The Manchester GT Winter : Faction Breakdown

With list submission locked for the Manchester 40K Winter GT, we can take a first look at the roster and the story about what players expect to be good. Currently there are 306 Players with only a small handful not having submitted a list - means we can get a pretty good look at how the meta is shaping up.

The big picture

First up, let's take a look at the whole field.

Here’s the split by the macro factions buckets:

Faction	Players	Share %
Imperium	122	40.4
Xenos	97	32.1
Chaos	73	24.2

A couple of quick takeaways:

• Necrons: most popular, again - one of the highest emergent win rates from recent game updates, the forces of The Silent King continue to reign supreme as the most represented faction.

• The roster is not top-heavy: the top 10 factions make up ~54.6% of players, which means you should expect a lot of variety round-to-round. In what is a very wide meta, a good sign for game balance.

Top factions at a glance

These are the most represented factions right now:

Faction	Players	Share %
Necrons	25	8.3
Space Marines (Astartes)	21	7.0
Death Guard	19	6.3
Blood Angels	17	5.6
Adeptus Custodes	17	5.6

Necrontyr Dominance

At 25 players, Necrons are the single biggest faction. That’s a clear signal: plenty of players think they can pilot it through a long event.

Marines Remain Popular

In the most unsurprising result, marines account for the largest portion of the event once you count all the chapters.

• Generic Space Marines (Astartes): 21

• Blood Angels: 17

• Dark Angels: 11

• Space Wolves: 8

• Black Templars: 6

• Deathwatch: 4

• 
  

That’s ~22.2% of the entire event - before you even start arguing about whether Grey Knights belong in the same “power armour” bucket.

Practical implication: you don’t just need one anti-Marine plan; you need a toolbox that can handle different flavours of pressure, durability, speed, and scoring style as the different sub factions all play the game in different ways.

Chaos, Chaos, and more Chaos

• Death Guard (19) lead the pack for Chaos - one of the biggest single-faction showings overall and a stark increase from previous representations. The plod-squad are back in force with their durable bodies and ability to answer the more elite builds that are tending to dominate right now.

• Chaos Daemons (14) one of the most popular picks from the ITT have a strong showing once again, with the scinitillating legion able to warp the gamestate to their needs paired with the stat check from multiple greater daemons pushing the board at once.

• Chaos Knights (10) make the “big models” meta a real part of the field.

  
  

Xenos

Xenos make up 32.1% and the distribution is nicely even:

• Necrons lead, but then you’ve got a band of T’au (14), Votann (13), Tyranids (12), Orks (12) that will show up constantly in pairings.

• Aeldari (9) and Drukhari (8) are present but not overwhelming.

• Genestealer Cult (3) is a real rarity - a faction you might dodge entirely.

Aeldari continue their fall from grace as the necrons ascend, a sight that the old ones would weep to see.

What to prep for

If you want to be brutally efficient with reps, aim your testing at:

• Necrons

• Marines (as a family, not a single matchup)

• Death Guard

• Custodes - Conspicuously absent in my analysis so far, but a savage list fielding numerous land raiders and usually more than 20 high quality high toughness bodies.

• then a second tier of common opponents: T’au / Daemons / Guard / Votann / Tyranids / Orks

And keep in mind: with this much faction spread, your fundamentals (mission play, deployment, trading, clock discipline) will matter as much as any one hard-counter plan.

We are looking forward to welcoming you

This weekend will be massive, one of the biggest gaming events in the north-west, and we can't wait to see you all there. In the run-up we will be continuing our analysis, looking at players to watch, and the impact it might have on the rankings once the dust settles!

If you missed out, you are not alone - the event sold out in record time! Because of this and the outstanding demand, we are running a second Manchester GT - the Summer counterpart later this year. You can get your tickets to it here.

Save the date: THE LGT 2026

Last year the community rallied to help make The London Grand Tournament 2025 the biggest Warhammer event ever. Not just in the UK but in the world. And we want to do it again.

The LGT 2026 is our 10-year anniversary, and we want to celebrate it with you, so mark your calendars and get ready, when tickets launch on Friday, 27th February @ 2PM.

We are making some big changes this year to improve on last year. You can find out more information in our previous blog post about it: here.