An introduction to the Blood Dragons

Whenever you go to RT's, clubs, or whatever to play a pickup game, one of the first questions a stranger might ask is what army you play. Unfortunately, I have to swallow a bit of pride and say "Blood Angels." I write this because Blood Angels players in general have it pretty bad with negative prejudice these days. The new BA codex is viewed by many as being cheesy and overpowered. I'll be the first one to admit, the codex is probably a little bit too good. But my "Blood Angels" army isn't your typical Blood Angels army, and I can proudly say that I jumped on the BA bandwagon before the "cheesy" new codex was released.

The reason I consider my army to be unique for a BA force is not because I made my own chapter that looks very similar to Flesh Tearers, but rather the unit composition.

No Jumppacks, no razorbacks or rhinos, no special characters. So what could I possibly be playing that is able to win a good amount of games?

Lots of bodies is the idea. 4x footslogging 10 man tactical marine squads is the core of my army, which I field in 1500+ pt games. They need to be footslogging to keep the points down. Sure, Blood Angels tac marines might not be the best troops choice around, but few armies can contend with that much power armor. On top of that, I've got a devastator squad with 4 lascannons, 2 baal predators and 2 vindicators. I'll go into more detail about each unit in seperate blog posts, and how they have synergy with the rest of the army.

Hobby wise, my Blood Dragons are loosely based off of a faction from the PC game Freelancer which was released in 2003. Freelancer is my favorite PC game of all time and I still play it to this day. Some of the motifs of the army include samurai themed (eldar) banners with the faction emblems from the game on the sergeants and captain. I wanted these guys to have a gritty feel compared to my other clean armies, so I did my best to paint an abundance of battle damage and weathering. I am happy with how this army has turned out, both visually and performance-wise on the tabletop.

My next few posts will be about individual unit tactics and how they fit into the "idea" behind this army. Perhaps I will be able to get in a few battle reports aswell.