Thank you all for meeting me here today, I am sure you are all wondering why I asked to speak with you. We need to talk about Warp Talons. Are they really OP? If you don’t have 30, should you even bother showing up? How can you make them work for you? Do they taste like chicken? These are the questions we will try to answer today.

So the statline is unchanged from before. M 12” breachable infantry with a respectable 3+/5++ T4 2W body with 4 Twin-linked S5 AP2 D1 attacks on 3s, sustained 1 for 22 pts a model is respectable. Now, we will go through the potpourri of detachments and how they spice these evil jerk chickens up, but the thing that has everyone doing a double-take is their new rule:

“At the end of the FIGHT phase, if this unit was eligible to fight this phase and is not in engagement range of one or more enemy units, you can remove this unit from the battlefield and place it into Strategic Reserves.”

Last edition, Tyranids had this ability as a stratagem and it was so broken they obliterated it rather than even try to make it 2 CP. So if your Khorne-ish game hens can run out, charge your opponent’s scouts, eat them, they can then GTFO. And then guess who can then Rapid Ingress on turn 2? That same pack of demon-fueled Foghorn Leghorns. This is the crux of why the internet has been tittering nonstop. Free stuff is good. If you pay 220 points in list building to include a brick of 10, you get to remove one of the opponent’s chaff units for free. The problem with 5s is that you are rewarded for overcommitting (because free is still free) and punished heavily if you can’t lift off (donated your fancy bird men for some stupid scouts).

So I would say that every CSM player has to really ask themselves why they aren’t including 1×10 Warp Talons in every list. The real interesting question is how many should you play (30 could be the right answer) and which detachments interact the most interestingly.  One baseline fact to be aware of – 10 generic warp talons kill 10 other generic warp talons about 52% of the time. Detachment rules can swing this dramatically. The role of running a 5 man squad is for it to run alongside a 10 man to help it take out slightly harder targets. You just need them to not be engaged at the end of combat, it’s okay if 2 squads work together to get it done.

Let’s start the detachment breakdown with the most obvious place these fowl fiends shine – Pactbound.

PACTBOUND

What do Talons get here? 1 CP Advance and Charge and 5+ Exploding hits. If you want the best place to try to fly like a Chaos eagle, this is probably your detachment. They all take the Slaanesh Mark, you start them all on the table and they roam alone or in pairs to eat whatever garbage your opponent left out and then Up, up, and away. Important breakpoint – in CSM vs CSM mirrors, 10 Pactbound Talons will kill any other Talon brick on avg dice, non-Siege Host bricks 90+% of the time. They eat 5 TEQs 76% of the time, 10 MEQs 95% of the time, 14 Boyz in Green Tide and 2 Meganobz in Bully Boyz Waagh. For 220 points. Fuggedaboutit. 30 seems like a good starting point.

RENEGADE REAVERS (RnR)

So you give up 5+ sustained for +1 AP and regular sustained. In general, the damage is similar or a tiny bit worse than Pactbound. We still have access to advance and charge (often at +1 to charge because that seems fun) but now we get Opportunistic Raiders – end of fight phase, Fall back or make a normal move, depending. Well this let’s you hit anything you want with the Warp Talons, then 1 CP fall back, “it’s nothing personal, kid” and ninja-vanish away with their rule because they were eligible to fight and now they aren’t in engagement range. This is another detachment that could make a case for 30. Also, I think catching your opponent’s Warp Talons might be the future of CSM mirrors and this detachment has the best plan for that. If you are up against a detachment that doesn’t boost Talon damage (Cult, Siege Host, Vashtor, Dread Talons, Deceptors), Armor of Contempt means you are likely to keep 3 guys alive on typical dice. Against Vets, it becomes a 50/50 if they will kill you, and Pactbound is only 60/40 on the 1 shot. If they fail their dark pact, they are cooked.

VETERANS OF THE LONG WAR

Why place Space Marine CSM? Why? They have a cool reactive move so your Angry Birdz can never be charged but also, always get to where they need to go to charge whatever they want. Yay. The downside of this detachment is that you are now a boring Space Marine player and I grieve for you.

SOULFORGED WARPACK, CHAOS CULT

Nothing here. Just wanted a palate cleanser from Vets.

DREAD TALONS

Sadly, the jump pack detachment has nothing spicy. +1 AP vs battleshocks opponents is forgettable. Fall back and charge really is not what we want them to be doing. I am sure there are just hordes of people imagining amazing ways of Relentless Pursuit-ing someone but again, they were supposed to ghost out. A rule of the universe is that Night Lords must always disappoint us as much as Night Haunter disappointed his Dad.

DECEPTORS

Deceptors is going to put a lot of bodies in inconvenient places for your opponent to excavate them. So Talons have a lot of intrinsic synegry with that plan by being so mobile and them getting access to +X to charge and a reactive move is exactly what you’d need to be able to bounce 1-2 10 mans of these around the board “solving problems” with your “demon warp claws.” 30 seems like too many with how many points you want to spend on your infiltrating units.

FELLHAMMER SIEGE HOST

This is the most interesting Warp Talon detachment to me because I think the new codex is even better than people think and we might be heading towards Chaos Summer. That means I expect mirror matches and I think RnR and Pactbound will be everywhere. -1 to wound means that Pactbound Talons are only 50/50 to cleanly wiping the squad and the other detachments can’t reliably do it at all, so you can play yours more aggressively and know that they have to gamble to punish you.

Happy hunting’s!

Doug

PS They taste like emu.