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In my tradition of being bitter at the BL supplement & feeling it was worse than the parent Codex, but playing it anyway out of an excess of spite and self flagellating hatred, I don't really think much of the formations in the new Black Legion supplement, but I feel strangely motivated to play them anyway just to add fuel to my raging misanthropy.

With that in mind, here's a first take on a smallish army consisting entirely of a single Black Legion Warband formation.

• Chaos Lord (warlord): VotLW, MoK, bike, Sigil, Axe of Blinding Fury, bolt pistol
• 5 Bikes: VotLW, MoK, Icon of Wrath, 2 meltagun, champ with power fist
• 3 Terminators: VotLW, 3 combi-melta, 2 power axe, chainfist on the champ
• 10 Chosen: VotLW, Icon of Vengeance, 3 meltagun, 2 power axe, champ with power sword, dreadclaw
• 10 CSMs: VotLW, 2 plasmaguns, 3 bolters, 4 ccweps, champ with power sword, rhino w/ dozer & havoc
• 10 CSMs: ditto
• 5 Havocs: VotLW, 4 autocannons

1500 on the nose. Havocs camp a backfield objective & provide some minimal covering dakka, CSMs go for central objectives and sit on them, Dreadclaw chosen and Lord w/ bikes run forward for T2 assaults. Termies deep strike and prey for favorable scatter rolls.

Least, that's the plan, if everything doesn't just, you know, die.

Honestly, I'd have actually been somewhat excited about this formation, if the double-boon rolls worked on gifts upgrades, and if instead of 'kinda sometimes preferred enemy' it had just made the vet upgrade free for units in the formation (would have saved the above list enough points to give a gift to every character except the havoc champ). Ah, well.

That looks like a pretty solid list. I can see why you have a bitterness for the BL supplements. The last one was pretty gak. However, I have high hopes for this one and looking at the new formations I think that although they're situational they could be quite good. Especially that Shrine of Deceit - imagine taking over a tau riptide wing with that, it would be utter devastation

I don't know. You'd have to survive to use it. And it only looks good because of how good the riptide wing is. Sure, if you get the power off you'll mess up some of his stuff on your turn, but the next turn hell just go write back to wrecking all of yours, and with three extra ICs in your list, you have that much less bulk in your army to take it. Especially if you bulk out those sorcerers at all in order for them to try anything else other than this power. They'll very quickly get to chaos knight points, and, honestly, you can't believe that having a chance at trying to steal an enemy units shooting is better than just adding a chaos knight to your list - which adds reliable heavy firepower while also contributing to your assault rush.

And assault is worth mentioning here, as the power isn't melee friendly - you can't use it on enemy units in melee, and enemy units you shoot with can't target other enemy units in melee. CSMs as a whole are still pushed into assault rush lists, as ineffective as they are, because our shooty stuff, while decent for support, is nowhere near as efficient or powerful as it would need to be in order to win games outright with it, even with this power.

And on top of all that, it's super situational, dependent on the opponent both having non-vehicle shooty units powerful enough to be worth the investment and lacking the anti-psyker defenses necessary to shut down your attempt. So... It's basically just Tau hate.


And I could see the coven being taken AS Tau hate, in a shooty-oriented Renegades & Heretics list somewhere north of 2000 points. But CSMs, again, are just too melee oriented, if you're getting more than one or two tries at the power, you've probably lost anyway.

Don't get me wrong, it's a decent formation, but I think it's nowhere near as good as people are making out, and it's pretty much flat out the best formation of the bunch. So yeah, I can't say I'm too impressed with this pile, though Black Legion certainly made out better than Crimson Slaughter in these updates, with slightly better formations, and access to parent book artifacts being more helpful to BL than CS since the latter had good artifacts anyway, while for the most part the BL ones are pants.

Excuse the tangent, but could you explain how the access to parent codex artifacts works?

The recent update to the BL supplement allows CSM artefacts to be taken in addition to BL ones.