Who performed best at LGT 2026? The answer starts with three factions

LGT 2026 in numbers | Part 1 of 6

Dark Angels, Adeptus Mechanicus and Orks led the larger faction cohorts. Looking at who attended, who won and who reached four wins explains why that matters.

If you wanted to understand the LGT 2026 field by walking between the tables, Adeptus Custodes would have been hard to miss. They were the most represented faction, with 81 active players. But if you wanted to find the strongest overall results among factions with at least ten players, three different names led the way: Dark Angels, Adeptus Mechanicus and Orks.

Across 1,024 players with pairings and 28 factions, those three recorded non-mirror win-equivalent rates of 60.9%, 60.7% and 60.3%. That is a closely grouped set of strong performances, rather than persuasive evidence that one of them was definitively the best army in the room.

All faction comparisons here use rounds one to five. A win counts as one, a draw as half, and games against the same faction are excluded. Later rounds are analysed separately, so a faction does not receive extra weight simply because one of its players went deep into the championship.

What players brought

Custodes accounted for 7.9% of the active field. Orks followed with 74 players, then Space Marines (Astartes) with 67, Dark Angels with 65 and Necrons with 64. Together, those five represented 351 players, or 34.3% of the field. They were prominent, but almost two-thirds of the room brought something else.

Adeptus Custodes were the largest faction cohort: 81 of 1,024 active players. The five largest factions together accounted for 34.3% of the field.

Popularity matters because it describes the event players prepared for and experienced. It also gives context to a result: twenty successful players from a large faction and twenty from a small one would tell very different stories. Attendance alone, however, cannot tell us which faction performed best.

Three strong results, with different sample sizes

Dark Angels recorded 167 wins, six draws and 106 losses across 279 non-mirror games. Adeptus Mechanicus recorded 71 wins, five draws and 45 losses across 121. Orks recorded 201 wins, one draw and 132 losses across 334. Each finished around ten percentage points above the 50% reference line, with Orks providing the largest game sample of the three.

Dark Angels, Adeptus Mechanicus and Orks clustered around 60-61%. The uncertainty ranges overlap; their precise ordering should not be treated as settled.

Deathwatch sat above all three at 70%, but that came from four players and twenty games. It is a real result deserving recognition, with a very different evidential weight. At the other end, Blood Angels recorded 38.1% and Drukhari 37.1%. Those are descriptions of these LGT cohorts, not predictions for every player using those armies.

A popular army was not automatically a high-performing army

Custodes paired their largest attendance with a 54.1% rate. Space Marines, the third-largest cohort, finished at 45.6%. Adeptus Mechanicus reached 60.7% with just 25 players. Putting attendance and performance on the same graph makes those differences immediately visible: the factions occupying the most tables were not necessarily winning the largest proportion of their games.

Attendance and results tell different stories: 81 Custodes players recorded 54.1%, while 25 Adeptus Mechanicus players recorded 60.7%.

How often did a strong weekend happen?

Across the whole active field, 177 players reached at least four wins in the first five rounds: 17.3%, or roughly one in six. Dark Angels achieved that with 20 of 65 players, a 30.8% conversion rate. Orks produced 21 such finishes from 74 players, or 28.4%. Adeptus Mechanicus contributed six from 25, or 24.0%.

At least four wins: Dark Angels 20/65, Orks 21/74 and Adeptus Mechanicus 6/25. The event-wide benchmark was 177/1,024, or 17.3%.

This measure adds something a game-level average cannot: it tells us how widely a strong record was shared among the people who brought a faction. Dark Angels and Orks combined high overall rates with substantial numbers of four-win players. That is the strongest supported headline from the faction overview. The small gaps within the leading group are less meaningful than that broader pattern.

About the data

Source: the LGT 2026 main-event placings and pairings exports. Rates exclude faction mirrors and one-sided results. Four-win conversion uses all active players, including those with fewer than five recorded rounds. Uncertainty intervals are exploratory player-cluster bootstrap ranges.

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