Needgaârd Oathband: The 11th-Edition Leagues of Votann Yield Point Income Detachment

Each time an enemy unit is destroyed, you gain 1 Yield Point.

To see why one sentence is worth 2 Detachment Points, you have to look at what Yield Points do. The army rule, Prioritised Efficiency, flips your entire army from the aggressive Hostile Acquisition stance to the defensive Fortify Takeover stance at the end of a Command phase in which you hold 7 or more Yield Points. The ordinary income schedule is objective-based and pays 1 to 4 Yield Points a turn depending on how far ahead you are on the board.

This detachment adds a second, entirely different income stream. A turn in which you destroy three enemy units pays 3 Yield Points on top of whatever your objectives paid, and it pays whether you are winning on objectives or not.

That matters most in the situation the army rule handles worst: you are killing things but losing on objectives. Ordinarily that army stays stuck in the aggressive stance with no Yield Points to spend on anything. With Martial Leverage, it banks.

Read the wording rather than assuming it. The rule says an enemy unit is destroyed. It does not say destroyed by your attacks, so it is not gated on your own shooting, and it does not distinguish between a five point screening unit and a two hundred point tank. Volume of kills beats quality of kills for this rule, which is why cheap artillery and mass infantry fire suit it better than a single enormous gun.

Both rewrites are first-party from the pack's Rules Updates section, and both are worth re-reading if you learned this card earlier.

Reactive Reprisal (2CP, Strategic Ploy), Effect section rewritten in full:

Your unit can shoot as if it were your Shooting phase, can only target that enemy unit when doing so, and can only do so if that enemy unit is an eligible target.

The rewrite tightens it. The unit is now locked to the one enemy unit that triggered the reaction, and the shot only happens if that unit is a legal target. If you were treating this as a general out-of-phase shooting phase, it is not one. It is the card's only 2 Command Point spend.

Void Hardened (1CP, Wargear), Effect section rewritten in full:

Until the attacking unit has finished making its attacks, each time an attack targets your unit, worsen the Armour Penetration characteristic of that attack by 1.

This is the standardised wording the pack applied to several factions' Armour of Contempt style cards in this pass, and the scope is the thing to notice: it lasts until the attacking unit has finished, not until the end of the phase. A second enemy unit shooting the same target gets nothing.

The other four stratagems are mirror-sourced: Honour of the Hold (Battle Tactic, 1CP), Ordered Retreat (Strategic Ploy, 1CP), Ancestral Sentence (Battle Tactic, 1CP) and Huntr's Mark (Battle Tactic, 1CP). Read those four cards in the Warhammer 40,000 app.

All four are mirror-sourced, and they pull in two directions, which is unusual on one card.

Oathbound Speculator (30 points). Leagues of Votann model only. Each time a model in the bearer's unit attacks, re-roll a Wound roll of 1; and each time that unit is selected to shoot or fight you can spend 3 Yield Points to add 1 to its Wound rolls until the end of the phase. The card's biggest spender, and the natural home for the income the detachment rule generates.

Ancestral Crest (15 points). Leagues of Votann model only. Once per turn, when you target the bearer's unit with the Command Re-roll stratagem, spend 1 Yield Point to reduce that use's cost by 1 Command Point. A Yield Point to Command Point converter, running the opposite way from Brandfast Oathband's Tactical Alchemy.

Dead Reckoning (10 points). Leagues of Votann model only. At the end of the turn, if the bearer is on the battlefield and you spent no Yield Points that turn, you gain 1 Yield Point.

That is a saver's enhancement on a card whose other three enhancements all want you to spend, and it is worth naming the tension rather than pretending it is not there. Dead Reckoning suits a list that is trying to cross the 7 Yield Point stance threshold and stay there; Oathbound Speculator suits a list that treats Yield Points as ammunition. Taking both is possible and slightly incoherent.

Iron Ambassador (5 points). Leagues of Votann model equipped with an Autoch-pattern combi-bolter only. Once per battle, when the bearer's unit is selected to shoot, spend up to 3 Yield Points and add the number spent to the Damage characteristic of the bearer's ranged weapons until the end of the phase. The cheapest enhancement on the card, and the only one in the faction whose eligibility names a specific weapon rather than a keyword. Check what your model is actually holding before you take it.

Enhancement points are dataslate-volatile and none of the four carries a change marker in this pass.

Plus [Hearthguard Covenant](/40k/armies/leagues-of-votann/detachments/hearthguard-covenant) (1 DP, total 3). Exactly a Strike Force budget, and the cleanest income-and-spending pair in the faction. Martial Leverage banks 1 Yield Point per enemy unit destroyed; Fury of the Hearth spends 1 to add [SUSTAINED HITS 1] to an Einhyr shooting activation, which then destroys more units. Hearthguard Covenant's Unique Tag is shared only with Hearthband, which costs 3 Detachment Points and could not be in this list anyway.

How to build it. Because the rule pays per unit destroyed rather than per point destroyed, this detachment likes a list that can kill several cheap things a turn: Hearthkyn Warriors in volume, Cthonian Earthshakers reaching screening units from safety, and a Hekaton Land Fortress for the things that need a bigger gun. A list built around one enormous damage spike banks fewer Yield Points than one that spreads its fire, which is the opposite of how most armies want to shoot.