Middle-Earth's Strongest Armies: March 26

Every 2 months, our GBHL Rankings Offficer Jack will be delving into the stats to see what are Middle-Earth's Strongest Armies.

It's been two months and we have had an FAQ so lets get back to doing list performance stats, I will aim to do this every two months or so and since I have all but 2 event results for the year up to last weekend it seems a good place to start 🙂

As it stands, Men of the West are the current front runner and I expect they will stay this way having dodged any list changes in February FAQ, maybe even buffed with other lists and monsters taking hits. They currently stand at 8 Podiums with 3 wins, 3 second places and 2 third places, but only 1 of these coming from the prestigious GBHL 100's.

Currently in 2nd place is the recently hit Depths of Moria with 6 Podiums at 2 wins, 3 seconds and 1 third, matching Men of the West on GBHL 100 performance. Currently they only have a 2nd place at a GBHL 100. However with the hit of this list being seemingly quite big in the February FAQ, especially for the goblin horde, I expect this list will fall of for the remainder of the year.

Finally in 3rd we have a three way tie with 4 Podiums each of Battle of Fornost, Usurpers of Edoras and Lurtz's scouts. Usurpers and Lurtz's were a main stay of last year but Fornost was picking up a lot in the later part of the year. Will these lists stay there throughout the next few months and which of the three would you place your bets on?

As for event performance, 10 lists have podiums at GBHL 100's however no list has podiumed more than once at them so far though we have only had 3.

As for 90's Men of the West and Depths have been taking them by storm with 7 and 5 Podiums respectively. However 25 different lists have Podiumed which shows there's still a lot of lists you can run at them

Finally GBHL 80's, Lurtz's scouts is in first with 3, which to me is unsurprising since it is a fan favourite fun list and Defenders of the Pelennor is in second with 2. (A slight tear fell when I saw a list that I thought was Atop the Walls, but when I checked the faction itself it was Defenders). Any other list that has Podiumed has only done so a single time.

As a running total I am still keeping track of how many lists haven't podiumed at any event. When I finished tracking results last year there were 28 lists yet to get that top 3 finish. Adding this years list to last years, of the 106 lists in total we are now down to only 19 that have never podiumed. Let's see if by the end of the year that number can be at or close to 0.

And that will be me signing off for this month, you can find the up to date list of winning factions here in the 2026 winning lists button: https://thegbhl.wixsite.com/website/rankings

Side note: there is a compiled faction tracking display in the works that add's both last years and this years together. I have been too busy to get it done yet. Anything else you would like for me to show off, talk about or display do let me know. - Jack Canavan, GBHL Rankings Officer

GBHL 100:

Men of the West, Depths of Moria, Usurpers of Edoras, Kingdom of Khazad-dum, Radagast's Alliance, Army of the White Hand, Fangorn, Battle of Greenfields, The Spider Queen's Brood and Army of Carn Dum. - 1 podium

GBHL 90:

Men of the West - 7 podiums

Depths of Moria - 5 podiums

Battle of Fornost and Usurpers of Edoras - 3 podiums

GBHL 80:

Lurtz's Scouts - 3 podiums

Defenders of the Pelennor - 2 podiums