The Lord of Skulls might be the most excessively grimdark, ridiculous unit in all of Warhammer 40,000. It’s a massive daemon engine with the torso of a robot, the tracks of a tank, giant canisters of blood on its back, and about one million skulls stapled all over its armor. It’s never been a popular unit for competitive gaming – but one World Eaters fan has made it the lynchpin of a strategy that took his forces to glorious victory.
Said fan is Taylor ‘Trout’ Davis, who piloted his World Eaters army list to a 5-0 first place finish in the recent ‘Luck of the Irish’ GT. The two day 48-player Warhammer 40k tournament took place at OP Comics and Games in Santa Rosa California, over the weekend of March 22 and 23.
Davis explains the full army list, how and why he built it, and how he piloted it to victory, on the Red Path YouTube channel, which you can watch below:
The kernel of the idea came when he was looking through the index for his Warhammer 40k faction, searching for a replacement for the Master of Executions (affectionately known as Moe to his devotees). This former lynchpin of World Eaters lists was nerfed in a recent balance dataslate. It turns out that Moe, and his usual support crew of a unit of Khorne Berserkers and Rhino transport, cost very nearly the same as a Lord of Skulls…
The Lord of Skulls suffers from many of the same problems that afflict the larger Imperial Knights, without any dedicated support from an army rule or detachment tailored around it. It’s almost impossible to protect the Lord of Skulls from enemy shooting, easy to box it in with chaff units, it doesn’t contest objectives too well, and it costs a huge number of points.
Its offensive output is ferocious, but it’s all too easy for it to never make back anywhere near the points invested in it. And then there’s the model, which looks like an early 1990’s children’s toy based on an obscure cartoon, and which was recalled after a child lost a finger in the firing mechanism.
Davis’ list makes use of the Lord of Skulls in an unusual way – it’s a very effective tool to help return the colossal Daemon Primarch Angron to the battlefield if your opponent ever destroys him. While plenty of skill is needed to pilot the list to victory, forcing your opponent to kill a Primarch twice is no small advantage.
World Eaters armies enjoy the Blessings of Khorne, a pool of eight dice rolled at the start of each turn that can be cashed in for special (violent) effects. If three of the dice come up as sixes, Angron can be ‘Reborn in Blood’, returning to the table at full health.
Using the Berserker Warband 40k detachment, Davis’ list includes a cheap Lord of Khorne on Juggernaught who brings the Favored of Khorne Enhancement. This grants a once per game ability to discard your initial Blessings of Khorne roll and try again. Unusually, this doesn’t count as rerolling, so other reroll abilities can still be used to modify the dice.
Two units of Jakhals also help out. While one unit of these cheap melee troops stands on an objective that you control, you can reroll a single Blessings of Khorne die. This has a tiny impact on your odds of getting Angron back, but it is useful for sculpting your Blessings to get other effects on turns when Angron is already on the board.
Then there’s the Lord of Skulls. When you roll your Blessings of Khorne, for each unit the Lord of Skulls destroyed in the previous round, you can modify one die up or down by one. And getting kills with the Lord of Skulls isn’t too hard, either.
The Lord of Skulls combines silly melee prowess with a variety of unholy ranged weapons. Davis loaded his out with pure anti-tank options, the Skullhurler and Daemongore cannon – both of them swingy, but more than capable of removing units of Custodes Wardens or heavy tanks in a single good shot.
So what are the odds of resummoning Angron with all this tech? Let’s assume that you’ve destroyed one unit with the Lord of Skulls in the preceding turn, letting you modify one Blessings of Khorne die from a five to a six. There’s a 30% chance you’ll roll three either sixes or two sixes and a five on your first roll. Using the Favored of Khorne reroll, you’re up to a 49% chance of success.
And then there’s slightly less than 1% chance that your final roll contains two sixes and no fives and you then get the last five or six with the reroll from your Jakhals. Let’s call it 50%. It’s a coin flip, sure, but 40k is a game of luck as well as skill. And when you win that coin toss…
If you want to try this list out, you’d better hurry: the angry red psychopaths are getting a new Warhammer 40k codex this Summer, and who knows if this tech will still be intact!
Source: Wargamer
