The Magmahold

Yesterday I went to the first UK based Underworlds Grand Clash of the new edition, at Warhammer World. There were 124 players which was fantastic to see, a significant increase on the last few clashes of the old edition. I’m going to run through my games as usual in these event reports, and then briefly cover some stats from the clash at the end. The main competitive format for the new edition is Nemesis, where you build a deck by combining any two of the six decks currently available (soon to be seven). You can then use that deck with any of the warbands allowed in matched play. I chose to take Cyreni’s Razors, an Idoneth Deepkin warband consisting of three aelves and a squid. They’re the warband I’ve played most of my second edition games with, I think they have solid stats and I like that they allow quite a flexible playstyle. The four fighters all have four health and hit for two damage, so they’re reasonable interchangeable in terms of how you use them, and it’s not a big deal i...

  Following on from my 2024 wrap-up blog , here’s a quick post on my 2025 hobby goals. Get my narrative Seraphon army to 2000 points. This one is carried over from 2024 when I painted a grand total of zero Seraphon. It will hopefully be my main hobby project for the year, and I want to get stuck into it from late January once I’ve finished off a few bits I need to do to get my Kruleboyz on the table. I have around 1000 points painted, so it shouldn't be too difficult to add another 1000 points, and I love the Seraphon model range so I'm excited to paint more of them. Play some games with Kruleboyz My excitement for getting some matched play games in with Kruleboyz has been dampened slightly by my getting a vaguely competitive army painted up coinciding with the new Orruk Warclans battletome bringing with it some significant nerfs, but I still want to try out the army and get some games in. I’ve kept this goal intentionally vague so I’m not committing to running them at an e...

 It’s time for the obligatory end of year blog when I look back at the hobby goals I set myself at the start of 2024 , and think ‘oh gosh, I did mean to do that, didn’t I.’ Finish painting a useable 2000 point Kruleboyz army I think I can just about say I did this one. I started the year with around 1500 points of Kruleboyz and I did go back and paint some more bits to take it over 2000 points, but then AoS 4 came along and I was suddenly woefully short of Gutrippaz. I then forgot all about Kruleboyz for a while as I was focused on my OBR army, but there are twenty Gutrippaz on my painting table at the time of writing this, and I’m planning to start using the army in matched play in early 2025. Paint a Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game warband and play a few games with them This one I definitely did, no generous accounting needed. I painted a bunch of dwarves for the Army of Thror, and played some games with them. I enjoyed the system a lot and would have liked to have played m...

During the pandemic, I wrote a blog post about how to play Warhammer Underworlds over webcam. Since then I still play most of my games over webcam, because my regular group are quite geographically dispersed and it works well for us. I know a lot of people play on Vassal or TTS, but I like being able to use the actual minis for the game. So here’s an updated post on how to play the new edition over webcam. What do you need to play Warhammer Underworlds: Embergard over webcam? Everything you'd normally need to play Embergard - your own models, dice, tokens, board, and cards. Some spare models to proxy the opponent's warband. It's easier if you have the actual models for the warband they're playing, but you can make do with any models. A webcam, or a phone you can use for video. A reasonably reliable internet connection. A friendly opponent. It's just about possible to play a game if only one of you has a camera...

Yesterday I went to my last tournament of the current edition of Warhammer Underworlds (1 st edition? Shadespire edition? Original Underworlds? I don’t feel like we’ve settled on a community name for it yet). It was a five game best-of-one, 25 player event in Redhill run by the Agents of Sigmar. I’ve been to several previous tournaments run by the Agents and they’re always well organised and fun events with a great group of people, so I had high expectations for the day. It was also very well timed, with the new edition of Underworlds due out next weekend it was great to have the chance to say farewell to the old edition in style with a tournament. The tournament was Nemesis format, I ran Xandire’s Truthseekers with the Hungering Parasite rivals deck. Xandire’s are a four fighter Stormcast warband with three Stormcast and their bird friend. They all have quite different fighter stats, and their standout mechanic is that they inspire when one of them dies, and they all get a differen...