Bald Brawler Wargaming

The Who

Howdy, my name’s Jake aka the Bald Brawler and I love Chaos Knights. I’ve one-tricked this army from mid 9th edition onwards, topping out at 5th worldwide for the faction in 2023 and bobbing around in the top 20 since then. I had 108 games of CK played in Pariah Nexus (almost all on the exact same 13 war dog list) and since our codex dropped I have been putting as many reps as life has allowed.

The results have been, uh, pretty good.

The What

My Infernal Lance list is as follows:

The Why

Let’s address the elephant in the room first: Why Infernal Lance over Lords of Dread? This is mostly a logistical issue for me, as my next major tournament is a team tournament and I need to fly there, and I can’t transport 5 bigs easily. This Infernal list fits perfectly into my carrying case.

The other reason is flexibility. Lords of Dread is a massive stat check (and is fun as hell.) But Infernal has tools for every situation and a ton of room for skill expression. Historically, CK’s worse matchups were melee armies with high AP since we lack an invuln save in melee. Infernal handles this while also providing several other defensive options and complimentary offense.

Also, I think Lords of Dread is gonna get smacked with a nerf bat (all bigs going up 20-30 points) and Infernal will survive that. Since my next major is going to be post-dataslate, I’d rather my prep time be effective.

The How

The name of the game for this list is pressure. While the war dog nerfs are felt, in this detachment they are ludicrously fast and substantially more durable. The threat of popping your 5++/6+++ and making some invuln saves against threats that would normally pick up your dogs with no save (like Bloodthirsters, other knights, and any AP3 melee) and then being able to crack back with something as threatening as a karnivore puts your opponent in a series of no-win situations.

In deployment, I almost always put a Karnivore in reserves to keep my opponent honest, with the plan to ingress it t3 into their backfield or somewhere where it can threaten their home (with 17″ move that is…most of the no man’s land). Additionally, if I’m against a list without a lot of scouting or infiltrating unit, I’ll reserve a unit of Nurglings to either come in to accomplish a secondary like Behind Enemy Lines or, more often, to screen out another area of the board once I’ve stickied an objective with a knight. Nurglings ingressing near a knight is also an option to keep in mind, as a heroic from them can really destroy the math for a charging unit and swing a combat.

My first drop after nurglings to secure scouting lines is usually the despoiler sitting behind obscuring on my home objective. It can reach basically anywhere so putting it in a neutral position doesn’t give my opponent much info and forces them to drop twice and inform my next drops. After the despoiler, I’ll usually either put down some Stalkers in obvious scouting lanes or put the Rampager right next to the despoiler. His job is to move up and be in a safe pocket for a turn or two, threatening to kill whatever my opponent puts out to deal with the stalkers. The Karnivores tuck in wherever there’s room, as they’re fast enough to get where you need and you’ll rarely want them going forward round 1 because they’re very valuable.

Finally, the Atrapos will come down once I see where their anti-tank or big monsters/vehicles are. If it’s possible to pick off a valuable target like a vindicator with him, I’ll deploy him to grab that sightline and also threaten a side objective. Otherwise, he’ll go be a problem elsewhere, doing actions like cleanse or sabotage and taking pot shots at stuff.

In my mind, the Atrapos is more of a distraction than anything, because it is so independent and does every role well but not amazing, I consider its job to draw my opponent into bad positions to deal with it so the real damage in the list can take out those tools.

Next let’s talk about the detachment itself and how best to use it. In general, round 1 you want to empower as few units as possible to save yourself some potential damage. Most of the time, round 1 is just staging, so you aren’t going to be shooting or fighting much and you’ll mostly be using the empowerment to move. After that, I empower every unit unless it’s at half or slightly above half wounds, because a failure and the subsequent mortals could force me to battleshock.

For strats, I tend to save at least one CP to double empower and will aggressively bin any secondaries I can’t max to fuel my CP generation. Since we’re such a primary bully, we can afford to go down in secondary scoring early (because it also usually means our opponent can’t get any challenger cards and scam us).

I usually won’t sticky my home turn 1 because the despoiler will chill there until 2 where there are juicier targets. This also means we have 2-3 CP going into t2 to use for interrupts or heroics.

Also, stop using Diabolic Bulwark. Just roll 5s instead. Seriously, that cp you use to maybe make a save is better used rerolling a failed save most of the time. Or just accept you’re going to be taking losses. Or, as previously stated, just roll 5s.

A quick bit about our army rule. If you’re playing against a long-range shooting army like Guard, Tau, etc, I will usually pick -1 to hit round 1. If your opponent is an army that can easily get within 18″ to shoot you, don’t bother with it. In this detachment, I’ve found taking the +3″ to auras round 1 has actually been extremely relevant, allowing more dogs to benefit from rampagers re-rolls and the despoiler’s leadership bonus. On round 3, I analyze the board-state and if there’s a lot of units below starting strength but not below half, I’ll take the battleshock below starting. Otherwise, I’ll either take the extra -1 leadership or roll and see what happens.

What about X?

I’ll try to head off some questions here. We’re pretty lucky in that most of our big knights are somewhat viable, but I think this current list is the best possible combination. I’ve thought about using a double thermal cannon despoiler with bestial aspect, or a second gatman, but both options sacrifice the melee and speed that the atrapos brings. I think a second gatman is totally viable if you don’t have an atrapos, but I think the thermal cannon variant is bad. The blast means they tag it with a rhino and you now have a 335 point paperweight. Not to mention you have to get close to their army to utilize it properly, while the gatman hangs out across the board and drowns your opponent in volume.

There’s also battle cannons. Don’t take battle cannons.

Let’s also talk about the two enhancements I’m not taking. I think Knight Diabolus is bait. Spending 25 points to make something not very good at melee slightly less bad at melee isn’t what I want to be doing. In general I see people taking this on the abominant and I think the abominant is still a bad model (unless you’re running multiples in lords). I think putting it on an Atrapos is compelling, but ultimately a unit of nurglings is better value than one enhancement. Blasphemous Engine is just too expensive. +2 wounds doesn’t feel equal to +1 toughness for me.

I think the other war dogs also sadly don’t make the cut because you need the Stalkers for early pressure and neither the huntsman or the brigand are going to be as effective as the karnivore. Executioners are also technically a datasheet.

That’s all, folks

Thank you for reading the write-up. If you have any questions, please comment and I’ll try to answer them. I’ll have battle reports coming up with this list in the near future so stay tuned for those!