Thousand Sons Thoughts

So I've tried again and again, list after list to make a decently powerful Thousand Sons/Tzeentch themed list. They have some great back story and are my favorite looking of all the chaos marines.

I'm no pro player by any means, but I have noticed some things over the past couple matches. I've been trying to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the Thousand Sons and how to best deploy them.

They have some decent strengths. The 4+ invulnerable save is awesome, and makes them pretty hard to kill even in melee. It makes them pretty resilient against high power weapons and blast templates. There is a 50% chance of doing nothing to them, with any weapon. So they are really good at absorbing those powerful hits that would normally crush vanilla marines.

They have the AP 3 bolter which is good, but, really only shines against armies with good armor (basically space marines). But, you can still just jump in cover, so its not that a huge of an advantage all around. It's still a nice weapon, I'll give them that.

They also have the double edged sword of slow and purposeful and relentless. I love relentless, its amazing being able to move, rapid fire, then assault to deny your enemy the extra attacks. Or move and then shoot bolters 24" and then assault. But, your movements are very dependent on dice rolls which I don't like. A Rhino can definitely help this out however they go down pretty easily.

Then you have the Aspiring Sorcerer. Which is an amazing unit. Very versitile. He can be a deadly melee opponent with warptime, assassinating independent characters and monstrous creatures with his force weapon. He also can't be targeted in melee and taken out because he isn't an independent character. He can also be given the wind of chaos power and really take it to hordes. But the big drawback with this guy is he is SUPER expensive and you must take them.

The Thousand Sons themselves aren't very cheap, at 23 points a model they add up fast for a troop choice. They are the same price as plague marines, but Tsons really can't melee aswell as PMs.

The best way to take out Thousand Sons is just with masses of small arms fire. Their 3+ armor save is the same as a normal marine, so they go down just as fast. This has always been the thing that makes Thousand Sons a so so choice. Your enemy can just force you to keep rolling and eventually you will fail.

So taking this all into consideration I've basically summed it up to this. Thousand Sons are one the most resilient troops in the game vs high power weaponry and blast templates and I want to take advantage of this. Their weakness is small arms fire and masses of non-power weapon melee attacks against them. So why not just make a huge squad of them? you can take up to 19 of them and the Sorcerer.

Now, a large squad would do 2 things. First of all, it would make so you could have more models of them on the field without having to shell out an arm and a leg for a blasted Sorcerer on every 8 models or so. You could essentially have 2 squads of thousand sons (9+9) and only pay for 1 Sorcerer. This would allow them to absorb a HUGE amount of small arms fire. I mean, each one that dies would have to fail a 3+ armor save. I'm probably wrong but that's near 4 shots on average for each guy. So something like 72 shots to take them out. That's a lot considering they can shoot back and have a better time than their foes because of the AP 3, plus a rapid fire from 18 bolters is gonna be painful.

Now, the downside to this idea is obviously mobility. Tsons are gonna be slow, and a large squad is gonna attract a lot of attention. For this reason I use a squad like this as the center of my force. With the 4+ invlun save, they are like a huge wall of moving cover for your whole army. With some vindicator or defiler backup that is a nice firebase.

I am gonna try to run this in my new list and let you know how it works out. Its a bit unconventional, but it might just be something that works for the Tsons.