Grey Knights came out and I jizzed in my pants

So soon it seems we shall be seeing hordes of supposedly rare silver-clad space marines clanking across gaming tables in all our respective gaming stores. The juicy morsels in the codex, courtesy of Mat Ward, will no doubt bring a great number of gaming crypt ghouls (band wagoners) out of the woodwork, hungry for a snack on the latest unsuspecting army.

Grey Knights looks like its either going to be the perfect Codex to represent the face-punching monks of doom, or it'll be so close that you won't have the heart to complain. Whether or not your local gaming guru gives them the green light or stamps them with the 'NOT VIABLE FOR COMPETITIVE PLAY - DESTROY IMMEDIATELY!!!!11' seal of damnation remains to be seen. There's still a possibility that they'll be ridiculously over powered.

The funny thing is that if the majority of GK players are like me, they won't have really been wishing for a codex thats totally over the top. Amongst the convoluted twisting corridors of the Internet, there was a player known as Silent Requiem who said what of GK players already believed in some sense. GK, as they stood, were not particularly powerful but they were very tactical. Certain enemy builds were impossible to beat for GK but many were beatable when armed with a Nemesis Force Weapon, a fresh bribe to the dice gods and an absolute fucking bucket load of finesse.

Give it up, Grandpa. I got a game to win.

This was achieved mainly through clever useage of Grey Knights being tiny squads (hideable), having storm bolters (which freed them up from the restrictions you get from having rapid fire weapons) and the fact that Nemesis Force Weapons, while not that great, at least gave even the most humble trooper a chance of killing most things out there. This meant that as long as you maneuvered right and managed to put a pill or two in a few choice targets, the game was winable. You might only end up scratching the enemy army, rather than doing any significant damage to it, but if at the end your few remaining grey knights were sitting on the objective and somehow the other guy's falcon grav tank wasn't, it was still a win. Another thing was that their fearlessness meant that you always knew exactly how your Grey Knights would react to any application of enemy force (i.e. not give a shit).  Losing fearlessness in place of ATSKNF seems retarded to me since if any humanoid being in the galaxy can claim to completely lack fear, its got to be Grey Knights, right?

In essence, all GK really needed/expected/prayed for was some kind of decent anti-tank solution, possibly a points reduction and maybe a slight initiative increase to help give them a chance when facing hordes of enemy power armour (damn those traitorous Ultramarines! We all knew they were too squeaky clean to be trusted!). Now however it looks like GW is going to give them the full works. You'll probably be able to match an IG army for melta spam in some way, we're getting a big monstrous thingy in the form of the dreadknight (cool, but why??) and in addition there's going to things like Eternal Warrior and 2+ invulnerable saves going around.

Don't get me wrong, this is all nice and heaven knows if someone deserved a strong codex, it was GK, but it just seems ironic that the GK veterans, while loving the look of horror on their long time Nemesis' faces, will probably find 95% of the tactical genius they'd built up playing GK flushed down the toilet due to it being totally unecessary now. Of course there'll be other tactics now but it'll be a totally different ball game and I bet some people will actually wonder whether they had more fun with or without the huge slab of Stilton wedged into their codex.