Warhammer 40K: The 4 Scariest Armies In the Game – Can You Beat These?
Goatboy here with the current scariest four armies in Warhammer 40K 10th Edition. You need to be able to handle these lists when you hit the tabletop.
Right now, there really appears to be two “best-of” lists with two gatekeeper lists that live right underneath them. These two best-of lists appear to be pretty rough as they can do so many things in the game, all while wrecking your army, and controlling the scoring. Let’s pull up a chair, bust out some snacks, and talk about the current best four lists in Warhammer 40K 10th Edition.
T-Sons and Sisters – The King and Queen of the Meta
Right now we really have two lists that are rocking towards the top of the meta. Both of these lists can easily pour out a ton of damage, have movement tricks galore, and just seem a cut above the rest of the armies around the tabletop. Thankfully both armies are not super easy to play, and we are still living in an edition where the card mission draw can just ruin your day. It keeps these lists from always winning, and feeling like initial Launch Aeldari.
The two armies are the Adepta Sororitas and Thousand Sons armies. Both of them really just have the chance to spike damage, have a ton of good stratagems, and powerful rules. The Thousand Sons sit in the index stage and hopefully with a new book coming at some point they will be toned down beyond just hitting a few things with the points bat. The Sisters of Battle, on the other hand, have extremely efficient rules attached to a ton of powerful characters and unit interactions. They feel like they can just about do anything and only real drawback – is they can get killed pretty quickly, which can blunt their potential.
Why Are They Scary?
There seems to be three rules that a good army needs to do and both of these do it. They can move very fast. They punish you with shooting. They can be somewhat tough to deal with. All of these things create a plethora of options to win the game. If you looked at the Champs Cup, each team had a Thousand Sons army and a Sisters army with both winning most of their games on the better teams.
I expect Sisters to get hit with the points bat pretty hard with a ton of things going up just to help tone the army down a bit down. It should probably move into the elite style bracket to make them feel almost Aeldari like with fewer units and less ability to just go wild, lay it all out, and win the game with hyper-efficient rules.
The Thousand Sons, on the other hand,will most likely take a points hit and a codex change to get them in line. I don’t like games where armies have an extra resource that others don’t use. We already have to deal with that in Sisters and the Faith Dice so having another one is a pain in the butt. It is one of the things I think should be on the list of GW Design Team’s rules to not break – don’t create another resource for a faction that other armies don’t use.
Astra Militarum & Black Templars – The Gatekeeper Armies
Now we move onto the two gatekeeper “stat check” armies we currently have out there now. These are builds designed to cause problems if your army can’t deal with this in an efficient way. This is usually dealing with a unit or a batch of units that are hard to deal with. You can see this in things like the Astra Militarum having a ton of tough tank shells mixed with a tough as nails infantry unit to create a nightmare scenario for armies to deal with.
Can you be tooled enough to deal with a tough infantry unit and still have enough gas to deal with 2+ armor save tanks that shoot you all game? Can you easily deal with the tanks AND a bunch of Bullgryns tagging all your damage options and covering you in an aura of stank that you can’t break through? If you can’t break through this AM combo, then winning the game is a going to be very hard to do.
On the other side of it is how the Black Templar builds are pushing the idea of: can you kill 120 marines in enough time to score some points? This is a whole over-level of stat check that armies have to deal with too. Sure they might not win versus a well juiced Sisters of Thousand Sons build, but they will be a nightmare for any other army to chew through quickly.
Why the Gatekeeper Armies are Rough
This is what a Statcheck army is – can you deal with a powerful stat for the army (bodies, toughness, survivability) in a way that lets you win the game? What armies are you thinking of keeping some of the other builds at bay? What kind of things are you dreading to see across the table from you when playing an event?
Next year should see Astra Militarum and hopefully Thousand Sons hit with the nerfbat. I can only hope we get a points update beyond just the much needed Blood Angels points but we’ll have to see. In two weeks will have Tampa event and I doubt will see any updates before them so will just have to wait, dread the Sisters/T Sons match up, and hope we get the best cards to win the game.
How does your army plan to take these power factions on?
