Lists of the Week: Top Performers 10/4/2024

 Hello battle brethren! Meta Monday is being a little slow with the weekend's results, so I figured I'd better stop waiting for them and start looking for the high performing lists myself.  It was a slow weekend anyway, with only 2 Dark Angels lists placing well enough to be of note.

Going through the GTs on BCP as they appear, the first Dark Angels list that rates a mention was played at the Alba GT 2024, played at (and I'm copy-pasting this from BCP): 10 Fő utca, Székesfehérvár, 8000, Magyarország in Hungary.  This was a 70 player, 5 round event. Daniel Orosz of Cult of Dice went 4-1 with his Gladius and scored 7th overall. You can see Daniel's list on BCP. The short version is below.

Angels in Wolf's Skin
Azrael
Apothecary Biologis: Fire Discipline
Judiciar
Assault Intercessor Squad: 5 choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Eradicator Squad: 6 chonky melta boys
Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys
Infiltrator Squad: 5 sneaky boys
Repulsor
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads

No shade at Daniel, but this is 99% the Lennon List, the only difference being that John Lennon's list has a squad of Deathwing Knights packing swords instead of maces. If John Lennon played it, we know it's a good list, and Daniel clearly got his reps in.

1rst round Daniel led with a very convincing 96-54 win against Chaos Daemons. 2nd round he got an 85-66 win against Thousand Sons, which is no small feat. 3rd round he took his loss, 69-78 against Death Guard. 4th round he squeaked a 78-77 win against Adeptus Custodes. The practice did him good apparently, because 5th round he beat Custudes again with a more comfortable 90-77 lead.

The next list that appears in the top brackets was played by Evan Stump of Xenos Petting Zoo at  the Paragon City Games Warhammer 40K Store Championships, a 5-round, 34 person event. Evan went 5-0 with his Gladius and placed 1st!  You can see Evan's list on BCP. The short version is below.

2 repex
Azrael
Captain in Terminator Armour
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys
Repulsor Executioner
Repulsor Executioner
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Callidus Assassin

This is a little different, the obvious point of variation being the pair of Repulsor Executioners. The Repex's Executioner (+1 To Hit targets below Half Strength) isn't very sexy, but they each pack a 2 shot D6+4 damage heavy laser destroyer and throw a veritable brick of dice for the chaff-clearing guns they are festooned with. (As an aside, the Repex is the kind of unit it's valuable to have a pre-counted bucket of color-coded dice for.) Evan was likely able to devote his Oath into whatever he wanted the laser destroyers to pick up, because the rest of the list barely needs Oath to function well. 

Azrael doubtless gets to hang with the ICCs in this list, which is more exciting than attaching him to Assault Intercessors and having him fight on the periphery, and the Terminator Captain adds some oomph to a squad of DWKs and lets them reroll Charge rolls. Evan skimped a bit on his backfield objective unit, settling for a squad of Scouts instead of Infiltrators, but he has the Callidus for her superior uppy-downy shenanigans. I'd have probably used Infiltrators and dedicated both Scout Squads to uppy-downy secondary scoring, but I'm not the guy who won a GT with his list. 

Evan's ride on the win train was non-stop. 1st round he crushed an Imperial Knights list 94-44. 2nd round he buried Chaos Marines 90-34. 3rd round was a much tighter 79-69 win against Genestealer Cult. 4th round he played another Dark Angels list and won 72-52. 5th round he ended strong with a 96-66 win against Tyranids.

Statistics

I don't have the stats for the weekend from Meta Monday, so I'll give you what's on Stat-check.com. Since the release of the Imperial Agents book (which hasn't been very long), Dark Angels have been sitting on a 51% win rate. 189 players have played Dark Angels lists, and have represented 5% of the player base. 

The Gladius has a 54% win rate. 9% of Gladius lists are going 4-0 for the first 4 games of an event. The Gladius has 5 event wins since Imperial Agents dropped, and have an overrep of 1.58. That figure indicates how over-represented the detachment is at the podium of events. An even 1 would indicate that exactly the same percentage of DA Gladius players that are showing up at events are making the podium of events. So, DA Gladius detachments have made the podium at a significantly higher rate than the statistical average - but not the highest by any stretch. 150 players played the DA Gladius, making up 4% of the player base. 

The only other detachment that has had more than 10 people play it since Imperial Agents is the Inner Circle Task Force. It was played by 17 players and got a 32% win rate. 

As usual, I encourage you to check out Dank List Wargaming, and I'd really appreciate it if you'd click the Follow button over on the left.

Well battle brethren, it was a short one this week. Watch this space for more weekend roundups, and I have another Know The Foe article coming out shortly. This time I'm covering Thousand Sons, so if you're having trouble with Magnus's book nerds, hopefully I can help you out. Congratulations to Evan and Daniel. May we all emulate your fine example. For the Lion!