Tuesday 29 August 2017

Khenetai Blade Occult

Hi all,

I thought I would talk about my favourite Thousand Sons unit this week.  I'm not sure why, but the Khenetai Blade Occult has really captured my imagination and are now a staple in my army.


I've used them in quite a few games and they have either proved nigh on unstoppable, or been blown to smithereens before making a contribution.


For those who are not familiar, they are an absolute blender in terms of the amount of attacks they can put out.  Especially if you run a full squad with the Mindsong of Blades rule.  In essence, this means your basic Blade is looking at five WS6 attacks on the charge at initiative with force.  This becomes even more fun if you roll on Biomancy, potentially giving you an extra three attacks each or upping your strength by three.


My army is predominantly based around a Zone Mortalis force, so I don't have any transports which somewhat hinders their performance on a conventional battlefield.  I probably should get around to adding some transports!

The models themselves were quick and easy to build.  You can definitely tell it's one of the newer kits with minimal amounts of flash.  Even more impressively, all of the swords were perfect and required none of the rigmarole of heating and cooling to get them the right shape.

I recently attended my first Throne of Skulls with Ikthelion and was presently surprised to be nominated for the Best Army award.  I was over the moon with this result as I had never entered any of the painting competitions before.  Even more surprising was that my Khenetai Blade Occult squad managed to win the Company of Legend award.  Clearly some warp fuelled trickery occurred as some of the other entrants were truly amazing.


Has anyone else had any success running Khenetai Blade Occult?  I saw quite a few other XV legion lists at the Throne of Skulls, but didn't see any other Khenetai.


8 comments:

  1. Stunning looking models! How did you paint the blades?

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    1. Cheers Drake! They were painted with Retributor Armour, three washes of Nuln oil, then a targeted dry brush of Retributor Armour. Then a line highlight with Vallejo Metal Acrylics Metal Colour White Aluminium was applied to the very edges.

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  2. They look great! I love the conversions I did using the 40k rubric marine torsos and shoulder pads, using tomb king tomb guard swords and FW achean heads, but man do I wish I had waited an extra couple weeks to pick these up instead! Just beautiful, love the insignia on their chests!

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    1. I think the chest insignia is my favourite bit of the model as well. The heads are very good as well. I wish you could buy them individually!

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  3. These guys are awesome! If I were to do TS I would be running a lot of these as they are so cool! Congrats on the painting awards from ToS!!

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    1. Cheers Darien. I'd like to run more as well - but I definitely need to invest in a transport first I think.

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    2. Got any thoughts on what transports?

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  4. Looking absolutely amazing! I'm investing in an airbrush to be able to paint my 30K Thousand sons just like this. Whats you recipe for that wonderful candy colour red? Is it Forge Worlds "Angron Red" or something else? :)

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