u/TooShoeMagoo

I’m wrapping up my mid-year data analysis with everyone else’s favorite statistic: army win rates. Previously I covered top-player representation, What Do the Pros Play? and 3-0 tournament starts, Winter Korps Ascending! This wraps up the data analysis I plan to do before moving on to everyone’s favorite kind of content: a tier list.

Before diving into it, I’m obligated to say that Warmachine is a game where skill really differentiates players.  I’m still figuring out how to make this idea concrete, but as a rough start I estimate that a player in the upper skill quartile has around an 80% chance of beating an average player, all things equal.  This means it's not about what faction you play, but how you play it. The opportunity for skill expression is part of why we love this game; it is also why the game can be so punishing for new players.

Anyway, back to the fun stuff.  

Here are the win-rates for each of the Mk4 armies, estimated using data from 7,526 ranked tournament games between January 21 and June 30. The estimates adjust for differences in player Elo/skill and allow army win rates to change over time. The first figure shows the current state of the game, based on June estimates, while the second figure shows how win rates have evolved over the season.

Old Umbrey sits at the top of the pack (appropriate for the Furry faction) with a 60% win rate.  The farmy has an admitted weakness into dedication shooting (36% win rate into Firequill and 37% against Lylyth5), but if you can dodge/play through those matches the Bears and Wolves are undeniably strong.  60% is probably a little bit high; it’s hard to entirely correct for many top-players switching to into OU.

Gyrmkin is the other standout.  The player base is smaller than OU so there’s more uncertainty, and people are still learning how to play with and against the Baba Yaga battalion.  Like OU, Grymkin struggle with heavy shooting (22% into Firequill ) so despite the Slaughterhouse and Old Witch nerfs, the mid-year update may actually be net-positive if Shroud helps shore up those bad matchups. 

I was surprised to see Sea Raiders near the bottom of the pack; the January update breathed new life into the army with a more balanced set of leaders and some good buffs to their Jacks.  Pure speculation: maybe the issue is in how Orgoth interact with SR 2026?    

Gravediggers being near the bottom is doesn’t surprise me at all. Caine4 is a strong warlock (my personal bogeyman!) but he also dies to a stiff breeze, and the player base seems to rely on him heavily. Both Sea Raiders and Gravediggers have top-place finishes at large events, so this may be less “these armies are bad” and more “these armies need careful list construction, favorable pairings, or experienced pilots.”

Overall, I’m not seeing a huge mid-year update effect yet. Some of that is probably my methodology: the model smooths win rates across adjacent months, which is usually helpful but not ideal for detecting sudden patch effects. It also takes time for players and the meta to adapt. I’m curious to see whether the July and August data make the update look more impactful.

So that’s the mid-year statistical tour: top-player representation, 3-0 starts, and now adjusted win rates. Next comes the only logical conclusion: wildly overconfident tier-list. 

Back on my grind today with more Warmachine stats, wrapping up the first half of the 2026 season. Today I’m focusing on one of my favorite stats: 3-0 starts.

This analysis includes 306 singles tournaments and 3,557 players from Jan. 21 through June 21, 2026. I’m using 3-0 starts as a proxy for “can this army reach the top cut of an event?”  Depending on the event size starting 3-0 could mean qualifying for masters, making the semifinals / top table, or even winning a small event.  Ideally we’d look at deeper runs like 4-0 or 5-0, but there are not enough large events yet to support that cleanly.

The first plot shows the raw data: how many players played each faction and how many started 3-0. The black line shows how many hot starts you’d expect if every faction had the same 3-0 rate, given that faction’s popularity. Armies above the line are over-performing; armies below the line may need a tune-up. The grey band shows the range you might expect from random variation, though it is not perfectly calibrated.

Most factions fall within the grey band, which is a good sign for overall balance. Old Umbrey, Brineblood Marauders, and Infernals look a little spicy; Winter Korps, Thornfall Alliance, and maybe House Kallyss look soft. That said, I would not panic-sell your pigs, elves, or patriotic snowmen just yet. Pigs are still only partially released, the Khadorans received some nice buffs, and the elves are about to start bullying us with IMPERATUS, THE ASHEN PHOENIX.

But raw results are only part of the story. Player skill matters a lot in Warmachine, and some armies (looking at you, Infernals) are notorious for having a relatively elite player base. The meta is also evolving; we are not playing the same game in June that we were playing in January.

The second plot shows the adjusted analysis: the odds of a 3-0 start by faction after accounting for player skill and time trends. An odds ratio of 1 means average after adjustment; above 1 means better-than-average odds of starting 3-0; below 1 means worse-than-average odds.

This plot paints a different picture. Convergence of Cyriss are looking really strong, so congratulations to the six people who understood the faction before crunching the data with a spreadsheet.  Winter Korps march back to parity, overcoming an icy start to the season, and Infernals are actually near the bottom - they should have offered more souls to their malevolent masters before the January Update.

Overall, though, the spread is pretty tight, and the 95% intervals overlap heavily. That suggests a lot of what we saw in the raw data may be driven by differences in player pools rather than clean, obvious differences in army strength.

Finally, the third plot shows how the adjusted odds have evolved over the season. Most factions are fairly stable, but the big story is the steady upward march of Winter Korps. They started the season looking rough but have improved consistently over time. With the mid-year updates now in play, I’m expecting big things from our Komrades in Red in the second half of the season.

The competitive season is halfway through! SR 2026 has super popular with growth up by nearly 70% year-over-year.  The big changes in the yearly update (mk4.5 lol?) have been well received by the community and SFG has continued to dial in the game during the mid-year balance adjustment.

Like any well-adjusted degenerate, I love a good army tier list. And what better way to celebrate the midpoint of the 2026 tournament season than by arguing about toy soldier power rankings on the internet?

Working on that tier list got me thinking. Previously, I looked at the overall popularity of each Warmachine army. But what are the best players, the Pros racking up big wins making huge Warmachine $$$ (lol), actually playing?

Below is the popularity of each army among the top 100 players from Jan. 21 through June 21, 2026. Results are weighted by games played, so if a player logged 3 Grymkin games and 12 Sea Raiders games, they count as 0.2 Grymkin players and 0.8 Sea Raiders players. The top 100 players were determined using TrueSkillThroughTime, an Elo-like rating system. The column Relative Difference shows whether an army is over- or underrepresented among top players compared with the broader player base. Positive numbers mean the army shows up more often among the top 100; negative numbers mean it shows up less often.

Faction	Top 100 Players	All Players	Relative Difference
Old Umbrey	17.1	132	+74.2%
Shadowflame Shard	11.8	110	+43.7%
Sea Raiders	10.6	98	+44.8%
Brineblood Marauders	9.2	91	+36.4%
House Kallyss	8.3	140	-20.7%
Grymkin	6.2	52	+59.9%
Gravediggers	5.8	104	-26.0%
Storm Legion	4.8	77	-16.3%
Legacy	4.5	146	-58.4%
Dark Operations	4.5	42	+42.8%
Necrofactorium	4.5	81	-25.6%
Winter Korps	4.1	108	-48.9%
Thornfall Alliance	2.3	31	-0.6%
Infernals	2.3	23	+31.8%
Kithguard	2.0	31	-13.5%
Crucible Guard	1.4	47	-60.9%
Convergence of Cyriss	0.6	29	-70.4%

Before discussing the chart, as a card-carrying statistician I’m compelled to warn you that theses kinds of results, especially the ratios, come with lots of uncertainty! So treat this kind of thing with a grain of salt.  It’s descriptive, not definitive.

A few things jump out. Old Umbrey is not just popular among top players; it is very overrepresented, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes tier-list goblins start wailing and gnashing their teeth! Shadowflame Shard, Sea Raiders, Brineblood Marauders, Grymkin, and Dark Operations also show up more often among top players than they do in the overall field. On the other side, Legacy, Winter Korps, Crucible Guard, and Convergence are substantially underrepresented at the top. That does not automatically mean those armies are bad; army vibes, player preference, model availability, and local metas all matter. But it does mean that the pro's are doing things a little different.

More to come. This is not the tier list – just one interesting metric among many!

I’m taking a detour from my pure data analysis to share a new tool: the MK4 Army List Explorer is available at:

mk4meta.shinyapps.io/WarmachineListExplorer

The lamely-named app pulls Longshanks data from nearly 27,000 Warmachine tournament lists from across 1,100+ events, covering August 2023 through late May 2026. You can filter by date range, army, leader, and event type, then view leader pairing summaries, unit usage rates, a unit-by-leader heatmap, and a top results table for strong event finishes. The Data tab has full notes on coverage and exclusions.

I think this could be useful for new players, trying to figure out which models go with which leaders, and for experienced players, aiming to get that perfect read on the meta. Take a look through the data and tell me what you find! What surprised you? What are the trends?  What is the meta doing wrong?

Here are some things I noticed, thinking about the impact of the January update :

• Sea Raiders are a standout success story.  Infamously, in the fall of 2025 Horrusk did not concern himself with a second list and made the cut in 85% of list pairings. That dominance has broken up, and three Sea Raiders leaders now sit at roughly equal representation.  Dusk, Old Umbrey and Grymkin look similarly healthy.
• Shadowflame Shard, Brineblood Marauders, and Gravediggers lists have consolidated around one leader or pairing, with the rest of the roster seeing limited play.
• The Trikehymera was toned down effectively in January, declining in pick-rate from 70% of list pairings to 32%. The Hydrix, in contrast, is seeing much more play and is up by the same amount.
• The Slaughterhouse is clearly a Grymkin staple at 85% inclusion across list pairs, and is nearly always included with Old Witch 2 and the King of Nothing.
• Turning to my beloved Brineblood Marauders, the Lochabash Bros stocks are going to the moon, from a 46% pick rate last fall to 95% post-update. Meanwhile, Mr. Boggs sits at 12% – I think the meta is sleeping on the little dude with a big gun.

Have fun searching, I hope you find this useful! And please let me know if you find any obvious bugs, I’m still ironing out the kinks. 

Warmachine tournament attendance has been rising since the 2026 January update!  Entries for Feb-May 2026 hit 3,044 total, up 85% from 1,647 in the same window last year.  With the recent announcement of a surprise midyear update, this is a perfect moment to take stock of where the tournament scene actually stands.

This is the first in a short series of posts reviewing the state of the game heading into that update. Today: attendance trends and faction switching. Stay tuned for win rates, hot starts, and unit composition breakdowns over the next couple of weeks.  Maybe I’ll even do a tier list.

Trends in Faction Play Rates.

The first plot shows how often each faction was picked in Feb-May 2026 vs the same period in 2025.  Overall attendance is growing (+85%) and so most factions have increased in popularity.

• House Kallyss is the biggest story here: 374 entries this spring, up +143% from 154 , making it the most-entered faction in the dataset.  Perceived as poor performers in 2025, the January update has reinvigorated the undead anime faction.
• Old Umbrey and Gravediggers have taken the tournament landscape by storm; these newly released fiction are the 2^(nd) and 4^(th) most popular in 2026.
• Warmachine 3d has breathed new life into Dark Operations, Grymkin, Convergence of Cyriss, and Crucible Guard.  Internals are also up, but with a more tepid possibly due to nerfs in the January update.  I’m not crying about that – happy that Zaateroth is no longer terrorizing the tournament scene.
• Storm Legion dropped -20%, the only established faction to shrink against a rising tide. Necrofactorium technically grew, but +6% in a year where the overall field grew by 86% makes them the least lively thing in the room .

Trends in Faction Switching

The second plot shows data from 695 players who played in a tournament in both Sep-Dec 2025 and Feb-May 2026.   For these players, we can see how faction choices changed before and after the January update, giving us a rough picture of how players responded to the changes.  Of course, faction switching at the new year is common for all sorts of reasons – the changes on this plot can’t be fully attributed to the update!

• Established factions Sea Raiders and Winter Korps saw renewed enthusiasm in the new year, with net gains of 16 and 13 players.  These are big improvements relative to their smallish player bases.
• Among the refreshed Warmachine 3D factions, Grymkin and Convergence of Cyriss  had strong inflows from existing players.  Crucible Guard was net neutral, with lots of churn, and many players left Dark Operations.
• Necrofactorium had the worst vibes, with 36/71 players leaving the faction and only 8 new players joining.
• The large outflows from Old Umbrey surprised me as they were one of the top factions in 2025 and they remain so in 2026.  This could be related to the tweaks the faction received in January, but I suspect people are jumping off the bandwagon now that the Azlanov easy button has been fixed.