The skull mask is where it starts. The armour underneath is perfectly fine. It’s the chromed death’s-head that Reivers wear bolted over the faceplate that people can’t get past. Phobos armour, the stripped-down sneaking plate that GW handed to the Vanguard Space Marines back in 2017, turned up wearing that mask, and a big slice of the hobby has never made peace with it.
Every couple of weeks somebody on the Space Marines subreddit asks, more or less, why does nobody like Phobos armour? And the thread fills up fast. Some of the replies are about the models, some about the rules, some about a vaguer feeling that these blokes don’t quite belong in the range. I’ve typed a few of those replies myself.
My actual position, for what it’s worth: the concept behind Phobos is one of the best things in the modern Marine range, and GW handed it to a unit that flopped on the tabletop while wearing a helmet that looks like a toy. Eight years on, roughly as long as my eldest has been alive, the dislike isn’t really about the idea. It’s about a range that never grew into it.
What Phobos armour actually is
Mark X power armour, the stuff every Primaris Marine wears, is modular. Same undersuit, different configurations bolted on depending on the job. Tacticus is the standard middle-of-the-road version your Intercessors run around in. Gravis is the heavy stuff, the great big Aggressor and Eradicator suits. Phobos is the light one. It sheds a chunk of the ablative plating in exchange for speed, and the servo-motors are engineered to run almost silent, so a bloke in Phobos plate can get within arm’s reach of a sentry without being heard.
That’s the whole point of it. Phobos is what the 10th Company wears, the reconnaissance company, and the units are all built around getting behind the lines before anyone knows they’re there. Infiltrators jam comms. Incursors clear the way. Eliminators are snipers in the even-more-stripped-down version of the armour, picking off officers from a rooftop. Suppressors technically wear a fourth variant called Omnis, a halfway house between Gravis and Phobos with a jump pack, but they run with the same crowd. And then there’s the Reivers, the terror troops.
The lore for all this is genuinely great, and I don’t think that gets said enough. Reivers drop in solar weeks ahead of the main force, silent, and then when the moment comes they break cover in a wall of vox-amplified screaming and shock grenades that pump out mind-shredding noise and hololithic nonsense to convince the enemy a much bigger force has arrived. During the Indomitus Crusade the Vanguard formations ran ahead of Guilliman’s advance and just quietly took the Chaos war machine apart. There’s a bit in the codex background where they drown a Chaos Titan in burning promethium by sabotaging a set of sump dams, and a bit where they assassinate a Khornate warlord mid-battle so his warband collapses into infighting. Guilliman was impressed enough with all this that he amended the Codex Astartes, his big treatise on how war should be fought, to make room for them. That version of Phobos, the one in the books, is genuinely one of my favourite ideas in the setting.
The Reiver problem
What sank the whole range’s reputation was mostly the Reivers. They were in the Dark Imperium launch box for 8th edition, so a lot of us got ten of them whether we wanted them or not. And for years they were a punchline. One of the units you’d point at when someone asked what the worst datasheet in the game was.
The gimmick is terror. Shock grenades, morale debuffs, making the enemy run away. Sounds thematic. Problem is that morale in 40k has barely mattered for most of the last decade, and the armies that do fold to morale are exactly the ones you don’t need an elite close-combat squad to deal with. So you had an expensive unit whose entire special trick did nothing against the stuff you actually fight. They didn’t punch hard enough to earn their points, they died to a stiff breeze, and the terror mechanic was a rounding error on the battle. GW kept tinkering with them across editions and they stayed the kind of unit you brought out of obligation, because it was already in the case and already painted.
I fielded mine anyway. Them’s the models I had. I’d painted them, so, onto the table, game after game, doing nothing much. My favourite doomed boys.
There was one game against Pete, garage night, 8th edition, his Salamanders. I grav-chuted the Reivers in behind his firing line, which is the dream, the whole fantasy of the unit, and then rolled a charge I needed a six on and didn’t get it. They stood there in the open for a turn and his Aggressors turned them into a fine paste. I’d painted the skull masks in a hurry with a drybrush that went chalky, so they didn’t even die looking good. Pete still brings it up. He paints faster than me and wins more than me and he does not let things go.
You could see the market’s verdict on the shelf, too. My local store had the standalone Reivers box hanging on the peg for what felt like the entire back half of 9th edition, and I never once watched anyone lift it down. The stuff they got folded into shifted fine, because people buy a Combat Patrol for the discount and the transport, but the loose box just sat there collecting that specific grey dust that only ever settles on unloved kits. Pete reckons GW kept them in the range mainly so the starter sets had something cheap to pad the model count with. I’ve stopped arguing with him about it.
The look, and whether it deserves the hate
So the models. The skull masks read, to a lot of people, like a mid-2000s energy drink mascot. Very edgy, very “operator,” all these little pouches and straps and grav-chutes strapped onto blokes who are already eight feet of genetically engineered murder. It’s tactical gear cosplay. It’s the bloke at the gym with more kit than sense. And because the early kits were monopose push-fit, an army of them all stands the same way, which makes the whole thing look flatter than it should.
And yet. Look, I want to defend some of this, because I think the hate overshoots. The Eliminators are a lovely kit, cloaks and long rifles, one of the better sniper models GW has ever done. The Infiltrators are clean and purposeful and paint up a treat. Even the Reiver mask, if you paint it matte instead of chrome and lean into the horror of it rather than the toy of it, can look properly grim. A Terminator scares you with sheer mass and slow menace. The Reiver’s just a bloke who’s been quietly creeping up on you for a fortnight, which is a flavour of scary I actually really like. There’s a good army buried in this range if you paint it right.
But I keep coming back to the fact that GW never committed. The range is scattered. Some units are Phobos, one’s Omnis, and a chunk of the “covert” identity overlaps with Scouts, who were already the 10th Company’s recon guys and cost a fraction as much. Nobody ever quite answered why a Space Marine, the most conspicuous soldier in the galaxy, needs a stealth line at all, and the models got made before the fiction had really decided. So it always felt bolted on next to the older Primaris stuff.
The Scout overlap is the bit that actually nags at me. Scouts have been the recon arm since I started playing, cheap lads in carapace who sneak up a flank and die holding an objective. Then Phobos turns up and gives you Incursors, who also sneak up a flank, cost about three times as much, and do a slightly fancier version of the same job. Both sit in the current starter armies. Both get described as reconnaissance. If a new player asks you which one they’re meant to take, the honest answer is a shrug and “depends on your detachment,” which is a rough thing to say about a unit that’s supposed to have a clear reason to exist.
If there’s one place the whole covert fantasy properly clicks, it’s Kill Team. A single Phobos squad picking its way across a cramped board, one bad line of sight from getting spotted, is exactly the right scale for what these guys are meant to be, and the Phobos Strike Team box is genuinely one of the better ones. At that size I completely buy it.
The best version of a Reiver I’ve ever seen, honestly, is in Space Marine 2. There’s a Raven Guard who moves through a hive at night and you actually feel the silent-killer thing land. Watching that, I got it. Then I looked at my chalky little squad in the foam and did not get it.
Where it landed
The funny bit is that Phobos didn’t die. It just quietly stopped being the thing GW pushed. It arrived properly with Shadowspear in 2019, got a big Vanguard wave, a codex supplement, the lot, and then the spotlight moved on to Gravis and the flashier releases, and the sneaky Marines settled into being one of the army’s quieter, less fussed-over corners.
Have a look at the starter-set lists WarCom put out for the new edition this month. The Phobos units that show up are Incursors, tucked into the mix, doing an honest job of removing cover and screening the advance. Nobody writes home about them. No Reivers in sight. That’s more or less the whole story of the range in one army list. Quietly useful, rarely the star, and eight years in I still haven’t stripped and repainted mine.
