At Warphammer, we’ve talked a lot over the years about how to play different armies in 40K. I’ve really enjoyed doing that, and people seem to be loving it. And trust me, there will still be plenty more of that.
But today, I want to talk about something much more fundamental to the Warhammer experience. We’re going to talk about achieving a mindset that regardless of your results or your army’s strength, keeps you growing as a player. We’re also going to talk about achieving a mindset that ensures you’re always doing the #1 most important thing while playing Warhammer competitively or casually: enjoying the game.
The best part of improving your mindset is that it will pay dividends no matter your goals. Do you want to be the best player and best sport you can be while playing TTS once a month with your friend? Do you want to start getting a positive record at your local RTTs? Do you want to start competing and placing well at the most competitive Warhammer events in the world? Regardless of what you aim to achieve, the principles in this article will help you reach your goals.
Let’s get into it. Without further ado, here is the complete guide to improving your mindset (and results) from Warphammer.
My Warhammer Background
For people who are reading this who aren’t Warphammer regulars, I’m going to share a brief bit about myself so you can understand where my perspective is coming from.
I started playing in late 8th Edition. My first 40K army was Death Guard. I chose them because I saw a Plagueburst Crawler on the shelf at my local GW store, and thought it looked really cool. I still think Plagueburst Crawlers are some of the coolest looking models in the game, for the record, but now I own every Chaos army (plus a few more).
How good or bad as player I am is for other people to decide. I’m currently 149th in the world in ELO, which is technically in the top 0.4% of tournament players. Do you want my honest thoughts on ELO? I think it holds little meaning, and I place almost zero weight in it. There are players below me in the rankings that I think are extremely talented and better than me. There are players above me that I think are mediocre players on the tabletop who get ahead by bullying their opponents and always having the strongest list in the room. But to sum it up, by the only (very flawed) objective measure of 40K skill that we have, I think I have a lot to offer other people.
Much more importantly, whatever success or failure in 40K I’ve had, I’ve tried to never compromise on a very high level of sportsmanship and running units/lists that are fun and interesting. I constantly offer huge takebacks or preemptive advice to my opponents at tournaments that would get me yelled at by people online who would tell me that I don’t understand competitive play. I also play way less 40K than I think people would assume. Outside of my full-time job I’ve been focusing on studying poker for the last few years. That actually culminated in me firing the WSOP Main Event for the first time a few weeks ago.
Basically, I don’t want people to disregard this advice as “Yeah, well I’m not a 40K pro who plays this game obsessively, so it can’t help me”. As of the time I’m writing this article, I haven’t played a single game of 40K in several weeks. If you’re someone who has limited time to play 40K, I think this mindset and learning advice is actually way more important, not less. You have to make sure your reps and opportunities to improve as a player are being maximized.
Alright, enough about me. Let’s talk about how we can help you get to where you want to be.
View 40K Games As a Puzzle to Solve, Not a Competition
If I can give you one piece of advice, it would be this one.
I think most players view the game as a competition between them and an opponent. When they lose, they feel negative emotions, because an opponent bested them. And because they experience negative emotions when they lose and their ego gets bruised, it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Why would you play more 40K if you’re made to feel inferior every time you play it? But how are you ever going to get better if you don’t want to play 40K, especially against opponents that beat you? You quickly get trapped in a mindset that prevents you from improving.
The single most important thing you can do when you’re getting into 40K is consciously try to avoid the “I feel bad when someone beats me” -> “I play less” -> “I don’t improve as a player” -> “I lose when I play” -> “I feel bad when someone beats me” -> “I stop playing at all” death spiral.
The inverse of this is the trap that the classic “That Guy who stomps new players who walk unsuspectingly into their local GW store” falls into, and why these local “noob stompers” never go on to have success at big tournaments or make a name for themselves. If the game is a competition to inflate your ego, why would you ever play someone who has a chance to beat you and bruise your ego? They’re also trapped in a mindset that prevents them from improving.
If you want to improve, don’t think of a loss as “my opponent beat me”. Think of it as, “I was presented with a bunch of board states, and I couldn’t figure out how to solve them”. You were given a puzzle and couldn’t work it out. That’s okay! It takes out the direct ego confrontation you might perceive between you and your opponent, and makes it you versus the game mechanics. That helps prevents the frustration from feeling like you’re losing to someone, and leads to situations where after the game you eagerly talk with your opponent and put your heads together about how you should have responded in that situation. Good players love this stuff and will happily talk about how you should have responded.
If you think about it, the opponent’s decision making is completely irrelevant to you. Your opponent is going to do what they are going to do. You have zero control over that. So why would you care if your opponent’s decision making was better or worse than yours? Your opponent being the best player in the world or the worst player in the world has zero impact on your own skill level. You are the player that you are. It doesn’t make any sense to get upset if your opponent scores more points or less points than you.
The way I see it, 40K is not actually a game between you and your opponent. It’s a game between you and yourself to make the best decisions you can with the resources you have and the board state you have in front of you. I get happy when my opponent turns off a key mechanic I relied on, because that just means the puzzle became a lot more interesting. The same thing applies if they spike their dice on a key turn, and take a lot of my army off of the table.
A practical example of this is playing Daemons (an army that relies on teleporting and deepstriking) versus armies with Infiltrators (a unit that prevents you from deepstriking in a large area of the board). You can think of it as “This mechanic is bullshit, I had no chance against those Marines because they brought a unit of Infiltrators”. And trust me, as much as I talk about mindset, I am not 100% immune to thinking Infiltrators are bullshit sometimes (they totally are).
But once you stop thinking about “this mechanic is bullshit”, and start thinking “how can I solve the puzzle of making plays without access to this mechanic I normally rely on”, you’re going to start hitting the next level. Breaking out of your normal gameplay loop will only help you in the long run.
Helping Your Practice Opponents Play Better Helps You
I see a variation of this question all the time online: “My practice buddy keeps forgetting about a niche mechanic in my army. I reminded him turn 1, but it’s turn 3 and he made that mistake again. Should I take advantage of the mistake or remind him?” And to my honest surprise, the most common responses are usually something like, “It’s not your responsibility to keep reminding your opponent of your army’s tricks, you warned him once, go for it.”
If your goal as a player is to become King Of Your Kitchen Table, you’ve gotten great advice from those internet commenters. You are going to become a highly tuned noob-stomping machine, capable of destroying any new players you come across that don’t know what your army does.
But you know what’s even more valuable than reps against opponents who make easily avoidable blunders? Reps against an opponent who doesn’t throw the game for no reason. And if it takes you helping your opponent at times to get a high quality rep in, then its a no-brainer to do that. It literally benefits both of you! It also seems way more fun to keep getting an interesting puzzle for 5 turns, instead of reaching a checkmate situation on turn 2.
I pay attention during my opponent’s turns, and if I see them making an avoidable mistake, I’ll actively remind them about my mechanic and how to prevent it. This is especially true if I’m playing a niche detachment or uncommon army. For example, I played a game with my Nurgle Daemons versus a very good T’au player recently. I reminded my opponent about my 3″ deepstrike stratagem, and he prevented me from using that to do any damage. However, he left a spot where I could deepstrike Rotigus so his half movement aura touched several key shooting units. With halved movement, those units couldn’t reach some key shooting lanes, and it would be trivial to avoid any damage on the following turn. I pointed this out and that the board state would be way too favorable to my Nurgle Daemons after that. We shifted over some Stealth Suits to block that spot, and continued the game from there. My opponent was an excellent player, but the implications of being able to 3″ deepstrike a half-movement aura are really weird and not something he had the experience to play optimally against. Because I wanted to navigate a board state where both armies are playing at a really high level, I helped him get there.
Don’t Get Salty. Being Fun to Play With Actively Helps Your Growth.
This aspect is really underrated. I’ve seen many instances over my time in 40K of local players taking very different trajectories as players based on how salty they get on the tabletop.
Let’s say there are two players, A and B. Player A is newer, but they’re fun to spend time with. After the game ends, their opponents are happy to hang around and keep chatting with them. Player A congratulates their opponents on the win, and wants to pick their brain about any mistakes they made. Their opponents that beat them are happy to point our their mistakes so Player A doesn’t repeat them, and gives them advice on how to play that matchup better. Player A lost the game, but because they didn’t get salty, they basically got personalized coaching and have immediately grown as a player.
Player B is also newer. But during Player B’s games, when bad rolls happen, they slam their fist on the table in anger. As the game ends and players are packing up their models, Player B talks about how its unbelievable how badly they roll, and they say their opponent brought a bullshit army. Player B’s opponent packs up their minis as quickly as possible and makes a beeline for the exit. Player B learns very little from that game. The only benefit they got from being salty is that their ego is kept insulated by the belief that they’re just unlucky.
As someone that has been one of the best players in my area across several different locations, let me tell you how I react to both. I’m happy to get paired into Player A on practice nights, and I’ll give them all the advice I can after the game. Nothing is going to make me happier than to see Player A succeed at future events as they continue to grow as a player. But if I run into a Player B that angrily rants about dice after the game ends? I will actually agree with you and say, “Yeah those dice were so unlucky, you had no chance”. I’m not going to mention the massive mistakes you made that I picked apart all game because I don’t want your fragile ego to blow up on me.
There’s also the reality that high-level 40K players are usually a pretty insular bunch. They often practice in closed groups or at private game days with other high-level friends. This is not because they are elitist dicks (although some of them definitely are), but because if you have limited practice time and lots of people that want to play with you, you want to play games that will challenge you as a player and also be fun to play.
After the tournament ends, the high-level friends talk to each other and say, “Player A and I had a really great game, you can tell he really wants to grow”. When Player A gets better as a player, the good players are likely to reach out to them and invite them to come practice with them. Player A starts rocketing up the standings as a player because their practice games are against the best players in the area, and then they eventually hit that high level themselves.
After the tournament ends, the high-level friends talk to each other and say, “Player B was so uncomfortable to play against”. There is zero chance they are inviting Player B to their private practice days and have to spend their free time listening to Player B whine about how “lucky” they are. So because of this person’s emotions at the table, they’re now locked out of practicing with all of the best players in the area.
What kind of impact do you think that has on that player’s growth, versus someone who the best players in the area are happy to get reps in with?
You Don’t Have to Play Perfect to Win. You Just Have to Make Fewer Mistakes and Smaller Mistakes Than Your Opponents
This is the biggest mindset hack I’ve used to avoid frustration and keep growing as a player.
Let’s do a quick thought experiment first. Let’s say there was a “solver” created that could play 40K, like there are solvers that play chess or poker. Basically, a machine that plays perfectly optimal and weighs every factor at all times to always make the optimal decision.
What we’ve seen in these other games like chess and poker is that whatever players were considered the best in the world before solvers came out, are revealed to be far from perfect once objective tools come out to measure optimal play. There is no reason to think this wouldn’t apply to Warhammer. No one has a 100% winrate. Every win you’ve ever had was versus opponents who make mistakes and didn’t play 100% optimally versus you, so don’t take too much pride in it.
Basically, every single person is making mistakes and missing plays on the tabletop. Everyone is bad to some extent. It’s just that some players are less bad and make fewer mistakes than others. Do you know what separates great players from average players? The mistakes they make are smaller, and they make mistakes less often.
A beginner mistake would be not remembering how that mission’s scoring works, and walking off of an objective and costing yourself points for no reason. A pro-level mistake would be moving a unit 1″ too far forward because two turns from now, you might need to advance it to an objective slightly in the other direction to have enough OC to prevent them from flipping it turn 5. But these are both mistakes!
And you know the funny thing about mistakes in 40K? Depending on where you are in your growth as a player, you won’t even be able to see a lot of the mistakes you’re making until you hit higher levels in the future. Let me give you an example of a mistake I made. I played a game with my Daemons versus Custodes. Turn 2, I missed a chance to Rapid Ingress a unit of Nurglings I had in reserves. If I Rapid Ingressed that unit of Nurglings, I could have then advanced them up the board on my following turn, and then screened out the screens that my opponent was going to deepstrike into the place where the Nurglings would be two turns later. When it got to the point where my opponent deepstruck a unit to screen me in that area of the board later, I realized if I had missed Nurgling RI play. If a newer opponent was playing me, they wouldn’t have even noticed I made a mistake because they wouldn’t have thought of the play and noticed the missed opportunity. And if I caught myself missing a clever play, I’m sure there are plenty of other clever plays that I’ve missed and never noticed. Even with all of the experience I have in 40K up to this point, I still want to examine my own gameplay for mistakes because I know there are plenty there.
Once you start accepting your gameplay is super flawed, it takes a lot of weight off of your shoulders. You don’t have to play perfectly to win. You just have to play less bad than your human opponents. You’re also going to beat yourself up less for mistakes, because everyone makes them.
The other benefit of the “keep getting less bad” instead of “getting good” mindset is that you won’t plateau as easily. If your goal is to “get good”, once you “get good”, that’s it. You’ve gotten good, so you aren’t driven to keep getting better. But if you’re constantly studying your own gameplay for mistakes and trying to prune them out, you’re always improving because there isn’t a bar to hit.
Even “Bad” Units and Armies Have Unique Mechanics You Can Take Advantage Of
One mindset trap I see people fall into is to know (or be told) that a unit is “bad”, and discard it entirely. They’ll never give it a second thought, because it’s “bad”. Why would you waste your time on a bad unit?
The reality is that even if a unit is bad, it has something good on its datasheet or some sort of interesting synergy somewhere. And if you build to take advantage of what that bad unit does well or find a way to compensate for what makes that unit bad with your in-game decision making, that bad unit can still do good things.
A great example is how I approached Traitor Guardsmen in the CSM index. Everyone thought they were bad, and basically no one was running them. If you asked online what people thought about running 3 units of them, people would have laughed at you. But I decided to take a look at the datasheet again with the mindset of “What does this bad unit do well?”. I noticed that they were OC2. I did some mental math, and realized they had by far the highest OC per point in the CSM index. That’s a strength right there! Why are they considered “bad”? They are very fragile and pretty slow and do little damage, and they compete with Cultists who can sticky objectives.
So we’ve already gone from the useless “bad unit is bad because it is bad” mindset to identifying the unit’s strengths and weaknesses. Now we have to figure out how to take advantage of the strengths and cover for the weaknesses. We have to find a way to deliver that high OC to objectives while covering for their low speed and durability. Boom, we decide to stick those Traitor Guardsmen in Land Raiders, and now I have a podium finish and a Best Chaos trophy from a decently sized GT.
I don’t want your takeaway to be about Traitor Guardsmen specifically. I want your takeaway to be an entirely new approach of looking at units in your army. Look at every unit in your collection with a fresh set of eyes.
Here is how most people view units: “Bad units are Bad because they are Bad. Good units are Good because they are Good. I just need to acquire as many pre-approved Good units as possible and I’ll do well.” This leaves you stuck in an endless cycle of buying new models and focusing on expanding your collection, instead of expanding your skillset.
Here is how I recommend you view units:
- I’m going to look at this unit with a fresh set of eyes, and an open mind
- What strengths does this unit have?
- What issues does this unit have?
- How can I take advantage of these strengths in my gameplay and list-building?
- How can I cover for these weaknesses in my gameplay and list-building?
Once you adopt this mindset, you no longer have 5 playable units in your codex. You have an entire codex of playable units. I promise you that is a lot more fun.
The People Telling You Not to Try Things Usually Have No Idea What They’re Talking About
Imagine a world where above every discord/FB group/WarhammerCompetitive/etc commenter’s username, you could see a pop-up with the number of games that person has played that edition and their record at tournaments. For the record, I’m not advocating for that at all. That would lead to really toxic environments, and really harm 40K communities as they turn into ego battles between members with the highest numbers. This is simply a thought experiment, and I hope no one takes it more seriously than I’m intending.
But you know what would happen in this world? I think you’d feel a little bit silly for asking for so much advice from most factions groups or general competitive Warhammer pages, and start relying a lot more on your own gameplay experience and intuition.
If you got excited about a unit or army and then got a reply from Frank saying, “LOL that’s trash, try [other unit] instead”, you might give up entirely on experimenting with that unit. Now what if you could see that Frank last played a tournament in 7th Edition and has played 3 games total of 10th Edition, all of them 500 point games against his younger brother?
You would be nice to Frank! He’s allowed to be part of this conversation and hobby, and all perspectives are welcome. But I can promise you one thing: You would worry a lot less about what Frank thought about your idea. And you would play a bunch of games with your new unit, and you would find some success, and you would have expanded your skills and knowledge of the game.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Unless you only want average results, don’t worry about what average players are doing.
Final Thoughts
The most important thing I’ve always strived to do at Warphammer is improve people’s enjoyment of 40K. A big part of that is helping people improve their skills, but that’s only part of the equation.
If you focus on having a resilient mindset and viewing each game you play or every list you write as an opportunity to grow as a player, you’ll find yourself reaching whatever goals you have set.
If you want to join a really positive community with many really experienced players trying to improve their skills and share advice, why not join the Warphammer community? I’ve never seen a 40K community the better embodies the ideas in this article, and I love hanging out with all of the wonderful people there. Come say hi today! https://discord.gg/r7K7gY35
As always, have fun, stay safe, and may the Dark Gods bless your rolls!