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So still refining my competitive list, and I'm down to a choice between two fantastic units, tomb blades or lychguard.

Overall: Like most TAC Necron lists The idea is to mix capable CC with capable shooting. The hard hitting Shooting is accomplished by a unit of deep striking destroyers, and a doomsday ark. The doomsday ark is important, so it gets backed up by a cryptek and a spyder, who together will heal 2d3 wounds per round. With the QS stratagem and smart placement I should be able to dominate a fire lane (or several) with fairly minimal risk of getting one shotted. The Nephrek overlord keeps morale at bay for the three units of infantry, denies psychic powers, and buffs the immortals to be a better anti-infantry unit. Wraiths will do wraith things like assassinating HQ and tieing up important units in CC.

Lychguard: The idea here is that on turn 2 use the VoD to move the lychguard towards the enemy, in support of the wraiths. With an overlord and MWBD they have a good chance of making the charge, especially if you are willing to blow a command point reroll. The idea is to combine a traditional tough hard hitting melee unit with a unit as slippery and unpredictable as wraiths. The idea is with a double threat like that the opponent will have a hard time countering your CC. if they deploy screens out the wraiths can cruise past the screens and get to the juicy bits inside, and if they deploy screens close the Lychguard will just kill their way thru them and consolidate into important units.


Tomb blades: Much less thought is required here because tomb blades are awesome, hard to hit, tough with two wounds a pop, and hit like a truck dropped from space. This takes the army in more of a shooting direction, rather than the balanced approach of the lychguard list. Without lychguard to shepard, I change the overlord into a destroyer lord, ghetto celestine style.


So what do you guys think, should I go with lychguard, or tomb blades, or something else entirely?

I like the Tomb Blades better with the DS changes (beta rules) its hard to say how the Lychguard will perform. You hve almost 25% of your army committed to that tactic, and despite what you think, getting a 9" charge with re-rolls is still unlikely, only 48%. (i run nids and regular dont get my 8+" charges with rerolls at 59% chance). which means if you fail, That puts them on turn 3 before they are even in the fight, by which point your army might have already been dwindle down piece meal.

I could be wrong, only way to find out is to try it. I like the Lychguard but with the DS changes being pushed back its going to be difficult. You might try the Monolith or Night Sycthe invasion beams as they can come in at the beginning of the Movement phase and then move in.

I think going hybrid might cause issues for target prioritization if you go all shooty and have TB zipping around flying over screeners into backline with 14" movement. With objective grabbing potential and ability to harass and shift across the board quickly.

Also, 2 blobs of 10 warriors is going to get wiped. i dont think you will get your RP on them.

The Spyder is probably a waste of points. I worry about whether you will have enough powerful long-range shooting. Another DDA would probably help you quite a bit, but you'd have to give something up to get it.

About the spyder, The easiest way to calculate the syders value is to do a cost benefit for the value of the repairs on the DDA. Doomsday ark is 193 points, for 14 wounds. So a little less than 14 points a wound, so it will take about 2 to 3 rounds for the spyder to pay for itself. Anything after that is gravy.

However a better way to think about it is in terms of what I can negate. Given how tough the DDA is, the spyder could end up negating hundreds points of enemy fire power over the course of a game. Here is the math on that using lascannon devs. Las cannons will hit 2/3 of the time wound 2/3 of the time and QS will stop a lascannon about 42% of the time (so a 58% chance of failure) that means the average las cannon shot will do:

.67 * .67 * .58 * 3.5 = .9 wounds

So the spyder will negate a little more than two las cannon shots a round. At 38 points per las cannon (dev marine + lascannon), that ends up negating 76 points a round. It's a gamble of course since they could just one shot the DDA but if they manage that I'm out a whole lot more than the spyders cost. You see admech do these kind of shenanigans all the time, and it usually works out fairly well for them, so I'm giving it a try in Necrons.

As for running warriors at min size, I want people to shoot at my warriors, any shot wasted on a warrior is a shot that doesn't go into more valuable units. The amount of effort it takes to kill a ten man warrior squad is disproportionate to its cost especially with auto passing morale. Since they can't rely on morale to finish them they need to overcommit to wiping them out. Sure I could make them unkillable by running them at a 20 man squad size, but that would make them less desirable as targets, cost a lot more points, and not really add much to my bottom line. So it comes down to why include warriors at all, and the answer is twofold, to fill out a battalion on the cheap, and so they can teleport to/sit on objectives.

As for the Lychguard, it's actually an 8" charge since they will have MWBD. Even if they don't make it a squad of lychguard 9" from an opponents formation is sure to draw huge amounts of firepower, which will make using Dispersion field amplification worth while, Even if I only get a few mortal wounds/saves out of it. I'm obviously not sold on it though, as I do worry about how the meta will adjust to deep strikers with the beta rules, and because it's possible that they could get tarpitted (not likely though since they are very good at killing chaff with Awakened by murder and MWBD).

Just so you know, if you veil the lychguard, they dont keep the MWBD. Sad but its in the new FAQ that things which leave the table and re enter dont keep buffs

Grimgold - that's an interesting point you make. As someone who is also an AdMech player, we don't go out of our way to get more repair ability, it's just baked-in with all of our HQs. Your analysis is suggesting an intentional choice, which it really isn't.

The lascannons could just shoot the non-QS spyder on T1 and moot everything too unless you're looking to hide the spyder cleverly behind terrain.

My skepticism aside, the Cloaktek + Spyder healing combo is a concept being discussed in the Necron tactica right now and I'd be curious to see some battle reports if you stick with it. It would probably get a lot more mileage out of it if there was another DDA to assist. Given the new FAQ, in sub-1000 point games where you can't have more than 2x of the same unit, a spearhead with a Cloaktek, Spyder, and 2x DDA could be nasty.

Red Acolyte wrote:
Grimgold - that's an interesting point you make. As someone who is also an AdMech player, we don't go out of our way to get more repair ability, it's just baked-in with all of our HQs. Your analysis is suggesting an intentional choice, which it really isn't.

The lascannons could just shoot the non-QS spyder on T1 and moot everything too unless you're looking to hide the spyder cleverly behind terrain.

My skepticism aside, the Cloaktek + Spyder healing combo is a concept being discussed in the Necron tactica right now and I'd be curious to see some battle reports if you stick with it. It would probably get a lot more mileage out of it if there was another DDA to assist. Given the new FAQ, in sub-1000 point games where you can't have more than 2x of the same unit, a spearhead with a Cloaktek, Spyder, and 2x DDA could be nasty.

I've watched quite a few batreps where admech kept a knight or a dune crawler alive past their expiration date, and there does seem to be some planning around keeping kastelan robots alive. As for the rest you're right to be skeptical, we haven't seen it tested yet, and theorycraft needs to be backed up by play experience to be reliable. However I'm pretty confident you can squeeze a few more turns out of a DDA with proper support, because it's incredibly hard to one shot a DDA because QS functions like a 4++ against las cannons and a 3++ against meltas in melta range. doing it as a spearhead seems like a great idea, then you can run Nihilakh for the reroll ones. Sadly I only have one DDA atm and while I could proxy my ghost ark as one, I kind of hate that, so I'll probably wait until I get a second one to try it.