ShotDownMind, a good friend of mine, recently talked about the new army itch, and man, am I feeling it. I've gone through a lot of different ideas and desires, and I think I've finally settled on a death guard army. Nurgle is probably the most competitive mono-god list in the chaos marine book, so with that in mind, let's look at some important things when creating this army list.
#1: Special or not?
The first thing I address when picking a new list is whether or not I want a special character present in it. As many of you know, most special characters are capable of changing your list and swapping things around. This is especially true of Chaos Marines, giving you many different options for your lists. With that in mind, let's observe our Nurgle special character: Typhus.
Typhus, in short, is an incredible badass. Toughness 5 in terminator armour, with feel no pain, and causes fear. The manreaper rocks face, as typhus can take the punishment before he swings, and furthermore, he's a nurgle sorcerer, level 2, who generates both of his powers from nurgle's discipline. This is huge, as nurgle powers are extremely strong, and definitely are a big deal in most games. Next are troop plague marines, which makes us very happy, and the zombies; zombies seem pretty damn awesome for holding objectives, but don't forget that enough Str6 vs. T3 will still end them as easily as regular cultists.
So what are his shortcomings? Well, Terminator armour is a double edged sword, as when you're at low points, it's harder to fit in that unit to go with your character. So, if we run typhus, we will need to either walk him with a unit or buy a nurgle-marked unit for him to run with. Also, his points cost of 230 can be a bit tough to deal with, as we're going to start with a 1000 point list, and over 20% of the total list goes to typhus.
All of this taken into account, and I still choose Typhus for my HQ. Moving on.
#2: Troop Base
Your troop base is the next most important decision that you make, and I feel that this one is pretty straight forward. Let's go with running one 7-man unit of plague marines, with a meltagun, a flamer, a rhino, veterans of the long war, and meltabombs and gift of mutation on the champion. 240 points. Easy peasy.
For our second troop choice, twenty zombies will do us just fine. 90 points for a fearless and feel no pain unit of twenty models. This puts a total of 330 points in troops, and adding in Typhus, 560 points. 440 to go.
#3: Game Winners
This is a generally broad category, and in my thousand sons list, the nurgle obliterators and heldrakes fall under it. Heldrakes are probably the most important thing we can bring, so let's add two, as they support each other well, and will bail us out when we face all those enemy flyers.
Two heldrakes is 340 points, leaving us with a meager 100 points to spend.
Ouch. With only 100 points to spend, let's retract and just take one heldrake, so that maybe we can grab a killy unit for typhus to run with.
Only one heldrake leaves us with enough points to fit three mutilators with mark of nurgle and veterans of the long war(195), leaving us with 75 points left. So lets put in a good distraction, and run two nurgle chaos spawn, giving us our 1000 point list for our FLGS escalation tournament.
So there's a little insight into how I write a list, and here's my list for the local tournament circuit that starts at 1000 points.
Typhus - 230
warlord
Plague Marines x7 - 240
Vets, flamer, meltagun, meltabombs, gift of mutation, rhino
Zombies x20 - 90
Heldrake - 170
Baleflamer
Mutilators x3 - 195
Mark of Nurgle, Vets
Chaos Spawn x2 - 72
Mark of Nurgle
