Reviewing My Initial CSM Codex Hot Takes: Where I Went Right, and Where I Went Very, Very, Very Wrong

When the Chaos Space Marine codex came out, it was heralded as one of the best codices everyone had seen in a long time. People were shocked that this codex had not 4, not 5, but 8 different detachments. Those people were mainly Custodes and T’au players that were stuck with a tiny number of detachments, and an even fewer number of good ones. No one has ever accused James Workshop of being a fair man.

Me? I just thought CSM were neat. After quickly getting some games in, I came out with my initial Hot Takes on every detachment in the codex, available here: https://warphammer40k.com/hot-takes-about-every-legion-after-10-games-with-the-new-csm-codex/.

The CSM codex has been out for roughly 3 months. This means enough time has passed that we can do a retrospective of my initial takes about the codex, and how they compared to how things actually turned out.

If you’re convinced you know more about CSM than me, then this is the article for you!

We’re going to detachment by detachment, and review how my predictions ended up comparing to reality. Two quick things to note: First, while I’ll provide the Winrate/Number of 4-0 Starts/Number of GT Wins/Percentage of Players with a Positive Record for each detachment, keep in mind that statistics do not always tell the full picture. They tell most of the story, but I reserve the right to nudge a detachment slightly higher or lower than their raw statistics based on other factors. It’s also tough to weight different statistics into one ranking. If a detachment has a high winrate but never wins events, is that better than a few event wins but a low winrate? There is no objectively right answer, so I’ll do my best to average the results into one grade and accept that people might disagree. Second, a big thank you to my friends at Stat Check for providing the data used in this review. Stat Check is one of my personal favorite resources in the hobby, and there is no better place to go for analysis of tournament results.

With that out of the way, let’s jump into things and see if I have any idea what I’m talking about when it comes to Chaos Space Marines. If you were right and I was wrong on something, gloating in the Warphammer discord (or comments here or wherever you find this) is not only allowed. It is highly encouraged. 40K is ultimately just a game, and I wouldn’t be doing this if I couldn’t have some laughs at myself.

Let’s dive right in, starting with my least favorite detachment of all time.

Fellhammer Siege-Host

My Prediction: F-

Reality: F- (29% Winrate, 0 GT Wins, 0% 4-0 Starts, 8% Positive Records)

Accuracy: 100%

Let’s start with a victory lap.

Immediately calling the Fellhammer Siege-Host complete garbage has been my best call in 10th Edition. I thought the rules were awful from the first read, even as other content creators talked about its strengths. Part of the reason this detachment was overrated by some other content creators early on could be because it has a few restrictions that people might have missed on their early reads (the detachment rule only works in shooting, the detachment rule and 5+++ strat doesn’t work on Damned, -2″ to charge having to be declared at start of phase, etc).

This detachment just doesn’t do anything that helps you win games of 40K. It doesn’t do anything that makes games of 40K fun, either. This ruleset is so weak and so bland that I’m surprised GW didn’t give it to the Imperial Fists.

That being said, I’ve actually come around a tiny bit on Fellhammer. I think CSM hull lists built around Helbrutes buffing Predators/Vindicators/Venomcrawlers can be extremely strong, and you could probably make a version of that in Fellhammer. But that is because I think that list is strong enough to be relatively detachment agnostic, not because Fellhammer does anything valuable.

Deceptors

My Prediction: A-

Reality: C- (34% Winrate, 0 GT Wins, 0% 4-0 Event Starts, 24% Positive Records)

Accuracy: 30%

I am just going to be honest with you: As long as Warphammer content exists, I’ll be falling in love with Chaos armies that do cute stuff. There is a reason that Disciples of Be’lakor are my favorite army of all time, and not one of the many Chaos lists that have been stronger over the years.

I still think Deceptors are quite a bit better than people give them credit for, but I’m also prepared to accept I was too high on them. I just think they’re neat. I probably overrate armies that have the potential to do interesting things instead of armies that do something powerful in a straightforward way.

Deceptors feel like they’re either one mobility boost or one defensive boost from reaching the next level. CSM damage output is pretty good at a base level, and the Shooting rerolls stratagem is quite good. The issue with Deceptors is that there are no boosts to mobility once the game starts, and CSM threat ranges can be pretty small without access to advance and shoot, or advance and charge. I would have also loved it if Deceptors had a stratagem to provide a defensive boost. A variant of Dark Obscuration (Stealth, and upgrading to being untargettable outside of 18″ if a condition is met) would be really on-brand.

One more point to keep in mind: At the time I was reviewing the detachments, Warp Talons were arguably the best unit in the codex. Deceptors had great support for Warp Talons, so it made sense that a detachment that could get a lot of value out of the best unit in the codex would be strong in turn. Warp Talons have since gotten nerfed in a couple ways, lowering Deceptors stock as a result. You can tell me I was completely wrong on Deceptors, but grade me on a tiny bit of a curve, please and thank you.

Pactbound Zealots

My Prediction: A-

Reality: A- (48% Winrate, 4 GT Wins, 6% 4-0 Event Starts, 49% Positive Records)

Accuracy: 100%

Everything I said about Pactbound Zealots has held up really well. This makes sense because there wasn’t much new to say about an updated version of the Index detachment. It’s a slight shame that Pactbound Zealots are just the “index but slightly worse” detachment, but the overall package of rules remains extremely strong. Anyone that gave Pactbound Zealots below an A- rating would have been an overreaction to the slight nerfs.

Much like Renegade Raiders, Pactbound Zealots are decent in an average players hands. Notice that almost exactly 50% of their players finish with a positive record and their slightly below 50% winrate, which puts them right in the middle of the pack. But give this ruleset to a great player (or a decent player that owns enough AC/DC to spam them), and you’ll find yourself with an army capable of winning events against almost anyone.

Just like Renegade Raiders, Pactbound Zealots interacts with so many datasheets in so many ways that they’ll have plenty of other places to turn as units get buffed and nerfed. I have a hard time imaging this detachment getting much better or much worse over the rest of 10th Edition, so Pactbound Zealots will remain one of the game’s best detachments… even if they’re just a hair short of being in the true top tier.

Soulforged Warpack

My Prediction: A-

Reality: B- (44% Winrate, 0 GT Wins, 1% 4-0 Event Start, 41% Positive Records)

Accuracy: 60%

Oh, look. Another Chaos army with awesome vibes that does interesting stuff that ended up overrated by Mike. Shocking.

Soulforged is a really, really interesting detachment. To this day, I think it is still hard to judge, and there are a really wide range of opinions on its strength.

It’s not an A- detachment. Much like Deceptors, I think I overrated it based on the vibe of “Do I think this does interesting stuff?” rather than “Does this consistently help you win games?”.

But on the flip side, I think its winrate is a bit lower than its raw strength. Soulforged also probably brings out players whose mindset is “Daemon Engines are cool” (very true!) rather than people whose mindset is “This detachment is my best chance to win games and I want to min-max it”. This will have slightly depress their winrate.

Unfortunately, that the best way to run Soulforged as a take-all-comers list is with 3 max units of AC/DC supported by Forgefiend/Venomcrawlers/Maulerfiends. Lists of AC/DC supported by shooting are just better in Renegade Raiders or Pactbound Zealots, so Soulforged lacks of bit of identity with the current CSM points costs. I promised Warphammer Patrons that I would do a Soulforged writeup. I still plan to do that as soon as I can. But I am intentionally waiting to do that until we get the next MFM, because I think Soulforged is extremely points sensitive to changes in specific units. If one Daemon Engine goes up 10 points and another goes down 10 points, we might go from running 3 of the first and 0 of the second to running 0 of the first and 3 of the second.

One issue with Soulforged that I partially overlooked in my initial review was just how brutal it is to have 0 access to Fall Back or Advance and Shoot in an army of big based units that are easily moveblocked or tagged. I knew it was an issue, but now that I’ve had more time to get reps in with Soulforged, it is a really big issue. Soulforged can be a brutal army if it gets the right tables and matchups in a Teams setting, but I’ve cooled a little bit on it in general. I also think there are better choices in the game if you’re looking for what Soulforged brings in a Teams setting.

To sum it up: Really cool detachment, does really interesting things, but I’ve discovered its weaknesses are just too glaring to put it in the bottom of the A Tier like I did in my initial review. Soulforged Warpack is the worst detachment in the game that I would not be shocked to see win a GT.

Renegade Raiders

My Prediction: A

Results: A (52% Winrate, 6 GT Wins, 5% 4-0 Event Starts, 47% Positive Winrate)

Accuracy: 100%

I can’t take too much credit for being extremely positive on Renegade Raiders. Basically everyone was very impressed by Renegade Raiders from day one. I’ve seen a small amount of players say stuff like “Renegade Raiders only works versus bad players and doesn’t work if your opponent keeps their real units off of objectives”. This is pretty much nonsense. The real strengths of Renegade Raiders are army-wide Assault, access to Advance and Charge, and the busted things you can do with Opportunistic Raiders. The fact that you can also turbo-charge your damage when the opponent dares to try to hold Primary by putting durable units on objectives is just a huge bonus.

If you’re looking for an ideal 10th Edition detachment, Renegade Raiders are it. They’re very strong in a talented players hands, as demonstrated by their GT Wins. They’re not an auto-win in an average players hands, as demonstrated by less than 50% of its players even reaching .500. Unlike a lot of 10th Edition detachments like the Soulforged Warpack or Stormlance or Bully Boyz or Green Tide or… basically every Ork detachment, come to think of it… Renegade Raiders doesn’t railroad you into extremely specific builds. Whatever CSM models you personally own on your shelf, you can do something fun with them in Renegade Raiders.

Renegade Raiders really love spamming AC/DC, as the interactions with Opportunistic Raiders (and to a lesser extent Mark of the Hound and +1AP) are just nuts. If AC/DC get nuked, Renegade Raiders will suffer a little bit. But at the same time, Renegade Raiders buff such a wide array of units that players of this detachment will be spoiled for options to replace them. Renegade Raiders have won events with 0 AC/DC, so a nerf to AC/DC will just crater one toxic build, not the actual detachment.

I’m also going to give myself some bonus points for mentioning in my review that we needed a nerf to the interaction between Opportunistic Raiders and Warp Talons. GW’s change to Warp Talons that required them to kill a unit before jumping away basically did exactly that, although there are still niche situations where Opportunistic Raiders helps. We didn’t need Warp Talons to cost almost 300 points for 10 Marine bodies on top of that, but James works in mysterious ways.

Chaos Cults

My Prediction: Meme

Results: Dream (68% Winrate, 17% 4-0 Event Start, 2 GT Wins, 75% Positive Records)

Accuracy: 0%, with a caveat

I’ve seen so many comments talking about the fact that basically every content creator “missed” on Chaos Cults. I’m not going to shy away from this discussion. Let’s talk about it!

Chaos Cults are an interesting one. They’ve turned out to be very strong, largely carried by max bricks of AC/DC. I still remember my first time facing Chaos Cults in a practice game last month. I was running a Nurgle Daemons/allied Rampager list, and figured that the opposing list would struggle to kill all of my T11/T12 units. That was completely wrong. I got my full health Rampager charged by a unit of AC/DC, and figured I would take some damage and then do a lot of damage myself back on the clapback. I never got to swing back. The AC/DC didn’t just kill my Rampager. They way overkilled it, leaving a bunch of dice unrolled. It was eye-opening.

So why did I “miss” on Chaos Cults? I have a lot of personal disdain for Accursed Cultists and Cultist spam in general. I’m very happy for the players enjoying this detachment and doing great with it, but I did not get into CSM to play this. My ideal CSM army is a brick of Terminators walking up the board supported by power armour in transports and some tanks, not a horde of rabble, and know a lot of players feel this way. I’ve talked a lot in the index days of 10th Edition about how much I disliked CSM’s best unit being a niche cultist unit instead of the actual power armour. I personally own literally 0 AC/DC and have 0 plans to buy any. Before the codex came out, I had played 0 games with AC/DC (I have since played a few games with AC/DC spam on TTS, all in Pactbound and Raiders).

So while I was wrong about Chaos Cults like basically everyone else, I honestly don’t feel too bad about it. I straight up said that if there is something strong in this detachment, it’s going to be up to someone else to find it, not me. Chaos Cults are also buoyed by only being run by a small handful of talented and dedicated players, since it is such a niche playstyle. They’re clearly extremely strong, I 100% didn’t notice that, but they’re also not a 68% winrate army. I doubt anyone really believes Chaos Cults are as strong as 8th Edition Iron Hands or 9th Edition Harlequins.

My only hope now is that GW finally nukes AC/DC so we can stop having our winrate propped up by my least favorite unit in the codex, and we can instead get some buffs to the more traditional and widely owned CSM units like Havocs and Raptors and Heldrakes.

Let me float an Accursed Cultist nerf suggestion out there: Keep the points cost for 8-man squads the same or give it a slight bump, but massively increase the cost for full sized squads. MSU squads of Accursed Cultists aren’t scary. It’s the massive efficiency of Dark Communes (and their enhancements) and stratagems on full sized squads that is the issue. Basically, cost Accursed Cultists like Scourges in reverse. Innes Wilson has also floated the idea of locking Accursed Cultists to only 8-man squads, similar to what happened with Desolators getting locked to 5-man squads. I don’t like that idea for the reason of it pisses me off when GW sells models to people and then changes the rules so they can’t run them, but purely from a balance perspective, I think that could make a lot of sense.

Veterans of the Long War

My Prediction: C-

Results: C- (40% Winrate, 0 GT Wins, 0 4-0 Event Starts, 31% Positive Records)

Accuracy: 100%

You know what? I’m pretty proud of this prediction in hindsight. I talked about how people would overrate this detachment, and that it didn’t provide what CSM actually need. Over the next few months, VOTLW has neither sniffed top tables (0 GT Wins or 4-0 Starts) not provided a power boost to average players (less than 1/3rd of its players even reached .500).

I think many people overrated Veterans out of the gate because of the allure of Hit rerolls, a reactive move, and an Armour of Contempt equivalent. I agree that these three things are valuable. But that is basically where the detachment begins and ends. Basically everything else is very conditional and/or mediocre, as if GW themselves overrated those initial rules and put a ton of conditions in to make sure this detachment wasn’t too strong.

Veterans also suffers really hard from a lack of “playmaking ability” which I think most people missed initially. The things that it does well are very predictable, and things that opponents have lots of experience playing against by this point in 10th Edition. No one is going to be caught out by a Reactive Move, -1 AP, or Hit rerolls when Marines have had that exact combination since day 1 of this edition.

VOTLW are just a Gladius Task Force with half the rules, and that’s a real shame. At the very least, I would have loved it if VOTLW gave reroll Wounds instead of reroll Hits. That would have made them a mirror to Oaths of Moment instead of a copy+paste, and synergized with Abaddon in the Black Legion themed detachment instead of giving you what you already have. It also would have worked well with CSM having decent access to Dev Wounds and a lot of medium strength weapons, but almost 0 innate access to Twin-Linked.

Dread Talons

My Prediction: C+

Results: F (28% Winrate, 0 GT Wins, 0 4-0 Event Starts, 13% Positive Records)

Accuracy: 40%

Oh, look. Yet another Chaos army with awesome vibes that does interesting stuff that ended up overrated by Mike. Shocking.

I’m really glad I bumped Dread Talons down to a C+ instead of something like a B or B-, because their results over the last few months have been absolutely abysmal. You know things are bad when you’re competing with Fellhammer for the worst performing detachment in the game.

I think one reason I gave Dread Talons a vaguely passing grade was because I thought their detachment rule was better than people thought (mostly true) and that Merciless Pursuit was really strong (it is). But I missed giving Dread Talons a D or F rating because I underestimated just how awful almost everything else in this detachment is.

It is actual insanity that all of the damage buffs versus Battleshocked/Below Half-Strength units are entirely dependent on those specific targets, rather than providing a baseline buff and then providing another conditional buff versus those very niche targets. Depthless Cruelty shouldn’t be +1 AP versus a Battleshocked unit. It should just be +1 AP, and then an additional +1AP versus Battleshocked units.

Another fun fact: Dread Talons are literally the only 3″ deepstrike stratagem in the entire game that has a restriction on not being used turn 1. This is complete and utter insanity. Necrons can teleport and 3″ deepstrike an entire Monolith turn 1. GW was so afraid of 1 unit of freaking Raptors led by a specific character with a specific enhancement with 4 melta guns and 6 bolt pistols 3″ deepstriking turn 1 that they put in a specific restriction. How the hell do these two different rulesets come out from the same company? Grey Knights can teleport and 3″ deepstrike 32 OC of Terminators with a reactive move and an enhancement to be literally unshootable turn 1. Dread Talons can’t 3″ deepstrike some Raptors that have 0 access to any defensive buffs. Get the hell out of here.

Here is a funny anecdote about Dread Talons. Justin Curtis was experimenting with Dread Talons, and was having decent success in his testing. I know he has done creative stuff with CSM for a long time, so no surprise that he started finding some spice. That was until he played a game against Daemons, where the Dread Talons detachment rule meant Daemons were literally getting almost free healing the entire game. That was the end of his experimentation with Dread Talons.

This detachment just needs a re-write, as well as across the board points drops to units like Raptors/Terminators/Obliterators that this detachment incentivizes you to run. We’ll see what happens, but I’m not optimistic.

Final Thoughts

I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the various CSM detachments now that enough time has passed to have real data on how they are performing. Where were you right? Where were you wrong? Come tell me in the Warphammer discord today! This is genuinely the best Warhammer community I’ve found, and I’ve love to see you there.

I just got back from playing 4 straight days of Warhammer at the NOVA Open, having an amazing time in both the 5-man Teams event and the singles event. I helped lead our team to the win in the Teams event, and I helped lead myself to… an okay finish in the Singles event, finishing 40th out of 364 players. Don’t play 4 straight days of Warhammer, people. It is just too much Warhammer. I’m definitely going to do writeups of both experiences at Warphammer, so keep an eye out in the coming weeks.

As always, have fun, stay safe, and may the Dark Gods bless your rolls.