Warhammer Underworlds tournament report - February 2026

First Underworlds tournament report of 2026, let’s go.

I blogged back in November about how watching the Underworlds stream from the World Championships of Warhammer had made me want to try to get better at Underworlds, and since then I’ve been thinking about the game more and trying to get the reps in to be competitive at tournaments. There’s a Warhammer World Grand Clash coming up in March, but for my first tournament of 2026 I went to a five round best-of-one event run by the Agents of Sigmar in Redhill.

There were 22 players, and possibly because there were two golden tickets to Worlds on offer it was a super competitive field. I’d been doing fairly well in practice games in the run-up to the event so I felt like I had a chance, but the day before the event I had to give myself a mental talking to and try to get myself into a mindset where I wouldn’t be disappointed if I lost more games than I won, because looking at the roster the chances were that every game was going to be tough.

My warband and deck

I was running Blood of the Bull, the Helsmiths of Hashut warband that came in the Spitewood box. Their key mechanic is that they can get ‘demonforged dice’ by delving treasure tokens, which give them an extra dice on their attack or save rolls. They inspire to two defence dice, so with good use of demonforged dice they can pretty consistently be rolling three defence dice, making them very survivable.

From left to right: Imnidrin, Morudok, Zuldrakka, Grisk, Tokkor

My deck was Emberstone Sentinels/Pillage and Plunder. I hadn’t played this pairing before starting it for this warband, but I’ve ended up really enjoying it. It has some pretty easy end phase scoring (Broken Prospects, Torn Landscape and Iron Grasp are all reasonably reliable scorers that you’re likely to get at least two of in most games), and Pillage has some nice surges. Emberstone has some really solid ploys and upgrades, with Confusion being a particular favourite, and I run both Hidden Paths and Canny Sapper to give  me a couple of ways to teleport round the board, as my fighters are only movement three.

After some experimentation I’ve found Delving for Wealth to be the better restricted pick than Supremacy: while it’s only one glory as opposed to three, Supremacy can get in the way of scoring other objectives like Torn Landscape or Desolate Homeland, and also clashes with wanting to delve treasure tokens to get demonforged dice. And my surges are weaker than my end phases, so taking Delving for Wealth helps a lot there.

The other big question with picking objectives is whether to take Strip The Realm, a three glory end phase for none of the opponent’s fighters being on a treasure token. It’s pretty easy to counter, but I’ve found that I score it in around half my games so I think it’s worth taking. I run it as a thirteenth objective, so it’s not a big deal if I don’t score it.

Full deck list for those interested: https://www.underworldsdb.com/shared.php?deck=0,ES5,ES7,ES11,ES29,ES19,ES17,ES32,ES23,ES31,ES30,ES14,ES20,ES28,ES18,ES16,PL7,PL1,PL9,PL11,PL5,PL4,PL6,PL10,PL12,PL2,PL28,PL23,PL15,PL31,PL27,PL18,PL17,PL22&warband=BloodoftheBull&format=nemesis

The warband and deck pairing plays pretty defensively: ideally I want at least one two glory end phase objective in my starting hand, and then I very much focus on scoring rather than killing things. Against most warbands I want to set up towards the back of my territory and make my opponent come to me. Demonforged dice are key, so ideally I want to start the game with objectives that involve moving onto tokens, so that I can combine scoring with delving to get demon forge dice. Fighter wise, Zuldrakka (the leader) is key to keep alive, but she’s also the tankiest on four wounds so sometimes I end up putting her up front to avoid one of the three wound fighters being one-shotted early on. Grisk (the hobgrot) and Tokkor (the ranged one) tend to hang out on feature tokens at the back, while Morudok and Imnidrin I play pretty flexibly depending what I’m up against and where the feature tokens are placed.

For board choice, I prefer the Emberwatch board where possible. My warband has really good accuracy and defence dice without needing waystone hexes (that grant rerolls), so I’d rather deny that buff to other people.

Games

I’ll go through each of my games and give a brief recap. I didn’t take any notes during the event so this won’t be a play-by-play retelling, rather I’ll try to sum up the gist of how each game went.

Game 1 vs Imogen with Exiled Dead (Pillage/Deadly Synergy)

I don’t think I’ve ever played Imogen before, but she won at least one of the Redhill tournaments last year so I was expecting this to be a tough game. Fortunately her warband, the Exiled Dead, are one that I’ve had a fair bit of practice against and think is quite a good match up for my warband. Exiled Dead are a horde warband that have great action economy: they can move or fight with all of their four zombies in a single activation. So they’re very good at surrounding a fighter and overwhelming them with high volume low damage attacks. But because I don’t want to go to them, I don’t need to charge in and leave a fighter in a vulnerable position, so I can make them spend a lot of time moving before they get to me. I also have quite a few cards that can move fighters around in the power step to get them to safety if needed.

I had a good hand of end phase scoring in round 1, so I sat back and let the zombies come to me. Towards the end of the round Imogen charged Regulus and Markov into my leader, but I was rolling a lot of defence dice and got lucky and didn’t take any damage. Because the zombies can’t hold treasure tokens Imogen would have had to essentially waste an action to try to counter Strip the Realm, which she chose not to do, and I did have it in my hand so I scored pretty big in the first end phase.

Once I was ahead I could continue to play defensively, so I concentrated on scoring my surges and picking up a bit of glory from kills when I could. While the zombies can come back when they die, they come back next to their leader who was right at the back of Imogen’s board, so they weren’t an immediate threat on return. I also managed to kill Markov early in round 2, which took out one of the possible threat vectors.

Imogen had some bad dice luck, I think she missed her first six or seven attacks, which made it hard for her to score and meant that I still had all five fighters alive to do stuff. That meant that I built up a convincing lead, and I ended up winning 20-9.

It was obviously great to win game one, especially as most of my friends from my regular Underworlds webcam group (the One Crit Wonders) also won, so we were off to a good start.

Look at me remembering to take photos of my games

Game 2 vs Luke with Skinnerkin (Blazing Assault/Deadly Synergy)

One downside of my friends winning was that it made it likely I would have to play one of them, which is what happened. Luke and I had played a bunch of practice games in the run-up to this event, so we knew each other’s warbands and decks pretty well at this point.

The Skinnerkin are a flesh eater courts warband who play pretty aggressively. Their warscroll lets them collect haunch tokens, which they use to inspire and to do a range of special abilities, including healing. They took a small nerf in the recent FAQ, but are still pretty good. They’re vulnerable to warbands that can hit for flat three damage and not allow them a chance to heal, but my warband is mostly doing two damage, so I knew from experience that I was probably only going to be able to kill one or maybe two of Luke’s fighters.

I tried to write some notes on this game the evening after the event, but I really struggled to remember much of the detail, except that it was very close throughout, and low scoring. I was pretty focused on trying to keep my fighters away from Luke’s leader and slow down his rate of gaining haunch counters, which I was pretty successful at as I don’t think he inspired at all. But my scoring wasn’t great either, I scored Strip the Realm in the first end phase again which got me off to a good start, but I think I struggled with some of my other objectives in this one. I managed to kill the Carnskyr early in round 2 which was a key moment, as in practice games its mobility and ability to ping damage onto fighters it flies over had proved very annoying. But I don’t think I killed any other fighters, I did some bits of damage but Luke spent a bunch of haunch tokens for healing. On the other hand, because Luke’s warband didn’t inspire his fighters were relatively inaccurate, so I was able to defend against a lot of attacks and block his scoring too.

This was maybe the most tense game of the event in the moment for me, because it was so low scoring and we were on very similar scores throughout so it felt very cagey. Which is probably why I can’t remember what actually happened, I have a good sense of the vibes of the game but not the details. It ended up with a very narrow win for me, 13-12. No photo of this one because I completely forgot.

Game 3 vs Dan with Jaws of Itzl (Blazing Assault/Pillage and Plunder)

Dan is another friend and regular practice opponent, which was good because I knew we would have a fun game, but bad because again I knew he’d be a very difficult opponent, and we’d been pretty much honours even in our practice games.

As an aside, one thing I liked about this tournament is that the tie-breaker was strength of schedule rather than glory points, so it meant that after you played someone, regardless of the result, you were incentivised to want them to do well in their remaining games and finish as high as possible. Obviously I would want my friends to do well anyway, but it was a nice extra touch.

I can remember a few key moments from this game, but not much of the detail of what came in between. Jaws with Pillage/Blazing is a very strong pairing, and a tricky match up for me. Dan has a lot of the same end phase objectives as I do, so to some extent we are competing to stand on tokens, but he is also much more aggro than me and punches very hard. However, my good defence dice and good accuracy are a challenge for him, as at least early game I’m typically going to be rolling more dice.

In a couple of our practice games I’d managed to kill the Venomites first activation, which hurts Dan more than might some Jaws decks because he needs them to help delve things. But Dan had unfortunately learnt from this experience, and kept them safely out the way. He was also able to inspire his leader early on by pinging me with damage with Trapped Cache, so I was off to a bad start. Round 1 I don’t think much happened, Dan threw So-Kar forward on the right and did a bit of damage to someone (I think Tokkor), but then used Illusionary Fighter to pull him back to safety.

In Round 2 there was a crunch moment right at the start of the round: Dan chose to go first, as it gave him the chance to have Krojax charge Zuldrakka (my leader) who was still uninspired, before I could get any demonforged dice to boost her defence. Dan rolled five dice needing swords, and got…zero successes. This was huge, if he had killed her it would have been two glory and I’d have been down a key fighter. I did toy with trying to kill Krojax, but on my first attempt to put some damage on him I rolled three successes and he promptly rolled three defensive successes (with Impossibly Quick) to put a damage onto me, so I gave up on that and took Zuldrakka off to fight So-Kar instead. She was more successful here and I took So-Kar out either late in round 2 or at the start of round 3. We were very close on glory so it became a game of trying to maximise scoring from the final few activations. Most of my remaining fighters were safely out of the way, but I had Grisk (the hobgrot) in the middle of the board on guard. I thought that Dan would likely be wanting to get onto my Aqua Ghyranis token for a bonus glory point, so I moved Grisk onto it so that Dan would have to kill him first. He did try in the last activation of the game, but because Grisk was on guard he had decent defensive odds and he survived. I ended up with another one point win, 16-15.

Here is Grisk being a brave hobgrot and surviving getting punched by Krojax

At this point there were only three of us who were 3-0 so I had to start thinking that I could conceivably win. After three super close games I was also feeling a bit on edge. I really enjoy playing in tournaments, and I think in general I play better in tournaments than I do in practice games,  but this was definitely one of the times I’ve most felt the pressure. Last year I wasn’t interested in going to Worlds so the prospect of a golden ticket wasn’t that exciting for me, but this year with Worlds being in Barcelona I was very interested in qualifying, and that did make a difference to the pressure levels.

Game 4 vs Connor with Zondara’s Gravebreakers (Pillage and Plunder/Deadly Synergy)

I hadn’t played against Zondara’s for a while, but at least on paper they’re not a great match up for me. They’re competing with me for feature tokens, and their main threat piece (Ferlain) is faster than anything in my warband so they can pick their battles more than I can.

I started the game well and scored Strip the Realm again in the first end phase, but Connor got a bunch of early surges so we both scored well in round 1. I killed the three zombies early on, but Connor promptly brought them all back, and sadly there’s no glory for killing them again. The obvious counter to Zondara’s is to kill Zondara and Ferlain, but since the recent FAQ they have a lot of healing, and Connor also put Great Fortitude on Ferlain early on after which I pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to spend time trying to kill them and would instead focus on scoring my objectives and trying to deny Connor his objectives.

Again this game was very close throughout, I think we were tied on glory at the start of round 3. I thought towards the end of Round 3 that I was going to lose: Connor had a zombie on a feature token in the back of my territory that he could have delved with to both deny me Desolate Homeland (no more than one treasure token in my territory) and be on treasure token 5, which would have given him the advantage if we’d been tied on points at the end. But in the end he delved elsewhere instead to score one of his own objectives, so I got Desolate Homeland, and was also holding the tiebreaker advantage. It did turn out after we had counted and recounted our points that we were tied 19-19 on glory, so I scraped the narrowest of wins on the tiebreaker.

Tokkor proudly holds treasure token two at the end of the game to give me the tiebreaker win. Behind him you can see Connor's very cool alternate minis for Ferlain and Zondara.

 

Those of you paying close attention will have noticed that I’d now won two games by one glory and one on a tiebreaker. While I think I played well in all these games, clearly there was a certain amount of luck involved! Probably one key dice roll going differently would have been enough to have lost me any of those games. But obviously dice luck is part of the game, and one thing I like about Blood of the Bull is that you’re usually rolling a lot of dice, so you can stack the odds in your favour to some extent. One thing I did note across my games were that an unreasonable number of my poor dice rolls were for Morudok: normally he does a lot of work, but at this tournament he must have offended Hashut, as he couldn’t hit anything to (sometimes literally) save his life, and very much took a back seat to Zuldrakka and Imnidrin in most if not all of my games.

Game 5 vs Daniel with Knives of the Crone (Blazing Assault/Raging Slayers)

Daniel was the only other player on 4-0, so whichever of us won this game would win the event. Knives of the Crone with this deck pairing are pretty much a full on aggro warband. Following the recent FAQ they have the capacity to get a lot of cleave which can be very bad for me, but I thought I'd probably have more chance of getting kills back than I had had against some of the other warbands I’d faced, and while Daniel’s deck pairing has great utility cards it doesn't have the best objectives so it's quite reliant on getting kills to boost the glory.

I was unsure whether to keep my starting objectives in this game: I think I had Torn Landscape, Hostile Takeover, and a one glory end phase. But I thought I had a good chance of scoring Torn Landscape, so I decided to keep it. As expected Daniel played very aggressively, he killed Grisk very early on, and scored a bunch of surges. I did manage to score Torn Landscape (two or fewer treasure tokens on the board), but I couldn’t do that while countering the possibility of Daniel scoring Overwhelming Presence, which requires none of my fighters to be on treasure tokens. So I had to hope it wasn’t in his hand, but unfortunately it was. However, I did manage to deny him some other scoring by using Commanding Stride to get Zuldrakka into his territory at the end of the round.

At the end of the round Daniel was something like 8-3 up, and I thought I was most likely going to lose from there, which took a bit of the pressure off. But in round 2 I managed to score some surges and caught up a bit. His leader ended up squaring off with Zuldrakka when they both had really good defensive buffs so they failed to do much damage, but I did get one hit through to leave his leader on one health. Otherwise we both did a good job of denying scoring, I don’t think either of us scored anything in the second end phase. I'd been worried at the start about the potential for Daniel to get a lot of use of cleave through his prophecy rolls, but actually this didn't come up much if at all. Daniel used most of his rolls early on to inspire fighters, and then later in the game either the dice didn't work out for cleave or a defensive reroll was more important.

At the start of round 3 I took his leader out for a two glory boost. Daniel used Haymaker (+2 damage for one attack) on his weakest fighter to kill off Morudok, but I ended up with Zuldrakka and Imnidrin both with defensive buffs and both on guard, making it extremely hard for him to get damage through against them.

We were very close on glory at this point, so we were trying to predict what end phase scoring each other had and how to deny it. While there quite a few fighters still alive there was no easy glory to be had from kills, so we both spent a few activations worrying about board position and in Daniel’s case cycling objectives rather than going for kills. Daniel tried a low odds attack against Imnidrin on the last activation of the game which I think might have changed the outcome if successful, but fortunately for me it wasn’t, and I ended up winning 16-13.

Zuldrakka has adopted a common Blood of the Bull strategy: run away!

That left me 5-0, so I took first place and picked up a green Spitewood trophy and a golden ticket to Worlds. I don’t think I’ve fully processed how excited I am about this yet, I haven’t won a tournament since pre-pandemic, and it’s great to feel that the practice I’d been putting in in recent months has paid off. However, my plans for a relaxing post-tournament evening were somewhat ruined by discovering that water was coming through my kitchen ceiling, so I will probably enjoy the win more once I’ve got over the stress of dealing with the resulting plumbing emergency!

Thanks to all my opponents for five great games. Going to Underworlds tournaments is maybe my single favourite part of the hobby, and this tournament was really well organised by the Agents of Sigmar and ran super smoothly.

I’m certainly planning to go to Worlds, pending some figuring out of logistics, so I guess I need to keep on practicing to make sure I can represent myself well once I get there. I’m not sure what to do warband wise now, I would like retire Blood of the Bull for a bit (if nothing else I expect my regular opponents are pretty sick of them by now), but there’s only three weeks until the clash at Warhammer World which doesn’t feel like much time to get competitive with something else. I’ll probably try out a few things in the next week and see how I feel.

Obligatory trophy photo