Teams Explained: Roster and List Building

In singles 40k, list building is mostly about your consistency: can you play into the field, across missions, without falling over?

In teams, list building is about your intent: what matchups do you want to create, what matchups do you refuse, and what score do you need each table to deliver when the draft doesn’t go your way.

That’s why teams players don’t talk about “bringing a strong list.”

They talk about bringing a roster.

And with the UKTC Winter ITT almost here, that roster puzzle is about to be played at absurd scale: the event is billed as the world’s largest 40k team tournament, it’s sold out, and it’s sized for 800 players.

So, if you’re on the outside looking in (or you did get a ticket and want a primer on where to start), here’s how the best teams think about roster construction: archetypes, roles, and the restrictions that make teams 40k its own game.

Start with the constraints (because they shape everything)

At UKTC ITT events:

• Teams are 5 players. 

• You can only include one of each faction per team (no duplicates).

• Pairings aren’t random at the player level — captains draft matchups inside each team-vs-team round.

• Results feed into score normalisation: VP differential converts to a 0–20 scale, where draw games hover around 10–10 and blowouts push towards 20–0.

  
  

That “one of each faction” rule is the big one. It forces real creativity, because you can’t just stack the current best book five times. You have to cover the field with five different toolkits. This includes allies, so no Agents tech piece for all your imperium players, or Daemon allies for all the forces of chaos.

Archetypes: what your list is in the ecosystem

When teams talk archetypes, they’re not talking about a faction name. They’re talking about how the army wins games and what kinds of opponents it pressures.

Here are the archetypes that matter most in teams roster building:

1) The Hammer (pressure + primary denial)

This list wants to hit the mid-board early, make you fight for primary, and turn the game into a constant “fall behind and never recover” problem.

• Loves: armies that can’t trade efficiently, armies reliant on fragile scoring pieces

• Hates: high-volume trading, resilient counterpunch, armies that can keep scoring while dying

2) The Skew (stat-check)

This list asks a blunt question: “Do you have enough of the right answer?”That answer might be anti-tank, anti-horde, anti-fly, anti-invuln, anti-elite — whatever the meta is under-prepared for. There are teams made entirely of 5 stat-check lists, from 5 Horde lists with 100+ models each, to 5 Big-stuff lists with less than 10 models each.

• Loves: unprepared rosters, balanced “goodstuff” lists without hard tech

• Hates: dedicated tech lists and captains who can simply draft around it

3) The Anvil (movement, staging, denial)

This is the “you don’t get to play where you want” army. It wins by dictating lanes, move-blocking, screening deep strike, flipping tempo, and forcing awkward trades.

• Loves: melee armies that need clean angles, lists that over-rely on reserves

• Hates: armies that don’t care where the fight happens (or can teleport out of the rules)

4) The Blunter (high floor)

This list’s superpower is that it can score even while losing. It’s built around reliable secondaries/actions/board presence and tends to keep games close.

• Loves: anything that can’t stop it scoring

• Hates: extreme denial and blowout pressure

5) The Glass Cannon (high ceiling)

This list is built to absolutely delete specific opponents. In teams, that’s valuable because a single big win can swing a round via normalised scoring.

• Loves: its “prey matchups”

• Hates: being forced into the wrong table/opponent, and any plan that requires surviving

6) The Counter-meta Tech (specialist hunter)

This is the list you bring because you expect a popular archetype to show up in volume — and you want a reliable answer somewhere on your roster.

• Loves: predictable metagames

• Hates: wide, messy fields unless it also has a stable floor

A good five-player roster usually wants coverage across these archetypes, not five versions of the same idea.

Roles: what your list does in the draft

Archetype tells you how the army plays. Role tells you why it exists on the team.

The cleanest way to think about roles is the same language captains use:

The Hammer

Your “win big” piece. It exists to create 16–4s, 18–2s, 20–0s when drafted correctly, because margin matters in teams scoring.

The Anvil

Your “don’t lose big” piece. It absorbs pressure, keeps the score tight, and gives your captain safe defensive options in the pairing sequence.

The Tech Piece

Your meta scalpel — it’s there to punish a common boogeyman.

The Flexible All-Rounder

It takes awkward pairings, plays lots of missions, and stops your team collapsing when the draft gets weird.

The Wildcard

The curveball. Sometimes it’s an off-meta skew, sometimes it’s a weird build that forces the opponent to “waste” a good attacker dealing with it. Sometimes you just have a player that does it like no one else for that faction and you want to let them off the leash.

Those five roles aren’t mandatory as a strict 1:1 template — but if your roster can’t answer who is our Anvil? Who can Hammer? Who takes the ugly games? You’re building blind.

The teams scoring effect: build for range, not just “winning”

Because UKTC teams uses a normalised scale driven by VP differential, your roster needs two things at once:

• Ceiling: at least one or two lists that can genuinely run up a score when drafted well

• Floor: at least one or two lists that can lose “usefully” (keep it close, deny that 20–0)

That changes list construction in practical ways:

• Greed is punished if it turns bad matchups into catastrophic losses

• Consistency is rewarded because 11–9 losses are often fine for the team plan

• Denial matters even when you’re losing — shaving 5VP off the opponent can literally shift the normalised result

If your whole team is made of high-variance lists, you’ll have rounds where you either smash… or implode.

The best rosters feel boring in the best way: they always have a path to a team-usable score.

A simple roster “shape” that works surprisingly often

If you need a starting blueprint, try building a five like this:

1. One true Anvil (high floor, resilient scoring, low risk)

2. Two Hammers (each with different prey — don’t double up on the same target)

3. One Flex (stable, mission-capable, draft-friendly)

4. One Tech/Wildcard (forces decisions, patches a known weakness)

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Then pressure-test it with two questions:

• What happens if our worst two matchups are unavoidable?

• Where do we get our big wins if the opponent plays defensively in the draft?

If you don’t have good answers, you don’t need new factions — you need clearer roles.

The classic teams roster mistakes (that everyone makes once)

“We brought five strong lists!”

Cool. What’s your plan when the opponent drafts your three best players into their two worst matchups?

“Our lists all do the same thing.”

That’s how you get hard-countered as a team. Diversity isn’t aesthetic — it’s a defensive structure.

“We forgot about the missions / tables.”

Teams is list-vs-list inside a pairing plan, and UKTC is running a defined missions/terrain approach for its events. If your list only works on one style of table or requires a perfect lane every round, it becomes a liability in the draft.

“No one wanted to be the Anvil.”

Everybody loves being the Hammer until your captain needs someone who can take a punch and post a 9–11 instead of a 0–20.

How to actually get better (fast) before your next teams event

If you want the biggest performance jump, take some time and consider these activities:

1. Write down each list’s role in one sentence

2. Identify each list’s top 5 and bottom 5 matchups

3. Do two pairing practice sessions with another team

4. Track: Where did we bleed points? Where did we fail to generate big wins?

You don’t need a thousand reps. You need to see the draft from the captain’s chair at least a couple of times before you turn up.

The Winter ITT factor: why this event hits different

The Winter ITT isn’t just “a teams weekend.” It’s a mass-scale, high-energy hall full of squads who came to play the format properly — five lists, captain-led drafts, and every VP swing being tracked across the table row. This will be followed by the Spring ITT - the second of 4 teams events in the season.

And the most painful part?

It’s already sold out.

So if you missed it: get on the waitlist, mark your calendar for the next launch (Summer ITT Launches 27th March 2026) , watch the coverage, and start building your next roster now — because the only thing worse than a bad pairing is seeing your mates post “we’re in” while you’re searching for a fifth at the last minute.

Tickets to all our event can be found here.