Lists of the Week: 3/24/2025

Hello battle brethren! Another weekend has come and gone. That weekend only yielded 2 lists to talk about, but one of them is Toby Bennett's Stormlance Task Force, which he played to go 5-1 at The South-Coast 40k Super-Major, a 5-round, 243 player event with the top players facing off against each other after the 5th round. Toby's list wound up falling to the hellaciously-broken Ork More Dakka! detachment (3 of the 4 top bracket lists were More Dakka! lists, and they took the top 3 spots). The Tobinator took 5th place, doing Black Crow Gaming proud. You can see Toby's list on BCP and below. 

Look, it's an innovative list alright, I started with 15 deathwing knights because I'm a lovely person, then I got sad that Aeldari can move block me so I added 15 Jump packs because just leave me alone please and thanks but then everyone started talking about this new bloody Ork list and I had to counter that so in went the triple preds and really this is where we got to. Lion is still a DILF but he can't reactive move now, boo hiss (This is legit what Toby named the list)

Azrael - Warlord
Lieutenant with Combi-weapon
Assault Intercessor Squad: 5 choppy boys
Intercessor Squad: 5 bolter 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
Incursor Squad: 5 spotty choppy boys
Predator Destructor
Predator Destructor
Predator Destructor
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads

Toby already did a pretty good job describing the thought process behind his list in his list title, but I suppose I might as well add some thoughts. The first is that this is a pretty stripped down list, with no indulgences at all. Everything's got a purpose, which Toby described above. It seems he leaned into teching against the meta lists, but he didn't ignore the probability of going up against something like a Knights list. DWKs can of course punch down a Monster or Vehicle really nicely, and the Destructors will do a credible job with their sponson lascannons, HK missiles, and even their Destructor Autocannon is not useless against them.

Incursors keep popping up in these lists. I suppose they're a useful way of counterbalancing -1 To Hit effects, and if your opponent doesn't have any, then shooting with +1 To Hit can be like having a second Oath target for way less than Guilliman costs. They're also respectably knifey, so you can put them into skirmishing units. 

Azrael, sadly, is relegated to hanging with Assault Intercessors in the backfield, but that does seem to be what top-performing lists do with him, and it does give you something to put into pesky opposing tech pieces popping up in your backfield. Tobes has Intercessors minding his backfield objective, and they can sticky it and come off as soon as his opponent commits his reserve assets. Two squads of Scouts and the Combi-Lieutenant can run around and score Secondaries. Toby outfitted his Scouts with combat knives, so they can go shank his opponent's tech pieces, and honestly they probably do more damage that way than occasionally getting to potshot with a missile launcher and a sniper rifle.

Toby went 5-0 through the 5 main rounds of the event! 1st round he buried Chaos Daemons (Shadow Legion) 100-45.  2nd round he crushed T'au Empire (Experimental Prototype Cadre) 100-32.  3rd round he drubbed Drukhari (Realspace Raiders) 90-60. 4th round he drubbed Death Guard (Plague Company) 84-56. 5th round he convincingly beat Custudes (Lions of the Emperor) 91-57. It finally took a top player and a broken detachment to end his streak, 61-100 against Orks More Dakka! (The exclamation point being part of the name of the detachment annoys me so much).

The other list that went X/1 this weekend was also played at The South-Coast 40k Super-Major and was also a Stormlance, played by Patrick Carroll of Bristol Crusaders. Patrick went 4-1, earning himself 40th place, which out of a field of almost 250 is respectable. You can see Patrick's list on BCP and below. 

Patrick's List
Azrael
Ravenwing Command Squad: Fury of the Storm
Intercessor Squad: 5 bolter 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
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Outrider Squad: 6 choppy biker boys
Gladiator Lancer
Gladiator Lancer
Callidus Assassin

It's interesting to see how Patrick's list differs from Toby's. One big difference is that Patrick has a big brick of bikes with which to exploit the detachment's Mounted-keyworded Stratagems. I imagine Patrick sents it out first turn to draw aggro, nerfing opponent's shooting into it with Ride Hard, Ride Fast. They'll hit pretty hard on the charge too, with the sheer mass of attacks and the Champion getting up to Strength 7 AP -4 Damage 3.

Azrael gets to lead a unit of ICCs, which is far sexier than sticking him with Assault Intercessors, but at the same time makes one more likely to throw him in harm's way, which could lose one his CP generation. Patrick leaned a little harder into anti-Vehicle/Monster with his tank choices being Gladiator Lancers, though they can throw a bucket of dice at chaff, and Aeldari infantry really doesn't like having buckets of Strength 4 shooting thrown at them. 

With 2 Scout Squads in the list, Patrick doesn't really need the Callidus to uppy-downy score Secondaries for him. I suspect the Callidus might be in there to snipe out pesky Aeldari characters in particular, with all her weapons having Precision and most Aeldari characters being 4-5 Wounds. Sniping them out seems eminently doable for a Callidus. At least once anyway. 

In the 1st round, Patrick squeaked out a win against Astra Militarum (Hammer of the Emperor) 83-79. 2nd round he drubbed Aeldari (Aspect Host) 93-61. 3rd round had a tight win against Genestealer Cult (Biosanctic Broodsurge) 64-58. 4th round he took his loss against Adeptus Custodes (Lions of the Emperor) 57-75. He ended strong though, with a 5th round win against Blood Angels (Liberator Assault Group) 78-70.

I'm going to throw an Honorable Mention to Jay Seebarun of Vanguard Tactics, who went 4-2 with his Gladius Task Force at the Goonhammer Open UK March 2025, an event with 6 rounds and 65 players. I happened to find it looking for that second Stormlance that went 4-1. You can see Jay's 9th place placing list on BCP and below. 

Dark Angels: G
Azrael - Warlord
Chaplain in Terminator Armour
Chaplain in Terminator Armour
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Infiltrator Squad: 5 stay-off-my-lawn boys
Infiltrator Squad: 5 stay-off-my-lawn boys
Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys
Predator Destructor
Predator Destructor
Whirlwind
Armiger Warglaive
Armiger Warglaive
Callidus Assassin

Jay's list bears some similarities with our previous lists, with the DWKs, Predators, and Azrael joining ICCs. It's interesting to see the Whirlwind. I think Jay's thinking behind that is to tech against Aeldari and Orks, though one might argue for 10 more points he would have been better off with a Desolation Squad. He went with 2 squads of Infiltrators, which will effectively let him zone out a whole third of a table. I'm curious to see the Terminator Chaplains, particularly because both his DWK squads are macey boys. If they were swordy boys it'd make more sense to me. My only thought is that Jay wanted to make sure they were wounding on 2's against virtually all Infantry and Mounted units. Either that or he really wanted Mortal Wound protection all the time (that's probably more likely).

The allied Knights are something we don't see too often at top levels, probably because they don't benefit from army or detachment rules. If you're going to ally in Armigers, Warglaives are the way to go though. Their thermal spears and Reaper chain-cleaver are solid weapons that do things that we're hard pressed to find in our own army, whereas the Helverin isn't bringing much to the table Predator Destructors don't, and the Moirax has weird guns that don't seem like they'd be useful enough without Knight army and detachment rules.

In Jay's case, he really needs the Callidus to do uppy-downy secondary scoring, since he doesn't have any Scouts to do it with, nor any jump pack units to drop in and score.

Jay drubbed Chaos Daemons (Shadow Legion) 97-63 in the 1st round. 2nd round he was crushed by Adeptus Custodes (Lions of the Emperor) 46-100. He bounced back in the 3rd round with a convincing 85-67 win against Genestealer Cult (Host of Ascension).  4th round he had another convincing win, 91-71, against Aeldari (Aspect Host) 5th round he took another loss against Custodes (Lions) 85-95. He ended strong though, with a credible 100-80 win against Black Templars (Righteous Crusaders).

Statistics

Dark Angels as a whole had a respectable 51% win rate over the weekend, with 24 players playing 133 games and winning 68 of them. We had 2 X/0-X/1 results, which we discussed above. 

The best-performing detachment by far was the Stormlance Task Force, with 9 players, a 62% win rate, and both the X/1 results.

The most played detachment was the Gladius Task Force, with 12 players who sadly only earned a 42% win rate.

One player took a Company of Hunters and did better than I did, going 3-3 at their event.

One player took a Lion's Blade detachment and went 2-3 at their event. 

My observation about Dark Angels since the beginning of the 2025 is that, as an army it can do decently, but not with our bespoke detachments. We're also not winning events, having had only 1 event win over approximately 3 months. That suggests to me that our bespoke units and detachments could definitely use some upward tweaks. 

Factions To Be Aware Of

Last week's prediction that Orks More Dakka! are going to be a problem was no great feat of prognostication and it certainly came true. The OMD detachment had 40 players who scored a 67% win rate, 19 X/0-X/1 results, and 4 event wins. That's more players than we had in total and literally 10x the X results.

Aeldari are also a problem, the Devoted of Ynnead detachment in particular with 28 players, a 61% win rate, 7 X results, and 2 event wins.

There are other strong factions and detachments, but none of them seem to be putting up such lopsided results in vast numbers as Ynnead Aeldari and MD Orks do. 

That, honorable battle brethren, is what I have for you. Follow me if you like this content, and also check out my pals at Dank List Wargaming over on YouTube. Until next week, may you crush your heretical and xenos opponents. For the Emperor!