In 5th edition, the game was mostly about knowing your factions. You could include the power units from your codex with optimal wargear (things like Thunderwolf Cavalry and Nob biker wound allocation shennanigans) and otherwise focus on maximising your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses. When it came time to actually play, you knew what to expect from opposing factions and focused on mitigating their strengths while exploiting their weaknesses. All pretty straightforward. The notion of choosing a faction based on its play style was very real.
Then 6th edition comes along and introduces allies. Now everything is different. First thing: if your faction has a weakness you just plug it with another faction. The most obvious example was one of the first combos of 6th edition - Tau/Eldar. Once is fast but paper thin, the other is tough and slow. Both have devastating firepower. Seeing a Tau army win by zooming Jetbikes over to objectives on the last turn after camping in a corner the whole game is really lame.
Second thing: combos. The Seerstar of 6th edition, with two farseers and a full compliment of warlocks all on jetbikes accompanied by the Baron from the Dark Eldar codex was, to a 5th edition player, one of the lamest things ever. It was the first totally invincible deathstar. Nob bikers were annoying, maybe a bit cheesy, but they could be managed. The Seer-star was just bullshit. There was also the pink star, which similarly abused 2++ re-rollable saves.
But over time, countermeasures emerged, because everyone else had access to brutal combos as well. One obvious example is the Super-friends army, which run its own death star of close combat characters supported by grav-guns for those annoying battle-suits and rune priests to shut down Eldar psychic powers. The new rules for flyers also saw the emergence of the daemon flying circus, which was, as I understand it, one of the first lists ever to spend five turns doing nothing but scoring first blood and then win on the last turn with linebreaker and objective contesting.
It seemed to me that at this time, competitive 40K was different, but not worse. There was more creativity in list design. The game had become more complex, deeper. This happens to all games. Magic had its first combo deck in the mirage cycle (maybe year 5?) with Carniverous bloom. It had another a few years later with the Tolarian academy builds, which later morphed into high tide. Nowadays, magic is replete with a huge range of builds and deck concepts. This kind of evolution is good for a game. It becomes richer. My old gaming group rejoiced when Vs. got its first pseudo-combo deck 'mad scientist', which used 1 cost GCPD dudes to reinforce each other and soak damage while it used search cards like Alfred to get pieces of a combo relating to deploying Batman on turn 7 (I can't quite remember the details).
The same thing is now happening to 40K. Just recently we saw a bizarre new tyranid list win a major tournament using almost entirely Lictor's and genestealers, all deepstriking using a bastion. These units had been written off as worthless until combined in this incredibly novel way and thrown into a meta full of Wave Serpent spam and bikes. This is enough variety and looseness in the rules in 40K nowadays to have this kind of creativity in army design.
Another thing that changes as a game gets more complex is that a 'meta' emerges. This refers to the current lists that are popular. In most major magic tournaments, four builds will constitute 75% of the field. Much of the last 25% will be decks specifically designed to beat those 4 builds. As certain decks dominate or certain counter decks become effective, the meta changes as people seek to get better match-ups on average. This happens because rarely is there a deck that has an advantage against all other builds.
Previously, there wasn't much point in applying the concept of a meta-game to 40K. The dominant armies were usually on top because they had the most recent codex, which GW would design to defeat the armies that dominated the previous meta (ostensibly to sell miniatures). This was teh phenomena of Ward-dexes. Moreover, people played the faction they collected and simply modified their lists slightly to tackle new threats. For example, when Heldrakes hit, daemon players swapped back to plaguebearers instead of Daemonettes.
Now the meta is real. It is dynamic and shifts frequently because of the rock-paper-scissors nature of modern competitive 40K. Drop pods beats imperial knights which beats lictor-spam which beats drop pods. It is imperative that you are aware of the meta and make list choices accordingly.
Unfortunately, tournament 40K can't quite accommodate this. Magic uses a 6 round to top 8 format. This means you play 6 one-hour rounds and then the top eight players do a winner takes most, single elimination mini-tournament to decide who comes out on top. To make the top eight you typically needed a minimum 4-2 at a small tournament, 5-1 or 5-1-0 at major GTs and the like. This allowed a deck to meet the paper to its rock once a tournament and still make the finals table by beating all its 50-50 matchups on skill. The whole process takes a day.
In Warhammer, playing 9, 1850 point games would be gruelling to say the least. Hence the employment of bracketing systems that emphasise winning your first few rounds. This makes match-ups much more critical. I won't comment here on what could be done; that's up to the TOs.
What are some of the other short-comings of this new complexity? I see two, related issues. Not being able to keep up and ballooning costs. With allies, you now often need to collect several armies so you can make the most of battle-brothers. I can field nearly all Space Marine armies and can proxy a Grey-Knights/Ultramarines centurion star for practice games. CSM players need to have a Daemon army and vice-versa. This makes the game very expensive and makes it extremely difficult to break into competitive 40K unless you can borrow armies. In some cases, you will be ineligible for painting points if you borrow an army and this will make it impossible to get a full score, so you're burned either way unless you sink huge time and money into collecting and painting as well as playing.
The pace of change is more a problem of 7th edition and its new system of factions, allies, detachments and formations. Rules for formations and detachments, as well as character dataslates and the like, seem to be coming out almost fortnightly, and some of them are pretty scary. Staying on top of all that so you're opponent doesn't surprise you with some unit that is invincible when it deep-strikes or something is pretty tough. Moreover, some of the formations are just stupid. What Tau player wasn't going to take two broadside squads and a riptide? They don't need a bonus for doing something that is obviously powerful already.
Magic releases (or it did when I was playing), three sets a year of 350, 150 and 150 odd cards, plus a revision of the core set every three years or so. Something like this would make Warhammer much more manageable. TOs could proxy this by only allowing models released more than three months ago, which is basically what already happens. This still leaves the player to go about checking for rules updates every week. The solution here would be for GW to make all rules available for free in an online repository, but there is a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. Gaming groups sharing material is a bit of a band-aid but effective enough.
One last thing: I want to return to game balance for a moment. It seems to me that while the early days of 6th edition suffered from codex creep (Heldrake to Tau to Eldar to Space marines), the codexes since have been well balanced. We can only hope that this trend continues and that by the end of 2015 we have a well balanced game. At that point, GW looks set to double down on WFB 9th edition and we'll be left to enjoy things for a while.
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