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I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet, but on the diagonal deployment mission, your reserves come in from your long table edge. This is almost like making them outflank, as that edge goes all the way into the enemy's deployment zone.

So, in that scenario, you can use reserves very offensively.

See, trukks are very fragile, and manz are very dangerous. So they get shot down fast. And then you have just a trio of manz sitting with their thumbs up their asses in the field, where as if you hold them for a little, you can off some more anti light tank, and damage some units, and then your MANz come in, and there's nothing to oppose them, so they just go to town and rip up everything.

 Tarrasq wrote:
Usually you do it so your scoring units dont take the brunt of an opponent's alpha strike.

As the extreme example of this, Eldar Jetbikes. A squad of Jetbike Guardians can be very cheap, you spend at least one turn untargettable, then when you come in can basically go wherever you want on the board to avoid heavy fire and pickup objectives.

What about short range units that have nothing to fire at in the first turn. Kind of dumb to have them sit there while getting shot at in return from longer range units. Plus if you're going first, you can't deploy your units in relation to their preferred target, but when you bring them from reserve, you can.

 ScionOfSanguinius wrote:
For my codex, Blood Angels, we have a special rule that allows us to deepstrike with jump packs and only scatter 1 D6. This allows for some dual melta gun, tank popping, fun. It was WAY more fun when you didn't have to start with half your army on the table. Overall I think reserves is good because it allows your opponent to show their hand a bit and you can get a better idea of how their army functions, especially if its one you've never played before.

THIS.

I play BA with a defensive contingent behind an aegis. While my opponents are reacting to my hunkered down group, my deep strikers gett to come in where they want and that is great to have the knowledge that when you set up first, less than half your army is deployed, and the rest is coming in top of turn one. It lessens your opponents advantage of deploying second. All of a sudden you are picking off his flank units and making him spend the entire game reacting to you.