1500 pts against Tau

Hello everyone!

I've finally got the models I need to run a Dark Eldar army, so my friend and I decided to play a game soon. I came up with a 1500 pt list and I want your advice, critiques, etc. My friend will be playing Tau, and knows that I will be playing Dark Eldar.

The List

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My Plans and Reasons

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Well there you have it. What do you think?

The general shell looks reasonable to me. I hate to see the archon without a weapon of some sort though since he is the most accurate shooter in the entire army.

Overall I think you may suffer with what you've got planned though. From my experience anyway tau tend to have more answers to reserves than they do random marker lights outside of skyrays that is. For this reason I really wouldn't be deploying by DS unless its absolutely necessary. I'm not a fan of the scalpel squad personally but in this instance I feel its worse than usual. I would recommend leaving them home honestly and getting some lances and disi's into the list instead.

Other than that you may look into some combat elements. If you can reach a tau unit they are dead so they will never ignore something competent coming at them.

Unless your friend has a radically different style of play that I've seen before, he'll probably be playing gunline Tau early in the game, with most of his forces massed in one fairly compact area.  Due to the Interceptor, you have to weigh the pros and cons of my recommendation, but I can tell you that it will be VERY effective if you pull it off.

Since you're taking Cast of Players, the Mask of Secrets Shadowseer and the Death Jester give you two potent Leadership penalty tools which you can buff even further with your Dark Eldar.  You'll need to change your list slightly though as you'll need both DE HQs (and you'll need two) to join the Cast of Players in their Raider.  You can keep your Archon as is and add either a Succubus or Haemie and give them the Archangel of Pain.  You can WWP down in the Raider and when you open the Archangel of Pain, every unit within six inches will be taking casualties based off a Leadership check at -6/-4 depending on how far away they are from the hull of the Raider.  The beauty of the Archangel is that it's an AOE attack and can hit multiple units within its specified radius.  Then you get to shoot with the Death Jester and if you kill a model, the unit must take a fallback move at an additional -2.  AND THEN, you get to shoot the Shadowseer's Grenade Launcher which can cause a Pinning Check and further casualties based on how much the targeted unit failed the check by.   AND THEN, you have end of phase Leadership checks to see if the Tau fall back if they lost 25%, which will also be made at -4/-2.  I've seen this cripple Eldar armies in one turn.   Oh, I forgot to mention that your Shadowseer should also have Psychic Shriek if you roll on Telepathy (which you should).  

As I said, you'll have to change up your list a little to try this out, but I've used it in several games and it is essentially like dropping a nuclear bomb on your opponent.  However, I've never had to worry about Interceptor so might be worth putting Night Shields on your Raider to afford some extra protection on this very devastating unit.

EDIT: I highly recommend reading Jimsolo's Freakshow Tactics series of articles if you haven't already. Seeing as how you're playing DE + Harlequins, I think you'll find it very useful.