Liam van Sichelen Logé, better known to English-speaking Warhammer 40k players as Liam VSL, is a prodigy of the game. The current captain of the Belgian national team for the World Team Championships, and the runner-up in the 2025 World Championships of Warhammer 40k, he’s a lethal threat with many factions – none more so than the Chaos Space Marines, which he used to take first place in the 1,000 player London GT for three consecutive years. If you want to understand the Chaos Space Marines, there’s no better person to ask.
This is the first interview in Wargamer’s masters series, where we talk to players at the very top of the game about the Warhammer 40k factions they’ve built their reputations with, and what their expectations are for those armies in Warhammer 40k 11th edition.
Falling to Chaos
Liam VSL started playing Chaos Space Marines at about 12 years old, and – after dropping out of 40k during high school – picked them up close to the start of 8th edition after grabbing the Death Guard starter set. “One of the first achievements I had with Chaos Space Marines was winning some really local tournaments; that allowed me to get recruited into the Belgian national team”, VSL says.
He moved around other Chaos factions during 8th and 9th edition, before settling on CSM as one of his main armies early in 10th, and taking down the London GT with them in 2023, 2024, and 2025. As well as heading the Belgian national team he competes as a member of Team Ignite, and he’s a professional 40k coach with the Stat-Check Collective. And somehow he’s also finishing a masters degree in robotics!
The Adeptus’ Astartes melee-centric mirror
“You can see Chaos Space Marine as being a mirror of the classic Space Marines”, VSL says. They’re a combined arms faction that has competent units for every part of the game, but focus a little more on melee than compared to their loyalist cousins. “If you look at their shooting in itself, it’s not incredible; if you look at their combat in itself, it’s a bit better, but still not incredible”, VSL says, “but it’s really the combination of both that makes them shine”.
VSL says “I’ve always played Chaos Space Marines with a lot of MSU infantry combat units that go relatively fast, ideally that go out of a rhino or that are in a big block, like 10-man Possessed”, backed up by “a backbone of shooting”. Though this overlaps with some other armies, “if you go to one of the God-specific Chaos armies – Death Guard, Thousand Sons, Emperor’s Children, World Eaters – they will be more oriented to one play style in particular, whereas Chaos Space Marines are really more general”.
Being flexible also means that the Chaos Space Marines don’t push anything in the game to extremes – they don’t choke on any part of the game, but nor do they truly excel. “If you drew a tree of competences, it would be really balanced”, VSL says. The army has “decent durability, while not being crazy durable; it has a couple of tricks here and there, nothing crazy; it has decent mobility” with “a lot of access to advance and charge, advance and shoot”, but not the most innately fast units.
There may be no glaring weaknesses in the Chaos Space Marines arsenal, but therein lies the challenge of mastering them. “It’s not an army that has one unit that does one job really well, and often you won’t be able to say, ‘My unit is going to go kill that tank’, you will need a combination of units”, VSL says. “The army has a bit of a struggle killing high toughness, high save units; it has a lot of anti-infantry guns, but not that many anti-tank guns”, he adds.
Players who’ve seen the sudden popularity of triple Defilers in the Pactbound Zealots detachment might take issue with that last assessment, but the Defiler is doing so well that it’s a prime target for a points increase in the next balance dataslate. VSL’s point is that Chaos Space Marine players need to be ready to bring multiple units to bear to achieve an objective, because the army favors generalists over silver bullets.
The Chaos Space Marine army rule lets units pray to the dark gods and get either Sustained Hits or Lethal Hits, which means “you can adapt yourself a bit to your target in that way”. “Suddenly, when you pray for Lethal Hits, even random bolters might do a damage or two to big targets”, VSL says – and often that unexpected damage boost makes the difference between destroying a tank and leaving it on one wound. “The most joy I have with Chaos Space Marines is when I’m able to kill stuff with a bit of rock”, he jokes.
Looking to 11th edition
With the World Team Championship in August, VSL will only have the rules for 11th edition for a month before he has to lock down an army list. Chaos Space Marines are popular among his team mates, so he thinks he’s likely to play Aeldari or Emperor’s Children instead, and act more as a Dark Apostle coaching and list-building with his team-mates. But in September, “I’m going back to the London GT – I won the last three with CSM, I’m obviously going to come back with CSM just for the story”.
At the time of our interview the details of 11th edition were slowly filtering out from Games Workshop. VSL has some qualified concerns. “The tables we saw are not that amazing for CSM… there is quite a lot of line of sight”, and not too many areas “where you can stage your army and be really aggro”. Though he doesn’t expect the core identity of the Chaos Space Marines to change radically as a result, some assumptions of how you execute on your game plan may have to shift: “you won’t be able to just bring Rhinos with six inch move infantry, and hope to be enough to hit your opponent”.
He thinks that the change to the benefit of cover – from a saving throw bonus to a penalty to hit – might “might bring light to AP one shooting that was a bit irrelevant until now”. “The codex actually has a decent amount of Heavy Bolters and units like Venom Crawlers”, and it’s possible that 11th edition is going to make them more relevant to the game.
As for what he’s hoping to see in the Chaos Space Marines’ 11th edition codex , VSL is mostly content with the current core play style – but there are a few units he would like to see get a tune-up. In 10th edition “we only saw MSU Chaos bikers as scoring units, but it was quite fun back in the day to have big units of bikes that were actually doing decent damage”, he says. And while the refreshed Defiler is a beast, “the other daemon engines were a bit ignored” and could use a rework. But “they’re not really my play style, so they are a unit I disregard a bit”, he admits.
It’s a nice reminder that, while VSL may be one of the best in the world with the Chaos Space Marines, there’s still a question of taste in any list-building decision. Perhaps 11th edition will give a different kind of CSM army the opportunity to shine?
If you’re getting into Chaos Space Marines for 11th edition, come and say hi in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
