Dark Eldar: 2013 in Review

Greetings, my Dark Eldar wielding friends!  As some of you may know I run the itoysoldiers.com website.  One of the core features of the site is to track and report on the results of miniature war game battles.  It’s been a reasonably busy year on the site (all things considered) and there’s enough data to provide some nifty “end of year” stats and since we’re all DE players here what’d be a better start to my EOY write ups than the…

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Year in Review:  Dark Eldar
It’s not a terribly shock to see that the Dark Eldar happen to be the most popular army on iToysoldiers.  It’s the army that yours truly plays and so there’s a wee bit of a bias towards them (and of course, Chaos Space Marines).  That said, the DE were tied with Space Marines for the #1 spot for number of players – five each.  It’s important to note that one of those distinct players represents “unregistered players” but still.  It’s two higher than the next highest.  The cool thing is that from a pure battle point perspective, Dark Eldar players held the #1 and #2 spot.  Chaos Space Marines and then two Space Marine players came in third, fourth and fifth.

How’d they do on the field?  I’m glad you asked.  There were 32 battles played with Dark Eldar – either as player 1 or player 2.  Their total battle score was 90 which put them in the #1 spot there.  That’s 19 higher than the next highest (CSM).  The results were 14 victories, 1 draw, and 17 defeats.  The average battle score was 2.8125.   Unfortunately, once you take out any army that fought less than five battles, they only ranked 8th with an average of 2.8125.  The highest average battle score went to the Tyranids.

Based upon the results on iToysoldiers, the Dark Eldar have the hardest time defeating Chaos Space Marines and tend to do best against the Space Marines.  Another interesting side note:  The first 40K league hosted on iToysoldiers saw a Dark Eldar army as the final victor.  In fact, first and third place went to Dark Eldar.

As I mentioned before, Dark Eldar is one of my armies and since I tend to be pretty good about reporting my battles there’s a wee bit of skew to the data.  I’m looking forward to a more people adding their battle results so that in 2014 the results will be more accurate – or at least represent a larger data set.

The full report for all the games that iToysoldiers covers is at http://itoysoldiers.com/stats/yearly.  It’s never too late to record your battles – the results are updated dynamically.  All you have to do is join, record some battles and poof!  Robert’s your mother’s brother.  Any other stats you’re interested in seeing?  Let me know.  I live for feedback

I couldn't seem to get to the stats on your site - do I need to join first?

As a side note, I never had much of a problem knocking Chaos over with Dark Eldar, but Imperial Guard give me conniptions. How did we fare against them in your books?

Certainly Space Marines are a good match up for us, Tyranids also.

I'd be happy enough to add my games, but I only played 10 or so for the year.

I'd love to see your battle results on the site! 1 or 10 or 1000!

You don't have to sign up to see the content on the site so you should be able to see the basic stats by visiting the link in the post. However, to be fair, I did do some of my own analysis to get the DE specific stats (still working on the various displays of data).

So Chaos and IG, eh? Well, as it stands CSM have claimed 4 victories and 1 defeat against us. The IG pulled in 1 victory and two defeats. So oddly enough: Opposite of what you're seeing.

No worries, I'll have another look

Discrepancies will happen with small sample sizes :)Maybe it's just the way I play - but in 25 games against IG, I've won 4 and drawn 1. 18% W/L ratio   

Of course that spans 3ed-6ed, and on the other hand, I've only lost once to Tyranids in 8 games. Swings and roundabouts.

Well, submit those games and fix my sample size. I'm one of the two really active Dark Eldar players on the site and I've always had problems with Tyranids - since 3rd. Certainly contributes to the difference in what you experience and what the stats show. I'm sure that once more folks get on board it'll normalize. Or maybe not. That's why I think the idea of the site is cool.