Lists of the Week: Top Performers 1/6/2025

Happy New Year battle brethren! After a 2-week break for the holidays, we have had GTs take place once again! Despite us probably entering the beginnings of the Ultramarines meta (at least as far as top-performing Space Marine lists goes), some Dark Angels lists did place well at their events, including winning the biggest event of the weekend. I was a little disappointed to see that none of them were Lion's Blade or Company of Hunters lists, but only one of them was a Gladius. So, let's look at the lists that did well over the weekend!

Our event-winning list topped the 2025 Glass City GT in Toledo OH, a 5-round, 100-player event. Zachary Morales took a Vanguard Spearhead and defeated all comers to take 1st place! You can see Zachary's list on BCP. The short version is below.

Dark Knights
Azrael - Warlord
Librarian in Terminator Armor: The Blade Driven Deep
Techmarine
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Centurion Devastator Squad: 6 ultra-chonky shooty boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys
Predator Destructor
Predator Destructor
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Vindicator
Vindicator

A Vanguard Spearhead winning an event was certainly not on my Bingo card, but here it is. It's not the most obvious detachment for making use of our bespoke units en masse, but if you don't mind building your list around a big brick of Centurion Devastators, you can get some work out of it. I think the Vanguard is considered more advantageous when one uses Ultramarines, because Uriel Ventris grants an Infantry unit the Deep Strike keyword, and that plus Guerilla Tactics is a spicy combo, but CentDevs don't really need to Deep Strike to reach out and touch whatever they need to.

Just a few reminders, as I don't find myself reviewing Vanguards that often, the Detachment rule is that everything in the army gets Benefit of Cover and Stealth against shooting attacks that come from more than 12" away, which is certainly a nice quality of life improvement for shooting units. The Blade Driven Deep enhancement grants Infiltrate to the unit the character is attached to, and Guerilla Tactics is a stratagem that allows the player to uppy-downy any Infantry unit. 

You can probably see where this is going.

The core of the list is the brick of CentDevs, who uppy-downy to get angles on targets Zachary wants destroyed. Handily, their Decimator Protocols rule grants them their own rerolls To Hit - rerolling 1's, or rerolling all To Hit rolls if the target is on an objective. That allows Zachary to obliterate any one unit his opponent puts on an objective with the CentDevs, while putting Oath on another target for his Predators and Vindicators to blast away. I suspect a significant reason we don't see more lists like this is that players are hesitant about making a major investment in the DevCents, them being Firstborn units and GW phasing out more and more of them as editions go on.

Vindicators and Predators certainly aren't going to mind getting Benefit of Cover in the open. Pred Destructors grant a nice solution to elite 3-wound infantry, and nothing in the game is going to enjoy having Vindicators line up to blast them with demolisher cannons. 

I can't decide if Zach uses his infiltrating Deathwing Knights to put pressure on his opponent early or to stick them on an objective, obliging his opponent to send out some pretty serious assets to remove them, exposing them to his return fire. Azrael doubtless hangs with the Inner Circle Companions, and I wouldn't be surprised if Zach holds them back as a counter-punch unit to deal with anything his opponent sends out to try and destroy his tanks.  He doesn't have an obvious unit to leave on his backfield objective, but the Vanguard has a strat that can not only sticky an objective, but also inflict a few Mortals on any unit that drops onto it, and any unit that does drop in would be exposed to getting murdered by Azrael and the ICCs if I'm right about how Zach uses them. That more-or-less frees up Scouts and Jump Intercessors to run around and do what they do. 

One little thing made me raise an eyebrow is that Zach's DWK Knight Master packed a Relic Weapon instead of the Great Weapon of the Unforgiven. The rest of his DWKs are listed as having maces, so I'm not sure why he made that choice. 

Zach rode the win train nonstop to the end of the track, and he faced some pretty stiff competition right out of the gate, taking a 1st round 82-75 win against Blood Angels played by Brad Chester, who I gather is the Brad Chester who has been a member of the Art of War team and is a professional 40K streamer and not some scrub with the same name. 2nd round he punished Astra Militarum 87-40. 3rd round he had a solid 79-61 against Aeldari. 4th round he had a comfortable 89-78 against Tyranids. 5th round he ended strong with a solid 87-57 against Necrons. 

The next list we're looking at was played at the Frost Spite GT in Phoenix AZ, where I'm almost certain they didn't actually have frost, but they did have a Dark Angels Stormlance played by Tanner Floyd of Making Saves take 4th place with a 5-1 performance. I don't think Tanner's name has cropped up in my blog before, so congrats to Tanner! You can see Tanner's list on BCP. The short version is below. 

Initial D-W
Azrael
Chaplain on Bike: Fury of the Storm
Lion Dad - Warlord
Sammael
Intercessor Squad: 5 bolter 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
Outrider Squad: 3 choppy biker boys
Outrider Squad: 3 choppy biker boys

Well, brethren Alan Percival and Toby Bennett did say we should look at the Stormlance as one of our competitive detachments. Tanner went all-in on punching things to death with this list, eschewing any fire support units or even the usual Scout Squads to score secondaries. He's got a pretty good range of punchy death in this list too, with plenty of Damage 2 punching from the DWKs, ICCs, and even the Outriders, Damage 3 punching from Sammy and the Chaplain when they charge with their attached Outriders, and Damage 4 punching from Lion Dad. The Chaplain having Fury of the Storm fixes the primary weakness of his melee attacks, the low AP, improving by a pip all the time and two pips when charging. He'll be Strength 8 on the charge too, wounding T4 infantry on 2's. Pretty sweet!

Tanner took a 1st round 46-79 loss against Adeptus Sororitas. He then won all his subsequent games. 2nd round he crushed Custodes 97-42. 3rd round he had a comfortable 87-74 against Tyranids. 4th round he had a close 93-83 against Necrons. 5th round he scored a close 85-79 against Blood Angels. 6th round he ended strong with a solid 97-63 against Blood Angels.

The last list we're looking at this week was played at the ProCon Golden Ticket GT played in Ontario OR (in the United States, not Canada), a 5-round, 23 player event, where Shaun Sharp of #REKT went 5-0 with a Gladius Task Force to take 1st place. It's kind of nice that the weekend was bracketed by Dark Angels wins at the biggest and smallest events. Anyway, you can see Shaun's list on BCP. The short version is below. 

Shaun's list (he did not give it a clever name)
So Good I Can't Believe It's Not Ironstorm!
Lion Dad - Warlord
Azrael
Intercessor Squad: 5 bolter boys
Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Invader ATV
Ballistus Dreadnought
Ballistus Dreadnought
Ravenwing Darkshroud
Redemptor Dreadnought
Redemptor Dreadnought
Redemptor Dreadnought
Vindicator

This is definitely not a conventional DA Gladius. In fact, it's so unconventional I'm inclined to wonder if maybe it's a Lion's Blade and Shaun built in in the app as a Gladius because the app hasn't been updated to include the Lion's Blade yet (I checked just a couple hours ago). You'd think he'd have at least a few more token Ravenwing units to activate the detachment ability and some of the strats, but he's not really Deep Striking anything in this list, so the Redemptors are probably stomping up the board and the mass of Dreads may only need 1 turn of having their shooting enhanced before the Redemptors, Azrael and the ICCs, and Lion Dad charge in and wreck things. He probably just uses the ATV to activate Illuminating Fire once, then has it charge in to help Azzy and his spooky awesome swordy buds stick their charge.

Edit: Shaun commented on Facebook that his list was, in fact, a Gladius. He uses Devastator Doctrine early to get shooting angles, Assault Doctrine to get his Redemptors and Lion Dad stuck in, and then Tactical Doctrine to fall back out of combat to get more shooting and charging in. 

Shaun's ride on the win train started with a tight 1st round 80-78 against Orks. 2nd round he got a comfortable 93-74 win against Necrons. 3rd round was a solid 77-49 win against Chaos Daemons. 4th round he had another squeaker, 76-74 against Adepta Sororitas. 5th round he ended strong with an 87-73 win against Chaos Knights.

Statistics

It's a brand new meta, so it's a fresh start on the data collection. 19 players played 93 games and won 46 of them, for an overall 49% win rate. We had 4 players go X/0-X/1, with 2 of those winning their events. 

Our winningest detachment was the Vanguard, with 2 players playing 10 games and winning 7 of them for a 70% win rate. That said, one player was responsible for 5 of them, so the other player only got 40% win rate. 1 of the event winners was a Vanguard.

Our second-winningest detachment was the Stormlance, with 5 players playing 26 games and winning 16 of them for a 62% win rate. 

One optimist played the Unforgiven Task Force and got a 40% win rate.

One other optimist played a Company of Hunters, but looks like he dropped after going 1-2 on the first day because he's only listed as having played 3 games.

I'm going to asterisk the Gladius and the Lion's Blade, because Shaun's list is entered as a Gladius, but I've got $5 says it's a Lion's Blade, which seriously alters the statistics. 

*The Gladius was played by 7 players who got a 44% win rate and picked up the other event win.

*The Lion's Blade had 3 players who scored a 33% win rate

If I'm correct about Shaun's list, the Gladius' win rate for the weekend is actually 34% and the Lion's Blade is 50%

Edit: I was not correct. 

I had the notion to keep a running tally of the size of the events lists are scoring at, because while winning or placing at a GT is impressive regardless of size, the bigger the GT the stiffer the challenge (at least one would think). Here's my table for this week:

Here's how I'm ranking events.

Small event: less than 30 players

Medium event: 30-89 players

Large event: 90-200 players
Huge event: 201+ players

I'll grant that these figures are a little arbitrary, but they give us a baseline to work with. I think it'll be interesting to see if we're just terrorizing little metas, or if we're competitive at big events.

One other piece of information I'd like to offer is what lists appear to be topping the meta. This will inform all of us what we should expect to face going to tournaments, so we can familiarize ourselves with their rules ahead of time. 

Necrons are at the top of that list, with a 56% win rate for the weekend, 13 X/0-X/1 results, and 2 event wins. 10 of those X/0-X/1 results and both event wins were Shatterstar Arsenal lists, so bone up on what that does.

Astra Militarum scored a 58% win rate over the weekend, with 8 X/0-X/1 results and 2 event wins. 5 of the X results and both event wins were Bridgehead Strike lists.

Adeptus Custodes had a 53% win rate, with 7 X/0-X/1 results and 1 event win. 5 of the X results were the Solar Spearhead detachment, and the other 2 and the event wins were Shield Host lists.

That, battle brethren, is what I've got for you this week. If you like my content, hunt down that Follow button like it's a member of the Fallen. Also, you won't regret following Dank List Wargaming over on YouTube. Until next week, good luck in your hobby and competitive endeavors. There's one more weekend before the Las Vegas Open, so hopefully we can figure out what to play that will do the legion chapter credit at the biggest event of the year. For the Lion!