Warhammer Underworlds Grand Clash event report - April 2024

Another Underworlds tournament, another blog. Yesterday I went to a Nemesis format Underworlds Grand Clash at Warhammer World. It was six rounds of best-of-one, which I think is the first Nemesis event in this format at Warhammer World.

I’m going to run through my games as usual, but also talk a bit about the current meta.

I have no idea what’s going on

This was an interestingly timed tournament, because there has been a shedload of new releases for Underworlds recently. In the last month, we’ve had seven new warbands released (three brand new ones: Zondara’s Gravebreakers, the Skinnerkin, the Brethren of the Bolt, and four re-vamped warbands from earlier seasons with updated cards and abilities: Zarbag’s Gitz, Mollog’s Mob, Spiteclaw’s Swarm, and the Thorns of the Briar Queen). There have also been three new Rivals decks: Rimelocked Relics, Hungering Parasite, and Rimewyrm’s Bite. To top it all off, a few days before the clash we got a new FAQ that included some significant nerfs to the Ephelim’s Pandaemonium warband and the Force of Frost Rivals deck. All of this meant that pre-clash I felt like I had less of a grasp on the competitive meta than I’ve ever had going into a tournament.

Before the tournament I’d played exactly one game with or against most of the new stuff, except for Thorns of the Briar Queen and the Hungering Parasite deck, which I’d not seen in action at all. So I didn’t exactly feel well prepared, but then again I doubt many of the other players did either – there have just been too many new releases recently for anyone except the most dedicated of players to have got enough practice in to be familiar with all of it.

I think the general sense I had pre-tournament from chatting to my regular practice opponents and looking at what people were talking about on social media was that no one was expecting any of the new warbands to set the world on fire, but that the new Rivals decks all looked pretty strong. I was worried about the ping damage potential of Rimewyrm’s Bite, as historically ping damage has been very strong in Underworlds. But most of the talk was focused on the Hungering Parasite Rivals deck, which is a weird and wonderful deck that’s different to anything we’ve seen before.

The gist of Hungering Parasite is that it comes with a special upgrade called Bane of Heroes, which is pretty much always in play – when you kill the fighter with it, it comes back onto another fighter at the end of the turn. It’s a debuff upgrade that staggers the fighter with it and everyone around them, and most of the cards in the Parasite deck interact with it in some way. It has a lot of weird interactions with other mechanics, some of which are going to need an FAQ to clarify them, and it felt very possible to me going into the clash that someone would have figured out a completely broken combo with it. Warhammer World run monthly Underworlds tournaments on a Friday night, so there was one the evening before the clash, and that was won by a Parasite deck, which further fuelled my fears! In the event though, these were proven wrong, and while some Parasite decks performed well at the clash they didn’t by any means dominate the event.

What did people take?

I was really interested to see what the mix of old and new stuff was, so I spent this morning going through the placings producing some stats on which warbands and decks people ran. Here are some charts showing the frequency of different warbands and Rivals decks. (Caveat: these are unofficial stats produced manually by me trawling through the roster from the event. No one else has checked them, so it's not impossible I've made the odd mistake. There were seven players who didn't upload a decklist, so the stats on Rivals deck pairings aren't complete).

Some reflections on this:

•  This feels like a very healthy mix. While a few warbands were particularly popular, overall there were 33 different warbands taken, and I think every Rivals deck except Seismic Shock got a look-in (note that there were a few people who didn’t upload a deck list, so I don’t know which Rivals deck they took).
• Some of the stuff that has been very strong in the last year has fallen off a lot. While seven people took the Force of Frost Rivals deck, the highest placing of them came in 44^th place (out of 92), and no Domitan’s Stormcoven or Ephelim’s Pandaemonium player finished higher than 44^th either.
• Four fighter aggro warbands are very popular, with Gnarlspirit Pack, Crimson Court, and Hedkrakka’s Madmob showing up in large numbers. However, looking at how these warbands placed, they’re spread throughout the standings and not clustered towards the top.
• The two players who won all six of their games took combinations of warbands and Rivals decks that no one else ran (Sepulchral Guard with Rimelocked Relics, and Exiled Dead with Beastbound Assault).
• The highest placing Hungering Parasite deck was paired with Hexbane’s Hunters, which surprised me as I’d expected Parasite to be predominantly paired with more aggro warbands (more on this later, as I played against the Hexbane’s Parasite deck).
• Rimelocked Relics, the Rivals deck that the winning player was using, was only taken three times, and the players who ran it came in 1^st, 52^nd, and 80^th, not sure what to take from that but it tickled me.
• There were very few older warbands, though possibly this is partly because some of the popular ones have now got a revamp. I think there was only one non-updated warband from the first two seasons (one player ran Grashrak’s Despoilers).
• The very new warbands generally didn’t perform all that well. Twelve players ran the recently released warbands, of whom nine finished in the bottom half. That might speak more to lack of opportunity to practice than anything about the strength of the warbands, though.

I’m really interested to see how the meta develops. There are lots of warbands and deck combos I want to try out now that there’s not the pressure of needing to practice for the clash, so it feels like an exciting time for the game.

My road to the tournament

The last time I blogged I’d just gone 4-1 at a local tournament with my Hexbane’s Hunters/Malevolent Masks deck. My plan following that was to switch warbands and get practice in with something else for the grand clash. I ended up picking Headman’s Curse, a warband which I’d not used much before but was keen to try out.

I then had an absolute nightmare month of losing almost every game I played. Headman’s Curse are a swingy warband, you’re quite reliant on the leader getting kills, and sometimes it can go badly if the dice abandon you. But I was doing worse with them than I could blame on dice luck: I think at one point I had an eight game losing streak with them. I tried a few different Rivals decks with them, probably the most common pairing with Headsman’s is Tooth and Claw which is generally a good match for aggro warbands, but I wanted to run something a bit different if I could, so I initially tried them with Toxic Terrors and then with Rimelocked Relics. But I did end up switching to Tooth and Claw in the end, since I was doing so badly I felt I’d better stop trying to be unique and special and just do whatever it took to get some wins. Things did improve a little bit, and I had a couple of games where the dice favoured me and I got convincing wins.

Everything came to a head on the Tuesday before the tournament, when I played against my friend Amit’s Lady Harrow’s Mournflight and got absolutely smashed – I risked everything on an attack that failed to a double crit defence, and got wiped out without scoring a single glory. I decided at that point that a) I didn’t fancy being that dependent on dice luck for the clash, and b) I had by this point lost so many games with Headsman’s Curse that I needed to accept that it wasn't just about bad luck and I was Not Very Good with them. So I changed my mind about taking them to the clash.

I fell back on Hexbane’s Hunters as my plan B, because I still had the Malevolent Masks deck that I’d done well with at my previous tournament, and I was confident I still knew that deck well enough to play it competently. However, going into the clash I’d only played one game with it in the last month, and I hadn’t tried it against any of the new releases, so I felt extremely under-prepared.

At the tournament

I love Underworlds Grand Clashes. Going to Warhammer World is always fun, and there was a really good atmosphere for the clash. There were ninety-two players which I think is probably the most there’s been at a post-pandemic Underworlds tournament in the UK (tell me in the comments if I'm wrong), and almost everyone from my regular practice group attended, so I knew a lot of people there. I mostly play practice games over webcam rather than face-to-face, so it was great to see my friends in the flesh, including meeting a couple of them in real life for the first time.

Since playing in chess competitions as a kid I’ve always loved competitive two player gaming. I think the pressure helps me focus, and I definitely have a higher win rate in tournaments than I do in practice games.

My warband and deck

Hexbane’s Hunters are a six fighter warband with a lot of low wound fighters. The idea behind them is that they get stronger as some of them die: when a hunter is killed you can drop an upgrade from your hand onto a surviving hunter for free, and they have some very strong upgrades and power cards. I paired them with Malevolent Masks, a deck built around mask upgrade cards that give fighters various special actions. The Mask upgrades aren’t that great in isolation, but they interact with the objectives and ploys in the Masks deck to give some decent passive glory (ways to score without interacting with the enemy), and some powerful abilities. I’d found that it paired well with Hexbane's, because the warband mechanics make it easy to get the mask upgrades into play and avoid bricking your deck by having a hand of objectives that require upgrades in play but no glory to play upgrades with.

Game 1 – vs Andy with Spiteclaw’s Swarm/Breakneck Slaughter

Spiteclaw’s Swarm are a skaven warband, originally released in the Shadespire season but recently re-released with updated cards and abilities. They’re quite a flexible warband, built around a mechanic that lets them bring back fighters when they die. They’re very fast, and Andy had paired them with the Breakneck Slaughter deck that makes them even faster. I’m not very familiar with the new version of this warband, and I’d played Andy once before in a clash and knew that he was a good player, so I expected this to be a tough match-up.

It ended up being a very high scoring game, as we were both more focused on following our game plan than stopping the opponent from following theirs (in my defence, I didn’t have a great idea of what his game plan was). I killed a couple of his minions early and started moving through my objective deck, though he promptly brought the minions back into play. I then got a nasty surprise where one of his fighters had a scything attack (lets you attack every fighter around you) that I’d been ignoring because it only did one damage, but he had a ploy that gave them +1 damage for a whole activation, and took out two of my fighters.

I ended up scoring my entire objective deck except for Completed Pact (a third end phase cards that needs me to have more fighters with mask upgrades than my opponent has surviving fighters, which is very hard to score against anyone who can bring back out of action fighters), and farming a lot of glory off repeatedly killing his minions. I killed his leader at the start of the third round which was a big swing, I definitely had the luck of the dice in this game as Hexbane seemed to roll nothing but crits for his attacks. However, Andy was scoring a lot too, and since I couldn’t bring back my fighters when he killed them, it ended up with three of his fighters alive at the end against only Hexbane on my side. It came down to the final end phase scoring. It ended up being 20-18 to me, and we figured out that if Andy had done something different with his final activation he could have denied me two glory and won on a tiebreaker, so it was a really close game. But I was very happy to start off with a win, and pleased that my deck had performed well.

As per usual I failed to take many photos of my games, instead here's a photo of me at the clash with my friends from the London Underworlds community (increasingly not actually very London based as we have attracted some non-Londoners to our weekly webcam games).

Game 2 – vs James with Hexbane’s Hunters/Hungering Parasite

I expected that at some point during the event I would get a lesson in how the Parasite deck works, but I hadn’t expected it to be paired with Hexbane’s Hunters! Mirror matches in Underworlds can sometimes be a bit unfun as they have a tendency to come down to whose best fighter can kill the other person’s best fighter first, but the Hexbane’s mirror match is one of the better ones since you’re not dependent on any individual fighter in the warband. In this case we also had very different Rivals deck pairings, and it ended up being a really interesting game.

James started the Bane of Heroes upgrade off on Aemos, the most melee focused of the witch hunters, but it ended up moving around all over the place during the game including onto several of the dogs. We traded off fighters throughout, the Bane of Heroes upgrade  staggers the fighter with it and everyone around them, so a lot of attacks were going into staggered fighters which ended up being pretty deadly. (Stagger lets you reroll a dice in attacks against a staggered fighter, so it makes it easier to kill them).

James outscored me for the early part of the game, but then I got a few good kills and got my objective deck working, so I was slowly catching up. Eventually it came down to his Hexbane (with the Bane of Heroes upgrade) against my Quiet Pock and Grotbiter (Pock is a ranged focused hunter, and Grotbiter is a dog). There was a crunch moment where he missed a five dice attack with Hexbane to take out my Aemos, which would have been huge, but he had a ploy that let him redo the attack and I didn’t get that lucky a second time!

I misplayed the third round: I elected not to try to kill Hexbane, because it was going to be pretty dicey (he was quite buffed up with upgrades), and because I didn’t know what objectives the parasite deck had, and was worried that he might be able to score off me killing him. But I hadn’t properly thought through what I would be able to score without killing him, and as it turned out I just didn’t have the glory to catch up. So the better play would have been to have taken a risk and gone for the kill, and if it had worked I might have just been able to catch him. But as it was, he came out the winner 18-14. It was a very fun game, and given I’d never played against the parasite deck before I didn’t think I did too badly.

One learning point from this game is that I need a fifth mask upgrade in my deck: had I had a mask upgrade to play on Grotbiter at the end, I could have scored another five glory from objectives. But I’d gone through them all already, wasting one to score a surge objective for playing two upgrades on the same fighter in a round, which in hindsight I shouldn’t have done. If I keep playing this deck I think I’ll add an extra upgrade and power card, since I got through the whole of my power deck in several of my games.

Game 3 – vs Sam with Zondara’s Gravebreakers/Daring Delvers

Zondara’s Gravebreakers are one of the newer warbands. They have Zondara (a necromancer), Ferlain (her love, cursed into the form of a wolf-like beast), and three zombies. They’re not particularly strong initially, but have some very good upgrades they can use to buff Zondara and Ferlain. They also have a mechanic that lets them move objective tokens around the board, which combos well with the exploration mechanic from the Daring Delvers deck. I’d played against this warband and deck combo once before, so I expecting Sam to set up very defensively and he didn’t disappoint me.

Given that, I set up very aggressively, and focused on trying to get my deck moving by taking out zombies and scoring glory. Unfortunately, in this game I had the flip side of my good dice luck from the first game, and my fighters couldn’t roll successes to save their lives. Sam was able to exploit the risky way I was throwing my fighters forward in search of kills, and he took out Aemos in round one and Hexbane and Pock in round two, which left me with only my three weakest fighters alive.

At this point, however, both my dice and my deck came good. I dropped mask upgrades onto Bridget and the dogs, and they were able to farm zombies for glory and score most of my surge objectives. I stayed away from Sam’s stronger fighters, and he was focused on his own game plan rather than chasing me all over the board, so I was able to survive and keep scoring. My deck is designed to have a strong third end phase, and it came good here – I think I scored five or six glory in the third end phase, ending up with a 16-16 draw. I’d been behind for the whole game and I honestly hadn’t expected to catch up, so I think we were both quite surprised when we realised that I hadn’t lost.

That meant that at the half way point of the tournament I was 1.5-1.5, which I was pretty happy with. Given my lack of preparation I’d decided in advance of the event that my goal was just to go 3-3 or better, so I was perfectly on track for that.

My recently painted Zondara's Gravebreakers

Game 4 – vs Adam with Drepur’s Wraithcreepers/Tooth and Claw

At this point it was starting to feel like quite a long day, and we didn’t have a lot of time between games, so my notes for this game are unfortunately a bit lacking. Drepur’s are a four fighter aggro warband that have some very good faction cards that give them solid all-round useful abilities like extra damage and pushes. I won the roll-off for boards and long boarded Adam, in the hope that he might not be able to get into me round 1.

The game started off badly: the long-board didn't help much, he killed a couple of my fighters round 1 and I didn’t manage to kill any of his. My objective deck bricked a bit, and I only scored one glory in the first round, so as was rapidly becoming a theme I found myself well behind in round 2 and trying to catch up.

I got a bit of momentum going with the Retractable Pistol upgrade on Hexbane, which lets him make a reaction shot when someone moves near him, and put some damage on Adam's fighters. I killed the two weaker fighters in Adam’s warband, but he killed Hexbane with his leader at the start of round three, which left me with only the two dogs alive. I had a chance to kill his leader with the Maskborn ploy, which lets me bring back a dead fighter to make one attack, but I brought back Hexbane and unfortunately despite being heavily buffed up with upgrades he whiffed the attack. If that had worked I think I might well have won, but as it was I just couldn’t catch up enough and I lost 13-14.

All my games so far had been very close: I’d had a two glory win, a four glory loss, a draw, and a one glory loss. So while this loss put me 1.5-2.5 down for the day, I was having a blast – I’d played four really tight games and my opponents had all been friendly and engaging players. I was very keen to get at least one more win in the last two rounds though.

Game 5 – vs Alex with Thorns of the Briar Queen/Rimelocked Relics

The Thorns of the Briar Queen are another of the recently re-released warbands. I hadn’t played against them in their new incarnation, but back in the Nightvault season I played a lot against the old version of the warband. The general idea is that they have a lot of fairly weak chainrasps, which can be pushed around the board to hold objectives and provide supports for stronger fighters. I knew that the Rimelocked Relics deck leant itself to a hold objective playstyle, so I was expecting that to be Alex’s game plan.

This ended up being my favourite game of the tournament, Alex was a lovely guy and it was another super close game. I got unlucky with my power card draws and only drew one mask upgrade in the first two rounds, which made things tricky as it was hard to score my objectives without having the masks out. However, I was able to steadily kill off his weaker chainrasps, so while I wasn’t scoring much glory from objectives I was getting some glory from kills. Killing his fighters also helped limit his glory a bit, so while he was ahead of me on glory for most of the game having scored steadily, he wasn’t out of reach.

There was a crunch moment at the end of round 1 when Alex rolled a double crit defence with a chainrasp to stop Hexbane from killing it and inspiring, which I was worried would be huge, but I think I was able to inspire Hexbane early in round 2 instead so it didn’t end up being as bad as I’d feared.

I was able to kill Varclav (the second strongest of Alex’s fighters) with Hexbane in round 2, thanks to some good use of ploys to get out-of-sequence attacks, and towards the end of the third round he only had the Briar Queen alive facing off against Hexbane, Pock, and Grotbiter. I could tell by Alex’s play that he was trying to score objectives that needed him to kill my fighters, and I was never going to kill the Briar Queen as she was on full health and heavily buffed up. One of the masks in my deck gives a fighter an action that lets them push a fighter away from them: I’d never previously used this action, but in this case I was able to use it with Grotbiter to push the Briar Queen away so that she couldn’t get an attack in on Alex’s final activation. I then had a big third end phase of scoring once again, scoring Completed Pact (more fighters with mask upgrades than he has fighters) and Lives Well Spent (two hunters dead and I’d scored three objectives) to come from behind and win 15-14. It was a fantastic game, and Alex was a great opponent who hid any disappointment at losing by one glory very well.

After five very close games and a long day I was feeling shattered at this point, but there was still one game to go.

Game 6 – vs Jack with Headsman’s Curse/Toxic Terrors

Given the journey I’d been on with Headman’s Curse in the run-up to the event, it felt like a fitting end that I would play them in the final game of the day. I’d tried the Headman’s Curse/Toxic Terrors combo a bit in my ill-fated run with them, so I knew exactly what was going on, which was helpful given how tired I was.

This was really a game where everything went right for me. My objectives and power cards came out in a good order, while Jack struggled to get his scoring moving. Toxic Terrors has some nice debuff cards including a couple that can stop fighters from being able to charge, but because I have a lot of fighters that’s not as bad for me as it might be for some other warbands, he hit Aemos with one of those debuffs in the first round but it didn’t make much difference to my game plan.

I managed to get a couple of things working that I hadn’t previously in the event: I got an inspired Bridget into a position where she could make a very effective scything attack that put some damage on the Wielder of the Blade (Jack’s leader), and then I also got to make an attack with Aemos with Woodcutter’s Strength for the first meaningful time in the event. Woodcuttter’s Strength is an upgrade that gives Aemos extra damage for each success he rolls in the attack roll, which makes him terrifying. I sent him into the Wielder in round two and he did four damage in one attack and took him out, which left me in a very strong position. I again managed a big third end phase of scoring, and won 17-6.

I remembered to take a photo during the game! Here is Pock facing off against the Bearer of the Block.

Wrap-up

That left me on 3.5-2.5 for the day, which I was very happy with, especially given how unprepared I’d felt coming in. The top thirty-two players received alt-art cards and I managed to sneak into 32nd place, the only one of the top thirty-two not to go at least 4-2.

Excitingly, my friend and regular opponent Aaron won the event, going 6-0 with his Sepulchral Guard which was a great effort. Aaron is one of the nicest people in Underworlds and has been playing Sepulchral Guard for years, so it was great to see him do well with them.

Overall it was a fantastic day, I usually come away from tournaments feeling hyped to play more and this was no exception. I’m keen to try out some new things now, I want to get the new Brethren of the Bolt warband on the table, and I’m also tempted to go back to my old favourite warband the Dread Pageant and try them out with some of the newer Rivals decks.