NOVA 2013 Top Armies + Brief Meta Analysis

Looking at the final Top Bracket placement for the Nova Open (via Torrent of Fire) probably won't be that eye-opening to anyone who's been following 40k meta.



No lists sadly, I'm hoping that some of them get posted later so as to see what the pre-dominant builds are (especially as I am still personally fuzzy with the Tau-Dar codices). I'm sure that searching the blogdarks would yield up some more results.

So...

NOVA OPEN GT - TOP 16

Position	Name	Primary Army	Allied Army
1	Justin Cook	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
2	Alex Harrison	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
3	Nick Rose	Eldar
4	Neil Gilstrap	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
5	Matt DeFranza	Eldar	Dark Eldar
6	Jeremy Veysseire	Tau Empire	Eldar
7	Aaron Aleong	Eldar	Tau Empire
8	Adam Tricola	Grey Knights	Tau Empire
9	Alan Bajramovic	Tau Empire	Eldar
10	Ben Mohlie	Necrons	Orks
11	Tony Kopach	Imperial Guard	Space Wolves
12	Brad Townsend	Dark Angels	Imperial Guard
13	Matthew Bennett	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
14	Nick Nanavati	Chaos Daemons	Chaos Space Marines
15	Werner Born	Necrons	Tau Empire
16	Bob Roda	Chaos Daemons

As you can see as the results suggest, Tau and Eldar are just on fire, with the top tournament wins now to back them up.  Tau take up 6 out of the top 16 primary armies (37%), grabbing exactly half of the top 10 lists. Eldar come in next with 3 primaries, and Chaos Daemons follow with 2.  The rest is a smattering of different one-ofs bolstered by yet more Tau and Eldar Allies.  Focusing on just the allies, its visible that Tau have been used to bolster most armies firepower as well.

With the recent talk of Daemons being used to counter/combat Tau, being a Daemons player, I am a little disappointed that they didn't fare better.  It makes sense though that Daemons, while sporting very powerful builds are prone to extremely bad cases of luck (in the case of the Grimoir backfiring, monstrous creatures falling down, the Warpstorm going bananas).  Its just the nature of the way their codex is set up.  As the NOVA open was played over the course of 8 games, Daemons were more likely to run into several bad games due to the dice rolls over time. Tau in contrast to this (and Eldar to an extent) when well played, will be consistently more reliable from game to game.

Looking at the NOVA invitational (which was only played over 5 rounds rather than 8), you can see that Daemons did a bit better taking up the 7th and 10th spots (rather than 14 and 16).  I am interested to see if the CSM allies went beyond running a Helldrake, some cultists and a Black Mace Prince as well here.

Position	Name	Primary Army	Allied Army
1	Aaron Aleong	Eldar	Tau Empire
2	Jesse Newton	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
3	Brett Perkins	Eldar	Tau Empire
4	Adam Tricola	Grey Knights	Tau Empire
5	Matt Schuchman	Eldar	Tau Empire
6	Matt DeFranza	Eldar	Dark Eldar
7	Nick Nanavati	Chaos Daemons	Chaos Space Marines
8	Alex Harrison	Tau Empire	Tau Empire
9	Alan Bajramovic	Tau Empire	Eldar
10	Jeremy Veysseire	Chaos Daemons	Chaos Space Marines

Eldar take the cake for the invitational, with Tau settling in closely at 2nd, 8th and 9th place - Tau allies abound for every Eldar primary (except one),

I'll be extremely interested to listen to Neil Gilstrap's breakdown of differences between his tournament experiences over on the 11th company podcast. He took two armies to play with in the two different tournaments - his Tau scored 4th place overall in the Open, but his Daemon army he brought to play with in the invitational ended up in 32nd (dead last) place.

So, its important to realize this is just a temporary snapshot of the tourney meta scene - as Space Marines drop in I am sure that we will see yet more big shifts as GW unloads their codex updates.  As much as I hope that some new Imperial builds will knock Tau from dominating the top spots, I am more likely anticipating some sort of new Tau/Space Marine power combination will be emerging. 

 

Tyranids at this rate are going to need to be AWESOME if a dedicated assault army is ever going to work reliably in this edition again.  While Daemons can pull some goofy tricks off with the right dice and powers, the nature of their randomness just isn't going to work consistently every game.  That won't stop me from playing with them though as they are an extremely fun list that makes for interesting games for both sides.