Welcome back list review fans! It’s been a while but now that I finally have a week of zen-like quiet where I’m neither recovering from a tournament nor frantically painting for the next one the time seemed ripe to take a look at what the rest of the tournament scene is up to. Last time we did this was for the LVO but (as is the fashion these days) plenty has changed since then, with two new books worth of rules becoming legal and a refresh of the ITC format. It sure would be nice to see what the metagame is up to.

Well good news – this coming weekend sees Majority T3 put on the North East Open in the United Kingdom. I’m not making it myself (as a lifelong soft southerner I worry I will be immediately eaten by wolves if I go north of Manchester) but 100 players are, including some of the best in the UK, so it promises to be a real showcase for what the recent books do to the meta and the updated missions. I should say on that point that if you fancy watching the action live over the weekend the excellent folks over at Hellstorm Wargaming will be streaming it, so tune in to their channel on the weekend if you want to see some high end 40K in action.

Today, as we always do with these, we’ll be taking a bit of a deep dive into three lists that caught my eye as especially interesting as I went through the document. However, before we go into the detailed reviews I thought it would be worth going through a some thoughts on the metagame from the event as a whole and where various factions seem to be at right now. Let’s get started with that.

The Metagame

For this section, I’ll go through some of the major factions in the metagame and any trends that are noticeable, sometimes including a list where there’s one that was interesting but didn’t make it through to the last three.

Notable factions I’m not going to talk about in this section are Tau, Guard and GSC. These three all got buffs in the Greater Good, and I normally start out planning to pick a representative list for each of the recently buffed factions in the deep dive. For Tau and Guard I’ve done just that, and will include some other quick hits in those sections. For Genestealer Cults…yeesh. There is exactly one detachment (never mind army) of Genestealers in the entire field, featuring in the only Hive Mind army at the event. That’s a real shame – we kind of knew GSC were in a rough spot after Chapter Approved hit them hard, and I wasn’t super impressed with their rules from The Greater Good, but I was hoping someone would find a way to leverage them (perhaps a Ridgerunner list). We’ll have to see if that improves in the coming few months, but right now I think there would be a real argument for an emergency revert of the Aberrant nerf in the Spring FAQ – it’s very clear that by the time it hit it wasn’t needed.

Necrons also don’t really get a look in – there’s a single list and it’s on Doom Scythes and Tomb Blades – perfectly effective, but nothing super surprising.

With that disappointing news out of the way, on to some of our contenders!

Space Marines

Space Marines remain, unsurprisingly, hugely popular and what I tend to think of as the two top variants are both here in force:

Shooty Iron Hands w/Resin Dreadnoughts

Raven Guard/RG Successor Centurions (sometimes Raptors featuring Lias Issadon)

There’s obviously some variety within those, and a few unit tweaks here and there, but I didn’t see many where I would be wildly surprised by an opponent pulling them out on me. One Hands list was a little bit of a curve ball though and at least somewhat caught my eye. I wouldn’t say I like it, more that it made me throw up in my mouth in a slightly different way, but I’m pretty sure that counts as innovation: