Warhammer Underworlds tournament report - November 2023

Yesterday I went to an Underworlds tournament, so here’s an event report blog. The tournament was run by the Agents of Sigmar at the Gamers Guild store in Reigate. It was a five round best-of-one tournament using the Nemesis format, which is limited deckbuilding using a warband deck and any one Rivals deck. 

I took the Thricefold Discord, one of the warbands from the recent Deathgorge boxed set. I’ve played probably 10-15 games with them since they were released, but almost all in straight Rivals mode with just their warband deck. I’d only played two previous games with them in Nemesis and that was with the Tooth and Claw Rivals deck, which I decided was a poor choice for them and immediately binned off in favour of Fearsome Fortress. So I hadn’t played any practice games with the deck I took to the event. 

For people unfamiliar with the warband, the theme is that they are three Slaaneshi daemons who hate each other. In mechanics terms, this means that each one inspires when another one makes a roll with no successes. The three fighters have very different stats: Vexmor is slow and inaccurate, but has five wounds and hits for three damage; Vashtiss has four wounds with a decent ranged spell attack, and Lascivyr is speedy and accurate, but only has three wounds. 

They have some fun card mechanics, including ‘false gift’ upgrades that provide both a buff and a debuff, and can be given to enemy fighters – and ‘temptation’ gambit cards that give the opponent a choice of two possible effects. I was running them with the Fearsome Fortress deck, which is themed around being on or near feature tokens in the middle of the board. My untested theory was that this should work reasonably well, as I rarely go full aggro with the Discord so they’re often in or around the middle of the board, and it gives them some quite easy to score surge objectives to help them get off the mark. 

I didn’t take any photos of my games, so this is going to be a word heavy blog, but here’s a photo of my warband. 

From left to right: Vexmor, Lascivyr, Vashtiss

Game 1 vs Axel with Ephelim’s Pandaemonium/Seismic Shock 

I won the roll-off and foolishly elected to place three objectives, which meant my opponent could choose board orientation and promptly long boarded me. My immediate concern was that this was quite awkward in practice as the tables we were playing on were very small, but it was also a problem for me in game terms as it meant that he could sit at the back of the board and score passive glory (glory from objectives that don’t require taking out my fighters), which Ephelim’s are very good at. 

The story of this game for the first few rounds was that we both had terrible dice, and consistently rolled swords when we needed hammers to hit. That meant that I did quite well at inspiring my fighters, but not very well at killing anything. He put some wounds on Vashtiss early on but couldn’t finish her off, and I did the same with his fighter Spawnmaw, who he threw forward early on. I was able to keep Ephelim himself largely out of it with some false gifts (I reduced his line of sight to one hex to stop him casting spells, and also reduced his movement), but was struggling to score much glory myself, and because I couldn’t finish off Spawnmaw my fighters were stuck in the middle of the board and weren’t threatening Ephelim at all. 

It was close and low scoring for the first couple of rounds, but in round three Axel was able to finish off Vexmor and got too far ahead of me on glory, and I think I lost something like 8-12. I wasn’t too unhappy with this, it was a tough match-up, and as it turned out Axel went on to win the event so he clearly knew what he was doing. 

Game 2 vs Jon with Skittershank’s Clawpack/Tooth and Claw 

This game was rough for me. Skittershank’s Clawpack are a warband themed around taking out the enemy leader, and I made a mistake during deployment and deployed Vexmor at the front, thinking that I’d want to play quite aggressively to kill the relatively squishy rats. What actually happened was that Jon drew a great starting hand and was able to take out Vexmor on his second activation. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I think he did one wound to them with his first attack, then pulled them forward with a ploy and did another wound to them with a second ploy, and then charged in with his leader and managed to roll a crit to take them out. This was a huge blow for me, as it gave away a lot of glory, inspired the whole of my opponent’s warband, and removed my strongest fighter. 

I was never really going to come back from that, I gave it a reasonable shot with Vashtiss surviving until midway through the third round and taking out a couple of rats, but I was always behind on glory and ended up losing 7-12. I should definitely have deployed differently, this was the first time for a while I’d played against the Clawpack and it showed. If I’d deployed more defensively, while I might have struggled to score many objectives early on, I could also have denied him scoring and could potentially have baited out and killed a few rats so that he’d be less of a threat for later rounds. 

That left me on 0-2 going into lunch. I hadn’t come with particularly high expectations as I knew I was lacking practice with my warband, but I was definitely fearing the worst at this point! 

Game 3 vs David with Grinkrak’s Looncourt/Force of Frost 

For game 3 I was matched against my friend and regular opponent David, who was playing the Looncourt and had also had an unsuccessful morning. The Looncourt are generally thought to be one the weaker warbands, they have a lot of fairly weak fighters who can easily give away glory, and don’t have particularly strong objectives. That said, I knew that David had had a lot of practice with them, so I didn’t want to underestimate them. 

One advantage I did have was that while I was relatively inexperienced with the Thricefold Discord, so were my opponents. David hadn’t played against them before, and it would turn out that my opponents in my next two games hadn’t either. I obviously talked them through the basics to make sure there were no ‘gotchas’, but it’s always tricky to play against a warband when you don’t know what options their card pool gives them. 

In the first round I deployed quite defensively, as I knew the Looncourt had a few hard-hitting fighters (particularly the squig riding knight)and I wanted to try to draw them out. I was able to pull the grot catapult forward into a lethal hex in my territory with a temptation card early on, and took it out later in the round. I tried to nerf his squig knight by giving him a false gift to reduce its move, but David spent an action to break the card, and then charged the squig in to kill Vashtiss. 

I had a narrow lead going into round two, but things then swung decisively in my favour. David missed consecutive attacks with his squig knight and another heavily buffed grot, and that stopped him scoring a few objectives. I was then able to take both of them out with my remaining fighters, which left him without many real threats left on the board. 

In round three I got a lot of powerful upgrades out, and my fighters were also all inspired by now which does a lot to boost their accuracy. I mopped up all the remaining grots except his leader, which allowed me to score a three glory objective for one of the warbands having only a leader surviving. That gave me a 20-4 win to get me off the mark. It was a tough match-up for the grots, and I also had some good fortune with David missing some key attacks, and my objectives coming out in a close to perfect order which allowed me to score almost all of them for a high glory win. 

Game 4 vs Harry with Gryselle’s Arenai

Gryselle’s Arenai are a fun warband, they are pretty fragile, but fast, and once they get upgrades and buffs out they can dish out a huge amount of damage. I deployed quite defensively, knowing that they would definitely be wanting to bring the fight to me. 

Round one went pretty well for me, I killed two or three of his fighters and scored some of my surge objectives. He put wounds on most of my fighters, but didn’t manage to kill anyone. At this stage I felt things were going quite well, but his leader was still alive and unhurt, and I knew that she was by far the greatest threat. My opponent had also managed to score some high glory objectives, so we were fairly close on glory. 

The board state at the start of round two was that he had his leader within charge range of all my fighters, but his other fighter was further back. I think I won the roll off to go first, and was able to retreat with Vashtiss so that his further back fighter was out of charge range of all of mine. That was a big deal, because in Underworlds if any of your fighters don’t have a charge token, you can’t reactivate fighters who have charged. That meant he was only going to be able to make one activation with Gryselle (his leader) which was a big limiter for how much damage he could hope to do. 

Immediately I did that, however, my opponent upped the stakes by ensuring that if Gryselle was only going to get one shot, it was going to be a big one. He played a couple of buff cards that meant that all his attacks would have scything (meaning that they could attack multiple fighters), and would do additional damage on a crit. That meant that he could charge Gryselle into a place where she could attack both Vexmor and Lascivyr, and could potentially do enough damage to kill them both. I couldn’t do anything to stop this happening, so I just had to cross my fingers and hope that I got lucky. Fortunately the dice gods smiled on me and Gryselle missed both of her attacks, leaving her very exposed. I then spent a few activations attacking her back but missing, while my opponent’s surviving fighter moved up into a position where she’d be able to influence the game in the final round. 

In round three I had a choice: either try to take out Gryselle to vastly reduce the potential damage my opponent could put out, or leave her alive to try to score a three glory objective for a leader being the only surviving fighter in either warband. I opted to try to kill her, as I was pretty confident that if I could do that, I’d be far enough on glory anyway to win and my opponent would struggle to score much else. This worked out: I killed Gryselle, was able to take out my opponent’s remaining fighter as well, and wrapped up a 12-7 win. 

Game 5 vs Adam with Gorechosen of Dromm/Tooth and Claw 

At this stage I was very happy to have pulled it back to 2-2, and didn’t really mind too much whether I won my final game. Gorechosen is an interesting match-up: they’re another three fighter warband, with more wounds in total than me but less mobility. My opponent had the choice of whether to place three objectives or control board orientation, and went for objectives, which I think might have been a mistake as I was able to offset the boards a bit and make it difficult for him to get into me in the first round. 

The first round was very cagey, we both started off by drawing power cards as neither of us wanted to be the first to move a fighter into harms way. But eventually he did have to start moving up, and moved the Gore Hulk into the middle. I’d got a good hand of ploys so was able to do some shenanigans at this point: first pushing Lascivyr onto an objective that they then charged off to score Bold Sortie (score a glory for making a charge that starts from a feature token into your territory), and then using another card called Redeploy to push them back out of range again after they’d attacked. All that meant that I was able to put wounds on the Gore Hulk without putting any of my fighters at risk. I had the final turn of the round, and was faced with a choice: I could charge Vexmor in for a chance at taking out the Gore Hulk and to have them on an objective for some end phase glory, or play it safe and continue to hide at the back. I opted to charge in, and despite being uninspired and only rolling one dice for attacks, Vexmor got lucky and was able to take out the Gore Hulk. 

In round two Vexmor died, but I was able to use temptation cards to pull Dromm (his leader) out of position, and took Herax (his other surviving fighter) out by pinging him with spell damage from a safe distance and then charging in with Lascivyr to kill him. This was not without risk, as he had an upgrade that meant that if I’d not killed him he’d have been able to hit me back, but Lascivyr inspired is very accurate so I felt it was worth the risk. That meant I could score my three glory ‘only the leader left alive in one or more warbands’ objective in the second round end phase, which gave me a decent lead.

In round three, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and ran away. While I had two fighters left to his one, Dromm was heavily buffed by this stage and had a load of wounds, and as I was up on glory I didn’t need to chance it. So I made sure he couldn’t take out either of my fighters, and ran out a comfortable 13-6 win. 

Final result 

That left me on 3-2 for the day, which I was extremely happy with after my bad start. I came 7th out of 24, which was enough to net me some nice alt-art cards. The big win against the Looncourt probably helped me out a lot with the placings, as it meant I had a decent glory difference to push be ahead of some of the others who finished 3-2. 

Overall it was a really fun event, it was very well organised, and everyone there was great to play against and chat with. The main thing I think would have improved it would have been having larger tables for the games as it felt a bit cramped, but that just wasn’t possible in this venue without reducing the number of players, and the store was otherwise a very nice venue. 

One interesting rule that was in place for this event was that after the first game, the roll-off for choice of objectives or board alignment wasn’t random. Rather, it you’d lost more roll-offs than your opponent up to now, you automatically won the roll-off and got to choose. I’m undecided on what I think of this, it reduces the potential for bad feels if you lose every roll-off, but creates new potential for bad feels if you get a match-up where you know the roll-off matters more than usual (e.g. if you know your opponent is playing a defensive deck and will want to long board you) and you automatically lose it. I think on balance I would like the rule more if the roll-off mattered equally in every game, but because how important it is varies depending on the warband and playstyle of your opponent, I’d rather take my chances and roll dice every time. 

I was pleased with how my deck performed, I think Fearsome Fortress is a decent choice of deck to pair the Thricefold Discord with in Nemesis. The main thing I might change is looking to put in another high scoring end phase objective, as my total glory potential was relatively low. But all my objectives felt scorable, and by the end of the event I’d got to the point where I had a pretty good grip on what they were and what a good starting hand of objectives looked like. Ideally of course I’d have had this from the start of the event, but I’ll be better prepared for the next time I take them to a tournament!