After a week of previews, today all the new Necron and Ultramarine updates are live on WarCom and the Warhammer 40K App. That includes three new Space Marine detachments (two of which can be used by all Marines) which you can take a look at in our series of Detachment Focus articles below:

If you missed yesterday's look at the Necron detachments, those are as follows:

In addition to this, we get the details of points costs and the rest of the updated C’tan Datasheets, and that’s what this article will be focused on.

We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of these rules for review purposes.

Ultramarines

Captain Titus and the Wardens

Titus checks in 90pts, which is a respectable number. It doesn’t make him an auto-take, but it’s very much fine, and the only thing holding him back is now many other good choices there are both for Leaders and solo utility Characters.

The Wardens also check in at the 90pts figure, and on them that’s pretty aggressive. You get a massive number of wounds for this price with some free utility attached, and the ability to bolt them onto other units creates some interesting decision points. Assault Intercessors seem especially interesting here - you already sometimes see these essentially as an upgrade for a Character, and Metaurus plus a bunch of Wounds and a boost to their OC seems like a plausible combination. You can also easily sub them in for a backfield Intercessor unit if you decide that the redeploy and additional robustness is better than sticky objectives.

Victrix Guard

Victrix Guard Chapter Ancient Credit: Keewa

Victrix Guard get their wings clipped, dropping down to 3W per model, but getting a small compensatory points drop to 110/220pts. This is a huge deal, as it’s now far, far easier to tech for them, and they actually have numerous predators (including literal Predators) that handle them efficiently. It’s particularly relevant in the context of the recent buffs to Lords of Change, but Necrons do very well out of it too, since both the Nekrosor and Deceiver (more on him shortly) provide very effective D3 output. While sometimes it’s frustrating that Space Marines often get compensatory buffs with their nerfs, here the point cut alongside this seems justified; it’s much easier to just lose a unit of these in the wrong matchup now.

That doesn’t mean they’re not a good unit still, perish the though, and one squad still seems like a lock in most Ultramarines lists, but going all-in on 18 now carries much higher risks if you encounter the wrong foes.

Necrons

Nekrosor Ammentar

The Nekrosor rocks in at 165pts, which is a bargain and should secure him a spot in a lot of Necron lists, even those without much else in the way of Destroyers. He does have a few matchups where he’s a little shaky, but in most games he’s a massive pain when dropped on a flank with Rapid Ingress, and is fine lurking in a central ruin for the auras and threat projection as well.

C’tan

C'tan Shard of the Void Dragon. Credit: Rockfish

Nightbringer first - you’ve seen the new Datasheet, and it turns out that you pay the princely sum of 10 additional points for the changes, to which I say “yes please”.

The good news doesn’t stop there though - the other three C’tan datasheets have also been updated, picking up similar basic stat changes to the Nightbringer, and also getting bigger lethality updates. The Void Dragon and Transcendant go up by 10pts to pay for this, while the Deceiver increases by 20pts (but arguably gets the biggest power boost).

Defensively, all C’tan now share the 16W, 3+/4++, 5+ Feel No Pain and -1D profile the Nightbringer has. We went over what this means in our review of the Nightbringer, and the short version is that it’s a net positive most of the time. In the games where it isn’t, you also have the help that all of them now have Deep Strike, so you can use Rapid Ingress to get the jump on foes with big guns. The mighty Void Dragon also shares the M10” the Nightbringer picks up, while their smaller cousins still get a boost to M8”.

In terms of offence, the Void Dragon gets a boost to the ranged spear attack and the strike mode in melee. The ranged spear used to have the weird gimmick of only being S4, so only really doing anything into Vehicles, but is now S8 and d3 shots, so threatens to impale a few elite Infantry or a lone Character. In melee, the strike profile gets boosted to AP-4, presumably to reduce how often an embarrassing bounce off a Land Raider or Dreadnought occurs.

The Deceiver. Credit: Wings

The Deceiver gets a significant boost to their ranged attack, which is now damage 2. This is a huge change - it puts it to numbers where it will often spike out enemy Characters, and because so many big Monsters/Vehicles are Characters, it’s surprisingly good at helping take those down too. On top of this, the melee goes up to S10, which is also reasonably impactful. It still leaves them short on punching out big Knights, but suddenly makes anything up to Armiger-sized units much more afraid, and avoids humiliatingly bouncing off Helbrutes. The Deceiver does get the only nerf of the bunch, which is that they’re no longer OC6, which was a cute bonus, but presumably too subtle a way of conveying their strengths. Expect to see way more of the Deceiver despite this, especially as there’s good synergy between their redeploy and Deep Strike.

Finally, Transcendents go up to S10 in melee, and see their ranged damage change to flat D2 instead of d3. This is the dud of the pack - especially with the boosts to all the others, there’s just no compelling reason to take one of these any more, and they badly needed to be swinging at S12 for there to be any solid reason to do so.

A weak finish, but fantastic news in general for the big trio, who should thrive both in the Pantheon of Woe, and also more widely. Rather cutely, the total points cost for the three of them with the mandatory Pantheon upgrades is exactly 1000pts, so if you want to only have to think about half your list, get in on that!

Wrap Up

We’re only a week into the New Year, and everything’s being shaken up already! It’s going to be an exciting start to 2026 as all of this beds in, and stay tuned to our regular content to see how all this novelty impacts the metagame.

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