11th Company GT

Going to ground with a 2+ on 90% of your units is a thing, apparently.

If all of those Lictors are independent (is the formation 5 individual guys?), then anything like a Knight is going to be just overkill wherever it goes. Its shooting is largely negated by targeting a single model that will go to ground, and in combat it's going to wipe.... one model. Congrats.

That many Lictors saturates the board with homers for the 3 Mawlocs, which are nigh-guaranteed to come in turn 2, and then pop up every turn after that, on target. It's limited still, as you can (fairly easily) pick off Lictors around you to clear the area (how fluffy is that??!!) but of course the Homers are just a bonus... you can always try for a non-perfect DS (shady).

Still sports 4 small, easy-to-hide super-scoring units, and nothing that heavily requires Synapse (taking away a potentially self-mutilating rule from the equation).

All that said... I can't see how this could have possibly done so well, outside of people just not realizing how it works, and getting surprised by it (which could have been the case). Even GW doesn't know how Nids function, so how should the players?

Technically Lictors are S6, with a rend allowing a potential Pen on AV14. Their anti-tank is often overlooked, for... reasons. Sigh. They should really be at least shrouded... and with the way cover-ignoring weapons are, I also think that they and Venomthropes (and Shrikes, for the love of everything holy!) should have a 4+.

I think a lot of things about Lictors, really... granted, I want them to be closer to 100 a piece and actually be scary, but... that's just me. I'd rather them be better in an all-comers list, instead of built for this style of list and little else. Shrug. It's a specialized tool, and it's just too specialized for my purposes, no matter how much I love the model/fluff.

Yeah, I still can't find any specifics anywhere. And S6 with rending is good and all, but man, I just don't see them ever killing a Knight like that.

Hopefully we can get some info soon.

From FTGTEvan: "From the discussions I've seen it benefited from the mission pack, which had no Kill Point missions and all objective games, some of which had options for progressive scoring or end of game scoring. Essentially the list was able to get to or contest every objective while also minimize the usefulness of any nasty unit because the squads are generally tiny and inconsequential.

Been told he used spore mines to surround knights to restrict their movement. Sean is a really good player, so it definitely took a lot of finesse and cleverness. Congrats to him."

Baller.

I think the toughest matchup there would be the Tau, but with all the targets he presented, he probably just overwhelmed the opponent. Doesn't want to put too many markerlights on a single model, doesn't want to fire too many missiles at a single model, etc. Probably played a little too passive, didn't want to commit too much to killing a single lictor, etc. Nice play.

Remember kids, always build your lists for the MISSIONS you'll be playing, not for flat-out killing the enemy. TRUUUU

More from Ordosean

"Sorry fellas, been at work all day so trying to catch up now.

Well something that you need to know about me is I hate to be boring. Most of my list design process starts with me deciding either a theme or a group of units that I want to use. So for example Beast Star Dark Eldar for me was born out of my desire to win games with close combat and use the special character VECT, now that list paradigm certainly evolved into the hated beast star style list that exemplified everything that people hated about 6th edition... but it was not born out of the desire to create an all encompassing unbeatable list.

So backtrack and forward. Ive had tyranids since 5th edition. Bought built a list with lictors, genestealers, a flyrant and some mawlocs, had a lot of fun. All reserves style stuff. 6th edition comes out and you cant put more than 50% in reserves list is dead for that edition. 7th edition its up to you now what and how much... just have to not get tabled, so Lictor/mawloc stuff can work again. Dark eldar get a new book and my assault stuff sucks and Vect is gone so need to make some changes, for kicks and giggles use death leaper formation with old dark eldar in a tournament go 5-1 and really like what the lictors do. So start thinking about playing bugs again.

So with that in mind the list starts to develop, obviously the theme is once again surprise were here so death leaper formation is in, to augment that push as many other lictors as I can in so we end up with 8. From there 3 mawlocs are an easy addition, I already had 2 and so spent a lot of discussion and introspection whether to add a 3rd or go with something else like a carnifex or tyranofex as I had some in boxes I had won in the intervening years... but the 3rd mawloc was a better fit in every way so conceded to the better choice there. I already had one flyrant built and ready(sexy forgeworld one) so thats easy and again I conceded that in this instance its probably not necessary to try and reinvent the wheel, double flyrant is pretty darn solid and nothing else in the slot is fast enough or fits into the list as well. In some test ideas I had ravenors and shrikes in the fast slot and liked them as light lictors... but that involved buying and painting the models so I looked at my case and said well genestealers are kinda like that too.... plus they are already painted. The bastion is just so useful for the comms and line of sight blocking that its an auto take, because you never know if the tournament you are going to will have enough good terrain.

From there you have to start looking at a little psychology too... the whole list is crazy and its nickname is #LictorShame... mainly as a goof ball idea that people would be ashamed to admit defeat to not only Tyranids but also these tyranid models in particular. So my friend suggested that since I had a few points to spare I might as well toss in some spore mines because it was just one more hilarious unit to add to that psyche out moment when opponents read your list at the table. Then once we got the list on the table we quickly realized that the crazy theme and list was actually gelling together even better then I had expected... I had ideas that it should work, but to see it not only work but really work well gave me a lot of confidence to bring it to 11th company. SO much confidence that I was telling a lot of people that I was going to win the event, and even stealth posted the list on here to kinda put it out there before the event so that when I did win I could point back and say I warned people it was coming.

But the overriding idea of the list is to push the boundaries of competitive 40k. Because I feel that a lot of times there isnt enough belief in some forgotten units... but the right combos and outside the box thinking can create powerful builds that dont strictly come out of analyzing the most points efficient models and highest math hammer based attrition.

So after that little rambling introspection into how and why the list came into existence... hopefully not too boring Ill go back to searching through the thread to try and answer question."

p.s. I'm fucking obsessed with this right now

So, many, lictors. That is a seriously cool list though.