Are you prepping for the American Team Championship? Well we’ve gathered the data from several ATC style prep tournaments for you today! The ATC will be using ITC championship missions 1-3 and some custom FAQ rulings. Our tournament incorporated these as did several others in our area. We thought it might be helpful to show you those results today. You can also check out our Southern Tournament Circuit standings as well for some more insight to the meta. And as always, we’ll add a little commentary. Also be on the look out for more ATC type articles as our team is on the tracks to Cha-Cha-Chattanooga! Sorry, we’re nerds.
Tournament Results:
| Faction | Average Points |
|---|---|
| Adeptus Sororitas | 90 |
| Astra Militarum | 89.2 |
| Aeldari | 89 |
| Drukhari | 81.67 |
| Space Wolves | 74 |
| Tyranids | 67.67 |
| Custodes | 67.5 |
| Dark Angels | 66 |
| Harlequins | 66 |
| Overall Average | 65.9 |
| Deathguard | 65 |
| Necrons | 64.75 |
| Imperial Knights | 63 |
| T'au | 60.67 |
| Thousand Sons | 58 |
| Chaos Daemons | 47 |
| Deathwatch | 47 |
| Grey Knights | 45 |
| Adeptus Astartes | 42.33 |
| Adeptus Mechanicus | 36 |
| Blood Angels | 26 |
Remember in ITC championship missions for ATC there are a possible 5 points per round x 6 rounds + 12 points for secondaries for a total of 42pts per game. That means the max score for these 3 round events was 126.
Top Factions
I can’t wait for plastic sisters. We’ll call from Sisters down to Tyranids the top factions to be on the lookout for. Sisters have a lot of play in the ATC meta just because they can serve a fast anti-armor role or a horde control role with a fair amount of survivability. There was also just one Bolter Babe player so that skews things somewhat. Next up was the good ole’ Guard. I think you’ll be seeing this as a great take all comers list when paired with Custodes Shield Captains or Blood Angel command point farm/Slamguinius captains. There was also an air cavalry build that tabled 2 seperate Shadowsword lists. Oh yea don’t forget about the triple Shadowsword lists floating around out there either!
Next we have the space elves of both flavors. Drukhari covens have performed particularly well winning one of the events but many Dark Kin players went undefeated. You can attribute that in part to the machinations of Vect which you can read our opinions on here. We all know Dark Reapers and Shining Spears are still a threat especially with that sweet -1 to hit on many of their models.
Finally we have Space Wolves and Tyranids. The Space Wolf list performing well has been a combination of Dreadnoughts and Knights so go figure out how you’re going to deal with that now. Overall Tyranids are still very powerful. They have Genestealer Cults support that can take over an enemy model (see: Shadowsword). They have long range shooting and mortal wounds. And they just have a ton of chaff supported by Hive Tyrants. The only reason they didn’t do better was because there was a wide spread of players which brought their average down overall.
Middle Tier
We’re going to call Custodes down to T’au the Middle Tier. They scored within 5pts of the overall average. The middle is actually very tightly clustered which says something in favor of ITC missions being closed to “balanced”. I think all of these armies serve a purpose and a role in the meta. Custodes are relatively hard to kill even if they’re point inefficient. Dark Angels can be fast and marine bikes are actually a nasty surprise for some armies as well as their plasma guns. Deathguard, Necrons, and Imperial Knights are all resilient armies that can expect minor wins or minor losses if paired decently.
I do want to take a moment and talk about T’au. The winner of our ATC Prep Tournament was 3 Yvharas and 2 normal Riptides with a Coldstar commander. Damn. That was an incredibly nasty list. The Yvharas are the only list I’ve seen bring down a 27 shining spears list (read how those pixie bastards work here). I think this is something to watch out for even if the rest of the Tau might need some help.
Factions That Struggled
Now we’re looking from the Thousand Sons down. I think we already knew about Grey Knights, Death Watch, and the devoted of the Omnissiah. The Blood Angels work much better supporting a different Imperial element than on their own I think right now. What is more surprising is to see Thousand Sons and Chaos Daemons closer to the bottom.
Our team is fielding a Tzangor based Thousand Sons list because we have a Chaos Marines/Daemons player already. Basically we can’t use horrors for that list, okay. We’ve found that Thousand Sons perform really well if paired correctly but man can they take a long time to play the game. In ITC missions if you can’t get out of turn 3 or 4 you’re points just aren’t very high even if you’re winning games. I think Chaos Daemons is facing a similar problem.
Final Thoughts
Finish your games. Time is a huge factor with some of these lists. We saw several undefeated players score very low because they didn’t have enough time to table or score points. I wish ATC would use some type of point differential system per game like 2 years ago instead of flat game points. That’s going to make some games contribute waaaaay more points to the match up than others even if the scores are close.
TLDR: Look out for Covens, Guard/Imperium soup, and Tyranids. Be able to fight Knights or Shadowswords, pair your specialist smite or chaos armies well, and finish your games!
Oh and shameless plug: if you’re struggling to track all of those points please think of us and our score trackers. We can even do custom ones for your team if you send us an image to our email at [email protected]!
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