As we gear up for the launch of the new Kill Team – which we’re dubbing Kill Team 2024 – Games Workshop have been releasing more information about the game. In today’s article on Warhammer Community they dropped perhaps the biggest bombshell of the previews so far: Starting with this edition, they’ll be starting a new rotation system for competitive play, with older teams in the range rotating out after a specific period of time. For the original Kill Team 2021 teams – Kommandos, Death Korps, Novitiates, Pathfinders, Legionaries, Corsairs, and Blooded – plus the White Dwarf and PDF teams (Phobos, Void-Dancer, Warp Coven, Wrymblade, Hunter Clade, Gellerpox, and Elucidian Starstriders) – that means rotating out of competitive play (and ongoing balance support in 2025. For the remainder, that means they’ll rotate out in another three years, presumably after Kill Team 2027 launches.
There’s a lot to talk about here and so we’ve rounded up our Kill Team crew to talk about what’s going on with this change, what they like and don’t like about it, and how they think it will affect competitive play.
The Roundtable
- Travis “HappyRaccoon” Cheng
- John “Can You Roll a Crit?” Rees
- Thundercloud
- Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones
- Sky Serpent
- TheArmorOfContempt
- NotThatHenryC
Q. Let’s start with your initial reactions to this change. How do you feel about this announcement, and the timelines given?
TheChirurgeon: With 33 teams and more on the way, something had to give. Dropping Compendium teams was always going to happen at some point, and rotating out old teams is also something the game needed, sad as I am to see Warpcoven and Legionaries eventually go. It’s also a good way to get rid of some of the teams which were causing problems and didn’t need to stick around forever – Gellerpox and Starstriders got more than enough of a second life following their re-release.
Thundercloud: I’m always a bit uncomfortable about stuff going to Legends, because people regard it the same as being kicked out of the game. What this is in fact about is that there will be a tournament rotation. There’ll be rules at launch for the WD teams and various other Year 1 teams, but they’ll stop being tournament legal after Year 1.
The issue with this is how many people will treat it as removing them from the game when Year 2 starts and people have the models and the rules for the edition of Kill Team that they’re playing but they’re not useable at GW tournaments and not receiving balance updates. People got really salty about the Marine codex not including the Horus Heresy units and being the size of a phone book, but they still aren’t letting people use their Kratos in events, despite there being rules for it in 10th.
HappyRaccoon: Personally I am a fan of a sort of controlled burn of older teams, and this announcement isn’t even quite that strong. They’ve explicitly mentioned that the teams will have one more season/year of explicit play, and that local TOs will have full ability to run whatever they want. Sure the World Championships of Warhammer will be classified, but your local hangs? That’s between you and your friends, and the rules will all still be balanced. As a TO I somewhat expect to run a mix of the two, but that’s still over a year away as far as planning goes. In my opinion as a Magic the Gathering player, 4 years of support is plenty; as a player I barely even play some of my older teams; as a TO it’ll let me focus on not 50+ teams at the big tentpole events. It sucks to have things change, but it’s better than no change.
TheArmorOfContempt: As someone who paints incredibly slowly, I am not a big fan of this. Teams are a major investment to me in terms of personal time, so not being able to use them in competitive events is annoying. Personally, I am not happy, but I understand how hard it can be to maintain balance with these kinds of numbers.
Sky Serpent: I think it’s a positive change overall and for a competitive minded game makes a lot of sense. With all the rules being free and an app coming, it will be easier than ever to learn different teams and not worry about gotchas.
As someone who is heavily invested in certain factions (hi Corsairs and Drukhari!) it could be difficult that I might never get the opportunity to use a Kill Team in an event that I put 100’s of hours into converting and painting and I think there will be a lot of others in that boat.
CYRAC: I think it’s good. GW have been pretty clear with this. A Kill Team has 4 years of legality at Classified/GW events and 6 years fully over 2 editions. Even after a team is no longer classified, they’ll continue having balance changes and updates, which is great news.
NotThatHenryC: A bit confused. The text implies that teams last four seasons (years, roughly) but the image at the end has things phasing out quite a lot sooner than that. I’m pretty sure the image is wrong. In general though it seems like a necessary, if painful, approach to bloat.
TheChirurgeon: I think the challenge is that those “four years” technically start from the set’s release in Kill Team 2021, so the first set have one year left and the remaining group have 1-2, depending on when they release.
Though it’s worth pointing out that this is just for Classified mode, and you’ll be more than capable of playing casually with whatever you want, or running a tournament which allows more than just Classified mode teams.
Q. Is this a good thing for the game or bad? Defend your answer.
Thundercloud: I’m going to put a retailer/product developer/rules writer hat on and say that tournament play doesn’t need more than 32 factions that stores can stock and balance updates need to be written for at a time.
32 factions is a lot. It’s more than 40k. It’s massively more than a lot of skirmish games out there. And it’s still enough to have an interesting meta.
HappyRaccoon: I think I might be repeating myself from above, but sure why not. Classification gives you a 4 year road map for any Killteam purchase. If that represents an issue for a new player, that is at least on the tin, which is good. For the tournament crowd it’s easier to study for a smaller skew of teams. Mid skill players learning the game will probably not even notice the change until they attempt to go to a GW open, or a larger event. GW isn’t hiding the set up, and I think the layer of communication, and the move to free online rules are all broadly positive. I think classification represents a way for the game to have receding periods where rules that have crept up can ebb like the tides. Do we really want every team to need some sort of movement cheat in the ploy phase like Nightmare, and Termination?
TheArmorOfContempt: Personal complaints aside, this is probably what is best for the game, especially when you get to the point where you have multiple teams from the same faction, Wyrmblade and Brood Brothers for example. One hopes that down the road teams will be a strong representation of their parent faction in microcosm, which might even see a return of some form of list building.
Sky Serpent: I think it’s a good move for the game in terms of accessibility. I personally took a break from Kill Team for a year in the middle of the last edition. When I came back so much had changed in terms of added rules and new Kill Teams that it felt far too hard to get back into and I saw a lot of friends give up too.
Is 32 factions too many? Possibly but I wouldn’t want to see the game slashed down too much further and I think the approach works.
One thing it will do is force mono-faction people into picking up more Kill Teams, and I hope it doesn’t force them out of the game instead. Having a ‘representative’ of most of the 40K factions always on play should be doable, especially given it’s circa 32 teams.
CYRAC: I like the change as it makes it easier for newer players to get into the game and avoids the situation games like Underworlds have where you can’t even buy competitive teams or cards etc. Teams still being legal once losing classified status is good too as I aim for my events to be non-classified. Having the option is great and GW even encourages this in their article release.
NotThatHenryC: A bit of both. The game has too many factions but it’s going to hurt to retire your favourite guys. I played someone recently who’d spent a year painting a stunning Phobos team and it’s sad they’ll have such a short lifespan at official events. It could impact the hobby side of the game – I might spend less time on teams in future, now I know they won’t last forever. I’ve got unpainted novitiate and starstrider teams and I’m not sure what to do with them now.
Q. Were there any surprises in the list of Classified Teams?
TheChirurgeon: I am surprised that Chaos Cults and Inquisitorial Agents are in the “two more years” list. They seemed like good teams to rotate out sooner rather than later.
Otherwise, this list looks fine. I think it was cool that Gellerpox and Starstriders got a new lease on life last edition but I think they can go ahead and sit from here on out – they’ve had ample time.
Thundercloud: I’m surprised that Wyrmblade are in considering that Brood Brothers essentially replaced them and are better.
Gellerpox staying was also good. They need four more years.
HappyRaccoon: Angels of Death are a new team on the list, and Intercession seem to not be present. One would expect those to be similar but Justian is not listed at all. I wonder if that is a fusion moment or a removal moment. Considering the vibe of the article, I’m hoping for the fusion. This list otherwise just seems to be the ITD season 2 split, and everything lines up there. So no surprises with that in mind.
TheArmorOfContempt: Not really. All the White Dwarf teams are present in the Year 1 removal along with the oldest boxed teams. One assumes this means we either see these teams rebranded as something else, or another release will take their place. To do anything else would be insanely foolish on GW’s part as removing the only Ad Mech representation in the game would probably not go over well. That being said, this is merely from a competitive standpoint, and most competitive players are more than willing to jump to another team since Kill Team doesn’t usually have the monetary and time investment of a standard 40K army.
Sky Serpent: I perhaps didn’t expect to see all of the Annual teams included but then they give needed representation to factions such as Harlequins and Adeptus Mechanicus, for example.
CYRAC: Chaos Cult and Inquisitorial Agents. Just let them go already haha. I honestly expected Chaos Cult to go though considering they never had a dedicated Kill Team box (White Dwarf teams too).
TheChirurgeon: Yeah, Chaos Cults are a weird outlier in that they’re one of the only Kill Teams which not only doesn’t have a dedicated box, but can’t be built from a single 40k box – to build one properly requires a Dark Commune, Cultist Mob, and Accursed Cultists box, making it one of the most expensive teams to build by far. That really doesn’t fit with the “one box per team” model Games Workshop is going for and I’m in favor of that model, even if it means no more Cults teams.
NotThatHenryC: Only that their image suggests that some teams will be leaving the classified list way earlier than they should. Maybe it’s saying the second batch will last two or more years. I’m glad nothing is being retired immediately.
Also I’m pretty sure they’ll introduce a team of some kind to replace the retiring marines, orks and Legionaries. Rather than leave these factions unrepresented I think it’s more likely a hint of teams to come. Could there be Legion-specific teams like Nemesis Claw for more of the Chaos Legions?
Q. What impact do you see this having on competitive play?
Thundercloud: A rotating meta that shifts year on year. Kommandos have been top tier throughout the previous edition, while teams like Legionaries have been to some extent supplanted by Nemesis Claw. It definitely encourages players to get a new team, and means that anything too dominant from the last edition will eventually leave the meta. Sorry Hierotek Circle, you tried.
HappyRaccoon: Considering that GW will be focusing on classified teams, I suspect it’ll matter in about a year, when the first declassification happens. Until then it basically means nothing, outside of players knowing where they should spend their time. Hopefully that frees up some meta space for some of the newer teams to breathe, but considering how good Kommandos have always been, who knows how well GW can handle that tightrope act. Sooo effectively very little until next year, and then only to the TOs who care. If you want an unclassified tournament at that juncture, run a tournament and be the change you want to see.
Sky Serpent: I’m intrigued to see how the community TOs approach the change, most of The Old World event organisers allow Legacy armies but that is perhaps easier with the smaller amount of factions involved.
However Legends are effectively dead when it comes to 40K so I’m interested to see how it plays out.
TheArmorOfContempt: Unlike the competitive 40K scene, Kill Team’s scene has been strongly guided by GW since the game was released. Large unaffiliated events like LVO and NYO do exist, but the established GW circuit and WCW finals are clearly the backbone of the annual competitive cycle. Anyone who plays the game purely for its competitive aspects will likely enjoy these changes as it will keep the game from becoming stagnant. If anything this means GW will have an even more firm hold on what is defined as competitive play for their game.
CYRAC: Not too much? We won’t see the effects of it till Season 2 next year and even then there will be many independent events not using Classified imo
NotThatHenryC: I certainly can’t claim to have any idea what the 3.0 meta will be like, but we’re about to have a bit of an odd season I think. There will probably be some teams that come out of the edition change on top and do well in the coming season, but then the oldest of those will drop out of the game. If my unpainted novitiate suddenly look awesome should I slap some contrast on them and use them for a year or invest in something new? I don’t know.
Q. For the 40k people: How do you think this will impact 40k, if at all?
TheChirurgeon: This is an interesting question because I originally thought the Legionaries box was just going to become the default Chaos Space Marines kit. Finding out that it won’t be has a whole lot of implications for competitive play. For one, it means that the days of available plastic Reaper Chaincannons might be numbered, and second it means that I might need to stock up on a bunch of those boxes for the future because I’m always going to want to have “laughing chaos marine head” on hand for a conversion.
More broadly, this suggests that not every Kill Team box is going to get a new 40k datasheet in the future, as doing so might mean supporting those options longer than GW wants. I think we’d already seen that a bit with Hearthkyn Salvagers – there are options in that box which never made it to the Hearthkyn Warriors datasheet – but it will be interesting to see how that changes in the future. I’d be shocked if say, Novitiates and Voidscarred stopped being playable in Sisters and Aeldari, respectively, but the plan may be just to not keep them in stock on a regular basis moving forward.
Thundercloud: I was going to say it means that the upgrade sprue teams will be out of circulation by the time 11th edition comes around, but checking it only half of them will be.
Will all the teams move over to 40k units, teams like Hierotek Circle, or just leave the range?
What about teams like Novitiates, where the specialists are an upgrade sprue on a 40k unit and it was just a 40k unit that hadn’t already been released? I foresee a lot of specialists just becoming ordinary troopers because 40k is trying to stay streamlined, and every model in a squad having different rules or weapons is a big pain to remember and track.
Sky Serpent: Some of the Kill Teams are very much first and foremost 40K units with some added Kill Taam guile and flair added, units like Kommandos will be welcomed into the main Ork range easily.
There are some units though such as the Hand of the Archon who have an upgrade sprue with lots of options which didn’t become their own datasheet or have those entered into the Kabalite Warriors rules like other factions did, I don’t know if that set will exist in the future.
For me as a serial kitbasher, Kill Team will continue to add more conversion and modelling opportunities for me so it’s win/win either way for me.
TheChirurgeon: The bigger question mark for me may also be terrain kits – Into the Dark terrain isn’t just for Kill Team, it’s necessary for Boarding Actions, so I hope it sticks around or stays in production for a while longer. As big a pain as rearranging it can be, the Into the Dark terrain offers an incredibly different play style that you just don’t really get with the other Killzones and GW already has a major problem when it comes to terrain. Specifically, that they don’t seem to carry or sell terrain much any more, despite how crucial it is for play.
Q. Let’s speculate a bit on seasons – it seems like there were three in Kill Team 2021: Chalnath, Into the Dark, and Bheta-Decima. Do we expect that kind of terrain-based trend to continue with KT24?
Thundercloud: Ideally, yes. A terrain box with additional scenery in the wave releases is one way to do it, but we saw the issues with that in the last season of both Kill Team and Warcry where the terrain box meant to last all season sold out and took ages to reprint or never came back. Then everyone got wave releases with maps for terrain they couldn’t buy.
I wouldn’t blame GW for doing £125/130 boxes with terrain and two teams in considering they immediately sold out throughout the last edition and avoided the problems with the terrain box selling out in the final season. I wouldn’t like buying 4 big boxes a year for three years, but I can see why they might do it.
Sky Serpent: I prefer the format of a new Killzone for the season which makes the new dual sets more affordable, if you’re a Kill Team collector you could’ve ended up with a lot of Gallowdark for instance!
New terrain adds a bigger incentive to buy the new Killzones which is great, I’d rather not see terrain that massively turns the game on its head though. Or does that make it more exciting? I don’t know, all I want is the Deathworld Forest back!
HappyRaccoon: I hated the Bheta-Decima release methodology as no one ever had enough of the terrain sets to play it. While having approximately one jillion ITD sets was annoying, it did mean that everyone could play with it. If Volkus is in all the new boxes I’ll definitely be stoked, but I am a greedy TO that is partially supported by his community. Unfortunately the narrative end of KT was somewhat underutilized so I have less care for the expansionary model of bits. Though I suspect it’ll be better for more casual minded groups, and if that goes away I will be sad for the players that love that sort of thing. Volkus is looking hot so I am overall looking forward to it.
CYRAC: Oh totally. If we get more seasons like Gallowdark for Kill Team, then I’m more than happy for it. If we get yearly in-depth and fun seasons like that then I foresee minimal issues. Just let’s hope Bheta-Decima is better refined.
TheArmorOfContempt: While there exist more than enough factions and sub-factions for GW to keep this kind of rotation going for a long time. I am more skeptical of how terrain will be handled. Having to come up with unique Kill Zones that simply don’t feel like rehashed versions of previous ones is something that may grow difficult over time. That being said, limiting the number of teams in play means there is less to fix when introducing some sort of unique Kill Zone effect that breaks one or more teams.
NotThatHenryC: I think the last couple of seasons have struggled with their terrain releases. They’ve given us essentially a core set and then a bunch of narrative bits that are barely used – and not at all in matched play. So I’ve got things like the boxes from Termination but nothing much to do with them. Hivestorm doesn’t seem to have any equivalent of that stuff in the box so maybe they’ll be using a new system. I’ve no idea what that will be, but the Hivestorm ruins look great so I wouldn’t be against getting more of them.
TheChirurgeon: I like the terrain-based seasons, but I agree with Travis that it’s a mixed bag when you get stuff like Bheta-Decima. You absolutely need to have full market saturation with the terrain for it to gain competitive traction and while anyone could build Chalnath-like ruins and they sent out free ITD terrain kits to TOs, Bheta-Decima didn’t have anything close to that, plus it sold out on release with no second wave. The result? No one played it, and that’s a shame because while the initial rules weren’t great, the updated competitive rules for the terrain were solid.
This is a difficult problem to solve with the new terrain. I suspect we’ll see similar adoption rates for the new Volkus cityfight stuff, since it’s part of the starter box for a new edition, but I’m less hopeful we’ll see that level of adoption for anything else.
Also I really want some jungle fight terrain. Let’s make that happen.
Q. Any final thoughts here?
TheArmorOfContempt: This will likely result in no small amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth from some individuals who feel GW is obligated to support their models for eternity. As I mentioned earlier this is something that even makes me a little weary when I first hear about it. I put tons of effort into my guys, and knowing they have a time limit, even if it is years, can be frustrating. But on the plus side we finally have clear communication from GW on how they plan to handle this kind of thing meaning players can approach it informed. Additionally, this is simply the reality of business, model companies must get you to buy new models. It could be worse, you could be playing Magic.
Thundercloud: I can see why GW are doing this from a business point of view, and from the point of view of managing the range, and since it’s still 32 teams in the rotation (if they stick to quarterly releases) that’s a lot to look at for balance a few times a year and still plenty to be rolling around in the meta. One thing I got salty about in Warcry was that some of the Underworlds models were very good but had been out of production for a long time and not come back and it meant some people could meta game and some people couldn’t depending on whether they’d bought stuff for an unrelated game system two years before. If they don’t limit the number of teams in rotation they’ll hit 60+ by the end of the edition. That’s unmanageable from a balance/design point of view.
The move to online rules makes the game more accessible for everyone. That’s a very good thing.
Sky Serpent: This is a change that makes the game a lot more accessible for not just new players but those 40K players who are looking to dip their toe into the skirmish world.
Going forward I will continue to play with models that I love like the Corsairs, I won’t stop using them with friends the minute they become declassified. However I’ll also keep a ‘new‘ Kill Team such as Hand of the Archon on standby too so that I can field them in any event or venue.
HappyRaccoon: It’s already daunting for a new player to be told there are 30bespoke+10-ish compendium teams. So having some sort of method to the madness is good. Having seen past skirmish games buckle under their refusal to rotate I think this will be a good thing in the end. Overall I’m excited by the news that rules are forever free online, and the rest of the news I’ll process in a year when it becomes relevant.
CYRAC: As I sit here eating my Pastrami sandwich at Katz deli, I feel an odd sense of familiarity with the sandwich, as while it is stuffed with succulent New York meat, I am stuffed with constant, enjoyable, brand-new Kill Team content. The new change for classified is like cutting this sandwich in half, making it more digestable and manageable for new players, while veterans like myself can gorge on the full experience.
Another good takeaway is the clear(ish) messaging from GW. We have a fixed idea for lifespans of Kill Teams plus subtle confirmations of future editions and support for Kill Team! Factions will continue to get balance updates, even when removed, so it’s a great sign of GW’s plan to stick to 6 years of support for a kill team.
NotThatHenryC: Like a player who has survived a multi-day tournament on a diet of meaty sandwiches, Kill Team has a painful but necessary purge in its near future. None of us is likely to enjoy this but the bloat has to go and this is probably the best way for it to happen. At least GW have given us a year’s warning that things are going to lose support, so we can make informed choices about what we buy and paint.
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