Recommendations 40k army

Gents,

Am planning on starting up 40k again after a long period off.
What army would you recommend I start, used to play DE and Marines.
Will need to have a 1,500 pts list painted and ready for Sept.
Your advise would be greatly appreciated

You want it cheap army, fun army, competitive, fast, tanky?

Right atm there are specific units and races that people hate. Imperial guards with vendettas are reaaaaly good, but your opponents wont realy like to play against you (new 6th edition syndrome becouse of flyers). Necrons are both cheap and top tier right now, becouse of their flyers. Chaos Space marines have helldrake, which is another, one of the best flyers in the game atm, and actualy, its realy cool and fun to play him, but not against him. Also double sorcerers CSM builds have ton of utility and options. When I play against them, It seems like my opponent has alot of fun casting their spells.

Grey knights are cheap, sturdy, and a generaly good army, but in my taste, they aren't realy fun. Orcs are always fun, they don't care about flyers at all, but are expansive army. You're definately going to have great fun with orcs, thats for sure.

If choosing from those who you played already, Dark eldar in 6th got ALOT better, due to the allies. You can ally Eldar guys, with eldrad, to get great powers and best psycic defense in the game, which is realy strong. All our vehicles, get jink save, means that they get cover save when they just move (and when you don't move them right?), which makes them even more durable. Shooty dark eldar is the army I play aswell, and are crazy fun and strong . The downside is recent Tau book. DE did good particulary against most things, but tau with beeing able to strip cover from units with ease, totaly crushes our only defense possible. You can actualy be tabled on T1 - T2 against Tau, no joke. But thats only that

For spacemarines, depends which spacemarines you're talking about. Right now Space wolves are considered most competitive and strong. Personaly I played Blood angels, but they received heavy nerfes from previous edition, and by many they are considered the weakest SM codex (well, I'm far from that statement, but Id say, that right now there are better codexes indeed). Dark angels are now realy strong. But as I mentioned earlier - Helldrake... is a  bane of ALL space marines, except terminators. Helldrakes 99% of the time are equiped with a flamer, whose flamer template can be placed anywhere 12" from the head of its model, as templates do, it ignores cover, is AP3, and str 7. So every marine you wound on 2, automaticaly dies, unless it has Inv save, or Feel no pain (so almost never, unless its legion of damnd, or blood angels). Luckily, most blood angels have that, but thats the only protection that will still get alot of casualities. Yet, terminators don't realy care about helldrakes, which makes Terminator based army realy good. Deathwing comes to my mind.

So Deathwing is also good competitive army. The recent deathwing book actualy got ALOT of fun - the reason why I'm starting to play against them. They can choose to deepstrike on T1, with 1 special character, saying your DW don't scatter, you can go nuts with droping your heavy artilery right into the face, and the turn they deepstrike, they get twin-linked on everything. Just how sexy this sounds?

Vanilla spaces marines are hmm, I'm not sure. They have fun little flyer, thats not totaly broken like most other flyers (means, other players won't discard you, becouse you run them), but extremly fun to fly around and quite good overall. Helldrake just makes your army look dumb. If I would look for a fun SM army, I would choose one of its chapters, like Imperial Fists, or Salamanders. Both are fun with their rerolls on their signature weaponry.

Hope this wall of text somehow helps

Raven,

Thank you for your input. A full and comprehensive over view.
I'm tempted by the death wing army idea. I used to play Dark Angels and I like the fluff that goes with them.
Are they competitive enough by them selves?

I started to play with them recently, with having in mind "Pure Terminators!". My previous post could be a bit misleading. ALL their terminator units can deepstrike on T1, AND added to that, they have that special character which doesn't scatter, and ALL those who deepstriked, has that twin-link. (my previous post could look, like only 1 unit can do that). 6th Edition rule states precisely, that you can reserve (therefore deepstrike) 50% rounded up, of your units, where special characters and their units count as single unit still. The rest MUST start on table. So Pure terminators are somehow limiting this factor. So ppl invented a way, to include Dreadnoughts with autocannons (which are realy good too) so they count for that non-reserved limit, or you can get Landraiders, as not bad transport, for melee Termies.

6th Edition is now objective based edition, meaning 5/6 missions, has objectives of some sort, that ONLY scoring units (troop choices) can take over. So troops are now realy the thing, that you should rely in 6th. Scoring terminators, are just awsome!

They have weaknesess like almost all armies do. Like they hate hordes (new Chaos space marines with cultists/zombies based, orcs or tyranids). But hey, you still can equip your termies depending, on what your Meta plays with. My local area game store runs 2 Deathwing players, and they just love them. They might have rough time against hordes, but they don't care. Deathwing deepstrikes are just too fun. So yes, they are competitive enough by themselves.