Imperial Guard Blob Squad in Effect!

Cvinton here and recently I’ve dove into the imperial guard blob and I’m in love. Seeing that many bodies on the board is just silly. I don’t yet think it’s competitive for tournaments just because it is so far off base for the meta, however I have no other reason than that to believe its not a tournament possibility so its totally possible that it might happen.For my list I run total foot guard. It’s an old school 3^rd edition style list except no lemans or basilisks this time around. It’s a throw back to when transports were little death boxes that might kill everyone inside when blown up, no saves or wounds, just dead.

The blob is usually 3 infantry squads with 3 power weapons, a commissar with a power weapon and 3 grenade launchers.I go with the launcher over melta to save points. Total points saved in my list if I switched out all the lanchers for melta is 45. I recently played a game where I was punished by a landraider being on the board but it was a freak occurrence that I didn’t have the weapons teams to handle it. Generally my list also sports 3 3x Lascannon heavy weapons squads and that is usually enough to pour the shots on to keep a landraider not shooting to full effect the whole game or dead quickly.
Opps- Bad rules usage. I blame The Judge, he told me I was wrong when I said "Ok, these two launchers in side and this one on rear" and he was like "OH NO! You resolve those as majority because I totally know what I'm talking about and am a infallible 40k genius rules lawyer superhero!" The Judge....pffff.


Power weapons are a must. You bury them so deep and being that they’re on sergeants you get a bunch of attacks. Combined with Straken and these guys are the teeth to your blob, really making them dangerous.The commissar is not an IC and so he can’t be picked out, either can your sergeants. They’ll need to kill off 27 guys before you start digging into power attacks and by then those power attacks have more than likely eaten up the enemy. Round one you should get 16 attacks as long as you play straken right (counter charge) and then they shouldn't be touched until at least round 3 giving you 12 more power attacks each round until you finally start having to put wounds on them. It’s a pretty sure thing that the enemy will have to weather 28 power attacks before it even hopes to cause wounds there.
Most assault units can’t take that kind of punishment. The meta’s heavy hitter’s are the hit hard, hit fast brand of assault. They want to run in there, beat up the target, break it and run it down. Talk to any assault player and they want combats to last one round or end the round with just one lone guy left to prevent getting hosed on their opponents turn. A power house death star unit needs to always be killing to get its points back or do its intended job. The blob just doesn't let this happen. It sucks that squad in and no matter how hard it fights it won’t have the stamina to outlast the blob.

I think if I wanted the blob to be effective for tournaments I’d up it in size. Right now I run 3 blobs of 31 men. It works for me because that is pretty fun and lets me be totally over aggressive with each and not care. If I was looking at a tournament, I’d play just one big blob to wrap up that fearless death star my pyskers can’t deal with because of the rise of chaplain popularity and spend the rest of my points as usual on vets in chimeras. I’d consider 4 or 5 infantry squads in one blob all with power weapons just to be a sort of mid field tar pit.

It’s basically 345 points for 5 infantry squads with a powered commissar and 5 powered sergeants. I’d utilize the platoon command squad with 4 melta in a chimera or 4 flamers in a vendetta to score objectives so I’m not including that cost in the total cost of the platoon since we’re just talking about blobs. >Now compare that cost to a lot of the other big bad units and you’ve got a deal when it comes to countering those units.

I know I’m really excited and really gung-ho about the blob but it does have its limitations. It’s only made of weak, unskilled bodies that die easily and Straken is a huge part to its ability to kill. Its main function is a massive tar pit, and the bigger it is, the better of a tar pit it is. Imperial guard really like to play the statistics game and the blob is a perfect example that if you roll enough dice, you’ll hit averages and a lot of these death star units out there really depend on either being on a hot streak or you not getting enough dice to hit averages. On paper, 50 guardsmen with 6 powered sergeants can almost always beat any 10 man elite unit…or at least tie it up for the whole game!

Post some thoughts on the blob. What have you done that worked? What failed? What have you seen done? Seen fail?