Warhammer 40K: The Truth About Legends
Let’s talk about Warhammer Legends, and why some people are mad about them.
Last week GW officially unveiled Warhammer Legends. These are a collection of semi-retired units and upgrade options, generally representing units or options that you can no longer buy models for. Legends gives you rules for the models so that you can keep playing them, but they exist it in a kind of unsupported state and won’t get regular updates. Legends includes the vast majority of units from the Indexes that either haven’t gotten new rules or were not included in their army’s book. The introduction of Legends was met with a lot of happiness, but also a fair bit of confusion and anger. Today I want to look at some of the questions surrounding Legends and address them.
N.B. Legends exists for both 40K and Age of Sigmar, today however I am just focusing on the 40K side of things.
Where Can You Use Legends
This of course is the biggest question about Legends, where are they legal to use? That question is a little thorny here, and where a lot of confusion is. First off, if you are playing Open or Narrative Play, you are totally cool. These formats have loose guidelines and are really designed for using things like Legends and fun but “unbalanced” units. There should be no issue there. As for other types of games, GW has a few things to say. In the Warhmmer Community announcement the Community team had this to say:
Well that seems pretty straightforward, so where does the issue come in? Well when Legends was first annoucnced the Legends page had this to say:
The rules presented here are designed to be definitive, and will only be updated when we change the core mechanics of the game. This means that Legends units are not designed for matched play (as they won’t, for example, have regular points updates).
Humm, OK this IS a bit different there. That statement seems to imply that you can’t use Legends in Matched Play as well, not just competitive play. That would be a pretty big deal, and since it came on the Legends Page itself, not an article about it, a lot of people felt it was a definitive statement about the use of Legends. This caused a less than friendly debate over when you could use Legends (which to a degree is silly, since even if playing Matched Play you and the other player CAN ALWAYS AGREE TO HOUSE RULES). However GW seems to realized the confusion they caused and updated the Legends page to now read: 
So there it is. GW has gone back and cleared up things – Legends are “legal” in matched (what ever legal means for a causal game where you can the other player can agree to make anything “legal”) but not recommended for Competitive Play. A mistyped sentence lead to honest confusion over rules, that has now been cleared up.
Competitive Play ≠ Matched Play
I think now is a good time to acknowledge something that should go without saying: Competitive Play is not the same as Matched Play. A lot of people, including myself and GW, are guilty of using these terms interchangeably at times. They are however not quite the same and can have different rule sets and expectations. Now I’ve actually written about why we talk about competitive play so much before. Basically we talk about playing in a structured manner, because it’s functionally impossible to talk about other types of play, when people are using their own house rules, or making up stuff. Those are amazing ways to play, and great ways to have fun, but in those situations players are using so many subsets of rules it hard to find common ground to talk about it. Competitive, or structured play gives us common ground to talk about, and it does influence other types of play.
How To Use Legends
So now that we know Legends are OK for Matched Play, you should be able to just show up for game night with in your army and play without doing anything else, right? Well, no. Or at least I wouldn’t. Now a lot of people have gotten very defensive about the mere idea of not allowing Legends, and so this may be hard for some to swallow but here is my stance: if you plan on using Legends ask the other player first. Even though GW says they are OK for Matched Play lets acknowledge that Legends Units are not standard and exist in a special way. I think it’s only polite and common courtesy to ask your opponent before using any non-standard unit. This is especially true if that player is new to the game and may not even be aware of the existence of Legends. Then not only will you be being polite but you might turn her on to a new cool conversion idea for a unit she didn’t even know existed. At the end of the day if you aren’t there to be competitive and just to have fun, then BE NICE and make sure both players are having fun.
On the other hand sometimes the players are there to be competitive. Many players use standard game nights to practice for competitive events. These players may only want to face units and builds that are legal in competitive play and would be opposed to facing Legends units or options. In this case you guys should respect each other wises and find a common ground. Either don’t use the Legends options or find another opponent. Frankly if you are there for a fun fluffy game with your Legends units you are taking because you’ve used them for decades and couldn’t care less about if they are competitive and she’s there to practice for LVO- well you guys aren’t looking for the same thing out of that game anyway. At the end of the day the rule with Legends is the same as the rule with anything, talk to the other player, be kind and polite, don’t get worked up over a game and have some dang fun.
Let us know what Legends units you play to keep using, down in the comments!
