Tau and Death Guard Lead the Meta in Week of March 16 Tournament Results

Warp Friends pulled data from 14 tournaments for the week of March 16, aggregating results from 688 total players across 3,638 games, with all data manually gathered from Best Coast Pairings and limited to events with at least 20 players and 5 rounds. The picture that emerged was one of sharp extremes: a handful of factions running hot and a large chunk of the Space Marine range firmly in the red.

Sisters of Battle were the week's standout performer. "Sisters had a great week, 61%," Warp Friends noted in their video breakdown, with Death Watch and Tau both clustering just beneath that mark. "Death Watch and Tao all both right up there at almost 58 and 59%," putting three factions well above the curve in a single weekend. Thousand Sons also posted a solid showing, though no specific win rate was attached to their result in the data.

The week's faction focus fell on Tau and their Mon'Ka detachment alongside Death Guard running the Virulent Vectorium. Death Guard's Virulent Vectorium accounted for about two-thirds of the Death Guard player base, at 66.7%, with secondary detachment options splitting the remainder at around 11-12% each before dropping sharply to roughly 3%. Despite their strong internal representation, the Death Guard's aggregate win rate came in below the meta average of 49%, sitting in the 44-45% range and producing no tournament wins against a field average of one.

Necrons continued doing what Necrons do, winning despite a massive player base, with C'tan still choking lists out. The community's patience with the C'tan is visibly fraying. "Ffs when will GW learn? Ctan are so obnoxious when they're too good and, right now, they're WAY too good," read one widely circulated Reddit comment, and competitive analysis backed up the sentiment, describing the C'tan as "still extremely good."

The most tactically interesting placement of the weekend came from a Warpbane list piloted by a player named Ben, who carved through multiple C'tan builds to finish second. His build layered standard Warpbane elements with Razorbacks and Armiger Warglaives alongside the expected Dreadknights, using the Armigers as mid-tier bait: not precious enough to mourn if removed cleanly, but awkward enough for an opponent to ignore, and capable of objective denial against a C'tan in a pinch. Grey Knights' overall win rate also ticked up slightly this week, though sample size remained small enough to treat the bounce as a potential blip.

The Colorado Cup '26, a 189-player, 6-round Grand Tournament in Brighton, Colorado held on March 14, featured a tight top-8 with Iron Hands and Necrons leading the field. The Blade of Ultramar detachment also put up a 60% win rate with two tournament wins credited to a player going by Gravgar in what was described as his "final dance" with the build.

Space Marines outside of Ultramarines had little to celebrate. "Seems like space marines (besides ultras) are REALLY struggling in this meta right now," with several chapters posting win rates between 41% and 43%. Talons of the Emperor held steadier ground, running the three Land Raider setup that has been propping up their numbers. Black Templars and generic Marine players, meanwhile, absorbed what the community called disproportionately heavy nerfs relative to Custodes in the most recent dataslate.

This is only the second week of the current dataslate, and as Warp Friends observed, "a lot of the tournaments are going to start implementing the new rules and points changes" as list lock-in delays wash out of the system. Competitive commentary described it as "a bit of an in between week, with a mixture of initial forays into the new metagame and a few remaining holdouts from the old one," with some encouraging signs of non-Ultramarine Astartes experimentation and varied Necron builds appearing at the top tables. Whether the C'tan numbers come down before GW acts on them is the question the community will be watching most closely over the next few weekends.