Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So I finally played in an ITC tournament, and I wanted to see where a win would place me (114 points if I did my math correctly), I started looking at the math and realized what a weird system the ITC has in place for rankings. Long story short, I spent an evening going over the points, players and factions for the ITC and noticed a few things:

There are two Categories of players at the top Winners and Attenders

The first thing that jumped out at me while looking at the lists is there are two classes of people near the top, winners; people who win a significant number of the tournaments they attend, and attenders; people who have participated in a lot of events. It's possible attenders are also winners, but the way ITC limits points to the best five games we really don't know. A few examples:

The number 3 tau player has 6 events reported 5 of which count towards points, and has a score of 447, which means he probably finished in the winners circle in at least 3 of his tournaments and placed well in the others.

The number 2 tau player has 13 matches, and his five best total to 463. This means that he had 4 probable first or second places and a lower finish in his top 5. This also means that his other matches were worse than his worst match in his top 5, which in all probability means he is playing at a lower level than the number 3 player. Effectively he has gotten on base more because he has been at bat more.

No single faction appears overwhelmingly dominant

This one actually surprised me a little, the highest any single player achieved score wise is 748.73 (remember this is a total of points for the five best Tournaments a player had) which I will assume is pretty close to the maximum anyone can achieve. However when I looked at specific factions, most were below the 500 mark, and aside from an outlier the ones above 500 were fairly close to 500. There are a few lessons in here, no faction comes close to winning all of their games, and to be one of the top players you can't stick to one faction. Both of which imply either some level of rock paper scissors style balance or being forced to adapt to a changing meta.

The Big 4 aren't all who you think they are, and it should probably be the Big 7

The top four armies are in order: Space Marines, Chaos daemons (summoning shenanigans), Eldar, Dark Angels (probably ravenwing/super friends, but it's not called out specifically), followed by necrons and Tau tied for fifth. The Imperial knights are closer to the top six then the 11 below them thus my recommendation of a Big 7 if we are going to include tau or necrons in the list. This is based on a combination of the highest rated 50 players average score per top five Tournaments they attended (representing average performance by good players), and the highest score for the faction (representing peak performance).

You can see the end results here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hZb7l2HT9ut82hJ9Q1kjBb88mT_gXLmHCHbYrfUPd8c
and the raw data here https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GqTx3FjGqJZmZkmtqO_AP_Ny87mtKYv9fz8qwRXkDpY

For the spreadsheet challenged: http://imgur.com/gallery/hvXgw which list them in descending order (ie: worst to best, sorry blood angels but you kind of knew it already)

There were two things I had to tweak for this, first I excluded players with a single event, because of how hit or miss those tended to be. I would have liked to exclude all players with less than 5, but most factions didn't have enough players at that level for a comparison. Second I had to exclude Matt Root from the Ad mech rankings, he was a few too many Stdevs outside of the rest of ad mech players, and single handedly broke my ratings system for ad mech. I have no doubt Ad mech are as good as he makes them look, but only for a player as exceptional as he is (and he is the number 1 player by a long shot).

A few other random musings;

Space wolves did much worse than I expected, the top players were solid but the majority of players did not do well. I guess it goes to show they are indeed a hard to master list (which experienced space wolves players have been saying for a while), and that charge all the things with TWC is not a sufficient enough strategy to consistently win on it's own.

I don't have much chaos in my local meta and after seeing daemons I'm kind of glad. I suspect they are that highly rated based on the strength of summoning, which is basically free points. Summoning was a large enough issue in AoS that they had to gut it when they added points, and I suspect we will see something like that style of change in 40k if we ever see an 8th ed.

Tau and Necrons being tied amuses me, as at least on these boards and in my local meta, they are pretty intense rivals. The fact they are so close in capability might explain part of that, well that and they are both kind of outsiders in the 40k fluff.

Both the events I've attended claim they've reported their data, but their numbers haven't shown up in the rankings yet. I'm not sure if it's common for people to lie about reporting the numbers, common for numbers to get reported and not posted for months, or if I just had crappy luck in the events I attended.

In any event, from the rankings I see, it seems like your conclusions seem correct. I also got the impression that the top players in each faction seem pretty close to one another, which makes me think codex gap isn't as bad as you might think, but I could be incorrect.

All the restrictions do is show that, even with a bunch of them, the Eldar codex is still broke.

Eldar are strong, and excluding the very likely monolist chaos daemons, they would be number 2. However they are beatable, which is one of the encouraging things about this look at the data.

Doesn't ITC have several house rules that affects balance in the first place? Is there anywhere to compare how the raw GW codexes pan out one against each other?

It's not too bad overall, outside of the tau, ITC just tried to clarify rules as opposed to changing them outright. The base Tau codex is a cluster, and to put it mildly the FAQ was controversial. Rather than digging that horse up for another round of beatings, I'll just say this is the only repository of it's kind, and the other tournament's also have special rules, so it would be hard to get a vanilla comparison.

The biggest factor is missions as those tend to make or break an army depending on how you set things up. You could play with raw 40k rules, but the mission you pick is definitely going to have an effect.

BA are worse than Skitarri. Hilarious.

I was actually really sad to see skitarii that far down, as I had thought about starting an ad mech Maniple. As for BA, they are the CC focused SM chapter in a very shooting heavy meta, that are overcosted to a man, and are lacking any of the tricks that successful CC armies in 7th have. Most of this is from before angels blade though, so the ratings may take some time to catch up.

After playing against two G-cults this weekend I actually think they might be the new bottom of the totem pole, but that is as a necron army that is CC capable and shooting capable. They will probably give tau fits though,

They're a powerful counter to Tau if the Tau player fails to bring enough screening/overwatch units, but if the Tau do survive the initial exchange, their cheap access to Interceptor and easy access to Ignore Cover suggests the disappear-and-reappear trick could be fairly easily countered.

 Grimgold wrote:
So I finally played in an ITC tournament, and I wanted to see where a win would place me (114 points if I did my math correctly), I started looking at the math and realized what a weird system the ITC has in place for rankings. Long story short, I spent an evening going over the points, players and factions for the ITC and noticed a few things:

There are two Categories of players at the top Winners and Attenders

The first thing that jumped out at me while looking at the lists is there are two classes of people near the top, winners; people who win a significant number of the tournaments they attend, and attenders; people who have participated in a lot of events. It's possible attenders are also winners, but the way ITC limits points to the best five games we really don't know. A few examples:

The number 3 tau player has 6 events reported 5 of which count towards points, and has a score of 447, which means he probably finished in the winners circle in at least 3 of his tournaments and placed well in the others.

The number 2 tau player has 13 matches, and his five best total to 463. This means that he had 4 probable first or second places and a lower finish in his top 5. This also means that his other matches were worse than his worst match in his top 5, which in all probability means he is playing at a lower level than the number 3 player. Effectively he has gotten on base more because he has been at bat more.

No single faction appears overwhelmingly dominant

This one actually surprised me a little, the highest any single player achieved score wise is 748.73 (remember this is a total of points for the five best Tournaments a player had) which I will assume is pretty close to the maximum anyone can achieve. However when I looked at specific factions, most were below the 500 mark, and aside from an outlier the ones above 500 were fairly close to 500. There are a few lessons in here, no faction comes close to winning all of their games, and to be one of the top players you can't stick to one faction. Both of which imply either some level of rock paper scissors style balance or being forced to adapt to a changing meta.

The Big 4 aren't all who you think they are, and it should probably be the Big 7

The top four armies are in order: Space Marines, Chaos daemons (summoning shenanigans), Eldar, Dark Angels (probably ravenwing/super friends, but it's not called out specifically), followed by necrons and Tau tied for fifth. The Imperial knights are closer to the top six then the 11 below them thus my recommendation of a Big 7 if we are going to include tau or necrons in the list. This is based on a combination of the highest rated 50 players average score per top five Tournaments they attended (representing average performance by good players), and the highest score for the faction (representing peak performance).

You can see the end results here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hZb7l2HT9ut82hJ9Q1kjBb88mT_gXLmHCHbYrfUPd8c
and the raw data here https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GqTx3FjGqJZmZkmtqO_AP_Ny87mtKYv9fz8qwRXkDpY

For the spreadsheet challenged: http://imgur.com/gallery/hvXgw which list them in descending order (ie: worst to best, sorry blood angels but you kind of knew it already)

There were two things I had to tweak for this, first I excluded players with a single event, because of how hit or miss those tended to be. I would have liked to exclude all players with less than 5, but most factions didn't have enough players at that level for a comparison. Second I had to exclude Matt Root from the Ad mech rankings, he was a few too many Stdevs outside of the rest of ad mech players, and single handedly broke my ratings system for ad mech. I have no doubt Ad mech are as good as he makes them look, but only for a player as exceptional as he is (and he is the number 1 player by a long shot).

A few other random musings;

Space wolves did much worse than I expected, the top players were solid but the majority of players did not do well. I guess it goes to show they are indeed a hard to master list (which experienced space wolves players have been saying for a while), and that charge all the things with TWC is not a sufficient enough strategy to consistently win on it's own.

I don't have much chaos in my local meta and after seeing daemons I'm kind of glad. I suspect they are that highly rated based on the strength of summoning, which is basically free points. Summoning was a large enough issue in AoS that they had to gut it when they added points, and I suspect we will see something like that style of change in 40k if we ever see an 8th ed.

Tau and Necrons being tied amuses me, as at least on these boards and in my local meta, they are pretty intense rivals. The fact they are so close in capability might explain part of that, well that and they are both kind of outsiders in the 40k fluff.

Well players who are competitive wont probably play in less than 12 tournaments a year, so I don't really know if the "attender" designation means much. Competitors like to compete, and if you win all 12, your score still floats at 327 or so unless you add majors to it. Because you can only include 3 RTT's in that score and so it's 100+9 for three consecutive wins (and then modified by attendance).

So a regular attender could win every time and not be higher ranked. I like that about it because it forces the big fish in the little ponds out into the bigger ponds.

The top 5% of the ITC are elite in general because they are in fact regularly competing and honing their skill. Anyone with less than 12 events in a year is probably not in the "competitive" mold". It isn't that they dont compete. It isn't that they arent good or dont win. But I mean if you only play in a tournament every couple months...

So three scores ceom from RTT's and the rest come from Majors and GT's. To be in the top 5-10%, you are going to have to put your toe in those waters and swim with the pirahnas, and I don't mean the Tau Empire ones...though you might.

 Grimgold wrote:


The Big 4 aren't all who you think they are
Space Marines, Chaos daemons (summoning shenanigans), Eldar, Dark Angels (probably ravenwing/super friends, but it's not called out specifically), followed by necrons and Tau tied for fifth.

...who do you think we thought they were?

I'm not actually surprised by your Big 4, not overly. I'm actually somewhat shocked that DA managed to rank that high - I would have thought Tau and Necrons had more options - but then, Lion's Blade is good for the same reason Gladius is, so DA are basically SM with fewer options.

Sadly, DA aren't in the top because of lions blade, like Chaos daemons they are a monolist army, and the monolist is built around ravenwing.

I play a lions blade with my DA, I love it cause it's fluffy, brings a variety of models to the table, and is less competitive than my usual necron lists. However without skyhammer assault forces, tactical doctrines, and the other trappings of a gladius, they just aren't quite as good.

As for who I thought the big four were, Space marines, Eldar, Necrons and Tau (more or less in that order). If we exclude monolists, that is the big four.

jade_angel wrote:
I'm not actually surprised by your Big 4, not overly. I'm actually somewhat shocked that DA managed to rank that high - I would have thought Tau and Necrons had more options - but then, Lion's Blade is good for the same reason Gladius is, so DA are basically SM with fewer options.

Dark Angels won the Bay Area Open this year. Look folks. At some point...its about the player. Codex's dont win champiobships. Champions win championships.

 Jancoran wrote:

jade_angel wrote:
I'm not actually surprised by your Big 4, not overly. I'm actually somewhat shocked that DA managed to rank that high - I would have thought Tau and Necrons had more options - but then, Lion's Blade is good for the same reason Gladius is, so DA are basically SM with fewer options.

Dark Angels won the Bay Area Open this year. Look folks. At some point...its about the player. Codex's dont win champiobships. Champions win championships.

It's not exactly a flash in the pan, Dark angels in general perform better than tau, and their top players are among the highest rated in the game. Champions rarely fight with a handicap, and that's reflected in this data set (with one glaring exception). I doubt the best player in the game could make blood angles a 500+ point faction. Like most things, success in 40k is a mix of opportunity and skill, and a surplus of one can make up for some lack in the other, but isn't as good as a surplus in both.

It's expensive to try and attend them all over the place. Thats how the 400+ players distinguished themselves. They didnt just compete, they did it in bigger venues. That costs some cash to do. I dont think most people will bother attempting the top spot. Why?

Well 748.73 is the current top score. Matt Root. That score means 5 wins at VERY large events. Spendy.

I've met Josh Death locally. I thought he might take it all. We shall see.

7 of the top 50 play in my meta and I know that at least one of those seven absolutely is good enough, if he could afford it or could get the time off. Anyone in that 400+ range is legit though.

I'd be interested to hear what high ranked players in ITC have to think. On other notes I think you've come across the big fundamental flaw in ITC, their ranking system is attendance based. You have to go to the big tournaments to get better scores, a local player who can't travel but is undefeated won't be able to match the score of someone with deep pockets. They say it's based on professional poker's rating system, but we don't have the same kind of community as professional poker. That's not to say I don't get why they are using it, The current format has the advantage of being simple and not requiring much data retention, but as someone who does big data for a living neither of those seem like obstacles.

I think they should have some kind of ELO system, like professional chess uses, at the very least as a supplement to the current system. It would require match by match tracking, and some math, but someone threw together an amazon cloud app to do it for heroes of the storm which has a much larger data set, and funded it with Patreon and banner ads, so we are not talking about high dollar implementations.

 Grimgold wrote:
I'd be interested to hear what high ranked players in ITC have to think. On other notes I think you've come across the big fundamental flaw in ITC, their ranking system is attendance based. You have to go to the big tournaments to get better scores, a local player who can't travel but is undefeated won't be able to match the score of someone with deep pockets. They say it's based on professional poker's rating system, but we don't have the same kind of community as professional poker. That's not to say I don't get why they are using it, The current format has the advantage of being simple and not requiring much data retention, but as someone who does big data for a living neither of those seem like obstacles.

I think they should have some kind of ELO system, like professional chess uses, at the very least as a supplement to the current system. It would require match by match tracking, and some math, but someone threw together an amazon cloud app to do it for heroes of the storm which has a much larger data set, and funded it with Patreon and banner ads, so we are not talking about high dollar implementations.

Here is the counter point though and what I would say in its defense:

Although many will not aspire to the number one ranking for the totally understandable reasons of access to games and/or money. the reality is that the systems job is to advise on two things: Given you playing your best game... what's the best you can do. It stops you from just racking up points by attending a bunch. It says NO, we want to know what your five best efforts look like.

The rating system doesnt concern itself with fairness, it concerns itself with attendance. Since the ITC started, it has SIGNIFICANTLY increased attendance at events. People who understand the rating system enjoy the challenge of seeing how far they can go.

In addition this forces them to go to bigger events and to travel outside their little fish pond at least a little bit. What good are the ratings if its just the same bully beating up on the same runny nosed kids week after bludgeoning week?

The Good side here is that the data basically tells you that on your BEST DAY, here is where you stand. And on their best days, here's where other people stand in relation. And in all this, it does the admirable next step of taking into account the levels of competition you achieved it against by forcing you to prove it against increasing odds to reach the 400+ world.

So while I will (personally) never put in the effort to get to the top of the mountain, and many will not, it gives you a true estimation of where you stand on your five best days and against the competition you CHOSE to gain it against. It's a brutally fair snap shot. Most players who are competitive will have at least 12 attempts on their resume during the year and possibly a few more than that, but 12 is going to be a pretty normal number. and only 5 of the 12 count. Same for everyone else.

Also there is a fulcrum that is invisible in ratings. In my last GT, I fought a guy who is 0-12 against me. If I win, I go on to face a guy who I have had almost equally good success against, Chancy Rickey. And...he...beat me. Seized initiative on me and his 13th game was the one he got me in (way to go Oseas Aduna! You deserved it buddy). Good for him. It's a game of inches and what was looking like a top finish turned into tenth place in the end. Them's the breaks. And so on that day I made a little headway but not much and the question becomes: do I want to keep competing and finding my best day? Or am I content where I'm at? I like the fact that you are constrantly tryng to compete against YOUR OWN best day, in increasingly larger events to try and establish a true measure of where you stand.

But "almost" counts for horse shoes and hand grenades. Not much else.

So I like the system becaue it attempts to maximize participation in the hobby. And that end, on its OWN is worthwhile. We all remember the desert of players 6th Edition encouraged, much like 8th Edition Fantasy. Many of us are veterans of this board and all the moaning and gnashing of teeth over it. the ITC does do one thing right which is that it absolutely sells people on the importance of attendance and staying involved in the hobby. It gives you something cool to shoot for.

I am outspoke that I feel the ITC overstepped on its FAQ's in places and has done a terrible job of asking its poll questions. But as for their positive impact on maxing out tournament attendance a lot of the time? They get an A+

 Jancoran wrote:

jade_angel wrote:
I'm not actually surprised by your Big 4, not overly. I'm actually somewhat shocked that DA managed to rank that high - I would have thought Tau and Necrons had more options - but then, Lion's Blade is good for the same reason Gladius is, so DA are basically SM with fewer options.

Dark Angels won the Bay Area Open this year. Look folks. At some point...its about the player. Codex's dont win champiobships. Champions win championships.

Okay, show me that DA player's list. $5 it has the Librarius Conclave on bikes and all Ravenwing.

Champions don't win championships, good builds win championships.

 jreilly89 wrote:

 Jancoran wrote:

jade_angel wrote:
I'm not actually surprised by your Big 4, not overly. I'm actually somewhat shocked that DA managed to rank that high - I would have thought Tau and Necrons had more options - but then, Lion's Blade is good for the same reason Gladius is, so DA are basically SM with fewer options.

Dark Angels won the Bay Area Open this year. Look folks. At some point...its about the player. Codex's dont win champiobships. Champions win championships.

Okay, show me that DA player's list. $5 it has the Librarius Conclave on bikes and all Ravenwing.

Champions don't win championships, good builds win championships.

It is their Gladius + a couple Ravenwing Command Squads. So you're half right.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
That does prove their Tactical Marines are worthless without free transports though so...

 Grimgold wrote:
I'd be interested to hear what high ranked players in ITC have to think. On other notes I think you've come across the big fundamental flaw in ITC, their ranking system is attendance based. You have to go to the big tournaments to get better scores, a local player who can't travel but is undefeated won't be able to match the score of someone with deep pockets.

A local player who is undefeated doesn't really mean much. They very well may be the strongest player to ever pick up the game, but without some kind of link to the larger community, its impossible to tell if they're really that good or just a big fish in a small pond. There's just too many specifics to a local meta to derive anything meaningful from their results (maybe its somehow completely devoid of Eldar or something). Comparisons require some sort of connective tissue to have any real validity, which is exactly what the players who attend multiple large events provide.

 Jancoran wrote:

jade_angel wrote:
I'm not actually surprised by your Big 4, not overly. I'm actually somewhat shocked that DA managed to rank that high - I would have thought Tau and Necrons had more options - but then, Lion's Blade is good for the same reason Gladius is, so DA are basically SM with fewer options.

Dark Angels won the Bay Area Open this year. Look folks. At some point...its about the player. Codex's dont win champiobships. Champions win championships.

Its not as though the champions are showing up with half-hearted fluffy lists.
They might be using Dark Angels which are traditionally considered weaker than say Eldar... but they're taking 2+ rerollable biker squads and powerful formations.

So the guy that won the Bay Area Championship was actually playing for third place in the final round, and was playing down. His list was the Lion's Blade Strike Force:

Lion’s Blade Strike Force

Company Master: (Warlord) Fist, Artificer Armor
Chaplain: Bike, Auspex
Tactical Squad: Rhino, Grav-Cannon,
Tactical Squad: Rhino, Multi-Melta
Tactical Squad: Razorback (HB), Heavy Bolter
Tactical Squad: Razorback (HB)
Tactical Squad: Razorback (HB)
Tactical Squad: Pod, Melta/Combi-Melta
Assault Squad: 2x Flamers, Pod
Assault Squad: 2x Flamers, Pod
Devastator Squad: Rhino, Grav-Cannon
Devastator Squad: Rhino, Grav-Cannon
Scouts
Ravenwing Strike Force
Techmarine: Bike, Auspex
Ravenwing Command Squad: 5 Black Knights, Apothecary, 5 Plasma Talons, Grenade Launcher
Ravenwing Black Knight Squad: 5 Black Knights, Huntmaster, 5 Plasma Talons, Grenade Launcher
Ravenwing Darkshroud

He brought 2,260 points to a 1,850 tournament. Right off the bat, he has a force almost 20% larger then his opponents. He never played a similar list to his own, and His opponents: Daemons, Eldar, Orks, Ad Mech, GuardDar, and Imperial Knights. He was 5-0 going into the last round, and was paired down playing a 4-1 player. His opponent wasn't even in the top 8 at the end of the tournament. The only reason he won the entire tournament was the top table, playing for first and second place, tied. And with the way ITC scores matches, the first and second place players went 5-0-1, while Brandon went 6-0 playing down. I think his win was a large combination of list building and luck. If you read the interview Brandon gave at Frontline Gaming, he even admits he got lucky. His most difficult game was in the fourth round against the GuardDar army that went to time, and he won with a final score of 6-5. If the game would have been played to conclusion, he would have lost.

My opinion, Brandon is a great player, and it was a perfect storm of opponents and the final tie at the first table that allowed him to get 1st place.

D'oh Ninja'd

https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2016/07/18/bay-area-open-live-coverage/

See, that DA list doesn't even surprise me. Gladius is just amazing, there's no denying it, and black knights/RW Command Squad are one of the single best things DA have that regular SM doesn't.

Not saying that guy isn't a good player, but list building is 40-50% of winning at 40k.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 jreilly89 wrote:

 Jancoran wrote:

jade_angel wrote:
I'm not actually surprised by your Big 4, not overly. I'm actually somewhat shocked that DA managed to rank that high - I would have thought Tau and Necrons had more options - but then, Lion's Blade is good for the same reason Gladius is, so DA are basically SM with fewer options.

Dark Angels won the Bay Area Open this year. Look folks. At some point...its about the player. Codex's dont win champiobships. Champions win championships.

Okay, show me that DA player's list. $5 it has the Librarius Conclave on bikes and all Ravenwing.

Champions don't win championships, good builds win championships.

It is their Gladius + a couple Ravenwing Command Squads. So you're half right.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
That does prove their Tactical Marines are worthless without free transports though so...

All Tac Marines are worthless without free transports. It's rather sad

Wow Tamwulf, that was an amusing read. Though in all fairness it was a mixture of absurd luck, and being really good. Though Matt Root is kind of the counter example, No other majority ad mech list has been nearly as successful. So there is definitely something special about the player. Which dove tails back to my point, it takes both a good list, good skills, and good luck to be a champ. If you have an abundance in one you can make up for a deficiency in another, but the people on the top are going to have them all.

 Grimgold wrote:
Wow Tamwulf, that was an amusing read. Though in all fairness it was a mixture of absurd luck, and being really good. Though Matt Root is kind of the counter example, No other majority ad mech list has been nearly as successful. So there is definitely something special about the player. Which dove tails back to my point, it takes both a good list, good skills, and good luck to be a champ. If you have an abundance in one you can make up for a deficiency in another, but the people on the top are going to have them all.

Exactly. There is a reason you don't see Orks and DE in the top 8 No matter how good the player you just can't compensate for a bad codex enough.

SemperMortis wrote:

 Grimgold wrote:
Wow Tamwulf, that was an amusing read. Though in all fairness it was a mixture of absurd luck, and being really good. Though Matt Root is kind of the counter example, No other majority ad mech list has been nearly as successful. So there is definitely something special about the player. Which dove tails back to my point, it takes both a good list, good skills, and good luck to be a champ. If you have an abundance in one you can make up for a deficiency in another, but the people on the top are going to have them all.

Exactly. There is a reason you don't see Orks and DE in the top 8 No matter how good the player you just can't compensate for a bad codex enough.

Not according to Jancoran.

Edit: NVM.