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Sunday, December 1, 2013

Be'Lakor Review: Black Library adds a Character Over Night!

Full credit to Ana at Painting Mum for this awesome photo
TJ here to herald the return of Be'Lakor, the first Daemon Prince to the 40k universe! There is no better way to herald his return to the fluff and the rules than to do a review of the new Army List update for CSM and Daemons:
That's right, the big B is an HQ choice from either a detachment of Chaos Space Marines or Chaos Daemons. This gives you some flexibility if you are allying those armies on just where you want to put him, which is really nice! 

He is a flying monstrous creature with Mastery Level 3, which again, is very nice as most of us want ML3 Daemon Princes in either book.

He knows the entire discipline of Telepathy. That means guaranteed Terrify, Hallucination, Puppet Master ect. This can pair well with his rule Lord of Torment, in which he gains D3 warp charges enemy units failing morale tests. 

He lacks armor, but comes stock with a 4++ and shrouded, which is pretty sweet, but with a standard CSM Daemon Prince stat line, what is there to keep him alive after he fails a save vs S10 weapons?

Eternal Warrior, that's what! Bam! 

Addiitonally, he has the Blade of Shadows, which is pretty nice, giving him both flesh and armorbane, Mastercrafted, +1 S/ AP2.

He gets all of this and a crappy Warlord trait for just over what you would currently pay for a tooled out DP ... so the question is, is he worth it? Well, I can tell you I wouldn't take him as a Warlord just to do it, but I do think he has a place in either army. He can take that second HQ slot if you are running Flying Circus tzeentch princes next to Fate Weaver, otherwise, he will contend with your greater daemon slot (because you will always take Fatey in a FMC list). Beyond that, he would be an easy grab from the CSM allies, or could be a good HQ for a Fast attack based list, like a hound list.

For CSM, he offers up a prince that won't get grounded and die without having to take a Black Legion skull prince. He also adds those gauranteed telepathy powers to either list, which is great on a platform with wings and EW. He can also be allied from CSM with other armies due to the allies chart, so expect to see him popping up in my Necron lists. 

What does that mean for other allies? I don't know. Knowing you have the telepathy powers locked down may open up a few builds, who knows.

Now beyond all the rules, he has some great background and even a short story. Be'Lakor is a pretty cool character who is now identified as a "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" kind of rival to Abbadon and finally gives us a little more to chew on that the "pure supervillian evil" theme we normally get out of codex backgrounds for Chaos.

All for just $3.99 for the Ebook. 

I strongly recommend picking this up for allied armies and main armies for Chaos, it's cheap and good value.

So, what do you guys think of Big B? What do you guys think of the idea that characters can be inserted at any time into any codex? 

7 comments:

  1. Could you provide a link to said army list update?

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  2. Just go to the Black Library web site, you'll see it.

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  3. I'm in! I imagine my regular opponents will be seeing lots of this dummy!

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  4. Eternal warrior makes him a genuine Mephiston level threat!

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  5. For sure, I think he is really good because he has combat ability as well as buff/ debuff power. It's pretty legit.

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  6. I'm not sure that I agree about the good value comment - $4 for one character seems rather steep. Just imagine if this is popular how many other individual characters will follow, once you've had to buy 7-8 of them it won't seem so cheap anymore.

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    1. I would rather pay 4 dollars each than have a compendium come out once a year with a bunch of rules that I have no interest in. Or be tied to a white dwarf that is annoying to carry around.

      He has lots of fluff, provides a decent boost to both armies and this is the exact sort of thing we have been wanting for awhile. I am excited and hope this trend continues.

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