Help with Death Guard

Hello everyone, I'm hoping someone maybe able to help me with some tactics or suggestions to my list, I'm due to play against a more experienced player who runs Death Guard, and from the last game I watched him play, he looked difficult to beat.

I'll admit I haven't played too many games of 40k and the few I have were against Tau and Orks, which  I seemed to do ok with. If anyone could look at what I have available and suggest maybe some tweaks that would be great, or you could even just say 'you're going to get slaughtered with that list,' that works too haha.

Ok, I tend to have a lot of wych cult models just due the fact I really like the look of them which may be my downfall

Raiding Force - 4CP
Battleforged   - 3CP
Prizes from the Dark City (-1CP)
= 6CP (may be too low..)


Patrol Detachment - Cult of Strife
HQ             - Lelith Hesperax - penetrating blade x 2 (Warlord - Blood Dancer)
Troops        - Hexatrix , 7 x wych , Wych with Shardnet and Implailer
Fast attack  - 3 x Reavers - one with a blaster and grav talon
Transport    - Raider with diss cannon

Patrol Detachment - Cult of the Red Grief
HQ             - Succubus - (the blood glaive and blast pistol)
Troops        - Hexatrix , 4 x wych
                 - Hexatrix , 4 x wych
Fast attack  - Helliarch , 9 x Hellion
                 - Reavers x 6 (2 blasters, 2 grav talons)

Patrol detachment - Kabal of Obsidian Rose
HQ             - Archon - (Djin blade, blast pistol)
Troops        - 5 x Kabalites (1 blaster)
                - 10 x Kabalites (blaster & Dark Lance)
Fast attack - 5 x scourges ( 4 Blasters)
                 - 5 x scourges (4 shredders)
Flyer           - Razorwing jetfighter (2 dark lances & splinter cannon)
Transport    - raider with dark lance
                - Venom with 2 splinter canons

My hope is to try and lock him down with the wyches to stop him moving around and sitting on objectives whilst my kabalites soften up any bigger targets whilst capturing objectives themselves. The flyer I can use to target and poorly placed characters or again, any bigger targets.

OK - Deathguard are hard to kill. If they buff up with Psykers they are even tougher. I'd take the Helm of Spite myself, to let you prevent him casting a buff onto the Poxwalkers he'll almost certainly have.

A little shuffle round could give you a battalion and an outrider for 9 CP's. Put all your Wyches into the strife detachment, knock Lelith down to a normal Succubus to free up points for a 2nd. You can find the other points you need by dropping the Archons blast pistol and the razor wings Splinter Cannon.

The Reavers in the Strife detachment go into the Red Grief one to make an Outrider. The reavers and Hellions benefit from Red Grief more than the Wyches, and the Wyches benefit more from Cult of Strife so it makes sense. Also, put your transport into your Kabal detachment and it will gain 6" range on its Dissie. It can still carry your Wyches but CoS doesn't help your transport really.
I'd also downgrade the Dark Lance kabalite to a Blaster kabalite. He's going to be moving in a Raider I presume? With Obsidian Rose a 24" blaster is plenty of range, and a Dark Lance will suffer -1 to hit when you move, the blaster won't.

A final note - if you split your 10 man Kabalite squad into two 5 mans, and can find points for a second Archon, then that's another 5 CP's from a second battalion.

Ok ill see if I cant fiddle with the detachments a bit for that sweet CP. The idea of the red grief Wyches though was that advance and charge, I wanted to get them in combat as quick as possible before they get shot up too bad. Unfortunately I only own two raiders, so I wanted to save one for the Kabalites and the other for Lelith and her Wyches to protect them enough to get them to combat, disembark, then charge the raider in to protect the Wyches on their own charge. If it isn't destroyed it could just fly away and taxi anyone else who needs a lift.

Ive just changed the list to get all the Reavers in the Red Grief detachment, makes more sense like you said, and also moved the CoS raider to Obsidian, but that could go into Red Grief too I suppose. I kinda like the advance and charge rule, given our high move speed already.

Also, as youve suggested ive changed that dark lance kabalite for another blaster. I wanted to make sure I had enough darklight to make sure if he killed any blasters, I still had plenty to play around with

A 24" gap from a fairly typical deployment, assuming your opponent deploys right up to the line, is still a tough gap to clear turn 1 for Wyches. They will usually be getting into combat turn 2, Red Grief or not in my experience. If you really want to try for those turn 1 charges, deploy them in a transport to give yourself an extra 3" disembark movement, before moving, advancing and trying to charge. Then your Kabalites can hop into the now empty Raider before it flys off to do its thing.

Yeah that could work well actually, kind of like Uber for the dark kin

The Reavers and Hellions should make it with a bit of luck, and if I can, I hope to use the fly by stratagem too to soften them up as much as possible. A couple of MW's may make a difference. Im looking forward to it regardless. Its not a competitive list by any means, but I love the Wyches and rush centered play, however, I know they are going to be tough to crack, so I just want to be as annoying as possible, instead of going for kills

Red grief is probably not the most competitive choice, but I'm a fan of using wytches as red grief, the extra movement to get into combat is usually handy. That being said, wyches are going to have a tough time fighting Death Guard. I had a game against DG a few days ago and my wyches really struggled to take out poxwalkers, with the buff to their toughness and a character nearby that took away the advantage of charging the poxwalkers hit first, took out  a fair number of wyches then added more poxwalkers to the unit from the dead wyches. I found dealing with poxwalkers outside of melee was far more effective, just dumping poison shots into them took them out. Wyches would probably be better suited for holding up any plague marines, they can probably hold up a unit for a fairly long time and whittle them down.

Other thing to watch out for against DG, even their small 8-10 wound vehicles are surprisingly resilient given they all have +5 invuls plus their disgusting resilient saves. You really need to focus one vehicle down at a time, and since DG are really slow use your speed to your advantage to hit the weaker parts of his army fast.

Also one last idea, I don't know if you have any coven units but I ran 3 talos with chainflails and those also did some nice work against poxwalkers, and they could also handle any of the vehicles in melee fairly well with the scalpel.

Ok yeah, Im trying to be very wary of the poxwalkers. In the last game i watched him play, he used them as a screen to protect his prince and plague marines, so I'll definitely keep my wyches away from those where possible.

I know he has a couple of drones and a plagueburst crawler, and I think he has a hauler as well. Im hoping that if I can focus my darklight instead of split-firing, something is bound to get through eventually, I feel I should have enough blasters and lances for this.

And once there is a gap in the pox walkers, I can annoy the marines and prince as much as possible... thats the plan at least.