Welcome to Competitive Innovations, our weekly feature for a number of game lines across the tabletop wargame space. Each week our army list and tactics experts canvass the top tournaments for their game of specialty, looking at the week’s top match-ups and how they played out on the tabletop to let you know what’s hot, what’s not, and what might be coming next as the competitive meta evolves year-round.
It was a bit of an over/under on whether there would actually be any GT-sized events just three days after Christmas, and it seems like the scene is still recovering from the blockbuster year we’ve just had, with only RTTs firing.
We’ll be right back into the swing of it from this coming weekend, however, and with thirty exciting new detachments in play thanks to the kind gifts Da Red Gobbo handed out over Grotmas. Players across the world have been hurridly painting up new toys to use with these new rules (I know I have), so it felt appropriate to use this event-less week as an excuse to kick off 2025 by stirring some controversy ranking these new detachments for impact, making sure you know which ones you need to be prepared to face, and setting me up to either look like a genius or dumbass in a few weeks time. Let’s take it away!
How This Works
Contributing Factors
Normally when I do tier lists, event results (both win rates and X-1+ finishes) are the main contributing factor, with the occasional bit of vibes-based fudging. Since these are new, and there have been very few GTs with even some of them legal, the vibes will be flowing much more freely this time around, but there are a couple of other things feeding in as well. The rankings here are based on the following:
- Vibes and impressions from reviewing the rules.
- Early data we’ve gathered from RTTs and the GTs that allowed them, particularly focusing on win rates and successful 3-0s at RTTs.
- Discussions with various top players about what’s performing in their testing.
You’ll have seen some of the data in Rob’s Hammer of Math from last week, and we’ve refreshed the dataset since then, covering more games and more detachments.
The Data
TheChirurgeon: Welcome to the stats corner! As Wings mentioned, we’re all about data here. While data won’t always tell the whole story – it’s easy to lose track of things like high-level player performance when you just look at aggregates, we want to make sure we’re incorporating data into our process for creating a tier list. We’ve previously looked at win percentages in last Monday’s Hammer of Math – you can find that article here – but we can drum up the Tabletop Battles data chart from there again to look at win rates for games logged in the app:
This is good to know, but it’s also limited in that it’s just Tabletop Battles data. What do I mean by that? Well, we know there are some inherent biases in Tabletop Battles. For one, players in TTBA tend to win more games than players who do not use the app – their win rates are higher than 50%. This isn’t a big shock, as we’d expect the players who take the care to do electronic tracking and scoring of games to be a bit more keyed-in to the game. Second, this doesn’t take into account the importance of winning consecutive games, especially when those games are against more difficult opponents. That’s where tournament data comes in.
Of course, this creates a problem for our early analysis: There are very few tournaments in December, particularly when it comes to GTs. In fact, there were no qualifying 40k GT events this past weekend for us to draw upon. So we dug through our dataset and decided to look at the next best thing, grabbing RTTs and smaller events. In particular, we pulled a sample of 442 events in December, consisting of the following events:
- 407 three-round RTTs of 8+ players
- 7 four-round events of 8+ players (who are certified freaks)
- 25 five-round events of 8+ players
- 3 six-round events of 8+ players
With those last two categories being either the GTs or the events that were pretty close – we end up usually discarding a bunch of 24-player events in our weekly round-ups and data analysis. Why 28? Because that’s the classic ITC cutoff for a GT, and also because it allows a 32-player event to have up to 4 no-shows/drops but still count, and that feels like the correct threshold. If you’re wondering, Stat Check uses a cutoff of 24 players for their events.
With this new data we can take a look at the standard stats – win rate and TiWPs (times a player started 4-0 or better), but add in two new stats: 3-0 records for RTT winners and RTTiWPs, for players starting an RTT at 2 wins or better. These aren’t stats we’d normally use, but counting 3-0 records gives us a helpful “next best thing” to look at when gauging a Detachment’s value. Because smaller events still tend to do wins or win-path pairings, a 3-0 player still had to win games against an undefeated opponent every round. And while I’m personally of the belief that any Detachment can win an RTT (barring insane conditions – RTT difficult can vary wildly by geography and local scene), I think this is a great way to look at them to give us some extra volume to the data.
It’s worth noting that a handful of these have shown up at the sparse GTs run in the middle of the month, two weeks after the first week of Grotmas releases but before events stopped. Among those first GTs, only Creations of Bile and Warrior Bioform Onslaught lists posted results. And we still don’t have anywhere close to enough data on some of these, even with the RTT spread – Champions of Faith and Final Day look like they could have legs but I’m wary of any result with fewer than 50 attached games. Likewise, people haven’t played Champions of Fenris, Wrathful Procession, Armoured Warhost, Angelic Inheritors, or Hearthband much at all, which makes sense as they’re by far the newest in the sample (except for Armoured Warhost, anyways).
On the topic of 50-plus game Detachments, Creations of Bile, Solar Spearhead, Shatterstar Arsenal, and the Warpbane Taskforce are the clear winners here, and they’ve all put up not just high win rates but are regularly topping their RTT appearances (note that RTTs with more than 8 players usually feature multiple 3-0 finishers). Taktikal Brigade and the Black Spear Task Force also have some strong showings, and we’ve seen Warrior Bioform Onslaught actually win a GT along with Creations of Bile.
On the lower end, the Flyblown Host, Haloscreed Battle Clade, and the Iconoclast Fiefdom are the Detachment showing clear bad results, though before you write those off they need context, too – the Haloscreed Battle Clade posted the highest win rate of Admech Detachments over the month, and the Iconoclast Fiefdom showed progress week-over-week. Flyblown Host feels about right, however. Similar to the Haloscreed Battle Clade, the Bridgehead Strike also posted win rates higher than the Combined Regiment in December, and Scintillating Legion outperformed the Daemonic Incursion Detachment.
OK Wings, back to you.
The Tiers
Wings: Using all of this, I’ve split the detachments into four tiers, as follows:
- Smash Hits: The best of the bunch, detachments that give existing strong factions tools that are as-good-as or better than what they already had, or push some new factions into the top tier.
- Strong and Real: Good detachments that have the strength to become relevant parts of the competitive landscape without pushing the envelope as hard as the Smash Hits.
- Maybe: More marginal detachments where the power doesn’t seem to be quite there (or notably behind existing options), but I’m not ruling out some surprises.
- Nope: Weak detachments that are demonstrably worse than what a faction already had with no real redeeming features.
Within the tiers, there is no order unless I say otherwise. There are a few specific Detachments where I’m on the edge and will talk about why, and I have put those at the start/end of the relevant sections, but otherwise the order within the section doesn’t mean anything.
Tier List
Just the List
If you just want to see the whole tier list in one place rather than reading through, click the expand link below. Otherwise, read on.
Tier List - Click to ExpandSmash Hits
Strong and Real
Maybe
Nope
Smash Hits
Necrons lead the charge here with a detachment that provides relevant boosts to a wide range of units, and pushes some existing hits (plus some new standouts) to themoon. Necron armies utilising Starshatter get access to mobility, strong offensive bonuses, and tools to protect key units, creating extremely strong all-rounder builds.
Creations has one of the few GT wins that a Grotmas detachment has picked up thus far, offering the tools to create a powerful infantry-heavy brawler build. Since that’s what Chaos Space Marines like doing anyway, this provides a new competitor to Renegade Raiders and Veterans of the Long War at the top for those who want to skew hard towards the melee end of things rather than mixing in shooting. Lots of CSM units are perfectly poised to cross relevant breakpoints with most of the available Detachment buffs, and the Stratagems/Enhancements give you a good suite of toys to get the job done.
TheChirurgeon: I’ll add to this that I think the Creations of Bile list does what CSM already what to do generally and there are likely going to be several different ways to build a winning list with this Detachment.
Slaanesh picked up the standout Detachment from Daemon day, pushing the damage output from their biggest threats to the moon, accompanied by unique and highly disruptive stratagems. The fact that Slaanesh’s Greater Daemons are the most spammable out of the datasheets obviously helps here, but there are also incentives to reach deeper into their range than before. This early on, our stats are definitely advisory at best, and early results tend to skew win rates for good armies up, but this has just enough games under its belt to make the fact that it’s currently north of 70% in the tournament dataset pretty alarming, as even if the next few weeks smooth that out pretty aggressively, that would still leave it comfortably top tier.
Custodes Dreadnought spam is back. Hoo-fucking-ray. I’m so happy for them.
Specifically, the vanilla VenDread having a built-in revival turns out to have been a balance landmine waiting for a new set of rules to trigger it, and combining those with Telemons and newly improved bikes has created a concoction that my top player spy network reckons is going to have a big metagame impact, and our stats fully agree. This must be what other people feel like when Aeldari get new rules.
Dreadknight spam is back. Hoo-fucking-ray. I live in hell.
Anyway, I reviewed this one and my take was that the detachment rule was so powerful that it probably didn’t matter that the rest of the kit was pretty mid. This appears to have been accurate, with Dreadknights (plus no-scope Purgation Squads) becoming absolute terrors when powered up with full wound re-rolls, and Purifiers giving you a strong troubleshooting unit.
TheChirurgeon: Early testing against Grey Knights with this Detachment is total hell.
The most pleasant surprise in the top tier is Librarius Conclave, which on first read looked like a super flavourful but quite niche detachment, but the more we looked at it the more there seemed to be some real combos and power to play with, particularly assembling a nightmare Sternguard brick that can one-shot almost anything in the game, and charging Terminators up to the nines.
The question was whether that would be enough depth to push a top build over other flexible options like Gladius, and it looks like the answer is a resounding yes, at least when run as Ultramarines with improved Oaths and Guilliman. I’m going to level that I think the chances of the Sternguard combo surviving past the next Balance Dataslate are fairly minimal, because there’s strong historical precedent for anything that drops that many Mortals getting nerfed, but it’s not the only thing that makes this good, and the detachment is cool enough on top of it that it’s nice to see.
TheChirurgeon: It’s worth noting that Dark Angels likely also have a top-tier Librarius build somewhere in there, owing to Ezekiel being able to join some extra units like Bladeguard Veterans.
Strong and Real
Auxiliary Cadre provides a strong combination of scoring tools and AP buffs, letting you build very flexible lists that can adapt to a wider variety of opposition than some other Tau builds. This one grew on us the more we looked at it during the review window, and the same seems to be true for the Tau playerbase now they’ve started getting to grips with it, and I expect it to join Retaliation Cadre as a fairly regular fixture in X-1+ Tau finishes.
Haloscreed gives AdMech a second detachment alongside Skitarii Hunter Cohort that provides access to reliable buffs, skewed a bit more towards the offensive and supporting a wider array of datasheets. Because this was one of the first detachments to drop, the number of games played with it in the window we sampled is roughly neck-a-neck with Hunter Cohort, and it’s slightly ahead on win rate, suggesting this is a real alternative, though we should note that both are sub-50 percent at events, so this is very much a “it’s on-par with the existing best for a weaker faction” rather than this blowing the metagame open
Here we get to the first Detachment where there’s a strong disagreement between the Tabletop Battles data and the early tournament results, which is where the vibes come in. In this case, Wager is sufficiently middle-of-the-road in the TTBA data that I’m willing to break upwards on the basis that it seems to be terrorising RTTs pretty handily. There is always the risk with techy armies like Aeldari factions and GSC that over time opponents get a better handle on how to defeat them, but I think here the tricks are still going to be good once people have a handle on them, and the power boosts to some already strong units are very real.
Deathwatch are back with new Kill Teams, and appear to have come out the gates as a solidly effective way of playing Marines if you don’t want to just join the Ultramarine hive mind. In particular, the extremely good updated Indomitor team and the very silly special weaponry that their veterans get lets them create powerful infantry bully builds.
This one I’m going to have to ask you to stop looking at the numbers and tell you to trust me that the amount of cackling I’ve heard from reputable Guard fans justifies this. Temptestus Scions are some of the best non-Vehicle units in the guard book, and there were already viable lists leaning on spamming Scions across a mix of Deep Strike and Taurox prime setups to hose the enemy from the table. If that’s your plan, this gives you a massive improvement in tooling, ensuring the maximum possible number of units strike at peak performance, and additional mobility to reach out and crush any straggling opposition. Guard win rates have a noticeable tendency to start low and rise as builds get refined, and I’d expect to see this go significantly up as the weeks go on.
Tzeentch looks to be in second place as far as the Legion detachments go, which isn’t massively surprising as this does the two things you want as any sort of tricksy army – confuses the hell out of opponents, unlocks new roles for some units, and lets powerful units operate with impunity. The implementation of a semi-symmetrical mechanic is really good here, as the way flux accumulate really tricky choices for opponents in whether and where they should be spending them. That wouldn’t make a good detachment by itself, but then you look at the Enhancements and see “ah, I get one no-scope Lord of Change and one that gets to be an actual melee threat, where do I sign up?”, after which it would take some real bad Stratagems for this not to be worth trying. Since the Stratagems are instead pretty good, providing a nice mix of offence, defence and mobility, this ends up as a pretty strong detachment, albeit quite matching the excesses of Slaanesh.
Battleline Stormboyz, be still my beating heart. That, in combination with the ability to pull a unit into Reserves, gives this detachment a very strong Secret Mission game to plan around, and it’s far from the only trick it has going. The Detachment ability provides flexible and impactful bonuses, two Enhancements that add Leader options unlock new heights for some already decent units, and the stratagems provide some good movement and scoring tricks. It does require quite careful list building to get enough Characters in to issue the right number of Taktiks, but there’s a bit of wiggle room thanks to the Stratagems not relying on Taktiks to be good. Big fan of this one – a good combo of flavour and function.
One of the challenges for Grotmas is handling factions where there are existing strong Detachments, or the design space has already been heavily used, and on that front Blood Angels should have been a pretty tough one, as Liberator Assault Group is already pretty much the perfect Blood Angels all-rounder detachment. Surprisingly, the (also fairly all-rounder) Angelic Inheritors still seems to have landed fairly well, providing a comparably effective suite of tools for players that want to skew a little more towards melee, herohammer and non-Death Company. The big gains are access to In the Shadow of Great Wings and Unto the Burning Skies, which unlock new options in the mid/late game either by protecting a unit out in the open on an objective or resetting a powerful Deep Strike threat. There’s a definite trade-off in raw killing power compared to Liberator, but the trade is good enough that they’re both worth considering – which is exactly where these should land.
This one is definitely out on a limb, because the dataset is miniscule – many of the GSC games it’s being compared to in TTBA will have been pre-Dataslate, and while the RTT win record is promising, it comes from only six players. Why I’m bullish on this one is that I think people are going to increasingly discover how good being able to take a GSC list with allies is under the new Cult Ambush system, as it means fewer units competing for your Resurgence Points. The detachment also has good fundamentals – the Tyranid units it lets you add include cost-efficient skirmishing tools, there are some strong offensive boosts in the Enhancements and Stratagems, and you cannot really go wrong with +1 to Hit as a wide-ranging buff in GSC. Pleasing to see both this and Reaper’s Wager landing well, and I hope it encourages more similar experimentation from GW.
TheChirurgeon: The Final Day Detachment is one of several that let you radically tinker with your list construction, and I think those are just much more likely to have a wide variety of outcomes, particularly since they can rise or fall with balance updates that are wholly unrelated to their core faction. This both makes it more likely they’ll fly under the radar and more likely they’ll take a lot longer to figure out.
Despite this being one of only two on the list that already has a GT win to its name, I was real close to bumping this one down to the “maybe” tier, but the numbers were just about good enough that I didn’t. Part of why is also the nature of the GT winning list – counterintuitively, it went relatively light on Warriors, using just a few squads as all-rounder superstars, and spending the rest of the points on generically good monsters, which still get a nice generic re-roll strategem from the Detachment. That could be the way to go, or we could be due some breakout successes in a few weeks once players manage to borrow enough Warriors to flood the board with them. There’s enough depth here that this is at least viable, but I can certainly believe that in a few weeks we’ll be saying there’s not much point running it over either Invasion Fleet or the new and improved Assimilation Swarm, which has quietly putting up some excellent numbers in the same dataset.
Maybe
This one is solidly on the edge as well, and if I had to pick which Detachment on this list I’m most likely wrong about, it’s this one. The Vessels kit is very spicy on paper, providing more wiggle room in how you set up your Blessings (often being able to put Advance/Charge on the things that need it and focus on Feel No Pain/output for the rest), helpful access to Wound re-rolls into key targets, and some decent Enhancements. What it doesn’t have is the Berzerker Warbands +S/A ability, and I am leaning towards that being enough of a downside that this just doesn’t get there. World Eaters must win fights they start, and the reduction in threat on the charge (plus no access to a -1D Stratagem in melee) means that this detachment just isn’t as good at that. It’s real close, and people might find a way to set this up to take maximum advantage, but I expect this to be tried for a bit and then simmer below Berzerker. It’s certainly not bad, but I think it’s weaker than your existing option.
TheChirurgeon: I’ll differ here – I think this has a ton of play due to its consistency. I think it’s more on the real and strong side of things than maybe, but it’s also just not going to hit as hard as those times when you spike your rolls with Berzerker Warband.
The other real marginal call here, and one I pretty much have to do vibes-only thanks to it being at the top of the RTT table (but with miniscule amounts of data) and second-from-bottom in the TTBA data (also with hardly any data). I just do not believe you have enough Miracle Dice under the new regime to make this worthwhile, not when you have access to Hallowed Martyrs as a pretty acceptable all-rounder detachment. I assume this was finalised before the Balance Dataslate was, but getting nothing unless you use what is now a very limited resource is harsh, and some of the Stratagems/Enhancements further depending on this is mean. I think Sisters got hit too hard in the Balance Dataslate and expect to see some recalibration next time, after which we’ll see. Is there value here in the meantime? I guess you could theoretically just plan around a Vahl deathball dominating the table, and maybe in a rough world this is one of the better things Sisters can do, but my bet would be that a Martyrs build is found that holds a mildly sub-par win rate, and this drops off.
Blood Legion has some very scary effects, but gives your opponent quite a bit of agency over when they trigger, which is never ideal. Right now, it looks like you’re better just going for Daemonic Incursion and forcing the issue on your own terms, especially because Khorne stuff works particularly well with the abilities from that.
Weird, headache-inducing Battle-shock mechanics is it? Theoretically it might be possible to stack up enough of those to make something happen, and Daemons is the place where that would be most valuable thanks to Shadow in the Warp. I have heard rumblings to the effect of this being more playable than it looks and this is squarely on my list of detachments that someone will win a GT with somewhere to prove a point, but I’d be astonished if it ends up being a better choice than Daemonic Incursion
Flyblown Host is the first of two instances where past Balance Dataslate decisions bite on Index armies. Because improved Contagions was added to the Index detachment rather than changing the army rule, taking Flyblown Host means that you lose them, and you simply do not want or need to be doing that. In theory there are some cute things you can do here, particularly with big bricks of Poxwalkers, but why bother? All the units it supports can also be used (very effectively) in the Index detachment, which looks super strong going into 2025, so even if there are valid armies you can create with this, you’re just making work for yourself. My bet is that when the Death Guard Codex rolls round, super Contagions will get baked into the army rule, at which point there’s more of a decision here, but for now, only do this for style points.
The Champions detachment rule is theoretically scary for shooting armies to play against, giving Space Wolves lots of ways to start fights, but only the 6″ Enhancement version can properly force the issue, and too much of the detachment’s putative “power budget” gets spent on how scary the rule is to an opponent who walks face first into it. What that means is that against savvy opponents with non-melee armies you’ll get danced around, and against other melee armies you may find you don’t have the oomph to win the fights that you start. Fundamentally, this counter-charge effect is much better as a 6″ Stratagem as it appears in some other Detachments, because you get the threat of it without it eating up lots of power space. As is, you’re far better off just sticking to Champions of Russ or (if you want to go all-in aggro) Stormlance.
This is probably the best detachment in this tier considered in a vacuum, but have you heard about the Gladius Task Force? It’s pretty good, I hear. Basically – this is a classic situation where you can get power by jumping through some hoops, but you could also just have pure power in a list entirely devoid of hoop-based requirements. When you boil it down, the only thing here that is tangibly doing something you simply cannot get elsewhere is the Deathwing counter-charge Stratagem, and while that is very good, measured over a large number of games it is very unlikely to overcome the value of Advance/Charging a wall of multiple units in Assault Doctrine. I still 100% expect to see some GT wins with this simply because the people, they love the hoops, and I want to be crystal clear that this is a relative rating rather than me saying this is actually bad.
On to one I don’t think is fantastic, but so much of the power of Chaos Knights is purely in their Datasheets that I don’t think it can be written off entirely. For whoops all Dogs losing Knights of Shade is probably too much of a hit, but if you want to go for one big Knight and supporting dogs I think there’s arguably more here for you between Diabolical Resilience and Unrestrained Rage, so it might get a small amount of airtime.
Veiled Blade Elimination Force
Why is this not in “Nope” you ask? Because:
- It is at minimum the second best Agents detachment (essentially by default).
- I guarantee you that there are between five and ten players out there who have now made it their life’s ultimate goal to win a GT with this.
I just want to make it clear to those brave heroes that I am rooting for them, and on that basis cannot rate this lower than “Maybe”.
Nope
See with Iconoclast Fiefdom, at least the add-in units are expendable, and their role focused on either running interference for big Knights or buffing them up. Here…you have an ultra-limited range of Mechanicus stuff you can add in, and the combos/benefits opened up really just don’t fit together as a cohesive whole. Because you’re Imperium you also already have a fairly broad selection of add-ins you can grab from the Agents book, so you do not need what’s on offer here in the slightest. The sort-of-Overwatch is decent if you want to take a Valiant specifically, but that’s not enough to save this from the scrapheap.
Shockingly, it’s quite hard to make a new detachment that competes with the all around monstrosity that is the Cult of Magic, and that’s been so metagame-defining for so much of the Edition that running Thousand Sons without some of its tricks feels absurd. That’s particularly true here where some of the abilities feel like they assume you have access to some of the tricks from Cult of Magic, particularly Ensorcelled Infusion. Round things out with the fact that the Detachment Rule is a non-Combo with Magnus’s aura and this is a real miss.
Very much in the Death Guard bucket of “whoops we forgot the Balance Dataslate buffs only affected the detachment.” Can Votann function without sprinkling around lots of free Judgement Tokens to get them through the early game? Currently no!
This is an Infantry-focused melee pressure detachment for Black Templars, which is a problem because the Black Templars Index option is an extremely good Infantry-focused melee pressure detachment. This is nowhere near as good as that one. The only saving grace is that if you really want to relive the glory days of early 9th, a Bike Chaplain leading a bunch of Outriders about might be slightly better here than in Righteous Crusaders, but otherwise you should extremely not bother.
“Oh look, the whiny Aeldari player put the Aeldari detachment last, classic Aeldari player” Ok but:
- I also play Necrons and put them first.
- Have you read this? It doesn’t do anything!
Technically I should withhold judgement, because we know from the announcement interviews that the Aeldari codex is changing the army rule, so perhaps this will make sense once that lands. It does not right now, other than making me want to get out the metal Bonesinger model I’ve got somewhere to be a Farseer with the relevant Enhancement.
Final Thoughts
…and that’s it. Happy new year, and go out there and prove me right/wrong depending on where your faction loyalties lie. Normal service resumes next week.
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