Plague Marines
SWORD: what Plague Marines kills
Damage for its points
per 100 pts spent
Its 90 pts kill ~87 pts in one activation.Typical melee unit: 55 per 100
Best against line infantry, weakest against heavy vehicles and monsters
Into each enemy type
Units near it by SWORD
Across the game· melee units
SHIELD: how hard Plague Marines is to kill for its points
Toughness for its points
per 100 pts spent
Its 90 pts take ~332 pts of enemy units to kill.Typical melee unit: 307 per 100
Units near it by SHIELD
Across the game· melee units
What reviewers say
3 reviewers- Tough, with lethal hits 1 of 3
- Do well in the siege detachment 1 of 3
- Cannot use pacts; better in their own army 2 of 3
Compare
| Unit | Letter | SWORD | SHIELD | Lists |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plague Marines90 pts | C | Top 5% | Top 25% | 3of 134 |
| Legionaries95 pts | B | Top 2% | Top 41% | 41of 134 |
| Cultist Mob50 pts | S | Top 15% | Top 14% | 127of 134 |
How we got these numbers
What we ran
Plague Marines, 5 models, 90 pts, with 1 Power fist, 1 Plasma gun - standard, 1 Plasma gun - supercharge, 4 Plague knives, 2 Bubotic weapons, 2 Heavy plague weapon, in Veterans of the Long War. On its own: no leader, no stratagems, no other units' auras. Counted as dice: the detachment's rule.
SWORD
Enemy points it kills in one activation, per 100 pts of its own, against a mix of targets weighted like top tournament lists.
90 pts → kills ~87 pts → 97 per 100SHIELD
Enemy points it takes to kill it, per 100 pts of its own: the points of the cheapest units from top lists that kill it 80% of the time. It's per point, so a costly unit has to be much tougher to score the same.
~332 pts → 369 per 100Top and bottom %
Where each number ranks among the game's 571 melee units. How we score.
The letter
The average of 8 reviewers' newest Chaos Space Marines tier lists: M.S.G. (CSM tier list, 25 Oct) (25 Oct), Goonhammer / tabletopbattles.com (dataslate review, Detachment Focus, Competitive Innovations: 4 post-dataslate lists) (28 Oct), Auspex Tactics (meta watch of 30 lists, first month of 11th) (14 Jul), Boltgun Tactics (dataslate review and London GT recap; his own lists, inferred) (6 Oct), Exalted40k (every CSM list at the WTC, counted; post-dataslate list writing) (6 Oct), 40K Dirtbags (Chaos Cults list, 3-0 and 1st of 30 at an RTT) (19 Oct), 6 Plus Plus Gaming (interview with Theo Hayat, 5-0 at Birmingham) (14 Jul), 1d6chan (community 11th-edition tactics wiki, much text carried over from 10th) (30 Oct). A reviewer who would rather not be counted: tell us.
Lists
134 public Chaos Space Marines tournament lists, September – November 2026, from grimstat-corpus (CC BY 4.0). Also from Listhammer. Organisers and players: ask us and we'll take a list or an event down. Numbers run 4 Nov.