Hey everyone! My name’s Connor, or as I often go by online, “Spannaway”. I genuinely believe Hunter Clade is one of the most effective kill team choices, especially after the December 2023 data slate. They excel at elite hunting, and can trade effectively into midrange and horde teams.  In order to give myself a sense of legitimacy, and a basis as for why you should listen to me, I am (as of August 9th,, 2024) the third highest ranked Hunter Clade player worldwide, and highest in the US per BCP rankings. I have also played Hunter Clade since their initial release, and likely have 200+ games on the team, and consistently place in the upper quarter of players at Killteam Cascadia events (Go KTC) with my most recent accomplishment being 8th overall at the Tacoma Open (I also literally live the “flesh is weak” thing, as a Type-1 Diabetic since my fifth birthday, I have slowly been replacing my decaying form with biomechanics). The main reason for this guide is to try and ease the transition of understanding how to build Hunter Clade, both at a single box of Skitarii and Sicarians level, as well as what I’d recommend for a full 20 operative roster.

You'll see me type out 5/5 or 7/4, and these operatives represent the amount of Skitarii and Sicarians you should bring, respectively. For all the times I say 5 Skitarii, I mean bring a Leader, with the loadout as discussed above, though again feel free to experiment with their weapon options. Beyond this, the other four operatives are a Plasma and Arc gunner, a Diktak, and a Surveyor. When I say 7, I mean the previous 5 operatives, as well as 2 basic Shocktroopers, as well as with the Enriched Rounds Equipment. Bringing the rad carbine to 3 / 4 rending makes a significant difference; two normal hits going through now wounds all 8-10 models, and can half health 12 wound marines. Furthermore, a crit + hit now kills a standard guardsman profile, meaning that if they save well enough, they can't block one of your crits to stay alive at 1 wound. For all these cases, I recommend utilizing Vanguard Skitarii, as discussed earlier, I find far more success with my radiation soaked boys.

Okay! Here we go:

In this case, I recommend 5 Ruststalkers, each equipped with the Transonic Blades. Naturally, take Optimized Gait whenever you bring a ruststalker as well. The equipment allows you to traverse the map far more effectively, and keep your charge threat range at a solid 9" in most cases. The reason for the Transonic Blades in this matchup is the chapter tactic of Durable, which once per shooting or melee attack, reduces a crit's damage by 1. In most cases, ruststalkers require three hits from an assault intercessor to die. With this in mind, the Transonic Razor will not be enough to kill an intercessor, as two crits and a hit would only be 13 damage (4 damage from reduced crit, 5 from second, and 4 from a normal hit), assuming you roll well enough to naturally get two crits as well. Compared to the damage of the blades, which also can also help secure the kill through rending, you reach that 14 wound breakpoint easier (5 damage from reduced crit, 6 damage from the second, and 4 damage from the hit). In all these cases, this is assuming you're the attacker, and that your opponent does not parry to survive. And even if they do parry, in Turning Point 2 when most of your charging and fighting will be taking place, I'd highly recommend doing so with Accelerant Agents active. This means you all but guarantee the kill, so long as the dice gods/Omnissiah do not forsake you, so make sure to pray to them. Furthermore, I especially say use Accelerant Agents on the modes Loot and Secure, where if you do kill them in the first round of combat, you can do the mission action immediately afterwards to force your opponents hand. Combine this with Conqueror Imperative for the free reroll in melee, and you're golden.

While still the same layout of the 5/5 split, in this case I'd recommend going the Transonic Razor and Choordclaw layout. The main reason being that these marines are at lower health breakpoints, and often have more utility in melee combat. Particularly, the shrive talon, anointed, and Grisly Trophy Equipment all have ways of getting around your dice. So in this case, you want to make sure you hit as many dice as possible, as it still will take 3 hits, regardless of crit status to take these baddies down. Again, mix in on turn 2 with conqueror imperative and Accelerant Agents to really put the hurt in. This one is a bit more contentious, as Mutagenic Flesh on Nurgle operatives makes it harder to get the kill in when our base damage drops from 4 to 3. However, I still find the rerolls useful due to the dice manipulation, and trying to guarantee 12 damage through  when most of their melee operatives have very reliable ways to score crits has left me in multiple situations where no damage goes through. Ideally, the goal of rusties in this match up is to slow down their operatives while our ranged units can fire them down (or ideally even beforehand) as well as just put damage into them. In most cases with their melee operatives, a rustie is going to die, so the goal for the rerolls is to put either 8 (crit + reduced hit) or 6 (2 reduced hits) damage into them, a much easier breakpoint for all our ranged weapons to deal with. It is also woth noting that in situations where they do not have the nurgle ploy, the 4/5 balanced approach becomes even stronger, because again it allows you to likely hit with 4 or 5 of your dice, making it an incredibly reliable weapon with dealing with the enemy, especially when they are not a melee specialist (Gunner, Icon Bearer, etc)  

While the same breakpoint of Legionaries, the Phobos have significantly less utility tools regarding melee combat, so I'd recommend just going Blades, to fish for that crit with Conqueror Imperative or a CP reroll to ensure you get the kill while taking as little damage as possible. Even if dice fail you, Phobos have less durable pools as well through strats compared to Nurgle Legos, and our Skitarii can finish them off. 

This is the single marine matchup where I'd drop the 5th sicarian. Nemesis Claw' equipment of the Flayed Skin and Grisly Trophy as well as their rending chain swords just extremely drops the effectiveness of our rusties, no matter the profile. Mix that in with the abilities of the skin thief, screecher, and visionary, and you can start to understand my reasoning. Overall, I'd always make sure to bring at least one infiltrator, as on open, you can use them before your gunners activations to get them within 6" to cancel In Midnight Clad. Then next activation, pop up a gunner on vantage and blow that marine away. Boom you've killed an enemy on TP1, always a good thing to do. Mix that in a second time with the other gunner and you've practically secured the victory. Overall, this is a matchup where I'd focus on ranged shooting and scoring in order to overpower them. 

Before hand, I thought this a pretty simple match up for us. 9 Bodies with relatively less mobility then elves was a simple match up. However, with the addition of the 10th scout and more and more people dropping the gunners this team has seen some significant power increases. I think that in order to fight them, you want a 2/2 split of sicarians, as they do occasionally have some rerolls thats good to cancel out if they use. Plus the power sword is a good way to guarantee a kill on the infiltrators. For rusties, you want 4/6 rending in my opinion, as with their power sword damage knives (GW What the hell) and the tac ploy to make a hit a crit, they can kill you if you only have hits. As such, you gotta gamble on the crit to make sure you can take them out before they finish you off. This right now is one of our toughest matchups, as 10 wounds with a 4+ save is an awkward profile for us, and mix in the shotguns and you can see the level of difficulty. Most of the time they want to reach our spawn zone, so look to play defensively and try and take them out from range before pushing up TP3/4. 

In these matchups, I'd recommend 4 Ruststalkers, all Razors and Choordclaws. The utility of the no reroll ploy from the Infiltrator's does not matter as much, as elves also hit on threes. So just having 4 pieces that can often 1 for 2 the elves is useful, with the extra reroll from balanced helping to make sure you get the hits you need kill the enemy while only taking one hit back when you're the attacker, as well as giving chances for you to parry out of combat into a kill when on defense. Us being at 10 wounds compared to their 8 puts us at a slight advantage, often able to take one more hit of damage. 

Still very similar to the plan for other elves, except you're going to want the 4/6 rending profile. The main reason being with how much damage the HOTA operatives can push through, you definitely need to risk the Rending crit in order to take them out. Their 6+ FNP on 8 wounds means on average they have a health pool of 9.2 wounds, which can and (at least against me) often spikes. Hence, the rending pool to a potential of 12 damage unless they parry (something they're not likely to do unless you only have two successful dice) means that it is extremely rare for them to FNP through that damage. In this match up (and all elf matchups for that matter), try and set up shots for the enriched radium carbines, they do great work at putting these pesky guys down. 

For these teams, I'd recommend a split of 2 Infiltrators, and 2 Ruststalkers, each with Razor and Choordclaw. Due to the reliance of rerolls for (most of) these teams to secure their kills, the anti reroll strat from the Infiltrators is extremely effective (can outright shutdown Warpcoven Tzang's). While it feels nice to have 4 circles of these, I still believe you need the melee power of the ruststalkers. The choordclaw still helps to reroll and kill these models, especially Warpcoven sorcerers. Try and position your infiltrators aggressively, but in safe cover points you can watch to make them last as long as possible while ruststalkers move to clear key targets. Generally, Turn 2 and 3 you'll blow all your CP to ensure Accelerant Agents and Neurostatic Interference go off, though if dice behave, you'll likely wipe most of the opponent off the board so that you're okay to be broke by turn 4. Into Orks, Fellgore, and GPOX,, I highly recommend the Hunter Clade Specific Tac Op "Calculated Eradication". While these teams do solid damage, their higher wound count and worse save characteristics mean that it is easy for us to cause more damage, especially turn one if you're able to popcorn shoot, as well into fellgore/GPOX in which you can start entirely on engage orders. 

Into these opponents, I believe you want a pair of infiltrators and a pair of rusties (4/5 Balanced). The Infiltrator's power sword or taser goad is often all you need to kill most of these guys, and turning off their rerolls can give you significant sticking power as hitting on 4's means they miss half of their attacks, with no way to adjust that. As long as you're in cover, all but overcharged plasma and melta attacks will bounce off you. For Into the Dark, be aware of using the ability to double fight in the confined hallways of the Gallowdark allows for very good trades. One to especially look for is using the beloved play of a APL boosted ruststalker as well as accelerant agents to Normal Move into a doorway, open, Hatchway fight for free from the AA Ploy, and if a second target is there, fight again. If no such target is there, you can often dash backwards into cover, as this entire team you're on a conceal order. It's a nasty trick, and super effective for opening moves TP2/3. Specifically, for Brood Bros, it's often worth having a third infiltrator. I'm still getting more experience into the team, but turning off the crossfire characteristic means they're the weakest shooting of any of the guard teams. With their lack of specifically good melee, you can slaughter them in melee. Look for double charges with infiltrators to remove an enemy model while still protecting your sicairans in melee. If they bring a patriarch, be ready to do whatever you can to avoid that flank. Look to try and reduce their health pre melee with a plasma/arc shot (even 4 damage is solid chip on them). If ITD, just try and sacrifice that hallway; only brute force if they've got control of 2 or more objectives. The primus is spooky but relatively I think you can just have normal target priority on them. If they bring the Primus, you want to have a decent target priority on them. Look for a forward deploy with the infiltrator to threaten them on TP2. These guys are good, don't get me wrong, but they're still just guardsmen. They die quickly, while likely outscoring TP1/TP2. It's a balancing act of putting them in the ground before you run out of gas, but it's doable. 

You'll want all ruststalkers (4/5 Balanced), as the infiltrator forwarded deploy for all intents and purposes will never be useful as any experienced player will bring the Lokatr. Salvagers are a decent pain with their 3+ save and constant crits, but are still only 8 health. Even with the new damage reduction ability, the melee threat is not too worrying. 4 Attacks on 4+ is not statistically the best, so even if they are the attacker you can often parry out and kill them through weight of dice (or ideally you have a crit so the breakpoint is still 2 strikes to kill). Though of course, try and just out maneuver them due to the slowness of the team. Look to put a servo skull on your leader if needed, and set up for multiple double activation kills. As always, anytime you can remove their forward models to force them to come forward to contest points, that's a good advantage for us.

You'll want two pairs of each type of sicarian. As unideal it is, you'll need them to move forward onto those potential bombs (them or your basic skitarii shocktroopers) in order to clear the way for your gunners. Make extreme use of our healing ploy when fighting with rusties, as that is critical to getting them out of the 1 shot range for lots of their melee weapons. If on ITD, forward deploy one infiltrator on one flank, and use the other (with servo skull) on the other. Try to clear lanes as fast as possible so that ideally you can kill 5 by the start of TP3. That really ruins the Resourceful mechanic, as well as we can often just out maneuver in general. Tough survivalists will nearly always be on, so make sure to use enriched rounds on both the basic shocktroopers and the surveyor. Unless you see easy ways to use the ignore obscurity tool, just use the surveyor as a chip tool. Generally a hit and crit will be enough to make the enemy be forced to make the Yaegirs injured, and if dice spike for us, you can often outright kill in shooting. Their rocket guy is scary (Blast 3" is no joke to 40mm bases)) so pay attention to both where that model is located, and how many resource points they have. Put solid focus on the bombast too, that is one of the biggest target priorities for us as their shooting tears through skitarii. 

Alright! Onto deployment, some of the most important parts of Killteam. 

First, look for vantage points that overlook either light cover or objectives. If you see such a location, be ready to have a surveyor boost a gunner as discussed earlier, and take the shot as soon as you can make sure your gunner will be safe. This is especially brutal as a final action for the turning point, after your enemy has used all their operatives. Otherwise, perhaps combo your Diktat with your gunner through a Control Edict play for the ever dangerous popcorn shooting if you need to eliminate a model earlier in the turn.

In general, I recommend most of your operatives be placed on conceal, and gunners on engage behind heavy terrain, ideally near a piece they could climb onto vantage. One common strat I’d recommend, especially on short edge deployment, is save a recon dash for a ruststalker on engage. Mixed in with aggressor imperative, which you should use at the start of every game, you can threaten a 19” charge range, which can reach most objectives that don’t have significant terrain blocking your way. 

I often deploy ruststalkers on the flanks and in cover, where they can move + dash into the midboard, and threaten charges for turn 2. However, it’s worth considering keeping one or two near your leader throughout the turning point, and set up for a control edict combo on turn 2. This is especially powerful on loot, where ideally you have your leader in the middle of your forces, with a ruststalker 3” on his left and right. Combo Control edict with accelerant agents, and look for a charge + fight + loot play for both of the rusties, and you can outright win the game of that, especially into teams with less models than you. 

Beyond this, if you’re using the 7/4 split, utilize your two basic shocktroopers as action monkeys to either loot or secure points, and have your more specialized operatives move into locations where you have multiple opportunities for danger on turn 2, whether you win initiative or not. These examples include situations mentioned above, such as the double ruststalker charge, gunners behind vantage points, your leader in cover but near allies for the boost, as well as to take advantage of his powerful pistol as a counter punch, and shocktroopers on points, ready to either loot again, or charge forward and tie up targets with their injury aura. If you’re using infiltrators, be sure to have them ideally in the very front, so that when using their anti-reroll strat, it’ll force enemies to either stay far away from you, or move forward with less consistent damage.

And also make sure to use the Concealed Position tac ploy on loot! As I’ve said, its incredibly powerful and can outright win games. On ITD, remember it’s the 6” move + free door open, and you’re capable of using the Infiltrate scout option on them. Combo this with either an ally opening a door for them, or they themselves doing so with a servo skull, and you can often get a solid kill for free. Best case scenario, boost them with your diktat for a whole host of possible combinations, one such being as follows: Open door, charge, fight, secure point. This is especially brutal as a final activation to steal a point from your opponent, even more so if you charged two models and killed one, leaving another stuck in melee at the start of turn 2.

Roster Building! The bread and butter of Admech. In my opinion, this is the optimal roster for Hunter Clade when going to a mixed tournament, though as mentioned, feel free to experiment! 

Vanguard Alpha with Arc Pistol & Taser Goad

Vanguard Shocktrooper x2

Vanguard Gunner with Plasma Caliver

Vanguard Gunner with Arc Rifle

Vanguard Diktat

Vanguard Surveyor

Ruststalker with Transonic Blades x5

Ruststalker with Chordclaw and Transonic Razor x4

Infiltrator with Stubcarbine and Power Weapon x4

Unfortunately, getting to this level of operatives would require a full box of skitarii, and three boxes of sicarians, if you're truly going WYSIWYG. If you're okay with proxying ruststalkers, Hunter Clade can be built with a skitarii box and two sicarians. Just have one box maxed out as rusties, and the other as infiltrators. I would not recommend ever proxying infiltrators as ruststalkers, or vice versa, as they do very different jobs, and can be confusing to opponents to keep track of them if you're fielding both on the field at the same time.

If you've just got a single box of each, here's my recommendations for how to build the skitarii and sicarians respectively.

Skitarii Box:

Body 1: Skitarii Vanguard Alpha with your choice of weapons, though I'd recommend the Arc Pistol and Taser Goad

Body 2: Skitarii Diktat

Body 3: Skitarii Ranger Transuranic Arquebus Gunner. While you will likely never use this guy, it's a sick model and fun to build and paint! This is supposed to be a funny hobby after all!

Body 4: Skitarii Vanguard Gunner 1 (Plasma or Arc)

Body 5: Skitarii Vanguard Gunner 2 (Whichever gun you have yet to use). 

Note: For both the arc and plasma gunners, if you wish to experiment with ranger gunners, I'd suggest using head pieces 120, 123, and/or 124. These pieces will not have the helmets or hoods that are often used to identify vanguard and rangers respectively, and can be effectively used to help your opponent tell the difference between the two. So, if you do run all vanguard, just tell your opponent all my small base guys are the vanguard, and have the injury aura, or if running gunners as rangers, say all the helmeted guys are vanguard and non-helmets are not. 

Body 6: Basic Skitarii Vanguard Trooper

Body 7: Skitarii Surveyor. Unfortunately, a single box of Skitarii is meant to be built as having either a single diktat or surveyor (these models were originally made for 7th edition 40k, where you could only bring one or the other). As such, you'll have to source another torso and pair of legs, and in my opinion, this body combo gives the best pose for a guy doing a scanning action. Use pieces 69 and 70 to build the omnispex, and then you have a couple of choices here. If you want your surveyor to be a ranger, which has some merit as you can have him buff himself to become a pseudo third gunner, perfect, just use right arm piece 67 with the galvanic rifle and you're all set! If you are wanting to do a full vanguard skitarii force, you have a couple of options: If you want the gun to be shouldered, you’ll need to find another piece 66. Plenty of admech players will have spares if you know any in your local games store, or hell if you're in the KTC discord, DM me and odds are I can spare one. Otherwise, if you want to do some basic hobbying, take piece 62 or 26, which are used in bodies 2 and 6 if you don't give them the specializations, and cut away the hand on the front of the rifle. These work well enough as a neutral pose for your kitbashed surveyor! Congrats, you've built a unique skitarii, you truly are one with the Machine-God! :D

Body 8: Basic Skitarii Vanguard Trooper #2. Well done! You've got all 7 Skitarii you'll ever need, and a cool sniper one as well! 

Bodies 9 and 10: Build them as whatever you like, leave them on the sprue, or hey, send them to me, I'll always take more skitarii. If you want, make another Alpha with a different load out using these ones! They're purely just spare bodies at this point! 

Sicarian Box:  

In this case, I'd recommend building 2 of the sicarians as the infiltrators, and the other 3 as ruststalkers, utilizing whatever loadouts you prefer for the ruststalkers. As for the infiltrators, I'd build one as the sicarian infiltrator alpha. While you in all cases will likely not utilize the model as an alpha, it's a great looking model, and can serve to represent any infiltrator you equip with a servo skull.

There we go! Twelve pages (and probably some more by the time I finish writing this part) of me professing my love for the 100% not biased in any way best team in Killteam. I hope this guide has helped answer some questions as to what goes on with the Hunter Clade team, and what to look for when playing them.

If you have literally any questions about this team, please feel to reach out to me! I’m @Spannaway on pretty much everything; Discord, Twitter, Instagram and so on! I really hope you enjoyed reading this and thank you so much for doing so! Check out Vox Cascadia, the podcast I’m on, as well as Killteam Cascadia, the best event organization for Killteam. Feel free to join our server at https://discord.gg/killteamcascadia to see all our events and just be in the coolest discord server around. And thank you again to Zack and DisregardingDice for hosting this and all your hard work!