40K: The State of the Meta – Post Adepticon 2011
Well, everyone is back home, but as the dust settles, Adepticon gave the blogosphere a good snapshot exactly where the current Warhammer 40000 metagame is, and its quite a bit different than last year…
Here is the breakdown of the big showdown, the 40K Championship, which attracted the big players:
Blood Angels: 38
Black Templars: 3
Chaos Daemons: 14
Chaos Space Marines: 21
Deamonhunters: 1
Dark Angels: 5
Dark Eldar: 10
Eldar: 7
Imperial Guard: 32
Necrons: 3
Orks: 32
Space Marines: 28
Space Wolves: 43
Tau: 5
Tyranids: 13
Some standouts from this list; A quite small number of Dark Eldar for a codex that has been out for 6 months. Secondly, the biggest loser of popularity compared to last year was IG, who had almost 60 spots in 2010. Orks are surprisingly common, and at least one made it into the second day cut as did Tyranids. Not as many straight codex Space Marines either.
I’m starting to wonder if we are seeing the community gel around IG, Blood Angels and Space Wolves as the three hot builds out there, but with the point and shoot puppies/angels being considered easier armies to command on the tabletop compared to the slightly more demanding IG rules.
As further fuel for the fire, I would like to share a datapoint given to us by the Adepticon staff. Event organizers recieved 40 counts-as army requests, which are defined as a player requesting models from a particular codex range, to be allowed to be used to represent another codex. 38 of the 40 were requests for transfers into codex Space Wolves armies. Just saying…
So have at it folks. What do you think is going on, both at a community macro level, as well as the current “hot” and “cold” trends among both new and veteran players…
