Chaos Space Marines win Mayhem 5 as 10th edition winds down

Mayhem 5 delivered the clearest snapshot yet of what competitive players are squeezing out of 10th edition before the reset. In Mebane, North Carolina, Clay Plumridge won the 165-player event with Chaos Space Marines using Pactbound Zealots, a result that felt less like a new breakthrough and more like a polished final form for a mature edition.

Plumridge’s list leaned hard into the faction’s greatest hits. Defilers led the army’s threat profile, while Abaddon anchored the centre and a Chosen and Masters bomb rode in a Rhino to apply pressure where it mattered. A Beast of Nurgle, Nurglings, and Kravek Morne rounded out a build that mixed redundancy with awkward, hard-to-answer pieces. It was not flashy new tech. It was a pile of proven tools arranged to overload decision-making and punish any slip in positioning.

That approach worked because the list could threaten multiple parts of the table at once. The Defilers gave it a durable, punishing core. Abaddon and the Rhino package created a second wave that opponents had to respect. The supporting pieces added enough irritation and board control to make the army feel larger than the sum of its parts. In a late-edition environment, that kind of layered pressure is often what still gets to the top table.

Runner-up Mike Robertson showed that the old edition still has room for elite shooting armies to spike, too. His T’au Empire Retaliation Cadre finished second, a strong reminder that efficient firepower and sharp movement remain live options even as the metagame tightens up for the last stretch of 10th. The weekend’s wider slate reinforced that point, with events including the Maryland Open, Shanghai 40K GT, and a spread of European and North American tournaments alongside local GTs and RTTs.

That breadth is the real story here. Mayhem 5 was not an isolated outlier, but part of a packed competitive calendar that kept producing varied results right up to the end. The column treated the whole run as the last big burst of output before the showdowns go on hiatus until 11th edition arrives, and Plumridge’s win fit that mood perfectly: familiar tools, expert execution, and one more clean data point from an edition that is already starting to give way.