A long, loooong time ago I ran a series ‘faction focus’ blog posts, looking at how each played, their tactics, weaknesses and so on. As it’s been a couple of years I thought I’d revisit each faction over the next few months, alternating these posts with ‘normal’ ones.
The difference this time is that I have numbers I can refer to, rather than just offering opinions and thoughts. Thanks to our analyst, Pete, I’ll be able to give you some interesting stats on each faction, possibly revealing some surprising facts along the way.
So, don your spikiest spikes, summon your daemoniest daemon and let’s look at the Chaos faction.
Popularity
Decks from the Chaos faction fought 422,473 battles during October 2019, meaning they were chosen by players 9.3% of the time. Note that those stats don’t include Campaign battles when players had no choice on the faction they used, they’re purely for normal battles.
With eight factions in the game you might be expecting the average pick rate for each faction to be around 12 – 13% but the Space Marine faction skews the numbers because new players have no choice but to use them, and as our largest faction (and the most popular army in Warhammer 40,000) it’s inevitable they’ll shift the stats. Basically, we consider the Chaos faction’s 9.3% to be a reasonable number.
Victories
In October, Chaos decks won 51.1% of their battles, a number that only rises a couple of percent as you get to the top Rank players. That shows us that players aren’t reliant on getting cards unlocked at top Ranks to make competitive Chaos decks (while you could argue that players may be getting access to those higher Ranked cards early through Rank unlocked packs, it’s difficult to upgrade cards because normal packs still won’t give you duplicates until you reach the required Rank).
Attacks
In October the Chaos faction dealt 203,755,646 Wounds to their enemies, which should please Khorne. We’ve tried to have each faction more or less match how its’ armies play in tabletop 40K, so I’m pleased to see the following stats:
- 63.5% of that damage was done through melee attacks.
- 23.2% using psychic attacks.
- 13.3% using ranged attacks.
I think that reflects how a mix of Chaos Space Marines and Daemons would fight on the tabletop pretty well.
Also, Chaos cards attack (instead of Readying to increase an attack for later) 77.8% of the time, reinforcing their aggressive play style.
Rarity
Finally, let’s look at how many cards of Common / Rare / Epic / Legendary rarity the Chaos faction has:
- Common – 14
- Rare – 10
- Epic – 3
- Legendary – 3
Which tells us they have 30 cards in total and are short on Epic and Legendary cards. This is something we’ll try to address as we add new cards, so look for a higher proportion of ‘famous’ Chaos miniatures to start appearing in the new year.
Also, the average points cost of a Chaos faction card is 24.5 and it will be interesting to see how that balances out against the average costs of all the other factions.
Conclusion
I hope those stats were interesting and, along with the original Chaos faction focus, give you some idea of how to use Chaos decks in battle. Let me know if you’re surprised by any of those numbers or if any are unclear, otherwise I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to look at another faction.
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Thanks,
Stu
Very interesting. Possibly maybe fabius bile or lucius or both hahaha.
It’s interesting that you mention those miniatures as we’ve been considering adding them for a while now but have held back because their miniatures are quite old and don’t necessarily stand up as well as some of the newer Chaos characters.
I guess it’s a question of whether that matters or if it’s just better to get fan favourite characters into the game.
Fabius Bile I don’t think has been updated since he came out, at least he looks identical to back before 3rd edition. Lucius at least is a bit newer, though I’d like to see him come out with a host of new slaanesh Marines/Daemons
These statistics are indeed interesting, however could you please confirm if these are pure Chaos decks or with allies? if with allies are they included in it (or if chaos are used in allied decks) ?
I think the range is lower than I’d expect because the Obliterator is the highest rank lock in the deck along with the Spiteclaw, the deck lacks Havocs currently, as well as a Terminator with the infamous Reaper Auto Cannon and the majority of Chaos’ ranged firepower comes from it’s vehicles. Since they don’t use dreads anymore other than the hellbrute they lack the range the would otherwise have in vehicles where as their former brothers in the Marines, have plenty of dread variants in the game.
I’ve checked with Pete and the quoted stats do include any decks that are using Ork and / or Tyranid allies (basically any decks with Chaos Warlords). Therefore the stats may be different for Campaigns, where no allies are allowed, which is something I could look at after this faction series. Thanks for the question and the idea!
That’s cool. Personally I’m digging the space marines, but I love all the factions. Quick question, how does the reading mechanic work? Especially for understanding and using correctly commissar Yarrick?
Check out the game guide on CombatCards.com for details on areas like that (and please do let me know if the guide doesn’t clarify things so I can update it).