Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. I’m approaching Underworlds with a focus on improving gameplay, building communities, and a maybe eventually painting some models. Today, we’re going to take a look at taking your first steps into building a deck for playing in the Nemesis format.

Underworlds Decks Breakdown

Underworlds has two forms of play – Rivals and Nemesis. Rivals is the format where you pair any warband with one of the premade Rivals decks and start playing. There’s no deck to build because it’s a fixed list, so it’s the fastest way to get straight into the game. There’s also the Nemesis format, which is mostly the same aside from one key difference: you create a pool of cards out of two Rivals decks which each contain 12 objectives and 20 power cards, then build your deck out of that set of 64 cards. You’ll wind up with a 20 card power deck and a 12 card objective deck once finished*. The typical objective deck will consist of 12 cards total – 6 surges and 6 end phase objectives. Your power deck will be 20 cards with half of them being ploys and the other half being upgrades.

*Yes, you can go over 12 objectives and 20 power cards in your deck with some restrictions. There can never be more than 6 surge objectives in your objective deck, nor can you ever have more ploys than upgrades in your power deck. There are occasions where this could be the correct choice, but a lot of the time it’s going to be better to stick with a 12/20 split. It’s Card Game 101 to tend toward the smallest legal deck size so you can consistently get your best cards more often. With that out of the way, the rest of the article will be sticking with the 12/20 split assumption.

Currently, we have six Rivals decks to choose from and they all have fairly distinct themes and plans. If you’re unfamiliar with them, here’s a very brief rundown:

• Blazing Assault: This contains objectives primarily focused on making attacks and slaying enemies. The power cards help enhance attacks, slightly help with some defense options, and pack a ton of positioning/movement tools.
• Emberstone Sentinels: The objectives are highly centered around holding and attacking from treasure tokens with a slight emphasis on ones in enemy territory, while the power cards offer ways to get to treasures and stay on them despite your opponent’s attempts to drive you off.
• Pillage and Plunder: These objectives mostly want you to delve treasure tokens with a side of caring about fighters being in various territories. The power cards include multiple teleports, weapons, and generically useful pushes and attack enhancements.
• Countdown to Cataclysm: The deck as a whole is a hodge podge of approaches – objectives can care about holding treasures, making attacks, having fighters in certain territories, slaying enemy fighters, etc. The power cards are equally unfocused (which is not necessarily a negative thing) and offers pings, weapons, and a bunch of weird one-off effects.
• Reckless Fury: The latest strike deck has objectives that focus on charge tokens for both you and your opponent; the power deck includes ways to move/add charge tokens, push your fighters around, and enhance your charge threats.
• Wrack and Ruin: The objective cards here are a mix of caring about fighters being in particular territories, damage being distributed among fighters, and playing ploys. The power cards support these plans with the most pings of any deck, your standard array of generically useful pushes, and some nice defensive tech.

How I Build

Typically, I’m going to start with a warband that I want to build a Nemesis deck for. It’s definitely possible to pick single Rivals deck, then find an appropriate warband and second deck to put together with it, but that’s just not something I find myself doing very often. Also, most of the time people are going to identify a warband they’re interested in due to a mix of aesthetics and playstyles, then try to figure out how to make them work. It’s much easier to get my brain excited about the idea of playing with my plastic skeleton dollies than it is about playing with a deck that wants me to stand on things and roll dice (although that’s pretty fun, too).

I’ll grab the warband I’m building for and pick two of these decks that I think will suit the play style that I’m attempting to build toward. You absolutely can spread your cards out on a desk and build a deck that way, but my preferred method is an online deck builder and my site of choice is UnderworldsDB which was built and is maintained by Discord user Mcrat. It took me a little while to get the hang of it – partly from experimentation but a lot of it was thanks to Skyler’s deck building series titled What the Decks?! back in first edition. This whole article, and honestly a lot of my experience in Underworlds in general, can be considered an homage to that guy. When you first enter Underworlds DB, you’re greeted with a screen that looks like this:

The first thing to do here is to go down to the drop down menus below the big pink box. Make sure Nemesis (Organized Play) is selected, then pick your warband of choice from the second menu. Once you’ve done so, click Refresh data to load up the warband and all the potential cards. I’m going to pick The Headsmen’s Curse for this demo because I have been wanting to build a deck with them and also because my wife has expressed interest in trying them out. I can’t wait to be the second best Underworlds player in my household.

A small point of interest is that the Fighter cards button will toggle visibility of the fighter cards and warscroll for your warband, but only after you’ve added at least one card to the deck.

After you hit refresh data, you’ll have a mess of multiple pages of cards listed down at the bottom of the page. Trying to weed through 200ish cards at once sounds unpleasant, so let’s take a look at the Filters option by clicking the button with the same name. This button works as a toggle to display and hide all of the individual filtering options.

The left side lists all the current Rivals decks split up by their archetypes as given by GW. It also includes a little icon to denote if any of them have plot cards, which is helpful because you are only allowed a single deck with a plot card in Nemesis. If you don’t know the deck icons by heart, you can mouse over them to get a tool tip including the deck name.

The search field can also come in handy for narrowing down your decks if you do a little hunting. For instance, you can search for treasure token or feature token to see what objectives and power cards care about those types of tokens in all the decks. Maybe you have a warband that’s starting on 2 dodge for a lot of fighters – you can search for guard token to see which decks offer ways to add those to your fighters and potentially score from having them. Other potentially useful phrases to search for are stagger (for stagger tokens or stagger hexes), attack action to pick out all the upgrades that grant new attack options if your fighters need some extra juice, heal or save if you want to make your fighters more durable, etc.

I’m going to pick Blazing Assault and Countdown to Cataclysm for this deck pairing. My rationale is that I know Blazing Assault offers a lot of movement tools and some accuracy boosting effects which are exactly what the Headsmen’s gameplan needs – you’re putting all your eggs in the basket of landing a 2 hammer attack. However, the end phase objectives in that deck are pretty weak but Countdown to Cataclysm can offer some fairly easy to score ones that will help shore up our glory pool while contributing power cards towards Plan A of “Hit With The Big Sword.”

After picking those two decks, you’ll see the filter is applied automatically and now your card pool is a much more reasonable 64 entries (filtered from 188 total entries**). But we can narrow this down even further by using the Card type filter on the right side of the filter panel. My deck building process tends to start with the surge objectives, then end phase objectives, then either the ploys or upgrades – I do it this way because games are won or lost based on who can score their objectives, so I want to make sure the rest of my deck is centered around supporting them.

** “188? But that isn’t a multiple of 32!” If you honestly had this thought then I regret to inform you that you’re a turbo nerd, but I respect it. At the time of writing this, there are four cards on the Forbidden list for the Nemesis format. That means they’re not legal in any Nemesis deck, and Underworlds DB takes that into account. Since we have selected Nemesis as our format of choice, it will go ahead and filter any illegal cards from showing up while building a deck. How handy! 

The three icons here are for objectives, ploys, and upgrades respectively. If you click on the icon for objectives, you are then presented with further options to refine your search. Let’s go ahead and click on Surge to limit what’s shown.

Now that the filters are set to only display a reasonable amount of cards, we can click the Filters button again to collapse (but retain the settings of) the filter window and check out the cards available. These columns are all sortable, so feel free to mess around with the way it’s presented to you.

Once I have the filters in place, I simply go down the list of the available cards and toss any that seem to have potential into the deck list. At times, this leaves me with an abundance of cards that I’ll have to pare down later. Other times, I’ll notice that I’m shy a few objectives so I have to make the choice to either adjust the gameplan with new objectives or write off the deck combinations as not quite viable. In this case, I wound up with seven potential surges that you’ll see further down. Roughly, I wanted to avoid any surges that required kills (and try to avoid these in general when possible) because dice will be dice and sometimes you just won’t slay your target. I also wasn’t keen on any that would require me to overly restrict my fighter positioning – those flanked and surrounded bonuses are tremendously important. That winnowed out most of the options and left a variety that just want me to make attacks (not even requiring they be successful) and have a fighter die (or score even easier when the underdog). Shocking Assault is in here because I know I’m going to consider another treasure based objective for the end phases later on.

Moving on to end phase objectives is simple. Just expand the Filters section again, click off the Surge filter and click on the An end phase filter. You may also have spied the Third end phase filter here. This currently is just a relic from the previous edition where some end phase objectives would only be able to be scored in the final end phase of the game, but as of now nothing exists like that in this edition of Warhammer Underworlds. Feel free to ignore it for now and just take a look at your end phase objective options. This is also a time where changing sorting options can come in handy. Personally, I like to start by sorting by glory and seeing how many of the 2+ scoring objectives I can reasonably fit into the deck. This helps to raise your potential glory ceiling and can come in handy. A deck that only takes 1 glory end phases will (likely) have an easier time scoring them, but you’re going to be hamstringing yourself if the most glory your deck can score you is 12. I like to aim for something around 16, with a little lower being acceptable if your gameplan is “table the opponent” because you can rely on bounty to shore up your score.

One reason I chose these two decks were because while Blazing Assault has some truly bad ass power cards and surges, its end phase objectives can be more accurately described as bad, ass. It’s not that they’re terrible, but so much of the deck’s scoring is held up in Annihilation which is just not going to make the cut in 99% of the decks out there, so you’re left with a pile of 1 glory end phase cards. Countdown to Cataclysm has a package of three 2 glory end phases that I’m finding more and more reliable, however, so that can help balance out this issue. Spread Havoc (despite being listed as 0 in the deck builder) is a guaranteed 1 that can pretty easily also score for 2 midway through the game. Wreckers is also a reliable 2 glory because incrementing your cataclysm tracker at every single step is optional. If you’re worried that you’ll outpace your ability to score Wreckers, simply don’t increment your tracker. Lastly, Set Explosives feels a little questionable because it wants you to hold treasure tokens. This isn’t normally your game plan, but between the Scriptor being able to hold further back and (presumably) a brawl occurring around another, this isn’t exactly impossible. I don’t love it but the total glory is pretty low so we’ll see how it shapes up.

I’m not going to belabor the process for adding your power cards. Upgrades and Ploys follow the same process as Objectives from earlier. You can filter by them and search for any words or phrases to help narrow it down even further if you wish. I often sort Ploys by their name, since there are a couple of cards that have multiple printings – you can’t take both Great Fortitude cards from Emberstone Sentinels and Blazing Assault if those are you two decks, for instance. Upgrades can be sorted by their name, deck, or their glory cost. Using all these tools, I went through the power cards first and added anything that I thought had potential. I then did the same for upgrades. In both cases I was heavily favoring anything that gave enhanced accuracy for landing the Wielder’s all important chop, anything that helped position models like pushes or teleports, and a smattering of defensive cards to help keep our fighters in the game.

After doing this first pass of simply adding all the potential cards that I think I’d like to use, this is where I’m at:

You’ll notice that it helpfully tells us this deck has too many surge objectives and that we can’t have more gambits ploys than we can upgrades (references to gambits should be replaced with the correct terminology aka ploys sometime soon). That’s good to know! If you want to do a little reader exercise and take a look at this deck to determine which cards you’d like to cut, here is a link to the deck as it is in the image above. I won’t say that this framework is the optimal one, but I think it’s a pretty solid basis. From here, I’m going to remove one surge objective, one end phase objective, two ploys, and one upgrade. After some hemming and hawing, I wound up settling on this list.

That doesn’t mean this is the list I’ll stick with after a few test iterations. I was pretty reluctant to cut Savage Blow, since it essentially mimics the warband’s Cackling Court ability by making each dice have a 16.6% higher chance of being a success. Ultimately the Wielder and the Bearer aren’t rolling enough dice for me to think it’ll be worthwhile, but it’s on my short list of cards to swap in if I see any under-performers. Likewise, the stagger potential from Raging Tremors feels like it’d be nice to have, but perhaps not worth a whole card slot. For objectives, Shocking Assault felt like it might be me trying to be too optimistic in having it overlap with scoring Set Explosives. In reality, they likely won’t be in my hand at the same time and it’s yet another objective that would be pulling me away from the main goal. I’m definitely going to test it out, though.

Anyway, the main point of this article isn’t to show off a particular deck. It’s to introduce Underworlds DB to anyone who isn’t familiar with it and give folks a taste of one way to build Nemesis decks. I hope this makes someone feel a little more confident in venturing into Nemesis and realizing it isn’t that much different from the comfortable Rivals format.

If it still feels a little overwhelming and you’d like to take a look at decks others folks have made, the Battle Mallet team not only have a podcast and event organizer resources, but they also maintain a Nemesis Deck Library that features decks from the community as well as decks taken from tournaments. This edition is still fairly new, but they’ve done a good job of populating it and keeping it up to date as each new event wraps up. Another blog focused on newer players, Spent Glory, has a whole slew of articles on building a deck (they’re from the previous edition of the game, but still hold golden nuggets that can carry over to this edition).

For those of you who haven’t dipped your toes into Nemesis yet, I hope this shows you that the deck building aspect isn’t a daunting process. For readers who haven’t heard of or used Underworlds DB, I hope you have a new tool in your kit and look forward to hearing about new deck builds! Goonhammer Patreon members can share them in the Underworlds channel of the Discord and we can all waffle on trying to find the right 11th ploy to cut together.

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