squad of fire dragons. The fire dragons disappeared, and both wave serpents were shaken. A soul grinder appeared off of the bloodletters icon, flamed down a squad of guardians, caught one of the wave serpents and immobilized it, and then wiped out the rest of the guardians with its harvester. The bloodletters reformed and charged at another squad of guardians nearby, taking them out.

At that point, it was mainly mop-up, as the bloodthirster took down the avatar, the soul grinders accounted for the rest of the skimmers, and the bloodcrushers after some amazing DT rolls (1,2; 2,2; 3;1, etc.) and run moves (1-2" max) killed his pathfinders.

Fun games all around. Wish I could have stuck around for the drinking afterwards, but I was feeling ill and decided to drive home ASAP.

Deamons have a good habit of reacting to the mission and choosing their battles.

Nice job. Usually all the games I see, the blood crushers are the MVPs but the Soul Grinders are almost always hard to kill.

Nice to see a Thirster set down an Avatar...Accept no Substitutes!

Good report, gratz for the win.

Did you see any 6 dreads marine army ? How would you play against it ?

I play an army with the same type of units, but with rending heralds on chariot instead of a thirster, and my squads are smaller, but more numerous (very similar to the one of 40k enthousiast, but I use plaguebearers as I find the other troops too fragile).
Made 2 games vs a marine army; 4 "normal" dreads + 1 ironclad, + 4 tac squads (on rhinos/razor/pod).
Almost full melta, which means the grinders didn't last long. The rending on the crushers and the heralds didn't prove efficient enough to kill the dreads, maybe due to my incapacity to roll a 6, but I felt unable to deal with so many dreads (they just charge my crushers / heralds, and end up slowly killing them.)

Would you rely on the thirster on this situation? or do you see any other alternative ?

Other question: don't you feel the 8 crusher squad is a bit dangerous to deep strike ? or risky to have it locked in assault ? (dreadnought, defiler)

was there a prize for winning the turney

Thanks for the kind words.

lolzman wrote:was there a prize for winning the turney

Yes.

Arleucs wrote:Good report, gratz for the win.

Did you see any 6 dreads marine army ? How would you play against it ?

Use the bloodcrushers to tie up as many dreads as possible, and use the bloodthirster to kill ironclads. If I can work it, send the soul grinders against ironclads at 2 on 1. Actually, tying up the ironclads can be done with nearly any of my troop squads as well.

I've had good luck with flamers hitting ironclads as well, since they're usually running so close together that I can get 2 or 3 with a single turn's shooting.

Arleucs wrote:
Other question: don't you feel the 8 crusher squad is a bit dangerous to deep strike ? or risky to have it locked in assault ? (dreadnought, defiler)

Absolutely not. The 8-man squad is always the first squad to deep strike, and the large size actually proves to be an advantage most of the time, since it essentially gives the squad extra movement. Getting locked into assault might be a problem, while there are things they can't kill effectively, those things tend to not be the kind of things that can kill them effectively either.

Thanks for the report. An interesting read.

- Blackbone

wow. nice report, i mgona give the 8 man crusher squad a try.

I play against Chaos Demons quite often at my FLGS and I see Crusher and Letter squads like in your list all the time. I think the thing that people forget is that letting Crushers of Letters assault your assault units is the worst thing that can happen. I know every list doesn't have them but anything I5 should be taking those guys down if they get too close. I use my smaller Noise Marine squad to shoot then mop up letter squads and sometimes I sacrifice my MoT, Wind DP to Crushers but he usually destroys the unit. The thing I mainly try to accomplish is assaulting any Khorne Demon units with my Berzerkers.

The list is very solid though. A lot of Chaos Demons I see running around lack shooting altogether. I believe it is one of their strongest suits, hitting the table and laying down some impressive fire to wipe squads out. I think the next super dominant list is probably going to be well run demon lists like this. It's not so much point and click like Dual Lash but mixed chaos is getting better and better as times go on.

Typeline wrote:I play against Chaos Demons quite often at my FLGS and I see Crusher and Letter squads like in your list all the time. I think the thing that people forget is that letting Crushers of Letters assault your assault units is the worst thing that can happen. I know every list doesn't have them but anything I5 should be taking those guys down if they get too close. I use my smaller Noise Marine squad to shoot then mop up letter squads and sometimes I sacrifice my MoT, Wind DP to Crushers but he usually destroys the unit. The thing I mainly try to accomplish is assaulting any Khorne Demon units with my Berzerkers.

The list is very solid though. A lot of Chaos Demons I see running around lack shooting altogether. I believe it is one of their strongest suits, hitting the table and laying down some impressive fire to wipe squads out. I think the next super dominant list is probably going to be well run demon lists like this. It's not so much point and click like Dual Lash but mixed chaos is getting better and better as times go on.

To be fair, with that build I've really only got shooting when my usual secondary comes in first, or if I think that it will help (one unit that I need to shoot up early, for example). Where it really comes in handy is that my usual primary with this build (thirster, crushers, and grinders) is rock hard and can take most armies punishment. With the secondary having some shootiness, they can be effective from the turn they arrive, cutting down on the number of turns that they're doing nothing.

If the dice don't favor me, my secondary has enough bodies to absorb shooting, and my play goes different, as I'm playing for time until my heavy hitters arive.

I like the use of primarily khorne units. It looks like soul grinders are the best choice for HS from what I have seen here on Dakka.

G

Hey congratz on the win, I am assuming it was the GTI?

Thanks for the write up too, it was a good read.

Nice win and thanks for putting it up,

Great job on the win. Strong demon list there....

particularly loving the bloodcrusher rig, and the naked grinders...

I've been pushing 8 man crusher units with full upgrades on Somnicide for a while now. Now I can just send him this link

Well written list from an up to date codex, well played, well deserved win.

How does this list work against other armies that don't deploy? Like podding marines? I always have trouble wrapping my head around that.