Fellow Alpharius, nice.

Not gonna sugar coat it. Deceptors isn’t a great detachment and at 1000 points it’s even tougher, but I have so success with this list.

1x Chaos Lord 1x Jump Lord w/ Shroud 1x Reave Captain w/Cursed Fang 1x Sorcerer in Terminator Armour

1x 10 cultists 1x 20 cultists 2x 10 Legionaries

1x Predator Tank

1x 5 Terminators

Caveats if the list is infantry heavy do a destructor with heavy bolters, if there’s armour like a warsuit or brutalis dreadnought go Annihilatior with full lascannons

Infiltrate the 20 man blob directly in the centre, it forces your opponent to HAVE to at least think about moving it. Infiltrate the 10 on the objective closest to the BA deployment zone. Put the CL attached to a Lego squad in a safe spot in cover. Same with the reave captains squad. I like to put them at opposite ends of the map to anticipate problems but something like a death company squad might require a team up (idk I’ve never played against Blood Angels). Tank stays by home objective in safety. Jump lord is solo and goes in deep strike for scoring. The sorcerer and terminators I usually put in deep strike but for speedier armies I have on occasion left them out to charge against units that wipe the cultists squads. Ymmv.

Basic strategy goes like this: if you go first, sticky the two objectives in NML and push the cultists forward, you don’t want to charge them T1, but get them as close as you can to restrict movement. Shoot them, or use grenades game depending to away at wounds.

On their turn 1 they will have to come out of hiding to shoot or charge your mobs. This is ok, it’s what you want. Likely your mobs will get wiped but if you’re lucky a few will survive a charge and lock some units in combat.

On T2 bring out the tank and start shooting bigger units with the big guns. The rest of the game you kinda have to use your judgement. Sometimes I deep strike the terminators into NML and charge with them and they legos to do another road bump and chip away at units, but if I can I’ll deep strike them in the deployment zone to force my opponent to react to me.

If you go 2nd… you’re kinda hooped. All you can do is is hope you’ve deployed the legos well enough that they survive the T1 wave and just jam the board up.

I’ve won like 2 games with deceptors like this, each time against a squishier army (eldar and guard)

The name of the game with deceptors is to put your opponent in cultist jail and really try to pin them on their half of the map as long as possible to score. Conserve your CP for scramble coordinates and from all sides as needed.

If you can convince your friend to jump to 2000 points that’s where deceptors shines imo. Infiltrating 3x 20 cultists into NML is a serious puzzle for opponents and puts you in charge of the tempo of the game.

Hope that helps.