1000pts Vampire Noob

[Acrux]

Heya guys,
I've been thinking about starting up a small Vampire Counts army to play against a friend of mine who as been getting back into warhammer. I've been playing mostly 40k these days. I have Empire and Skaven armies but I felt like trying something different this time. I just picked up the army book. I don't have any models yet, wanted to get a decent list written up so I have an idea of what to get.

So here's what I've come up with, just a small army, only 1000pts.

Vampire
tomb blade
the flayed hauberk
red fury

Vampire
black periapt
lord of the dead
avatar of death (hw sheild)

20 Skeleton Warriors
FC, war banner

20 Skeleton Warriors
FC

5 Dire Wolves
5 Dire Wolves

10 Grave Guard
FC, Royal Standard of Strigos


This comes out to 1000 pts even. The two vampires will hide out in the two skeleton units. The two wolf units will guard flanks and hunt for war machines/shooty units. The Grave Guard will try to pick up flank charges for the skeleton units.

Originally I was going to go with a Necromancer on a Corpse Cart instead of the second Vampire. I like the model but I was a bit skeptical as to how well it works on the table.

I really like the Grave Guard models but my other thought was possibly replacing them with either 2 small Crypt Ghoul units, a small spirit host unit, or a Varghulf.

Tell me what you guys think. I'm open to any suggestions.

Thanks in advance,
Acrux

 

[Ergo-Sum]

Hi, welcome to the site.

I'd generally say that a pretty good first list, I'd only make a few changes.

On your first vampire, I'm not that keen on tomb blade. It only works when your skeletons are below their starting strengh, which shouldn't be all that often with your lord of the dead vampire. I'm also not keen on red fury on a 3 attack non-hatred model. It's not likely to generate enough extra kills when you're missing ,at best, one third of the time. I would go for either sword of might or battle, combined with infinite hatred and walking death.

I also think your grave guard are a bit small. I'd drop the champion (not really need if there are no heros in there) and one of the wolf units to get them up to 14, then run then 7x2. 10 grave guard can be killed a bit too easily if another hammer unit like dragon princes or chaos knights charges them due to the crumble. Even 6 black knights with Strigos stand a fair chance of crumbling 10 grave guard.

Everything else looks good!

Anyway, just a few ideas for you to consider

 

[Acrux]

Thanks for the input ergo
I reworked the first vampire for infinite hatred and walking death. That does look better now that I think about it. I opted for the sword of battle over might as my primary opponent will be playing dark elves. The extra attack seemed more worth while. Being mostly t3, outside of the slightly better armor save modifier, s6 isn't any better than s5. Dropping the one unit of wolves and the champion for the grave guard allowed me to run 15 of them instead of 10.

Now I just gotta go pick up some models and see how it goes

Acrux