Top Necron player says 11th edition demands careful list building

Andy Quas-Cohen is not talking about Necrons like they are an autopilot army, and that is exactly why his take matters. In Wargamer’s Masters series, the world-class Necron player, sitting 11th on the global ELO leaderboard and backed by a strong run of results across 2024 and 2025, gives the faction a blunt reality check: 11th edition will reward careful list building far more than raw datasheet obsession.

Necrons are strong, but they are not simple

Quas-Cohen’s core message is that Necrons remain tough, flexible, and deceptively demanding. That is the key distinction a lot of players miss when they look at the faction from the outside. Yes, Necrons have the kind of headline units that make people start building lists in their head immediately: C’tan, Warrior blobs, Lychguard, the Tesseract Vault, the Silent King, and Doomsday Arks.

Those units tell you what the army can do. They can hit hard, they can shoot well, and they can anchor a table in a way that forces the opponent to deal with them. But Quas-Cohen’s point is that none of those pieces is automatically enough on its own. A strong Necron list is not just a pile of famous units, it is a plan that lets those units actually do their jobs.

That is where 11th edition changes the conversation. Detachments give each list a more explicit identity, which sounds helpful until you realize it also makes bad mixes easier to build. Necrons have enough detachment variety to support several different styles, but that flexibility comes with a cost: if you do not know what your list is meant to be doing, it is very easy to spend points on models that look powerful without really working together.

The three jobs every Necron list has to solve

Quas-Cohen’s interview boils the faction down to three demands that have to be balanced at once: survive long enough to matter, deal damage in the right places, and score efficiently. That is the lens worth using if you are starting a Necron collection or retooling an existing one for 11th edition.

• Survive long enough to matter. Necrons are at their best when the enemy has to work to remove them, not when they are sacrificed early for a flashy trade.

• Deal damage in the right places. The faction has real punch, but that punch has to line up with the opponent’s key threats, not just whatever is closest.

• Score efficiently. If your expensive units are doing all the work and none of the scoring, the list is already wasting value.

That balance is what separates a functional Necron army from a list that only looks scary on paper. Warrior blobs can help you hold space. Lychguard can give you a stubborn center. C’tan and the Silent King give you presence that the opponent cannot ignore. Doomsday Arks and the Tesseract Vault point toward the army’s shooting game. The trick is not owning those pieces, it is putting them in a structure that makes their battlefield roles clear.

How to build around detachment identity

The biggest practical lesson here is that 11th edition pushes you to think in terms of detachment plan first and unit profile second. Quas-Cohen’s advice is not to chase the strongest-looking model and then hope the rest of the list works itself out. He wants Necron players thinking about battlefield role and scoring pattern before they ever get seduced by a stat line.

That matters because the same faction can try to play several different games. One detachment might lean into a hard center with durable bodies. Another might favor more pronounced shooting support. Another might reward a more balanced approach that keeps multiple threats alive long enough to score and trade. The exact style matters less than the internal logic of the list.

A good starting point is to ask a simple question about every unit you add: what job does this model do that the rest of the list needs? If the answer is vague, it is probably a trap. If the answer connects directly to durability, damage, or scoring, you are at least building in the right direction.

The traps Quas-Cohen is really warning against

The most dangerous mistake is treating Necrons like a plug-and-play collection of good datasheets. That mindset is how you end up overbuying or over-focusing on models that do not actually support one another. Quas-Cohen’s warning is especially sharp here because Necrons tempt players into exactly that kind of shopping list. The faction has so many recognizable centerpiece units that it is easy to confuse “popular” with “coherent.”

The other trap is assuming detachment variety means every mix is viable. It does not. More options in 11th edition mean more ways to build something effective, but they also mean more ways to create a list that has no clear scoring plan and no real battlefield rhythm. If your units all want different forms of support, the army starts fighting itself.

A practical build process keeps that in check:

• Decide what kind of Necron army you are making before you buy more toys.

• Give every major unit a purpose tied to survival, damage, or scoring.

• Make sure your detachment choice supports the way your units actually want to play.

• Resist the urge to overload on headline models just because they are the ones everyone recognizes.

That is not glamorous advice, but it is the kind that wins games. Necrons can absolutely punish opponents when the list is coherent, and that is precisely why sloppy construction hurts so much. The army has enough raw quality that bad lists do not always fall apart immediately, which makes the problem harder to spot until you are already behind on the scoreboard.

Quas-Cohen’s real message is that Necrons are still one of the faction best suited to patient, deliberate play, but 11th edition will make that patience count even more. If you start with a detachment plan, assign every unit a job, and build around scoring as much as damage, you are playing the faction the way one of the world’s best Necron players thinks it should be played.