List of the Week: Top Performer 6/24/2024

 

Hello battle brothers! Another week has come, and with it a new meta is upon us! However, the events of the past weekend represent the last of the old meta. According to Meta Monday, only one Dark Angels list placed highly over the weekend, so this will be a short one.

The event the list placed at was the ITA 40K Singles GT 2024 in Ipswich Australia, where David Trueman of Virtus Veritas went 4-1 to score 5th out of 58.

David brought an Ironstorm Spearhead to the event, but his Ironstorm looked a little different from the ones that we've come to expect. You can see his full list on BCP here. The short version is below.

Ipswich Tank Association
Azrael
Lieutenant with Combi-weapon
Techmarine: Target Augury Web
Techmarine: Master of Machine War
Gliadiator Lancer
Gladiator Reaper
Gladiator Reaper
Predator Destructor
Predator Destructor
Predator Destructor
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Vindicator
Vindicator
Callidus Assassin

As you can see, no Darkshroud in this list, nor any Stormravens, Repulsor Executioners, or Dreadnoughts of any chassis. Instead, there's a veritable motor pool of medium tanks, the majority of which are Firstborn. After singing the praises of the Predator Destructor in this article, I'm gratified to see a high-performing list use three of them. It also explains why David preferenced Master of Machine War over Adept of the Omnissiah, as none of his vehicles were going to be fighting to much effect.  Between the combi weapon Lieutenant, the Callidus, and the Scout Squads, he also had plenty of units that could run around the board scoring secondaries for him.

1rst round was a win for David over Chaos Daemons, 70-55. 2nd round was an 82-49 win against Adeptus Sororitas. 3rd round was David's highest scoring game with a 96-82 win over Chaos Marines. David took his loss in the 4th round, 68-75 against Drukhari. David ended strong in the 5th round with an 81-58 win over Thousand Sons.

Next weekend will be the first weekend of the Pariah Nexus meta. A lot of people are starting to refer to the upcoming meta as the 10.5 edition, and I think there's some justice to that. The Ironstorm took a pretty significant nerf, with the Target Augury Web and Master of Machine War enhancements both changing from being auras to being targeted on single units, and the Stormraven went up in points sharply. However, I don't think we've seen the last of it. Tanks are still good, the Ironstorm still buffs tanks, it's probably one of the easier detachments to pilot, and I think we've seen enough Ironstorms without Stormravens do well to know that they aren't critical to the detachment's peformance. 

That said, GW improved the detachment rules for both the Unforgiven Task Force and the Inner Circle Task Force, plus they buffed Deathwing Knights and Lion El'Jonson. I think the Unforgiven Task Force is still fatally flawed, but the ICTF definitely looks a little more spicy, and Deathwing Knights slap now, so it might be we start seeing ICTFs with 3 units of DWKs placing in the meta. The Lion may appear more in competitive lists too - being able to Kool-Aid-Man it through walls should enable Lion Dad to get the drop on something important, and he's going to kill pretty much anything he touches. He might also wind up being a pretty important piece of tech against psychic armies, shoud the Thousand Sons and/or Grey Knights become the new boogeymen of the meta. We'll have to wait and see. 

Until then, congratulations to David Trueman on a fine performance, and I look forward to seeing what people come up with next week. May all your games be fun, and let us all represent the legion chapter as well as David did!

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