As we covered last week Chapter Approved is here, ringing in a whole bunch of changes for a whole bunch of factions. My beautiful Space Elves, my first and greatest 40K love, are no exception. We’ve already looked at the big winners and losers from each faction, but now it’s time to go a bit deeper and see what this means for some current top lists and if any new ones about to emerge. Behind the scenes I am corralling the disorganised rabble that is the Goonhammer writing team to try and get everyone else lined up to cover their factions of choice, but as you might have expected (since it was the only one we did last year) Craftworlds is going to be first out of the gate because I can just slam this bad boi out. I’ll very likely be picking up Necrons too, so look forward to that next week.

The way we’re going to do this is as follows:

Look at what our baseline – pick out some recent, successful lists and identify how many more or less points they have now. Tour through the most significant units that changed and what impact that might have on strategies. Come back to the lists we covered and examine how we might change them based on the update. See if there are any whole new lists that might arise thanks to the changes.

How easy that is to do is obviously going to vary by faction, but for Craftworlds we’ve got a wealth of stuff to play with, so let’s get started!

Current Lists

We’re going to look at three current lists, two successful ones we’ve already talked about recently and one winner from a recent GT. As ever, we’d like to thank 40kstats for the hard work they do curating data and lists – it makes writing this kind of analysis so much more practical, and is great for the community as a whole.

The lists we’ll be looking at are

Tomas Christensson’s Shining Spears and Fire Prisms list from the Alliance Open

Colin Sherman’s Combined Arms/Dark Reapers from the Stumptown Stomp

Gaz Jones’ Expert Crafters from the Element Grand Slam

Tomas Christensson’s Shining Spears