Orks went 18-4 into Space Marines. What can LGT matchups really tell us?

LGT 2026 in numbers | Part 3 of 6

Some faction pairings produced striking records. The useful question is how far those results can take us, and where the evidence runs out.

Across the first five rounds of LGT 2026, Orks met Space Marines (Astartes) twenty-two times and won eighteen of those games. An 18-4 record, or 81.8%, is one of the clearest matchup stories in the results. It is also exactly the sort of statistic that needs its denominator attached.

Twenty-two games tell us something concrete about this event. They do not establish that the next Ork player to face Space Marines has an 81.8% chance of winning. The distinction matters if we want matchup content that is useful to players as well as attention-grabbing.

First, read the matchup map

The analysis contains 2,377 games between different factions in rounds one to five. With 28 factions, there are 378 possible distinct faction pairings. LGT recorded at least one meeting in 347 of them, giving us broad coverage of who played whom.

The matchup map shows observed win-equivalent rates where factions met at least ten times. Grey cells are not a 50% result: they indicate a mirror or insufficient data.

A heatmap makes patterns easy to spot, but the colour only becomes informative once you know how many games sit underneath it. Read each cell from the row faction's perspective, check the number of meetings, and keep the result tied to these players and this event. Dark Angels and Blood Angels are separate faction labels here; Space Marines means the export's Space Marines (Astartes) category, not all armies wearing power armour.

The records that stand out

Alongside Orks' 18-4 against Space Marines, Dark Angels went 20-7 against Custodes: 74.1% across 27 meetings. Necrons went 10-2 against Aeldari, an 83.3% result from twelve games. Against Chaos Space Marines, Necrons recorded eleven wins, one draw and three losses; with a draw counting as half, that is 76.7% across fifteen games.

Selected observed records include Orks 18-4 versus Space Marines, Dark Angels 20-7 versus Custodes, and Necrons 10-2 versus Aeldari. These are event results, not established hard counters.

Space Marines themselves offer an important counterpoint. Their aggregate faction rate was 45.6%, but they went 9-3 against Grey Knights, or 75.0%. An army's overall event result is an average across the opponents it actually faced. It does not imply the same performance into every faction.

Score margins add another layer. Across all 22 Ork-Space Marine meetings, Orks averaged a positive margin of 31.4 points. Across Dark Angels' 27 meetings with Custodes, their average advantage was 18.0 points. Those figures indicate that the observed results involved more than a collection of narrow wins. They still cannot tell us which units, deployments or decisions produced the advantage.

Coverage is broad; depth is much thinner

Of the 378 possible pairings, only 85 reached ten meetings. Just fifteen reached twenty. The 85 pairings meeting the ten-game threshold accounted for 1,278 of the 2,377 non-mirror games, or 53.8%. Almost half the recorded games therefore sit in matchups too thinly sampled to display a rate in the main heatmap.

LGT observed 347 of 378 possible faction pairings, but only 85 had at least ten meetings and fifteen had at least twenty.

Even the displayed cells are exploratory. A player can contribute more than once to a faction pairing, the field was not randomly assigned to armies, and we are selecting noteworthy results from hundreds of possible comparisons. Extreme-looking records are easier to find when there are many chances to find them. Ten meetings is a display threshold, not a certificate of statistical certainty.

Turn the result into a useful question

For practice, these numbers identify matchups worth investigating. An Ork-Space Marine review could ask whether scoring denial, trading or list composition explains the observed gap. Answering that would require lists, game accounts or replays that are absent from these exports. The results give us a well-founded reason to ask; they do not supply the tactical explanation.

That is the value of the LGT matchup report: specific records, visible sample sizes and clear leads for deeper analysis. Orks went 18-4 into Space Marines here. Keeping the word "here" in the story makes the statistic more credible, and the follow-up discussion more useful.

About the data

Source: the LGT 2026 main-event placings and pairings exports. Directed matchup rows are counted once per distinct faction pair for coverage totals. Matchup rates exclude mirrors and one-sided results; draws count as half. Main heatmap threshold: ten meetings. Standout graph selection threshold: twelve meetings. No adjustment for players, lists or schedule.

Follow UKTC and the LGT over the next few days as we share the results, matchups and player stories from the event.