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3. He sent Thracians (as) guards.

I translate that as:

ἔπεμψε Θ?ᾷκας ὡς φύλακες.

I use ὡς because in a previous reading lesson they give it as "as." And I looked it up in my lexicon(Liddell and Scott) and it seems to be useable for what I'm going for here.

But I'm not sure if it is right to use it here and neither if I'm using φύλαξ in the best grammatical case with it.

If anyone could give me a better translation and tell me what's wrong with mine or tell me how to use ὡς that would be very nice. Thanks for reading.

I'm not absolutely certain what the best construction would be for the example you gave. I think you can use ὡς the way you did, although it isn't the most common use. φύλακας should be in the same case as its antecedent.

There's also another way in Greek to express a noun which is in apposition with another noun. This is where the Attic use of the article becomes quite useful. In the nominative you would write οἱ Θ?ᾷκες φύλακες (εἰσιν); the noun with the article is the subject, the one without is the predicate. With verbs of naming and the like (where it's natural to have a noun or adjective in apposition with the direct object) you can do the same thing: ?κάλεσε τὸν Σωκ?άτην σοφόν

I'm not sure whether you could say φύλακας ἔπεμψε τοὺς Θ?ᾷκας, however. It doesn't sound quite right for some reason and I can't find the section in my grammar at the moment which talks about this (apart from verbs which normally take a double accusative)