Warhammer 40K: Psychic Armies On the Rise
So it looks like all those 40K psychic armies may be good after all.
This past weekend we had a number of tournaments and a number of somewhat surprising results. It seems that a couple of the books that were recently released released are finally coming into their own. The Grey Knights have really come up to the top in a lot of tournaments. The Grey Knights have actually got the top spot on a number of tournaments this past weekend and actually Placed in the top spots in other tournaments that they didn’t win. In addition, there has been some good showings for the Thousand Sons as well. This is showing that these two books can compete in the general meta and this week we will look at it a couple reasons of why they are able to compete and why Grey Knights in particular seem to be doing much better then their Chaos Space Marine counterparts, the Thousand Sons.
Easier To Play
From what I can see and have read on the surface anyway, it appears that Grey Knights are much easier to play than the Thousand Sons. Many of the abilities and stratagems, along with the powers, seem to synergies much easier or at least make it much easier to find the synergies in the army. If you compare this to Thousand Sons, the Thousand Sons seem to have a lot more moving parts in the army.
There seems to be a lot more that a Thousand Sons player has to remember and more importantly remember how each of the different aspects of the army synergize in order to be an effective army. As a result playing a Thousand Sons army has a higher learning curve than playing a Grey Knights Army. That’s not to take away from Grey Knight players but it shows how some books are easier to work with than others when in a competitive environment.
New Codex Syndrome
The fact is that Grey Knights and Thousand Sons are recent codexes and seem to be doing well, now that people have figure out how to play them, also points to a common occurrence in tournaments. Many times when a new book comes out especially if they’re as complex as the Grey Knight and Thousand Sons codex there is a period of time where players have to get used to playing against these armies. This can range from as soon as as the book is released to a month or two after the release of a book it really depends on the complexity of the book and the ability of players in the local area.
The assumption is that players will eventually adapt to the new books but there are cases, like Ad Mech and Druhkari, where no matter how long people have to try to” solve the problem ” it sometimes cannot be solved without direct actions from the game designer. So we will see in the next few weeks about the longevity of the codexes in regards to tournament play.
Can It Continue?
Although I mentioned it in the previous paragraph, as to what factor you need to look at to continue to do well, the question really is “can these codexes continue to do well in an Ad Mech and Druhkari dominated meta”? We would have to take a really deep dive into the players history of who they played in the particular tournaments that they won or did well in to see what armies it actually played against, how they did and how those armies and players did for the rest of the tournament. This is important because this tells us how well the product actually is especially when it got to go against the top tier codexes.
So as we get more tournament results, each time we get to see more games where Grey Knights and Thousand Sons go up against Ad Mech and Druhkari and see how well they do. If we continue to see these codexes do well then it proves that the codexes can hold up and maybe not be top tier but are kind of near the top depending on matchups because if they’re able to get favorable matchups or avoid certain matchups in a tournament, which is possible, then they can do well you and you cannot say that for all the armies out there, unfortunately.
~That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know what you think, and why you think the psychic armies did so well, in the comments section below.
