500 Points, Salamanders, and a Very Weird Death Guard List
We had one of those very hobby-group moments this week: a quick invitation to a league game, a suspicious-looking 500-point list on the other side of the table, and immediate list-chat in the comments.
end3r dropped a note that on Monday at 17:00 he’d be playing a Colosseum league game with Salamanders into Death Guard, and if anyone had time, they were welcome to come by and watch. Naturally, that immediately turned into discussion about the opponent’s list.
According to Michał, it was, and we quote, “a weird list.” Which, honestly, is exactly the kind of sentence that gets us interested in a 500-point game even more. Small games already tend to magnify every odd choice, every missing tool, and every unit that maybe looked better on paper than on the table.
end3r, of course, took that in stride and joked that maybe the guy just didn’t know what he was doing. We’ve all been there — either saying it, or being the person it was said about after trying to squeeze one more “clever” unit into a tiny list.
What we liked most in this little exchange was that it immediately turned into the next natural question: do you already have your own 500-point roster prepared? Michał did, and promised to share it once he got home. That’s the kind of energy we really enjoy around league play: not just showing up for games, but comparing approaches, trimming lists, and trying to figure out what actually works when every point matters.
At 500 points, army-building gets brutally honest. You can’t hide weak choices behind redundancy, and you usually can’t afford all the utility pieces you’d like. Every list starts to show its character very clearly. That’s especially true in Warhammer 40,000, where some factions feel very “themselves” even in tiny formats, while others can end up feeling awkward if the list doesn’t quite click.
That reminded us of end3r’s earlier write-up from the first Salamanders league game, which is still a very fun read and captures that exact feeling of a compact army still playing to its identity:
And honestly, we agree with end3r’s own reaction to it: it reads really well. The quoted bit says a lot in just a few words:
This is one of those games where the army identity feels very real. Salamanders in small points still do Salamanders things: get close, threaten automatic hits, punish movement, and make melta count.
That’s exactly why these small formats are so interesting for army-building. A 500-point roster isn’t just a smaller version of a full army — it’s more like a stress test for what your faction is actually trying to do.
In the middle of all that, we also had a completely different kind of hobby-side message from pegie: a stack of Sapkowski books to give away for anyone interested. Very off-topic, yes, but also very on-brand for a friend group where tabletop, fantasy books, and random “does anyone want this?” offers all live happily in the same chat.
Apparently there was quite a lot of it, all from SuperNOWA, so maybe someone managed to fill a gap on their shelf while the rest of us were busy thinking about flamer ranges and plague-ridden list construction.
So that was our little snapshot of the week: league prep, list skepticism, 500-point theorycrafting, and fantasy books on the side. Pretty much the perfect mix.
Now we’re curious what Michał’s 500-point roster looks like — and whether that “weird” Death Guard list turns out to be actually bad, secretly brilliant, or just the kind of thing that only makes sense after it has already beaten you.