A. Going tall beats going wide — and the game turns on one timed push
What Wilson actually said, from 10 events and 59 games: scoring in 11th is so achievable that points don't protect you — he won a game 100–93, the highest-scoring loss he's seen, and at 95 he considers a game safe (he's drawn once in that position, never lost). List construction is being pushed tall by the missions themselves: kill-based missions tax unit count, and holding ground takes durability — "there's just so much stuff out there that punish you for playing wide." His Recon example is precise: against Take and Hold's kill condition, the Recon player needs "a unit that doesn't die when it goes into that third table quarter." Trade that unit away every turn and both players score three-for-three while the Recon player bleeds the material. The outs are a unit that lives there — his examples are the Aeldari Avatar, the Lion, and War Dogs — or overloading the scoring by going to four quarters.
Where the summary inverted him: aggression. Wilson's stated principle is that "generally this edition being aggressive has a lot of failure states." His model is the timing window — hold a strong scoring posture, build a hand of aggressive cards, and commit once, on the turn where your push holds the opponent's primary down while you max yours. Being forced to push on bad timing is the losing seat; the passive scorer makes the opponent play aggressively into him. His two game shapes follow from that: the lock-out game (cripple them so they score ~nothing after turn three — many of his wins were 20–0s of this kind), or the both-alive-on-turn-three game, where both players are scoring 80+ and a single timing window decides it. The "nickel and dime" texture the summary promoted to a co-equal plan is, in his usage, a fallback — what a Recon game becomes when the tabling plan fails.
The disposition detail the summary dropped entirely: Wilson quit Reconnaissance for events after the World Team Championship — fast Purge the Foe armies bleed Recon's screening resources too quickly, and the Recon-vs-Purge matchup is, in his words, "the reason I gave up on reconnaissance." His own preference for singles is Priority Assets — his "baby," a stand-on-the-points build that forces opponents to come to him — and his per-disposition numbers say he plays it slightly more aggressively than his Recon: opponents average 60.46 points against his Priority Assets vs 59 against his Recon. His one Take and Hold event produced scores of 100, 100, 93, 75 against opponents' 45, 70, 68, 75, 80. Disruption he refuses outright — he says no power on earth could compel him to play it in a tournament he cares about winning. And the caveat that cuts the other way: Recon is meta-dependent — it matters only if a top-three army is running it, and he floats Custodes as a potential Recon build going forward.
The corroboration: the "MSU Dead" thread reaches the same headline from the other side — Tyranid players report there's basically no point trying to keep opponents off objectives for a few turns when they can just kill you and max primary anyway, and Sam Pope's big-brick World Eaters show max bricks are completely viable — and the weekend's results point the same direction, with brick-heavy Marine and AdMech builds winning (see Analysis C and the Top 10). The mechanism, though, is Wilson's: not constant aggression. Posture, patience, and one committed turn.
How it works
11th's primary scoring is achievable enough that denial-by-spread loses value, and kill-based missions punish the unit count that spread requires. Durable units hold a scoring posture without bleeding kill points, so the game resolves one of two ways: a lock-out, where the opponent scores ~nothing after turn three, or a single timing window where one player maxes primary while holding the opponent's down. In Recon vs Take and Hold, the third-quarter unit is the fulcrum — if it dies every turn, both players trade three points for three and the Recon player loses the material war; if it lives, or the Recon player overloads to four quarters, the trade breaks.
Sources: Stat Check, "10 Events of 11th Edition: What have I learned?" (Innes Wilson) — full transcript checked for this digest; r/WarhammerCompetitive, "#1 ITC player Innes Wilson shares thoughts on 11th edition so far"; r/WarhammerCompetitive, "MSU Dead"; Sunday Night Stats Oct 23–25.