Road to NOVA: Tyranid List Building

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, friend of the blog, Phil, has put together a Road to the NOVA Open League. After chatting with him and campaigning for some interest local to me, I got myself a small local bracket to play games in starting this week.

I am predictably bringing my Tyranids, but on the fence about some adaptations of Lictorshame and which I want to take. Both variants take advantage of the third detachment allowance to bring in a formation. The first uses Sporefield formation with the intention of clogging the midfield with cheap throwaway units that can present problems:

• CAD
• Warlord Flyrant
• Flyrant
• 3x1 Lictor
• 2x3 Rippers: Deep Strike
• Bastion: Comms Relay
• Hive Fleet Detachment
• Flyrant
• Tyrant Guard: Adrenal Glands, Toxin Sacs
• 3x1 Lictor
• 3x1 Mucolid
• 2x3 Spore Mines
• 3 Mawloc
• Sporefield
• 3x1 Mucolid
• 3x3 Spore Mines

The sporefield mines return on a 4+ when destroyed, allowing me to consistently drop in more mines throughout the game to cut off movement lanes and threaten objectives.

The other variant takes a cue from Ron's list and uses Deathleaper's Assassin Brood:

• CAD
• Warlord Flyrant
• Flyrant
• 2x3 Rippers: Deep Strike
• Bastion: Comms Relay
• Hive Fleet Detachment
• 3x1 Mucolid
• Lictor
• 4 Spore Mines
• 2x3 Spore Mines
• 3 Mawloc
• Deathleaper's Assassin Brood
• Deathleaper
• 5x1 Lictor

This list adds one more lictor (essentially) and the formation allows for some combos with the -1 Ld debuff they have. In particular, it allows morale to be more of an issue for the majority of armies that average Ld8. It also makes losing to the lictors in combat a scarier proposition. That said, our consensus against Ron this weekend was that it was mostly an annoyance and rarely game changing. 

The two lists are extremely similar with slightly different approaches. In the second list, I could theoretically drop all the spore mines for another Lictor, but that limits the list's ability to null deploy somewhat, requiring either larger Mucolids or more valuable models to be camping the comms. 

I'm still on the fence about which list to take (have until the end of the month to finalize lists) but looking forward to games against Chandler, Tom, and Rick in the coming weeks. First up is Chandler and his Wolves in Mission 1 from the NOVA Open packet. Scheduling all the games could be interested but I'm excited to get some solid NOVA practice in several months out.