surprising top three at the Norway major

[Jack Shrapnel]

Well I guess harlies in second aren't a HUGE surprise, but this is pretty different from the US results from ninth, and second GT in a row where marines have NOT made the top 3!


bloodofkittens.com/blog/2020/09/13/a-major-from-norway-and-the-surprising-dark-god-results/


Daemons in first is a bit surprise to me, due to how easily they give up secondaries, but this one had only 2 keepers, which mitigates bring it down a bit... but abhor the witch and assassinate are still pretty much easy 15's

[Frosty the Pirate]

I mean, look at those scores for the Daemons. 96/97/100/97/81

Other than the final, those are basically perfectly played games. Those scores mean the army is maxing primaries and missing a point or two on secondaries. That's wild!

It's a shame it doesn't show what the margin of victory was. I'd be curious because winning a game say 96-90 is far different than winning 96-27.

There's a part of me that wonders if marines being SO overwhelmingly popular is contributing to their average showings. In the past Marines tended to not have a great matchup vs each other, which might be pulling them down the power ranking.

Harlies might be no surprise to some, but some power-ranking had Harlies as low as equal to gatekeeper factions such as Imperial Guard and Craftworlds. Which I think is definitely an under-ranking.

[Jack Shrapnel]

There's so many marines and they are really good at killing other marines (their new weapons even more so that heavy bolters are going to flat 2 damage!) and everyone figured out right at the beginning of their domination of the tournament meta that if you are going to a tourney you HAVE to tool your list to kill marines.

Harlies and death guard are the two strongest factions in 9th given the existing codexes. When played right their only threat is each other. Now all of this is changing in the next three months with SIX new books by the end of the year, however one of those books is Death Guard... so we'll see what happens there.

As said very well by Tabletop Titans - if you're playing Harlies you dictate all of your fights, so you should never be in a fight you didn't choose.

in 9th, mobility equals scoring primary and secondaries. Harlies got this more than any other army.

Primary means holding points and not dying... death guard's specialty.

But I will say that Daemons list must have been played flawlessly... I can only rarely make it through a game and still have my keepers of secrets still alive by the end, and those are the big threats of the list. I'm honestly not sure how he wracked up that many points - wish there were batreps of those games because I want to learn!

[Khalai]

I really think we have to take tournaments in places like Norway with a grain of salt. Travel isn't exactly easy right now, so top tier players aren't as likely (or even wanting) to be hitting all the majors. Norway isn't big, and even if you include the rest of Scandinavia it's not like having a major in England, or France, etc.

[Jack Shrapnel]

well a 58 player tourney I think is a pretty good sample size (considering people were freaking out over the much smaller initial tournaments which said salamanders were going to dominate 9th - which you know, hasn't been repeated since)

Here's a meta analysis of the top lists, and shows actually quite a surprising amount of variety.. that noise marine/big bird/magnus list has me thinking for sure.... and another great finish for deathskulls orks as well!

www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-9th-invasion-gt/