Angel's Keep: A 40K Dark Angels Blog

  Hello battle brothers! Since the Meta Monday report is a little delayed this week, I thought I'd indulge in writing a tier list of our bespoke units. I've had the idea in the back of my head for a few days, so this gives me an opportunity to bring it to you.  I'm not claiming to have the greatest expertise in matters competitive, but I do try to make at least an RTT or GT a month, and I also try and squeeze in some other games. There are some pretty good players in my area too, so I suspect the local meta is pretty competitive, but that could just be my ego talking. I've also been writing this blog for several months now, and it doesn't take a genius to see what's popping up frequently in competitive lists.  A-Tier Azrael I'm certainly biased, but I don't think anything we have is S-Tier. If we have anything that's close, it's Azrael. The Supreme Grand Master of the legion  chapter has appeared in virtually all of our top performing lists, and ...

 Hello battle brothers! Another weekend has passed, and with its passing comes word of the Dark Angels lists that performed well during the weekend's events. There were three standout lists over the weekend, and two of them were played at Baltic Cup XII in Altenholz Denmark, a Grand Tournament with 98 players. The first of the two lists was played by Niklas Frerichs, who went undefeated to earn 2nd place with his Gladius Task Force. You can see  Niklas' list  on BCP. The short version is below. Custodes at Home Lion El'Jonson Azrael Apothecary Biologis: Fire Discipline Lieutenant with Combi-weapon Intercessor Squad: 5 bolter boys Aggressor Squad: 6 chonky fisty bolter boys Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys Repulsor Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads Sc...

  Hello battle brothers! I bring you the news of the top performing Dark Angels lists from over the weekend! We have three lists that appeared in the Meta Monday roundup. As I was writing about the statistics from the weekend, I saw that there were four Gladius lists that went X-1 over the weekend, but I could only find three. I'm not saying that fourth list doesn't exist, but I wasn't able to find it. I even looked at the lists from the North American Team Championship, but Meta Monday must not use those lists in their data, because in the 5-Player Team Event I found a list that went 6-0 that is not in the Meta Monday roundup. It may occasion an article of its own, but I'm not going to discuss it here. The first list I'm going to cover was played at the J-Town Throwdown at Jonesboro AR, a 43 player event where Bryce Watson took 2nd place, going 5-0 with an Inner Circle Task Force list! There's already been a Facebook discussion of Bryce's list, which you ca...

I love me my Ravenwing Knights. They did some quality work for me back in 9th edition. I ran a Ravenwing detachment for most of that edition, and the Black Knights were the centerpiece unit. Even when I broke down and started playing a Deathwing detachment, it still included my 10 Ravenwing Knights - and Sammael, as it happened. Sammael would tell them "Go forth and be awesome!" and with Weapons of the Dark Age they'd proceed to delete whatever I pointed them at. Early in 10th edition, I found them to be pretty disappointing. On paper, their damage output should have been about the same within 9", but getting them there was a trick, and there's a vast gulf of difference between two 3-damage shots and three 2-damage shots. Plus, their melee profile took a pretty significant hit. So, after a game or two I shelved them, and my Deathwing Knights had a run on the table until I started playing a Firestorm list. At the beginning of 2024, when we first started getting cr...

  Image from Reddit r/Warhammer40K Hello battle brothers! I've had this goofy idea for a list rattling around in my head for a while, so I thought I'd flesh it out and share it with you. The concept of the list is to really lean into Hellblasters to the point of absurdity. Full disclaimer: I'm not trying to promote this as a practical or effective list. However, I do think it has the potential to be funny.  The inciting moment where the idea for this list first popped into my head was at one of the points where I was reading the strats for the Unforgiven Task Force. In particular, Grim Retribution, which is a reactive shoot-back strat. It can only be targeted on a unit that lost models as a result of enemy shooting, so that rules out vehicles. My first thought when I saw that strat was that it would only be useful used on units with particularly powerful shooting that are big enough to still have models left after an enemy unit has shot. That rules out a lot of possibilitie...

Hello, battle brothers! Here is your weekly roundup of the top performing Dark Angels lists over the weekend. It was not a busy weekend, which doubtless comes as no surprise to those of us who are citizens of the United States, as not too many of us are going to attend GTs on 4th of July weekend. In fact, only one of events listed on  Meta Monday  took place in the United States.  It wasn't a great weekend for our army unfortunately, as there were no event wins or 4-1 results. Therefore I went a little deeper to find the best performing lists at the most attended events. They may not have done spectacularly, but they do give us an idea of what people are playing, and we can still learn from them. The biggest event of the weekend was II GT Tormenta de Hostias in Lica d'Amunt, Spain, where Soto Cripta took an Ironstorm Spearhead and went 2-2-1 to score 32nd out of 64 players. It's in the upper 50% of rankings and a 50% win rate, so it's a bad performance. Here is  Soto...

Hello battle brothers! As we enter then 10.5 meta, we as Dark Angels players have a lot to be happy about! Today I'd like to list the 5 changes the recent releases of the Balance Dataslate, Munitorum Field Manual, and Core Rules I'm most excited about.  1: Lion Dad can walk through walls. One of the great tragedies of 10th edition has been that Lion El'Jonson has not seem much play. He started off seriously overcosted, then got nerfed when we got our codex supplement. GW did reduce his price in the previous Munitorum Field Manual, but he was (and is) still more points than any of the C'Tan while being objectively worse than them. We've had pretty good reason to leave him brooding on the shelf.  That said, he's still a beast in combat. You can pretty reliably put him into anything in the game and expect to be picking up the other model instead of him. One of the things holding him back from reaching his true potential has been that enemy units could exploit terra...

Hello battle brothers! It's the beginning of a new era in 40K 10th edition! Dark Angels made a pretty solid showing at events over the past weekend, with one event win and five 4-1 placings. The Ironstorm didn't go away, but the Gladius has also risen to the top scores, including the event win, so let's take a look at what has done well at the beginning of the new meta. The event winning list seems like the obvious place to start, and that was brought to us by a familiar name - Alex Vian of Midwest Murdersports. Alex brought a Gladius Task Force defeat all comers at the Built Forge Tough GT in Chaska MN. Here's the link to  Alex's list  on BCP. The short version is below. Back On my bullshit Azrael Asmodai Apothecary Biologus Intercessor Squad: 5 bolter boys Impulsor Assault Intercessors with Jump packs: 5 flying choppy boys Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky swordy boys E...