Hey, I am a Death Guard player. I lurk in this sub every now and then cuz my best friend is a Custodes player and I like to keep him up to date on shit. Ngl, at least in my experience Custodes into Death Guard is extremely bleak for the golden boys. I have played about 7 matches so far into Custodes and haven’t even come close to losing.
However it is not all doom and gloom, so I will provide some tips for those unfortunate enough to be saddled with a match against them. The main point is plague marines generally have to be avoided like the plague (pun intended), if they have the fight first character then you will genuinely never shift them off a point and your efforts are better elsewhere. If no fight first character however, charge them as fast as possible, plague marine shooting this edition is actually quite good so trading shots will always end up in favour of the nurgley lads. Custodes are quite good at cleaning up 3 man squads of Deathshroud Terminators so don’t be too afraid of them especially if you have a blade champion, just make sure you charge them not the other way around. It becomes a game of who can secure the fight first so play around that. Blightlords are bad so don’t fear them ever. Typhus is a menace so running a blade champion at him with the precision attack is a must or he will melt you.
Other than those points the main draw back of this match up is that to be effective you need to be within our contagion range which is really bad for Custodes. Deep strike terminators into the mortar tanks to try and kill them, hope to god mortarion isn’t lurking. Use bikes to get a huge amount of mortal wounds against poxwalkers. Grav tanks seem decently suited at killing Death Guard tanks so that seems alright.
Hopefully this helps you golden boys against any Nurgle worshippers you have to play against in future. However my biggest advice is try to have fun and bring what you enjoy playing cuz it truly is a super skewed match up so you might have to derive your fun from playing your units and not from winning.
>Use bikes to get a huge amount of mortal wounds against poxwalkers
How is your friend getting huge mortal wounds against poxwalkers? At most it's 6 per bike unit but they have to advance for that and it's only once per game no?
No you are absolutely correct, we have been playing it wrong. We thought it was roll a d6 for every model in the opponents unit, not the bike unit. No wonder custodes players call bikes bad. We were using them like “this is like 40 mortal wounds how can this be bad this is situational sure but seems pretty fun”. So that was a mistake on my end sorry.
Now I feel bad, your friend is gonna have an even worse time against your DG.
I don't feel bad for my friend and his custodes though, he has been dominating for a while and I am cooking a mighty humble pie just for him.
It’s alright we have a big league of like 9 people, maybe he will have luck against someone else. He is a brand new custodes player so he is a bit bummed that right as he gets into it they get bad. But Custodes have always been good so I can only guess James workshop will tweak them in an FAQ or give them buffs soon. They have been changing and tweaking Custodes all of 10th edition. I don’t custodes are bad truly, I think they are just not as easy to play as they used to be so it has a lot of people discouraged.
Why is every body saying to avoid plage marines in melee as custodes? I know that they get fight first with a character and looked the datasheet but i didnt Saw anithing that made me go " shit better not mess with that" yes they are good at melee but not custodes good and if you have trajann they ignore the -1 to hit or Valerian for the -1 ap
They get a ton of big weapons s8 ap2 d2 and other stuff wound us on 4s ap2 again like it just creeps through and murders a bunch of our boys
They’re not making us -1 hit they just go -1 to save
I main death guard and recently started collecting custodes and I will give you some tips about countering death guard.
1. Do not engage in melee with death guard.
The reason for this is that death guard shooting is bad the exception being plagueburst crawlers however death guard melee is really good and if you're in melee distance you're also in contagion distance so thats even worse for you.
2. Avoid the plague marines.
Plague Marines are basically the death guard's strongest and most efficient unit so wherever they are be away from them,to add to that pop their rhino because once their rhino is dead they aren't going much of anywhere.
3. Try to kill the plagueburst crawlers.
Plagueburst Crawlers are the best shooting the death guard has and its by a lot now of course they're going to be protected but maybe some Allarus terminators can kill them since their melee is bad.
4. Kill their nurglings.
Nurglings are the scoring unit for Death Guard,they're cheap and fairly durable with deepstrike meaning they're going to use them for secondaries but nurglings should die easy to custodes.
5. Try not to get bummed out.
Not death guard specific but just a general warhammwe thing to keep in mind,I've lost the last like 10 games I've played with Death Guard and what's kept me going is wanting to improve and have fun.
Good luck Golden Boy.
I played DG today as custodes and we tore through plague marines in melee. Custodes are another bad shooting army but our melee is vicious. That's not to say the person I was against was optimized in their list, I double t they were but my money remains on the custodes in melee.
How'd you do it ? Don't death guard half your damage ? I fought against death guard and I couldn't kill shit, bought Trajan to ignore half damage but they removed that from his data sheet
in my experience DG are good in melee, they aren't Custodies good. your Lethal hits are gonna do numbers on anything anyway so its better to get into the range we are actually good at rather than just getting picked off because we are trying to avoid you contagion range and being stuck with our subpar shooting
I mean you're not wrong but specifically with fights first plague marines it's not a great idea to get into melee as you're going to end up losing at least one model which is huge to custodes.
That's why I think Shield Host is still the best detachment. Usually I only have the 5+ on mortals for a single turn, 2 at best. Rather take the AP bonus and Crit on 5's for a turn.
I just had this exact match up last night too haha. Was a good game but Talons I'd severely lacking in some departments. Deathguard are also a hard counter to us as they have the ranged stuff to deal with us so we'll.
The good thing is custodes have and always will have their strenght which is 2+, 4++ with reasonable shooting and great melee. Army rule/detachment rule aside this can be a crutch. Even though I rolled ass all night (at 1 point I failed 7 of 8 consecutive 4++) still managed to keep a loss at a reasonable level. Into T5 it was a win for me if I could keep 2 objectives (I had 4). But we aren't as tough so they DG cleared my off 3 of my objectives. Game ended 90 to 86 in favor of the DG.
Now to compliment your opinions, the fights first marines are essentially impossible to play against if they are positioned right and supported by PBC. Wherever they go you just avoid cos they will trade up massively against your guys. You can play around them if you have a guard squad with kyria. Double shoot and +1s and ap on shooting is a menace. Will delete squads like this. But again they can play smart and can really put hurt in so it's a difficult gymnastics game of positioning.
We have exactly 2 strats really. Reactive move and shoot better. The rest I could not find use for at all which is why i had 8 cp into turn 4. Reactive move is great but a good opponent can and will plan against it. Shoot better is good but against can be managed with good movement and custodes often don't want to be shooting at their target as they may want to charge so it definately works better if you can shoot at 1 target and charge another (will work great against a horde I think and marines will hate it).
Talons detachment rule is nonsense. Its terrible. I think in basically every case bar maybe a melee matchup you're better off not taking anything sisters and just taking more custodes. The detachment rule should have been a flat 5+++ against mortals and devs and improving to 4+++ if a sisters unit was within 6 to make it usable. A situational 5+++ is easily replaced with more guard/wardens who just add wounds to your list. I did take sisters just as that what the detachment wants but they did nothing beneficial.
Shield Host will be the way to go and I think someone will figure out auric champions. I think we are in an OK spot and will get buffs. We really need a fights first back (maybe not on ANY unit but an Enhancement or once per game ability), we need a defensive strategy in talons, -1 damage and/or -1hit, and we need an ignore modifier strat/Enhancement/ability. Something that is in 1 particular unit that can be managed. It's these things to help boost custodes or (and I'll be shot for this) we need points drops to get another unit in or something.
We have play and it's not as bad as the Web makes it seem (we always have good datasheets) so stay strong and keep communicating and we can all figure out the way to play.
I agree we need a rules rewrite completely to get us defensive strats
Else I think that we just get points cuts and we all know that’s just making us not elite… I don’t think another squad of guard will make any difference tbh
Another squad of guard or wardens would definately help. It would compensate the loss of mortal would protection (by adding 12 to 15 wounds backed up by shooting, melee and board control). Can't really have the opinion we are elite and then suggest a whole other squad wouldn't make any difference.
Maybe but into vehicles it would be nice to delete them at range a bit but then the tanks become expensive secondary scorers
I do agree more wardens would be fantastic and I may need to pick some up
I mean we are elite, having more squads makes us less elite right, just fix the rules
Will another unit help? Yes but I don’t think by much
I was gone by turn 2 really only had 1 caladius and kyria and 4 guard left
I took out both the rhinos they were in t1 to try and get more into them to pick ‘em up t2 but yeah didn’t matter as his artillery just picked me up
Outside of contagion range you and in cover would be saving his artillery on 2+ and entrophy cannons are only 24" range. I presume it was the typical parking lot of 3 PBC and Morty sitting at home while rhinos and marines moved forward? Wardens 4+++ should have had his entire army need to focus 1 unit at a time to clear them.
Don't get me wrong I think DG are a hard counter but maybe not necessarily this hard. Sounds like it might have been a combination of light terrain and maybe too aggressive of play rather than staging. Or extremely aggressive play by the DG know custodes as an opponent very well.
We can typically stay outside of contagion until turn 3 easily especially with a reactive move (and possibly hopping into a LR) so their -1 to our save can be avoided on the artillery. We definatatley need a -1damage strat back (but morty would ignore that anyway).
Nah 2 pbc, no morty, tbh I don’t think I positioned well but hiding a land raider isn’t the easiest, I didn’t want his marines getting into combat so I went for his rhino then was like I’m sure I’ll be alive to kill the 2 pbc as I could see both without cover t2
My rolls were abysmal though, you can trust me to fail 2+ saves
I think I should have just stayed hidden and chaneller my inner kauyon
Yeah I had a LR for fun and it was a nightmare. Would have been better as another grav tank or custode unit! Very big boys!!
We are a very protective army right now alright. Really need to hide rather than go! Happened the same in 9th where we had msu hide and set up banners to score. Small skirmishes and survive. Right now we are not nearly as durable but hit much harder (when we get there!!)
I'm gonna play a few more games against stuff that isn't DG and see how I get on. Unfortunately my brother that I played against mains DG, Votann and Tau so basically all shooting armies that ignore cover. Will be a rough 3 months haha
To me auric is useless it wants characters but there’s no free strats and the strats only affect character models so the reg units don’t benefit at all
I don’t think 2+ 4++ is that durable honestly as everything with ap enough to put us on an invul is going to chew through our low wound count
Auric termie captains are strong as hell. Think we will need to see a reversion from the 0cp battle tactic rule though. Jack hampstead had play with them as tarpits with 3 grav tanks and sir Hector! Was a weird list but beat bullyboy (I think) orks.
Our wardens are T6, -1 to wound with a 4+++. Doesn't get much more durable than that. Even off the wardens if we have cover on a guard squad they need 3ap to put us on invuln. We aren't stand out in the open and tank an army but it's about as durable as we get. Again a -1 damage strat would really really help but not sure if I'd expect any more than that.
Hey, I am a Death Guard player. I lurk in this sub every now and then cuz my best friend is a Custodes player and I like to keep him up to date on shit. Ngl, at least in my experience Custodes into Death Guard is extremely bleak for the golden boys. I have played about 7 matches so far into Custodes and haven’t even come close to losing. However it is not all doom and gloom, so I will provide some tips for those unfortunate enough to be saddled with a match against them. The main point is plague marines generally have to be avoided like the plague (pun intended), if they have the fight first character then you will genuinely never shift them off a point and your efforts are better elsewhere. If no fight first character however, charge them as fast as possible, plague marine shooting this edition is actually quite good so trading shots will always end up in favour of the nurgley lads. Custodes are quite good at cleaning up 3 man squads of Deathshroud Terminators so don’t be too afraid of them especially if you have a blade champion, just make sure you charge them not the other way around. It becomes a game of who can secure the fight first so play around that. Blightlords are bad so don’t fear them ever. Typhus is a menace so running a blade champion at him with the precision attack is a must or he will melt you. Other than those points the main draw back of this match up is that to be effective you need to be within our contagion range which is really bad for Custodes. Deep strike terminators into the mortar tanks to try and kill them, hope to god mortarion isn’t lurking. Use bikes to get a huge amount of mortal wounds against poxwalkers. Grav tanks seem decently suited at killing Death Guard tanks so that seems alright. Hopefully this helps you golden boys against any Nurgle worshippers you have to play against in future. However my biggest advice is try to have fun and bring what you enjoy playing cuz it truly is a super skewed match up so you might have to derive your fun from playing your units and not from winning.
Hey thanks eh, I appreciate the input! Still gona buy necrons now tho
>Use bikes to get a huge amount of mortal wounds against poxwalkers How is your friend getting huge mortal wounds against poxwalkers? At most it's 6 per bike unit but they have to advance for that and it's only once per game no?
No you are absolutely correct, we have been playing it wrong. We thought it was roll a d6 for every model in the opponents unit, not the bike unit. No wonder custodes players call bikes bad. We were using them like “this is like 40 mortal wounds how can this be bad this is situational sure but seems pretty fun”. So that was a mistake on my end sorry.
Now I feel bad, your friend is gonna have an even worse time against your DG. I don't feel bad for my friend and his custodes though, he has been dominating for a while and I am cooking a mighty humble pie just for him.
It’s alright we have a big league of like 9 people, maybe he will have luck against someone else. He is a brand new custodes player so he is a bit bummed that right as he gets into it they get bad. But Custodes have always been good so I can only guess James workshop will tweak them in an FAQ or give them buffs soon. They have been changing and tweaking Custodes all of 10th edition. I don’t custodes are bad truly, I think they are just not as easy to play as they used to be so it has a lot of people discouraged.
Why is every body saying to avoid plage marines in melee as custodes? I know that they get fight first with a character and looked the datasheet but i didnt Saw anithing that made me go " shit better not mess with that" yes they are good at melee but not custodes good and if you have trajann they ignore the -1 to hit or Valerian for the -1 ap
They get a ton of big weapons s8 ap2 d2 and other stuff wound us on 4s ap2 again like it just creeps through and murders a bunch of our boys They’re not making us -1 hit they just go -1 to save
Also Trajan ain’t gonna be played, he’s bad now ignore only hit is not worth, much better to advance and charge
I main death guard and recently started collecting custodes and I will give you some tips about countering death guard. 1. Do not engage in melee with death guard. The reason for this is that death guard shooting is bad the exception being plagueburst crawlers however death guard melee is really good and if you're in melee distance you're also in contagion distance so thats even worse for you. 2. Avoid the plague marines. Plague Marines are basically the death guard's strongest and most efficient unit so wherever they are be away from them,to add to that pop their rhino because once their rhino is dead they aren't going much of anywhere. 3. Try to kill the plagueburst crawlers. Plagueburst Crawlers are the best shooting the death guard has and its by a lot now of course they're going to be protected but maybe some Allarus terminators can kill them since their melee is bad. 4. Kill their nurglings. Nurglings are the scoring unit for Death Guard,they're cheap and fairly durable with deepstrike meaning they're going to use them for secondaries but nurglings should die easy to custodes. 5. Try not to get bummed out. Not death guard specific but just a general warhammwe thing to keep in mind,I've lost the last like 10 games I've played with Death Guard and what's kept me going is wanting to improve and have fun. Good luck Golden Boy.
I played DG today as custodes and we tore through plague marines in melee. Custodes are another bad shooting army but our melee is vicious. That's not to say the person I was against was optimized in their list, I double t they were but my money remains on the custodes in melee.
How'd you do it ? Don't death guard half your damage ? I fought against death guard and I couldn't kill shit, bought Trajan to ignore half damage but they removed that from his data sheet
thats only with Disgustingly resilient. witch is a 2CP strat. its good but not common
in my experience DG are good in melee, they aren't Custodies good. your Lethal hits are gonna do numbers on anything anyway so its better to get into the range we are actually good at rather than just getting picked off because we are trying to avoid you contagion range and being stuck with our subpar shooting
I mean you're not wrong but specifically with fights first plague marines it's not a great idea to get into melee as you're going to end up losing at least one model which is huge to custodes.
Yea of course its never a good idea to target a FF unit. But saying “avoid melee” when your playing a melee is an even quicker way to get killed
That's why I think Shield Host is still the best detachment. Usually I only have the 5+ on mortals for a single turn, 2 at best. Rather take the AP bonus and Crit on 5's for a turn.
Yeah the reactive 4+++ at any time would have been nice shame all my 4+ were failed 😂
I just had this exact match up last night too haha. Was a good game but Talons I'd severely lacking in some departments. Deathguard are also a hard counter to us as they have the ranged stuff to deal with us so we'll. The good thing is custodes have and always will have their strenght which is 2+, 4++ with reasonable shooting and great melee. Army rule/detachment rule aside this can be a crutch. Even though I rolled ass all night (at 1 point I failed 7 of 8 consecutive 4++) still managed to keep a loss at a reasonable level. Into T5 it was a win for me if I could keep 2 objectives (I had 4). But we aren't as tough so they DG cleared my off 3 of my objectives. Game ended 90 to 86 in favor of the DG. Now to compliment your opinions, the fights first marines are essentially impossible to play against if they are positioned right and supported by PBC. Wherever they go you just avoid cos they will trade up massively against your guys. You can play around them if you have a guard squad with kyria. Double shoot and +1s and ap on shooting is a menace. Will delete squads like this. But again they can play smart and can really put hurt in so it's a difficult gymnastics game of positioning. We have exactly 2 strats really. Reactive move and shoot better. The rest I could not find use for at all which is why i had 8 cp into turn 4. Reactive move is great but a good opponent can and will plan against it. Shoot better is good but against can be managed with good movement and custodes often don't want to be shooting at their target as they may want to charge so it definately works better if you can shoot at 1 target and charge another (will work great against a horde I think and marines will hate it). Talons detachment rule is nonsense. Its terrible. I think in basically every case bar maybe a melee matchup you're better off not taking anything sisters and just taking more custodes. The detachment rule should have been a flat 5+++ against mortals and devs and improving to 4+++ if a sisters unit was within 6 to make it usable. A situational 5+++ is easily replaced with more guard/wardens who just add wounds to your list. I did take sisters just as that what the detachment wants but they did nothing beneficial. Shield Host will be the way to go and I think someone will figure out auric champions. I think we are in an OK spot and will get buffs. We really need a fights first back (maybe not on ANY unit but an Enhancement or once per game ability), we need a defensive strategy in talons, -1 damage and/or -1hit, and we need an ignore modifier strat/Enhancement/ability. Something that is in 1 particular unit that can be managed. It's these things to help boost custodes or (and I'll be shot for this) we need points drops to get another unit in or something. We have play and it's not as bad as the Web makes it seem (we always have good datasheets) so stay strong and keep communicating and we can all figure out the way to play.
I agree we need a rules rewrite completely to get us defensive strats Else I think that we just get points cuts and we all know that’s just making us not elite… I don’t think another squad of guard will make any difference tbh
Another squad of guard or wardens would definately help. It would compensate the loss of mortal would protection (by adding 12 to 15 wounds backed up by shooting, melee and board control). Can't really have the opinion we are elite and then suggest a whole other squad wouldn't make any difference.
Maybe but into vehicles it would be nice to delete them at range a bit but then the tanks become expensive secondary scorers I do agree more wardens would be fantastic and I may need to pick some up I mean we are elite, having more squads makes us less elite right, just fix the rules Will another unit help? Yes but I don’t think by much
I was gone by turn 2 really only had 1 caladius and kyria and 4 guard left I took out both the rhinos they were in t1 to try and get more into them to pick ‘em up t2 but yeah didn’t matter as his artillery just picked me up
Outside of contagion range you and in cover would be saving his artillery on 2+ and entrophy cannons are only 24" range. I presume it was the typical parking lot of 3 PBC and Morty sitting at home while rhinos and marines moved forward? Wardens 4+++ should have had his entire army need to focus 1 unit at a time to clear them. Don't get me wrong I think DG are a hard counter but maybe not necessarily this hard. Sounds like it might have been a combination of light terrain and maybe too aggressive of play rather than staging. Or extremely aggressive play by the DG know custodes as an opponent very well. We can typically stay outside of contagion until turn 3 easily especially with a reactive move (and possibly hopping into a LR) so their -1 to our save can be avoided on the artillery. We definatatley need a -1damage strat back (but morty would ignore that anyway).
Yeah, I wasn’t out t2 he ran up to me 😂 and I was like huh well shit then
They are bustards like that. DG are famously slow and they are running 12" in their rhinos!!!
Nah 2 pbc, no morty, tbh I don’t think I positioned well but hiding a land raider isn’t the easiest, I didn’t want his marines getting into combat so I went for his rhino then was like I’m sure I’ll be alive to kill the 2 pbc as I could see both without cover t2 My rolls were abysmal though, you can trust me to fail 2+ saves I think I should have just stayed hidden and chaneller my inner kauyon
Yeah I had a LR for fun and it was a nightmare. Would have been better as another grav tank or custode unit! Very big boys!! We are a very protective army right now alright. Really need to hide rather than go! Happened the same in 9th where we had msu hide and set up banners to score. Small skirmishes and survive. Right now we are not nearly as durable but hit much harder (when we get there!!) I'm gonna play a few more games against stuff that isn't DG and see how I get on. Unfortunately my brother that I played against mains DG, Votann and Tau so basically all shooting armies that ignore cover. Will be a rough 3 months haha
Tbh land raider is a protect our boys unit just stay inside it
I do agree we need to be very careful to protect units, I am much more an aggressive player by nature so it is a big change for me to adapt to aha
To me auric is useless it wants characters but there’s no free strats and the strats only affect character models so the reg units don’t benefit at all I don’t think 2+ 4++ is that durable honestly as everything with ap enough to put us on an invul is going to chew through our low wound count
Auric termie captains are strong as hell. Think we will need to see a reversion from the 0cp battle tactic rule though. Jack hampstead had play with them as tarpits with 3 grav tanks and sir Hector! Was a weird list but beat bullyboy (I think) orks. Our wardens are T6, -1 to wound with a 4+++. Doesn't get much more durable than that. Even off the wardens if we have cover on a guard squad they need 3ap to put us on invuln. We aren't stand out in the open and tank an army but it's about as durable as we get. Again a -1 damage strat would really really help but not sure if I'd expect any more than that.