Warhammer Underworlds tournament report - April 2025

 Yesterday I went to a 31 player Underworlds tournament in Redhill run by the Agents of Sigmar, so it’s time for another event recap blog. I’m not going to get into the detail of my games as much as I usually do in these blogs, because I didn’t make any notes on my games during the day. But I’ll talk a bit about how I’m finding Underworlds at the moment, and briefly cover how I got on at the event.

Tournament prep

Since the Grand Clash at Warhammer World in February, I’ve been struggling a bit to figure out what warband and deck I want to play. I was very happy with how I did at the grand clash with the Emberstone Sentinels/Countdown to Cataclysm deck pairing, but was also a bit bored of playing it as I’d barely played anything else in the new edition, so I wanted to try something different.

I tried out a few things, but nothing really stuck. I experimented a bit with Hexbane’s Hunters with the new Edge of the Knife deck (which is based on fighters being ‘tempered’: either having a wounds characteristic of two or less, or having taken two or more damage), but while it was quite fun to play it was also pretty bad (or at least I was pretty bad at playing it), and I wanted something that I felt I could be at least a bit competitive with. Then I tried the Dread Pageant, who are my all time favourite Underworlds warband, and who I think still have a decent ruleset in the new edition. But I feel like the best deck pairing for them is probably Emberstone Sentinels/Countdown to Cataclysm, which I didn’t really want to go back to, and also I was rapidly running out of time to get practice in before the next tournament and wasn’t sure I’d be able to get good enough with them to do them justice.

I was getting a bit frustrated by the Underworlds meta at this stage. I don’t generally like playing the warbands or decks that are the most popular, I like to take something that I think can be competitive but that people won’t be as familiar with and won’t give me loads of mirror matches. But with the new edition having more limited deck building than the old, I felt like the meta was starting to feel a bit ‘solved’ – most regular players by now have a very good idea of how different decks play. The warband pick can add some variety, but there are often one or two warbands that feel like the ‘best’ choices for each deck pairing, and if you take something else it can feel more like intentionally handicapping yourself than doing something interestingly different. So I was struggling to find a deck/warband pairing I was excited about.

Worth saying that a few weeks on from this, I'm feeling more optimistic about the meta than I was. I’ve seen a few people recently trying things that do feel interestingly different (e.g. the Spent Glory blog ran a great article recently about running Edge of the Knife with elite warbands), and from what I saw there was a decent mix of warbands and deck pairings at the tournament I’ve just been to, including some people trying out warbands that are perceived to be sub-optimal and having fun with them. We’re likely to see an FAQ soon that will shake things up, and each new deck that comes out leads to an increasingly large number of new deck pairing options. So I think the game is in a reasonable place, but I definitely had some moments of frustration while trying to find something I was excited to play.

By now the tournament was only a few weeks away, so I decided that what I needed was something that I felt I could get competitive with with a very minimal amount of practice. I opted for the Jaws of Itzl. This was for a few reasons: the Jaws lend themselves to aggro play which is a reasonably simple play style, and I’d played a lot of games against the Jaws, so I was pretty familiar with their abilities and how the warband works. I was also quite happy with the paint job on my Jaws, which is always a plus when taking a warband to an event. The Jaws are certainly a popular warband, but I felt that their popularity had dropped off a little bit since they first came out, and no one in my regular practice group was running them.

My Jaws of Itzl

I went for Blazing Assault/Countdown to Cataclysm for the deck pairing, because it’s quite flexible and I thought I would enjoy it more than I would the full-on aggro option of Blazing Assault/Reckless Fury. 

In the end I managed to get five practice games in. I did win all five, which was encouraging, but most of them were very close, and I felt like I had better than average dice luck across the games. Going into the tournament I felt like I had a reasonable idea how to pilot the warband and deck, but I definitely wasn’t as prepared as I’d have liked to have been. In particular, I would have liked more time to iterate on my deck and try out different cards, and I didn’t feel that I had a very good grasp on when I should mulligan my starting objective or power card hand.

My games

Game 1 vs Daniel with Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz, Pillage and Plunder/Blazing Assault

I was nervous about this match-up because I’d only ever played one game against the Beastgrabbaz. The warband have really solid stats, in particular almost all the fighters have two dice defence, which means that if the dice aren’t on my side I could potentially fail a lot of attacks. However, as it turned out the dice were very much on my side. I played very aggressively round one and was able to take out three fighters including Borgit. My opponent had deployed him quite defensively, but I had cards in my hand that gave me extra move and I was able to get an upgrade onto my leader that gave him cleave, so I took the chance and went for it and took Borgit out. That left me in a really solid position and I was able to score pretty well for the rest of the game, while denying Daniel his big scoring objectives, and won 15-7. I did roll two triple crits during this game, so there was definitely some good fortune involved.

The end of the game: my big lads are all still alive, while Daniel only has his trogg left

Game 2 vs Martyn with Ironsoul’s Condemners, Blazing Assault/Wrack and Ruin

I’d played and won a recent practice game into the Condemners, so I was reasonably confident going into this one. We both had some pretty bad dice at times and it was very low scoring for a while, I don’t think either of us scored a single objective during battle round 2. But I took out Ironsoul early in round 3 for a big glory swing, and was able to capitalise on that and score a bunch of other stuff to come away with a 15-3 win.

A late game photo: my saurus are facing off against Tavian, Martyn's last surviving fighter

Game 3 vs Jack with Grandfather’s Gardeners, Emberstone Sentinels/Countdown to Cataclysm

I’d never played a game with or against the Gardeners, so I was nervous going into this one. They have a warband mechanic that means when uninspired they can’t take more than two damage in a turn, which means that despite having a fighter who hits for three damage from the off, I can’t one shot them. I got off to a bad start and didn’t manage to do much damage at all in round 1, and Jack was able to score a bunch of end phase glory from holding treasure tokens. From that point onwards I was in catch up mode, but because I could only do two damage to fighters at a time I was having to invest a lot of effort in taking out any fighter, and I wasn’t able to kill them quickly enough to stop Jack continuing to score well. I knew his deck very well so I was consistently able to predict what he was going to score, but failed for the most part to do anything about it. Jack played it very well and it ended up a 10-19 loss for me.

Game 4 vs Harry with Gorechosen of Dromm, Blazing Assault/Countdown to Cataclysm

Harry and I had mirror deck pairings, so had a pretty good idea how the other was going to play. The game was very close throughout, with a very tense third battle round where we both had big hitting fighters left and were having to think hard about order of activations and when to commit by charging fighters in. In the end things fell my way and I was able to wipe Harry’s warband, while I had two fighters left alive. That meant that although Harry had scored more glory from objectives than I had, I had more glory from killing fighters and took the win 17-14. It was a very tense game and I was on a proper adrenalin high at the end of it. I made one silly mistake by spreading my upgrades out across my fighters which stopped me scoring Loaded for Bear (have a fighter with three upgrades), but otherwise I thought I played this one pretty well.

Harry reminded me to take a photo at the start, so here's the deployment

Game 5 vs Jon with Daggok’s Stab Ladz, Countdown to Cataclysm/Wrack and Ruin

I was excited for this game, because I really like the Stab Lads but haven’t yet figured out how to make them work this edition (or in the previous edition for that matter), so I was hoping to learn from seeing how Jon was using them. His deck leant very heavily into ping damage and he did a lot of work in round one to get his fighters next to mine so that they could use the Stab Ladz warband abilities to dish out more ping, but he had some bad dice luck and didn’t end up doing a lot of damage. One weakness of the Stab Ladz is that they don’t have great defence, I was able to take Jon's leader out early, and once I'd established an early lead I could play it pretty safe from there. I ended up winning 17-9.

The end of the game: Jon's last fighter is surrounded by lizards

That left me 4-1 for the day, which I was very happy with and definitely exceeded my expectations given how little practice I’d had. I came 5^th out of 31 players, and just pipped my friend Mike on a tie breaker to be the best placing Order warband and win a mug. It was a really good day, the Agents of Sigmar tournaments are always well organised and have a great group of regular attendees, so it was nice to catch up with friends as well as playing some new opponents. 

I think I might stick with the Jaws for a bit, I want to make a few tweaks to the deck (Annihilation has to go, I didn’t score it once at the event!), and I’m having a lot of fun with them. But I also want to give the Stab Ladz a go, and maybe try an elite warband Edge of the Knife deck too. Lots to think about!