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Recently a close friend of mine convinced me to try Warhammer 40k, I've had some experience with a few other tabletop games and when I was 10 years old I played Tomb Kings in Warhammer Fantasy. So I wrote up what I think is an OK army list for 40k Chaos Daemons. Keep in mind due to me and my friend being university students we decided to keep the costs minimal and have a 550 point limit and also we try to avoid buying cost heavy units such as Daemon Princes etc etc. My friend is building a Necron army (which I am not looking forward to fighting from what I've read) and I'm building a heavily Nurgle based army with a few ranged units for versatility. The units I intent to Include are:

2 Troop of Plaguebearers comprised of 10 units each (A total of 20 plaguebearers).

1 Troop of Pink Horrors comprised of 10 units.

1 Herald of Nurgle with a psych level of 2, Loci of Fecundity and equipped with the Grimoire of True Names.

1 Herald of Nurgle equipped with a psych Level 1, Loci of Fecundity, a basic ether blade and Dark Blessing.

Hopefully this combination of units will be powerful enough to take on the Necrons, I look forward to any advice you can provide me with and appreciate any comment. Below I will briefly describe how I intend on using the units and why I selected them, keep in mind I have never played 40k and am very new to this, so I don't know all the rules yet but I have a reasonable understanding.

So to cover the basics the two troops of plaguebearers will be headed by the heralds of Nurgle so that the Loci of Fecundity can be at optimal effect and provide my units with 'feel no pain' as they advance towards the enemy units. The single troop of Pink Horrors will be providing ranged supportive fire for the duration of the battle and hopefully avoid direct combat. I want to try something interesting with my heralds equipment as I decided to give one herald both an ether blade to cut up anything in his way, and dark blessing for those important invulnerability saves, what I am hoping will be viable is that the second Herald of Nurgle will continually buff the first herald with the Grimoire of True Names, giving him the possibility to have not only the bonus rolls to invulnerability saves due to dark blessing but an extra +2 to each roll! this isn't even including the feel no pain that he gets from his Loci of Fecundity. I also gave the Herald equipped with the Grimoire level 2 psych so that he can stay out of combat for the most part and remain buffing the other herald and casting spells.

This is what I think will be a decent take on a very low cost army, look forward to reading any suggestions you have, thanks for your time.

First of all you can't just pick Dark Blessing. You buy a greater reward and you roll for what the bonus is at the start of every game.

But more importantly this list isn't very good. Plaguebearers just don't do a lot. They are slow so can't catch anything to fight and don't do a lot of damage so will have trouble killing stuff. Without grimoire the die really fast in combat. Also Pink Horrors (which should be at 11 so you get 2 warp charges) suck at shooting because of the massive amount of warp charge they require to function and still being unreliable (you have to cast that power and then you still have to roll to hit on bs3)

The important thing to know about daemons is that our troops are not what's great about our army. Our bread and butter come from our fast attack and HQ (also soul grinders). The troops are just there because you have to take them. Generally speaking the only troops daemon players will take are 2x11 pink horrors solely for the warp charges to do summoning and not shooting. If you want to focus on Nurgle you should be focusing on Plague Drones, Soul Grinders or Daemon Princes. Those units are excellent and have some punch.

Oh I see, but what would be some more cost effective alternatives to the army I suggested? being a 550 point limit I cant really have much of a troop of using all special units. what troops would you suggest having rather than the plaguebearers or the pink horrors considering the small army size. I don't have to go full nurgle, Khorn is also quite interesting although all of my previous army composition was based upon recommendations from the wiki. If I were to get 2 troops of Pink Horrors than I wouldn't have enough points to really have too much damage on the table, at least I don't think so.

going nurgle, 3 plague drones and some upgrades for their champion are under 150 points, and are pretty durable.

but really, you could field 2 units of 11 horrors, and a single tz herald and have an incredibly brutal list at that point value (and be way under 500 points). summoning is kinda ridiculous in low point games.