40k 8th: Are Command Points Actually Necessary?

By Wesley Floyd | August 8th, 2018 | Categories: 40k News & Articles, Editorials

In a meta where we are seeing almost every competitive list spam command points, we have to ask… are they really necessary?

It seems like everywhere we go to look at tournament lists, we see cheap battalions to act as fuel for scary units. Knights and Primarchs just to name a couple. In the spirit of anti-meta, we are going to look a little deeper into the trade-offs of points for CPs.

The Idea Behind CP Spam

The whole idea behind CP spam is to allow the player access to aspects of the game that are very powerful and for a longer amount of time than the opponent. It’s possible for the Imperial Guard to actually net CPs when using a stratagem. (that’s a little crazy).

Imperial Guard aren’t the only CP superpower, however. Cultist Spam and Dark Eldar are also familiar with having more points than they know what to do with. CP spam obviously works and there’s no disputing that. But can a list that only has a fraction of the CPs as his opponent, still beat those armies?

Deathguard and 7 CP

The Bay Area Open witnessed a list with half of the CPs that other lists we running come out on top. It beat lists that were intentionally spamming/farming CPs just like 90% of the other lists out there. How could he have possibly beaten that?

There are two different mentalities of strategic players. On one hand, you can sink points into cheap and less than primo units to convert them into CPs. OR, you can squeeze every last point you have into scary units that can actually do damage and treat CPs as icing on the cake. We can look at the list above as clear evidence of this and it didn’t do too shabby.

Like we’ve said before, CP spam is definitely competitive and powerful, but it’s not a necessity. The Death Guard player ran some big scary units that costed a big scoop of his points. He also had a VERY low model count compared to what other lists were running. That’s because he wanted all of his points to go into the units that had big back-ends and could take a hit. It’s refreshing to see an anti-meta list go against top meta lists so well.

Could it Spark a Meta Shift?

Of course, we are just looking at one instance where a list with hardly any CPs did well against armies that had all of the CPs. Even though this is one instance, it has to speak loudly considering that the player won the tournament. This is clear evidence that CPs aren’t everything. Hopefully, this will start a meta shift. Especially with the whispers of chess clocks coming into competitive play.

Maybe people will pull back on spamming so many models for cheap battalions?

40k 8th: Are Command Points Actually Necessary?

What other lists would you like to see players come up with in the future? Do you CP spam or go for the elite units? Are you building a list to counter CP spam? Let us know in the comments of our Facebook Hobby Group.