This Week in the ITC: GW Comes for the Iron Hands

Hello, fellow Competitive 40k fans! SaltyJohn from TFG Radio here to discuss this week in the ITC.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Games Workshop did it. They proved a lot of people wrong and successfully addressed the issue of Iron Hands, and some general Marine issues, outside of their normal FAQ schedule! I would like to thank all the 40k meme lords, and trolls, for relentlessly posting about how broken the Marine Supplements were and getting GW to fix this. Before I go too much further, here is a link to the FAQ. We are truly blessed that we were able to get all those memes, troll posts, out there before Pope Francis told us to give it all up for Lent!

Whether it was the memes or the TOs in the community legitimately considering banning the Space Marine Supplements in order to address the issue due to lack of GW response, or even acknowledgment of the issue or that a solution was coming, or LVO results we will never truly know. However, it is clear that GW has addressed the issue!

It had become increasingly clear after LVO that Iron Hands, and to a lesser extent Imperial Fists, needed to be addressed. The online community, which let’s be honest contains a lot of “players” as well as players, had some split opinions on this. Some of these opinions were so bad they barely qualified as opinions, yet others brought back the arguments of the dark ages of competitive 40k. For seemingly no reason other than it’s an easy, lazy, fall back opinion, we even saw the return of the ‘BaN FoRGeWorlD iT iSn’T EvEN Gw!”.

Shockingly, Games Workshop was able to deal with this issue without banning all the Forgeworld Indexes and units! Imagine that! I can’t possibly comprehend how they were ever able to figure out a way to tame down a unit from a book that’s been around, and a non-issue, since 8th edition began without outright banning an entire range of models! It was also amazing that Games Workshop was able to release an FAQ outside of their normal FAQ schedule! So shocking, so amazing.

Hopefully, you recognized the sarcasm in the paragraph above. So with this new FAQ in place where does that leave us in the ITC? Well, firstly it means we won’t see the same list winning Adepticon that won LVO, which is good. It also means that we will be entering the new ITC season’s new mission era with a new and healthier meta! Which is also quite good.

There has been some discussion that GW didn’t go far enough with their nerf in this FAQ. I think it is important for us to remember that while we may want an FAQ to address the dominance of a faction we shouldn’t be wishing for FAQs to make a faction irrelevant. There’s no need for GW to make Iron Hands a faction that is not worth taking anymore, rather just toning them down to being on par with other top factions makes them still worth taking but not overly powerful. I understand the desire to see the faction that has caused so much ire, and “feels bads”, in the competitive scene taken down hard but that really isn’t necessary.

Ultimately the fact that GW took the initiative to fix a major problem, outside of their normal FAQ/Rules schedule, and do so in a way that left the faction and Forgeworld rules intact and useable is something we should be applauding. I for one, am grateful.