Guard equivalent teams can’t handle that, and marine teams will generally have one or two more models than a four model Custodes team because they’re elite, and they can’t take an exchange with Custodes either shooting or in close combat. This means that a single Custodes ‘in the zone’ can blender their way through 2 or 3 models in a turn. If it has the wounds to take that much damage, it likely won’t survive a second Shoot action. Custodes rolling 4 dice for shooting are fairly likely to get 4 hits, and Guardian Spears are P! so if any of those hits are crits, the target only rolls 2 defence dice and is pretty likely to take 8+ damage and die. Their own shooting is generally enough to one-shot a 7- or 8-wound model in a single Shoot action, and their melee will generally kill a 7-wound model on the first strike with a critical hit. On top of that Custodes have a 2+ save, 18 wounds and can soak almost any weapon that can be thrown at them.
This would let you potentially move 16” in a turning point while Fighting twice and Shooting, and then coming back and Overwatching later. This means that theoretically you could use Brotherhood of Demigods to charge, then activate the same model, Fight, Charge again, Fight again and Shoot. With 4 APL, a combined double shoot/double fight with Peerless Warriors and the ability to take another action and not have it count as an activation in Brotherhood of Demigods. However double shoot or double fight actions mitigate this somewhat (which marines, plague marines and chaos marines have access to) and let you fire up to three times with each model including an Overwatch shot.Īnd then you have Custodes. Normally this is made up for by having smaller numbers (5 or 6 for power-armoured teams) and topping out at 15 or so actions per turn or giving up speed. The current problem is that elite teams break that. If you’re in the open, you’re likely to be in trouble, and hugging cover to advance to where you can invalidate you’re opponents Conceal orders is a normal thing to do. They’re built around Kill Team as a game where you Conceal fairly often and models are reasonably fragile. These teams don’t have saves better than 4+, don’t have more than 10 wounds in general, and are able to fairly rapidly kill each other. Thundercloud: Kill Team, in the releases of factions built for Kill Team (Veteran Guardsmen, Kommandos, Novitiates, Tau Pathfinder Operators, Hunter Clades), appears to be largely built around reasonably large (10-14 operatives) Kill Teams. Credit: Rockfish So why are Custodes so good? Mechanicus have too, which is good news for players who want to switch to the new Hunter Clade, which appears to be a more powerful variant of the faction.Ĭustodian Guard. Grey Knights have also put up some respectable numbers, and Kommandos and Veteran Guardsmen also appear to have done alright. They are without peer in Kill Team 2.0, and it’s not particularly close. There is at least one of each in those categories from the lists we do have, so it still bears breaking out, but it’s worth noting that there are a couple of gaps here.Īlright now for the other thing: Talons of the Emperor – or Adeptus Custodes, as most players will think of them – have an astounding 79% win rate so far. They’ve also won all but one of the events in our sample, and have gone undefeated 11 times in events, for a record of 55 wins, 14 losses, and 1 tie. One thing worth noting: We don’t have all the lists – they aren’t all publicly available – so it’s difficult to figure out how many “Ork” lists are actually Kommandos, and how many “Imperial Guard” lists are actually Veteran Guardsmen. That’s a pretty good starting sample, even if we don’t quite have enough data to cover everyone.Īlright, so with that out of the way, let’s dig into the results and… oh dear. That gives us a sample of 747 games, with a mix of 3-, 4-, and 5-round events in the mix, including one at Warhammer World run by Games Workshop. Since the new Kill Team launched, there have been 12 Kill Team events run with 8 or more players, run in the US, Great Britain, and Spain (Kill Team is surprisingly popular in Spain – most of the tournaments run over the last month have been held there). Our data here comes from Best Coast Pairings, the premier tournament app for Warhammer.
And these results are fairly surprising and what you might call “not great.”īefore we dive in, we should talk about where this data comes from. Well today we’re extending that work to Kill Team, looking at early tournament results for the game and seeing how things stack up. We’ve done a lot of analysis of the 40k and Age of Sigmar metas over the last few months, looking at faction win rates and identifying which lists are doing well in the meta.