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Hive Tyrant: Cause or Symptom?

tyranids eternal crusade hor wal

Jstove is back with another instant classic, and this time we’re getting his opinion on the Hive Tyrant spam we’ve been seeing lately. Is it cause or symptom?

Jstove here, and I’m pitching in on the latest boogeyman of 8th edition, the hive tyrant.

If you don’t care about competitive 40k, be warned, this article is about competitive 40k. But before you click off and take your business somewhere else, you should know one important thing… What happens in competitive 40k filters down to Saturday afternoon pickup game 40k, and if the rumors are true, it’s gonna happen to every Nid player you know! Hooray!

What am I talking about?

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Adepticon. The winning army list, which you can pull up pretty easily on google if you just search “Adepticon 2018 Hive Tyrant” had 7 flying roaches, a fistful of Mawlocs, a splattering of Ripper bases, and my personal favorite, a cloud of Mucolid Spores. The big deal though was that through the shenanigans of detachments and force organization, General Smartypants McHivemind, the greatest Tyranid player in America, decided that what the swarm really needed to dominate the galaxy was to just cram as many Flyrants onto the table as possible and swallow the souls of the inferior non-insectoid prey beasts that inhabit planet Adepticon.

Now if you’re gonna spam a model, the Hive Tyrant’s not a bad pick. He’s got an invulnerable save, his wings are cheap, he’s a Psyker, he can have access to a pretty phenomenal array of guns and melee weapons that can put a lot of dice on the table. Not always the best stuff, but Smite and Flight will get you there. Overall, the Hive Tyrant’s got a strong 3.00 grade-average, he’s got B’s across the board. Not as killy as a Primarch or a Greater Demon, not as shooty as a battle tank, and not as mad wizardry as Magnus or Tigurius, but he’s the right price to do the job, and the job requires that there be 7 of them.

But is the Tyrant being a great model really the problem?

This isn’t the first time spam has beaten the game. Spam is an integral part of competitive 40k. You find the best model in your codex, which is typically the model that does its job really well or does a lot of jobs well enough at a competitive price, and you jam as many of that model into your army as you can. In the past, we’ve seen it done with Demon Princes, Stormravens, mortars, KDK Fleshhounds, Eternal Warrior Screamers of Tzeentch, Carnifexes, Space Marine demi companies, footdar, pound puppies, 3rd edition 6 man lasplas tacticals… The list goes on forever down through the editions.

The problem here is not the Hive Tyrant or the rumor that he is going to get Tau Commandered and become a 0-1 pick. The problem here is that we’ve all gone to the 40k all you can eat buffet and we can come back for as many plates as we want. When you create a game format that allows you to always have a fundamentally free choice of the way you organize your army, and the 8E Detachment system more or less completely enables that, you open Pandora’s box. Today, it’s Hive Tyrants… Yesterday it was Stormravens… Who knows which power model is going to be the next bottomless tub of mac and cheese at the 40k buffet?

That’s why the problem is not the model itself. There’s nothing wrong with a Stormraven, Hive Tyrant, or a Demon Prince being good. The problem is that if I put the correct amount of Cultists, Rippers, Scouts, or Nurglings in the right slots, I can have as many of them as I want because that’s the Detachment circus we’ve all agreed to play with.

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The problem is that we might be a little too free. Maybe there should be a limit on what kind of Detachments we can take. In Master Hivemind Matt Root’s winning 7 Fyrant circus there was a Supreme Command Detachment, an Outrider Detachment, and a Battalion Detachment. Is Matt Root a bad guy, or is he just building the best Frankenstein monster out of the corpses he was given? I’m inclined to believe that the Hive Tyrant is the symptom and that Detachment rodeo is the cause.

Because even if the Hive Tyrant is nerfed or forced into a 0-1 slot, that won’t curb spam, it will just curb one model that tastes like spam. The next Matt Root will find the next Hive Tyrant and the circle of life will move on.

In order to truly destroy the Flyrant’s iron grip on the galaxy, we need to impose some kind of limit on what Detachments are available or tax them somehow.

This is just blatant opinion on my part, but I also personally believe that the game design genius that allowed the 40k rulebook to go to print with the Supreme Command Detachment in it should be dragged into the street and crushed to death under a pallet of Hive Tyrant boxes.

You had to assume that being given carte blanche to just shove a handful of the most powerful characters in your codex into any list you wanted was going to backfire spectacularly. I had no idea GW was that desperate to sell Demon Princes and Hive Tyrant kits, seems to me they were already pretty great picks.

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About the Author: Jack Stover