Blood Angels Reinforcements: Stormraven Gunship and Furioso Dreadnought
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The presence of the mighty spinning Stormraven can only really mean one thing: that it's now available to advance order. Not only that, but so is the Blood Angels Battleforce and the Furioso Dreadnought.
If you like pure, brutal combat with endless swathes of gore, then Blood Angels are the army for you. But don't be fooled by their unrelenting savagery - a swift and decisive assault can be just as tactically demanding as using a balanced force. The Blood Angels are the perfect army if you love to dominate the battlefield with heavy assault units, forcing your opponent to fight out of their comfort zone. They are relentless, destructive and more than prepared to get their hands dirty. Do you have what it takes to lead them?
With their love of flight and swift assaults, the Stormraven Gunship is the best way to get your Blood Angels into battle. You may not be able to tell from the picture but the Stormraven is a huge kit. With a mighty wingspan of almost ten inches and a nose-to-tail measurement of the same length, this vehicle will dominate the battlefield. The kit comes with all the weapon options available to the Stormraven, which means you have plenty of choice on how to kill your enemies. I would liken the Stormraven to a brick being thrown through a window with a note attached - it gets the message across with suitably excessive force.
Like the Stormraven, the Furioso Dreadnought is a plastic kit with plenty of options to choose from. There are three unique sarcophagi in the kit - Furioso, Death Company and Librarian, which allows you to choose the Dreadnought you want to build. It also includes all the weapon options for these Dreadnoughts too. The real appeal of the Furioso kit comes with it's rules. Equipped with Blood Talons it can potentially wipe out an entire unit in a single turn as every unsaved wound that it causes generates another Strength 6 attack that ignores armour saves and re-rolls to wound. It really is incredible.
We have sent a Black Box out to all our stores this week with both of these kits inside. They should be there by the weekend, so make sure you get into your local Hobby Centre to find out more about these awesome kits. Here are a couple of pictures of the sprues to whet your appetite:
The Stormraven comes on four sprues, with all of the parts numbered to aid you in the assembly process. I found the internal components and the doors particularly ingenious - they fit together with precision accuracy. The Furioso actually took longer to build because I couldn't decide which Dreadnought to make (it took almost an hour to make up my mind). Parts like the magna-grapple fit with such accuracy that you can put it on the Dreadnought without glue and it won't fall off, which means you can keep it as a separate component that you can add to the Dreadnought if you want to use it in your games.
So why are we so excited about these kits? What difference will they make to your army? Well, to help answer these questions, Simon Grant has written an article about Blood Angels armies, which can be found in the Astronomican. It includes three very different army lists based around these new kits, illustrating just how versatile Codex: Blood Angels can be. No other army out there has the ability to field 11 (yes, that's right - 11) Dreadnoughts in one force.
The difficult decision is which type of army to go for. Having two or three Stormravens in your army gives you massive tactical flexibility and almost total domination of the battlefield - the enemy can't go anywhere without you intercepting them or dropping a unit on them (or, heaven-forbid, a Dreadnought). Alternatively a massive block of three or four Dreadnoughts will terrify your opponent - they make for a very intimidating sight and you both know they will cause carnage in combat. The alternative is a couple of each: two Stormravens with a Dreadnought attached to each of them.
There are just so many options. I've always preferred an infantry based army to a mounted one, so the Dreadnoughts are tempting me more at the moment, but then maybe it's time for a change, maybe I should make an entirely airborne army. Oh the choices - I expect you're thinking the same thing right now too. When you've finished pondering and weighed up all the pros and cons, here are the kits available to advance order:
We plan to show a lot more of the Blood Angels over the next couple of weeks, plus plenty more besides! If you have a Blood Angels army then feel free to send us an email with a few pictures and some text about how you made them. To keep you busy until the new kits arrive, here are a few units that we would suggest adding to your existing Blood Angels army:
