Thousand Sons 9th Edition Codex

Analysis, October 19, 2020

What can we expect to see in the 9th edition codex for Thousand Sons?

New Edition, New Codex

So, it’s been a few months and we now have some semblance of what the codexes are going to look like in 9th edition. First out of the gates are Space Marines and Necrons, both of which have had their details covered in many other sites/articles. What I want to focus on is what these books can tell us about how the Thousand Sons codex will look.

If you don’t really care about the “why”, skip to the end for my summary.

Core

The biggest thing being introduced in this cycle of codexes is the notion of what a “Core” unit is. In the September article they talked about how this implemented in more detail - to put it simply, certain units gain the Core keyword. Core units are described as:

The Core keyword is used to identify units that form the fighting… well, core, of an army. These are most commonly represented by units of line infantry, though this doesn’t mean it’s exclusive to Troops, nor just Infantry.

The key importance to this is that crucial mechanics, such as “Re-roll 1s to hit” auras, now appear to only apply to <Core> units. While this appeared like it may only apply to Space Marines, they rolled this out for Necrons along with a massive model range update similar to what we saw with Death Guard. What this tells us is that it won’t be restricted to just Space Marines and we can expect to see the same rule applied to Thousand Sons.

What units will be Core?

Gleaming what we can from the units that received Core, we stipulate that Thousand Sons will likely have the following Core units:

After that its a crap shoot. Do they include Enlightened? What about the Mutalith Derp Beasts?

The other question is, what will apply to Core units in Thousand Sons. In Space Marines, it has the biggest effect on auras, like I mentioned above. What’s possible to gather from this is that there is a concerted effort to move away from serious re-roll mechanics as a central factor to game play like we saw in 8th edition. While this certainly messed with Space Marine army composition, Thousand Sons weren’t an army really built around it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice bonus for your Rubric Marines or Predators, but lists were not designed around it.

So, what this likely means is Chaos Lords will follow suit with their Captain counterparts. Since Exalted Sorcerers are designed as Chaos Lord / Sorcerer hybrids, we’re likely to see these units gain the same treatment. This likely means the bonuses/improvements we’ve been enjoying lately with Demon Engines are likely going to be a short-term boon. (Re-rolling 1s on a 4+ BS is just about as good as a 3+ BS)

This also means the usefulness of units like Predators, Demon Engines, Land Raiders, (non-Core) units, is going to mainly depend on what support we get from either Stratagems and/or Psychic Powers.

Unit Changes

Before we get into the structure of the army rules it’s important to remember that Thousand Sons share a lot of overlap with other Chaos Space Marine armies. That means the structure has always been that the core rules/points for many units are not even defined in the Thousand Sons codex. Units like Helbruts, Predators, Vindicators, Land Raiders - all get their rules from Codex: CSM and are simply copied over as eligible units in a Thousand Sons detachment.

Units like Havocs and Terminators may give us some hits towards any weapon/profile changes that might come along with the new codex.
One thing is for certain - we know Rubric Marines and Terminators are gaining an extra wound (and go up in cost), which will go a long ways toward improving the army’s survivability.

Legion Trait

One thing GW realized early in 8th edition was that Grey Knights and Thousand Sons needed more to put them on par with the other armies. That’s why they gave the army a boon where they could cast smite without paying the increasing cost. This made Thousand Sons particularly dangerous to armies vulnerable to heavy doses of mortal wounds. It’s also been clarified that the new rules introduced in Psychic Awakening were intended to replace this stop-gap.

On the other hand, just having an extra 6” to your range isn’t enough to stand toe-toe with the other armies, essentially meaning that there should be a respectable update coming for the Thousand Sons legion trait. Where I see opportunity here is to expand on the Cults introduced in Psychic Awakening and offer a wide-range of sub-Legion traits, like many other codexes have, which are in addition to the extra 6” range to powers.

Psychic Powers

Its reasonable to assume that there may be some small tweaks here/there but major overhauls to any psychic powers are unlikely to be seen. While theres plenty of useful powers, none are strong enough to make bad units good.

Therein lies the problem - Thousand Sons, as an army, is riddled with mediocre units relative to the rest of the “meta”. While the Core units above are solid to good, there isn’t much else to splash into the army and make a good showing on the competitive tables.

Stratagems

This is where I think we’re going to see the biggest shakeup. Stratagems can make or break an army and with the new structure of paying Command Points for detachments, the true measure of an army’s effectiveness is going to be in the quality of it’s stratagems. There are plenty of good ones that exist today, but many of the Chaos Marine stratagems need to either be accessible or copied to the Thousand Sons codex. This would go the same for Death Guard as well.

Speaking of rotten tomatoes, its interesting that they’ve chosen to roll out Death Guard before Chaos Space Marines this go-around. It means we will only get a slight peek at whats in store for us. There will be a couple things to key in on:

  1. Do any additional units from CSM “port” over to Deathguard?
  2. Are there any significant profile adjustments to units like Land Raiders? Or do we remain stuck with the quad-lascannon variant?
  3. Do they give all of Chaos Space Marines a “Core” set of stratagems and then a set of bespoke ones that build upon them?

That third point is rather important and could end the issue where a sub-faction pays the price for a unit being good in another codex. To this point, in theory, anything that is “shared” would have the same core set of rules. After that you’d have bespoke sub-faction rules that build on them however, the point costs would always be balanced on the core set of rules and stratagems.

TLDR

The skinny of it is, there isn’t much reason to expect a real major shake up. Short of a “Death Guard”-like roll out of new models (units), we’re unlikely to see much changed for the army.

One final word, and I think this will be the x-factor, is what they decide to do with Demons. One thing that is really needed is god-specific faction souping (or better rules for it). They’ve been slowly adopting more and more of the Age of Sigmar rules to 40k. It’s likely time they decide to adopt the Summoning rules as well, which would introduce a whole new avenue for running Thousand Sons and Demons of Tzeentch together.