Event report - Straight Outta Shadespire XIV tournament

 On the Saturday of the Easter bank holiday weekend, I played in the ‘Straight Outta Shadespire XIV’ Warhammer Underworlds tournament, a best of one championship format event played over webcam, with a special highlander rule that meant each entrant had to take a different warband. As the name suggests, this is the latest in a series of webcam tournaments that have been running since the pandemic put an end to face to face organised play. It was the time I’ve played in one, I’d been tempted before but put off by worrying that my slightly spotty internet connection might not be up to it. Having recently got a new router that excuse no longer applied, so I figured I’d give it a go.

I ended up taking the Godsworn Hunt, which is probably the Underworlds warband I’ve had the most experience with, though less so in recent times. I’d probably have gone with Khagra’s Ravagers had they been free when I signed up to the tournament, but someone had already taken them, and though that player later either dropped out or changed warbands I decided to stick with the Godsworn.

My deck

There are broadly two things that the Godsworn Hunt can do well in the current meta: they are fast, and they can hit very hard once you start upgrading them with extra damage upgrades like Great Strength. They have a lot of fighters, and there is no one fighter you need to keep alive, so the deck works is broadly to get started by either picking off a weak fighter or scoring a surge objective that doesn’t require a kill, and then start stacking extra damage upgrades onto one or two fighters so that you can take out the opponent’s big hitters. The weaknesses of the warband are that the opponent can potentially score a lot of glory from taking out your fighters, and you really need some early glory to get off the ground. One of things I struggled with in practice was figuring out when it was best to discard my starting hand and redraw in order to make sure I’d be able to get up and running quickly.

I don’t want to go through the whole deck in detail, but I’ll touch on a few specific decisions I made. Firstly, there’s a big focus on speed. I have three objectives that require me to move or charge five or six hexes, and two gambits and two upgrades aimed at letting me score these. This is quite a big commitment, and there is a risk I struggle with these if my cards don’t come out in the right order, but it’s my easiest source of passive glory so I decided to commit to it. Secondly, I’m hedging my bets a bit on primacy – I have three objectives that I can score through gaining or having the primacy token, plus one (Underdog) that I can score by not having it. This is probably sub-optimal deck building, but it didn’t work out too badly for me in the end. Thirdly, I made the tough decision to drop one of the best cards in the game, Mischievous Spirits (which moves all the objectives on the board one hex). I did this partly for reasons of game speed, as there were only 45 minutes available for games, and particularly over webcam Mischievous Spirits can take a while to play out. In the event this was never a problem for me, and I think I’d have done better to keep it in at the expense of Living Land (which allows me to move one objective in my territory, or flip an objective whose number is equal to the round number).

Game 1 – Thundrik’s Profiteers

I was quite happy with this match-up, as I’ve played against the Profiteers with the Godsworn a fair bit before. I won the board roll-off and chose to place three objectives, as I thought it was likely that my opponent would be playing an objective based strategy. I went with the ‘Menhirs of Binding’ board from the Direchasm set, which I ended up using in all my games, and my opponent offset the boards to the maximum extent allowed.

The main lesson I’ve learnt from playing this match-up previously is that what you want to avoid is charging in each fighter one by one into the range of the Profiteer’s guns, so initially I focused on Drakkskewer who was the furthest forward of my opponent’s fighters, and also one of their main threats. With the help of some lucky dice, I managed to take him out pretty early, and then with the aid of some movement and push gambits I was able to make a charge with Theddra into Thundrik (the leader and most important fighter in the opposing warband). This was a risk worth taking, as I knew that taking out Thundrik would leave me in a very strong position, and as it was near the end of the round there was a reasonable chance that she might live long enough to get another chance if she failed.  In the event the attack succeeded and Thundrik was taken out. This left me feeling pretty confident, as without Thundrik my opponent wouldn’t be able to inspire his fighters. It wasn’t over yet though, we were both trying to score Dominant Position (hold more objectives than your opponent) in the first-round end phase, and he edged me out of it with some good use of gambits.

The second round was less eventful: I took out Alenson, finally scored Dominant Position, and got Grundann (one of my bigger hitters) into a position where he’d be able to charge into either of the surviving Profiteers in the final round. My opponent stacked a lot of objectives onto Deadeye Lund, who was the strongest of his remaining fighters.

In the third round I decided to ignore the buffed-up Lund, and instead took out Ironhail to set up a high scoring third end phase with Path to Victory and Absolute Dominance. My opponent scored Absolute Stillness and Cryptic Companion with Lund, but it wasn’t enough and I came away with a fairly comfortable 19-14 win.

Game 2 – Mollog’s Mob

For the second game I had a match-up I’d been dreading against the big troll. I haven’t played any recent games against Mollog as no one in my local group plays him, but I’d heard a lot about how he was dominating the current meta. Essentially Mollog is very good because once inspired he can charge twice per round, you can stack upgrades on him to give him lots of rerolls and extra wounds, and there is a card called Ferocious Resistance that he can use to heal a large amount, making him even harder to kill.

My game plan was to ignore Mollog completely, as the one weakness Mollog has in the current meta is that there is no way to inspire him if he doesn’t take damage. While uninspired he’s limited to one charge per round, which limits his damage dealing potential a lot if you can keep out of his reach.

Unfortunately, I got a bad starting objective hand and had to discard it, which limited my long term glory potential. My opponent set us up with long boards, and dropped the Stalagsquig on an objective at the back of my board. I threw Jagathra’s javelin at the Stalagsquig early on in the hope of a lucky kill, but it didn’t work out. Not much happened in the first round, Mollog only managed one attack which luckily, he missed, and I had drawn into another sub-optimal hand of objectives, so wasn’t able to do much either. At this stage I felt that things were going ok though, as Mollog hadn’t got too scary yet.

In the second round I was able to take out the Spiteshroom with Grundann, and Mollog killed Shond (which was pretty annoying, as I’d be lining up a plan to charge Shond into the Stalagsquig to take advantage of his cleave). I ended with primacy and had a high scoring end phase with Dominant Position and Path to Victory, which put me in a good place going into round 3.

In the third round I killed to Bat Squig, but Mollog killed Ollo and then charged most of the length of the board to kill Theddra and score Victorious Duel. It ended up being extremely close as he scored a lot of third end phase objectives, ands in the end he just edged me out by one glory, 13-14.

I think my game plan was spot on, and not trying to fight Mollog was absolutely the way to go.  I got a little bit unlucky with my starting objective draw, but other than that there were probably two things I could have done differently: first I could have moved Theddra one more hex away from Mollog, which would have saved her. I was prioritising getting her onto an objective, but I should have considered that he was likely to be playing Victorious Duel, and done more to anticipate and prevent it. Secondly, I think I should have gone after the Stalagsquig more, I was put off by his two dice block, but I could made more of my fighters with cleave.

Game 3 – The Dread Pageant

I wasn’t sure how this match-up was go, my opponent had previously won a few of these tournaments so I knew he was a strong player. He won the board roll-off and set up very defensively with long boards. I set up as aggressively as I could, but was still quite far back.

In the first round, we both started off by moving some fighters onto objectives. I knew I’d have to take the game to him though, so once Glissette moved forward onto an objective I charged Jagathra in, and got lucky and managed to take Glissette out with the javelin. I then put Feral Symbiote on Grundann, who was my furthest forward fighter, so that he’d be well placed to charge in at the start of the next round. My opponent outscored me in the first end phase by getting Dominant Position and a faction card for holding two objectives, so it was 3-5 at the end of round 1, but I wasn’t unhappy with my position as I knew I was well placed to take out his leader early in round 2.

My opponent took the first turn of round 2, and charged Slakeslash into Grundann to try to take him out before Grundann could take out Vasillac. This meant he had to charge through two lethal hexes, taking two damage, and the attack whiffed leaving Slakeslash very vulnerable. I was able to kill Slakeslash with Grundann, and then with the aid of movement ploys I was able to charge Theddra into Vasillac and kill him too. This left me in a very strong position, and in the third round I was easily able to take out Hadzu to wipe the opposing warband and claim a comfortable 19-9 win.

Game 4 – Hrothgorn’s Mantrappers

This wasn’t a good match-up for me, I’d played Hrothgorn during some practice games and got thumped. One of the possible Hrothgorn strategies is one that aims to remove every objective on the board, in order to score a six-glory objective called ‘Feast the Beastgrave’. I knew that if my opponent was going for that, I’d probably need to kill Hrothgorn in order to stop it.

My opponent won the board roll-off and gave me objectives, which made me think he might not be going for a Feed the Beastgrave strategy. I got a horrible power card draw of four upgrades, including three out of four of my extra damage upgrades; and Dark Destiny, which is probably my best gambit. I decided that despite it being upgrade heavy I had to keep it, but I knew it was going to make things difficult.

The game started very badly, with my opponent scoring 5 glory before he’d even had a turn through some nice surge objectives (I can’t remember exactly, but think he scored Intimidating Display for having the fighter with most wounds, and then went on to score Unexpected Cunning and Frantic Exchange for playing lots of power cards, Gathered Momentum for scoring two surge objectives, and an objective for flipping an objective token). This let him put some upgrades on Hrothgorn, so things were already looking pretty bad for me. I tried to take out Thrafnir early and failed, so ended up spending the whole of the first round trying to take him out, eventually succeeding on the final activation of the round. The bright side for me was that Dark Destiny (a card which gives me a 50% chance of keeping a fighter alive if they’re about to die) came off for the first time in the tournament to keep Theddra alive and stop Hrothgorn inspiring.

At the start of the second round, I had to make a decision as to whether to focus on killing Hrothgorn, or ignore him and try to take out the gnoblars. I had one attack on Hrothgorn which I failed, and after that I gave up and went after the gnoblars instead. I very quickly realised this had been a mistake, as it became apparent that he was playing a Feed the Beastgrave strategy and I wasn’t going to be able to do a lot about it.

At this stage it was pretty clear that I was going to lose. I managed to kill all the gnoblars (including making an 11-hex charge with Grawl into Quiv to take him out) and scored enough objectives to get me up to a respectable 13 glory, but Hrothgorn rampaged around in my territory taking out anyone he could reach, and flipping all the objectives to score a ridiculous 26 glory.

I’m not sure I could have done a lot about this, if I’d focused on going after Hrothgorn I would have had a reasonable shot of eventually taking him out before he could flip all the objectives, but I would have scored less glory myself that way. Because my opponent had got so much early glory he’d been able to get Hrothgorn to eight wounds with all damage reduced by one, so it would have taken a lot of attacks to whittle him down. I think it was always going to be a difficult match-up for me, and my bad starting hand draw combined with my opponent’s very good draw made it pretty tough. That said, my opponent played extremely well and didn’t make any mistakes, so he definitely deserved the win.

Wrapping up

Overall, I had two wins and two losses, and came 10^th out of 18. I was pretty happy with this, my two losses came in two very tough match-ups, and I was pleased with how the deck worked and didn’t think I made too many mistakes.

I don’t think I would change the deck too much, I’d probably drop Unassailable for another end phase objective, and as discussed early put Mischievous Spirits back in in place of Living Land. I’m also in several minds about Worthy Kill, which is a Godsworn Hunt card that is a two-glory surge objective for taking out a four-wound fighter. On the face of it it’s a great card, but I’ve found that often I don’t have it in my hand at the right time, and I only scored it once in four games during the tournament. So I’d be tempted to replace that with something else, maybe Temporary Victory (score immediately after an activation if you’re holding three objectives) for some more passive glory.

It was a really fun event, and I hope I'll be able to play in more of these in future. I'd been a little bit worried about competitive webcam gaming would work, but it was a very friendly atmosphere with everyone trusting each other to be honest about dice rolls and card draw and not worrying too much if everything was visible on camera, which made things easier. I enjoyed all my games, all my opponents were very nice, and the event was well organised and ran smoothly. I'd definitely encourage any Underworlds players who are missing tournaments to give it a go. 

A couple of my games ended up being streamed, so you can see my game against Mollog on Can You Roll a Crit's Twitch channel (starts at about 01:50:00), and my game against the Dread Pageant on the Agents of Sigmar YouTube (starts at about 02:21:00).