December has been a whirlwind month for Warhammer 40k, and with only one detachment left to debut, we’re now sitting on nearly 30 new ways to play armies. And while it’ll be a while before we have full data on all of them, we have been sitting with them for a few weeks now in Tabletop Battles, and that means we have game data we can look at. So today we’ll be taking a look at the first play results for the new Detachments, talk about which ones are driving results, which ones are promising, and which ones might surprise us in the coming weeks.
These results come from games collected in the Tabletop Battles app between December 1st and December 22nd, 2024. I’ve omitted any factions from the sample with fewer than 20 games.
We can see a few early results in here, but with the Daemons, Knights, and Astra Militarum Detachments it’s probably a bit too early to come to a firm conclusion – they’re sitting on fewer than 50 games played each, though Astra Militarum are very close and we’re pretty comfortable suggesting their result for Bridgehead Strike is likely accurate.
Let’s run through the winners and losers here.
Winners
- Space Marines Librarius Conclave –Â The surprising winner in terms of win rate so far, albeit with a small number of games, is the Librarius Conclave, which picked up some extra wins when we folded in games played with Dark Angels and Space Wolves, both of which had even better win rates than standalone marines. Versatile datasheet buffs stack with librarian buffs and datasheet buffs from the December dataslate to make for some devastating marine armies. Having Deathwing Knights that can move 7″ or get on-demand -1 to Strength for incoming melee attacks can be a big help. Right now we’re seeing lists which lean heavily on Sternguard bricks to achieve some incredibly nasty fire output, supported by Guilliman and a Terminator unit with a Librarian.
- Necrons Starshatter Arsenal –Â We were already apprehensive about this Detachment when it dropped, but it got a further push from the December dataslate and balance updates, which nerfed Hypercrypt Legion pretty heavily, pushing competitive Necrons into the new Detachment. The new Detachment has insane movement tech and good buffs for mounted units, and this will become the de facto way to play Necrons competitively for a while.
- Adeptus Custodes Solar Spearhead – Custodes were already in a good spot and this new Detachment gives them an even better option to work with. The Solar Spearhead is just very good, and can put out a ton of shots with its Dreadnought options. And with only 24 models, it’s not a hard list to learn, either. We expect Solar Spearhead lists to rise rapidly in the meta. The Telemon with Feel No Pain is an incredible beast on the table, and we’re expecting to see more lists running three of them with three Venerable Contemptors, who provide the best bang for your points buck in the army right now.
- Grey Knights Warpbane Task Force –Â Another sleeper, the Warpbane Task Force doesn’t seem that bad until you actually play against a build running six Nemesis Dreadknights, a unit of Interceptors to ask as spotters (who can shoot and then scoot behind a wall), and a host of five-model Purgation Squads firing four Psycannons through cover re-rolling all hits. The list can just put out an obscene amount of damage
- Chaos Space Marines Creations of Bile –Â This one was no surprise, as the Creations of Bile looked pretty strong out of the gate, offering very solid datasheet buffs to an army already filled with strong melee units.
- Adeptus Mechanicus Haloscreed Battle Clade – The Haloscreed Battle Clade has been putting up solid results for Adeptus Mechanicus players. It’s still behind the Cohort Cybernetica in terms of overall win rate, but ahead of the Rad-Zone Corps and Skitarii-Hunter Cohorts since the start of December. We’re less certain what the impetus is here, but we’re glad faction players are excited to try it.
Losers
- Thousand Sons Hexwarp Thrallband – No surprise here; the Cult of Magic is one of the game’s best Detachments and the Hexwarp Thrallband is… very much not.
- Death Guard Flyblown Host – While results for the Flyblown Host aren’t bad – 51% is very solid – the standard Death Guard Detachment is just a much better, more versatile option. Flyblown Host has some interesting play, but it just can’t compare to sticky objectives and a choice of additional contagion.
- Chaos Knights Iconoclast Fiefdom – I’m not surprised this one came in low. I think this is lower than the Detachment’s actual power level, but it seems like a legitimately difficult Detachment to learn to play and it could level out after another month or so of tinkering and testing. Or it could just not be worth it.
There you have it. So far everything else appears to either be mid (or at least, on par with existing detachment options for the army), or needs more games. The Legion of Excess right now looks like one to watch – I won’t be surprised to see it creep up – and the Deathwatch Black Spear Task Force also stands a good chance of climbing on the list, though it’s hard to tell whether that’s the best way to run Deathwatch right now. For the remaining set, we’ll just need more time for players to play games. The Aeldari Armoured Warhost only had 12 games at the time of this writing, and was posting a lower win rate than the Battle Host. The Scintillating Legion and Plague Legion were also sitting on fewer than 20 games, though appeared to be posting positive results.
In terms of who’s “Too good” well, right now it looks like Starshatter Arsenal, Solar Spearhead, Librarius Conclave, and the Warpbane Task Force Detachments are going to cruise right along to a Q1 dataslate nerf. That said, I don’t anticipate we’ll actually see buffs for the under-performing Detachments, so it’ll very much be a “what you see is what you get” kind of situation with those.
Final Thoughts
Even for some of these Detachments with hundreds of games under their names, it’s still early days – many of these dropped before the Dataslate update and that will have a large impact on how these play. We’ll take another look at this data in two weeks, once we’ve had more time to collect data to see how these are shaking out, and when we’ve had time to collect games for every single new Detachment.
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