A few words about the Tyranid Codex. Part1

Today I would like to share with you my thoughts regarding the Tyranid Codex in the dusk  of the 5th edition. To begin with , I am playing Tyranids and Blood Angels for several years. However ,  I had abandoned the xenos race for quite some time, and decided to give them a try around a year ago. I was participating in the first ETC Greek team back then , and, having the Blood Angels place already occupied , that left me with the sole option of restarting my old army.

 I can't say that I am not happy/content with the new codex. I find it to work perfectly well and I believe that to this day it still is very competitive. My personal game record has many victories with tyranids , greatly outnumbering my lost games. So, for me , tyranids are a winning army.

 That said , I had a conversation with some tyranid players from other countries at the ETC tournament. I had the pleasure to chat with the  Team Wales Tyranid player , Filippo (who managed to get 1st tyranid player place in the tournament ). He told me from the beginning that " our codex is s**t!".  After the FAQ came out,  the Tyranid codex got nerfed....badly...and that left us tyranid players with a rather mediocre codex to do our best. We also discussed about all the units included in the codex and we agreed that , of course , most of them are utterly useless in competitive gaming. As Filippo said " the only useful units in the codex are the Tervigons , genestealers and Hive guards. Everything else seems to fail become worth its points. "

I believe that the words of Filippo would raise a few eyebrows among the tyranid generals of the ETC. In fact , most of the lists that were deployed in the tournament were copies of the Polish tyranid general list that he used in 2010 ( 3 Tervigons , 60 Genestealers and as many Hive guards and Hormagants possible ). The results of course seem to be disappointing for the future of the tyranid presence in the ETC...Filippo gathered  72 out of 120 points ( I gathered 65 ) and thus , that makes me believe firmly that we wont see many tyranid generals in this year ETC.

I am mentioning the ETC simply as an example of what people of the competitive gaming scene think about our codex. I am sure that many of you are against the ETC tournament , for your own reasons , but I am only trying to share my personal experience with you. I am afraid that it is a fact that our codex is considered by top players/ teams to be obsolete.

Now , if you allow me , I will present you my personal opinion about  tyranids , as I have experienced them for quite some time now.
 I personally do not agree with the opinion of Filippo....or atleast , I do not agree completely. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that the Tyranids are a game-winning army. However it is true that when Cruddace wrote the codex , he opted to make a book based on the Tyranid middle-class creatures: Warriors.

 And so , with the new book , we have Tyranid Warriors as troops. They were buffed with an extra wound and a 5 point discount each. They were also given access to a bewildering variety of equipment , a brand new transport and an HQ Tyranid Prime that was making the whole Warrior ussue breaking the " Over-powered meter ". For a mere 360 points you could buy  5 warriors + prime  with power-weapons and a host of bonuses , as well as deep strike. Thus , tyranid generals were making a core of 2 warrior units with their primes , and the list was filled out with supplementary units , like tervigons and hive guards.
 Of course , you could still spam little critters with fleshborers and still have room for monstrous trygons. As a result of this amasing of power given to Warriors , GW decided to " break " the Prime+Warriors + Mycetic Spore combo by prohibing the deployment of  an IC with a unit in the spore. Automatically , warriors became one of the worst options in the Tyranid codex. They were now more susceptible to Instant Death , and without their Prime bestowing WS 6 upon them they were not so fancy in CC either. They simply became a non-appealing choice.

That's all for today. Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. I would really like to know what is your opinion about our codex. In the upcoming part 2 I will give a detailed tactica about tyranids as well as sharing some thoughts about tyranids in 6th edition.