Army List Part 5: My Favorite List In the Game

I like my Loganwing list alot. Like, a lot a lot. But this list is my favorite. It's from a codex I don't own, a race I've never played, and really is just something I have no experience with at all. Despite all that, it still just feels right to me. Without further ado:

I am Legion, for we are Tyranids:
HQ
Tervigon - Adrenal Glands/Toxin Sacs

ELITE
2 Hive Guard
2 Hive Guard
2 Hive Guard

TROOPS
10 Termagaunts
10 Termagaunts
Tervigon - Adrenal Glands/Toxin Sacs/Onslaught
Tervigon - Adrenal Glands/Toxin Sacs/Onslaught

HEAVY
Tyrranofex - Rupture Cannon
Tyrranofex - Rupture Cannon

Just. So. Perfect.

I don't even know how to play it. I just know that I like it. Best part is, this only comes to 1500 points. I get another* 350 points to play with. I don't know anything about the 'Nids codex**, and I shamelessly stole this list from someone else, so I've no idea what to do with those remaining points. Everyone seems to think Hive Tyrants with Old Adversary and Tyrant Guards are cool. I wonder if I can fit them in 350 points or less. I've no idea what Old Adversary is (something about preferred enemy? I don't know) but if the internet thinks it's cool, then it must be.

Or I wonder how many Trygons I can get in 350 points. They seem pretty cool too. Again, I'm not sure what they do exactly, but from what I understand they're big and scary and have a lot of wounds.

Oh, I know. 350 points worth of Rippers!

I suppose I would have to do some more research on the space bugs if I ever wanted to actually field this list. Figure out what to do with those extra points. Or maybe I'd just play it against 1850 lists as-is. With this core on the table, I wouldn't even care if I lost every game. Just getting to play it would be enough.


The sad truth, however, is that I can't play this list. Not with anything that isn't Xenos scum anyways, and certainly not Custodes. For previously mentioned reasons (unless footnotes are counted last, then for reasons yet to be explained) I pretty much refuse to play with Tyranid models. A lot of them look pretty good... ok, all of them look pretty good, but I still can't bring myself to use them.

Orks might be able to pull off this sort of thing. I could see some relatively believable conversions for most of the modles. Tervigons as weird, Ork-spewing fungus pods? Or something? I dunno, it's a stretch, but not completely out of the question. I still don't want to play Orks either though. Daemons neither, which would be about the only other guys that could do count-as reasonably. Anything with power armor would be tough to justify, and that's really what I would like to have.

Here's a thought. What about this Tyranids list as Adeptus Mechanicus? Hmmm, yes, that just might work. Let's see:

Tervigon: Some sort of techmarine manufactorum***
Termagaunt: Standard techmarine
Hive Guard: HXC Techpriest with mad body mods
Tyranofex: Weapon platform of some sort, dreadnought-type thing perhaps?

I like it. If I had a beard right now I'd be stroking it and looking off into the distance, deep in thought.

...

Hm, I don't know.
Custodes would be far easier to model, and possibly paint. I would need a lot less Custodes, that's for sure.

27 Custodes, PA and TDA combined.

29 standard techmarines at the least. That being if the Tervigons all roll triple 1's on the first turn. A more realistic number would be somewhere around 80. That is 3.5 spawned per die for 2 turns. Although in a perfect game, where nothing dies, and the dice land perfectly for 6 turns, I would need 290 of them.****

The dreadnought/t-fex are the same. I have a DN design that I really like that I would opt to use either way.

I would have to come up with something really impressive and convincing for the Tervigons. And then make 3 of them. This is starting to sound worse than the Boyz list...

Also, it's easy to show up to a shop with a fully converted Custodes army and say "These are my Space Wolves" and be accepted. To show up with a fully converted Mechanicus army and say they're Tyranids though? That's a completely different story. A lot of people are strongly against count-as armies, especially ones that look completely different than what they're being played as. I don't know the shops around here well enough to know how that would go over. The hope would obviously be that my shit would be so hot that nobody would care what it was representing. Also, I mean really, if someone wants to play Blood Angel models as Tyranids, that's one thing, but why should I be held accountable for GW having not yet made a Mechanicus codex? In all honesty, they would probably play similarly to the current Tyranids codex anyways. Just with tech upgrades instead of biomorphs.

This sort of throws a monkey wrench into things. I'll have to mull this over some and weigh my options. Perhaps get some Vassal games in to see if I even like this list. I don't have any understanding of how to play it, so it's not impossible that I'd hate it.

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* - I tend to write like I speak, for better or for worse, and I initially started this sentence with "A whole 'nother" but couldn't figure out how it would be written. I think it would be "A-whole-nother" with the word "whole" being injected into the word "another" for emphasis. Sort of like "Abso-fucking-lutely".

** - Tyranids are a race I pretty much swore I would never play. Back when I started 40k in 2nd edition, a friend of mine played them and we basically had to beg him not to play them so the rest of us could have a chance at winning a game for once. Maybe we all sucked, or maybe they were imba back then, who can say now? The fact remains that they've always put a bad taste in my mouth since those days. On top of that, now that I'm old enough to understand and appreciate the 40k universe a bit more, I find the Tyranids to be utterly terrifying. And to be perfectly honest, it isn't the type of terrifying like "Have you seen The Ring? Man, that movie was scary!" but more like "Can we please not talk about anything non-Euclidian? I finally just stopped having the night terrors."

*** - I was going to put a link to Master Mold here, but apparently the internet contains no decent pictures of him.

**** - Math. Let's do some.
Expected die roll: 3.5
Chance of rolling doubles in 3 dice: 96/216 ~ .444444
Expected Tervigon spawn throughout game:
(3*3.5)+(3*3.5*.555)+(3*3.5*.555^2)+(3*3.5*.555^3)+(3*3.5*.555^4)+(3*3.5*.555^5*.666)+(3*3.5*.555^6*.666*.5) = 22.8 per Tervigon (assuming nothing ever dies)

This is 3 die rolling 3.5 on average and each turn there is a 44.4% chance that they won't be rolling any longer. Also, at turns 6 and 7 there is a 33.3% and 50% chance respectively that the game won't get that far. So, with 3 Tervigons in the list, I can expect to need 68.47 Gaunts, +20 that I start with, so about 89 Gaunts. Awesome. Of course, there's always the chance that they'd spawn more or less, or that I'd only need 39 Gaunts if half of them get killed every turn or that the Tervigons die early, or whatever else.

Just like any statistics, this doesn't mean this is how many I will get every time, but I can say that assuming nothing ever dies (which I know of exactly one game in which that has ever happened) I can expect about 69 Gaunts to be spawned on a per game average.