Flawless Blades
SWORD: what Flawless Blades kills
Damage for its points
per 100 pts spent
Its 95 pts kill ~151 pts in one activation.Typical melee unit: 55 per 100
Best against heavy vehicles and monsters, weakest against hordes
Into each enemy type
Units near it by SWORD
Across the game· melee units
SHIELD: how hard Flawless Blades is to kill for its points
Toughness for its points
per 100 pts spent
Its 95 pts take ~301 pts of enemy units to kill.Typical melee unit: 307 per 100
Units near it by SHIELD
Across the game· melee units
What creators say
7 creators- Fast elite melee, the army's main hammer 6 of 7
- Hit any target hard, whatever its toughness 4 of 7
- Small cheap units trade well 4 of 7
- Spectacle of Slaughter lets them arrive and strike first 4 of 7
- Fragile, and shooting folds them 3 of 7
- Need the right detachment to arrive intact 3 of 7
- Struggle into units that shrug off damage 1 of 7
Compare
| Unit | Letter | SWORD | SHIELD | Lists |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flawless Blades95 pts | S | Top 1% | Top 45% | 156of 180 |
| Chaos Terminators155 pts | C | Top 5% | Top 14% | 19of 180 |
| Noise Marines160 pts | B | Top 8% | Top 47% | 53of 180 |
With a leader
| Solo | Led | |
|---|---|---|
| SWORD | 241 | 247 |
| SHIELD | 317 | 317 |
| Solo | Led | |
|---|---|---|
| SWORD | 241 | 241 |
| SHIELD | 317 | 317 |
Per 100 pts: on its own, then with the leader joined.
How we got these numbers
What we ran
Flawless Blades, 3 models, 95 pts, with its datasheet's weapons, in Coterie of the Conceited (Pledges to the Dark Prince: 7+ points). On its own: no leader, no stratagems, no other units' auras. Counted as dice: its own abilities and the detachment's rule.
SWORD
Enemy points it kills in one activation, per 100 pts of its own, against a mix of targets weighted like top tournament lists.
95 pts → kills ~151 pts → 159 per 100SHIELD
Enemy points it takes to kill it, per 100 pts of its own: the points of the cheapest units from top lists that kill it 80% of the time. It's per point, so a costly unit has to be much tougher to score the same.
~301 pts → 317 per 100Top and bottom %
Where each number ranks among the game's 572 melee units. How we score.
The letter
The average of 7 creators' newest Emperor's Children tier lists: Joy's 40k channel (datasheet tier list, its dataslate review and its detachment tier list) (28 Oct), Goonhammer / tabletopbattles.com (dataslate review, Detachment Focus, Competitive Innovations: 5 winning lists and 22 summaries) (28 Oct), Auspex Tactics (army overview, top units, winning lists and the WTC's 36 lists) (6 Aug), 1d6chan (community 11th-edition tactics wiki, partly updated for the dataslate) (30 Oct), Grand Slam-Gaming (three of his own lists) (28 Aug), Chaos Coterie (three list builds) (12 Jul), Vanguard Tactics (the 1-DP detachments, on preview rules before points) (10 Jun). Questions? Get in touch.
Lists
180 public Emperor's Children tournament lists, September – November 2026, from grimstat-corpus (CC BY 4.0). Also from Listhammer, MiniHeadQuarters, ChampionsHub. Questions about a list or an event? Get in touch. Numbers run 2 Nov.