Its all About the Tau - Lists from the New Codex.

Having gone through the Codex in some detail, the next step is to put it all together and come up with some lists.

As I’ve been going through the codex 4 potential list have been rattling around in my head, 2 of them I think will be more competitive than the others, but the less competitive ones might be more fun. The lists are

Mech Tau. Mobile Fire Warrior Squads in D’fish.

Gunline Tau. Lots and Lots of Dakka blowing everything off the board.

Farsight Bomb. Farsight and his 7 Samurai deep striking in an blowing stuff away, and

Shadowsun’s Ghost Cadre, Stealth Suits, Pathfinders and Kroot….. lots of Kroot.

Now of course there are a loads of variations on these themes, but you need to start somewhere!

I’ll start thinking them through over the next week or so. I’ll building them to 1850pts, as the plan is to qualify for the GT Final this year, and that seems to be the points for this event.

Now I’ve always tried in my Tau lists (not so much in marine lists) to build a balanced army, with something to cope with anything I might come across at a tournament. In doing this I try to think about all the threats I’ll need to face, and design a list that has answers to those threats. Abuse Puppy did an excellent article about this on Kirby’s blog a couple of weeks ago, which I couldn’t possible top, so I won’t try.

Here’s a summarised version of his threat list.

·      Multiple Flyers,  Can you deal with 2-3 AV12 flyers, or 3 – 4 AV11 ones – i.e. Vendettas, Night Scythes or Stormravens. Or 2 Winged Hive Tyrants? Can your army shoot them down, or can your army ignore them and still compete? A variation on this is, can you kill 2 Helldrakes before they kill you?

·      Guard Blobs. Can you kill 40+ T3 models, who may have FNP, or a 2+ cover save?

·      Deep Strikers. Can you deal with 3-4 drop pods in your face turn one, or maybe Deathwing?

·      MEQ Horde. Can your army kill 60+ marine that are advancing on your objectives?

·      Monstrous Creatures. Can you kill 3 Tervigons at range? If not you will struggle with most Nid builds.

·      Deathstars. Can you kill a squad of TH/SS Terminators – Nob Bikers – Paladins – Harliestars? What about a squad of Wraiths with a destroyer lord tanking wounds up front, while not quite a deathstar, he’s probably got 2 of them!

·      Mech. Even although you see fewer list that spam low AV vehicles, you still need to be abel to deal with 3-4 of them.

·      Hordes. Can you kill enough orks to stop being overwhelmed by a green tide – can you kill enough Seekers or Khorne Hounds to stop them wiping you turn 3?

·      AV13 and 14. Land Raiders, but more common, at least in UK based Tournaments, 3 Annihilation Barges.

·      Scoring. Have you got 4 or 5 mobile and/or resilient scoring units

A pretty tall order, particularly if you also want to try and build some sort of redundancy into the list – i.e. have more than one thing that can deal with each of these threats. I’ve been struggling with this so far in 6^th, but I suspect the new Tau ‘dex has the best chance of doing it.

First up will be Mech Tau.

EYIG