Though I’ve had to update my 5th edition henchmen list significantly to keep it competitive in 6th edition, Coteaz remains at the core of most if not all of my Grey Knights armies. Whether or not the list is built around scoring henchmen, 6th edition has made Coteaz – already one of the best values among special characters in any codex – even better. Now he brings you two rolls on Divination and two powers a turn, in an army that really benefits from Divination’s force multipliers. And that’s in addition to Coteaz’ scoring henchmen, his daemonhammer, his 2+ armor save, his underrated bolter-bird, his seize the initiative shenanigans, and his 12″ no-drop bubble. But I’ve always felt the GW Coteaz model, while cool, just doesn’t do justice to the pure narrative-forging badassery that Coteaz represents. So I decided to make my own.
There’s grimdark, and then there’s grimdark. This coteaz would rather tear your arms and legs off and make you into a flying, biting zombie servitor than redeem your soul.
To represent Coteaz’ daemonhammer, I used a rather vicious looking mace head from the Chaos Knights sprue, on the handle from a space wolves thunderhammer. To represent his psyber bird, I bashed together an angry looking servitor thing with wings (made from a zombie torso, bits of an aquila, and some slices of plasticard rods for buttons/lights/dials) that he carries around by the neck and unleashes on everything from hapless guardsmen blobs to zooming vendettas.
Coteaz’ body is a chaos warrior, the head is from a flagellant, and the inquisition symbol is from god-knows-what, found at the bottom of my bits box.
Coteaz has been a superstar in many of my 6th edition games so far, mostly by throwing prescience and misfortune around like it’s going out of style, but he’s also managed to knock a vendetta out of the sky by throwing his bird into rear armor and rolling boxcars for hit and glance. Thus, Coteaz’ battle cry has changed from “I’ve been expecting you!” to “Death by birdfuck!”.
Since a lot of my 5th edition games ended up with two Coteaz clones facing off across the battlefield, I felt it important to set mine apart. I think this little bugger does that quite well. The exterminatus train has no brakes, baby.
