Hail, brothers!

A couple weeks ago I wrote a cockeyed Grey Knight list focused on scoring fixed secondaries instead of tactical. If you want to see the original list and theory, it's in this post.

I took the list to a GT last weekend and took fixed secondaries instead of tactical, and the results are intriguing.

Why Fixed Over Tactical?

I lose all my games on primaries. That's it. I've never lost a game on the backs of secondary play. GK are amazing at scoring secondaries no matter what, so I needed to write a list that could fight harder for primaries.

That's why the list I came up with has ~1750 points of paladins, terminators, and strikes dedicated to holding down the board while the remaining 250 points net me ~35 points on secondaries.

How Does This List Work?

The list revolves around 3 specific units:

• Techmarine with First to the Fray
• Techmarine
• Brother Captain Stern

That's right. 245 points are scoring you the majority of your points in this list. The three fixed secondaries I recommend with this list (in order of preference) are:

1. Deploy Teleport Homers
2. Behind Enemy Lines
3. Cleanse (playable, but tricky)

The three characters above are designed to score 7 points each on DTH and BEL across 4 turns. It essentially looks like this:

Turn 1 - Prognosticate the Techmarine with FTTF into the enemy DZ and deploy a homer. 7 points.

Turn 2 - Prognosticate the second Techmarine into the enemy DZ and deploy a homer. 7 points if the other techmarine is dead (he will be lol). If your opponent is lazy with screening, you can throw a Callidus back there for the extra 1 point.

Turn 3 - Prognosticate Stern into the enemy DZ and deploy a homer. 7 points. If something else is still alive back there, 1 point.

Turn 4 - Stern probably died, but also probably stood back up again. Deploy another homer. 7 points. Most factions can either shoot or charge Stern to death, but rarely both. Savvy players will try to shoot him dead, then tag him in combat so he can't action even if he survives the fight. In that case, use a strike squad or random survivor on the battlefield. Screens are light on T4, so you may be able to use the Callidus if you haven't.

Turn 5 - Send whatever 1 unit you have left to nab the last DTH and BEL.

Congrats, you scored 35 secondary points!

I mention Cleanse as an option because your opponent may be running a horde - if they are, they definitely can screen your 3" deep strikes, so plan instead to use the characters above as your cleansers while the terminators/paladins hold down the fort around them.

The Numbers

For context, I took all of my event scores since 10e dropped and put them in the sheet linked here. These numbers are exclusively games played at RTTs or GTs (one of which being the Salt Lake Open). Admittedly, the sample size for fixed secondaries is still small (only 6 games so far), but the results tell a fascinating story. All six of my fixed games were played with Behind Enemy Lines and Deploy Teleport Homers.

Winning Scores - Fixed

Winning Scores - Tactical

As you can see, which list I took had no bearing on secondaries at all (to the point that I quadruple checked my math because my average secondary score was exactly the same). Taking a more conventional GK list with termies/libbies/etc Tacticals scored the exact same number of secondary points in my winning games as when I took fixed with techmarine memes and terminators.

Most importantly, my primary scoring is much higher because I can spend 1750 points on terminators that bat people away from objectives. On average, I scored almost 10 more primary points - which is more than enough to flip games, especially when your average winning score is freakin' 94 points.

The most important data, though, is on losing games:

Losing Scores - Fixed

Losing Scores - Tactical

Again, I've quadruple checked my math - When I took fixed, I scored the exact same secondary points in losing games as I did in winning games. That's because the secondaries are taking care of themselves, and I'm fighting the REAL battle - primaries.

This is reflected in the difference in total losing score - on average, I was losing with a whopping 75 points instead of losing with 63 on average. I think this is because when the fight goes bad with tacticals, you have to pull your units back to objectives to fight for primaries, and it can come at the expense of secondaries late in the game.

In total, this means that my winning games were scoring an average of 18.7 more points, and my losing games were scoring 23.5 more points when playing fixed secondaries.

Common Concerns/Rebuttals

"Won't people just overwatch your characters?"

This isn't a concern unique to fixed secondaries - opponents do when you play tactical as well. In my six games, only twice did my opponent overwatch a prognosticating character to death. I still scored 29 and 31 points on secondaries in those respectively with a win and loss between both.

Also, Prognosticated Arrival really enables this playstyle - you'd be surprised where you can sneak your 32mm base techmarines where they can't get shot.

"This won't work, your opponent will just screen you."

Nobody has ever screened a 3" deep strike on a 32mm base in my experience, and I don't see that changing unless horde/carpet armies rise back up. In that case, drop BEL for Cleanse.

"This is riskier than playing tacticals."

Tacticals are random. Fixed are not. I just throw my shit into the enemy DZ, cash out, win the game.

"Our strategems are super good - won't we be CP starved without the option to discard tacticals?"

Not in my experience. You only need your 1 CP per turn - one for Prognosticated Arrival on your turn for BEL/DTH, and one for Truesilver or Mists on your opponent's turn. Neither of those are Battle Tactics so you never need more than that 1 CP per turn. As people get lax with screens later in the game, you start picking up an extra CP here and there.

Besides - you don't want to discard secondaries. You want to score them.

"This playstyle has no lethality compared to a more traditional list."

Mkay well idk if you noticed, but our entire index is a little dry on lethality. The best part is this: playing fixed only costs 245 points. You can still run whatever else list you want to run. I'm doing 30 terminators and paladins because it's sick. Want to run 50 strikes to try and hold primaries? Sick, you still have 500 points left. Want to do 5x5 Terminators with Draigo and 3 Librarians? You can! And you'll still have ~250 points left for some strike marines.

"This list gives up No Prisoners and Assassinate really easily."

That's fine. The overwhelming majority of players play tactical secondaries, so they'll get 5 points out of the list 99% of the time from Assassinate and 2 on No Prisoners. I'm getting 7 per turn in exchange - they won't keep up.

Closing

I can't stop amusing myself with the potential lore explaining why Techmarines are being yeeted into enemy lines alone. "Goddamn it, Kevin forgot to calibrate the teleportarium again! Anyways, while you're out there, we need you to run some errands..."

I'm going to keep rolling with this to collect more data. Early results are promising, but still early. If nothing else, I wanted to share my findings to encourage the Brothers of Titan to give this playstyle a whirl - it's working for me, and it's hysterical to have people puzzle out why I have techmarines in a list with no vehicles.

Share your thoughts - and sally forth unto glory, Brothers!