Warhammer Underworlds tournament report - February 2024

 Yesterday was the second Underworlds tournament run by the Agents of Sigmar (I blogged about the first one last November here). It was five rounds of best-of-one using the Nemesis format, which for non-Underworlds aficionados involves limited deck building with a warband deck and one of the pre-built Rivals decks.

I’d initially planned on taking Daggok’s Stab Ladz, the recently released Kruleboyz warband. However, I’d had a pretty terrible run of practice games with them and hadn’t won a single game with them in the Nemesis format, so I decided to cut my losses. My fallback was Hexbane’s Hunters with the Malevolent Masks deck, which I managed to get all of five practice games in with prior to the event.

Hexbane’s Hunters are a warband of four witch hunters, some more melee focused and some more range focused, and two dogs. The warband has a special rule that when one of the hunters dies you can equip an upgrade for free onto one of the others, so the way they play is that you will inevitably lose some of them – they’re pretty fragile – but as the game goes on you can make the survivors increasingly powerful. They have some very strong ploy and upgrade cards, with a lot of tricks up their sleeves. The dogs aren’t much use individually, but can be used to support the others’ attacks, and are very mobile.

The eponymous Haskel Hexbane, leader of my warband

I’ve played Hexbane’s on and off since they were released, but never enough to feel like I’ve really ‘got good’ with them. They’re a warband with quite a high skill ceiling, and to play them well you need to be able to adapt to a lot of different situations depending what you’re facing and which of your fighters are still alive.

I paired Hexbane’s with the new Malevolent Masks rivals deck, which is themed around a set of mask upgrades. These each give the wearer a powerful action they can do, but also combine with various ploys and objectives in the deck – for example, there is an objective that requires a fighter with a mask upgrade to take someone out of action, and one for a fighter with a mask upgrade to be holding an objective. It’s a decent fit for Hexbane’s because the ability to upgrade one of your fighters when another dies can help you to get the mask upgrades out early and not brick your deck with a hand of unscoreable objectives at the start of the game when you don’t have any glory points to play upgrades with. At least, that’s the theory! The deck had worked reasonably well in the few practice games I’d played, so I went into the tournament feeling cautiously optimistic though under-prepared. One of its strengths is that it tends to have strong third end phase scoring: I have a fair few two and three glory end phase objective cards in the deck, so there is potential to score six or seven glory in the third end phase to swing the game if the objectives come out in a good order.

On the other hand, I was very conscious that I’d not practiced as much as I'd have liked to. In particular, I wasn’t feeling confident about making decisions on when to discard my cards and redraw at the start of the game, which is something that I find I get a much better sense of the more I practice a deck.

Game 1 vs Joseph with Headsman’s Curse/Toxic Terrors

The Headsman’s Curse are a Nighthaunt warband of four ghosts. The leader has a massive sword and does a tonne of damage, while the other three are significantly less scary but have various ways to buff and support the leader. Joseph was running them with Toxic Terrors, a poison themed deck that can apply debuffs to enemy fighters. Joseph is a young player, but I started the previous Agents tournament by losing to a teenager who went on to win the event, so I wasn’t going to under-estimate him (and as it turned out, he played very well).

I started the tournament by bricking my deck completely: I drew a hand of objectives that required mask upgrades, and no mask upgrades. I discarded my hand of power cards and once again drew… no mask upgrades. I was running five masks out of twenty cards, and by this stage had gone through ten cards, so this was pretty unlucky, but something that I need to be prepared for the potential to happen. I used my first activation of the game to draw a power card and fortunately this did finally give me a mask, but the first round didn’t go well for me: I missed a few attacks and failed to kill any of his fighters, and he didn’t kill any of my hunters so I wasn’t able to play the mask upgrade to get my deck moving. At the end of round one Joseph had scored a few objectives and I’d scored nothing.

As usual I failed to take any photos of my games, but this is what the Headman's Curse look like

Normally with Headsman’s Curse my tactic is to focus on trying to kill the leader as early as possible, but in this case Joseph had deployed him quite far back so he didn’t get into the fight in the first round, and I wasn’t able to attack him without moving one of my fighters closer and giving him an easy target (which I didn’t want to do). Joseph also gave him an extra wound with an upgrade, so I switched my plan to trying to stay out of the leader’s way as much as possible while killing the supporting ghosts.

In the second round my deck came good, and I was able to score some surge objectives and start scoring glory and cycling through my objectives. I killed two of his fighters, though he brought one of them (the Scriptor) back. Headsman’s Curse have a few ways to bring back dead ghosts and I think the Scriptor came back two or three times over the course of the game. However, this actually worked a bit in my favour, as ghosts that are raised come back with a wound which brought him into easy one shot kill range, so I was able to kill him repeatedly and score glory from the kills.

Joseph has been steadily killing off my fighters so I didn’t have many left by the end of the game, but once my deck started moving my objectives came out in a good order so I was scoring consistently, and ended up winning it 14-11. I nearly had a hero moment involving a card called ‘Maskborn’, which lets me bring back a dead fighter with a mask upgrade to make one action before they die again. I used this on Aemos, my most melee focused fighter, who has an incredible upgrade called Woodcutter’s Strength that increases the damage of his attacks for every success rolled. I think it’s possible to get Aemos to do eight damage with this attack with my deck, though I’ve never made that happen in practice. In this case I brought him back with Maskborn for a cheeky attack on the Headsman which if I’d rolled hot could have killed him, but what actually happened was that Aemos completely fluffed it and faded away having achieved exactly nothing.

However, I was very happy to start the tournament with a win, and to have recovered from a bad starting hand.

Game 2 vs Dave with Myari’s Purifiers/Force of Frost

Dave is a regular opponent of mine, and we’d actually played a practice match with our tournament decks in the week prior to the event, so we both knew what we were getting into. Myari’s Purifiers are a Lumineth warband with four fighters, they can dish out a fair bit of damage and have a few ways to get rerolls on their dice which makes them quite accurate, but they don’t have a lot of wounds. Force of Frost is a magic heavy Rivals deck which is one of the more common decks in the current meta, it has some powerful spells and a few cards that can be game changers in the right situation.

The fighter who is probably the biggest threat in Myari’s Purifiers is called Bahannar, he has a big hammer that hits for three damage at range two. That’s enough to one-shot any fighter in my warband, so I have to be pretty wary of him. He also has good defensive stats, so it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying and failing to kill him and leaving your fighters standing round him like sitting ducks.

We both deployed fairly cagily. I didn’t kill anyone in round one, but I was able to score some objectives, including a two glory objective called Proof Of Guilt for all of Dave’s fighters being in the same player’s territory (his own) at the end of the round. He killed Brydget – one of my witch hunters who can be powerful if she survives, but is the most fragile of the witch hunters and so often dies first – and one of my dogs. At the end of the first round things felt pretty even.

Round two was about jockeying for kills: I was desperate to kill Aileen, an elf with a sword who gets very accurate once inspired, and he was trying to kill Aemos, who I’d got a few good upgrades on. Eventually both of them died, but he missed a few attacks into Aemos first which meant that he didn't achieve much else with the round.

This is Dave's warband, which came in second place for best painted at the event

Going into round three, he had Bahannar and Myari (his leader) left alive, and I had Hexbane (my leader) and Quiet Pock, who has a very strong ranged attack but can only make it once per round. Both of his fighters had upgrades that were reducing how much damage they took, so I was realistically only going to be able to kill one of them, and I decided to target Myari as they had already taken a wound, and have slightly less good defensive stats than Bahannar. I don’t remember the exact order of events here, because it was complicated by Dave playing Time Freeze which is a card that essentially changes the order of activations, so I had two turns in a row and then Dave had two turns in a row. But what ended up happening was that Bahannar killed Hexbane, Pock did some damage to Myari with his ranged attack, and then Dave had a choice of whether to run Myari away or commit and try to kill Pock. He opted to commit, and that gave me another chance to attack Myari. At this stage Pock only had his (pretty rubbish) melee attack which represents him using his crossbow as a club. But he only needed to do one damage, and I had a few cards in my hand that I could use to give him extra dice for his attack, so I buffed him up and he successfully clubbed Myari over the head with his crossbow and took them out.

At this stage despite my success in killing Myari I was expecting to lose, the score was 12-11 to me going into the final end phase, but despite normally having strong end game scoring with my deck, this time I didn’t have anything in hand that I could score, and I was expecting Dave to be able to score something to overtake me. However, as it turned out, he didn’t have any end phase scoring either, so I squeaked a one glory win.

Game 3 vs Jon with Lady Harrow’s Mournflight/Force of Frost

Lady Harrow’s Mournflight are a warband of four banshees, that all look much the same. They have very strong passive glory scoring, inspire easily, and once inspired have some pretty decent stats. I’d not played against them for a long time as no one in my regular group runs them, and that lack of familiarity hurt me in this game as I made a number of mistakes.

Jon was pairing them with Force of Frost, which isn’t necessarily an obvious choice as they don’t have any wizards. However, they have a very good warband Rivals deck, so Jon was able to pick and choose a few cards from Force of Frost to balance out the weaknesses in their deck, while ignoring the more magic focused aspects of Force of Frost.

I made a couple of mistakes right at the start of this game: firstly, I discarded my objective hand when I shouldn’t have done. I can’t remember exactly what I drew, but I think it was a number of surges that were dependent on making successful attacks or taking fighters out of action. I was expecting Jon to play pretty defensively, so I risked discarding them, and drew into a terrible hand of end phase objectives that I was unlikely to be able to score round one. The second thing I did wrong was to move one of my dogs into Jon’s territory early on to provide support for an attack. Normally this is standard play for Hexbane’s: the first dog killed doesn’t give away any glory, so you can afford to take risks with them. However, Lady Harrow’s inspire from moving through an enemy fighter, so Jon pointed out after the game that moving the dog up had given him an easy way to inspire and had allowed him to play much more aggressively than he normally would have done. Lesson learned for another time.

Jon played quite aggressively in the first round, taking advantage of being able to move through the dog I'd moved forwards to inspire his fighters. He took out Brydget, and I took out one of his towards the end of the round. I didn’t manage to score any objectives though, and he scored a fair few, so he had a decent lead at the end of round one.

Round two was quite bloody: I killed two of his including Lady Harrow (his leader), and he killed Hexbane and Aemos, so going into the final round it was Pock and the dogs vs the final banshee. We probably scored pretty evenly in this round, so Jon was still leading going into round three.

An actual in-game photo, taken by my opponent (thanks Jon!). Hexbane faces off against three banshees.

In the final round he went first and killed Pock. I had one of the dogs equipped with a mask upgrade called Victrix’s Eye which lets the dog make a ranged attack that I like to think of as a laser eye, so I had potential to kill the banshee, who was already wounded. However, I ended up in a situation where I had a number of options for how to score glory but they required me to do mutually exclusive things so I couldn't do all of them. I ended up moving the dogs around to score some positional objectives, but I couldn’t get enough end phase glory to catch up, and lost 15-11.

This was definitely a game where my lack of practice hurt me: Jon clearly knew his warband and deck very well and played it well, while I didn’t know his warband well enough and that showed. I had to keep checking how many wounds each fighter had and things like that: the banshees get an extra wound when they inspire which is easy to forget about, and because the playing space was quite cramped there wasn’t enough space to lay out the fighter cards and upgrades in a way that made it easy to look across and see exactly what was happening. There was one point in round two where I attacked with Hexbane hoping to get a kill, only to find out that the fighter he was attacking had four wounds when I’d expected her to have three, which was an unpleasant surprise. Obviously that’s entirely on me, I should have confirmed in advance of making the attack how many wounds they had, so I was kicking myself in hindsight. Definitely a lesson learned, and I’ll be trying to find a way to get some practice games into Lady Harrow’s before the next tournament I go to.

Game 4 vs Simon with Cyreni’s Razors/Force of Frost

For game four I went from the unknown to the familiar: Simon is another regular opponent, and as with my game against Dave we’d played a practice game with these warbands in the week before the tournament.

Cyreni’s Razors are an Idoneth Deepkin warband of four fighters, who inspire at a different point in each round and then uninspire again. Their other defining mechanic is the leader’s ‘Hammertide’ ability, which allows her to ping a damage off the first enemy fighter in a straight line from her. Because my warband has pretty low health fighters that can be a real problem for me: Pock and Brydget only have two wounds each, so I have to be very careful to not give away an easy kill with them, especially if they’ve taken a wound already from something else.

Si chose to offset the boards, and deployed fairly defensively, with his leader in a position where I couldn’t avoid having at least one fighter in a position where he could hit them with Hammertide. What I did was to put a dog at the front of that row, with Aemos behind the dog (Hammertide hits the first fighter in the line, so as long as the dig was there, it couldn’t hit Aemos). As expected, Si played it pretty safe in round 1, and spent the first two turns using Hammertide to take out my dog. He also used a ploy card on Aemos to make it so that I couldn’t move him without taking a wound, which was pretty annoying as it meant that I couldn’t get him out the way of the Hammertide. However, he wouldn’t be able to kill Aemos that round with Hammertide, so I decided to leave him where he was and concentrate on doing what I needed to do elsewhere to score objectives

I ended up killing one of the Namarti in round one, and then got lucky and killed the other with Brydget in the first activation of round  two, which left me in a pretty good position. Si had put a load of upgrades on Cyreni, so I decided to try to stay away from her as much as possible, and focus on killing his other fighter (Cephanyr the squid) and scoring my objectives. We ended up with Cyrene vs Pock and Hexbane in round three; while Cyreni was heavily buffed up she could still only do two damage in one attack to my fighters, which wouldn’t kill either of them (Pock usually only has two wounds, but I’d played an upgrade on him to take him to three), so I was able to play keep-away and keep both of mine alive. This was important as I had a three glory objective to have more fighters with mask upgrades than there were surviving enemy fighters, which having two fighters alive both with mask upgrades allowed me to score. We were pretty close on glory at the end of round three, but I had a hand full of end phase objectives all of which I could score, so I got six glory in the third end phase and came out with a 17-13 win.

Simon's warband. Cyreni is second from the right with the fancy hat.

Game 5 vs Mike with the Thricefold Discord/Force of Frost

Mike is yet another regular opponent, though he only switched to the Thricefold Discord shortly before the tournament so I hadn’t played against him with that warband before. I know the Thricefold Discord pretty well having played with them in a couple of tournaments recently, but I’ve not played much against them, so it was an interesting one trying to think through how to approach the match-up. The Discord have three fighters with very different stats: one is very slow and inaccurate but hits hard, one is very fast and accurate but fragile, and the third is somewhere in the middle and is a level two wizard.

I drew a bunch of objectives that needed masks, and once again struggled to get the masks out round one, so it was low scoring. Mike didn’t score a huge amount either though, and I was able to kill Vashtiss, the strongest wizard in the warband, in round one. In round two I focused on killing Lascivyr, the smallest of his fighters, and the one I was most scared of because they are very accurate and could pretty reliably kill most of my warband if left alive. Mike had put an upgrade on Lascivyr that reduced the damage they took, so I ended up killing them one wound at a time, largely by using the mask that gives a laser beam attack action, which I’d equipped on Aemos. There’s a ploy card that allows a fighter to make the action on a mask they’re wearing, so I used that to get an extra out of sequence attack action which helped a lot.

Going into round three it was pretty close on glory. I still had Hexbane, Brydget, Pock and one of the dogs alive, and Mike just had Vexmor, his leader, who had six wounds but was only able to move one hex because of the downside of an upgrade they had on them, so had limited mobility. The Thricefold Discord have a series of ploys called ‘temptations’ where the opponent has to choose between two different outcomes, and Mike brought a bunch of those out here to try to get me to push Hexbane nearer to Vexmor. I managed to avoid any pushes, but I did have to take an effect that meant I couldn’t activate Hexbane for the round, so he was stuck in place and eventually got skewered by Vexmor. That left Vexmor out of position on one side of the board though, and I knew I had a strong hand for third end phase scoring, so rather than trying to kill Vexmor I equipped the rest of my fighters with masks and ran them away. I then scored six glory in the final end phase to win 11-9.

I think I got quite lucky in this game to be honest, Mike had some terrible dice with Vexmor so Hexbane survived longer than he had any right to. Additionally, I’d completely forgotten that the Discord have a three glory end phase objective for having only the leader alive in either warband – if Mike had had that card in hand at the end, he’d have been able to score it to win. It turned out that he didn’t actually have the card in his deck, but there was no way for me to have known that, so I was actually very lucky that I forgot about it as otherwise I would have probably tried to kill Vexmor and likely ended up losing in the process.

Mike's warband. Vexmor is in the middle.

Wrap-up

That left me with a 4-1 record for the tournament, which I was very happy with! I came in fourth out of twenty-three, which definitely exceeded my expectations given how little practice I’d had with the deck. I think I got a bit lucky with some of the match-ups, unlike some of the other players who went 4-1 I didn’t have to play the winner (who was running Hedkrakka’s Madmob, a very aggressive warband that would probably have stomped all over me), and I also avoided matching into anyone with the Voidcursed Thralls rivals deck, which can stop fighters making ranged attacks and I suspect is potentially a pretty rough match-up for me unless I play around it very well, which I’ve not had the practice in doing. But doing well in a tournament always involves a certain amount of luck, so I’ll take it when it comes, and I’m sure there will be a time in future when it cuts the other way.

Overall it was a really fun day, there was a good turnout with a lot of strong players, and the London/Surrey/South-of-England community seems to be going from strength to strength. While I play regularly with some of the attendees, there are others who I only tend to see at tournaments, and it’s nice to catch up with people and play against some different warbands.