How to Play Death Guard in Warhammer 40,000 11th Edition

Nurgle's Gift is an aura on every Death Guard model. If your Army Faction is DEATH GUARD, then while an enemy unit is within Contagion Range of one or more of your models, that unit is Afflicted.

Being Afflicted does two things at once. First, subtract 1 from the Toughness of every model in that unit, for the rest of the battle while it stays Afflicted. Second, that unit also suffers the effect of one Plague, which you select once during the Declare Battle Formations step and cannot normally change afterwards:

• Skullsquirm Blight. Faction Pack v1.2 rewrote this one into two clauses: each time a model in the Afflicted unit makes a ranged attack, enemy units have the Benefit of Cover against it; and each time it makes a melee attack, subtract 1 from the Hit roll. The ranged clause is new in v1.2 and older community write-ups do not have it.
• Rattlejoint Ague. Worsen the Save characteristic of models in that unit by 1.
• Scabrous Soulrot. Worsen Move, Leadership and Objective Control by 1, to a minimum Objective Control of 1.

And then there is the clock. Contagion Range is 3 inches in battle round one, 6 inches in battle round two, and 9 inches from battle round three onwards, and Faction Pack v1.2 adds that it cannot exceed 12 inches after modifiers. That cap is the reason several Death Guard rules stop being worth stacking: Plaguesurge, Blooming Pestilence, Reverberant Rancidity and Hypervirulent Strains all add 3 inches, and they all run into the same ceiling.

Two corrections worth making, because both are widely repeated. Disgustingly Resilient is not the army rule. It is a 2CP stratagem inside the Virulent Vectorium detachment, and it subtracts 1 from the Damage characteristic of attacks allocated to one unit for a phase. Your durability comes from Toughness, wounds and saves on the datasheets, not from an army-wide damage reduction. And the Plague is chosen once, at deployment, by the core army rule. Only one detachment, Champions of Contagion, lets you change it later.

There is a second army rule, Pact of Decay, which is a restriction rather than a benefit: when mustering your army you cannot select PLAGUE LEGIONS as your Army Faction unless something specifically says otherwise. The Tallyband Summoners detachment is that exception. Pact of Decay is recorded on the community mirror rather than in the Faction Pack, so treat its exact wording as the weaker-sourced part of this section.

The structural change is Detachment Points. In 10th edition you chose one detachment; in 11th you get a DP budget of roughly 2 DP at 1,000 points and 3 DP at 2,000 points, and spend it on detachments that each cost 1 to 3 DP, so you can now combine detachments.

For Death Guard that means the six codex detachments were joined by three new ones, all at 1 DP: Contagion Engines for daemon engines, Flyblown Host for Plague Marines and Paragons of Putrescence for characters. The Faction Pack prints all three in full.

The pack also does four other things. It amends three codex detachments in its Rules Updates section: it rewrites the Worldblight detachment rule of Virulent Vectorium, the Stinking Mire stratagem of Mortarion's Hammer and the Beckoning Blight enhancement of Tallyband Summoners. It errata the army rule twice, capping Contagion Range at 12 inches and adding a ranged-attack clause to Skullsquirm Blight. It prints a full Defiler datasheet with Death Guard faction keywords. And it moves a slice of the range to Warhammer Legends: Death Guard Possessed, the Death Guard Chaos Lord, the Death Guard Chaos Lord in Terminator Armour, Death Guard Cultists and the Death Guard Sorcerer in Terminator Armour are all reprinted as Legends datasheets, and none of them appears in the matched-play Munitorum Field Manual list.

Several vehicles also picked up the FRAME keyword: the Chaos Land Raider, both Chaos Predator variants, the Chaos Rhino, the Miasmic Malignifier and the Plagueburst Crawler. The Chaos Predator Destructor's predator autocannon went to Strength 9. The Deathshroud Terminators' deep strike ability, both of Mortarion's reactive abilities and Typhus's Eater Plague were all rewritten. Read the current datasheets rather than the ones you remember.

Your DP budget scales with game size: about 2 DP at 1,000 points and 3 DP at 2,000 points. Costs:

• 3 DP: Virulent Vectorium. It fills a whole 2,000-point budget on its own, so it runs solo. If you have read elsewhere that you can bolt a cheap 1-DP specialist onto it, check the arithmetic: at 2,000 points there is nothing left to spend.
• 2 DP: Champions of Contagion, Death Lord's Chosen, Mortarion's Hammer, Shamblerot Vectorium, Tallyband Summoners. Each leaves 1 DP spare for a support.
• 1 DP: Contagion Engines, Flyblown Host, Paragons of Putrescence. The glue, and all three together also make a legal 3-DP army.

Those DP values are not printed in the Faction Pack, but they are published officially in the Munitorum Field Manual, and Wahapedia's 11th-edition page independently agrees on all nine. No Death Guard DP cost is contested.

Unique Tags are a different story, and this is the one place where our two official sources disagree. The Munitorum Field Manual v1.3 lists no Unique Tag on any Death Guard detachment, and prints an explicit UNIQUE TAG REMOVED note against four of them: Champions of Contagion, Contagion Engines, Flyblown Host and Mortarion's Hammer. Death Guard is the only faction whose page carries that note. Faction Pack v1.2, from the same 26 August release, still prints UNIQUE: ENGINES above Contagion Engines and UNIQUE: FLYBLOWN above Flyblown Host, and still restates the restriction inside both rule texts.

We are not going to pretend that is settled. Nothing in this set states a Death Guard Unique Tag as fact, and nothing in this set suggests either of the two pairings the older tags would have blocked. Those two pairings get their own section below, because they are exactly the ones the arithmetic invites.

Nine detachments are legal. By DP cost:

3 DP, run alone

• Virulent Vectorium (Take and Hold) is the objective engine. Worldblight secures any objective a Death Guard unit controls at the end of your Command phase, and keeps Afflicting enemy units within range of it until you lose control. It also owns Disgustingly Resilient, the damage-reduction stratagem people mistake for the army rule.

2 DP, with a point to spare

• Champions of Contagion (Take and Hold) is the only detachment that lets you change your chosen Plague, at the start of any battle round. Four of its six stratagems buff an Attached unit, and all four enhancements are locked to a named character.
• Death Lord's Chosen (Priority Assets) is the Terminator detachment. Deadly Vectors rolls 2D6 for every Afflicted enemy unit in your opponent's Command phase and deals D3 mortal wounds on a 6 or less, with -1 if the unit is Below Half-strength.
• Mortarion's Hammer (Purge the Foe) is the armour detachment. Miasmic Bombardment Afflicts a battle-size-dependent number of enemy units that are more than 12 inches from every model you have on the battlefield, so it reaches precisely where your aura cannot.
• Shamblerot Vectorium (Disruption) is the horde. Numberless Horde adds a free ten-model Poxwalkers unit to Strategic Reserves in most battle rounds, and makes Poxwalkers Battleline.
• Tallyband Summoners (Disruption) is the daemon detachment. It lets you include Plague Legions units up to 500, 1,000 or 1,500 points by battle size, gives them Nurgle's Gift while they stand within 7 inches of a Death Guard unit, and pays that Death Guard unit +3 inches of Contagion Range in return.

1 DP, the splash picks

• Contagion Engines (Reconnaissance) gives four named daemon-engine datasheets the CONTAGION ENGINE keyword and [ASSAULT] on their ranged weapons.
• Flyblown Host (Reconnaissance) gives up to two Plague Marines units Infiltrators. That is the entire rule.
• Paragons of Putrescence (Priority Assets) gives every Death Guard Character unit +3 inches of Contagion Range, to a maximum of 12.

One name you may be looking for is not here. Plague Company is not a Death Guard detachment in 11th edition. It is in neither the Munitorum Field Manual detachment list nor the community mirror's 11th-edition page. If you are following older advice that recommends it as the beginner default, that advice is out of date, and we have retired our own page that said so.

Pick a core from your collection and playstyle:

• A Plague Marine and Rhino collection that wants to win on the mission wants Virulent Vectorium. At 3 DP it runs alone.
• Blightlords and Deathshroud want Death Lord's Chosen. Plagueburst Crawlers, Predators and a Defiler want Mortarion's Hammer. A pile of Poxwalkers wants Shamblerot Vectorium. Nurgle daemons already on the shelf want Tallyband Summoners. A shelf of named characters wants Champions of Contagion. All are 2 DP and leave a point spare.

If your core is a 2-DP detachment, spend the leftover DP on a 1-DP support, and pick the one that covers the hole your core leaves:

• On Death Lord's Chosen, take Paragons of Putrescence or Flyblown Host. Deadly Vectors rolls once per Afflicted enemy unit, so anything that Afflicts more units earlier is worth more here than anywhere else.
• On Mortarion's Hammer, take Flyblown Host or Paragons of Putrescence. The bombardment only reaches units more than 12 inches away, so you need something covering the near half of the board.
• On Shamblerot Vectorium, take Contagion Engines or Paragons of Putrescence. A horde has bodies and no damage.
• On Champions of Contagion, take Paragons of Putrescence or Contagion Engines. A character list has no answer to armour.
• On Tallyband Summoners, take Paragons of Putrescence or Flyblown Host. Both stack Contagion Range or supply the Death Guard bodies the 7 inch bubble needs.

The cleanest first list, and the one we would build with no other information, is Death Lord's Chosen (2 DP) plus Paragons of Putrescence (1 DP). Every point of Contagion Range you buy turns into extra dice in your opponent's Command phase, and the two rules never overlap.

If you want a genuine three-pillar army, Contagion Engines plus Flyblown Host plus Paragons of Putrescence is 3 DP and legal under both readings of the tag question, because no two of those three ever shared a tag in any source. You get engines that advance and shoot, Plague Marines already up the board, and characters projecting Contagion Range over both. The cost is depth: three stratagems each, nine in total, and six enhancements of which four are unit Upgrades.

This is the part to read before you build a 2,000-point list, because both of the pairings in question are 3 DP exactly and both look designed for each other.

• Contagion Engines (1 DP) + Mortarion's Hammer (2 DP). One is the daemon-engine mobility detachment and the other is the armour detachment. Of course you want both.
• Flyblown Host (1 DP) + Champions of Contagion (2 DP). One infiltrates Plague Marines and the other buffs Attached units full of characters. Of course you want both.

Under the older rules those two pairings were illegal, because each pair shared a Unique Tag: ENGINES on Contagion Engines and Mortarion's Hammer, FLYBLOWN on Flyblown Host and Champions of Contagion, and no two detachments in your army may share a Unique Tag.

Under the Munitorum Field Manual v1.3, read on 27 August 2026, they are legal, because that document lists no Unique Tag on any Death Guard detachment and prints an explicit UNIQUE TAG REMOVED note on all four of those detachments. Death Guard is the only faction whose Munitorum Field Manual page carries that note, and the same page still prints tag badges normally for other factions, so the badge is not simply missing.

Under Faction Pack v1.2, published in the same release and read on the same day, they are still illegal, because the pack prints UNIQUE: ENGINES and UNIQUE: FLYBLOWN above the two new detachment pages and restates the restriction inside both rule texts.

So two official documents disagree, and we are not going to guess for you. What we will do is never suggest either pairing, because that is the only advice that is safe whichever way it resolves. Check the Warhammer 40,000 app before you commit, since the app is the live authority and will settle it. And if you are playing in a tournament, ask the organiser rather than your opponent.

The good news is that the alternatives are strong. If you want engines and armour together, Contagion Engines plus Shamblerot Vectorium or Contagion Engines plus Death Lord's Chosen are both 3 DP and untouched by the question. If you want infiltrators and characters, Flyblown Host plus Death Lord's Chosen or Flyblown Host plus Mortarion's Hammer do the same job.

Three habits carry Death Guard games.

First, respect the clock rather than fighting it. Your aura is 3 inches on turn one and 9 inches from turn three. That is not a minor ramp; it is the difference between Afflicting one unit and Afflicting the enemy army. On turn one you are advancing, screening and taking cover. Committing a Plague Marine squad into a fight on turn one costs you the models that would have been projecting the aura on turn three.

Second, choose your Plague for the matchup, not for the feel. The army rule locks it in during Declare Battle Formations. Rattlejoint Ague against heavy armour saves, Skullsquirm Blight against a melee army that also shoots, Scabrous Soulrot when the mission is going to be decided by Objective Control. If you find yourself wanting to change it mid-game, that is the argument for Champions of Contagion, which is the only detachment that lets you.

Third, count what is Afflicted, not what is dead. Several of the best Death Guard effects pay out per Afflicted unit rather than per kill. Deadly Vectors rolls 2D6 for each of them. Creeping Blight and Eye of Affliction improve attacks against them. Miasmic Bombardment and Bloodrust Deluge exist purely to add more of them. A turn where you Afflicted five enemy units and killed nothing is often a better turn than the reverse.

A note on command points and clock management. Most Death Guard stratagems cost 1CP, but two of the best cost 2CP: Disgustingly Resilient and Plaguesurge in Virulent Vectorium, and Malignance Magnified and Blighted Land elsewhere. Hold a point for your opponent's turn, because the reactive stratagems here are the ones that decide whether a key block survives. And be aware that Death Guard involve a lot of dice rolling, including a 2D6 roll per Afflicted unit in Death Lord's Chosen, so rehearse a brisk sequence if you play to a clock.

Start with the honest version of the buying question. Death Guard are one of the friendlier armies to collect because their signature units are also the units their detachments are written around, so almost nothing you buy early is wasted.

[Combat Patrol: Death Guard](/40k/boxes/combat-patrol-death-guard) is the standing entry boxed set and the cheapest route to a Plague Marine core. [Battleforce: Death Guard](/40k/boxes/battleforce-death-guard) is the seasonal multi-kit bundle: Battleforces are re-cut every year, so what is inside changes from season to season and the box is only worth buying when its contents match the detachment you actually want to play. We do not print a kit list for either box here, because Games Workshop's own product pages are the only reliable source for current contents and we will not reproduce a list we cannot verify today. Both linked pages carry live retailer pricing so you can compare against buying the kits separately, which is the calculation that matters with a Battleforce.

[Boarding Patrol: Death Guard](/40k/boxes/boarding-patrol-death-guard) is a Boarding Actions set. Boarding Actions is a separate game mode with its own three Death Guard detachments, and none of the nine detachments in this guide applies to it.

Buying by detachment, if you already know which way you are going:

• Plague Marine core, any detachment. Plague Marines plus a Chaos Rhino to move them, and a Plagueburst Crawler for indirect fire. This is the foundation of every list on this page.
• Terminators, for Death Lord's Chosen. Blightlord Terminators plus a Lord of Virulence, who is the only model the Signal Pox stratagem can target.
• Daemon engines, for Contagion Engines. Foetid Bloat-drone and Myphitic Blight-haulers first, because those are two of the four datasheets the rule actually names.
• Characters, for Paragons of Putrescence or Champions of Contagion. The Malignant Plaguecaster, Noxious Blightbringer and Plague Marine Champion set is three characters in one box and is the best value in the range for a character-led list. Add the Biologus Putrifier and the Plague Surgeon.
• A horde, for Shamblerot Vectorium. Poxwalkers, and more of them than you think, because the detachment rule keeps adding new ten-model units and you need the models to place.
• The centrepiece. Mortarion and Typhus are both Epic Heroes, which means neither can carry an Enhancement. Buy them because you want them, not because a detachment needs them.

Compare current prices across retailers on the Death Guard army page and the boxes page.

One buying warning that is specific to this faction right now: do not buy a kit because an old list recommended the unit. Death Guard Possessed, the Death Guard Chaos Lord, the Chaos Lord in Terminator Armour, Death Guard Cultists and the Sorcerer in Terminator Armour are all Warhammer Legends in the current Faction Pack and none appears in the matched-play points list. The Plague Marine Champion and Lord Felthius both have boxes but are not standalone matched-play datasheets either.

If you are new or returning, build a Paragons of Putrescence list first. At 1 DP it is cheap enough to leave room to experiment, its rule is a single clause you cannot misplay, and it teaches the one habit that decides Death Guard games, which is thinking about where your Contagion Range reaches before you think about where your guns reach. It is also the only one of the three new detachments whose legality is not contested, because its pack page carries no tag banner and the Munitorum Field Manual lists none.

Once you are comfortable, try a 2 + 1 DP split. The cleanest one to learn on is Death Lord's Chosen plus Paragons of Putrescence, because both reward the same behaviour: get a durable block somewhere central, keep it alive, and let the aura do the work while your opponent's Command phase pays you for it.

When you want the full grinding fantasy, run Virulent Vectorium alone at 3 DP. Worldblight turns the ground you hold into a permanent debuff, and the detachment carries the deepest stratagem and enhancement list in the faction, which is what a 3-DP price buys.

Because Death Guard are still on a faction pack rather than a full 11th-edition codex, expect a future codex to re-tune this lineup and its points. Until then, everything here reflects the current, live rules, with the one exception we have flagged twice: the Unique Tag question, which is unresolved between two official documents and which the Warhammer 40,000 app is the place to settle.