I've painted the Sanguinary Novitiate as a mix of the Honour Guard colour scheme and the way I've turned out my Sanguinary Priests and he's turned out pretty nice if I do say so myself.
I had my first couple of games with this list against Bradimus Prime (of the Space Wolves Grey blog) the other day and whilst I did lose both games there were an awful lot of lessons learnt. The first game was against his all Terminator list and the second was against his standard 1500 point tournament build (see the Space Wolves Grey blog for more details) and the key points I took away are as follows:
1) Brad's terminator list is sick and wrong - my Blood Angels broke against his wedge of terminators like waves crashing against a cliff! Admittedly I did lose pretty much all my Sanguinary Priests pretty early on due to some Space Wolf trickery (all jump movement within a certain range of them was classed as difficult terrain, guess which of my guys rolled 1's when they were incoming!!!) but the main lesson here is to either stay away from them or seriously gang up on them!
2) Trust in thy armour! - cover becomes less important when you can get an armour save against most weapons that are thrown at you, that coupled with the Feel No Pain granted by the Sanguinary Priests means that these guys are one hell of allot more durable than Fire Warriors and standing in the open is not quite the death sentence it is with the Tau.
3) 18 inch threat range - this is very important with this list that I hadn't really considered until Brad pointed it out to me. I was dropping my guys in right amongst his Space Wolves which meant they pretty much took a round of fire and were then assaulted meaning that I lost the advantage of the Furious Charge granted by the Sanguinary Priests. Opting to drop them further out on their first turn of deployment and then roll in on masse seems to be the order of the day!
4) Play like you've got a pair! - this is something that I did during the games (some very, VERY risky deep strike's which pretty much all panned out thanks to Descent of Angels) but is worth remembering that losses are less important with a BA list than they are with the Tau, in fact even at the point when I'd lost about half my army I still felt in a fairly confident position which is something that I'm afraid I can't say about the Tau.
I really don't want to seem like I'm now completely anti-Tau, I will still be playing them as I really, REALLY enjoy the army it's just given that 5th edition has such a huge emphasis on the Assault phase of the game I can't really equate the Tau to being competitive as they pretty much ignore this entire aspect of the game.
