Welcome back to our coverage of the Underworlds event at GHO MD. We left off at lunch last time, so now everyone is back with a full belly and ready to knock out the final games of the day! Let’s see how it went.

Round 3 

Marquis of Peaches: Travis – The Headsmen’s Curse/Hungering Parasite

Coming back from lunch, I was feeling myself. This had at least something to do with the fact that I was three, soon to be four, beers game aids into the day; and something to do with the fact that I lost my first round and wasn’t going to win the tournament anyway.

I really enjoyed playing against Travis. I try not to be a rude person, but I couldn’t help but call Travis out. Between his watch, his tan t-shirt, and his haircut, I asked him how long he had spent in the military. This shocked the poor man, gods love him, who told me “no one has ever called me out like this before.” It’s adorable when veterans think they’re perfectly normal people.

Jake: Travis is one of the “honorary locals” that comes to the LGS I frequent. Whenever there’s a clash, there’s usually a carpool of these DC area players who come in. I’ve had the pleasure to play against most, but not all, of them and can safely say they’re great examples of the kinds of cool people you can find when playing Underworlds. Travis also recognized and complimented me on a Locked Tomb shirt I wore one event so he’s automatically cool.

Marquis of Peaches: Pretty early in this match, Travis mentioned to me that he was a relatively new Underworlds player. This actually made it a really good match. We took a fair amount of time working through the beginning of the game: rolling off, placing boards, placing objectives, drawing our cards, rolling off again, and actually placing our fighters. For some reason, the actual order of the pre-game sequence has never stuck in my head. Travis took a moment, several times, to look up the exact timing of rules during this match, and I’m really grateful for him for it. 

The Headsmen’s Curse is a tricky warband. I’ve played against them a few times now, and they’ve never won against me. Travis explained that they take a lot of planning to get their damage just right, which means they’re very sensitive to damage reduction and defense improvements.

Unfortunately for Travis, both Hexbane’s Hunter and Voidcursed Thralls have pretty good defensive cards: Unnatural Resilience, By Hook or By Crook, and the Lucky Hexbeak Foot – and these are only the ones that I had in my deck! More than once during this match, I had a fighter survive with one Wound remaining, which seriously interfered with Travis’s plans.

As far as I can tell, the Headmen’s Curse’s strongest tool is their leader’s ability to resurrect any of his fighters whenever he kills an enemy fighter. Combined with his massive attack profile and the rest of the warband’s ability to buff him, these spooky ghosties can very quickly come from behind as long as he’s still alive. I didn’t realize quite how powerful this would be in our first game, so it ended up much closer than I expected – a 12-7 win for me.

In our second game, I had a better handle on Travis’s tricks and prioritized my targets better. Also in this game, I saw one of the neatest tricks I’ve seen yet in an Underworlds game. I had given Aemos, my big bruiser, the Unnatural Resilience upgrade – which reduces incoming damage but cannot be given to a fighter with 5 or more Wounds. Travis responded by playing Scapegoat, which allowed him to choose an enemy fighter (Aemos) to have a Wounds characteristic of 5 and become easier to hit for the rest of the round. This broke Unnatural Resilience, and gave Travis an extra Glory when he quickly killed Aemos. A perfect execution!

Result: 2-0 match win, +12 Glory differential

Round 4 

Marquis of Peaches: Jesse – The Thricefold Discord/Rimewyrm’s Bite

Jake: I played against Jesse the week before GHO when he was piloting this same pairing and he swiftly put me into the ground. I’ll admit I kept an eye on this game eager to see the results.

Marquis of Peaches: Here at Goonhammer, we talk quite a bit about playing by intent. Simply, it’s when you and your opponent communicate throughout the game to avoid “gotcha” moments that can feel bad to both people involved. There is no better way to play in a tournament, and Jesse was easily the king of this. When we sat down, he asked a couple questions that made it clear how our match was about to go: “Do you have any attacks that can do three damage before upgrades? How about damage mitigation in your decks or fighter cards?” Those questions showed the kind of thinking that creates playing by intent – understanding the capabilities of everything on the board so that you can play around it. We continued to play by intent throughout the match, helping each other work out threat ranges (movement + attack range) and suggesting lines of play to get around our warbands’ tricks. 

There’s a fair amount of hidden information in Underworlds, which can sometimes interfere with playing by intent. While each player’s warband and Nemesis deck pairing are open information (Jake: Technically the warband is open information, but the pairing is only open if you have a plot card to reveal during pre-game), the cards in the decks are secret until they’ve been played or discarded. I don’t play enough Underworlds to be competitive, so one of my first questions is usually “do your decks care about objective hexes?” Technically, this isn’t a valid question. It’s on me to know the details of a deck’s playstyle based on the name. 

Of course, all of this assumes a much more competitive, tense match than Jesse and I had. By the time I asked this question, we had each cracked open a game aid and were well aware that we were down at the second table. Unfortunately, this also means that I don’t remember much in the way of details about these games! Mostly, I know that Jesse and I had an absolute pleasure of a match. He conceded the first game after I tabled him early in the 3rd round while I was up 12-4, and he had no objectives that he could score in his hand. The second game went much better for him, and he took it 17-8.

We had to play pretty quickly in the third game of the match, which is where playing by intent really shined. Based on the mutual trust we had established in the first two games, we were happy to let each other play cards retroactively and work through the effects together. This let us think simultaneously and play fast for most of the game, only pausing once something needed our attention. It ended up coming down to the very last action – Jesse had run his last remaining fighter away to protect him from the one dog I still had alive, and I was using my actions to cycle objective cards. I ended up pulling Proof of Guilt with my last action, which gave me the two Glory that I beat Jesse by, 15-13.

Result: 2-1 match win, +2 Glory differential. 

Jake: I’m glad you guys had such a positive game experience with each other. Jesse’s a rad dude and I always have a great time when we play.

This was the last round of the day, but if you were to look in the player pack you would notice there is a “sudden death” 5th round mentioned. This was the compromise I settled on when trying to iron out the schedule for the day. Since we haven’t had a GHO Underworlds event before, I wasn’t certain what the turnout would be like. In most situations, we could just play four rounds in a day and call it quits at the end. If there were enough people that we had 2+ undefeated players in the end, tiebreakers would handle it and that would be that. However, a golden ticket was on the line and I felt that it would be unsatisfactory for that type of prize to be awarded based on something like glory differential.

Enter the sudden death, best-of-one, finalist round.

If the event had enough players to end the day with two undefeated pilots, they were going to play a head to head game to determine the event winner. This would be done during the awards for the rest of the players, who could then either stick around or take off – our event at GHO was on a Sunday, so I knew people would need to get out of there to get ready for the upcoming Monday. 

Is a best-of-one game prone to luck? Yes. Is it an ideal way to determine who walks away with an invite to the World Championship of Warhammer in Atlanta? Probably not. But it’s the best I could come up with to keep it from being down strictly to tiebreakers, still allow the event to fit into one day, and keep the two hour rounds that I felt were essential. 

This is all a bunch of extra theoretical talk – the sudden death round wasn’t needed, so we went straight into awards and folks departed. Here’s a recap of how things shook out:

1st: Craig with Gnarlspirit Pack + Hungering Parasite
2nd: Isaac (aka Marquis of Peaches) with Hexbane’s Hunters + Voidcursed Thralls
3rd: Brady with Elathain’s Soulraid + Toxic Terrors
Best Painted: Kevin with Skabbik’s Plaguepack + Voidcursed Thralls
Best in Grand Alliance (Chaos): Craig
Best in Grand Alliance (Order): Isaac (still aka Marquis of Peaches)
Best in Grand Alliance (Destruction): Jeremy with Hedkrakka’s Madmob + Breakneck Slaughter
Best in Grand Alliance (Death): Travis with Headsmen’s Curse + Hungering Parasite
Smoking Boots (and a really sweet looking warband): Jon S with Skinnerkin + Breakneck Slaughter

Parting Thoughts

Marquis_of_Peaches: 3-1 on the day isn’t too bad! Losing in the first round was a little painful, but it definitely let me loosen up and have fun for the rest of the day instead of breaking my brain trying to fight for the Golden Ticket. Swings and roundabouts, really. The closest thing to a dark spot on the day was my match against Chris, only because he was very much not having fun because of a relatively uninteractive mechanic in my deck. I can’t blame him, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as my other three matches.

The rest of the day was an unmitigated success. The games were tight, the opponents were respectful, the game aids were cold. For a player pack without a painting requirement, the painting standards at the event were great! I felt good about the leather texture I had painstakingly glazed onto my li’l witch-hunters, but I wasn’t even close to contention for Best Painted. I’ll content myself with the second-place trophy, I suppose!

This is where I would normally say something about how I would have run the tournament better, or improved the player experience, or really anything intelligent. Unfortunately for my audience, I… basically have nothing to say! Jake ran a great tournament, and has massaged his local Underworlds scene into a great turnout for a world-qualifier event. I’m really looking forward to my next games, and hopefully getting to play Jake across a real live table some day.

Jake: I realize I should say something humble here, but honestly I’m proud as hell about how this event went. Thanks to everyone who assisted me in getting it planned, the day went off smoothly. All the players who came to slam hams were wonderful, and I’m equally proud that my local meta had such a strong representation here. Underworlds may have had a rough early time due to its release coinciding with Shitty World Events, but I feel like it’s coming back strong.

If you made it this far in the article, I hope to see you at next year’s GHO!

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