My competitive Necrons - making them work

[Plague _Lord]

I play in a very competitive environment and only go to tournaments with armies that I know, so Deathguard. I want to spice it up a bit and I do have a Necron army. I like the role of being the underdog and not necessarily taking the top meta armies. I think Necrons have a skew list that might work but I want your feedbeck before I start tournament testing.

 

The whole idea of the list is to go heavily into mortal wound output coupled with fast obsec units.

 

The list more or less would look like this:

night bringer

2x transcendant C'Tan

 

2x plasmancer, 1 orb

technomancer with canoptek cloak, thrall of silent king WLT

chronomancer with veil relic

 

6x skorpekh detroyers

2x5 scarab swarms

1x5 wraith

2x1 heavy lokhust destroyers

1x5 tesla immortals

1x6 flayed ones

 

I can fit the above into 3 detachments that give me 7 CP to start. My choice of dynasty would be custom traits with the pregame move of 6'', coupled with obsec.

 

List strengths:

- decent MW output

- can deal fairly well with elite armies

- fast movement of canoptek units

- fast obsec

 

List weaknesses:

- not much staying power

- low volume shooting

- no way to deal with hordes

- no way to influence MW output - either I roll well or I miss entirely

- No obvious secondary picks

 

Strategy:

I think this list has to play cagey and it does rely on terrain a lot to acutally work - this type of list will probably not fair well in the US, where terrain is scarce but here in my meta we play on boards with a lot of it. Secondaries are also hard to pick but there a few that I think should be autopick depending on the opponent :

1. Purge the enemy - this is quite a good secondary as you get a more often than not guaranteed 2pt just for holding your own quarter. I think it's easy to score 4 a turn with this list and on occasion turns with 6pts.

2. RND - immortals, flayed ones and possibly other units will get you a guaranteed 8pts from this. 12pts will have to involve vailing a unit on the last turn but this is also a possibility.

3. The hard pick that will depend on opponent and mission - it will have to be either a kill secondary (not optimal) or TTL on the C'tan. This is a hard pick and very situational. It all depends on the army facing you on the other side of the board. Sometimes TTL will be optimal - other times there is no way you can pick it. I think I will try to aim at a pick that can get me at least 5pts in a game.

The aim of the game with this list is playing really defensive-mindedely. We have fast obsec in the form of scarabs that should get to the midfield obejectives pretty early on and two counterattack melee units in the form of the skorpekh and the wraiths. I kind of want to invite the enemy into my scarabs early on and then blitz them with tough melee units that are hard to remove due to invuls and strats, but also have obsec. I would have to play cagey with the C'tan trio - swapping out one of the weak powers early on to have 2 transcendants popping off 2 sky of falling stars a turn and try to maximise MW output from safety. Choosing the moment to acutally engage with the C'tan is very important with this kind of list since rushing a C'tan just means it will die the next turn. Overall the plan is basiaclly not to kill the enemy but use fast obsec to steal objectives and use mortal wounds to kill elite units. Most top armies lean heavily into the elite unit playstyle - Tyranids, CWE, Harlies, TAU and they rarely have more than 1 screening unit. I think the C'tan can do work. Obviously this is a 100% loss against those weird 360 consript Imperial Guard lists but I have no problem with losing against the guard :)

 

So what do you think? Does this type of list have merit in a competitive environment?