How to Play Grey Knights in Warhammer 40,000 11th Edition

Gate of Infinity is the whole faction in one mechanic, and the details matter more than the summary.

If your Army Faction is GREY KNIGHTS, at the end of your opponent's Fight phase, you can select a number of units from your army that are on the battlefield, excluding units that are within Engagement Range of one or more enemy units, provided every model in those units has this ability. The maximum number scales with battle size:

• Incursion: up to 2 units.
• Strike Force: up to 3 units.
• Onslaught: up to 4 units.

Place those units in strategic reserves. Those units can make an ingress move in your next Movement phase, including in your first turn.

Three corrections, because all three are repeated widely including in our own older copy:

It is not the end of your opponent's turn. It is the end of your opponent's Fight phase, which is earlier. Your units come off the board before your opponent's turn has finished resolving, which is both better than it sounds and a sequencing detail you need to hold in your head.

It does not rescue units from combat. Units within Engagement Range of an enemy are explicitly excluded, and every model in the unit must have the ability. If you are stuck, the army rule will not save you. The only thing in the faction that pulls a unit out of an ongoing fight is the Brotherhood Strike stratagem Expeditious Exit, whose designer's note says so explicitly.

The units make an ingress move, not an ordinary arrival. This is the exact clause Faction Pack v1.1 amends by name in its Rules Updates, and the amended wording confirms it works including in your first turn. Several detachment rules and enhancements key off the words ingress move specifically, so the distinction is load-bearing rather than pedantic.

Sourcing note. The pack does not reprint Gate of Infinity in full. Its Rules Updates section amends the last paragraph by name, which makes that paragraph first-party, but the body of the wording above is read off a community rules mirror. We are telling you that here because it is the one part of this guide that is only partly backed by the pack.

In 11th edition you spend a Detachment Points (DP) budget rather than picking one detachment. The budget scales with game size: roughly 2 DP at 1,000 points (Incursion) and 3 DP at 2,000 points (Strike Force). The Munitorum Field Manual points at the Warhammer 40,000 app for the exact figures, so confirm them there.

The Grey Knights spread is simple and lopsided:

• 3 DP: Warpbane Task Force.
• 2 DP: Augurium Task Force, Banishers, Brotherhood Strike, Hallowed Conclave, Sanctic Spearhead.
• 1 DP: Argent Assault, Fires of Purgation, Immaterial Interdiction.

Now the fact that shapes every Grey Knights list: this faction has no Unique Tags. Not one detachment carries one. We checked the Munitorum Field Manual's Grey Knights detachment section, which contains zero occurrences of the word UNIQUE, and confirmed the parser works by running it against the Astra Militarum page, where it correctly finds four. The pack states no tag in any of the four detachment rules it prints in full, and Wahapedia records none.

That makes Grey Knights the mirror image of most factions in this programme. Elsewhere the interesting question is which pairing is secretly blocked. Here nothing is blocked except by arithmetic, and the arithmetic is unusually blunt: Warpbane Task Force costs 3 DP, so it can never take a partner of any kind. Every other detachment has one.

Run the numbers and there are 19 legal multi-detachment armies at 2,000 points: 15 that pair a 2 DP detachment with a 1 DP detachment for exactly 3 DP, 3 that pair two 1 DP detachments and leave a point unspent, and exactly one three-detachment army made of all three 1 DP detachments together.

No Grey Knights DP cost is contested. The Munitorum Field Manual and Wahapedia agree on all nine, and the Munitorum Field Manual prints no increase or decrease markers anywhere in this faction's section. That is unusual enough in this programme to be worth stating positively rather than leaving as an absence.

The Grey Knights menu divides cleanly into six whole-army identities and three single-unit specialists.

Start here. Brotherhood Strike (2 DP) is the right first pick. Fury of Titan re-rolls Hit rolls of 1 and Wound rolls of 1 for any unit set up by Deep Strike, for the whole turn, with no keyword requirements beyond having the ability. It works with whatever you already own and it teaches the core loop of arriving and striking.

If you want one detachment to be your whole army. Warpbane Task Force (3 DP) is the flagship, with six stratagems and four enhancements, the largest toolkit in the faction. Hallowed Ground turns re-rolls of 1 into full hit re-rolls wherever you hold ground. It fills your entire budget alone.

If you like Terminators. Hallowed Conclave (2 DP) is one sentence long and it is the strongest sentence in the faction: your Terminator units can shoot and charge in a turn in which they Fell Back. Tarpitting them stops working.

If you like the psychic theme. Banishers (2 DP) lets each unit take a Leadership test when it fights and choose Sustained Hits or Lethal Hits on its psychic melee weapons. It is the most skill-testing detachment here.

If you like vehicles. Sanctic Spearhead (2 DP) replaces your vehicles' Advance roll with a flat 6 inches and grants their guns [ASSAULT], so Advancing and shooting become the same move.

If you like the teleport game. Augurium Task Force (2 DP) gives you a second bite at the army rule every Movement phase, plus three separate stratagems that put units back into Reserves.

The three 1 DP specialists each rebuild one previously neglected unit, and each bolts onto any of the five 2 DP detachments above. Argent Assault gives Paladins +1 to wound against tougher targets. Fires of Purgation turns Purgation Squads into a battle-shock engine. Immaterial Interdiction lets Interceptors shoot and then move.

Our recommended first 2,000-point army is Hallowed Conclave plus Argent Assault, the sharpest aggressive build is Brotherhood Strike plus Immaterial Interdiction, and the most underrated is Augurium Task Force plus Fires of Purgation.

Because Grey Knights have no Unique Tags, there is no secretly illegal pairing in this faction. There is only one illegal shape, and it is arithmetic.

[Warpbane Task Force plus any 1 DP detachment](/40k/armies/grey-knights/detachments/grey-knights-warpbane-budget-trap) costs 4 DP against a 3 DP Strike Force budget. Warpbane Task Force plus Argent Assault, plus Fires of Purgation, plus Immaterial Interdiction: all three fail identically, and none of them is blocked by a tag.

It is a genuinely convincing trap, and the reason is that the surrounding coverage teaches it. Every write-up of this faction, ours included, describes the three new 1 DP detachments as cheap packages you bolt onto a bigger list. That is true of five of the six codex detachments and false of the one readers most want to play. Warpbane Task Force is the flagship, Argent Assault is the cheapest thing in the pack, and a reader who has correctly learned that 1 DP detachments bolt onto anything will build exactly this list and find it illegal at the table.

One shape that looks blocked and is not: Augurium Task Force and Immaterial Interdiction share the Reconnaissance force disposition, and readers coming from factions with tags assume a clash. There is no clash. Grey Knights carry no tags, and a Force Disposition is not a tag. The pairing is legal, costs exactly 3 DP, and is one of the better builds in the faction.

We never suggest the Warpbane pairing anywhere on this site, in any direction, and the Warpbane Task Force page records no pairings at all.

Three habits separate a Grey Knights player who wins from one who owns a beautiful, expensive shelf.

Decide what leaves the board before your opponent's Fight phase. Gate of Infinity triggers at the end of your opponent's Fight phase and cannot take units that are in combat. That means the decision about what to teleport is made before you let a unit get engaged, not after. The single most common Grey Knights mistake is leaving the good squad in a fight it cannot win and then discovering the army rule will not extract it.

Count your models before you trade. A full 2,000-point Grey Knights force can be under thirty models. There is no such thing as a cheap screen and no such thing as an acceptable loss. Every fight you enter should be one you have already worked out that you win, and if you cannot work that out, use the army rule to leave instead. Precision is not a playstyle preference here, it is the only playstyle that functions.

Score with the cheap units and kill with the expensive ones. Strike Squads exist to stand on objectives; Terminators, Paladins and Dreadknights exist to remove the thing threatening them. Grey Knights lose far more games to being out-scored while winning every firefight than to being out-fought. A unit sitting in Strategic Reserves is safe, but it is also not holding anything, so cycle deliberately rather than habitually.

There is no Grey Knights starter set, and if that is the phrase you searched for, this is the section you needed. Games Workshop's two-player starter boxes have never featured Grey Knights, and the retired Start Collecting line does not have a current Grey Knights entry either. What exists instead is a Combat Patrol.

The standard on-ramp is Combat Patrol: Grey Knights. It is the faction's entry boxed set and the closest thing to a starter set that exists. We deliberately do not list its contents here: box contents are re-cut over time, we hold no first-party contents evidence for this one, and our own catalog entry records only that Terminators and Strike Squads are often featured. Check the live box page rather than any contents list you read elsewhere, including our older copy, which asserted a specific loadout we could not verify.

If you play the boarding game, Boarding Patrol: Grey Knights is the other sealed entry point, though note Boarding Actions is a separate game mode with its own detachments and is out of scope for the guides in this set.

Building beyond the on-ramp. The two kits almost every Grey Knights army wants are the Strike Squad, which is your Battleline and your objective holders, and the Paladin / Terminator Squad, which is the exact catalog match for both the Paladin Squad and the Brotherhood Terminator Squad datasheets. Between them those two kits turn on Hallowed Conclave, Argent Assault, Brotherhood Strike and Banishers.

Characters. Castellan Crowe is named by name in the Warpbane Task Force stratagem Flames of Sanctity, which makes him a rules pick rather than a thematic one. Grand Master Voldus has his Sanctuary ability rewritten in Faction Pack v1.1 to grant his unit Stealth and impose -1 to hit on melee attacks against it. Grand Master in Nemesis Dreadknight is the faction's signature walker and the centrepiece of a Sanctic Spearhead list.

The buying warning that matters most. Faction Pack v1.1 prints a Warhammer Legends section, and Legends datasheets are not legal for matched play. Five are printed there, and two of them are headline characters: Kaldor Draigo, the Supreme Grand Master and the single most recognisable Grey Knight, and Brother-Captain Stern. The other three are the Grey Knights Dreadnought, the Grey Knights Relic Razorback and Servitors. Community coverage and our own earlier pages presented Draigo as a centrepiece for a competitive list. He is not one. Buy him because he is a superb model, not to play him in a tournament.

A catalog gap to be honest about. Three of the nine detachments are built on units we have no exact box entry for: Purgation Squad (Fires of Purgation), Interceptor Squad (Immaterial Interdiction) and Purifier Squad (Warpbane Task Force). Those detachment pages link no box for their core unit rather than pointing you at an approximate kit, because sending you to the wrong box is worse than sending you to none.

New to the hobby entirely? Read our best beginner 40k armies guide first, then browse all Grey Knights boxes to price out a force.