Don’t miss the new top 5 ITC super factions in Warhammer 40k since Las Vegas Open, with some thoughts on the FAQ shakeup that’s coming!
Hi I’m /u/matthra from Reddit, and those of you who browse the Warhammer competitive subreddit might already know me from post like this one, and this one. For the other 99% of you, I’m a data analyst by day and a rabid 40k fan by night.
As practice for my work, I do 40k data mining and create visualizations (charts and the like) to give people a view on the competitive scene in 40k. The community seems to really enjoy these, and I’m thrilled to be adding something positive and fun to the community. All of the data for this post is pulled from 40kstats.com, without them this kind of analysis would be nearly impossible.
I’ve been following the ITC changes to best in faction, and I’m very happy with how the vote turned out. I doubt it will have much effect on the meta overall, most people are trying to win the event they are going to and the top lists haven’t changed. With that said, I’m excited that it will reward people who are dedicated to a single faction. It also offers the chance for people like myself to do apples to apples comparisons between factions.
So let’s check the numbers and see how the new 40k ITC factions shake out after the change.
ITC Faction Population
First up let’s look at the population of each faction, for this, we will be using ITC events after the LVO. The rules for how factions are now determined can be found over on Frontline Gamings site. The new Imperium faction is number 1 in terms of size. The next biggest faction is Chaos, with Aeldari close on their heels (but for how long)…
New ITC Factions
- Imperium – 210
- Chaos – 97
- Aeldari – 77
- T’au Empire – 56
- Orks – 43
- Necrons – 23
- Astra Militarum – 21
- Genestealer Cults – 20
- HiveMind – 20
- Adeptus Astartes – 18
- Tyranids – 13
- Drukhari – 11
- Asuryani – 11
- Space Wolves – 9
- Thousand Sons – 7
- Dark Angels – 6
- Death Guard – 5
- Grey Knights – 5
- Blood Angels – 5
- Chaos Daemons – 5
- Imperial Knights – 4
- Cult Mechanicus – 4
- Deathwatch – 3
- Adeptus Custodes – 3
- Adeptus Titanicus – 1
- Chaos Space Marines – 1
- Harlequins – 1
- Renegade Knights – 1
- Ynnari – 1
ITC Faction Performance
Let’s take a quick look at how each of these factions are performing. The below visualization is a box and whisker plot, it takes some getting used to, but it’s pretty ideal for this application. The idea is that performance is a spectrum, you’ll have both skilled players and novices playing a given faction. So it’s more informative to show that spectrum, rather than trying to come up with a single number for each faction.
The box in the middle is where you’ll want to focus your attention, that shows us the range between a good player in the faction (75th percentile) and a bad player (25th percentile). Above the box are the best players for a given faction, and below the box being the worst players. One thing that becomes clear when looking at charts like this, no army is good enough to drag you into the winners’ circle, but there are some that can drag you out.
There are a few surprises, Necrons are performing pretty well, and are actually one of the more populous factions. Another surprise is that Blood Angels are doing worse than Grey Knights. Perhaps the Blood Angels are suffering from the changes to charging in the Fall FAQ. I also found it interesting that Genestealer Cult can take or leave Tyranids, but Tyranids perform worse without the cult to help them out.
As this ITC season goes on we are probably in for some surprises as we get more people competing for Best In Faction. Maybe we’ll start to see some positive movement for the space marines, who have really suffered in the era of soup. I also expect good things from Asuryani who seem well positioned to become the dominant Eldar faction (even with changes to Ynnari they are still powerful at their base level). My final bet is that Ad Mech will be the dominant imperial mono-faction since they can still bring a knight and count as mono-faction.
The Big Five 40k Factions
To close out I wanted to mention another trend in the data, which I’m calling the Big Five. In the late days of 40k 7th ed we had what we called the Big Four (Eldar, Necrons, Space Marines, and Tau) which were factions that were roughly competitive with each other but were head and shoulders above the rest of the field. From the data it’s pretty clear we are entering into another such era, except its five factions this time around; Imperium, Orks, Chaos, Aeldari, and Tau. These five factions really stand out in terms of how their best players are performing in ITC. I plan on going into more detail on the Big Five in later articles, but here is how each of the factions is performing based on their ten best players:
If win rates seem high, remember these are the top 10 players for each of the best five factions. Even with that expectation, I was still surprised to see how well these five factions performed. The next faction (The Hivemind which is GSC + Tyranids) has a 9% lower win rate than the T’au.
Anyway enough of me talking, what do you guys think, Leave your comments below. If you have suggestions on what area of 40k you’d like me to look at next leave them below as well.
Editor’s Note: we are very happy to have Matthra on board for his great beyond the numbers breakdowns on the current 40k ITC scene. Make sure to give him a warm welcome y’all!
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About the Author: Randall
