Monday, March 14, 2016

Cypher

This guy is straight up one of my favorite characters in the setting.
Not only do zero people actually know who he is, he is constantly giving the Dark Angels the middle finger, and he's on some mysterious quest involving a sword that no body recognizes.
His statline is pretty sweet too, and even matches his fluff!
For those of you who don't know, Cypher has his own dataslate which gives all his stats and wargear, as well as the means to field him: either as a slotless HQ for any human faction (Chaos or Loyalist, Guard or Marine). Except the Dark Angels, or as part of his own formation where he grabs up to three units of Chaos Chosen to represent some of The Fallen he has gathered.
He has an extended range bolt pistol, and a plasma pistol which lacks the 'gets hot!' rule and even comes with BS10 and a nifty rule that lets him shoot each gun twice in The same shooting round.
He has infiltrate, eternal warrior, ATSKNF, hit and run, and his sword (which is not a melee weapon) gives him shrouded.
Instead of the sword strapped to his back, Cypher instead prefers to use his pistols in close combat: half of his three attacks (four because of two pistols) are at the same profile of a bolt pistol, and the remainder as a plasma pistol... At I8, WS7 with another fun rule that lets him overwatch at full ballistic skill, which again, is 10 for the effect full on twin-linked at BS5 goodness. One does not simply mess with the Lord of The Fallen when he has a decent chance to drop 3 terminators before they can even blink
Now then, I've used Cypher in a number of games, each time he acts like a massive thorn in my opponent's side all game long.
In my last game, against Space Wolves (he had 2 units of thunderwolf cavalry), Cypher and his lone unit of 6 Chosen (who all had a melta gun), infiltrated and gunned down half a unit of thunder cav (3 of them) in the first wave of shooting, taking down another when charged on the next turn, but in return losing all but Cypher and one Chosen. Hit and Run helped me here, and on my next turn, all the stormshield saves were made. It wasn't until my opponent's turn 3 where he charged Cypher again with his now lonely thunder cav rider, and lost it in overwatch, which freed me to shoot up his terminators that dropped down next to Cypher just that turn. 3 termie deaths later, and in turn 4, I make the bone headed mistake of charging into the terminators with Cypher, thinking ill be able to hit better than I did, and ended up losing him.
Anyway, moral of the story: Cypher can be a massive pain in the butt for anyone hoping to get a unit of heavy infantry into the frey. Cypher simply won't allow it, and is rather cost effective for everything he does and allows, he's a great distraction unit that packs a very big punch.
On another note, when building my Cypher model, I chose to go the route of him being lost in The Warp for a bit, so upon exiting he grew a pair of feathered wings.
The wings on the model are from the Blood Angels Sanguinor kit, the sword and backpack are off the Lord from the Dark Vengeance set. Bolt pistol is from the Chaos Raptors kit, and the body, head, plasma pistol and pauldrons are all from the Dark Angels Veteran kit. Very fun project that has been worth every penny.
So gawk and enjoy my friends.

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