The Ghost With the Most!

With the recent release of the Ghost Infiltration Platoon, Steff’s been hard at work on an Imperial Japanese force. We’ve already seen her Onryō, and now it’s surrounded by a truly lethal cadre of the Emperor’s favourites. Take it away, Steff!

The new Ghost platoon came out a few weeks ago, giving Japanese players new ways to play the army, with teleporting troops out the wazoo. It’s a platoon that gives you a lot of powerful toys to play with, and I’ve decided to lean into that and build something that I can take to tournaments. This is my first attempt at a competitive list, so I’ll need to read every rule properly to see how the army rules synergise and think about list building from a different angle than my usual ‘is this cool and thematic?’.

The List

I needed one Ghost Infiltration Platoon Commander, two Ghost Attack Squads, and an Onryō as my mandatory choices. The officer gets a point of Guts, which can really swing a turn with a reactivation. This would be given to the nearest Ghost or Shadow Warrior unit as soon as they were in a good position to hit two targets. He also gets a combat blade for a bit of close quarters punch, as well as an SMG to keep his cost down.

The two Ghost Attack Squads are five-man barebones affairs, except for the (in my opinion mandatory) combat blades and anti-tank launchers. My idea here is to either get into cover and benefit from the 2+ cover save, while shooting a potential ten shots at Pen +1, or teleporting into the rear arc of a high-value vehicle and hitting it with the launchers.

The Onryō was already built with the twin Shiboru cannon, which is a beast of a gun, and it’s highly mobile, so it can get into rear arcs if I need to make sure of a kill on a vehicle.

There were a lot of options for what to add once I got past the basics, but I had a clear vision of what I currently didn’t have in the list: assault units!

In went 2×8 Shadow Warriors with no upgrades. These guys are really mobile, hit hard and have a ton of attacks, so I felt this was an important element to add in. Two squads of eight means I can hit two targets a turn rather than just one, so I opted for this configuration rather than a single full-strength squad. Also, more Order and Rift dice means more bag control and a better chance of a Surging result.

I finished the Ghost Infiltration Platoon off with Kimura Tadaaki. He’s mobile, so matches the rest of the army, and can apply some hefty morale penalties (and remove Fearless!) with his Shadow tokens. This ties in nicely with the rest of the army, softening up enemy units for the Ghosts and Shadow Warriors to finish off.

I was left with a bunch of points to fill to get to 1,750 (the standard size played in our HQ Store tournaments), so I opted for an Engineer Platoon. Two squads of six infantry, each with a flamethrower, plus two independent flamethrower teams (I used the German Veteran plastics for the flamethrowers) gives me a powerful combination for taking out enemy units who’ve already been hit by Tadaaki’s Shadows. Good luck making all those morale checks! I finished the platoon off with a pair of trucks to ensure I can get my short-ranged flamethrowers into action as soon as possible.

The Gameplan

My overall plan is to concentrate fire, hit key targets before they can act, and either destroy them or cripple the unit with Pins to freeze them in place.

Tadaaki will follow one of the Shadow Warrior squads, along with a truck full of flamethrowers, and focus fire on a unit at a time.  The Platoon Commander and Ghost officer will follow the other Shadow Warrior unit in a truck and do the same, spending their Guts aggressively to get some critical early game damage in.

The Onryō will go off tank-hunting with the Ghosts until there’s no more enemy armour, and then pivot to chip in some anti-infantry firepower while the Ghosts secure objectives and provide extra support.

Like all plans, this might not survive an encounter with a determined opponent, but I feel like this is a strong list that should have a good chance on the tabletop. It feels decently thematic, but it’s also focussed on what it’s doing, and it’s not ‘carrying’ any units that don’t have a definite battlefield purpose.

Now I just need to get it out on the table for some no-holds-barred action. I hear Marcus has been working on a very nasty British Commonwealth force…