List of the Week: Top Performers Roundup 6/4/2024

Hello battle brothers! Another weekend has gone by, and it almost went without a Dark Angels list appearing in the top contenders, but there is one to talk about. At Dicehammer Open VII in Irvine CA, Stephen Corrales of Xenos Petting Zoo went 4-1 to take 7th out of 45 players.

Of course, Stephen took an Ironstorm Spearhead, and despite my defense of them, a part of me said, "Ugh, another one." I was considering just glossing over it, but I figured I should at least look at it, and I was actually surprised by a few elements of the list. You can find it on BCP here, but to save you the trouble the TLDR version is below.

Black Iron
Azrael
Ancient in Terminator Armor
Techmarine: Target Augury Web
Techmarine: Adept of the Omnissiah
Assault Intercessors with Jump Pack: 5 flying choppy boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky boys
Ravenwing Darkshroud
Redemptor Dreadnought
Repulsor Executioner
Repulsor Executioner
Scout Squad
Scout Squad
Stormraven Gunship
Wbirlwind

When I looked at the list, I actually saw the Ancient in Terminator Armor first (because Stephen used the 40K app to make the list), and I was immediately taken aback, because I did not expect to see one of those. It did suggest there would be Terminators, and just a little way down, there they were! Repulsor Executioners are not so remarkable. I didn't expect to see two of them AND a Stormraven Gunship, but they're pretty conventional for an Ironstorm. This is the first of these lists where I've seen a Whirlwind though. I think the Whirlwind is significantly overpriced, but at the same time I've been toying with using them in an Ironstorm. 

To take a moment to explain my thoughts on Ironstorm Whirlwinds, I've observed that most players put pretty weedy units on their home objectives, which is usually pretty reasonable because they're generally hard for an opponent to get to. So, I've been thinking about using Whirlwinds to blast those units off opponents' home objectives and drop the now-cheap Assault Intercessors onto them. Alternately, it obliges your opponent to hold back a unit he wasn't planning on holding back, which is almost as good as destroying it, because it keeps it from doing whatever it was your opponent wanted to do with it. Then you can slap the Whirlwind fire onto THAT unit, either obliging your opponent to send another unit back there or just accept you flipping their home objective and moving on.  I'm not saying it's the best plan ever, BUUUUT it doesn't escape my attention that Stephen has both a Whirlwind and a unit of Jump Pack Intercessors in this list.

Over the course of the weekend, Stephen won his first 2 games, lost Game 3, and then won his last 2 games. Game 1 he faced Chaos Knights, and won 99-37. Honestly, Chaos Knights were probably laughably easy for his list to deal with. He probably took fixed objectives and chose Deploy Teleport Homers and Bring It Down, and only missed scoring 100 points because it's nigh-unto-impossible to get a unit into an opponent's deployment zone to score it on the 1rst turn.

Anyway, editor's commentary aside, game 2 he won 86-40 against Blood Angels. Stephen's 51-65 3rd Round loss was against Space Wolves, but it was not the list you're thinking. Instead it was a Gladius with three squads of 10 Wulfen. Round 4 Stephen got back on the winning train, going 67-45 against Adeptus Mechanicus, and then ending strong with a 93-76 win against Astra Militarum. The Militarum player was probably counting pretty heavily on his pair of Rogal Dorn tanks, which seems like a losing proposition against a pair of Executioners. 

To talk about the statistics, over the weekend 13 players took Dark Angels to GTs. 

Of those players, 6 of them took Ironstorms. However, the weekend win rate for DA Ironstorms was only 32%, with 9 overall wins. Stephen having racked of up 4 of those means that the rest of the DA Ironstorm players combined only won a total of 1 game each. What that suggests to me is that optimistic but inexperienced players are using the Ironstorm hoping it will carry them to victory, or at least positive win rates.

Firestorms actually have a better weekend percentage than Ironstorms- 50%, though only 2 players played Firestorms. 

Three players (including me) took Gladius Task Forces and we got a total of 5 wins for a 33% win rate. Sorry brothers. I didn't help our win rates, but at least I didn't particularly hurt them either.

The Company of Hunters actually outperformed the Gladius in win percentage, but only 1 player took a CoH and got a 40% win rate, so won 2 games. 

One stubborn so-and-so who didn't get the memo took an Unforgiven Task Force and won 1 game for a 20% win rate. 

Mercifully, no one took an Inner Circle Task Force. 

So that was the snapshot of Dark Angels over the weekend. Thank you to Stephen for upholding the legion chapter and congratulations on a solid performance! Hopefully we'll all improve our performance in the future!

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

List of the Week: The Lion Victorious!

Image
1  Hello battle brothers! I bring news of the most successful Dark Angels list from the past weekend. It was a slow weekend for major tournaments due to a prominent religious holiday, but a few events were held, and a Dark Angels list took the top score at one of them.  I had to make a profile on  MiniHeadquarters.com  to look at this list, so I don't know the player's name, only his username - Golgoths31. This is a shame, because his list is very different from the usual Ironstorm Spearheads we've been seeing take high scores at events these past few months. Golgoths31 apparently said (in French), "You know what? Winning with an Ironstorm full of Stormravens is all well and good, but what the world needs is Lion El'Jonson leading Dark Angels to victory at GTs", and he went ahead and brought us that experience! At  Les stratèges d’Ambre le tournoi du printemps  in Tuzaguet, France, Golgoths31 went 4-1 to be 1rst out of 24. It may not have been a huge GT, but h
Read more

Dark Angels Tear It Up at Beachhead Brawl 2024!

Image
  It was a good weekend for the First Legion! Dark Angels lists made a strong showing at major events. The biggest of those events was Beachhead Brawl 2024 in England, a 6 round GT with 159 players. Dark Angels lists took 2nd and 3rd place, going 6-0 and 5-1 respectively. They were played by Jay Seebarun and Liam Callebout, both from Vanguard Tactics. If Liam's name is familiar, it's because I've written an article about one of his list before, which you can find  here.   The two teammates clearly were working from a similar playbook, because their lists strongly resemble each other. Both players took Ironstorm Spearheads, led by Azrael, featuring a Ravenwing Darkshroud, a Stormraven, and a plethora of Redemptor-chassis Dreadnoughts. The Ironstorm has been showing itself to be one of the detachments to use to get tournament results. Let's take a look at their lists and see what we can learn from them. We'll take a look at Jay's list first. Jay went undefeated an
Read more

The book is bad. What can we do about it?

Image
Dang it, I only finished this guy months ago! Codex supplement Dark Angels is officially released, and with the release of the points update, we can officially declare that the 40K rules team has done us a disservice. There are a couple minor bright points, but in general the book is a story of models dropped from the range, units nerfed, points too high, and bad detachments.  This may be pissing into the wind, but I think we're entitled to voice our displeasure to GW, and there are a couple channels by which we might do so. The first is the  Warhammer 40K community Facebook page , which infuriatingly (considering how poor the book's rules are) has Dark Angels in the banner art. One doesn't have to scroll down far to find an entry featuring Dark Angels. Leave a response voicing your displeasure with the book there.  It is also (kind of, maybe) possible to email GW directly. The Warhammer Community site has a  contact us  page with a couple options for emailing the company.
Read more