Waging The Bug War: Tyranids at the World Championships of Warhammer Tournament Report

Note: Today at Warphammer, we have something extra special for everyone today!

This tournament report is guest written by Sam Pope, a friend of myself and Warphammer and one of the best Tyranid players in the world. He has been ranked #1 Tyranids each of the last 2 years, winning GT’s and achieving top finishes at some of the largest events in the world with his bugs. He finished 10th at Worlds, by far the highest ranked Tyranids player. Much more importantly, he’s one of the best sports and nicest people you’ll ever meet at a tournament. I consider myself lucky that we get to share Sam’s unparalleled insight into Tyranids with you here at Warphammer.

I’ve done some very minor editing to help Sam’s content fit better into the website structure, but this is all Sam’s work. Please make sure to show Sam some love in the comments here or wherever you find this! Enjoy!

Worlds Writeup

The world championships of warhammer (WCW) was the best singles 40k event I have ever attended. Every single opponent would have been my favorite opponent to play had I played them at a different tournament. Instead, I got to have 8 straight round of above-the-board toe-curling hoot-hollerin’ games of warhammer 40,000. I have once again snuck into Warphammer as a sneaky agent of the Great Devourer to share that experience with you. Thanks, Mike. 

Quick heads-up: This write-up will, by its nature, focus a lot on how my list fared into different matchups, and as such will be more Tyranid focused than the usual Warphammer reader may be used to. I’m hoping that it will still be an interesting read for any Xenos-haters, but if you are hoping for hot tips and tricks for Chaos, I’m fresh out (other than the fact that I think more CSM lists should have Pink Horrors). 

My Tyranids List

Some of you may recognize me as the guest on this website that did a write-up for Tyranids’ Unending Swarm detachment. I went on quite a tear with that detachment, and ended up winning the GW Dallas Open with it before its quick and untimely demise. RIP. Since then, I’ve been trying a few different things with Tyranids, winning GT’s with Vanguard, Synaptic Nexus, and Invasion Fleet. I decided, however, that it was only right that, since I won my ticket to WCW with unending swarm, I should play some swarm variant as tribute. As such, I landed on the following:

Cockroach Masochism (2000 Points)

Invasion Fleet

Tervigon w/ Talons – Adaptive Biology (200 Pts)

Winged Hive Tyrant w/ Lash Whip & Bonesword – Alien Cunning (230 Pts)

1×10 Hormagaunts (65 Pts)

4×20 Termagants w/ 18 Spinefists & 2 Stranglewebs Each (480 Pts)

1x Biovore (50 Pts)

1×3 Venomthropes (70 Pts)

2x Lictor (120 Pts)

3x Exocrine (405 Pts)

2x Tyrannofex w/ Rupture Cannon (380 Pts)

This list utilizes termagant swarms with more durability than you’d expect to force my opponent into bad trades- it often takes units that cost 300+ points to kill one 20-man termagant swarm with its defensive buffs up, which I can then kill and trade upwards into. And because of the respawning capabilities of the list, my opponent can’t chip away at them either. Tyranids don’t have a lot of speed this edition, so most of our competitive lists involve baiting our opponent forward with tough units (maleceptors, norns, tyrannofexes, 6” lone-op lictors, etc) and this list is no exception. However, I like it more than the others because of how relevant it is to have a bunch of cheap OC. I’ll get into more detail on how the list plays in each matchup description.

Day 1 – Round 1 – Dominique Carette (Canada) – Vanguard Ultramarines

The Ritual / Stalwarts / Hammer & Anvil / Layout 7

This event came out the gate with the barn-burner of a decision to have day one played on GW Layout 7. For those unfamiliar, layout 7 looks like this:

This layout is incredibly good for melee armies, as they can super easily stage behind the top ruin, and use it as a launching-out point into the middle ruin, and shooting armies have almost no way to dislodge a unit hiding in that top ruin. This made this matchup fairly interesting, as vanguard ultramarines is all about getting good sightlines for the centurion devastators, while pushing semi-durable melee units into the midboard to hold/deny primary. 

This would all be fine and dandy, if the primary mission wasn’t the ritual- with the ritual in play, my termagants usually don’t have enough movement to deny primary from where they’re staging. If we both just stare at each other, we’ll end up scoring identically on primary, and it’ll come down to the somewhat random decider of secondary scoring. That’s not acceptable, so I focused my gameplan on shutting down the devastator centurions so I could get more aggressive with my termagants and hopefully deny some primary. One can shut down the Dev Cents in two ways: kill them or tag them in melee. I set up to try both.

So at the top 2 Dominique set up his dev cents (blue oval) to kill one of my tyrannofexes I left out as bait. I ingressed an exocrine at top so I could put two exocrines into the dev cents in return. He put everything into the tyrannofex, nuked it from orbit, but then it was my turn. I pushed both exocrines up to shoot, and pushed up the rest of my army at the same time. Now here’s a little secret- exocrines are great marine-killers, but cent devs are no mere marines. With -1 to hit from vanguard and armor of contempt, I have to hit on 4s (with sustained), wound on 3s, and then hope he rolls 1s or 2s on his saves. Against all odds, I killed 1 model! Plan 1 (kill the dev cents) was looking grim. 

However, the ingress play was not a waste- because I threatened him with two exocrines, he had to pop armor of contempt, which spent his last CP, so the cent devs could not uppy-downy again. Instead, on the next turn, they had to trudge 4” forward so they could all see one of the exocrines that shot them, which pushed them into range of my termagants (which I marked in orange) on the following turn to charge. Said termagants both tied up the dev cents & denied an objective of primary, and then another squad did the exact same thing the following turn. This, along with him failing an important battleshock test from shadow in the warp, and me using some respawn tricks to score the middle objective on turn 2, put me squarely in the lead on primary, which I leveraged into a win, 94-78. Truly was a primary-based game: he beat me 38-34 on secondaries. 

Fun Trick: On his turn 1 he used the vanguard sticky objective stratagem on the middle objective. The vanguard strat also does, on a 2+, D3 mortals to a unit that moves within range of it. I took advantage of this rule to have 3 out of 4 of my termagant squads lose one or two models, allowing me to threaten control of an objective by respawning onto it, without actually being on it (which denies the cent devs full re-rolls to hit as well as secondaries like overwhelming and storm hostile). 

Day 1 – Round 2 – Alberto “The Carthaginian” Nicolas (Spain) – Blood Angels Liberator

Linchpin / Fog of War / Tipping Point / Layout 7

I’m sure you can guess my thoughts upon seeing this matchup: “Of course. Full melee Blood Angels on Layout 7. I guess I’ll die.” Truly, in any other event, a nightmare scenario that would stand out as my hardest game at the event. At WCW, it was just Thursday. My gameplan: Because of how the objectives are set up, it’s going to be very difficult to deny my opponent’s primary unless I get aggressive. Because of the insane staging points on this map, I had to just let him hit with all his units, weather the storm, and hope that my crackback would be sufficient to swing the game back into my favor. This is how things looked going into the bottom of turn 2: termagants strung along the front and back, forcing Alberto to throw all of his units into termagants, weather the storm, and see what happens. 

Does that sound familiar? Both of us were just riding our boats and hoping the dice helped us enough to stay in the fight. But I had a secret weapon- exocrines are damn good into marines. On his go turn, he picked up 40 termagants, a tyrannofex, and put 10 wounds on my tervigon. On my go turn? One exocrine picked up 4 jump pack intercessors. The second picked up 7 of Lemartes’ Death Company friends. The third? Picked up all 6 sanguinary guard. Hot damn. Hitting on 2s with sustained hits and wounding on 2s is a hell of a drug. My tervigon hunkered down with her new friends, the other big death company squad, slowly thinning out their ranks (without charge bonuses, and with her 4+++ active, she was a beast to remove), and my hive tyrant cleared out an intercessor squad on my natural expansion. 

Such a big hit was debilitating to Alberto, and while he picked up a few more pieces, he didn’t have enough left to prevent me from sending termagants to take his home objective, and sending my remaining exocrines to finish what they started. I think I likely lose ~30% of games if I were to be put in that exact situation again- If all my exocrines spiked downwards instead of upwards, it would be a really tough situation for me. Instead, it swung neatly in my favor, and I won 88-63. 

Sam Tangent – WCW Time Policy

As a quick aside, I wanted to shed some light on WCW’s clock policy, which made some people decide not to attend the event altogether. As a rule, GW events tend to shy away from clocks wherever they can. The GW philosophy is that they do not want the amount of time an army takes to play to be something that determines an army’s viability in competitive play. If a knights player plays a green tide player, they do not want that knights player to automatically win just because they can get through turn 5 in 45 minutes, while the green tide player maybe needs 1 hour and 45 minutes. 

The feel-bad outcome for this philosophy is when players inevitably do time out, there’s no real “fair” solution. Most of the armies that take the longest amount of time to play score most of their points early, and as such if the players are told to score it as it stands, the policy gives an unfair advantage to those armies, which can feel pretty bad. 

WCW’s solution for this was to have, quite simply, crazy long round length- each round was 4 hours with 15-20 minutes of “grace” time that could be added on (they would allow playing a bit into lunch, or a bit after the end of the day). Along with this, they had liberal benchmarks that they would call out- for example, round 1 was expected to be completed at 1 hour and 40 minutes into a round. Seems like plenty, right? Well, it should be, but if anyone fell behind these times, a judge would add a clock to your table, with time evenly split between players. 

Everyone has their preferences when it comes to clocks, but I want to go ahead and say that for me personally, I do really appreciate how GW handled their policy for this event. It isn’t really plausible to do for other events, but they took their unique circumstances and used them to craft a policy that was consistent with their design philosophy, and while said policy was not devoid of feel-bad moments (I definitely saw a game or two where someone clocked out after someone else took up the majority of the time in rounds one and two) such moments were very rare and all-in-all the policy lead to much more relaxed games focused on generalship and sportsmanship.

Day 2 – Round 3 – Wesley St. Hines (USA) – All Infantry Astra Militarum

Scorched Earth / Inspired Leadership / Crucible of Battle / Layout 2

Prior to the event, GW sorted all of the attendants into “Pods” of ~16 players, the winners of which would go into their own bracket where they would play for the title. The pods were announced a couple of weeks ahead of time and, as best as they were able, the event organizers split the attendants from each country evenly between the different pods. Well, I originally was in a pod with some strong players, but none of them had lists that scared me especially. The day before the event (I found out while in transit to the hotel) I was switched into a new pod. So all my prep was wasted, not a huge worry, but in my hasty prep that I could do, I identified one single list I was 100% afraid of: Wesley St. Hines’ all infantry guard. It seemed like an absolutely terrible matchup for me, but as we were both from the same country, and the event had a policy of not pairing people from the same country into each other unless they had to, I had hope that someone would play and beat him first, before I had to play him. 

Anyway, my third round was into Wesley St. Hines. Dammit. I knew this layout was going to be tough- my screening and anti-infantry were one and the same in my termagants, which meant he was going to be able to drop and unload his whole army into my anti-infantry before I could respond. And once he killed my termagants, I would have no consistent anti-infantry to clear out his OC 3 idiots from the objectives. He would have to make a whole bunch of mistakes or get wildly unlucky for me to win. 

Scorched earth helped my differential – I went first and scored a ten before he could drop on me, and he only scored a ten from rounds 3-5 while I worked to make any progress into his army. On turn 5, I scored another ten with some lucky respawns and shenanigans. I missed sabotage stupidly on round 2, and those 8 points (sabotage + 1 extra objective of primary) ended up being the differential of our game: final score 69 – 77. I needed Wesley to really stink it up on secondaries for me to claw my way back in that, and he did not do it. 

I don’t think the matchup is unwinnable, I just think it’s…very difficult. Wesley was a great opponent, and in my head was very likely able to go on to win the event if he hadn’t immediately gone on to lose on purge the foe the next round. He went undefeated otherwise- an incredible result for what he told me was his first major. I expect great things from him moving forward- he’s got a good head on his shoulders and the right mindset on the game. 

If I must lose, I’m glad it was to another swarm player. 

Day 2 – Round 4 – Andrea Costa (Italy) – Champs of Russ Space Wolves

Purge the Foe / Smoke & Mirrors / Tipping Point / Layout 2

Space Wolves on Purge the Foe. Big dumb tough units that I have to mostly leave alone or let my units feel the wrath of the surge move. My plan was this: because this isn’t stormlance, my shooting actually can hurt, so first turn I stay 6” back from a squad and unload into it. Second turn I shadow in the warp and hope a squad fails, so I can go on to shoot my whole army into it next. Ignore the third squad- feed it termagants for 4 turns. As an added bonus- I took, for the first time in my life, the precision on 6’s adaptation. All calvary did not make the other adaptations too useful. 

He went first, so after my movement phase the game board looked like this, with each numbered blob being a thunderwolf squad. I shot my whole army into squad #1, bringing it down to 1 singular model, which was not a character because one of my tyrannofexes rolled a six to hit, wounded, and he failed his 4+, so one of his characters took 10 damage to the face. Precision adaptation? Useful? In my game? It is more likely than you think. 

On the top of turn 2, I used shadow in the warp, and his squad #2 failed its battleshock test, and then went on to pick up a termagant squad. Squad #3 charged the same squad, but didn’t pile into more termagants as it would’ve let me take the top objective. So on turn 2 I shot my whole army into squad #2 and wiped it out. The rest of the game was somewhat formulaic from there, although at one point my tyrannofexes both whiffed into bjorn, and then one termagant squad did 4 wounds to him, which was great. Once again, exocrines carry me through a marine matchup. Final score: 93-64.

Day 3 – Round 5 – Andy Quas-Cohen (England) – Hypercrypt w/ Tesseract Vault

Burden of Trust / Prepared Positions / Search & Destroy / Layout 4

Okay, so the tesseract vault is actually quite scary for me. The thing legitimately just picks up a termagant unit every activation and puts some actual damage into my exocrines and such as well. My win condition is killing it, and killing it quick. My plan? Shoot everything at it a lot. Inspiring, I know. 

I (luckily) got first turn, and because the tesseract vault is huge, it couldn’t hide, so my whole army activated into it, and I brought it down to ~9 wounds. All my termagants that could instead activated into the nightbringer, and brought it down to ~5 wounds. On his crackback, he picked up a termagant squad and a tyrannofex, but not before I shadow in the warp’d, and he failed on his tesseract vault. It came down to this- could my tyrannofex get a shot through to kill the tesseract vault? Hitting on 2s, rerolling 1s, wounding on 3s, with a cp reroll… and I only wounded once. And then…he failed the save- no rerolling because it was battleshocked! 

From there I actually played a game of warhammer- his silent king ran around with the hexmarks killing termagants left and right, while my termagants played the denial game. He scraped his way back into the game with a secret mission, managing to get ahold of the three central objectives, but he was still 10 points behind on primary. Final score: 84 – 74. 

Day 3 – Round 6 – TJ Lanigan (USA) – Thousand Sons

Terraform / Stalwarts / Crucible of Battle / Layout 4

This game was interesting because TJ and I played each other at the top tables of a recent GT where we agreed it was a very bad matchup for him, as long as I went second. My termagants have too much scoring and denial power, and exocrines are too good at killing rubrics. Our previous game he played passively, slowly picking away from safe angles at my forces, but it was too slow and didn’t prevent my scoring. This game, he decided to play aggressively. When got first turn, he sent Magnus out right away, in the open in front of my army, and tried to kill a rupturefex. Double doombolt, Magnus with full rerolls went into it, and, through the power of a 5+++ (after doombolt) it survived on 3 wounds. 

Alas, rupturefexes are just about Magnus’ favorite offensive profile to run into. He can reroll every save they force, and blank one failed one, meaning that even if all four shots wound, on average they do no damage. So I depended on my exocrines to push some damage through, giving them lethal hits and all the trust in my heart. Alas, I rolled no lethals and my three exocrines got 1 wound through in total, dealing 3 damage. Not great. At that point, the board state looked like this: 

The next turn, he drew assassinate and, (after doombolting my 3 wound tyrannofex) he went all in on trying to kill my tervigon. But my tervigon is beefy, and doesn’t die so easy, so survived on 3 wounds. My durability there allowed me to get a terraform off with a lictor, and from that board position I just focused on keeping magnus where he was by charging him with termagants. He couldn’t kill 20 at once, so he was locked to the top of the board, allowing me to deny a long shot secret mission, while scoring primary where I could.

The final score here was 80-60, with me having 24 more points on primary. Thousand sons remains scary, but as long as I have second turn, I should be able to maintain a lead on primary that will give me the win. TJ, as always, was a fantastic opponent, and always demonstrates great sportsmanship and game-sense.

Day 4 – Round 7 – Alex MacDougall (USA) – Biosanctic GSC

Take and Hold / Raise Banners / Tipping Point / Layout 1

A lot of opponents I face with this list end our game saying “I just didn’t know what I was doing into your list at first, if I were to play you again I think I’d do a lot better.” And I agree! Figuring out how to play into my list isn’t easy. But playing against Alex was very valuable because I felt that the overall strategy that he brought to the table was exactly correct. He got first turn, and immediately sent 15 genestealers and 5 aberrants straight forward, turning on the pressure and focusing on limiting the amount of termagants I had early on. I cleared out all of them on my next turn, and they all respawned, coming back the following turn to continue pouring on the pressure. 

I managed to score a 15 on turn 2, and held him to a 5, but over the course of the game I slowly lost more and more units with his initial respawn luck putting in work over turns two and three. By turn 5, I couldn’t deny him a 15, which meant I only held a 5 point primary advantage over him, as the rest of the turns we both scored tens. I ended up 2 points behind him on secondaries, meaning that the final score was 90-87. 

This was one of those games where both players look back on the game and can point out 4 different times that dice rolls could have swung the game one way or another. Some examples:

• 6 termagants survived an abominant and 2 genestealers, scoring me 5 points on primary. 
• A lictor survived an abominant’s attacks by rolling 3 sixes on saves, which afterward allowed me to score 4 no prisoners points. 
• An abominant survived 4 or 5 fight phases in combat with a tervigon, who just couldn’t figure out how to kill him, and he later got spicy trying to steal my home.

Actually, it seems like it was all swinging from the abominants. Huh. Either way, a fantastic game and a great example of the sort of competition you hope for attending an event like WCW.

Note: Initially, after my turn 5 concluded, we scored up the game and calculated a tie, 87 to 87. I submitted the score as such, and then we noticed I forgot to score my defend stronghold. I decided not to update the score as we were both out of the running at that point already and I didn’t feel like flagging down a judge. Also, to be honest, once I was out of the running for winning the event, I started treating my games like practice matches for teams, and a 90-87 is a tie in the WTC teams format, so it felt like a tie represented the game nicely. 

Day 4 – Round 8 – Loukas Benard (France) – Host of Ascension GSC

Linchpin / Raise Banners / Search & Destroy / Layout 1

Okay, so- I think generally biosanctic is the better detachment than host of ascension, having tried both. However, into my list, I found myself more scared of what host of ascension could do- It felt similar to the full infantry guard list: I have to use termagants to screen, and every one of his units loves shooting termagants. It felt like I had to try to survive the go turn and then see what I could kill and deny after that.

Host of ascension also provided another unique problem- I did not have a shooting or melee unit that could one-tap the 20-man neophyte squad, and if I didn’t one-tap it in shooting then it would jump into reserves using the strat, and if I didn’t one tap it in melee it would pull out of melee using coherency tricks. So instead I had to try to tag it in melee without killing any models.

He went first, so on my first turn I was able to hold him to a 3 on primary, and on his go turn he killed 2 squads of termagants, but wasn’t able to deny me a 13 on primary. The turn after, though, I had run out of screens so he was able to drop in with an acolyte bomb to take me off my home objective. A big swing came the following turn, when I used shadow in the warp and his 20-man neophyte squad failed, and I immediately drew cull the horde. If not for that combo, it would’ve been an unscorable secondary, but because I drew it I was able to kill that unit, score the secondary, and then focus on killing each squad that respawned and popped up. 

Because I had end of turn scoring, I was able to grab a 13 at the end of the game to cement in the win, 87-73. A great game, and Loukas was genuinely one of the nicest, most joyful players I have ever had the pleasure to play against. I hope we get the chance to play again sometime.

Conclusion

WCW was truly a unique and incredible experience. I would recommend attending to anyone who gets the opportunity, and I am grateful for GW for making this a priority enough to put on such a well-run event. Truly got some amazing experience, and played some amazing players.

If you have any questions about the event or my list, feel free to drop me a ping in the Warphammer discord (https://discord.gg/rJakdmTU) or wherever you may see me lurking. I’ll try my best to answer, but if I don’t, someone helpful will usually be able to answer in my stead.