For someone with twenty years of experience playing the Drukhari, the most sadistic and bitter Warhammer 40k faction by some margin, Ridvan ‘Archon Skari‘ Martinez is an incredibly warm and enthusiastic person to talk to. Creator of the Skaredcast YouTube channel, a Warhammer 40k coach with Art of War, an expert columnist at Tabletop Battles, and with a good claim to be the best Drukhari player in the world, I interviewed Skari to get his advice on how aspiring Archons can marshal the Dark Kindred and strike terror into the hearts of their opponents.
Skari’s competitive Warhammer 40k career began by winning the Capital City Bloodbath in 2018, “a 100 person GT win back when that was the largest events got”. He’s racked up many trophies since then, and finished the 2025 ITC season number six in the world, playing mostly with the widely-lambasted Index Drukhari. He says he’s “most proud of being a part of the Canadian national team for five different ETCs and WTCs, and a part of the team that helped Team Canada become a seed one team” for the 2026 WTC.
He may be an absolute authority on the faction – you can book coaching sessions with him via Art of War – but Skari says that if you’re completely new to the game, you shouldn’t pay too much attention to experts. “New players listen to internet pundits too much”, he says.
“There’s a value and spark in allowing your creativity and your vision of what you would like to achieve help you create the experience that you want to create”, he explains, particularly if you’re brand new to the hobby. He sees real value in “spending hours gushing over all the little models and building them, learning how to paint, making your little 500 point force with a friend that does the same, setting up a coffee table with a couple of potted plants and a box of cereal as a building, and just rolling dice when you have no idea what you’re doing”.
But “players make the mistake of Googling the best thing for their faction, and finding that a lot of the stuff that they sort fell in love with is poo-pooed by internet pundits”. Skari clearly loves the innocent joy of the new player experience, but he also thinks that unguided exploration is an invaluable foundation to becoming a good player – for any faction, but particularly the Drukhari.
“The Dark Eldar have a way of being a vessel for a person’s expression of skill, but you have to learn what your skill expression style is. Are you an aggressive player? Are you more of a defensive player? Are you a player that likes a slow game, or winning very quickly?”
“Regardless of how good I am, I’m always learning something new with my Dark Eldar”, Skari says. It’s an army “that rewards a player who is hungry and never satisfied with the status quo of their own development”. It’s got a high skill floor just to start playing: “if you don’t have well-developed game fundamentals, playing Dark Eldar is very tough because it’s very fragile and does not forgive mistakes on the battlefield”. But “the ceiling always seems out of reach, which is why I like the faction so much, because I always find ways to make what I am doing more interesting”.
So, what guiding principles does Skari follow when leading realspace raids? “The first is understanding that every single model in my army is going to die every game” he says. “The key is to make sure they die in the spot I choose them to die”.
There’s a simple test for how effectively you’re feeding your troops into the meat grinder. “If you finish a game and you’ve lost and have no models left, you were probably too aggressive with your models; if you win a game and you have models left, you probably had more resources to increase your point score”. It’s only “if you win and have almost no models left” that “you’ve probably played to the maximum of what your army can give in that situation”.
If the Drukhari’s big weakness is that it’s a fragile army, “the biggest strength is its movement capability around the battlefield”. Skari sees the ability to move and maneuver as one of the most powerful capacities a faction can have, “because it is one of the few things that, as a player, I have full control over – when I take a model to place it somewhere else, it has nothing to do with luck or dice or saves or hitting or wounding”.
“Dark Eldar do that so well, you leverage a part of the game that you have full control over, and that is very powerful when it comes to playing the missions and scenarios.” He characterizes this as actually “playing Warhammer 40k instead of just trying to get the most powerful unit to kill your opponent’s most powerful unit”.
Another restriction on the Drukhari is the very small army list. “We lost a lot of our more technical or interesting toolkit pieces to Legends”, Skari says. That isn’t a problem for casual games “but for going to events where Legendary units aren’t always allowed, the limited access to units does make most armies feel pretty samesy”.
Even so, “there’s a core of five or six of Archons worldwide that are at that worldwide [competitive] level that have a completely different view of what a core of a Dark Eldar list is, and we build our armies very differently”. For Skari, “things like an Archon, Lady Malys, Incubi, a couple of skirmishing units like Reaver Jet Bikes, Mandrakes, those are the sort of things that I add in almost every single time”. Though “it does vary based on what the Force Disposition is that I’m trying to build around”.
Some top table players I’ve interviewed have provided technical breakdowns of specific lists, like Emil Söderholm’s lethal Deathwatch, or elementary tactica, as with Innes Wilson and the Genestealer Cults. Skari’s advice is more about cultivating a mindset to the game. “My motto is play to learn, play to teach, right? That’s the philosophy that I live by, I’m always playing to learn something new, and I’m always playing to teach”.
He adds that “the community that I’ve built around the Patreon and YouTube tends to be a very positive community of like-minded people, hungry for information with a positive vibe”. I can’t think of anything more ironic for a Drukhari player to say, but having spoken to Skari, it’s not at all surprising.
Speaking of positive communities, I’ll put in a sneaky plug for the Wargamer Discord community right here. We’re always ready to welcome new members – Drukhari included.
Source: Wargamer
