Welcome back readers. This week we’re going to do something a little different.

Over the last two weeks I’ve written previews for two ITC majors happening in Europe, the Alliance Open and the Element Games Grand Slam (Eggs). Normally after an event I do a full write up of my games but this time there isn’t a massive amount to say – I took my Wraithknight out again and, while I managed a respectable 3-2, it was extremely clear that many of the games were coming down to who got first turn, and after getting absolutely dunked round one I dodged the Space Marine part of the bracket most of the way through.

I’ll do a very quick recap later in the article, but what we’re going to focus on today is how things went for the other players whose lists featured in the previews. This has been something people have frequently asked about, and coming at the end of an rules “era” with Chapter Approved around the corner it’s nice to look at what seems to be working and what isn’t, and help identify what might be strategies to watch if points changes improve or hurt them.

Both Alliance and Eggs also ran with publicly view-able web-based pairing tools (tabletop.to for Eggs, a custom tool for Alliance) from which we can easily extract a wealth of data, which makes pulling this together a lot easier. Finally, some of the featured players from both Alliance and Eggs have, very kindly, talked to me about how things went, helping to flesh out the detail.

This is a new experiment, so let us know whether you like it, and thanks again to everyone who helped me pull this together. We’ll also be bringing you another meta update soon looking at the latest tournament stats, so make sure to tune into that if you want a more bird’s-eye view of the evolution of the tournament scene.

Without further ado, on to the lists.

Space Marines

At this point pretty much everyone is aware that Marines are the army to beat, with Imperial Fists, Raven Guard and Iron Hands supplements seeming to be the most consistent source of winning lists and Ultramarines and White Scars getting the odd look in. Sorry Salamanders.

We looked at three different Space Marine lists in the previews, as follows: