1500, 1850, 2000 or 2500 Why armies become defunct.

Space Wolves are best, No Mech IG, Necrons fail or do they?  Have we forced these armies to become noncompetitive?  As a community should we begin to police the lists and update them as a whole or should we just sit back and complain about it.  With the creation of INAT the community has accepted this group of individuals as a clarifying body for rules of the armies and the main rules book.  How hard would it be to create a group of individuals that update older codexes when the need becomes blatantly obvious?

With the recent FAQs brining Dark Angels, Blood Angels and Black Templars in line with Space Wolves you have once again allowed players that have had invested hundreds if not thousands of dollars into an industry back into the fold and made 3 more lists viable in 5^th edition.  Many times I have heard Richard from the Eternal Warriors (formally DLT) say how he despises playing lists over 1500pts.  I am in total likeness of mind here, as a game designer the intricacies for play testing and balancing for the enjoyment of all is a daunting task.  Sometimes this task takes months if not years to properly nail down.  Anyone who knows anything about prior editions going back to Rouge Trader knows that there was an experience associated with it, the traditional rock paper scissors fundamentals.

If you are listener of the competitive pod casts and read a lot of the tournament talk forums you will find that a tiering system has be assigned to the codexes; High, Medium and Low, most of the time we look at these tiers as your probability of placing in a major tournament and the overall competiveness relative to law of averages associated with all dice games. So let’s break this down in no particular order just a group lumping on the average of 2000pt lists

High – Wolves, IG, Blood Angels, and possibly now Dark Angels, Black Templars.(after the FAQ)

Mediums – Orcs, Eldar, Nids, Dark Eldar, Vanilla Marines, Witch Hunters, Chaos Marines, Demons

Low- Necrons, Tau, Demonhunters(will be moving when the new dex hits in April)

Now let’s level the playing field locking in at 1500pts, every list now has the ability to beat any other list.  Why do we constantly see tournaments above the levels of 1500pts? Yeah you have the toys to play 5000pts great Apoc it, that game system is built to handle larger armies.  Warhammer 40k is play tested and built for 1500pnts if you were to see a competitive years worth of 1500pnt tourneys the brackets would not be the same in anyway shape or form.  There might be similarities do to the sheer number of Wolves players vs. Witch Hunter players but all and all you would see many more of the older armies once again become more viable.