Alright, yesterday I talked about there being too much goddamn Warhammer and lots of events, covered 6 big GTs, talked about Tyranids, Eldar, and Tau. Today I’m going to run through the remaining five events, pick out any lists that look really compelling to me, and just go with that.

Before I dive into that, it’s worth taking one more look at the stats from last weekend’s events. You can find more of these over on the new 40kstats website. Here are some things to know about last week’s events, and what they say about certain factions:

• Everyone knows Tyranids are crushing it right now. But it’s worth talking about just how thoroughly they’re doing it – Tyranids made up a whopping 10.4% of the field last week, and still averaged a 65% win rate, with an average first round loss of 3.2. Tyranids represented 35% of all lists starting 4-0 or better (i.e. scoring a TiWP result). Of the 90 Top 8 spots available at GTs last weekend, Tyranids captured 30% of them, and they took 36% of the available top 4 spots.
• Less on the radar: Harlequins. Harlequins quietly averaged a 59.9% win rate last weekend, with an average first round loss of 2.7. They have the game’s second best TiWP ratio – 2.3, indicating that they end up in a winning position 2.3x more often than they should.
• Asuryani armies, particularly those running Hail of Doom, are also an issue, but the faction itself isn’t quite deep enough beyond those tricks – Asuryani lists make up 5.2% of the field and account for only 3.9% of TiWP occurrences. They’ll likely become a problem if Tyranids are nerfed but aren’t quite as egregious from a pure win percentage standpoint.
• T’au have flown under the radar a bit since their nerfs, but they’re everywhere – T’au have always been an extremely popular army, and the faction currently makes up nearly 11% of tournament lists at GT events. Overall they’re only averaging a 54% win rate, leading to the faction capturing fewer TiWP spots than they should. After Tyranids, T’au captured the next highest share of Top 8 spots, with 16%.

Forth Valley GT

30-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in Scotland, GB on May 28 2022. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

1. Ryan Kerr – Tyranids – Leviathan with two Harpies
2. Conar Leach – Tyranids – Leviathan with two Harpies
3. Matt Gibson – Chaos Knights – House Herpetrax, running one Knight Desecrator, 8 War Dog Stalkers, and 2 War Dog Executioners. Matt’s running the Diamonas on his Desecrator, which is cool enough that it makes me want to finish painting my Desecrator up.
4. Gary Duffy – Tyranids – Leviathan with two Harpies

Christ, that’s depressing.

Sunken City RTT

28-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in West Branch, MI, US on May 28 2022. This event didn’t require players to upload lists, which is lame as hell. And a shame, because I’d have liked to talk about the Iron Hands list.

1. Brenton Weiss – T’au Empire
2. Jon Droope – Harlequins
3. Josh Howard – Iron Hands
4. Robby Griffin – T’au Empire

Powerfists and Psykers 2022 Ironman

28-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in Ottawa, ON, CA on May 28 2022. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

1. Will Paul – Tyranids – Leviathan with two Harpies
2. Francois Lalonde – Asuryani – Hail of Doom
3. Jeremy Atkinson – Dark Angels – Jeremy was surprisingly running very heavy on Ravenwing. See the list, below.
4. Zach Comeau – T’au Empire – T’au Sept with Shadowsun and Longstrike

Spotlight: Jeremy Atkinson’s Dark Angels

This is partly for Greg, and partly because it’s just cool to see a semi-successful Dark Angels list that isn’t loaded up with Deathwing. For what it’s worth, Deathwing have a lot of the same problems as Blightlords Terminators in that they’re hard to kill but otherwise slow and not that big a threat from a damage output standpoint. Jeremy sidesteps all that by going with the much cooler Ravenwing.

Jeremy's list - click to expand

Game Knight 40k GT

28-player, 5-round Grand Tournament in London, Ontario, CA on May 28 2022. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

1. Hamza Syed – Harlequins – Light Saedath with a trio of Death Jesters
2. Daniel Platt – Harlequins – Dark Saedath with a bunch of Skyweavers
3. Ridvan “Skari” Martinez – Drukhari – Coteries of the Haemonculi Army of Renown. You know I’m covering this shit blow.
4. Christopher Rice – Adepta Sororitas – Bloody Rose

Spotlight: Skari’s Haemonculi Army of Renown

Our own Liam “Corrode” Royle wasn’t super impressed with the new Drukhari Army of Renown in Rift War and it was hard to blame him. But here comes Skari, treating that like an open challenge and taking them to a 4-1 finish.

Ridvan's list - click to expand

Skari’s list here runs 100 Wracks who are just tough as hell to chew through thanks to getting a 4+++ once the unit drops below half its starting model count, and those are backed up by Grotesques and Mandrakes for melee support. I’m still not sure the AoR is good (and when I showed this list to James “Boon” Kelling it made him visibly angry, which ruled), but big blobs of Wracks were playable good at LVO and are probably still good now, in part because a lot of the big Tyranid monsters and Eldar targets are susceptible to AP-1 poison. On that note the list might struggle against a Custodes or a decent Armour of Contempt list, but with the extra durability boost from the AoR it may just be able to outlast them while outscoring them on the primary.

Overall the list has a crapload of durable ObSec bodies to make primary scoring a nightmare, and it should do well picking Stranglehold, Retrieve Nachmund Data, and To the Last.

Next Week: Someone Else Takes Over

That’s it for this week’s Competitive Innovations. Join us again next week when we convince some other poor sap to take over here and write “Leviathan with two Harpies” over and over, with commentary on how one of them can beat the other by playing smart. Until then, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.