Meta Snapshot 6/8/2026
What that data tells us is that the Defiler meta is going to be what we wrap 10th edition with. The Top Faction of the weekend was, once again, Chaos Space Marines, and it appears the main list-building question CSM players are asking themselves is if the right number of Defilers is 2 or 3. The detachment breakdown is as follows.
I don't have any really penetrating insight into these lists I haven't made before. The short version is: Defilers and Chosen, with some utility units and supporting characters. My eyes are starting to glaze over when I look at CSM lists because they tend to be so samey. I found the 2nd place Soulforged list the most interesting because it didn't have any Chosen, and instead really leaned into shooty vehicles, with a pair of Vindicators and Forgefiends joining the pair of Defilers. It's a reminder that CSMs had a lot of good options before GW decided to make the Defiler overpowered.
The Number Two faction of the week is Thousand Sons, and if you thought TSons players would leave an overpowered datasheet on the shelf, you'd be wrong. Here's the breakdown of detachments and placings.
In some fairness, the Grand Coven list only had 1 Defiler in it, and it just seems to be filling the role that would otherwise have been filled by a Vortex Beast. Otherwise the list is what I'd expect to see from a pre-Defiler Grand Coven list: Magnus, a bunch of spellcasters, and a Rubric squad for each of the spellcasters that can join one, a Vortex Beast and the aforementioned Defiler that probably displaced a second Vortex Beast. It was a formula that worked without Defilers, and it works with them too.
The Rubricae Phalanx list can be summed up as follows: 20 Scarab Occult Terminators and 2 Defilers.
The Warpforged Cabal lists each featured 2-3 Defilers, 2 Forgefiends, and 1-2 Predator Annihilators. I suppose that's not surprising considering it's a Vehicle detachment. Two of the lists featured multiple winged Daemon Princes, but one didn't have any.
The Thousand Sons Defiler is, if anything, even more infuriating than the CSM one. It doesn't get Dark Pacts, but it does get a 6+ Feel No Pain and hitting on Overwatch on 5's, improving to 4's if the target unit is within 9" of a friendly TSons psyker. Blech.
I'd just finished the above material that has the strikethrough now and was looking at the spreadsheet I use to collect the raw data with when I noticed I missed a Necron entry, and was like, goddammit! I'd chosen Death Guard over Necrons because Death Guard had 4 top 3 finishes and Necrons had 3, but the missing entry makes them 4-4, with the Necron results being 2 wins and 2 second-place finishes, which is clearly better than the Death Guard performance. That makes Necrons the Number Three faction of the week. Here's what scored what.
The two Awakened Dynasty lists were character-heavy mixed bags. One spend just over 1200 points on characters, the other over 1500! Kind of the same story with the Obesiance Phalanx list actually, only it was mostly bigger characters - Nightbringer, Void Dragon, Silent King, and Nekrosor Ammentar, with Imotekh and a Psychomancer rounding out the personalities. Looking at the Hypercrypt list...same deal, over 1300 points in characters (almost 1000 in the three named C'tan alone), with another 540 points in a Seraptek Heavy Construct. I've never even heard of that thing before.
Here's a table of the events with their top three lists.
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