Finding something new with vanilla marines

Well waiting on the entire Dark elder range to come out I have decided to try an design new marine list and I need your help. I am suffering from a bit of tunnel vision since I have been playing with almost the same list for about a year and a half I am finding it a bit difficult to move my mind beyond it.

Firstly here is what I have been currently running at 1750.

Librarian – Terminator armour, Storm Shield
Terminators – 4 TH/SS, 2 LC
Landraider crusader – Multimelta

4x5 man tac squads in razorbacks with twin Heavy bolters
2 AC/HB Predators
3x2 Landspeeders with Multimelta/Heavy Flamer

The terminators give me a good counter charge unit or something I can shove down my opponents throat and force them to have to deal with it.

The speeders give me a second threat that can deal with heavy armour or hordes, tend to suck up quite a lot of fire power especially when turbo boosting and finally they are great for contesting objectives.

The preds just give me a couple of AV 13 that plink away at units and light vehicles.

The razorbacks/tac marines I deliberately didn’t upgrade for a number of reasons. Firstly with the land raider bearing down on you and all those speeders zooming about it’s hard to justify shooting at them. Secondly because they have only heavy bolters you don’t feel any major loss of fire power by moving them 12”. I have never seen a marine list quite like it at a tournament yet, if your not expecting it dealing with 6 speeders is a real problem. Normally if I can’t our fight my opponent I can out manoeuvre them.

Now there are a few down sides, first and foremost are space wolves, between the psychic powers and the masses of missile launcher my speeder tend to be neutered. Nids tend to be able to deal with terminators and all the hive guard hurt the speeders quite bad but at least I can out run them.

In general I find the list is still overly reliant on the terminators doing well they are the main killy unit and as good as the list is at opening up transports its still needs the terminators to actually kill what drops out. This also leads to low victory point scores as I win by out manoeuvring and killing key units not wiping my opponent off the table.

So that’s what have been running now onto what I am thinking about, picking a original vanilla marine list is proving a bit of a challenge made worse as a lot of the lists I have made you can generally do better in the marine +1 and +2 codex (BA and SW).

So the first list I have been play testing is a proper Razorback spam list

2 Librarians
5 tac squads (2 with combi meltas) in Twin Assault Cannon Razorbacks
3 squads of 3 attack bikes with Multi Meltas
3 AC/HB Predators

It’s a pretty straight forward list lots of dakka, I will try it out with las/plas as well but I like the sheer number of shots your putting out with those assault cannons. The second libby is because I had 100 odd points left.

I went with attack bikes over speeders as I find with the speeders you tend to only have one multi melta in the squad to shoot with and when you do have two you miss with both so I wanted to try out having three in the squads for over kill. The dakka preds because it’s rude not to for that points.

My main issue with the list is it’s rather boring and predictable, it works but it’s very cookie cutter.

The other thing I have always wanted to try is a drop pod list, I decided to break at least one rule I had and add Vulcan into the list.

Vulcan
4 x 10 man tac squads with melta gun, multi melta. Sergeant with combie melta and power fist in a drop pod
2 x Dreadnought with multi melta/heavy flamer, drop pod
Dreadnought with multi melta/Storm bolter, drop pod
2 x 1 land speeder with multi melta

Nothing shockingly new or original here drops down with lots of melta but again a bit boring, your alpha either works or it doesn’t there is no half measure.

Sternguard as something I have been trying to get working from the start so playing around last night I game up with the following.

Pedro Kantor
10 Sternguard, 4 Combie Melta, 2 heavy flamers, Power fist, Drop pod
10 Sternguard, 3 combie Melta, 2 Heavy flamers, Power fist , Drop pod
1 Dreadnought Multi melta, Heavy Flamer, Drop pod
2x10 Tactical marines, Melta gun, Multi melta, Drop pod
2x2 Land speeders Multi melta/Heavy flamer

The list currently has a few points spare but I think that’s the bones of it there, the sternguard and dred go in first and try to bust open some heads. The speeders DS and try and pop some tanks.

Any one got any suggestions how I could improve these or got any experiance with all drop pod lists?