List Building 101

    Welcome back recruits, I hope you have been enjoying the past week assembling your troops and thinking about all the awesome fighting and warmongering they are going to be doing! Everything should be coming along nicely, and you might be asking yourself where you go next after they are all sitting there assembled and looking awesome. We still have a lot of modeling left to do, basing, priming, painting, possibly sealing, storing, and transporting. I told you there was a lot to just the hobby side, but trust me it is worth it when we start breaking into the Meta.

    So there are a couple of tools that we are going to need if we want to start building army list that will one day be the number one list at the Nova Open! Let's see you should have the main rule book (BRB), all the codexes you would need for your army (since we get into different detachments for an army, more on that in future post), a blank piece of paper and pen (there are also programs, more on those in a future post). Now that we have all of our post age hipster gear, let's look at my small little force that I am going to refer to as the Scrubbing Bubbles.

Scrubbing Bubbles 1.0

   Now that our soldiers are here to clean the bathroom while we find the right song to listen to while we "clean". Let's look at what we have on the wet palette, starting from left to right front to back. The front squad is a Infantry Squad that has 1 Sergeant, 8 Guardsmen and 1 Special Weapon Guardsman, next to them is our Company Commander, then our Primaris Psyker. In the second row we have two more Infantry Squads and they are both the same with 1 Sergeant, 8 Guardsmen and 1 Special Weapon Guardsman. Lastly in the back, waving the last goodbye you'll ever see, it's our Leman Russ Battle Tank with a Demolisher Turret! Now that we have some structure and know what we are looking at let's go to our list and codex!

This is the first list I have hand written in a long time...

   The first thing we need to figure out is what type of Detachment we will be running, this is probably the most daunting thing when you first start building list. Turn your BRB to page 240 this will be where we find all the information about building a Detachment so that our army is Battle-Forged! When we build our army and it is Battle-Forged, it means we unlock some nifty features to our army and command points (CP)!!! Command points are where it is at, this is where our little snowflake bubbles can really be an individual. Since I have 2 HQ choices and 3 Troop choices, I am thinking I am going to build them into a Battalion Detachment so that I have access to +3 command points. 

We must take 2 Hq and 3 Troops MINIMUM

   Okay so some of you might be screaming at your monitor saying that Battalions actually give +5 command points, you are correct, however I have not mentioned anything about the FAQs until this point.  FAQs are essentially a patch to the game to try and make the game more balanced, this is something that is well known and essential to playing competitive, so take a few minutes read over the Big FAQ and your armies respective FAQ. As of the publication of this post the FAQ states you receive +5 Command Points for Battalion Detachment and +12 Command Points for Brigade Detachments. (After writing this little section, I can't think of a more clever way to introduce players to the FAQ, well played GW).

How about that Segue though?

   Okay now that we know we have our Army list spelled out with all of the units, we have them organized into a nice Battalion and even have ourselves 5 Command Points to spend! We need to get a little deeper into the list so that we meet up to the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) standard. This just means that what the models have on them is what you have them as in your list, so that you don't decide that that flame thrower is really a melta gun when it's next to the tank and not the troops. Funny how sometimes you don't play against the Daemons of Chaos and you still get the Changeling running around.

Want to stop troop spam? Have them write each one!

   So we take our Company Commander, his model has a Power Sword and a Plasma Pistol so we need to represent that on our list, don't forget to write down how many points everything is next to what it is. I am not going to put the points on the list for sake of not wanting to get into trouble. Then the Primaris Psyker has a force stave and a laspistol, there isn't really a need to write this on the list since it is in the Datasheet and it's not an upgrade, but we forgot to pick him some Psyker powers. We will give him Psychic Barrier and Night Shroud, or you can choose to role at the start of every match! We go all the way down and get to what we are looking at on top, if you have the Astra Militarum codex you can add all the points up and should get 438! 

Now that's a list

   Alright, since we are a Battle-Forged army we have to pick our Regiment! This is one of the areas Guard really shine, but also a really awesome mechanic that basically every army with a codex has access to. I went ahead and picked Cadian as my regiment, because I want my guys to sit back and just shoot, if any unit does not move it can re-roll 1s to hit. Combine that with the order of bring it down and you get a flat out re roll on misses which is huge for an army that only hits half of the time! I think that about covers the basics on how to write a list, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask them at the bottom!