A bit of a mixup to our usual formula this week – with the biggest event of the year (the LVO) happening the weekend just past, we wanted to give it the attention it deserves, with coverage of the full top eight from both of us.

That means that today we’ll be looking at:

• The Las Vegas Open

On Friday we’ll cover the rest of what’s out there, looking at:

• The Dutch Masters Finale
• 40k Brawl – January GT
• Peterborough Slam 5!
• MNM 40k GT 2024
• 2024 Leviathan Season 2 RTT

Now, please open up the music streaming service of your choice and start blasting Also sprach Zarathustra at top volume, because it’s time to look at the LVO finals.

Frontline Gaming LVO 2024 Warhammer 40K Champs

908-player, 10-round Supermajor in Las Vegas, NV, US on January 19 2024. All the lists for this event can be found in Best Coast Pairings.

This event used player-placed terrain.

The Showdown

Vital Ground – Chilling Rain – Crucible of Battle

Matt Lorah – Necrons (Hypercrypt Legion): Returning from last week, and proving that 30 Immortals are still an entirely valid part of a Necron army despite rumours to the contrary, Matt’s wild Hypercrypt build comes packed to the gills with tricks to confound foes, hammer blows from C’tan and the Monolith, and great and hard-to-pin-down anti-horde from Immortals.
Army List - Click to Expand

vs.

Folger Pyles – Aeldari (Battle Host): Really no more fitting participant in the LVO final than this – Folger’s list is basically the Aeldari build that’s been such a dominant force in the post-Dataslate part of 10th, in the hands of someone who knows exactly how to use it.
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Thoughts

Wings: Now. You probably know what happened in this game, because the memes have been glorious, but let’s have a look at how the builds stack up first. In one corner, the Aeldari – the game’s best Indirect in Night Spinners, one of the nastiest elite infantry units out there in Wraithguard, and plausibly the game’s single best unit in the Yncarne. Fast, highly effective at scoring, hyper lethal and hard to pin down – everything you want in the LVO final.

Up against it we have a (very) new challenger, ableit in the hands of a player whose been in the LVO final before. Matt’s Hypercrypt list is completely wild, combining aspects of Aeldari, Tyranids and Genestealer Cults with Necron goodness in an unholy fusion. The Monolith has been a little slow to get rolling in the UK, as it can struggle on UKTC terrain, but Gunum and I had some good fun brainstorming the range of wildly out there stuff you can pull with Hypercrypt when you have one and go second, and player-placed terrain is a much better place to use that than some other formats. This build can get units almost anywhere on the table to score, put dauntingly tough C’tan right in the opponent’s face if you don’t think they can handle it, or play a cagey, grindy game with Immortals if that’s what is called for, and I love it.

The mission is also somewhat favourable for it, because taking out the centre objective makes things a lot harder for the Aeldari to do what they want, which is to dominate the mid-board with the Wraithguard. Instead, they have to fight over the two flank objectives, but the tools the Necrons have brought make them very able to pick off chaff from two places at once, hampering the Aeldari’s ability to score. Fewer but more valuable objectives also makes the option of using Cosmic Precision to 3″ Deep Strike some Immortals then move them with the Chronomancer extremely good, even more so than normal, because it can be very tricky to prevent that being used to just flip an objective with impunity, starving the Aeldari of Primary points they’ll definitely need.

That’s not to say this is an easy win for the Necrons mind – Wraithguard are a big problem for this list, because they will absolutely look at a Monolith funny and kill it dead (trust me, I have field tested this), and there’s not much in the army that will kill them quick (the best bet is getting the Nightbringer in and using Epic Challenge to kill the Seer and neuter the unit, but even that’s not trivial or final). Triple Spinners is also a bit of a headache for the army, because it gets them to a threshold where they could just wipe a whole Immortal unit with a good turn of shooting (especially if some Spiders help), and that’s not something the Necrons want to happen. I do think I’d favour the Necrons overall, but there’s angles for both players to triumph.

In the moment, as you probably know already, the game swung hard and fast on one of the most epic plays ever seen in a grand final – Matt went second, and had space to Cosmic Precision the Monolith right behind the Aeldari on his first turn, and went for it, dropping both the box and some Immortals straight into the Aeldari backfield, blowing up some Night Spinners and scoring the rare first turn Capture Enemy Outpost to boot. The Monolith then proceeded to cling to existence by the narrowest of margins, despite the Wraithguard diverting back to help with it, keeping that pressure on for another turn. Couple that with how easily they can pick off the scoring units with only two objectives to handle, and lots of the Aeldari distracted, and that was more than enough to be a championship-winning play – congratulations Matt.

Lowest of Men: Wings has already covered this ably, but I just want to chime in and point out the glorious irony that, as Aeldari finally fall from grace, losing multiple major finals to Necrons, in this instance they’ve lost to their own calling card of recent months – jumping a horrible nightmare behind the enemy early, applying undue pressure and collapsing any forward momentum whilst scoring the secondary cards for fun with incredible reach and sneaky tricks. The Hypercrypt Necrons might be wearing a different mask, but tear it from them and you’ll see the same nasty, teleporting Elf Janitor from the start of this editions favourite episode of ‘Meta menace Scooby Doo’. Is Hypercrypt going to take up the mantle from Canoptek Court going forwards? Maybe. Matt has certainly done wonders for both the public profile of the build and for leaning into the Monolith as it’s signature piece, so you’d best get prepared for dealing with it…

Result

Necrons (Hypercrypt Legion) Victory – 80 – 56

Matt Lorah – Necrons (Hypercrypt Legion) – 1st Place

The List

See Showdown

Archetype

Hypercube

Thoughts

Wings: This list rules so hard man. I don’t have much more to say about it beyond what’s in the Showdown and my thoughts from last week, but I was rooting for Matt as soon as he hit the shadow round with this, and I’m delighted to see him take the trophy.

Lowest of Men: Wings has never ever backed or used the Monolith and if you see him running one in the future, just know that he’s copied Matt shamelessly, and that, dear reader, is definitely the truth I promise. Would I lie to you?

Folger Pyles – Aeldari (Battle Host) – 2nd Place

The List

See Showdown

Archetype

The one true Aeldari list

Thoughts

The list needs no introduction, but what a run with it. One of the Aeldari’s greatest assets is that they’re never without options to win a game in the right hands, which is why we see them featuring in LVO top eights year after year. Huge congratulations to Folger for piloting them all the way to the final, including through two other Aeldari players in the top 16, and ensuring that the defining list of 10th Edition got a suitable showing.

Lowest of Men: An incredible showing from Folger, Eldar are much tougher to play these days and he should be very proud of making it all the way to the final. The Monolith play was meme worthy but much harder to stop across a whole deployment zone with such limited Eldar assets in a list these days, and he was unlucky not to slay it when it landed and can hold his head high.

Samuel Pope – Hive Fleet Hydra (Unending Swarm) – 3rd Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

Archetype

Unending Swarm Carpet

Thoughts

Wings: From a sheer stamina perspective, this has to be the most impressive list in the top eight, and it’s a strong one to boot. Quite a few of the lists we see today lean a bit more towards stuff that can play effectively on tables with more open sightlines, accounting for the risk of player-placed terrain creating some killzones, and where some of the players have gone for crunchy stuff with big guns, this build just goes for quantity. Oh you blew up an entire unit? Well it’s back now, and 100 of its friends are big mad at you. Between the detachment ability, the number of bodies and the stratagems that Unending Swarm gets, this list can swiftly dominate objective play and pen the opponent in, requiring a combination of both extremely high volume firepower and speed to create space then pull back on scoring. It’s also handy that Exocrines are particularly good at killing some of the units that are best  at wading through hordes, making a mess of Chaos Chosen and Aggressors alike.

On top of all of that, the absence of any fixed Secondary like 9th’s No Prisoners in 10th means opponents will often be scrabbling to score Tactical Secondaries on a flooded board as well, leaving them few routes to a game-winning score. Only Matt Lorah’s incredible mix of anti-horde, mobility and scoring pieces was able to take this down in the end, but what a glorious run through to that point – well done to Samuel.

Lowest of Men: Unending Swarm can body and drown the unwary, and dominates space in a way few lists can. The match up this finally went down in against Matt’s Necrons is worth a watch, as you see him utilise some of the key tricks for managing its power – namely, trimming down the big slabs of chaff to a miniscule level but leaving several of them alive, so you can clean up multiple units in a single turn later, which greatly reduces the impact of the recycling stratagem. This includes being stingy even with overwatch kill opportunities to reduce trigger points! One of the strongest stat checks the Nids can put down at the moment, piloted extremely well by Sam, well done, but dude, pick your favourite joke name for your list and save the others for next time yeah? Don’t give all that good stuff away up front!

Daniel Olivas – Aeldari (Battle Host) – 4th Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

Archetype

Yncarne and Wraithguard

Thoughts

Wings: Plenty of familiar sights here, but definitely some tailoring to the player-placed terrain here as well. Fire Prisms get a lot better with PPT, as it’s pretty tough for opponents to hide their good stuff from both of them, and you’re not always going to be able to reliably hide in the mid-board as much as you might on UKTC or GW terrain. That puts the onus on making damage really land when it’s go time, something the Farseer Skyrunner also helps with by ensuring that whatever the Wraithguard look at gets fully obliterated, while the Footseer can toughen up either them or whichever Fire Prism is poking out with Fortune to minimise the swingback.

More than some of the other Aeldari builds around this one can kill you fast when it needs to, with the only issue (and part of why things like the Farseer are a little less popular) being that the triple Night Spinner mirror can be tough, which is eventually what ended Daniel’s run. The flip side of that is that I think this build is probably better at handling high pressure plays of the sort that Hypercrypt can put out than the more conventional Aeldari builds, so if Spinners take a big hit and Fire Prisms stay where they are, keep an eye on this one. Congratulations to Daniel on fourth.

Lowest of Men: I too am a Prisms (and indeed Falcon Fire Dragons) believer as we look towards a post slate future. Eldar need genuine, serious damage rather than leaning purely on the trickery and interplay of artillery and the Yncarne, as a wider range of armies and units (especially the many rhino toting menaces of the current game) give the Ignite build a headache and need a more direct answer at times. We wait with baited breath on the future of the elf menace…

Sweet Lew – Leagues of Votann – 5th Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

Archetype

Thunderkyn Spam

Thoughts

Wings: The nice thing about grav Thunderkyn is that there’s almost nothing they’re bad at shooting, with only T10+ Monsters really giving them trouble. Two full units of those, which will often be coming in from Strategic Reserves, is thus a pretty reliable hammer blow you can throw again and again, especially in concert with the Hearthguard block coming in as well. Going for one unit with beamers and two Brokyrs with different enhancements further doubles down on the adaptability – it helps them punch up into those few challenging targets, and like with Guide in the 4th Place Aeldari list helps to ensure that when you decide it’s go time, the opponent dies. It feels like the only major weak spot for the army is that it’s very poor at killing C’tan, which may have been what cost it when it was finally defeated by Lorah’s Necrons, but outside of that Sweet’s list here proved to be the leanest, meanest grudgin’ machine that entered the LVO.

Lowest of Men: I love the brutal shooting power of this Votann build, which definitely exploits the LVO terrain meta to their advantage (Votann in general had a great win rate at LVO which reflects their ability to shoot, fight, and survive in a wide range of terrain environments better than many). I’ve not used Beamer Thunderkyn but I can 100% see the appeal in something with slightly better range and spike potential than the Grav! A Long List and Appraising Glare both make it in here to ensure between the additional judgement options and the +1 to hit from the Forgemasters, those Thunderkyn WILL be shooting with a reliable consistency.

Richard Cozart – Astra Militarum – 6th Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

Archetype

Big Tank

Thoughts

Wings: Ah, speaking of hammer blows in the open – get siege-cannoned, idiots.

Even more so than the Monolith, it’s easy as a UK player to lose sight of the fact that some of the guard super-heavies (most notably the Stormsword and Banesword) are incredibly pushed when you can actually move them around the board, and this build looks ready to utterly trump any other player who’s relying on having armour in the open. Unless they can guarantee the Stormsword dies immediately, opponents just flat will not be able to keep their heavy hitters alive, especially with a Vanquisher and Demolisher ready to help. Anyone relying on volume D2 is going to have a bad time as well, since Armoured Might can effectively no-sell that, leaving the aggressor awkwardly shuffling their feet before getting blown to bits. The list scores pretty effectively too thanks to cheap transports, Gaunt’s Ghosts, and Cyclops from strat reserves, so if the opponent hesitates too long in the face of the big tank, they might not be able to catch up.

The possible failure point, of course, is that sometimes Wraithguard will just look at a tank like this and make it dead (especially with Night Spinners or Fuegan to help), and it was Folger’s Aeldari who finally put an end to the big tank rampage, but I am delighted to see such a rare unit making it into the top eight, and can only imagine how much fun it was go go through seven rounds of watching the horror dawn on opponents’ faces as they realised that they’d planned for a lot of things, but not that. Great work Richard.

Lowest of Men: This list is really, really cool. God bless big stupid vehicles.

Ben Cherwien – Black Templars (Firestorm Assault Force) – 7th Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

Archetype

Go Fast and Melt Things

Thoughts

Black Templars mastermind Ben pulls out a fairly unique spin on the Chapter here. We’ve seen lots of Ironstorm and Righteous Crusader lists doing well, but as soon as you read through this it’s clear that going Firestorm has been underexplored. The jump to S10 on melta weaponry is one of the most important boosts that Firestorm hands out, so the Templar ability of being able to pack more incidental meltaguns and multi-meltas into their lists by volume compared to anyone else works extremely well with it. It also provides plenty of redundancy for taking down enemy armour even if they manage to alpha some of yours – three melta shots from each Crusader squad will really add up, and don’t forget that they can do drive-bys from both the Rhinos and Impulsors.

At the other end of the spectrum, Sword Brethren are such a lethal melee unit that they don’t really need help from detachment rules to be good…but since you asked so nicely, they’ll very happily take +1 to Wound in melee from Crucible of Battle, thank you very much. All this on top of the normal Aggressor/Land Raider Redeemer fun creates a build that’s packed with killing power, highly mobile on the board and well adapted to player-placed terrain, so it’s no surprise to see it make the top eight in Ben’s hands.

Lowest of Men: Black Templars were my outside pick to win LVO and I had high hopes for Ben going into the final rounds. They can stage, punch and shoot extremely well, and have a great suite of tricks for dealing with armies that can’t answer them in combat. A key trap going off via No Escape can end games in a moment, as demonstrated elsewhere by armies like World Eaters at the moment, but unlike WE Templars have enough guns to mix it up and win via other means as well. Redeemer overwatch remains an incredibly potent midboard control tool, very well done on the run Ben.

Charlie Andre – Chaos Space Marines – 8th Place

The List

Army List - Click to Expand

Archetype

Accursed Spam with a Land Raider

Thoughts

Wings: Rounding out our top eight we’ve got Charlie running Chaos Space Marines, going on the Chosen and Accursed Cultist plan with one major tweak – replacing some of the normal Transports and Forgefiends with a Nurgle Land Raider and Helbrute. As discussed extensively throughout the top eight, player-placed terrain creates a risk that sometimes you’ll have to engage in a bit of a shooting match out in the open, and this setup de-risks that for Chaos. The Nurgle stratagem ensures that opponents will rarely be able to put their entire firepower into the Raider, and the Helbrute can easily hide near it providing it with double dip dark pacts.

The shooting that puts out isn’t as deadly as you’d get from Forgefiends or Obliterators, but it’s more than enough to gradually work through big toys on the other side of the table, and when you combine that with high pressure from the Accursed Cultists (who don’t really need cover to thrive), and some additional troubleshooting from Syll’Esske and the extra deadly Chosen squad with the Khorne Lord, you’ve got a spin on a top archetype that’s particularly well tuned for the event. Well done to Charlie for claiming his dark rewards for those smart choices.

Lowest of Men: The Talisman of Burning Blood Khorne Lord has become increasingly popular, offering you a proper hard target remover for those hard to reach places (for all their absurd potential, Chosen do occasionally whiff into monsters and vehicles and sometimes it just takes a bit of that sweet sweet anger to get things done). Another Land Raider for that sweet player placed meta, nicely done Andre.

The Best of the Rest

Eight more players made it into the shadow round after the swiss stages. They were: