These are all pretty good! Sentinel of the Veil has real legs and can be a great secondary warlord trait on a smash Chaplain or something similar.
Finally, Sentinel of the Veil gives your Warlord a 6″ Heroic Intervention move, plus the ability to always fight first in the Fight phase.
Tribal Heritage gives your Warlord a free re-roll once per battle plus the ability to use Epic Deed stratagems on your Warlord for 0 CP once per game.
Bloodied but Unbroken gives your Warlord +1 Attack, plus an extra Attack if he has fewer than his full starting number of wounds left. There are three traits for Emperor’s Spears, in line with the other secondary Chapters like the Crimson Fists and Flesh Tearers. First, though, let’s talk about what makes them unique. In particular, the melee-oriented Emperor’s Spears get a surprising amount out of being Ultramarines – as we’ll see later.
This isn’t a surprise – Spear of the Emperor tells us who their parent Chapter is, and the Codex Supplements are pretty clear that in that case you should stick to using that one – and is more than fine, as the Ultramarines have very powerful rules and relics. It now combines the Whirlwind of Rage and Hungry for Battle Successor Chapter Tactics, giving them roughly the same feel as before (unmodified hit rolls of a 6 cause an additional hit on a turn when an Emperor’s Spears unit charges, is charged, or intervenes), plus a little extra power from getting +1 to Advance and Charge rolls.Īdditionally, the Emperor’s Spears are called out here as explicitly being an Ultramarines Successor and as such use the rules from Codex: Ultramarines. In these new rules, the Chapter Tactic returns, but modified. Their first rules showed up as a pack-in for the special edition release of Spear of the Emperor in 2019, a custom chapter tactic released a few months before the second 8th edition Space Marine Codex called Redden the Earth, which gave them the ability to score 2 hits in melee each time they rolled an unmodified 6 to hit. This is actually the second time the Emperor’s Spears have gotten rules for those of you keeping track at home. The rules for Emperor’s Spears give us a new Chapter Tactic (well, kind of), three new Warlord Traits, two stratagems, and three relics. While we’ll be digging into full detail on these rules in a special future Start Competing article, it was worth going over what rules the Emperor’s Spears have today and the impact we think they’ll have on the competitive scene. Specifically, they’re introducing rules for a third Space Marines chapter this year, giving us updated rules for the Emperor’s Spears, a chapter of Ultramarines successors made famous in the Aaron Dembski-Bowden book Spear of the Emperor (it’s a great read, and worth checking out if you haven’t already). White Dwarf 460 hits the streets today and in a similar vein to other recent White Dwarf releases, it’s got new rules for 40k Matched Play.