The Birmingham GT: Faction Breakdown

Lists are in! For our first event of 11th Edition - the Birmingham GT is nearly here and we have our first look at the faction breakdowns and force disposition choices! (of those entered to bcp) As nearly 200 players compete in the world's first 11th edition super major!

Faction Choices

For the factions we have a surprise leader in the pack with The Thousand Sons - a very solid representation here with their ability to hand out masses and masses of damage from afar, the terrain changes for this edition and some (not so) quiet glow ups to the sekhetar robots making them very efficient in the new missions, keep an eye out for the Hexwarp Thrallband and Sekhetar Cohort detatchment combo here, as it adds plenty of efficiency to psychic weapons that the robots then get.

Necrons then take 2nd place in our popularity contest, with their reanimation shennanigans continuing to be incredibly annoying and C'tan somehow getting even better with the ability to take to the skys and get over those pesky walls. The trend for 11th edition seems to be leaning towards "fast gun good" and Necrons have some of the fastest guns in the business. Expect to see awakened and starshatter still however there are some very interesting combinations with cryptek conclave & another detatchment to flavour.

3rd place is then tied between Tau and Tyranids, perhaps a surprise to see the bugs so popular, however the start of the edition is where everything is up in the air and we see a lot more faction specialists revert to comfort in order to get their eye in as it were. Tyrands do have a decent gameplan here and can easily dominate games with the changes to battleshock turning the shadow in the warp to a very strong ability when it goes through.

Abracadabra

Though I have yet to mention it, there is a lot of magic flying around this weekend, or more specifically lots of psychic. The Marines are running a lot of librarius conclave to provide some very potent buffs and utility to their roster - fusilading sternguard are back and as strong as ever! We have the Thousands sons, Grey Knights, and Tzeench Daemons all looking to leverage a lot of speed and hard hitting shooting.

Are defilers still good?

It certainly seemed that we would see a drop in the number of defilers thanks to their points increases and subsequent tax for spamming them, however it has not removed them completely as plenty of the chaos forces can still leverage them as very powerful fire batteries with their speed and size allowing them to dominate firelanes, sometimes even over the terrain features themselves.

Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight

There is much more I would like to dive into here, but in the interest of time I will save that for later on in the week - so make sure you keep an eye on the social media pages for those posts when they come out.

I certainly will be taking a look at the many many melee armies that are represented and how they will be looking to play with their shiny new cover rules and hidden mechanics to get the drop on their opponents. Space wolves, World Eaters, Custodes, and Blood Angels all see strong representation here. Looking to pressure the board and close out the game in a few brutal rounds of close combat!

Faction Disposition

Perhaps the most impactful change for the new edition is the introduction of Force Dispositions. These are the changes to primary and mission play that is completely dynamic based on your opponent and your choice in list building will directly change the event you play.

We see a generally decent spread across the 5 choices here, but the most popular (of those set in BCP) is Take and Hold - not massively surprising here as it most closely mirrors the play styles that people are familiar with, and changes the least based on opponents.

Next up we have purge, which I was expecting to be the most popular, and in my opinion is the strongest - this leans very much into the ethos of "dead models can't beat me" and encourages players to get aggressive and take the fight to the enemy from turn 1.

Priority assets surprises me as the 3rd most popular here as it does have some very tricky match ups but this is outweighed by the fact that it comes with some top flight detatchments that provide some very formidable lists to deal with.

Recon brings up the rear of the most popular detatchments and is fairly stable all round, there are a few marine players here looking to take the librarius recon element as it is considered to have a fairly good match up into purge the foe.

Lastly we have a few brave souls daring to take Disruption - the most diffrent playstyle from 10th primary missions there can be and is the most interactive of all the dispositions requiring a lot of action economy and resource management.

Overall this will be the first major test of the disposition therory in a UK Tournament, and we are excited to see how the results play out this weekend. Stay tuned for more posts throughout the week diving into some of these lists and what they mean for the meta.