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The other thread of unbound lists seems to be mostly comedy lists.

I keep getting told that unbound armies will be incredibly powerful and will easily dominate competitive games if allowed. Apparently it will be easy to make lists which wipe competitive battle forged lists off the table making scoring irrelevant. I remain skeptical, but I'd like to see some evidence.

Obviously there is a lot of information we don't have at this point, but let's assume that most of the rules we don't know about will stay the same and that unbound does not remove restrictions on unique characters and artifacts.

Please bear in mind that these builds are meant to deal with competitive battle-forged lists, so they need tools to handle things like invulnerable deathstars, multiple superheavies, void shield generator networks and so on. I don't want to see builds which can take a normal army off the table, I want ones which can outclass even the toughest FOC-following lists out there. Just spamming heldrakes isn't going to cut it.

Lists don't need to be super detailed or anything. Just rough examples which illustrate the basic ideas.

20 Obliterators would do a number on many armies.

Problem with those sorts of armies is that they'll pretty much forfeit KP missions.

Chaos daemons furies could be a major problem. Daemon Jump infantry with a MoS at 8pts a piece is super nasty; back them up with FMCs and you'll wreck many lists.

You can also take the furies at 6pts w/o the rending/+3 run distance, which might be even more effective at 125pts for a 20 man unit.

120 of those and 4 Bloodthirsters would probably table many lists.

I wouldn't be all that worried about unbound lists. Sure there might be one or two guys in my local meta that'll use it to bring 5+ riptides, but I'd be more worried about them bringing the same 2++ rerollable deathstars or 3 riptides + support but having those lists able to hold objectives against a cool, fluffy night lords or iron warriors army I'd otherwise think about running.

Legion armies are actually playable Unbound after they don't have to commit 500 points to unupgraded Tactical Marines.

I find it hard to credit that a list made with fewer restrictions could not be made tougher than a list that has more restrictions. It is logic.

Therefore I would look at the best competitive Bound lists, and imagine how they could be improved by Unbinding them. To make a silly example, could a Necron deathstar be improved by adding Grey Knight Dreadknights?

The trick with unbound will be taking good lists cutting out what isn't good and adding in things that previously were stopped by the force org chart.

Examples include

5-6 Annihilation Barges Cheap enough to spam, strong enough to deal with most of the meta, and all you have to cut to add the extra 2-3 is one unit of wraiths or one flyer from the normal lists.

5-6 Thunderfire cannons, 200-300 more points than in a normal space marine list. Cut 1-2 bike/troop units to have a large increase in barrage firepower.

tiber55 wrote:
The trick with unbound will be taking good lists cutting out what isn't good and adding in things that previously were stopped by the force org chart.

This is the big one. Namely - troops. Troops are known as the troop tax for a reason - they're mostly terrible, and only taken because you have to, both for force organisation and for (in 6th) scoring.

Now that scoring can be done by any unit again, people can ignore the troop tax and make armies with no limitations. I'm sure enemy units with 'Objective Secured' will cause some headaches, but the beauty of no limitations is how much firepower people will be able to pack. A unit stubbornly holding an objective with that rule needs to actually exist on the table for it to work.

Riptide spam and some of the FW riptides for gravy.

Nothing but Skyblight swarms as far as the eye can see.

Respawning, high speed tarpits, Shadow in the warp casting flyrants, vehicle slaying Crones, and blob breaking harpies everywhere. Add more non-formation FMCs to your heart's content.

With the changes to grounding rules, this will be even stronger than it is now.

This list also hard counters most of the psychic reliant death stars and D-weapon spamming lords of war; and the FMCs have nothing to fear from Knights as they get vector striked to death while in turn being safe from all their blast weapons.

On that note, I wonder how the SitW will be changed to fit the new psychic system.