It’s been a few weeks since we released our initial look at the data for the Chapter Approved 2025-26 Missions pack, and if you missed our article on the new secondaries, you can find it here. In that article, we looked at some of the basics of the CA25 missions pack – secondary missions, primary, and go first win rates – and mentioned we’d be taking deeper dives into this dataset as we acquired more game data. In particular, we mentioned we’d be looking at Challenger cards.
Well, today we’re taking our first look at Challenger cards.
Let’s start with a quick refresher: At the start of the battle round, if the difference in player scores is 6 VP or more, then player with fewer VP becomes the Challenger until the end of the round. At the start of their Command phase, they draw a Challenger card. This gives them a use-it-or-lose-it Stratagem or secondary mission, with the secondary mission being worth 3 VP and usually trivially easy to score. It’s a catch-up mechanic, and one that’s bound to have a profound impact on scoring.
The Sample
The data for today’s analysis comes from all CA25 games in tabletop battles played since it was implemented in the app. We then cleaned that sample up, taking only completed games where more than 30 VP were scored. This left us with 29,532 games to look at.
Challenger Games
Of the 29,532 games in our sample, players drew challenger cards in 21,766 of them, or 74% of our sample. So the vast majority of games involve at least one challenger draw at some point or another. That said, who got to draw those cards depended heavily on who was going first. One of the things we initially noticed with the Challenger mechanic was that players going second have a huge advantage when it comes to the Challenger mechanic – they can very easily control the game score early on by seeing what an opponent has, and because they score primary VP at the end of the fifth battle round, they can often spend round 4 denying their opponent scoring while staying down, then collect free additional VP in the final round before catching up.
This was borne out in our sample:
- The player going first drew Challenger cards in 11,267 games – 38% of our sample.
- The player going second drew Challenger cards in 12,409 games – 42% of our sample.
That’s close to what I’d expect, though there are some other dynamics to consider – it’s very possible that both players end up drawing Challenger cards in relative close games, and that happened in 6.5% of the games in our sample. When only one player drew cards, it was most likely to be the player going second, which happened in 36% of the games in the sample.
Drawing vs. Scoring
Just because you draw a Challenger card doesn’t mean you’ll score it – taking the Stratagem is always an option, and if you’re losing bad enough, you may not be in a position to actually score your objective. In our sample, 41,995 cards were drawn, but only 29,141 were scored for VP, or about 69%.
The Overall Impact
So let’s talk about when and how this mattered: In our sample, 5,952 games were won by a player who drew Challenger cards (note that this overlaps with games where both players draw), or roughly 20% of games. That’s higher than I might expect for a catch-up mechanic, but we need to drill down to games where it actually mattered: There were 2,062 games in our sample with a margin of victory of 3 VP or fewer in which Challenger cards were drawn, and 1,504 of those where the margin was fewer than 3 VP. In other words, Challenger cards either flipped or had a major impact on the game about 7% of the time.
Going Second
Let’s go back to that stat about going second – players going second drew an average of 0.75 Challenger cards per game, compared to only 0.67 for players going first. If we treat the odds of scoring a Challenger secondary at somewhere around 70%, that will give players going second an average of about 0.15 VP per game from Challenger cards.
0.15 VP per game is not a lot, but it does combine with the other effect – the player going second more often being the one to determine who draws Challenger cards – to create a more pronounced impact. In our sample there were 10940 games where a player going second drew more challenger cards than their opponent (37%), and in those, the player going second and outdrawing won 1,864 times (17%).
Combine that with the scoring advantage you get from going second in missions, and now we have an interesting reversal from Pariah Nexus, where it is more or less always better to go second in games of Warhammer 40k:
There were only 10 mission + deployment combinations in our sample where the player going first won more than 50% of the time, and most of those had a sample size of fewer than 150 games.
Final Thoughts – and What’s Next
This impact was, on the whole, not as large as I expected. I suspect most games where one player gets ahead by a substantial margin are lopsided enough that 3 VP don’t really matter. And having played some games with the CA25 missions now, I can definitely say I’ve put thought into how to control the flow of cards as the player going second, being careful not to “over-score” early (you’d rather be down 6 than 5 or 4 in most cases) in order to draw a card and gain extra VP. This feels wrong to me, as a mechanic, but the flipside was that my opponent could do the same to me in return the following turn when I scored big on my own secondary objectives – and that’s likely to be the case most games.
As for whether Challenger cards are too strong, well that’s a tougher one – seven percent is lower than what I expected (I was thinking something like 12-15%), and you could make the argument that it’s not too high.
There’s still more to look at with Challenger cards, such as the turn they’re being drawn, and how they interact with turn 5 scoring for primary. As we collect more game data we’ll be able to dig deeper into the issue and do more granular cuts around the specific ways Challenger cards affect games. Stay tuned.
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