Hey everyone! I'm about to be teaching a new, younger player the ins and outs of WH40K soon and, since he doesn't own any armies of his own (yet) I am going to be building a pair of 500 point lists intended to play against each other using my two armies: Chaos Marines and Dark Eldar.
I don't know how well most of you know CSM, but I wanted to get some feedback mostly on whether or not these lists seem "evenly matched" for the purposes of a training game geared towards new players. I'm going to give the other player their choice as to whether they want to use the CSM or the Dark Eldar force and then I'll be using whichever one they don't pick. Here's what the matchup is looking like:
DARK ELDAR CAD
Archon
-Clone Field, Agonizer, Haywire Grenades
Incubi x3
-Venom (no upgrades)
Kabalite Warriors x6
-Raider (Dark Lance, Splinter Racks, Nightshield)
Kabalite Warriors x6
-Raider (Dark Lance, Splinter Racks, Nightshield)
(I thought about dropping the Nightshields in favor of upgrading the Archon's Clone Field to a Shadow Field, but I thought a 2++ might be kind of nasty in a casual game like this.)
CHAOS MARINES CAD
Chaos Lord
-Mark of Khorne, Axe of Blind Fury, Sigil of Corruption (4++)
5x Chaos Marines
-Mark of Khorne, champion w/chainaxe (AP 4), Rhino
10x Cultists
-Flamer
Chaos Havocs
-4x Autocannons, Rhino
(Having the Rhino full of autocannons will give the CSM player something to threaten those Raiders and Venom with while still being very effective against infantry as well. The Chaos Lord and champion with the Marines should be a pretty substantial threat to the Kabalites but will get torn up pretty bad by the Archon & Incubi.)
Does that look like a reasonable matchup? I figure for keeping things simple the first game would just be kill points, basically seeing who can table the other player first. If it goes quickly maybe we'll reuse the same lists for a Maelstrom mission or something and I can introduce the idea of objectives.
I do wonder if I went a little overboard with the upgrades, though. Perhaps running everything stock would be simpler, but I also kind of wanted to illustrate the versatility and usefulness of upgrades. Thanks for reading. Your feedback is much appreciated!