GW's War on Customers

As a paying Warhammer customer I'm pretty amazed by all the recent moves GW has been making with regards to 40k and their properties. I'd like to discuss it here. It seems to me that the company, although they are doing 'well', is on the path of self-destruction.

Counter-Necron

9 of the top 16 lists at Adepticon included this:

Lord,
3x Warriors + Night Scythe
3x Annihilation Barge

and 8 included at least 2 6-man squads of Canoptek Wraiths w/whip coils. These are purely to tie up and live through dedicated CC and heavy weapons units. They are also good at popping AV10 vehicles. They're a really good jump infantry unit because they ignore everything but impassable terrain so they can fly in a straight line towards whomever they wish to engage. They also have 3+/3++ and are thus very hard to kill even with just T4 and 2 Wounds. Thankfully they don't have power weapons. It'd be grounds to ban Necrons from tournies that is, combined with Night Scythes and Annihilation Barges. People think Heldrake is under-costed. Look at Annihilation Barge! 90 points! Heldrake should be 80 at that point-scale.

Anyways, ranting about poorly costed units aside how do you counter units like this? Because, to be honest, these guys can ally with damn near anyone, cost nothing and are going to be Top 16 of every competitive tournament so building lists purely to counter these will probably get you far. 

Necrons, Necrons Everywhere

Kept thinking about the ridiculous lists from Adepticon (and how some of them had to have won purely by dice flukes and by being matched against even worse crafted lists). The Dark Eldar/Eldar lists sticks out particularly to me as the main fighting capabilities are a 300 point unit of Warriors and a 275 point unit of Wyches (albeit 55 of each are venoms, which are known to be extremely powerful when you only take 2). And a 240 point beast unit. Very scary with an average toughness of 3 and no armor saves against bolters. Oh and 665 points worth of unique HQs. Oh and 9 Necron armies. They were all roughly this:

Lord
Warriors, Night Scythe
Warriors, Night Scythe
Warriors, Night Scythe
Canoptek Wraiths x a few
Annihilation Barge
Annihilation Barge
Annihilation Barge

Garnish as you'd like, win accordingly.

Adepticon 2013 Second Place list

I looked over the Top 16 finishers at Adepticon and I would love to post the second list because it is just the ticket for what might be good against the winning list. The list is SM/IG with 2 blobs, 3 flyers and Thunderfire Cannons. Which is really funny to me because I've seen Thunderfire Cannons get laughed at continually on the internet for being a waste of points and this guy took 3. List is below:

Adepticon 2013 1st Place List

Today I want to do an analysis of the winning list from Adepticon 2013. It's pretty easy to grasp list and can be seen below. I'm going to do an analysis of the army's capabilities and maybe show how tactically it's a really good, albeit cheesy-as-hell, army.

Review of the slew of FAQ Updates

In case you didn't see GW released a ton of new FAQs including one for Daemons and an update to the main rulebook. I'll review the changes here. First up the main rulebook:

Flyer Fix? Maybe.

Took a road-trip today so I had some time to think about 40k and what small fixes could be made to improve unit balance and I came up with a simple one: Shots at Zooming Flyers are resolved at BS2 instead of BS1.

I think this might be enough to really take flyers down a peg and bring them in line with other units. I got this idea thinking about Axis and Allies. In that game, any unit has a chance of shooting down a plane except for subs (deck guns can't do it). This includes infantry, tanks and other planes. In 40k this sort of real-world balanced units is not assumed nor enforced (hence blob armies) but it supposed to be mandated by the rules ie: not enforced but you have to. In this new edition instead of mandating varied unit composition with a semi-mechanized army they instead enforce buying Flyers. Literally that's all they do: buy Flyers. They aren't an instant win card, however, and still aren't that devastating to an enemy army except for the Heldrake and Necron Air armies. They will ruin opponent's armies without anti-air. You need anti-air just for those units. That's stupid. 

To correct for this just add "Snap Shots at Flyers are resolved at BS 2 instead of the usual BS 1". I think this will go a long way towards evening out that part of the problem.

Now about blobs...