New Warhammer 40K Codexes: Ranked by How Much They'll Change Your Game

By Carter Estes  ·  August 27, 2026

Every new edition of Warhammer 40,000 arrives with the same promise and the same anxiety. The promise is that your army will finally play the way it always should have. The anxiety is that you'll open the book and find half your collection has quietly become a display piece.

Eleventh edition is no different — except this time Games Workshop has been unusually honest about which of those two things is happening to whom.

We've now got enough 11th edition codexes in hand, and enough confirmed on the roadmap, to sort them by the only metric that actually matters: how much your Saturday afternoon is about to change. Here's my ranking.

1. Codex: Orks — The Book That Rewrote List Building

Fifteen detachments. Fifteen. I've been playing this game long enough to remember when an Ork player got one army-wide rule and a firm handshake, and now the greenskins get a buffet line.

The structure is the real story here. There's a single three-detachment-point option — War Horde — built as the all-rounder for players with a shallow, unfocused collection. Everything else is a one-DP detachment that laser-focuses on a specific flavor of Ork warfare. Green Tide is back and it makes the humble Boy genuinely frightening again, with meaningful spillover for Beast Snaggas. Wreckas exists to make Flash Gitz, Breaka Boyz, and Tankbustas do what their names imply.

What that means practically: Orks stopped being a faction where you pick a theme and live with it. Now you bolt your favorite pieces together. If you own a pile of Orks and have spent two editions being told your favorite units don't fit the plan, this is the book that finally lets you build the army you actually wanted. That's the single largest change to how a faction plays that I've seen come out of a codex in years.

2. Codex: Space Marines — Fewer Models, Meaner Ones

Confirmed for October, and it's going to generate more forum posts than the rest of the edition combined.

The design direction is clear: Marines hit harder, and Marine armies get smaller. You'll be fielding fewer bodies, but each one is tougher and more dangerous. The boltgun — sitting patiently at Strength 4 since the dawn of time — is finally getting teeth. I believe that's the correct call thematically, even if it took thirty years to arrive.

The part that stings is the Legends list. Seventeen units are going, and the casualty roll includes Tactical Squads and Razorbacks. Tactical Squads. The most iconic unit in the game's history, retired to the proxy pile. If you're a Marine player with a deep older collection, this book changes your game more through subtraction than addition — and I'd encourage you to make peace with that before October rather than after.

3. The Codex Format Itself — Quietly the Biggest Shift

This one nobody ranks, and everybody should. The 11th edition codex is a genuinely different object. Codex: Orks devotes roughly 115 pages to lore and hobby content — army showcases, painting guidance, the deep background material that made these books worth owning in the first place.

For years the codex drifted toward being a rules binder you tolerated. This edition it's a hobby book again. That's a change in what the hobby is for a lot of players, and it deserves more credit than it's getting.

4. What's Coming — Custodes, Tau, Dark Angels, Drukhari

Rumors point at Adeptus Custodes, T'au Empire, Dark Angels, and Drukhari following Marines and Orks, with Custodes looking like the safest bet for late in the year. Nothing confirmed, so treat all of it accordingly.

My honest read: Custodes and Drukhari are the two factions where a codex could most dramatically change the game, because both have spent this edition operating on faction pack rules that don't have room for their actual character. Custodes in particular is a faction defined by having very few, very expensive models — exactly the design space 11th edition seems built to reward.

What To Actually Do About It

Don't sell anything yet. That's my whole advice column. Every edition produces a wave of panic-selling in the first three months, and every edition produces a wave of regret at month six when a points update or a detachment nobody read carefully turns a "dead" unit into a staple.

Read your book. Play ten games. Then decide.

We stock the full run of new 40K codexes at The Game Station as they release, along with the Armageddon launch box, paints, and everything else you'll need to get the new army on the table. Codex: Orks is in now and Space Marines lands in October — come by the shop or grab yours online, and bring the list you're worried about. Somebody here has already argued about it.