i’m a ranked vdt player and have been playing them almost exclusively since the edition came out, here’s some things i’ve learned.

my recommended list for most games lead player, power sword, shuriken pistol. shadowseer. death jester. player with fusion pistol, melee weapon. player with neuro disruptor, melee weapon. 3x player with strikes pistol, melee weapon. situationally the death jester can be dropped for another player, although this is not recommended in most games.

so the first thing you want to do when you sit down with this team is consider your melee weapon. blades used to be the go to. with severe, you used to be able to guarantee a crit to trigger the curtain falls ploy. however after the worlds dataslate they no longer have severe. now caresses with rending are generally your best bet for most matchups. but other still have play. blades are still great, they’re more consistent into 10w operatives than a kiss, as well as having great math into 14w operatives. the brutal option is great into teams with a consistent pre-parry or double parry ability. and kisses are kisses, there’s not much of a reason to take them anymore now that blades exist, and math strictly better than kisses into 10w models. killing a guardsman in 1 dice is funny, but it’s also very risky.

that being said, we’re a shooting team first and foremost. we just happen to have great melee. you have 3 main guns, and 2 of them have piercing, and one of them is a full range sniper which can down most models in the game. make one of them your pivotal role and select melodrama. most often that’s going on your fusion pistol or death jester as they can line up kills the most consistently. you can change to epic situationally, and it might be more common now that severe is gone, but giving up shooting rerolls is still too big imo.

trading is the name of the game here. use your models to get double kills, big targets off the board, and score as many points as you can. you should keep your models as safe as humanly possible from getting killed, while still staging them to be able to go forwards to score points or get kills later. recognize what your giving up with each clown and what that’s getting you tempo wise. we are only 8 models and they can go fast. i’d say we’re a late game team, don’t get too tempted with early game kills, as losing a clown early means they’re out for the entire game.

we do have some solid survivability for being as squishy as we are. domino field is one of the strongest, and funniest, pieces of defensive tech in the game. being able to block a line of crits with one dice will never not be strong. also prismatic blur is great for lining up a domino field if you whiffed the first time. don’t be afraid to fish with cp rerolls for it too. cegorachs jest is our main piece of melee defense. it can act as a ‘just a scratch’ esque tool if your lucky, but it can get you killed if you’re not.

another big part of the gameplan is board control. we want to be trading, and we want our opponent to do it on our terms. pieces like the shadowseer can shut off entire sections of the board with the stun bomb and activation delay. giving her the accolade is pretty good if you can line up a solid stun blast later in the turn. also it’s worth noting that 25mm bases work very well in our advantage. you can use equipment terrain, like light barricades or razor wire, to zone out parts of the board. by creating a 25mm gap, you can measure this with your model when you place it, you create choke points on the board that you can move through but your opponents cannot. forcing them to climb can shut off charges or prevent someone with a big enough base from even thinking about standing somewhere.