Astra Militarum vs Thousand Sons, 10.12.2025

Back to the blessed L-shaped ruins of a city with an old~ish Leviathan matched play game. I played my trusty Scions (because I still don't have appropriate command squad models, and tanks don't do well on loaded tables) against the new Thousand Sons detachment.

The mission was whatever but we had two special rules giving us 3 secondary cards per turn and rolling 3+ on reserves.

The one giant Scion squad on the table assumes the dreaded triangle formation.

Battle round 1

For once I got first turn and immediately cannon'd the Tzaangor Enlightened. The Thousand Sons then moved out for points and stuff.

Battle round 2

I pushed up some troops for screening against a huge brick of deep striking Terminators. Shouldn't have: they failed their 3+.

And I brought in my strategic reserves unit.

Along with the small unit already there, they cleared out the Mutalith and a squad of Rubrics.

Nothing else moves because flamers.

Infiltrating robots move out but don't do anything. Magnus shows a wing tip and obliterates my transport.

Battle round 3

The remaining transport moved up and disembarked, triggering the robot overwatch. All the nuns died.

I dropped in Aquilons to shoot down a squad of Tzaangors. No luck. However, with everything else remaining, including two small squads, the transport and some artillery, I managed to take down both the robots and the Tzaangors. 

But the Terminators also arrived with Rapid Ingress. This was, of course, very bad news for my giant scion squad on that objective.

Battle round 4

Deep striking scions went back to reserve and dropped on the termies to annihilate them, along with the remnants of the first giant squad who ate a massive overwatch.

Then Magnus showed a wingtip and casually eliminated all my remaining scions.

We were kind of equal in points up to now, but the deletion of all my infantry meant almost no points in the final round. Thousand Sons win by 10ish points (even without painted bonus).

Conclusion

This list has never beaten Thousand Sons. So many flamers everywhere means one of my squads is reliably destroyed on the opponent's turn. And all my squads want to be up close and firing those meltas/rapid fire plasmas. Sigh.

The added firepower is nice, but I think I'll drop an artillery piece and bring some cheap infantry instead, for objective scoring and overwatch triggering.