"Hey Kirby,
First things first, love the blog, you've really helped me to explore different ways of using my Blood Angels particularly. Which brings me round to my next point; I was looking at two of your army lists, namely blood rodeo and bloodwing and wondering if you could combine the two to create "bling rodeo", aka sanguinary guard and bikes.
My thinking was something along these lines
Dante
Librarian w/Blood lance & sword, bike
Sang priest w/ JP x 2
Sanguinary Guard w/2 infernus pistols & PF
Sanguinary Guard w/2 infernus pistols & PF
Sanguinary Guard w/2 infernus pistols & PF
Sanguinary Guard w/2 infernus pistols & PF
Bikes x 8 w/2 melta guns, AB w/MM
Bikes x 8 w/2 melta guns, AB w/MM
2000/2000
Alternatively you could swap out the sanguinary guard for Terminators, VV or honour guard. It's got fewer bodies than a typical blood rodeo but the sang guard are a lot more dangerous than the assault marines.
What do you think? Could it work?
brother carc"
I like the idea and concept of Bling Rodeo, I mean Sanguinary Guard and Bikes are some of my favourite units in all of 40k but I don’t think it really works. Dante doesn’t really fit into the army except to make SG scoring. He’s a good in a punch-up but really wants an Honor Guard squad to make use of his perfect deep-strike ability and there really is no way to scrape those points together in this list unless you start dropping bikes or SG squads (and then what’s the point of Dante?). You improve the overall combat effectiveness of the army by dropping in 20 2+/power weapon wielding nutters but your army is still super vulnerable to AP2/1 and hammer units. This is one of the biggest issues of Blood Rodeo and generally why TH/SS Terminators are included. So whilst I love the concept, I’m not sure it’s better than the original Blood Rodeo simply because of the inefficiency of using Dante.
However, what about using SG in a normal Rodeo list? Obviously we’d be dropping the Terminators which reduces the survivability of the army in terms of rock units but in my games with the Blood Rodeo I often feel being able to apply more pressure to combat units or MC would be more useful than the rock-ness of the Terminators. Replacing Terminators with SG will obviously make dropping combat walkers with meltaguns a lot more important but you’ve got a more cohesive force and more punching power across the army. So let’s see what we can do with this…
We’ll start off with 2 SG units w/a Pfist. Not sure we need infernous pistols atm as our Bikes & ASM should be taking care of this. We also want two Priests minimum but we’ll include three w/Jump Packs and see how many points we have to play with. 2x Libby on Bikes w/Sword & Lance will help our combat and mech busting potential, too. This will set us back 915 points already. We’re going to want at least two full ASM squads backed up by a 5 man mini-squad setting us back 235*2 + 110. This leaves us just shy of 1500 points and sends us a whopping 65 points over when you add in two full Bike squads w/2x meltaguns and an AB w/MM. Let’s take a peek at the army and see what we can change:
2x Libby w/Bike, Blood Lance, Sanguine Sword
2x 5x SG w/Pfist
3x Priest w/Jump Pack
2x 10x ASM w/2x meltaguns, Pfist
5x ASM w/meltagun
2x 8x Bikes w/2x meltaguns, AB w/MM
So after some discussion with AbusePuppy dropping either a Priest or Libby makes the most sense. Since there are more units on the floor than a normal Rodeo I think keeping the 3 Priests is important to provide FNP for the Bikes and FC for the SG and ASM squads so we’ll drop a Libby which gives us points to play with. These points give us quite a few options as there are Infernous Pistols, Hand-flamers and combat weapons we can hand out. The list has some pretty decent anti-horde potential with TL-bolters and melee but I feel a couple flamers might be nice here or there whilst increasing the melta is important to breaking upon transports and we should try and increase our combat prowess due to the loss of Pfists on Bikes and S10 from Libby (even though we’ve got SG).
So taking all of that into account…let’s make the 5 man ASM squad our ball-breaker which can play hard and fast in the backfield if needed. Infernous pistol, melta-bombs and a hand-flamer costs a significant 30 points but is capable of dropping tanks and ranged units which could prove problematic for this list. We’ll swap one of the meltaguns in each Bike squad for a flamer which nets us a 20 point loss. An infernous pistol on each of the SG sets us back another 20 and leaves us with 40 points remaining. We can grab two more infernous pistols if we want and then hand-flamers or put some combat weapons on the Priests. For the moment I’m going to go with combat weapons on the Priests and an extra hand-flamer which leaves us with:
Libby w/Bike, Blood Lance, Sanguine Sword
2x 5x SG w/Pfist, infernous pistol
2x Sang Priest w/Jump Pack, Lightning Claw
Sang Priest w/Jump Pack, Hand-flamer
2x 10x ASM w/2x meltaguns, Pfist
5x ASM w/meltaguns, infernous pistol, hand-flamer, melta-bombs
2x 8x Bikes w/flamer, meltaguns, AB w/MM
Totals: 2000 points
19 Bikes
38 Jumpers
And to take down to 1750 you can drop the small ASM squad, four bikes from a Bike squad and the extra hand-flamer on the Priest. The upgrades are obviously interchangeable but it’s important to keep a good mix of melta, some templates and combat ability across the army. In comparison to the original Blood Rodeo, Bling Rodeo has more combat prowess and light arms protection thanks to Sanguinary Guard and moves as a more cohesive whole but loses out in Libby utility and not having a rock unit (which is also capable of dealing with other rocks).
So which is better? I feel this list is easier to use and more forgiving but if you are able to get the TH/SS Termies working for you in terms of knowing how to deploy them and when to commit them, Blood Rodeo is more balanced in being able to survive protracted combats.Also, this opens up the possibility of running 10 TH/SS Termies as part of Blood Rodeo instead of 5-6 which obviously helps with the single rock but is putting more points into a slower aspect of the list (which also means the rest of your army can be targeted more easily). Food for thought there...
So let's get discussing and a big thanks to Brother Carc for inspiring this idea!
