The ITC Warband Tier List by Windy

Hey there, meta chasers! Today we have a special treat in the form of a community-submitted analysis of competiton data for the last year. Loads of tournaments exist, but some of the larger and more prominent ones also submit their scores and results to the ITC, or International Tournament Circuit; a thing that once was the sole property of Frontline Gaming for 40K events, and now is run aliongside/with cooperation/taken over by Gamkes Workshop prime and hosts more of their events, such as Underworlds. Windy has gone through the most recent ITC scores for Underworlds this calendar year and was able to make some assessments of what is performing well in this moment when considering tournament players’ outcomes.

This is a fun exercise because it can result in a Tier List or two, which everybody loves. It’s extra fun because Path to Glory just wrapped up their Spitewood Tier List (you can listen to the A Tier here) and while Mark and George’s judgments are totally valid and based on combined decades of competitive experience, they do differ from these findings in some ways. Probably because not all events are submitted to ITC, including the Tacoma Open which was surprisingly missing despite my competing at it and shouldn’t I be the most important guy ever? This is why Gorechosen continue to be ranked too low, I tell ya what. Also it’s a GW-run event and you’d think they would submit their own events to their own standings list but who am I to bring logic into this.

Enough rambling. Let’s let somebody smart take the reins for once! Here’s Windy to explain what’s strong. There are two lists presented: The first takes the single best player of a given faction and shows how well a warband might rank if played optimally. The second takes the average of the top 5 players of a given faction to show how strong something will be in the hands of a skilled player.

Also, literally nobody took the Farstriders to an ITC event. GW plz buff, thx.

Welcome to this super serious analysis piece. Recently there was an article on Warcom which highlighted the BCP ITC rankings. Having a scroll through kicked off the ‘pointless analysis’ section of my brain. There’s quite a bit of data here, so I wondered if I could pull any conclusions. We also all love a tierlist, so I thought I’d have a run at a data driven tier list as well.

For anyone not familiar with the ITC rankings: A TO can apply to be part of the ITC rankings scheme through BCP. The results of those tournaments ran on BCP then feed their way into the ITC rankings. My understanding is that the higher the attendance of the tournament, the higher the available ranking points. And then the higher your placement in that tournament, the higher your points as well. For the warband rankings, it takes that entrant’s top 5 results with any particular warband which gives their ITC score for that warband.

It should be noted that there is no BCP entry for Thyrielle’s Zephyrites, so they will not show up in these lists. (Editor’s Note: I have seen them suvmitted as Myari’s Purifiers, Blackpowder’s Buccaneers, and more, so some of our data will be muddied by Zephyrites by necessity infiltrating other warbands)

Firstly, we have the top entry for each warband. This shows us: Warband ability x Warband popularity x Pilot skill. In order to be high on this list the warband needs to be good, it needs to be taken often, and the pilot needs to be good. This will give us which warband with a particular pilot is the best in the world. Securing high finishes in 5 tournaments with the same warband will give you a high score. One thing to note is that not all warbands have a single person taking them to 5 tournaments, so this data also scales with popularity.

In order to break them into tiers I have used the following methodology in lieu of actually thinking about the tiers. I wanted this to have as little subjective analysis as possible.

Average value provides the boundary between B and C tiers. The average of the top half provides the boundary for A and B. The average of the top quarter provides the boundary for A and S. I’ve then mirrored this for the lower tiers. I hope this makes sense from both an English and logical point of view, but to be honest, it doesn’t matter that much where the boundary is. These lists are in order with the left-hand side being the higher end of the tier.

So, without further ado here is the tier list for single entries:

Sat at the top with a mighty score of 903.48 is The Grymwatch, with maybe a surprising second place going to The Exiled Dead on 888.99.

Some other interesting high placements I’ll call out are:

The Headsman’s Curse (748.17) who I thought had been in a bit of a rough spot in this edition. Maybe an elite-leaning meta is finally catching up for them?
Borgit (661.81) and Brethren (546.94) are also both higher up than I’d necessarily expect.

As for surprisingly low placements:

Starblood Stalkers (543.93) and Jaws (541.51) are lower than how they feel when I play against them.
Mollog (426.15) and Rippas (376.39) are also much lower than I would have thought. What’s going on with Rippa? Are they just being played lots in non-ITC events? Or are people just playing them once or twice and then discarding them?
Sons of Velmorn (198.23) in F just feels wrong to me.

Honourable mention to a player called “BYE ROUND” who is the only entry in BCP for The Farstriders. I have therefore ignored them, so they score of 0 putting them very firmly at the bottom of the F tier. (Editor’s note: LMAO. Take a bye or play into the farstriders, still a bye)

And the thing we’ve all been waiting for. Which is the best Grand Alliance? Taking an average of all warbands in a particular alliance, here are the rankings:

Chaos (561)
Death (510)
Destruction (478)
Order (464)

Showing once and for all that Chaos is on top and Order is boring and lame (Albeit heavily influenced by The Farstriders).

Now is where the fun begins. I wasn’t satisfied with those results. For one thing, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the entire player base. We all have that one player who doesn’t play anything other than Emberwatch BARF, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Emberwatch BARF is widely popular. What would show that Emberwatch (BARF?) is powerful is if the top 5 entries for Emberwatch are all high placing.

So, I went back and scraped the remaining 4 of the top 5 entries for each warband which showed some interesting things. Some warbands have one person who is clearly obsessed and has placed highly at 5 tournaments and then only a few stragglers lagging behind with one or two mid tournament placements (I assume, I have no idea what the BCP numbers actually mean in reality). And then some warbands have high results across all top 5 players, showing consistent results for multiple players at multiple tournaments. Also, I have used the same methodology for generating the tiers as earlier. As every warband’s average is lower than their first-place finish all of the boundaries have shifted down as well. Because of this, some warbands will have a lower score, but their score has improved relative to everyone else.

With that in mind, here is the second of the tier lists which shows the average results across the top 5 players for each warband.

As before, it is worth noting that if all 5 players have all been to 5 tournaments the average score will be higher than if players in the top 5 have only been to 2 or three tournaments as can be seen in the lower tiers.

That feels a bit more like it! Up at the top are the ever-consistent Elathain’s Soulraid (687) and Spiteclaw (623). Showing high placings by lots of players over lots of tournaments.

Here is a list of all the warbands which went up a tier:

On the whole I feel that these are reasonable. Fairly consistent and relatively popular warbands. Except for Xandire’s. But it’s good to see that the community likes a challenge!

There are lots of warbands who went down a tier, but here are the headlines:

This is an interesting one. The headline is The Grymwatch. Widely regarded as ‘pretty good’, it seems there is one exceptional player and another very good player before a drop off of people taking them to 5 tournaments. Headsman also took a bit of a hit which shows the same as The Grymwatch. Essentially this table shows us warbands which most players aren’t committing to taking to 5 or more tournaments.

Now for another interesting category. Which warbands lost the least BCP points between their highest scoring and their top 5 average (score reduction)? Here are the top 5:

What we see here are two or three categories:

Players consistently taking a high performing warband and performing highly (Soulraid).
Players consistently taking consistent warbands and consistently doing well (Jaws and Blood of the Bull).
Players taking a ‘challenge’ warband once or twice before probably moving on to other things, but the placement of those warbands withing tournaments being fairly consistent (Sons of Velmorn and Xandire’s).

What we also see is a general trend of those consistent warbands moving up a tier as we take the averages.

And again, the thing we’ve all been waiting for: Grand Alliance rankings.

Chaos (344)
Order (310)
Destruction (293)
Death (291)

Chaos reigns! Order came up a lot due to consistency across the board but are still affected quite a bit by The Farstriders. Death took a massive hit with 4/10 warbands that lost over half of their ranking points when the average was taken instead of the top placing player.

Just before wrapping up, I’d be remised if I didn’t mention a glaring issue with the methodology of this article. If you wanted to take this analysis a step further, you could take into account the number of tournaments each player has with each warband. This would show warband placements without a popularity multiplication factor. But I think it’s kinda neat to see how popular warbands actually are within the community. Also, I couldn’t be bothered to scrape that data. Another omission from this data is the total about of entries for a particular warband. For example, Soulraid was taken to tournaments by 49 players, but The Grymwatch was only taken by 13 players. So, I think things would change somewhat if the total data was taken from BCP. Please let me know if anyone has a BCP connect that would do a download on all their ITC data for me. I’d be happy to do the analysis but have better things to be doing with my time than scraping data from BCP (clearly!).

Well, I think that’s probably it from me. Feel free to reach out on Discord @Windy if you want to tell me that I’m wrong. Bye for now!

P.S. Here’s a graph of the data I was working from:

Thanks again to Windy for putting this all together, I personally found it a very interesting read and I’m sure it will kick off no small amount of debate. Some things are strong, some things are strong and popular, some things are popular but not as strong, and some things just fall flat.

My hottest takeaways are:

Exiled Dead being that far up surprised me
I completely understand the no Farstriders
- this reinforces my view that several warbands including them, the Crimson Court, Sepulchral Guard, and Grinkrak’s Looncourt need something very big to improve their stats, warscrolls, or both.
I’m also surprised how low down Hexbane is – I have had some surprising success with them after the Marked for Death errata and also nearly got dethroned by them at Tacoma despite it being piloted by a newer player. Maybe with more time they’ll rise a little higher!
Glad to see Kamandora representing in the top ranks
How are Brethren of the Bolt doing so well!?
I must be legitimately wretched with piloting Borgit because I have them nowhere near the A tier in my personal games
I feel validated after Worlds 2025 because all 4 warbands I lost to are higher on both tier lists than Starblood and therefore totally not my fault ok I swear bro

If you have something to say about your favorite warband, violent calls to nerf or buff something in particular, or are willing to do the herculean task of figuring out how to average these out by number of entries per player to show raw strength rather than strength multiplied by frequency, I welcome all of it in the comments or at SpentGlory@gmail.com

Until next time, I hope you bring a warband up a tier and spend some glory in the underworlds!