Probing the depths - Obfuscation, Mind Raid
I hope your psychic defenses are strong. Today we're looking at the Mind Raid Obfuscation psychic power.
Again, here’s a link to the breakdown of the Librarians in the Space Marine Codex, remember you're looking exclusively at the Phobos Librarian here.
Background
The psyker delves into the mind of the enemy model learning ploys, plans orders and any other classified information, painfully. I really like this power because of its narrative style, the manipulation to learn the enemies plans, it screams Dark Angels for me with their hunt for the Fallen and I can only imagine this is weak compared to what enemies are subjected to on the Rock, the home of the Dark Angels (sorry showing some serious bias I know).
Overview
On the table, Mind Raid is 6+ to cast and runs in at an 18 inch range. You pick a model and its unit takes 1 mortal wound. That’s the guarenteed part. Then if its a CHARACTER, you roll 3d6 and if you equal or beat their leadership characteristic you gain a CP. Pretty decent, low cast value and potential benefit.
Pros
When you select a model you ignore the restrictions of targeting a model. This means you can select any CHARACTER you can see and the Phobos Librarian has the speed to move around to best use it.
Rolling the 3d6 against a character does average out at 12, with most characters sporting a leadership of 8 or more you should manage to gleam that command point a good portion of the time, and that’s where 9th gives you an extra gift.
9th edition has added the command phase where you gain a CP every turn. Its allowed a lot of people to have their favourite 1CP stratagem that they can throw down every turn which is brilliant. If you're using Mind Raid every turn you can start to look at reliably being able to use a 2CP stratagem every turn, a couple of cheap 1CP stratagems, or forcing your opponent to hide their characters a little better.
There are loads of stratagems in the Codex, and the majority are sitting at the 1CP mark. I wont go into them all here, but 2Cp could potentially allow an Intercessor squad to shoot twice, to use add a protective layer on a large squad with Transhuman Physiology or allow an INFANTRY unit to preform an action AND shoot, great if you've got a secondary to score but don’t want to compromise firepower.
Cons
Whilst this power can gleam CP from enemy Characters, it doesn’t work all that well where the enemy doesn’t field a huge amount of characters you want dead immediately. Armies like Genestealer Cults are CHARACTER heavy so you've got plenty of targets to pick from, however if you're facing down Custodes or even Knights, this power immediately becomes less useful due to the limited targets for its full effect.
You'll need to be really careful with your placement to pull this off, protecting your librarian whilst being able to take whatever the enemy character can throw at you. 18 inch is right in their face and you're likely to get charged and/or shot up immediately after you cast this.
To get the most reliability out of the leadership test, you need to lean into leadership debuff abilities. Hallucination works well in tandem with this but you loose a lot of the functionality of that power, and the movement trickery that personally I think will win you more games as you position yourself on the objectives.
Summary
There’s a lot of potential here, however it depends so heavily on your opponents force that I cant see this being a staple power taking in tournaments due to the preselecting of powers etc that 9th leans on. Its a real shame as narratively its brilliant.
'I'm impressed. No one has been able to get out of you what you did with the map.'