Good news – big changes in the metagame means that it’s exciting to write about tournament results again! Last week we previewed the North East Open, a 100-player major happening in the UK with a formidible roster of players in attendance. When writing the preview the angle was very much whether any of the new toys from various books would let any of the innovative armies we looked at challenge Marine dominance, but all that changes on Thursday with the publication of the Marine Errata, which we looked at in our round table on Friday.

Normally a big change this close to an event might leave the post-tournament analysis a bit moot, as rules cutoffs can mean they aren’t adopted, but luckily for us the organisers of the NEO (Majority T3) made the decision (with clear support from their players) to incorporate the updates, allow Marine players to change lists, relax painting requirements and redraw the pairings. That’s great news for us, as it means we get some hot-off-the-press results for the new metagame, so we’d like to thank the organisers for making what we think was a good call, and the Marine players in the event for being good sports about it.

What we’re going to do today is check in on the breakdown of the top five, the lists that went 4-1 or better and the lists we previewed, then go through some thoughts regarding what that means for the various factions, including some discussions with various players whose lists have been featured.

Huge, huge thanks to everyone who responded to my requests for their thoughts – getting in some analysis from the players with on-the-table experience of the lists being discussed really levels up what these articles offer, and getting to talk to lots of people about the game is one of my favourite things about writing for this website.

As a final note, all lists for the event are in BCP if we haven’t included them here – we’re touching on rather too many to include them all. The top four are also, of course, available on 40kstats.

Let’s take it away!

Results

The top five finishers after five rounds of competition were as follows:

Aeldari – Konrad Bartkiewicz (who we interviewed yesterday) Iron Hands goodstuff – Mike Porter Raven Guard Centurions – Bernard Lee Bloody Rose-centric Sisters of Battle – Matt Robertson Possessed Bomb/Thousand Sons – James Mackenzie

Obviously you can immediately see that the sky isn’t falling for Space Marines, as in the hands of some great players Iron Hands and Raven Guard still took podium positions, but what’s really striking is what happens when you extend out and look at the breakdown of all 4-1 or better lists, giving the following:

1 Mixed Aeldari

1 Craftworlds

1 Iron Hands

2 Raven Guard/Raptors

1 Sisters

2 Chaos (both Possessed Bomb)

1 Dark Angels

1 Orks

3 Tau

2 Guard/Blood Angels

1 Grey Knights

First up, if that top table metagame doesn’t bring a tear to your eye after the winter we’ve had then you must be a little bit dead inside or an Iron Hands player (at which point it’s probably both). We’re yet to see whether this will hold up as the metagame evolves but it’s en encouraging sign, with the conspicuous lack of an endless wall of Iron Hands lists padding out the higher parts of the bracket being extremely welcome. While the NEO was the biggest event going down, the pattern was repeated at other events that adopted the changes like the Giga-Bites Cafe & Alpha Strike Podcast GT, so hopefully it won’t prove to just have been a fluke.

That covers the top bracket, and we should also check in on the players (other than those already covered above) whose lists we previewed ahead of time. Their results were as follows:

Paul Dennett – Dark Angels – 4-1

Adam Young – Tau – 2.5-2.5

Leo Kyp – Tau – 3-2

Feliks Bartkiewicz – Tau – 4-1

Dominic Graham – Guard/Blood Angels – 3-2

Sadly it looks like Matthew Walker (Iron Hands) didn’t make the event in the end.

We’ve got plenty to talk about from that, and we’ll dive into some faction analysis and thoughts from the players in a second, but before we do that we thought it would also be nice to share some thoughts from the event’s organiser Ricci Lowe about how he thought it went.

Tournament Organiser’s Thoughts

Hey Ricci at Majority T3 here, Meta was as expected at NEO 2020, I think the previous article about the event really shone some light on the more interesting lists, special shout from me to Mark Walkers chaos knight build (I’m a chaos fanboy) and my main man Dom Graham, his list does wonders locally.

With the FAQ changes to Marines around 7 players changed up their army, including Innes Wilson who switched to Grey Knights, which in my opinion was smart, a player like him can pilot those lads to greatness. Marines are still good, they’re just not unbeatable. At the end Konrad jumped the top table from table 2 with a wildly high score in the last game, it could have went wildly different but he’s a genius with that army and also a lot of peoples hot ticket to win as soon as we announced we’d use the FAQ.

Final thoughts:

Eldar: still good,

Dark Reapers: making a come back

Haywire bikes: kill Knights

I’m borrowing a grey knight army for the next tournament I play in!

Event wise everyone enjoyed themselves, we inevitably had all sorts of issues in the background but I think we smashed it on the day but you’ll have to ask the players for their true feelings! (We smashed it)”

We’d like to thank Ricci for speaking to us and helping keep us up to date with list reveal times and ruling updates pre-event – and, of course, for being one of the heroic TOs who make our hobby possible!

Faction Thoughts

Aeldari

We’ll start with the returning pointy-eared menace, both because they won the event and because I’m massively biased. Other than Konrad’s list (Shining Spears/Expert Crafter Reapers/Artillery), the top performing Eldar players were a flyer spam/Expert Crafters build played by Colm McCarthy at 4-1 and a Drukhari build played by Eddie Chater at 3.5-1.5.

Colm’s list packs a truly eye-watering amount of firepower, squeezing in 8 planes, 9 Vibro Cannons and three Night Spinners, with a lone warlock being the only other model in the army. This kind of list has always been able to just sweep stuff off the board given half a chance, and the substantial reduction in the number of Imperial Fists and Leviathan Dreadnoughts in the metagame is great news for it – the high-firepower Fists lists could blow it off the board, while an unkillable Leviathan presented an often insurmountable challenge. In theory the army trades the ability to play the objective game well for being able to out-kill almost anything, but both those Marine flavours could generally out-shoot it while also packing enough troops to play a ground game, leaving the flyer spam build with a very difficult path to winning the game.

I’m not thrilled to see this back but it’s a list you need to prepare for. On the way to 4-1, Colm defeated an Iron Hands Brigade (with a Leviathan, but obviously it can actually be interacted with now), a more conventional Expert Crafters Craftworld build, Blood Angels and Raven Guard Successor Centurions, while dropping a game to a second Raven Guard Successor list. The one thing worth noting is that a lot of the wins here were quite close and low-scoring, suggesting that the list could be vulnerable to a slow start, and from speaking to the Raven Guard player who took a game off Colm that was partially down to being able to secure an early wrap with some Aggressors, which I would assume followed through to a lot of dead Vibro Cannons and a lack of board presence shortly after.

Eddie’s Drukhari build has a lot of familiar elements – it’s got plenty of Venoms, a unit of three Talos and three Black Heart Ravagers. All stuff we know and love, but all looking a bit better now the firepower Marines can bring to bear diminishes after the first turn. Eddie took down Imperial Fists, Raven Guard Centurions and Death Guard, lost to Grey Knights and drew against a Crimson Fists list. That’s a vastly, vastly better set of performances against Marines than we’d probably have seen a few weeks ago, so good job to Eddie and maybe look to see this classic style of list around a bit more.

One final important thing to note is that all three of the top performing Aeldari players had access to Agents of Vect. This stratagem is tremendously powerful against a wide variety of lists at the moment, and if you can possibly squeeze a Black Heart detachment into your elf lists you absolutely should, even if you can only manage a Patrol as Konrad did.

Space Marines – Codex

I mean they’re still here and they still seem to be pretty great, just not as overwhelmingly so as last week. Some changes do seem to be afoot though. Mike Porter’s 5-0 Iron Hands list still packs some distressingly familiar elements (two Chaplain Dreadnoughts, a decent number of stalker Intercessors) but also brings a few tools that we haven’t seen so frequently. He’s also running as a Master Artisans/Long Range Marksmen build, which helps to mitigate the impact of losing the super doctrine. A drop pod full of grav Devastators has been used to good effect in some of the Brigade-style lists before, but now there’s the pressure to milk value out of the super doctrine turn one I think they’ll become more common. The more unusual choices were a relic Scorpius and four-model Centurion Assault Squad. The Scorpius has been another relatively common flex choice, but again probably goes up in consideration because it hits hard turn one then doesn’t need to move from there on out. As a single unit with high output, it’s also a good target for Methodical Firepower or Wrathful Machine Spirit to up the output later in the game.

Finally, there are four Assault Centurions just chilling out. Many have long held that these need mobility strats to be worth it but apparently no, they’re still fine just on rate as a board-control element. The event was using central L-blocks, and just trundling these forward to occupy the centre of the table, counter charge push elements and decimate hordes seems to be enough of a role for them to fit into lists.

Clearly Iron Hands are still extremely powerful, but it’s good to see the lists change up a bit, and good job Mike on taking the nerf and pushing straight through it. On the way to 5-0, he beat Dark Angels/Guard, Blood Angels/Guard, Crafter Eldar, Tau and Grey Knights in a streamed table 1 game at the last.

Over in Raven Guard land, things also still look pretty rosy, with Bernard Lee taking them to 4.5-0.5 and Calum Purdie putting in a 4-1 result (both Artisans/Long Ranged Successors). Bernard’s list looks pretty similar to Raven Guard armies we’ve seen before, with the only major shift being that it’s heavier on the Eliminators than some previous versions. The list is still extremely strong, it just has to play a bit more fair now, having to hold its Centurions back in reserve for safety most of the time. A highly motivated horde list might try to screen them out – but those lists die in droves when the Assault Centurions come in with Tactical doctrine up within flamer range. Bernard defeated a more mixed Raven Guard list, a body-heavy Ork list, Dominic Graham’s Guard/Bangles, drew with Sisters and beat Imperial Fists.

Calum Purdie’s list tried out something that has been theorised as a response to the Master of Ambush change which was swapping up to including a full unit of six Aggressors (note: the version of Calum’s list in BCP seems to not have updated for the resubmission). He defeated Drukhari, Iron Hands, White Scars and Crafters Eldar, and lost the final round to Sisters.

We asked Callum whether losing access to Master of Ambush was a problem, and whether that was why the Aggressors came in:

“No problem. For me particularly, the change had no effect on how I played as I would always be deep striking my Cents. When we had the option to resubmit our lists, I upped my Aggressors from 4 to the full 6-man unit. They came in handy and was something my opponent had to deal with or at least felt like they had to deal with first turn. I only used them one game with master of ambush in order to get an early charge off and wrap a unit so they would be safe for a turn (this was Vs the Eldar flyer list).”

I think that’s an interesting bit of feedback – one of the advantages of the Centurion jump was that it gave you a lot of control over your opponent’s early choices, and the Aggressors stepping into that role even when not being jumped is definitely going to be valuable. Having the option to send something forward for a wrap when it really matters is also clearly very helpful. With hordes seeming to be slightly on the rise there’s plenty of room for Aggressors in the metagame anyway, so watch out for more people giving them a go. Thanks for talking to us Calum and well done on the 4-1 finish.

Taking the Marine results together, it looks like the killing power of Long Ranged Marksmen/Master Artisans builds from the Raven Guard/Iron Hands codices are still more than powerful enough for players to take them to the top tables, but it’s very noticeable as I pull out the brackets for players who we’re talking about that all the other mid-high table predators have much, much more realistic game plans against them. As it should be, frankly.

Grey Knights

One of those presumptive mid-high table predators is the new hotness Grey Knights, but they honestly had a slightly disappointing weekend, with only one player (Innes Wilson, who swapped to them from Marines) making it into the 4-1 bracket. That’s obviously slightly underselling Innes’ performance, as he played on the top table in the final round massively ahead on VP going into it, only being pushed out of the top five by high-scoring final round performances by some other players. You can see Innes own thoughts on the final game on his twitlonger. On the way to the final Innes beat vehicle-heavy Ad Mech, Eddie Chater’s Drukhari, Tau, James Mackenzie’s Possessed/Tsons. All the lists look super solid so the fact that the Grey Knights went through them is definitely encouraging for anyone who’s helped sell out Strike Squad boxes, but it may be that it takes a little while for a lot of the newer Grey Knight players to adapt to the list, which while extremely potent is also not very forgiving!

Dark Angels

Although Dark Angels are definitely hurt by the doctrine changes, their best build coming out of Ritual of the Damned seems to be Ravenwing, and they can heavily mitigate the impact through the Tactically Flexible warlord trait if necessary. A second turn of Devastator Doctrine for the plane bubble is basically all this list needed anyway and the combination of mobility, alpha strike threat and anti-infantry this army puts out still makes it formidible.

We looked at Paul Dennett’s version of the army last week, and he took this to a 4-1 finish, defeating Magnus/Mortarion, Chaos FW Spam, Grey Knights and Raven Guard, but dropping a game to Matt Robertson’s Sisters list. That particular build looks like a pretty horrific matchup for this army – it’s Repentia heavy and they’ll butcher Black Knights, while auto-charging Bloody Rose Zephyrim are a nightmare for the planes. Paul’s list was unusual in having two biiig Black Knight squads, and if the popularity of D2 melee/shooting continues I can imagine they might get swapped out for something that diversifies the target profile a bit. Still, it’s a great performance and good news for fans of the Unforgiven – good job Paul.

Sisters of Battle

So let’s talk about Matt Robertson’s Sisters list because it is wild (and terribly useful timing for poor, hard working website writers who’re supposed to be filling the Start Competing slot this week). Eschewing the Valourous Heart “anvil” seen in a lot of lists, this build is all hammer: