Embergard gives us our first view of the four archetypes of decks that Games Workshop has labeled for the new edition of Warhammer Underworlds. These decks, along with every warband, will have a play style associated with them. These play styles are Strike, Take and Hold, Flex, and Mastery. Since this is the introductory box to the new edition, the decks it contains can serve as signals to the intent that GW has when creating these archetypes. As such, I would also expect them to be more on the straightforward side since they are aimed at new players – and in a sense, we are all new players with the edition change.
Our Warhammer Underworlds: Embergard coverage:
- Embergard Core Rules & Unboxing
- Embergard Deck Reviews Part 1 – Blazing Assault & Emberstone Sentinels (this article)
- Embergard Deck Reviews Part 2 – Pillage and Plunder & Countdown to Cataclysm
- Warhammer Underworlds: Embergard Warbands Review – The Emberwatch & Zikkit’s Tunnelpack
I’m going to take a brief look at the cards included in these decks and highlight some that I feel serve as signposts to best express what the deck is trying to do. Each deck overview will start with the objectives, since those are the cards you need to score to actually win the game. Following the objectives will be the power cards, which are made up of ploys and upgrades that help support the objective scoring gameplan. There’s a lot going on in these decks, so I’m splitting coverage across two articles. The first will cover the Blazing Assault deck and the Emberstone Sentinels deck. The second will highlight the Pillage & Plunder deck as well as the Countdown to Cataclysm deck.
Warband selection as of the time of writing is pretty limited – only the Emberwatch and Zikkit’s Tunnelpack from this very same box are available, but Games Workshop has already previewed the next two brand new warbands as well as a release of 16 returning warbands, plus free-to-download rules for an additional number of previously released warbands. Any warband pairing recommendations are thus going to be based on vibes and previous edition experience until we get more information.
First up is the Strike deck in this box – Blazing Assault. As befitting a deck in the core box, the gameplan here is fairly straightforward. You’ll want to roll attack dice and, ideally, succeed with those rolls. Various objectives key off of making attacks, getting specific results on your attack rolls, or for slaying enemy fighters. The power deck mostly supports this plan by giving a large number of positioning tools, enhancements for your attacks (which will help score those objectives!), and a smattering of defensive options to keep your fighters swinging while in the thick of it.
Objective Cards
The first thing that jumps out to me is that this deck will likely have a low glory ceiling in practice when taken by itself as a Rivals deck. Like the other decks, the maximum glory achievable from scoring objectives is 16 – however, 11 of those are all from 1 glory value objectives and Annihilation (score in an end phase if each enemy fighter is slain) is worth a whopping 5 glory. Previous incarnations of this style of card have been very difficult to score, and with the way this edition is looking to shape up with higher defensive values on fighters it’s not likely to be any easier to score now. If you can pull it off, though, it’s going to feel amazing.
The low value of the rest of its objectives is offset by the fact that your #1 plan (and #2 and #3) is “attack and slay enemies,” so you’re in a good position to be picking up some bounty on the way. The remainder of the objectives in the deck feel like they’re not going to require you to jump through excessive hoops to score – in fact, a good chunk of the others will score themselves if you stick to the plan, have fighters to swing weapons, and have enemies to target with those attacks. This is actually an interesting consideration from the designers; by its very nature, a Strike approach will have access to more glory from bounty than other playstyles, so if intentionally lowering their objective glory was a way to offset this, I applaud it. The ease of scoring 11 of the 12 objectives is a recurring theme in most of these decks to the point that a good chunk of the time I wonder if it will feel like the objectives are going to score themselves. It’s a minor worry I have, but I think time will tell whether it’s a founded worry or not.
Power Cards
When I first looked at the power deck, the thing that stood out to me the most was just how much extra mobility this deck grants. The universally useful tools like Sidestep (push a friendly fighter one hex) and Illusory Fighter (remove a friendly fighter from the battlefield and place them in a starting hex in your territory) allow for small or dramatic repositioning in the power step. Commanding Stride (push your leader 3 hexes, but must end in a starting hex) feels particularly juicy. Often, the leader in a warband has the most impressive attack profiles so being able to get them into position to utilize those attacks will be helpful. Alternatively, you could run your leader away from danger – there’s nothing specifying the starting hexes have to be in the enemy’s or your own territory, so keep track of the 14 potential landing points for this card and position accordingly. In total, there are 6 ways to enhance your fighters’ movement or push some selection of friendly or enemy fighters.
Being able to surprise your opponent with some additional reach or gain out-of-sequence movement has always been a tremendously useful tool in a game so focused about positioning and efficient use of your limited turns. The fact that so many of them combo well with each other is icing on the cake.
Of course, this being the premier Strike deck, there’s also going to be plenty of ways to, y’know, strike your enemies. Two key upgrades are Accurate (a 1 cost upgrade that allows you to reroll an attack dice after seeing the results) and Keen Eye (a 2 cost upgrade that gives +1 attack dice to melee attacks). In the ploy pool are the similar Determined Effort (+1 attack dice on a single attack, or +2 if you’re the underdog) and Twist the Knife (grants grievous to a melee attack). Not only will these allow a fighter’s attacks to be more accurate and push damage through, it will also help you score many of the deck’s objectives.
General Thoughts
I’ve been fortunate enough to give a handful of teaching games of the previous edition over the last year. I’m also a vocal supporter of new players entering the game because without them, the game will slowly decline and die off. With that in mind, I was particularly invested in how Embergard could be used as an introductory point for potential new players. Blazing Assault in particular feels like a prime “teaching the game” deck to me. The gameplan is straightforward, so a player can focus on learning the core rules of Underworlds without getting tripped up by some weird niche objectives or situational-at-best power cards. This was something that would crop up in the past with warband specific Rivals decks – asking the Sepulchral Warden to go brawl with the enemy in order to score a kill surge often lead to a painful lesson learned. At the same time, there’s enough generally useful cards in here that it can serve as either a foundation for a Nemesis deck or a very useful toolbox to merge into another play style.
Rivals: There’s something for every style of warband that wants to take an aggressive approach in here. If your favorite warband is something along the lines of Spiteclaw’s Swarm or Hexbane’s Hunters, you could take advantage of cards which favor a horde approach where your fighters are going to be more numerous, but less hearty than your opponent’s (Strike the Head’s alternate scoring method of slaying an enemy with more health than your attacker; Field of Blood scores if 4+ fighters are damaged or slain). Other cards within Blazing Assault will favor a warband of elites such as Morgok’s Krushas or a single big bruiser like Kainan’s Reapers that you can gain extra mileage out of by protecting them or getting additional turns with (Tough puts a damage cap of 3 per turn on a fighter; Scream of Anger removes a move or charge token from one of your fighters but also deals 2 damage to it).
Nemesis: The deck has a very straightforward plan of “see your enemies driven before you,” but it also has many flexible tools that can be repurposed for other means. The new edition of Underworlds puts an emphasis on brawling in the middle of the board, so even a traditionally less aggressive approach will likely be rolling attack dice during the game more often than it was previously. As such, the fairly reliable objectives can help with any plan. All the movement shenanigans present in Blazing Assault can equally apply to a Take and Hold style where you want to get bodies onto treasure tokens – and with the defensive tech like Tough, Healing Potion, and Shields Up you can ensure your fighters are a little more difficult to remove than they would be otherwise.
Jake’s Picks
Fields of Blood: This card encourages you to put damage onto enemies and also punishes your opponent for doing the same to you. It has some limited play around potential which I think is important for objectives in a game design sense. It also features Prince Duvalle, and I am quite fond of the Crimson Court so that’s immediate bonus points from me.
Scream of Anger: I am absolutely going to use this more times than I should and get my fighters killed as a result. But the appeal of being able to do things like charge into the enemy with a big brawler such as the Gorehulk or Mollog in the first turn, remove the charge token and swing at someone else the second turn, and potentially charge whatever is alive/fled for a third turn? That’s too tasty for me to pass up even if it means my bruiser is going to be punching themself in the face in the process.
Tough: It remains to be seen how useful this will be. With the current fighters and cards, it doesn’t seem too likely to run into times when having a 3 damage cap will come in handy, but if other warbands and decks have ways of reliably getting up to the 4+ damage mark, this could really keep some of your fighters around longer. A nice bonus is that it doesn’t apply only to weapon attacks, but to anything dealing damage in a turn. Including power cards that deal damage such as Scream of Anger…
Next up is the first Take and Hold deck for our new edition of Underworlds. Emberstone Sentinels lives up to both parts of the play style’s name – it encourages you to take control of treasure tokens, often in the enemy’s territory, and then hold them long enough to score your objectives. This is not a passive, hide in the corner to score without interacting type of deck. Of the 12 objective cards, 7 require you to make attacks or be in enemy territory. As someone who was playing a very passive Lady Harrow’s Mournflight build with Malevolent Masks in the tail end of first edition, I get the appeal of having reliable scoring that doesn’t need to interact with your opponent. That doesn’t mean it makes for great games, though, and I’m glad to see Emberstone Sentinels encourage a more fight-and-hold style than hide-and-hold.
Objective Cards
As mentioned above, Emberstone Sentinels is similar to the other decks in that it has a 16 glory worth of objectives. There is, unsurprisingly, a high focus on standing on treasure tokens in this objective suite. The trio of not very creatively named Hold Treasure Token 1 or 2, Hold Treasure Token 3 or 4, and Hold Treasure Token 5 do exactly what they say on the tin and score in an end phase if you do the thing. I’d like to have seen Treasure Token 5 be worth more or have some extra flexibility in scoring, but as it stands it’s the worst of the three in terms of how easy it will be to score. I guess there’s a tiny incentive in holding treasure 5 for tie breaking, but that’s very rarely relevant.
The surge objectives in this deck are quite reliable and many of them can chain into each other. Aggressive Defender (make an attack while on a treasure token), Sally Forth (a fighter with a charge token holds a treasure token in enemy territory), Step by Step (a fighter with a move [or charge if underdog] token holds a treasure token in enemy territory), Stand Firm (a fighter with a stagger token holds a treasure token in enemy territory), and Unassailable (an enemy fighter attacks a friendly fighter on a treasure token) could conceivable all be scored within two turns. It gets a little “magic Christmas land” to have the proper sequencing, but the potential to dramatically snowball into a position of power is there. Like Blazing Assault (and the other decks), a large number of these are going to be hard to prevent your opponent from scoring.
Power Cards
Compared to Blazing Assault, the ploys and upgrades are unsurprisingly less slanted towards aggression. There are only two upgrades (both at a pricey 2 glory each) to boost attack dice or damage. However, there are many more ways to protect your fighters so they can do their job of standing on shiny hexes. For upgrades, Inviolate (fighter can’t be flanked or surrounded while on a treasure token), Agile (reroll a save dice), and Sharp Reflexes (+1 save dice to a maximum of 2) can give your fighters the defensive edge they need to stay in the fight.
If enemy fighters are standing on your beloved hexes, there are ways to make them get out of your way. The ploys Confusion (swap the positions of two adjacent fighters) and Shoulder Throw (instead of driving your target back, you can place them anywhere adjacent to your attacker) let you reposition the enemy while the trusty Sidestep (push a friendly fighter one hex), Hidden Path (teleport a friendly fighter from one edge hex to another), The Extra Mile (push a friendly fighter 1 hex after they move, but they must end on a treasure hex) and Duelist (after your fighter attacks, push them 1 hex) give your own fighters the extra maneuverability they need to settle in on treasures.
General Thoughts
Rivals: With the focus on standing on treasure tokens and making attacks while standing on said tokens, I feel like any warband that has access to ranged fighters will have an edge here. The Emberwatch, for instance, can plink away at targets that don’t conveniently huddle up next to a treasure token for you to score the surges highlighted above. There are a few tools in the deck to prevent your fighters from being driven back off of treasure tokens, so if you have a lower number of beefier models, they could conceivably weather the storm and remain on your objective scoring treasures. Alternatively, taking a higher model count warband would let you just swarm the tokens and try to just hold on long enough to score – this is even more reliable if your warband has any movement tricks. If any of these horde warbands wind up getting extra movement economy like they did in the previous edition, I’d count on choices like Sepulchral Guard or Zarbag’s Gitz to be solid contenders as well.
Nemesis: Like the previous strike deck, Emberstone Sentinels offers a wide array of fundamental cards that can be put to use in a variety of ways. Pairing it with Blazing Assault could allow the defensive tech present in here to make your fighters even harder to deal with while giving you tools to make scoring your attack-based objectives both easier and more impactful. Pillage and Plunder has some inherent anti-synergy in that it wants you to do a lot of delving which runs directly counter to your treasure holding goals, but there are a few objectives that want you to be on unspecified feature tokens (so either the treasure side or cover side counts) as well as multiple upgrades that grant weapon attacks with extended range. Countdown to Cataclysm is a grab bag of assorted tools including treasure based objectives, ranged weapon upgrades, and the very mechanic of the cataclysm tracker rewards you for enemies not being on feature tokens (perhaps because you, yourself, are standing on them!).
Jake’s Picks
Slow Advance: The type of gameplay that this objective encourages is quite appealing to me. I tried a few “invade and hold” style decks in the prior edition, but never quite settled on an effective combination. I hope this style of play works well and I intend to give it a few different attempts with the slew of warbands we’re about to have.
Switch Things Up: This power card is interesting, because it’s either going to be totally useless or a potential lifesaver depending on how many other objectives get printed that care about treasure token numbers. For the Rivals deck by itself, it’s useful for scoring the Hold 1 or 2, Hold 3 or 4, and Hold 5 objectives. In Nemesis there are a handful of objectives that care about treasure token numbers in the other decks, so this card could become a potent aid in scoring those objectives if you lean that direction.
By The Numbers: What a cool card. Pure card draw in Underworlds hasn’t been common (at least during the past year in which I have played), and the ceiling on this one is quite high. If you ever manage to draw 5 power cards, I feel like it’s safe to say you’re already winning that game. The majority of the time, it will be used after one of your turns when you scoot onto an objective before getting driven off or killed, and you can play it to draw 2-3 cards which is still a solid use and positive card advantage.
Closing Thoughts
For the first examples of what we have to expect in this new edition, I am on the whole optimistic with a few caveats. These two decks each have a distinct personality. They lend themselves strongly toward their intended play styles, which is perfect considering this is an introductory level product to the edition and the game. Each of the decks also have a handful of cards that augment other gameplans, so any of the six total possible Nemesis pairings using these decks will have potential to perform.
Another thing I like about the decks is that each of them have some amount of positioning tools. There will be opportunities in games for dramatic repositioning in power steps as one player pushes to hex X, then their opponent counters by pushing another fighter to Y, only for the first player to pull an enemy fighter out of position. Enhanced movement is incredibly powerful, especially out-of-sequence types in a game in which you are limited to only ever take 12 turns. In the previous edition of the game, some decks simply did not have these tools and they always felt like they were at a disadvantage when playing against those who did.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. The objectives in each deck feel much easier to score than similar ones from the prior edition. My initial concern is that, in the Rivals format especially, this will lead to less opportunity to counterplay your opponent and that more games will be decided by tiebreakers if everyone is scoring the bulk of their objective decks. We’ll have to see how games shake out in the next month or two, but my guess is that the average glory scored per game is going to be much higher and much closer than it was previously. This could lead to tighter games (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing) but despite encouraging brawls in the middle of the board, it could feel uninteractive. You’re interacting in that both sides are rolling dice and making attacks, but in some cases it doesn’t really matter what the result of those attacks are.
Nemesis could be able to sidestep this issue – the higher glory payout objectives are asking more of the player in terms of setup and execution, so if you want to include the highest payouts from both of your decks you’ll need to work to score them. This also leaves the option there to take the lower scoring, but substantially easier to score options if you are comfortable getting less reward for your lower risk.
The strongest feeling I had after looking at these decks, though, was excitement. I am excited to get to brewing deck lists again and trying out various combinations. Can I make a better flex deck out of Blazing Assault and Emberstone Sentinels than a dedicated flex deck? Can I find the balance of Cataclysm tracker cards to enhance an aggressive Strike deck without losing its focus? Is putting Annihilation in my deck a bad idea? Who knows! But I know I’m going to give them all a try.
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