Chapter Update 5/19/2025
We do have some lists to discuss however. I'm excited to tell you that an Unforgiven Task Force won an event! In addition to that, a Company of Hunters list went X/1, as did a Stormlance Task Force. Edit: Meta Monday incorrectly identified the winning list as a UTC, and in some fairness Conor's list entry on BCP doesn't include the detachment. His winning list was actually a Stormlance. Let's take a look at these lists and see what we can learn from them.
The obvious thing to do is to start with the event winning list, so we'll do that. At the Winchester 40K GT - May 2025 in England, Conor McNama of South London Legion brought his UTC Stormlance and his boss energy and went 5-0 to take 1st place! You can see Conor's list on BCP, and we'll discuss it below.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Conor has a discussion of his list on the Dark Angels Competitive 40K page on Facebook. If you're viewing this entry from there, scroll down a bit to find Conor's discussion of his list. If not, click on the link and scroll down to his post.
Conor's event-winning list
Lion Dad - Warlord
Azrael
Bladeguard Ancient
Judiciar
Lieutenant with Combi-weapon
Assault Intercessor Squad: 5 choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Assault Intercessors with Jump Packs: 5 flying choppy boys
Bladeguard Veterans: 3 awesome swordy-boardy boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Deathwing Knights: 5 awesome chonky macey boys
Infiltrator Squad: 5 stay-off-my-lawn boys
Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Sternguard Veteran Squad: 10 awesome bolter boys
This is a pretty conventional Stormlance list. None of the units are surprising to see, save maybe the Bladeguard and the Bladeguard Ancient, and we have seen those guys show up from time to time. Bladeguard make a reasonable lower-cost alternative to Inner Circle Companions that come with their own Invulnerable Save, and the Ancient both boosts their OC and can give them an Attacks buff once per game. I was a little surprised to only see 3 Bladeguard, but in his Facebook writeup Conor explained their job is to sit on an objective and be too much for a skirmishing unit to either pick up or out-OC.
Conor rode the win train all the way to the last stop. 1st round was a close 82-72 against Hammer Militarum. 2nd round was a crushing 99-25 against a Raven Guard Vanguard. 3rd round he squeaked out an 84-83 win against a Chaos Knights Traitoris Lance War Dog spam list. Round 4 was a tight 81-78 win against Angelic Inheritors Blood Angels. Round 5 Conor squeaked out another 1 point win, 78-77 against a Chaos Daemons Daemonic Incursion with 3 GUOs and the named GUO, Rotigus. Every time I see a list that spams GUOs, I've had the thought that Rotigus and the other named god-specific greater daemons should count towards the Rule of 3 in regards to how many of the type of greater daemons can be in a list, but that's a discussion for another day. Congratulations Conor!
Seriously go read Conor's writeup of his GT win. He goes into some depth about how his games went. I'm impressed with the amount of detail he was able to recall after the fact.
Our next list was played at the 2025 Game Grid Open, a 5-round, 35 player event held in Idaho Falls ID. Our brother James Walsh of Coors Light Saedath took a Company of Hunters, went 4-1, and scored 4th place. You can see James' list on BCP. Our discussion is below.
DA Hunters
Ravenwing Command Squad
Ravenwing Command Squad: Recon Hunter
Ravenwing Command Squad: Master of Manoeuvre
Outrider Squad: 3 choppy biker boys
Outrider Squad: 3 choppy biker boys
Outrider Squad: 3 choppy biker boys
Ballistus Dreadnought
Ballistus Dreadnought
Ballistus Dreadnought
Centurion Devastator Squad: 3 chonky shooty boys
Centurion Devastator Squad: 3 chonky shooty boys
Centurion Devastator Squad: 3 chonky shooty boys
Invader ATV: multimelta buggy
Invader ATV: multimelta buggy
Ravenwing Black Knights: 3 awesome plasma biker boys
Ravenwing Darkshroud
Storm Speeder Hammerstrike
First thing jumped out at me - no Azrael. That's unconventional, but the Company of Hunters has kind of weak stratagems, so James doesn't suffer as much from the lack as he might have playing a Gladius or a Stormlance.
Another thing that jumped out at me is that James built a primarily shooty list, which I think is the way to go with the Company of Hunters. The detachment rule is fantastic for shooting units, and James certainly stacked his list with those. What's more is that both the Ballisti and the CentDevs come with their own built-in rerolls to hit, making them pretty independent of Oath of Moment. That frees up James to put Oath on something he's going to put his bike squads into, secure in the knowledge he can rely on his other units' built-in rerolls.
James' list would be hard to put in jail. Recon Hunters lets him Scout a squad with that RWCS attached up 9", Master of Manoeuvre lets him have that unit pop out of Reserves Turn 1, and he can use Rapid Reappraisal to pop the theird RWCS and whatever it's attached to into Reserves Turn 1 and pop them out the next turn, or even that turn with Rapid Ingress if he happens to go first. I might have included at least a bigger Ravenwing Black Knight squad for full high speed plasma pain, but James may have decided a 9-man brick of them is too hard to maneuver around the table - I know from experience it can be pretty challenging.
I've questioned how worthwhile the Darkshroud is, with the amount of Ignores Cover there is in the game, but the Stealth bubble at least makes opponents' shots less likely to hit, and with the kinds of shots opponents would have to put into Ballisti or CentDevs, every miss is significant. If I was confident CentDevs will survive the purge of Firstborn units at least through 11th edition, I might be inclined to pick some up. I never picked any up because I used to think they were pretty goofy looking, but their appearance compares favorably to Aggressors and Desolators.
Speaking of Ignores Cover, the Hammerstrike provides it, it's got not insignificant firepower itself, and it's handy to have Fly in a list from time to time. I've been able to flip objectives by having a Storm Speeder hop over a screen and park itself on a lightly held objective.
Another unusual feature is that James doesn't have any of the usual utility units - no Intercessors or Infiltrators to hold the backfield objective, no Scouts for uppy-downy scoring. He does have a lot of Mounted units that can move around the table quickly, and go into Reserve off the table with Rapid Reappraisal. He might be leaving an Invader on his backfield objective, or possibly just stickying it with Hunter's Trail and pushing forward with everything he's got.
It looks like James was in contention for 1st place. Besides the player that actually took 1st place, James is the only player who went 4-0 over the first four rounds, and his loss was to the 1st place player. 1st round he crushed a Salamanders list of indeterminate detachment (wasn't stated in the list description) 100-48. For some reason the Salamanders player only played 1940 points, which probably indicates a pretty new player with a limited collection. Anyway, 2nd round James beat a Dark Angels Ironstorm 98-90. 3rd round he scored a comfortable 87-68 against a Death Guard Virulent Vectorum list. 4th round he crushed an Aeldari Aspect Host 100-45. 5th round he took his loss, 57-83 against the event-winning Chaos Marine Fellhammer Siege-host.
As I was searching through BCP results to find the third list Meta Monday indicated went X/1 over the weekend, I came across Alexander Marrone's Gladius Strike Force list. His list actually went 4-2, but it went 4-1 in the first 5 rounds of the event, and would have gone X/1 had it been a 5 round event, but it was a 6-round event. The event in question was Mayhem 4: Live Free or Dice Hard, with 155 players, easily the biggest event of the weekend, played in Mebane, NC. Alexander took 36th place, which is pretty respectable considering, so I figure his list is worth an honorable mention. You can see Alexander's list on BCP, and we'll discuss it below.
DA GTF
Azrael - Warlord
Judiciar: The Honour Vehement
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
Inner Circle Companions: 6 spooky awesome swordy boys
Invader ATV
Predator Destructor
Scout Squad: 5 sneaky lads
Vindicator
Vindicator
Callidus Assassin
This is a fairly conventional Dark Angels Gladius, with the main standout deviations being it having two squads of ICCs and two squads of Infiltrators. That may be a choice we should start considering more broadly. Units that have 6" Deep Strike abilities that can charge afterwards are starting to appear in the game (Deathshroud Terminators have it as a datasheet ability), so being able to force them to come in outside their ability to charge is going to be important. Two squads of ICCs is unusual mostly because I think most of us regard one as sufficient. Also, Alexander paid for it partially be only having two squads of DWKs. That said, there was one squad for Azrael and one squad for the Judiciar, so it's sort of a best-of-both-worlds scenario. The rest of the list is all pretty solid choices overall, and the Gladius is the best detachment for an army list with a balanced mix of shooting and assault.
Looks like Alexander got a by 1st round, being awarded 86 points. 2nd round he took a 65-82 loss against Ynnead Aeldari. 3rd round he had a close 60-54 win against Daemons Shadow Legion. 4th round he scored a respectable 99-74 against an Imperial Knights Noble Lance. 5th round he scored a solid 73-42 against a World Eaters Berserker Warband. 6th round he took a 46-87 loss against a Chaos Knight Traitoris Lance.
Statistics
According to Meta Monday's statistics for the weekend, Dark Angels got a 39% win rate for the weekend, which is pretty terrible. 31 players played Dark Angels lists. As I was looking through event listings on BCP, there were whole events where there were no Dark Angels players. Not tiny ones either - events with like 40-70 players. We're credited with 3 X-results, but I could only find 2 on BCP. We did get the 1 event win though, which I'm pretty sure breaks a months-long dry spell.
Stat-check.com lists Dark Angels as having a 52% win rate, but it's only tracking results to the release of the 2025 Q1 Dataslate, which was over two months ago. Our win rate has really taken a nosedive since then. I hope GW is paying attention.
Our most played detachment was the Gladius, with 11 players who were only able to manage a 37% win rate.
Next most played was the Stormlance Task Force, with 9 players, who scored an even worse 30% win rate, but a Stormlance player did pick up our one event win, incorrectly attributed to an Unforgiven Task Force.
After that, the Company of Hunters had 4 players, a 60% win rate, and an X-result.
3 players played the Unforgiven Task Force, and they managed a 50% win rate. The X-result/Event win attributed to a UTF was apparently an error. If someone is aware it's listed somewhere besides BCP, feel free to correct me.
2 players played Lion's Blade lists, bringing in a 33% win rate.
1 player got a 40% win rate with an Ironstorm Spearhead. 1 player got a 20% win rate with an Inner Circle Task Force.
Factions/Detachments to Watch Out For
Death Guard had 69 players, a 55% win rate, 17 X-results, and 5 event wins. They were the top scoring faction of the weekend. The Virulent Vectorum detachment was the most played with 26 players, scorning a 59% win rate, 9 X-results, and 4 of the event wins. Champions of Contagion was the third most played with 11 players scoring a 67% win rate, 6 X-results, and 1 event win.
Imperial Knights had 62 players, a 55% win rate, 14 X-results, and 4 event wins. They were the 2nd highest scoring faction of the weekend. Everyone playing Imperial Knights played the Noble Lance detachment.
Chaos Daemons had 66 players, 16 X-results, and 1 event win. They were the 6th place faction of the weekend. The most played detachment was Shadow Legion, which brought in a reasonable 49% win rate, but was responsible for 6 of the X-results. The Daemonic Incursion detachment had 20 players, who racked up a 65% win rate, 8 of the X-results, and the event win.
Aeldari had 64 players, 15 X-results, and 2 event wins. They were the 7th place faction of the weekend. The Devoted of Ynnead detachment was by far the most played with 28 players who racked up a 61% win rate, 9 X-results, and both the event wins. Games Workshop, would you please reel in that detachment!
That, battle brethren, is what I have for you. Be sure to check out Dank List Wargaming on YouTube. They put out a new video this week. As always, I hope my work is helpful to you. May you win glory for the legion chapter. For the Lion!
Comments
Post a Comment