A couple of weeks ago I ran the first in a series catching up with each of our eight factions, using data to look at how the Chaos faction is getting on. This week it’s the turn of the Aeldari, so don your fanciest Wraithbone hat, say something enigmatic and let’s descend into the Webway of data.

  • As before, this is looking at data from October 2019.
  • We’re only using ‘normal’ battles, not Campaign battles.
  • The data covers any Aeldari deck (i.e. one which has an Aeldari Warlord but may include Necron and / or T’au allies).

Popularity

The Aeldari have a reasonable pick rate of 10%, which as discussed last time is a normal amount because Space Marines throw the proportions out.

Aeldari decks have a high win rate, defeating their opponents 63% of the time. This makes them the third best faction in terms of win rate, behind T’au and Tyranids.

Damage

Two things stand out here, first that the Aeldari are joint first (with the T’au) in being the most aggressive faction. They attack 82% of the time, reflecting that their Warlord special rules reward cards being destroyed over Readying. I like that it also matches how Aeldari armies are hard-hitting but fragile in tabletop Warhammer 40,000 battles.

Second, let’s look at which attacks Aeldari decks make:

  • 44% of the time they use melee attacks
  • 42% are ranged attacks
  • 14% are psychic attacks

This immediately shows us that we need to get some more psychic cards into the Aeldari pool, as they should be one of the more psychically active factions. But that aside, compare the stats above to how much damage each of those attack types dealt in October:

  • Melee attacks dealt 61% of the Aeldari faction’s damage
  • Ranged attacks dealt 38% of their damage

So even though ranged attacks are chosen almost as often as melee ones, the melee attacks dealt a lot more damage. This may reflect cards like the Harlequins being popular, or that players may prefer the Avatar over the Autarch as their Warlord.

Cards

The Aeldari faction still needs more cards, with only 20 right now, but it does have a good spread of card rarities:

  • 10 Common cards
  • 5 Rare cards
  • 3 Epic cards
  • 2 Legendary cards

The average cost of an Aeldari card is slightly below most of the other factions at 22.7 points, reflecting that they only have one card costing more than 50 points (the Avatar of Khaine).

This is due to the Aeldari faction having so many infantry types to choose from – including all the Craftworld, Drukhari, Harlequin and Ynnari miniatures – so we haven’t ventured into their expensive vehicles yet.

Conclusion

All this tells me a few things that we need to address:

  • We need to add more Aeldari cards in general, which we’ll be doing through Missions shortly.
  • We should include more psychic cards to reflect how the Aeldari fight in 40K.
  • We should look for more high point Aeldari characters to include, though it will be interesting to see how popular these turn out to be, considering they don’t necessarily work well with the Aeldari Warlord special rules (which trigger when any card dies, not just your enemy’s).

Anyway, I hope that was of interest, but do let me know if any of the above was surprising or confusing. We’ll be back with another of these faction focuses in a few weeks.

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Thanks,
Stu