The end isn't neigh, don't break out that sandwich board just yet!

My oh my!

There certainly is a lot of doom-calling and gnashing of teeth with the release of the new Grey Knights book. After spending a good week making and breaking every list I can come up with, and I urge those of you who have problems with the book to go out and do the same.

One of the core mistakes I see people making, is not assigning any sort of points value to the ideas they are coming up against in their head. If you're scared of a combination of units, sit down and price them out. You'll usually find that it's a lot more expensive than you had anticipated, and when you stack the equivalent amount of points from your own list against it, you're not as hard done by as you thought.

If you include all the "OMG GOOD" toys in a GK list, you're coming in at a very high points total indeed.

The other thing I'm seeing go on a lot is what I like to call "The Perfect Storm Effect". People are worried about certain lists doing certain things at certain times that perfectly counters anything they can come up with and then "ONOEZ IM BONED!". What they fail to notice is that no one would take that list anyway, because it's a heap of crap against the other 5 people they will have to play that weekend, and even then it relied on a series of rolls successively going in their favor.

The best thing I can suggest you do from there is to play a few games out, see how it goes. You'll be pleasantly surprised when you move away from the doom and gloom world of the game on paper, and start filtering it through the infinite variabilities that happen on the tabletop. Failing that, at least get out and start having a bit of a read of battle reports, it won't take you long at all to find examples of them both winning and losing - with enough detail for you to figure out a bit more of whats going on.

If you look hard enough, you'll even find multiple reports of daemons pantsing good players wielding good GK lists because they're tailored to take on all comers, rather than being a dedicated anti daemon list :)

GK's are good, yes. They're not the broken game-killer so many are already bobbing their tinfoil hat covered heads to however. Invariably they continue to fit into the lovely paper scissor rock (lizard Spock?) type environment we play in today, and where they have their favored match ups, they will have their feared match ups just as often.

What will be interesting in the coming months is how they reshape the meta scene locally. The top tables right now have a very heavy presence of Tyranid Monstrous Creatures, in fact had I not barely dodged one of the lists in the final round by 2 points - my last event I played in would have had 7 trygons across 3 games alone.

Likewise, GK's have some fantastic anti horde tools, and I believe the end result in both cases will be that people gravitate towards a slightly more balanced approach.

Actually this is NZ, why adapt when whining is less effort :D?

I for one look forward to facing the knights on a far more regular basis. While they will no doubt present some challenges, the thing that I suspect will keep them from bolting ahead of the pack is that at the end of the day, you die like an overpriced marine and lose a lot of utility via strong psychic defense. While this doesn't ruin the party for them in the grand scheme of things, its a big enough hurdle to stop them from getting the 6-0-0 they'll need to win events locally.