Sisters of Battle win Tennessee Open as T'au dominate top eight

The question in Tennessee was not whether T’au Empire would show up. It was how to beat the army everyone expected to face, and Scott Ketcham answered it with Adepta Sororitas and a perfect 7-0 run. His Hallowed Martyrs list won the Tennessee Open on April 22, and the shape of the top eight made the result even louder: half the field was T’au, four T’au players filled places third through sixth, and a fifth T’au player also made the cut.

Ketcham’s win mattered because it did not come from outshooting the pack. Hallowed Martyrs played like an attrition engine, comfortable losing bodies, trading hard, and squeezing value out of every exchange. That style paid off in the tightest possible way. Ketcham reportedly won rounds 5 and 7 by a single battle point each, the kind of margins that turn a strong list into a championship list. The event data, reconstructed through Best Coast Pairings pairings and battle-point records, paints a picture of a weekend decided on precision as much as power.

Levi Hummon’s Tyranids finished second at 6-1 with Vanguard Onslaught, and his only loss was to Ketcham, also by one point. That is the clearest sign that the answer to a T’au-heavy room was not to join the gunline race, but to attack from a different axis. Vanguard Onslaught brought infiltration, movement tricks, and board control to break the normal T’au game plan, forcing the shooting army to spend turns solving positioning problems instead of simply deleting units.

Aron Huckaba’s third-place T’au Empire list still finished 6-1, and that matters too. It shows the faction was not merely present in numbers, but still strong enough to place at the top even when everyone knew what was coming. The Tennessee Open top eight was not a story about T’au fading. It was a story about the field learning how to fight back, with Ketcham’s Sisters and Hummon’s Tyranids proving that disciplined movement, trading, and board clogging can still punish raw firepower.

The broader context only sharpens the lesson. Games Workshop’s March 2026 quarterly balance update had already kept the competitive environment moving, and Warhammer Community’s Pariah Nexus Companion continued to frame play around a standardized tournament packet with FAQs, errata, maps, and support. In that setting, Tennessee offered a clean metagame snapshot: T’au still dominated pairings, but the best answers were armies that refused to play the same game.