Genestealer Cults: Purestrain Broodswarm Detachment Guide (11th Edition)

Genestealers already hit hard. What they have never done well is survive the turn after they hit, because a brood that has just wiped a squad is standing in the open in front of everything else your opponent owns.

Enemy Within removes that turn. At the end of your opponent's Fight phase, before their shooting has any bearing on the next round, an unengaged brood goes into strategic reserves. It is not destroyed, it does not have to walk back, and it returns wherever the mission's reserves rules allow.

Read the condition precisely: unengaged. A brood still locked in combat cannot leave this way. That is what Lurk and Strike is for, and the two rules are designed to be used together.

The cost is real and worth naming. A unit in reserves holds no objectives, and this is a Priority Assets detachment. Cycling every brood every turn wins fights and loses games. Use it on the brood that has finished its work, not on the brood standing on the middle objective.

One thing this detachment does not need to worry about. Purestrain Genestealers are among the cheapest units in the faction to bring back with the army rule: 2 Resurgence points for five models and 6 for ten. A brood that dies rather than escaping is not a disaster, which means you can afford to be aggressive with the ones you do not manage to withdraw.

Three stratagems, all 1 CP, and all restricted to PURESTRAIN GENESTEALERS units.

Lurk and Strike applies in your Movement phase when a friendly Purestrain Genestealers unit is selected to make a fall-back move: that move does not prevent your unit from being eligible to declare a charge. This is the partner to the detachment rule. Enemy Within only works on unengaged broods, and Lurk and Strike is how a brood becomes unengaged without wasting its turn: fall back out of the losing fight, charge into a better one.

Crawling Horror fires at the start of your opponent's Movement phase and gives one Purestrain Genestealers unit -6 inch detection range until the end of the turn. Spend it on the brood you most want to survive into your own turn, which is usually the one that has not fought yet rather than the one already in combat.

Inhuman Reactions fires in your opponent's Movement phase when an enemy unit ends a move within 8 inches of a friendly unengaged Purestrain Genestealers unit, and lets that unit make a normal move of up to D3+3 inches. Note the trigger distance: 8 inches, not 9. The pack's faction-wide sweep from 9 to 8 is already applied in this printed page, so this is the current number rather than an amended one.

Two enhancements, and they are structurally different from each other in a way that is easy to miss.

Mark of the Star Children (30 pts) is an Upgrade rather than a character enhancement, and it is PURESTRAIN GENESTEALERS unit only. That unit gains +1 Toughness, a 4+ armour save, and +1 Strength on its melee attacks.

That is a different model from the one your opponent has prepared for. Genestealers are normally removed by massed small-arms fire, and a 4+ save plus a point of Toughness changes the arithmetic of that entire exchange. At 30 points it is expensive for a 1 DP detachment, and it is the reason to take this detachment rather than merely the reward for having taken it.

Talons of the Sire (15 pts) is PATRIARCH model only and lets that unit's attacks re-roll wound rolls of 1. Cheap, narrow and additive: it stacks on top of everything else the brood is doing rather than competing with it.

Purestrain Genestealers are what this detachment exists for. The detachment rule, all three stratagems and both enhancements name PURESTRAIN GENESTEALERS or PATRIARCH and nothing else, so the detachment is worth exactly as much as the number of broods you field.

Patriarch. The only legal carrier of Talons of the Sire, and the model the brood is built around. It has a second, less obvious relevance: the Patriarch and Purestrain Genestealers are the two unit types Final Day's Psionic Parasitism can never select, which is why that pairing works better than it reads.

We link no box for either. Our catalog holds no Genestealer Cults single-unit box at all, and pointing you at an approximate kit would be worse than telling you we do not have an exact one.

Pairing, and the one thing you must not do. At 1 DP this pairs with four of the five 2 DP detachments for exactly 3 DP. It does not pair with Biosanctic Broodsurge, which carries the same PURESTRAIN tag. The pairing we recommend most is Brood Brothers Auxilia, covered on its own page: it supplies the ranged firepower this faction lacks while your Genestealers stop an opponent walking at the gunline. Note that both names contain the word Brood and that predicts nothing at all, in either direction.