Sometime in 2019 a bloke brought a Custodes army into my local store, and I spent most of a Saturday not playing my own game because I kept wandering over to look at his. The army was white. Marble white, with red shoulder pads and red tabards, and he’d done actual veining on the armour plates with a brush that must have had about four hairs left on it. Parked at the back of his deployment zone was a Land Raider in the same colours. I asked what the scheme was and he said “Solar Watch,” like I should know, and I nodded like I did. I went home that night and tried marble on one Imperial Fists shoulder pad as a test. It looked like a pigeon had got to it first. I painted over it in Averland Sunset the next evening and never mentioned it to anyone, including Pete, who would have asked to see it.
I thought about that army a lot yesterday, because Warhammer Community’s first look at the Custodes detachments for the new codex lists thirteen of them, and one is called Solar Watch. Six carry the tag Unique: Shield Host, meaning you pick one of the six and that’s your army’s Host. WarCom says five of those six are themed on the main Shield Hosts from the codex’s lore section. The one-line summary for Solar Watch: “Move even quicker than usual, and flow into and out of engagement like water.”
Three days earlier, in the “what you need to know” article, the same site confirmed that the Venerable Land Raider is moving to Warhammer Legends, with its “parking space” handed to the Caladius Grav-tank and the Coronus Grav-carrier.
What the Solar Watch Actually Is
For anyone who hasn’t read an 8th edition Custodes codex, the Solar Watch are the Shield Host that guards the Sol System itself. Their other name is the Castellans of the Blessed Worlds, and they see themselves as the Imperial Palace’s first real line of defence. They patrol the routes between the worlds and void stations of the system, from the orbital fortresses of Luna out to the star forts of the Halo Belt, and their job is to make sure nothing hostile ever gets as far as Terra. Their authority technically covers Mars too, but the codex says they’re wise enough to let the Mechanicus police its own deviants, so they only turn up there occasionally.
Here’s the bit the codex spends real words on. They usually get around the system on Navy craft and even trade ships, but they “maintain a formidable concentration of Venerable Land Raiders,” and their forces are typically mechanised, sometimes entirely. The more aggressive Captain-Generals have sent them out on what the codex calls Talon Sorties: Shield Company-strength armoured spearheads into the star systems nearest Terra, riding in on those Land Raiders, killing command elements and heavy assets, and then pulling out abruptly and leaving the Guard to mop up. The codex credits them with ending daemon cults, Inquisitorial coups and xenos incursions on every world in the system except Mars.
So the Solar Watch are the Land Raider Custodes. Their entry mentions the tank twice in two paragraphs, which I checked because I thought I was misremembering.
The detachment itself doesn’t care, as far as I can tell from one sentence. “Move quicker, flow in and out of engagement” sounds like a rule built for jetbikes and grav-tanks. Which, fine. The Caladius and Coronus do glide, and gliding in and out of combat is basically what a grav-tank is for.
I keep going back and forth on how much this should bother me. The Land Raider’s an Astartes tank. It’s a slab of Mars-built armour that the Custodes borrowed, the grav-tanks are Custodes-only designs from their own armouries, and if I’m honest they look far more like something the Ten Thousand would ride. The Coronus is a transport that looks like jewellery. Swapping a Marine box for a gold hover-sled is probably more in character for them, and I wrote a whole thing about how the Pallas replaced older vehicles in the lore and seemed perfectly happy about it then.
But the Solar Watch text doesn’t say “grav-tanks.” It names the Land Raider. And it’s not the only Host that does. Lexicanum lists a Dread Host formation called the Gladiari, three ancient Land Raiders, and cites this year’s Armageddon: The Return of Yarrick Armoured Gauntlet book for it. So GW wrote a Custodes Land Raider unit into the lore in 2026 and then Legends’d the model in the same year. I haven’t got that book, so I can’t tell you what the Gladiari do or whether they survive the page. I’d like to know.
The Aquilan Shield Turn Up Uninvited
The Aquilan Shield is one of the two detachments GW showed in full, and it’s the one that made me laugh out loud when I held it up against the old codex entry.
On the tabletop, the Aquilan Shield is a gun line that sits on objectives. Its detachment rule, Gilded Guardians, makes ranged attacks from anything with higher Strength than the target’s Toughness worse at wounding Custodes units (monsters and vehicles aside) while they’re standing within range of an objective. Its favoured ka’tah is Salvus, which gets 6” of extra range on top of its usual effect. The stratagems are Tip of the Talon (+1 Strength on shooting within 9”), Rapid Reactions (shoot a unit that just fell back from you), and Manoeuvre and Fire. The page’s tagline calls them “an unbreakable fortress of auramite.”
The codex entry has the Aquilan Shield as bodyguards, and very strange ones. The Palace doomscryers pick out people who, “through example, thought or deed,” are likely to head off disasters that would threaten the Golden Throne. Then a small band of Custodians appears next to that person, unannounced, and informs them they’re now under the Emperor’s protection. Nobody’s ever allowed to refuse. They guarded High Lords, Canonesses, Lord Inquisitors, generals, two Warmasters of crusades, and also, per the codex, frontline preachers and “bewildered militia leaders.” Then, at “the exact moment the usefulness of the person under their protection is deemed spent,” they leave. Without a word. Tragedy often follows, the codex says, which I’d guess covers most of the bewildered militia leaders.
My favourite is a Cadian, which given my own Guard army is probably bias. Lieutenant Nathasian of the Cadian 86th did something insubordinate enough to get himself scheduled for execution. Aquilan Shield Custodians turned up in a flash of golden light and cut down his Commissariat firing squad without saying anything, and with them standing behind him he got promoted to Commander of an Army Group and then to Warmaster of a whole crusade. The codex says the Shuddering Stars were swept clean. It doesn’t say what happened to him after they decided he was done.
So, a fortress on an objective. Right. The lore Aquilan Shield wouldn’t stand on your objective unless the doomscryers said the objective was going to become a High Lord. I think they’d make a brilliant Crusade detachment, and I’m not sure GW was ever going to fit that behaviour into matched play. How do you write “leaves halfway through the game once your Warlord stops mattering” as a rule anyway? Actually, that’d be a great rule. Awful for the person playing it. But great.
The Dread Host Get to Teleport From the Moiraides
This one’s just nice, so I’ll keep it short. The Dread Host in the lore travel on three pre-Heresy warships called the Moiraides, and only a handful of times in Imperial history have all three emptied out against a single enemy. The codex spread has a 2CP stratagem called Golden Light of the Moiraides, where the ships teleport the unit into battle.
Their base in the Palace is the Sanctum of a Thousand Eyes, lined with five hundred eagle statues each the size of a super-heavy tank, full of augurs and listening gear, which legend says can see disloyalty in anyone they look at. The detachment rule re-rolls charges. I’d have taken a rule about the eagles.
The Sixth Custodes Shield Host Detachment
WarCom said five of the six Shield Host detachments are themed on Hosts from the lore section. Aquilan Shield, Dread Host, Solar Watch, the Emissaries Imperatus (who rode with the Torchbearer fleets reminding Chapter Masters of their honour) and the Shadowkeepers, who I went on about yesterday, all have entries going back to the 2018 codex. That leaves Emperor’s Chosen, which I can’t find as a named Host in any codex I own or any of the pages Lexicanum draws from. My guess is it’s the odd one out, a detachment for people who want the Shield Host slot without the baggage. I could be totally wrong and it’s in the lore section of the new book, which I haven’t seen. Its favoured ka’tah is Rendax, and the add-on WarCom mentioned is mortal wounds on an engaged Vehicle or Monster.
Right, so, the Land Raider thing again, because I’m not done. Eight years. That’s about how long my car’s been making the noise it makes when I turn left, and it’s how long the Solar Watch have had “formidable concentration of Venerable Land Raiders” in their entry. Somebody out there has the army I saw in 2019. White, red, a Land Raider at the back. When the book lands they’ll open it, pick Solar Watch because of course they do, and the one vehicle in their Host’s actual description is a Legends datasheet. It’s still in the app. It’s just not events-legal by default any more, and you’d be bringing it to a game where the detachment you picked is about flowing like water. They didn’t do anything wrong, they just followed the colour page and the paragraph under it.
The Land Raider’s been bouncing between armies for decades, and Bell of Lost Souls reckons it’s “firmly back with Space Marines” now. If you’re a Custodes player with one on the shelf, the Legends datasheet exists, and your garage group probably won’t care. Mine wouldn’t. My own Fists Land Raider has had one track guard on upside down since 2016 and nobody’s noticed, or everybody has and they’re being kind about it.
Custodes pre-orders open this Saturday. WarCom says a lot of the continuing kits, the Coronus and Caladius included, are showing out of stock online because they’re being re-boxed with the dual logos, and that stores may still have the old boxes on the shelf. Same miniatures. If you’re planning a Solar Watch, that’s where I’d look first.
