By some measures, Innes Wilson is the best Warhammer 40k player in the world. At the time of writing, Wilson tops the global ELO ranking system, and has done so for the last six months; if you prefer the ITC rankings, he placed second overall in both 2025 and 2024. Though he’s a skilled Space Marine chapter master, he’s also a devastating commander of the relentless Genestealer Cults – and it was the nefarious servants of the Four Armed Emperor I asked him about for this interview.
This is the second 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.
Joining the uprising
Wilson has “been playing Genestealer Cults basically since they came out in seventh edition – back when the Deathwatch Overkill box came out, I got into Genestealer Cults because I could ally them with my Tyranids”, Wilson says, “basically as long as you can play Genestealer Cults – excepting the people who were alive in Second Edition”.
As captain of the Scottish national team, Innes took the Genestealer Cults to the World Team Championships in 2025, running the Host of Ascension. It was “one of the best runs that Scotland’s ever had – we finished 10th and managed to qualify ourselves to first seed”, jumping two whole brackets in one tournament, and Wilson was the team’s high scorer. In the last year he’s had several high-placed finishes with the Cults, including top eight at the 1,000 player London GT and making the finals of the Warmaster GT – a singles tournament that serves as a warmup for the WTC.
When he isn’t crushing tournaments, Wilson is a full time Warhammer 40k coach and part of the Stat Check collective. “I teach people mostly how to get better at playing tournaments; I have a lot of clients that want to improve their game, make their national team, go four and one at a GT”, he says.
Dying to win
“Nothing matters when you play Genestealer Cults”, Wilson says. The Cults have excellent access to recursion, “through onboard recursion, like the cult icons that bring your models back from your units that are still alive – so your opponent’s punished for not killing your things – and also the inbuilt recursion where you can bring your units back when they die”.
Death isn’t just an inevitability – it’s also an opportunity. “You are constantly able to bring more resources to bear than your opponent, anywhere you want”, Wilson says. “You have so little reason to care about what’s happening on the table because you can benefit from whatever’s going on” – units that aren’t destroyed will refill with models – and when your opponent does destroy a unit, this just means “you can move your power to wherever you want it to be”.
The Genestealer Cults’ army list has quite a wide range of abilities, which their recursion mechanics allow them to leverage in two very distinct ways, One approach is to bake maximum flexibility into your army “by bringing a massive toolbox that you can leverage into any different direction that you want”.
Because so many units can return to play (and they’re all doomed to die), you can effectively consider yourself to have multiple copies of whichever unit you need most. “In this matchup I need some fast moving stuff – I’ll bring my bikes back; in this matchup, I need some infantry blenders. I’ll bring my Genestealers back”, Wilson says.
The other way to take advantage of recursion is “by bringing the biggest sledgehammers, and just hitting your opponent with the same sledgehammer five times and hoping that the fifth one kills them”. While sledgehammer could literally mean a unit of Aberrants, Wilson is also referring to skewing particularly hard into one specific playstyle: “if you want to go down the really heavy melee route, the really heavy shooting route, the lots of tricks route, all of those are supported by a really flexible toolbox”.
However, “for all the benefit of being incredibly flexible” the Cults “struggle in the durability department”. “If you want things that will survive on an objective or be able to walk at your opponent, fail a charge, and then still be useful next turn, that’s really not there in this army”, Wilson says.
It’s not that there aren’t durable options in the army list, but “the things that are durable tend to be things that are inflexible”. Wilson thinks that building an army with more durable units means cannibalizing the core competencies of the army, which will hamper the Cults’ abilities in some more challenging matches.
Learning to accept that your models are going to die is actually one of the core skills a new Genestealer Cults player has to learn. “Back when I was playing Host of Ascension, I would play 150 models and I would comfortably expect to pick up 300 of them a game”, Wilson says. “Quantity has a quality all of its own – it’s okay to hold the objective by just putting so much stuff in front of your opponent they can’t deal with it”, he adds, “but… if you’re not comfortable with death, it can be a challenging way to play the game”.
Wilson describes the mentality he sees as key to success with the Cults: “I am willing to lose my pieces to create an opportunity”. “You are losing those 10 guys to make your opponent expose an asset which you can then deal with, which then means that the next 10 guys don’t die the same way – you’re continually asking this chain of question and response”.
It’s a big juggling act. You won’t get the most out of your units unless you can use their flexibility – “if you don’t, your army will fall apart”. That relies on the ability to Deep Strike your returning units back into play, preferably around the side and behind your opponent, and staging units for attacks on future turns, since they won’t survive in the open. You’ve got to apply pressure for your own game plan, and prevent your opponent pushing into you, stripping you of space and flexibility.
As for elements of the Cults that Wilson loves personally, he calls himself “the world’s biggest horde simp – I love playing big squads of 20 guys”. His WTC list had around 140 models. “I love that style because you get so much ability to do shenanigans with moving a 20 man unit one direction, charging the front of it, but the tail of it goes a different direction, sneaks onto an objective, takes some damage, regrows some models, and just causes all this carnage and chaos”.
It’s also possible to generate huge amounts of damage by stacking buffs. “You’ve got the Achilles Ridgerunners which apply the bonus AP and ignore cover, you’ve got wound rerolls against units on objectives, you’ve got the character buffs and all that kind of thing”. “Suddenly you go from being ‘That’s 20 guys with shotguns’ to ‘my Imperial Knight just died to that, what on earth is going on?!’ – and I love that.” Co-ordinating the numberless arms of this lethal yet fragile beast is a challenge he relishes.
Looking to 11th edition
Wilson has been on a break from the Cults since the WTC last year. “There’s something about playing 200 games in four months, it leads to burnout on an army”, he jokes. But he’s planning to launch straight back into them with 11th edition; “it seems like it’s going to be a very good edition for them”.
He’s quite upbeat about the new Warhammer 40k Detachment system and how this will interact with mission selection. “Being able to select your missions and play the ones that support your army type seems like it will be really good for Genestealer Cults”. “Some of the missions they’ve shown off are very action heavy, or very ‘stand this unit in this place, score these points'”, things that the Cults – who can deploy twenty units of five models and return five units to play should have little difficulty scoring.
There are questions about the Cults’ ability to interact with enemy scoring. “One of the things that Genestealer Cults does rely on is being able to take its opponent’s points down”, denying the opponents’ ability to score primary objectives with more bodies entering from unpredictable angles. Superficially they seem to be in a good place for the new edition. “It’s a Deep Strike based army”, Wilson explains, and “a lot of the boards they’ve shown off already have quite challenging movement lanes to get to your opponent’s objective – but the Cults will just appear out of the sewers and take it”.
But that assumes your opponent is playing a mission that can be denied by getting bodies on objectives. “If your opponent’s able to play a mission that doesn’t let you do that, you’re just playing a race to 100 points”. And that may be difficult in some cases. “They showed off one mission that armies with a Purge the Foe disposition can have, which is basically just ‘pick a unit in your opponent’s army, if it dies, you get five points – Genestealer Cults are going to struggle at not giving up those points”.
This leads to a dilemma. “I’m going to have to look for different ways to play that mission, or try to play a detachment that doesn’t let my opponent play that kind of mission”, Wilson says. But changing detachments has its own wrinkles. “Their detachments are very powerful, but they’re very specific – each of them is very siloed into its play patterns”.
He lists off the better detachments: “Biosanctic wants you to lean into the combat stuff; Final Day wants you to lean into the janky shenanigans; Host of Ascension wants you to play the shooting; and Outlander Claw wants you to play the denial and pressure game”. The problem is that “outside of a very small common core, there’s not a lot of overlap in the units that are good in each detachment”.
So if your favorite units are in a detachment with a Reconnaissance disposition, but Purge the Foe detachments have by far the best mission selection, you’re out of luck. “In something like Space Marines” – another army Wilson is lethally effective with – “if you’re playing a Hullltramarines style list, like the Guilliman plus Calgar plus tanks kind of build, you can go ‘The mission set for Gladius isn’t working, I’ll play it in Blades of Ultramar, or I’ll play it in Iron Storm, or I’ll play it in Ceramite Sentinels'”.
It’s a theoretical worry at the moment, and it may be mitigated by the Detachment Points systems. From what GW has said so far, most codex detachments cost two of the three DP you’ll have to play with in a 2,000 point game, while the downloadable detachments GW has previewed seem to cost one DP each. It’s possible that Cults players will be able to fix their army disposition with the choice of ancillary detachment.
When I interviewed Wilson, details were still emerging about 11th edition. One thing that wasn’t yet apparent were the changes to unit coherency – models in units must now be within nine inches of every other model, rather than within two inches of at least two other models – something that is going to curtail the shenanigans that a 20 model unit of cultists can get up to, but which will also make it harder for the Cults’ enemies to screen out their deep strikers.
Looking ahead for the Genestealer Cults’ 11th edition Codex, Wilson says the main thing he wants is “any unit of guys that can deep strike and take an objective”, and not more characters; with 14 characters and 10 units in the list, that really doesn’t feel like an unreasonable request.
“Something that hits on fours with its heavy weapons would be nice”, he adds. “There’s nothing more stressful than going ‘I have 20 lascannons that hit on fives with sustained hits, so I should hit an average of 10 of these’ – the volatility on that is slightly higher than some people’s blood pressures can handle”.
Are you ready to accept the blessing of the Four Armed Emperor? If Wilson’s enthusiasm for the nefarious xeno-cultists has rubbed off on you and you decide to start an army, or dust off an old one, come and share your progress in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
