Underworlds Clash event report

 Yesterday I went to a one-day Warhammer Underworlds Rivals format tournament at Warhammer World. It was a really fun event, in this blog I’m going to give a quick run-down of my games, and then talk a bit about how I found the event format.

Rivals is the Underworlds format that involves the least deck building: you pick a warband and either use their warband faction deck, or pick one of a number of pre-built Rivals decks to use them with. This was the second Rivals clash I’d been to, after the one at Warhammer Fest in May this year. But the format for this one was a bit different: the Fest clash (and all previously clashes I’d been to) were four rounds of best-of-three games, whereas this one was six rounds of best-of-one.

My warband

The warband I took was Domitan’s Stormcoven, which I ran with their faction deck. The Stormcoven are a Stormcast warband of three wizards, each of which when uninspired have a range two attack that does two damage, and a range three spell attack that does one damage. Their core mechanic is that after one of them activates you can choose to inspire either of the other two, but only one can ever be inspired at a time. They all have different strengths when inspired: Leona is the best at doing ranged spell attack damage, Sarpon has a very accurate three damage attack if he’s adjacent to the target, and Domitan has cleave on his attacks and goes to three damage on his range two attack. There are other nuances, but broadly speaking a lot of the decisions you make when playing with them are around who to inspire when.

They have quite a good Rivals deck with some easy to score surge objectives (surges are objectives that you score immediately after fulfilling the condition, which allows you to cycle quickly through your objective deck). Their end phase objectives include a lot of two glory objectives, but are harder to score, and most of them need to you to have your fighters in no man’s land or enemy territory. This can be tricky particularly against aggro warbands: because the Stormcoven can put out a lot of ranged damage, the temptation against aggro warbands is to sit at the back and pepper them with spell attacks, but doing that will often limit your scoring.

My Domitan's Stormcoven

I’ve been practicing with Stormcoven for a few months now and have enjoyed playing them a lot. If they can get their spells off and the objectives come out in a good order they can be very strong; most of the bad games I’ve had with them in practice have been when I’ve been torn between committing to trying to score risky objectives or trying to kill things, and not managed to achieve either.

There were around 25 warbands represented across 61 players, with the most popular and pre-tournament favourites being Ephilim’s Pandaemonium, the Tzeentch warband from the Wyrdhollow box. Ephilim’s are pretty good in Rivals because it’s hard to stop them scoring, so they can easily rack up a lot of glory. They’re also very fun to play. There were actually some nerfs to Ephilim’s Pandaemonium released in a badly-timed FAQ the day before the event, but the event team sensibly decided that it wouldn’t be fair to apply the new rules at such short notice, so they weren’t in use (though various rules clarifications released as part of the FAQ were used for the event).

My games

I’m not going to do a play-by-play of each game because I didn’t take enough notes and six games is a lot to remember, but I’ll give a summary of how each one went. 

Game 1 vs Conor with Headsmen’s Curse

Headsmen’s Curse is a nighthaunt warband with four fighters. The leader has an executioner’s blade and hits for a lot of damage, and the other three are chainrasps who don’t do a huge amount by themselves but can buff the leader or debuff the enemy. I’d had a few games against them in practice that had gone well, so I was pretty happy with this draw.

Conor set up quite aggressively with the leader towards the front. I won the roll off for first turn and elected to go first, I would normally give first turn away, but the Headsmen’s Curse have an action they can use if a specific fighter is adjacent to the leader which boosts the leader’s damage for the next attack. Conor had set up to be able to use this, which would make the leader immediately able to one-shot my fighters, so I wanted to deny it. With that in mind I took first turn and attacked the leader, I don’t think I did any damage but I was able to push him away from the buffing chainrasp.

Over the rest of the round, I killed one of the chainrasps, though Conor immediately brought him back. Conor did some damage back to me, and the round ended with the Wielder of the Blade landing a big attack on Domitan to leave him on four wounds taken with one wound remaining. This was an interesting situation because Domitan goes to five wounds only when inspired, so at this stage if he ever stopped being inspired it would kill him.

I won the roll off for first turn in round 2 and tried to kill the Wielder of the Blade with Domitan, but missed. At this point I decided it was in my best interests to uninspire Domitan and have him die. This was because you get extra glory for killing five wound or more fighters, and he was very likely to die on the next turn. Also the Wielder was already next to him, so it was essentially a free attack that would still leave the Wielder free to charge later. I think this was the right call, and my opponent agreed when we discussed it after the game.

From then on things went very much in my favour: I killed the Wielder with Sarpon on my next activation, and was well ahead on glory going into round 3. Conor ran his last chainrasp away into a corner so I couldn’t wipe them out, but I won comfortably. A good start to the event!

I failed to take any photos of my games, so instead here's a picture of my Headsmen's Curse warband

Game 2 vs Adam with Kainan’s Reapers

Kainan’s Reapers are an Ossiarch Bonereaper warband with one tough hard-hitting fighter (Mir Kainan), and five Mortek Guard who individually aren’t great but have a lot of potential to support each other and be given buffs to make them useful.

I hadn’t played any practice games with Stormcoven against them, but I thought the match-up might not be too bad as I was hoping to be able to ping off Mortek Guard with spell attacks for easy glory. In the event though the game didn’t go my way: Adam was able to land some early damage with Mortek attacks, and I missed all my early attacks leaving his Mortek unharmed and threatening my fighters. He brought Mir Kainan in to take out one of my fighters by the end of round 1. I had a chance to kill Kainan early in round 2, but it required a lot of things to go perfectly and this didn’t work out. By this stage Adam had upgraded his fighters to make them more accurate, and my warband was wiped out by the end of round 2. The only good thing about this was that it made it hard for Adam to score anything else, so while I was never in with a chance of a win, I only lost by a few glory.

 I do think the match-up was winnable for me with some better luck and better play in the first round, but Adam played it very well and deserved the win.

Game 3 vs Scott with Sepulchral Guard

The Sepulchral Guard are a warband from the early days of Shadespire with seven skeletons, who can be brought back after being killed. They’ve recently been re-released in significantly improved form, and I was a little bit nervous going into the match as I hadn’t played them since the re-release. However, one of their defining features is that they’re very slow, and I was able to use this to my advantage.

I set up fairly aggressively, because I wanted to be playing in the middle of the table to score my warband’s objectives. Scott committed his Champion (arguably his strongest fighter) early on, so after that my game plan became to stay out of the Champion’s way so that he wouldn’t be able to engage. I ended up with my fighters spending the whole game on the right side of the board, where only three of Scott’s fighters could really engage them. I killed those fighters repeatedly to get glory (I think I might have killed one of the petitioners three times), and while they did some damage to me, neither the Champion nor the Warden were able to engage. I racked up quite a lot of glory from objectives, and ended up scoring 19 glory for a pretty comfortable win.

One thing that did happen in this game was that I had a bit of a post-lunch slump which resulted in some slightly loose play with forgetting to play power cards at the right time, and at one point forgetting which of my fighters was inspired and rolling an attack with the wrong profile (I caught it immediately and rerolled it, but it wasn’t ideal). In a few of my other games I let my opponents do minor takebacks after forgetting to play power cards in the power phase, so I didn't feel too bad about doing the same here, but it’s something I’d like to improve about my play for the future.

Game 4 vs Dave with the Kunnin Krew

The Kunnin Krew are a Kruleboyz warband with quite a flexible playstyle. I’d played against them a fair bit so felt comfortable with them, but I knew they had potential to dish out quite a bit of damage which I’d need to look out for. They have two big fighters and three little ones, and I drew a good hand of objectives focused on spell casting and killing things, so my game plan became to kill the minions early.

This worked out pretty well, I killed his grots early, scored my objectives, and had a good lead going into round 2. In round 2 he had a disastrous turn when he used a card called Firebomb that includes a random scatter element. The dice were not on his side, and the firebomb ended going in a hex that was next to two of my fighters and both his big fighters, doing damage to all of them and killing his leader. To give credit to Dave he took it with very good humour, I think he felt that he had needed to take some risks to try to catch up, which was probably right.

After that I was able to mop up pretty quickly, and wiped out his warband by the end of round 2 for another high scoring win.

Game 5 vs Lee with Hedkrakka’s Mad Mob

Up until this point the draw had been pretty kind to me, but the Mad Mob are one of the best warbands in Rivals format. They’re a Savage Orruk warband that play very aggressively, and have a lot of glory scoring potential. My game plan for this one was to play very defensively: I won the roll off for boards and was able to offset the boards to put some distance between us, but I knew that by doing so I was also potentially limiting my scoring as it would make it hard to score objectives early on that needed me to be in his territory.

I really should have taken some photos at the event, sorry!

The first round went pretty well: he had some bad dice luck and didn’t get many attacks off, and I was able to put damage on a few of his fighters. I also got lucky with my card draw and was able to score some easy surge objectives, so we were about level on glory at the end of the round.

Round two also went well: I took out two of his hard-hitting fighters, and was able to start moving my fighters up which gave me a very strong second end phase of scoring, so I had a decent lead going into round three. Round three was very cagey, and it was my dice’s turn to fail me a bit, so he pulled back a bunch of glory with some kills and some objective scoring. Going into the final end phase of scoring I thought I might have scraped it, but he managed to score all three of his objectives to take it by one glory point! It was a great game with some very swingy moments, I felt that I’d played it pretty well but it wasn’t to be.

Game 6 vs Nicholas with Kunnin Krew

Another game against the Kunnin Krew, but this time they were using the Void Cursed Thralls Rivals deck. I’d only played one game against this deck before, so I spent most of the game feeling very tense and wondering what surprises were in store! Void Cursed Thralls is a fairly aggressive deck where fighters (on both sides) can become void-cursed, which has various effects, but most importantly for me means that they can’t make range three attacks. That’s huge for my warband, so I was a bit scared. Nicholas said that he’d played a game earlier in the day against another Stormcoven player and had cursed them all by the end of round one, which sounded ominous!

Nicholas set up quite defensively, so I played fairly aggressively and as with my previous game against Kunnin Krew I focused on killing the minions first. I was able to score some surge objectives to take an early lead, but he put a fair bit of damage onto my fighters. In round two I didn’t manage to land many attacks and he continued to put damage on me, so by midway round three I had a decent glory lead but had two fighters left each on one wound. At this point all of our dice luck deserted us, and we spent the rest of the round both failing to land attacks despite most of the surviving fighters being on the verge of death. By this point everyone was void-cursed except for his hobgrot, who I was determined not to kill in case he had an objective he could score if everyone was void-cursed. It turned out that there was indeed such an objective and it was worth four glory, so I was very glad I hadn’t attacked the hobgrot!

I ended up winning by a more comfortable margin than I felt I really deserved, there were a few moments where had the luck gone his way there could have been a big glory swing.

Results

I ended up going 4-2 and taking 10^th place in the event. I said at the start of the event that my goal was to go 3-3 but I was secretly hoping for 4-2, so it was nice to achieve that. I think I did get reasonably lucky match-ups, I didn’t have to play Ephilim’s Pandaemonium at all which I was very happy about.

The event was won by Gnarlspirit Pack, a very aggro warband, but there were four Pandaemonium players in the top ten including in 2^nd and 3^rd place, which suggests that the changes to them in the new FAQ are probably justified.

Thoughts on the format

I really enjoyed the best-of-one format. It meant fewer games in total than in a four round best-of-three format, where you are guaranteed to play eight games and could play as many as twelve. But that made it a bit less intense, and getting the chance to play more different people and warbands was nice.

The best-of-one format also allowed for slightly longer games, we had one hour per game which meant I never felt at all rushed. I find it very stressful in best-of-threes if my opponent plays slowly and I’m worried that we’re going to run out of time, so this was welcome. It also meant that if you finished a game quickly you didn’t have to wait long for the next one, whereas in best-of-three if you get hammered quickly you can end up having to wait around a while.

I guess the argument against best-of-one is that there is a strong luck element to the game, and if you lose a game because of bad dice luck there’s no chance for redemption. But Rivals is a swingier game mode anyway, so I think that you just need to be prepared to take bad dice on the chin if it happens. All of my opponents were lovely and despite some swingy moments I didn’t experience anyone getting at all salty about dice luck.

The final thing I liked about best-of-one was that with 60 players and six rounds we ended up with exactly one player on six wins at the end, which was great. In four rounds of best-of-three you usually have to rely on glory difference or glory scored to determine the winner, which means that people are motivated to choose warbands which have high glory scoring potential. Having a single clear winner on tournament points feels much cleaner.

Overall thoughts on the event

It was a really fun day, and I’m hyped to play more Underworlds now. I was there with friends from my regular practice group, we normally play our games online over webcam so it was great to see them properly and have a chance to catch up. Everyone there was really friendly and I had a lot of nice chats over the course of the day with my opponents and with people playing on tables near me.

I was very happy to place in the top ten (just!), and enjoyed playing with Stormcoven. I think it’s time for a change now though, so I’m going to put them on the shelf for a bit and try something else. Most likely this will be going back to the Dread Pageant, my all-time favourite warband, and trying to make them work in Nemesis format for a local league that’s starting soon.

The Dread Pageant are so good