A Warhammer 40k T’au Empire list without a single gun won a tournament to discover the worst army that 500 points can buy. The list, created by Redditor u/Throwaway_______837, consists of a T’au Ethereal, 24 marker drones and 11 shield drones, and can’t fire a single shot.
Throwaway explains on the r/Warhammer40k board that he created the list for the “Worst Tournament Ever”, which was held at their local game store Paper Hero’s in Los Angeles. Rather than compete with the lists that they brought to the store, players’ armies were “randomly given to another opponent”.
There was a prize for winning with the dreadful lists you were given, and a popular vote for the worst list. This encouraged players to create truly abominable army lists.
To get ideas for a useless army, Throwaway asked the r/Warhammer40k board for suggestions. There were options from many Warhammer 40k factions, including a melee T’au Empire army with unarmed Crisis Battlesuits, a Tyranid list mostly made of non-sentient spore mines, and an Ork army made entirely of diminutive Gretchin.
The suggestion for the “winning” list came from u/aiorta. If you’re not familiar with T’au drones, they usually serve as force amplifiers for the powerful shooting units in the T’au Empire list: marker drones increase accuracy, shield drones provide defensive forcefields. Neither has a ranged weapon. Nor does the T’au Ethereal commander, who is a spiritual leader rather than a military one.
Throwaway shared pictures of the army on Reddit on February 24. He used a 3D printer to produce proxies models for the tournament quickly.
Recounting the end of the saga on Reddit on Monday, Throwaway says that the list was decisively awful: “not only did I cause widespread rage and salt, but not a single person was able to kill more than a few models using this army”. He adds that “when it came to the worst army prize they actually decided to skip voting and just gave it to me directly”.