Mark Hertel took first place at the renowned Las Vegas Open Warhammer 40k Championship on Sunday, beating Ben Neal’s Space Marines with the elite Deathwatch. It’s a show of skill from the tournament master, and a vote of confidence for a faction that was all but wiped out of the rules of Warhammer 40k for several months in 2024.
The Las Vegas Open is one of the premier events in the competitive wargaming calendar. The 2025 Warhammer 40k championships was a nine round event lasting two days, with almost 1,100 participants.
Hertel won the finals by 86 points to 32, with very few models left on the table for either player. You can watch the match – and many other games from the LVO – over on the Warhammer Twitch channel.
Hertel has had just a little over a month to practise using the Deathwatch’s current rules, as they were only released on December 7 last year. When Warhammer 40k 10th edition launched the Deathwatch were a fully supported army with their own rules, but the unexpected release of codex Imperial Agents on August 24 effectively removed standalone Deathwatch armies from the game.
Codex Imperial Agents contains rules for the many subfactions within the Imperium of Man which don’t have full standalone armies of their own, such as the 40k Inquisition, Imperial Assassins, and Imperial Navy. While it’s possible to field an army just of Imperial Agents, the book is mostly a means to give tabletop rules to a grab bag of kits so you can ally them into another army list.
When it was released, the Deathwatch’s existing index rules were completely ditched, replaced with entries in codex Imperial Agents. This got rid of their many unique Kill Team units, leaving them with a range of units so narrow that players who wanted to field an army would have to bulk up with other Imperial Agents, leaving most of their existing Deathwatch model collection on the shelf.
The alternative was to field a Space Marine chapters list, taking a few Deathwatch units as allies. That could use all the models players already owned, but it didn’t really play like a Deathwatch list.
It wasn’t a bad fit with the lore of the Deathwatch: they often serve as special forces attached to larger deployments of regular troops, and only very rarely take to the battlefield at full chapter strength. But it’s been possible to field a full Deathwatch army with unique rules since 7th edition 40k, and fans were unhappy.
Games Workshop resolved that disgruntlement in relatively short order, releasing a new downloadable index for the Deathwatch during the ‘Grotmas advent calendar’ promotion. This isn’t exactly the same as the previous index: it incorporates the updates from codex Imperial Agents, gives them access to their unique Kill Teams and the rest of the Space Marines range, and provides a refreshed Warhammer 40k Detachment for them.
With a convincing, high profile tournament win behind him, fans will be sure to scrutinise Hertel’s army list and generalship for tips and tricks, and to pay a lot more attention to the Deathwatch going forward. We’re sure Games Workshop’s games design team will as well – perhaps expect to see some tweaks to their forces in the next balance update for 40k.
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Source: Wargamer
