Get your head out of the game?
Metagaming is using out-of-game information, or resources, to affect one's in-game decisions. Warhammer 40k has a nearly infinite number of possible armies people can play. On the other hand, quite a few of those aren't very good armies. In addition, you can take a look and see what armies are more popular than others. (Very easy example: most people play Space Marines of one kind or another. If you aren't prepared to handle Space Marine armies at a tournament, you really aren't prepared for a tournament.) If we know for sure that everyone at the tournament will play the same exact Space Marine list, it should be fairly easy to design a list that will beat them all. That's the concept of metagaming. Understand what's actually out there and prepare for it.

Many of the recognized top competitive players say there is no meta. They generally say that there are simply competitive lists and non-competitive lists. They do have a point. The truly competitive army codexes (generally recognized to be Space Marines, Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar and Tyranids) have a variety of units that will allow them to to be competitive. In fact, that is generally the definition of a competitive codex, it allows more than one or two solid builds. Theoretically that means you could encounter a huge variety of competitive army lists even within a single codex. If you don't have a balanced army, you won't be able to deal with them all.

But wait... There are a lot of very competitive list builds floating around on the internet for people to use. There are a number of sites dedicated to the idea of being competitive that give out great information. They don't just build their own lists, they tell you, with varying degrees of helpfulness, how to build your own competitive lists. (3++ is the new Black and Yes The Truth Hurts are two of my favorites. Be aware that the the second one is often referred to as the great, blue shark tank. The owner and most of the followers and guests are very snarky and aggressive. Be prepared and have a thick skin if you decide to post.) While there are a variety of competitive lists, most of them have quite a few things in common with the others.

Mechanization is probably the biggest one. While it gives you added mobility, it also can add firepower to your units, even allowing the unit to fire at one target while the vehicle fires at another. Mechanization also offers your units extra armor. With the adjustments to the vehicle damage table, vehicles are sturdier than they used to be, and even an AV10 vehicle gives your troops some shelter from small-arms fire. Half of these lists are also Space Marines of one flavor or another. That means a good number of heavily armored infantry. The other half have much weaker but much more numerous light infantry. All of these lists have lots of heavy weapons, with a focus on killing vehicles, though they have moderate anti-infantry capability as well.

Okay, so now what?
Now we take this knowledge and see if we can come up with something useful. Most mechanization comes in the form of multiple transport vehicles. Most of those transport vehicles have light armor around AV11. (Chimerae being the exception, but they have side 10, so you can hit them from the side if you don't have good odds from the front. Offensively, we'll need to be able to deal with lots of light vehicles. Call it at least 2 dead per turn reliably. (If you are using one-shot weapons like Hunter-Killer Missiles, either don't count them as part of this total, or require 4 dead on the first turn.) We'll also need to deal with about 50 or so Marines or about 80 Guard equivalents. Yeesh! Is that all?

Defensively, we'll need to be able to absorb or negate lots of heavy weapons. That means we either need to be able to survive a lot of anti-vehicle firepower (perhaps by using LandRaiders or other AV14) or we need to spam lots of vehicles (essentially what the above lists are mostly doing) or we need to leave vehicles at home. If you don't have vehicles or expensive models, those heavy weapons are nearly useless. One option here that runs against the standard thinking of competitive lists is to use a mostly infantry force and concentrate on killing their anti-infantry weapons first. Let them plink away with their Lascannons. I'm not saying running a mass of infantry would be easy, but if you built it to handle the above requirements, you might do better than you think.

Now, if this was just one opponent, doing this would be list-tailoring, which is pretty bad for two reasons. 1) It's a little like cheating. If you know exactly what your opponent is using, it gives you a massive advantage. Unless your opponent gets similar ability, it makes it a pretty one-sided game. (Unless the other guy is way more skilled than you are, then it might be a good way to even the odds a little, but talk to him first.) 2) Tailoring to fight a particular list tends to create an unbalanced list. This means it will likely crush its intended opponent, but be unable to handle other types of army. This gives rise to the Rock/Paper/Scissors effect you sometimes see.

On the other hand, if you are somewhat tailoring your army to handle a variety of the best competitive lists, and you keep the idea of a balanced army in mind, you might just have a winner on your hands. If your army can handle 8-10 AV11 chassis and either 50+ Space Marines or 80+ Guardsmen while being shot with lots of heavy weapons (something along the lines of 9 Lascannons, 3 mobile multimeltas, 6 TL-Autocannons and 12 Missile Launchers) and still be able to claim objectives, you should have a pretty good shot.

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