40K: The New Meta
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The New Meta
By Charles from Top of the Table Minis
Regular tourney player for Dead Red Gaming
We’re proud to sponsor Top of the Table Minis — the brilliant YouTube channel run by Charles, a sharp-eyed tactician, hobbyist, and regular on the UK tournament scene. When he and his brother Brendan have time to make the trip from Lincolnshire, they’re often found rolling dice at Mighty Melee with their usual combo of clever builds and characterful lists.
Here’s Charles’ latest take on the shifting 40k meta — Knights, Death Guard, and everything in between...
We’ve had a few weeks to get used to the new meta with the latest release of Chaos Knights and the significant changes to the Imperial Knights index — both in points and stat lines.
To give a brief summary on the “new” Knights and their changes: essentially, they got some fairly ludicrous point drops across the board. And for this price, they also dropped 1 Toughness and gained 3 Wounds. While this is more impactful for the Armigers — as T9 vs T10 is more of a breakpoint — the big lads don’t mind it so much. The added wounds give them a fair bit of protection against mortal wounds.
This pairs very well with the Towering rules and changes to the Super-heavy Walker ability (the ability to touch a ruin and see through it, and walk through walls respectively), making this army a horrific stat-check for a lot of people to deal with.
Imperial Knights love to ask the question:
“How do you like the sound of 4 x 28W at T11 with access to a 4++ in shooting and/or 5+++ in combat (for the Forge World Knights)?”
Chaos Knights are totally not copying the homework, with 5 (some lists can even run 6) of the big chassis — their shiny new army rules and codex give some real support to the bigs. Notably, Infernal Lance and Lords of Dread are both seeing a lot of early success.
To put a point on it: Knights are a very strong stat check and can use their high mobility and OC to dominate on primary. And with some savvy target selection, they can even table most armies in relatively short order.
The smelly elephant in the room: Death Guard
Death Guard also seem to be suffering from the success of tough models with cheap price tags — perhaps the strongest faction in the game at the moment.
They can pair (some would say disgusting) resilience with some very high damage output through their easy access to lethal hits, and their army rule dropping an extra point of Toughness and most commonly worsening an opponent’s save by 1 — which can functionally change their basic weapons to AP1. A very strong modifier, for sure. One of the few armies that can comfortably answer the Knights stat-check.
Other forerunners
Thousand Sons — their codex has been out long enough for the brains to work through and find the strength in that book. I expect to see Grand Coven as the most common detachment, as it can rapidly stack up buffs and generally kill whatever it looks at. Once again, we are in a world where Tsons can do whatever they want, but figuring out what they want to do is the skill — and it can take a serious amount of brain power and time to gaze that far into the warp.
With WTC just around the corner…
As I write this (notably not using the latest hot-fix FAQ from GW), we see this trend in macrocosm.
Every single one of the 40 teams is running Death Guard in their lineup.
Followed by:
- Space Marines – 36 teams
- Chaos Knights – 29 teams
- Imperial Knights – 28
- Thousand Sons – 28
- Necrons – 24 (a dark horse with a surge in popularity)
- Aeldari – appearing in half of the lineups, including a 70% presence in Seed 1 teams
Want the deep dive?
For more context on what all this means, check out Top of the Table Minis on YouTube, where over this week (15th and 17th of July) I’ll be breaking this down live on stream, clicking down into the comps and what it means.
Big thanks to Charles for the contribution — you can catch him regularly on Top of the Table Minis, streaming two competitive games a week and breaking down the latest meta moves with precision and humour. Give him a sub, and tell him Mighty Melee sent you.
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