Store Event: Hero Arena

Last night I checked the local GW store facebook page and they have put out an even in 2 weeks (Jan 19) called Hero Arena.  The event is as such: Participants bring a  single model, no named characters, with keywords INFANTRY and CHARACTER and roll on the custom character charts found in Chapter Approved 2018 (pg14-16) to create mighty arena champions and engage in a grimdark version of Super Smash Bros.

Having night to sleep on it, and pretty much all of my walk with my dog this morning, I have come up with a few ideas on how to proceed. Initial thoughts:

1) Needs a good Invuln save and/or save after save.  This is pretty straight forward.  Most weapons on characters practically ignore most if not all armor with -3 AP being a common range/melee attribute.  This pretty much means I need to have a 4++ minimum, preferably a 3++ and I can probably forget about regular armor saves unless we are talking about a natural 2+ (terminator armor, artificer armor) and I can find some cover to hide in.

2) Toughness and Wounds.  Probably need a T4 5W+ model to be bare minimum, unless I can offset lower numbers with another advantages such as extreme mobility, ability to fallback and charge...that kinda thing.

3) Psychic Phase.  Being able to actually have a psychic phase is probably a good option.  Being able to cast Smite and or potentially Deny the Witch can help cause or deny mortal wounds, which will most likely be a big part of this event.

4) Dealing and Dealing With Mortal Wounds.  Pretty much the elephant in the room.

5) Imposing negative modifiers.  -1's to hit or to wound are going to be huge.

With all those ideas bouncing around in my head I also had to limit my champion selection to models I already own.  This means Eldar, Dark Eldar or various Space Marine chapters. I'm going with non of the above. I choose the Culexus Assasin I picked up 2 months ago on a whim. Here is why.

Standard Assassin Profile

M7" WS2+ BS2+ S4 T4 5W 4A Ld9 Sv6+/4++

Weapons:

Hands....yup that's right, he is too manly for silly toys.  Why use a sword when you can just punch people in the face and ignore all armor saves naturally thanks to Life Drain ability.

Animus Speculum

18" S5 AP-4 D1 Assault3 (becomes D6 is any psykers are within 18")

Psyk-out grenades. Kinda garbage, D3 hits S2 AP0 D1 that cause Mortal Wounds on to hit rolls of 6+ to enemy psykers.  Can be thrown in the same turn they use their spooky monocle though.

Here are the kickers though.

Special Rules

Abomination: This model cannot be targeted or affected by psychic abilities and enemy psykers within 18" suffer -2 on Psychic AND Deny the Witch tests. That means he is immune to Smite, any other mortal wound spam spells and he can ignore the effects to Null Zone if some can actually cast it with that -2 hanging over their head.

Etherium: All enemy attacks targeting the Culexis are treated as WS6+.  Considering everybody is going to have characters that are WS/BS2+ (minimum 3+) this might be the best defensive ability in the game for this kind of scenario.

I have no clue how the upgrade charts are going to work but I'll address this in a follow up post with the results of the day after the actual event.