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Hey folks!

I'm going to be playing against Thousand Sons for the first time tomorrow with my Ultramarines. My only experience with Chaos is a game against Deathguard.

What should I expect? What do they do? What's their gimmicks?

From what others have said on here, triple Daemon Princes and Ahriman are a scary threat. Thousand Sons have one of the big Primarch guys, but if there aren't other big scary targets he supposedly goes down easy. They have a lot of sorcery; I'm pretty sure everything short of Tzaangors and Daemon Engines can cast. Tzaangor bombs are said to be terrifying in combat. Kill big units of 30 of them without any remorse.

If its pure thousand sons its a pretty straight forward army to watch out for. Their anti tank options come down to deamonengines (defiler, forgefiend) and psycic powers or trying to power through your armor with their special bolters (ap-2 bolters). Their deamon princes are arguably the best in the game too, with a 4++ save and casting 2 powers a turn.

Their marines all get the all is dust rule, add 1 to saving throws if the weapon is damage 1.

Finally all of their marines are psychic. Most know mini smite (1 mw on a 5+ rolled on 2d6, d3 mw on an 11+). Their chrs know normal smite. Their smites dont get more difficult to pull off.

There are a few different ways to run them. I run mine as a t1 assault force. Helldrakes, tzaangors (the goat people), and a warlord dp all rushing forward and getting t1 charges. This buys my force time to get into rapid fire range t2 and hold the middle of the board.

Alternatively i have seen people run rubric blob spam (lots of 5 man teams) for maximum smite output. These lists typically win through wearing your opponent down. These lists also use deep stike to their advantage, as well as scarab occult terminators.

Tzaangor bombs are legit.

Be prepared for large 30man blob 9" away. Position your units with that in mind. Also, don't throw characters at them as they get extra goodies when characters are involved.

Also, if the terrain is good and they're bringing Sorceror/DP, have a plan if they abuse the "hide troops out of LOS ahead of characters" that allows characters LOS abilities to throw psyhic powers down field. That is, bring something that can ignore LOS like thunderfire cannons, scorpius, etc...

Other than Tzanngor bombs and DPs, they're just CSMs.