Space Marine Errata February 2020 Winners and Losers

GW issued a new errata to bring Space Marines back in line with other armies. The intent is to make the game more fun by nerfing marines since up to this point they have been “over performing.” Read on to see these changes and what they might mean for tournament play in the near future.

(See the Errata here: https://www.warhammer-community.com/faqs/?orderby=post_created&order=desc#warhammer-40000)

Combat Doctrines

Space Marines can no longer choose to stay in Devastator Doctrine. You have to use doctrines as follows:

Turn 1: Devastator

Turn 2: Tactical

Turn 3: Tactical or Assault

Turn 4+: Assault

Furthermore, Adaptive Strategy is gone. Marines lost the ability to adapt their doctrines as needed and now have the order of their doctrines set in stone. This is a major setback for armies that relied on lots of heavy firepower and drastically reduces the effectiveness of armies like Iron Hands who could normally just stay in Devastator Doctrine to maximize their Chapter Trait.

Duty Eternal

The Duty Eternal stratagem is no longer cumulative with other rules that reduce damage.

Iron Hands

Cogitated Martyrdom – No longer works on vehicles. You also don’t get to make the FNP save twice since the roll to pass off the wound happens before rolling to ignore wounds.

Duty Eternal – Although this change affects all marines, it particularly affects Iron Hands who relied on the invincible Leviathan Dread combo.

Raven Guard

Master of Ambush – No longer works on Centurions. Not as massive of a nerf as you can still use it with models like Aggressors.

Biggest Losers

Iron Hands

Imperial Fists

Heavy Weapon units of all kinds

Biggest Winners

Everybody who is NOT a Space Marine

What Now?

So where does this change leave us? Well, day 1 of the errata we are already seeing Iron Hands armies go up on eBay. We will see fewer Space Marine armies in tournament play. Of those Space Marines armies remaining in play, we are likely to see Raven Guard more often as they are less affected by these changes and will still be very strong. We will likely see more Blood Angels hit the field (as a percentage of overall marine armies) as well.

Iron Hands and Imperial Fists will be much less common. The days of seeing half of the top 10 in every tournament as Iron Hands are gone. (Okay it wasn’t THAT bad all of the time but I’ve seen it often enough.)

Tau will probably become more common. Marines were solid at taking them down but without the ability to stay in Devastator Doctrine and with fewer Iron Hands and Imperial Fists, we might be seeing more of the large Tau suits come back out to play.

Imperial Knights. We will probably see a few more Imperial (and Chaos) Knights coming out of the woodwork. Like Tau, the natural predators of Knights will be less frequent and less capable so we will likely see more of these.

I’m sure I’m missing a lot of other changes that will be coming but the main change is that there will be more diversity in tournament play which, overall, is a good thing. I realize, however, that this may be less comforting to many Iron Hands players.

What do YOU think? Is this early assessment accurate? Please let us know what you think will happen now in the comments below!!