Greetings all!

For 10th edition I have decided to start up an army blog covering my entry into Genestealer Cults! The goal is to include hobby decisions, maths, tactics, and games as I start the army from the ground up.

Why Play Genestealer Cults

I feel like this is a pretty common question that any player new to any army or even the game asks, and it seemed like a good spot to share why I opted into the faction myself.

First, and most important: Play what you think looks cool. You’re going to be gluing, painting, and playing multi-hour games with these wee figurines. That’s a whole lot of time spent staring at them, so be sure to opt for an army, any army, that you actually like the look of. 

Second, playstyle. Playstyle is one of the most important factors to army selection for me. If you find an army that fits yourself, then it just takes the fun level and ramps it up so much more. One of my friends likes to play very aggressive, in your face, lot of charging and a lot of pressure. When we first started he was on White Scars, lots of bikes and such. But then he switched over to Orks, which truly fit his desired way to play and it was a match made in heaven. 

My playstyle comes down into two categories: movement and target selection. For me, movement is the most interesting and exciting part of the game. Anyone can sit down at a computer, crack open some Excel sheets, and math out the gated statistic models that the game uses. It’s basic multiplication and it’s not that hard. But movement in the game cannot be mathed out, you must learn it by actually playing the game, interacting with your opponent. It can be unpredictable, and can be very rewarding. Thus I like to pick up factions where you have mass deepstrike, you have that ability to sneak into places where your opponent would not normally expect your models to be. 

Movement feeds very directly into my other playstyle category: target selection. 40k is pretty simple, put the right gun into the right target at the right time. That’s where all the math and statistics and tactics come into play, and Genestealer Cults excels at this very approach to the game. My goal is generally to have a diverse set of tools and weapons in an army and then be able to apply them at will to the correct targets.

My third and final reason for picking up GSC is conversions and customizing. I really hate painting, but I really like to convert models, pick a new theme, and make something that is new and unique to myself. Conversions and paint schemes are a way to communicate your army to your opponent without using words; they shouldn’t need a multi-paragraph backstory to know where your guys are coming from. Fortunately GSC models are very easy to convert and have a large amount of 3d print support available as well!

Where to Start

Like anyone reading this, I started by doing research on the internet. GSC are a notoriously expensive army to collect, a challenging army to paint, and one that people often burn out on. The good news is that I have no money and little time, so no problems here at all! Fortunately no money and little time actually puts me on a budget, and hopefully will keep me on track to get everything painted without a wee little pile of shame building up.

I saw a lot of advice on starting with two Combat Patrols, and this is really smart financial advice. I personally went in a different direction, and started with a Combat Patrol + a Boarding Patrol. The reason for this was purely hobby psychology: two Combat Patrols means 40 Neophytes to paint. That…is a lot of Neophytes. By breaking it down into a Combat Patrol and a Boarding Patrol you don’t have to paint more than 20 of any given unit, very appealing to not being overwhelmed by the hobby progress.

Nextime: Painting up my ill gotten gains!