It’s another Underworlds preorder day! That means Goonhammer has coverage for a deluge of Games Workshop releases that will be coming your way soon. It feels like we just did this recently, but that’s the new edition rush for you. There are four boxes, each containing four revamped warbands and themed to one of the Age of Sigmar Grand Alliances. We also have two brand new warbands in the Jaws of Itzl and Grandfather’s Gardeners as well as two brand new Rivals decks with Reckless Fury and Wrack & Ruin. That’s 18 warbands, 2 decks, and a lot of new rules to cover!

Before getting into the reviews, if you’re reading this on November 23-24, the World Championships of Warhammer are underway right now, and this year the Underworlds event has streamed coverage! Check it out over on the Mortal Realms YouTube channel. The hosts for the stream are Davy from the What The Hex?! podcast and Mike (aka Fishmode) from the Spent Glory blog and Underworlds Underground podcast. These two are genuinely wonderful dudes with a solid grasp on the game and a great way of explaining what’s going on. Check it out!

In these deck reviews, I’m going to take a look at the cards and highlight a few that I am personally interested in for various reasons. Each deck overview will start with the objective cards, since those are the cards you need to score to actually win the game and thus shape the deck’s entire approach to playing. Following the objectives will be the power cards, which are made up of ploys and upgrades that help support the objective scoring gameplan. Finally, I’m going to touch on some potential warband pairings for playing these decks in the Rivals format, as well as my initial thoughts on using them as one of your two decks in the Nemesis format.

If you want to check out the other items being covered today, you can find those articles here:

Despoilers and Daemons: Chaos Warbands
Revenants of the Realms: Death Warbands
Brutes and Bandits: Destruction Warbands
Heroes and Hunters: Order Warbands
The Jaws of Itzl and Grandfather’s Gardeners

Reckless Fury is the second Strike deck available in this edition of Warhammer Underworlds. When comparing it to its contemporary Blazing Assault, Reckless Fury has an increased focus on your fighters having charge tokens, being in enemy territory, and it concerns itself with your fighters’ bounty characteristics more while Blazing Assault is highly concerned with you making attacks and rolling certain values while doing so. While it may not seem like much of a distinction, the tools present in Reckless Fury along with some of the abilities individual warbands can bring allow you to lean into different synergies to score your objectives.

Objective Cards

To get an idea of how much this deck wants you to have charge tokens, 9 of the 12 objectives directly refer to fighters needing charge tokens. This objective deck cares more about charge tokens than Pillage and Plunder cares about delving! The other three objectives are still appropriately Strike themed – two care about slain/damaged enemies while the remaining objective focuses on being in enemy territory with multiple move tokens.

The first cards I look at when checking out a new deck are the surge objectives, so let’s start there. There are a trio of these that could conceivably scored in the first two turns provided you have a hefty enough fighter and a good landing point for a charge – Best Foot Forward scores after a successful attack if the fighter has charge token(s) and is in enemy territory; Frenzied Rush scores after an action step if you have 3+ bounty worth of fighters with charge token(s) in enemy territory; Sally Forth scores after an opponent’s activation if you have a fighter with a charge token on a treasure in enemy territory. A number of the elite brawler warbands have a fighter that is worth 3 bounty that you wouldn’t mind shoving into enemy territory to score these surges early.

Savage Sprinter is another generally useful surge objective that I can see getting played often – you score it after any action step if a friendly fighter in enemy territory has 2+ move tokens. This is particularly good if you have some tech either in the power deck or your warscroll that allows fighters to make moves outside the normal timing (such as Scurry with Zarbag’s Gitz or Skitter with Zikkit’s Tunnelpack).

Living Bludgeon will require some planning or support to pull off since it scores after giving a guard token to a fighter with a charge token who is not in friendly territory. You will either have to be able to charge out your entire warband to activate the fighter again for the guard core ability, or get that guard token from a power card or warscroll ability.

The final surge is Vicious Brawl which scores after 3+ fighters with charge tokens are adjacent to each other. It has an underdog clause that reduces the requirement to 2+ fighters instead. If the non-underdog reading requires all 3 fighters to be adjacent to each other (so forming a triangle), this is a quite rare occurrence in games. If they just need to be strung out in a line, that’s going to be a little easier. Regardless, having ranged weapons makes this easier to set up to score since you can just charge next to your buddies and shoot over their heads if needed.

Three of the end phase objectives are worth one glory each. Aim for the Top is going to either encourage you to split your damage (always a risk) or it will score later in the game, provided you’re doing a sufficient amount of killing since it’s asking for 4 or more total bounty worth of slain and/or damaged enemy fighters. Bloodbathed Rampager, along with having a metal as hell name, is confusing on its own because it scores if a friendly fighter has 2 or more charge tokens. This isn’t doable normally, but don’t worry – this deck has tools. The final single glory end phase objective is Red Aftermath with the fairly attainable requirement to have 2+ bounty worth of slain enemy fighters. That’s the name of the game for this deck anyway, so that shouldn’t be a huge ask.

Stepping up the glory payout, we have Arena Mortis. You’ll earn 2 glory if all fighters in the same territory have charge tokens and their total bounty is 4+. This includes your opponent’s fighters, so this could be tricky to pull off if they’re not inclined to be making charge themselves. If that’s the case, you’re going to need to rely on some pushes, killing those pesky non-chargers, or potentially leveraging ranged weapons while charging up to the edge of your territory or into neutral territory. The other 2 glory reward in this deck is Bloody Momentum. If 2+ friendly fighters with a total bounty of 4+ have charge tokens and are in enemy territory, you’ll score this. This is one that will be easier in round 1 and get progressively more difficult as the game plays out and your fighters start going down.

The capstone objective for Reckless Fury is the 3 glory payout in Unrelenting Massacre. How do you get that bag of glory? Simple, all fighters need to have charge tokens. This is a pretty big ask – your opponent is certainly not going to be inclined to help you score this. You can’t even “just table them” and score it without careful timing, because running out of charge targets could happen, although there are a couple of cards in the power deck that could help you if you get stuck in that position. I do like that the capstone card for this objective deck is something you have to actively build around and work toward, but rewards you decently and still feels achievable. It’s a far cry from Annihilation in Blazing Assault, or the disappointingly limited Spread Havoc in Countdown to Cataclysm (why oh why couldn’t it be your cataclysm value minus 1 and score 0-3 glory instead of 1-2?).

Power Cards

As I’ve hinted at a few times, there are multiple ways to grant fighters charge tokens in the power deck. Starting with the ploys, there’s Braced which simply picks a friendly fighter and gives them a charged token. This, and other effects like it, can be used to help score your objectives above but are also great to catch your opponent off guard. I had this done to me in a test game where I thought my fighter was safe standing next to a very threatening enemy fighter that had already charged and my opponent still had a fighter without a charge token. He surprised me by granting a timely charge token to his fighter across the battlefield, then punched my fighter’s lights out. Catch Weapon is a touch more flexible in that it responds to a fighter making a successful attack and then gives them a charge token. You could use this on your own fighters, or to mess with the plans of an opponent if they wanted to get multiple attacks off in a round. Quick Shift allows you to pick a friendly fighter with a move token and replace it with a charge token.

Aside from generating charge tokens, there are ways to shuffle around existing charge tokens on your fighters. Get It Done is honestly frightening to picture being used by a warband with a single big brawler. Imagine Mollog charging in, throwing his charge token over to the Stalagsquig, and getting to charge again the following turn. If you really want to shuffle tokens, Over to You does it with aplomb by pulling all the move, charge, guard, and stagger tokens from one of your just-slain fighters and dumping them onto another friendly fighter.

Push Through does a reasonable impression of Get It Done, or the Blazing Assault’s own Scream of Anger, by inflicting a damage to one of your fighters and allowing them to use a core ability as if they had no move or charge tokens. The only stipulation is that it’s restricted to a fighter with a bounty of 2 or less, so no using this on Blackpowder or the Wielder of the Blade.

Reckless Fury doesn’t have much in the way of pushes in the power deck. The only showing here is Diving In which pushes a friendly fighter up to 2 hexes as long as they end adjacent to any fighters with a charge token (yours or the opponent’s). It’s still solid push tech and directly helps to score your surge Vicious Brawl. Speaking of diving into a pile of charged fighters, Outburst plays up the other meaning of “charged” with a lightning based pun. You pick a friendly fighter with a charge token and roll an attack dice for each enemy adjacent to them. Any result of hammer inflicts a damage on the enemy fighter. If you’re the underdog, you can instead roll dice equal to the round number. The odds here aren’t great when not the underdog at only a 33% chance of working, but it can take out vulnerable fighters and gets much more accurate if you get to roll 2-3 dice.

Maybe your opponent isn’t playing nice and is refusing to join in on the big brawl in the middle of the board. If you use Reckless Attitudes, they’ll helpfully see the error of their ways! This ploy restricts enemy fighters from using any core ability other than charge in the next action step. No move, no guard, no attack (unless it’s part of a charge), and no warscroll core abilities allowed. Do note that the opponent does still have the option to use the focus action instead, because it’s the player who focuses – not a fighter. And if your opponent has already charged with every fighter in their warband and you tell them they can’t do anything but charge, a focus might be the only thing they can do!

Lost Legacy is the final ploy and it’s a pretty neat one. You play it after a friendly fighter is slain and you discard their upgrades. Pick one of those discarded upgrades, put it in your hand, and draw an additional power card. Some upgrades are incredibly powerful, and getting a second use of them after their first wielder is taken out can swing the game in your favor. Getting to draw an additional power card to replace Lost Legacy itself was an unexpected bonus but it really cements this as a solid card, provided you have good upgrades (and why would you take 10 bad upgrades?) and your opponent actually kills some of your fighters.

Speaking of upgrades, what does Reckless Fury offer? One that pairs well with the first set of ploys above is Headcase, a 0 cost upgrade that allows you to, in the power step, give the equipped fighter a charge token if they don’t have one. Since this is a 0 cost upgrade, it’s effectively another copy of Braced but reusable.

Another upgrade that has a cousin in the ploy pile is Fury of Aqshy, a 1 cost upgrade that prevents fighters adjacent to the wielder from using any core abilities other than charge. Do keep in mind it applies to your own fighters as well. It is a more narrow application (literally; just applying to models surrounding your equipped fighter) but since it’s persistent you can really use it to mess with your opponent’s gameplan if you can position well.

Furious Might is the only way this deck has of boosting damage, and for 1 glory it does so by giving grievous to melee weapons that the equipped fighter has provided they have a charge token… and the attack they are making isn’t part of a charge. You’ll have to either charge out your entire warband before being able to access this, or use something like Push Through to temporarily ignore the effects of the charge token. Similarly restricted, but with less universal appeal, is Still Swinging. It’s the exact same card, except you are gaining ensnare instead of grievous. I’m still hesitant to include upgrades that do nothing but grant ensnare (although I have come around on doing the same with cleave) and this has additional restrictions. I feel like this is one of the early, easy cuts to make for Nemesis.

There are still a couple upgrades that care about charging – one is Headlong Charge which is another 0 cost upgrade that gives +2 move when performing a charge. Straightforward and free, I can see this being generally useful. The last is Bellowing Tyrant, a weird 1 cost upgrade that grants a core ability to the bearer of the card. Bellow (the core ability’s name) can be used even if the fighter has a charge token, and it pushes each other friendly fighter with any charge tokens up to 2 hexes. Then you pick one of the pushed fighters and remove one of their charge tokens. The card art has Hrothrorn yelling at his little grots, but this amusingly feels like a better use if you have a dinky little grot being the one bellowing at Hrothgorn (or a Mortek yelling at Kainan, or Stalagsquig shouting at Mollog, etc.) since you can reposition the big bruiser and get another charge off with them.

Keen Eye shows up here, and it’s just as useful as it is in the other decks. If you don’t have all the decks memorized already (don’t worry, you’re clearly a normal person so good on you) this is a 2 cost upgrade that gives +1 attack dice to the fighter’s melee weapons. Expensive, but powerful and always useful. Blades of Wrath is a new one, but feels fairly generic and can be used by many warbands – for 1 glory, your fighter gets to take a parting pot shot at adjacent enemies when they die. You roll a number of attack dice equal to the battle round for each enemy fighter adjacent, and if you roll any hammers that fighter takes 1 damage.

With two more upgrades to go, there’s Bladecatcher that costs 1 glory and prevents attackers from using weapon abilities against this fighter. Weapon abilities include the ones in the rulebook (cleave, ensnare, grievous, brutal, grapple, and stagger) but also ones granted to fighters from their warscrolls like Fillet from the Skinnerkin or Swashbuckle from Blackpowder’s Buccaneers. I’ve had firsthand experience against this card, and I was honestly surprised by how effective it was. Weapon abilities are going to be fairly common, either baked into the fighters’ cards or granted from upgrades, ploys, and warscrolls. Being able to consistently shut them down is great.

Last, and certainly not least, is the disgusting Utter Ignorance. It costs 2 glory, but it’s worth it! If the fighter with this upgrade were to be slain, they’re not. Instead, you make them vulnerable and discard this card. If you put this onto a large fighter that’s difficult to take down, your opponent will have to go through the effort twice – and you get a chance to heal some of the remaining damage or reposition before they can. Seeing this go onto a fighter like the Gorehulk or even a little guy like Snirk is going to make your opponent gnash their teeth. I know I did.

General Thoughts

On the surface, this deck might feel similar to Blazing Assault – they’re both Strike decks, they both want you to fight, and they both have some very solid tools in their toolbox. I think one of the key differences is that many of the objectives in Blazing Assault were tied to the outcomes of attack rolls – roll a critical, roll different symbols, roll all successes – and that’s something you don’t have any control over. Sure, you can weight the odds in your favor (not literally – please, no toilet dice in Underworlds) but you’re still leaving it up to fate. Reckless Fury on the other hand mostly wants you to make charges and position in certain ways. These are things that are, mostly, in your control. You’ll still need valid targets to charge, but luckily every warband in Underworlds is made up of at least 3 fighters, so you’ll be able to make those charges.

It’s certainly a new take on things to want charge tokens on your models – typically, you’re doing what you can to work around them but this deck turns a mechanic designed to limit your options into the main plan. I’m glad to have something this innovative and new in our deck pool, especially considering Strike is often thought of as simple and easy to pilot.

Rivals: It’s not what immediately comes to mind after looking at these cards, but Thorns of the Briar Queen also has some innate bonuses regarding charge tokens. You can generate two in a turn with their push, and charge tokens help to boost your accuracy when ganging up on enemy fighters. It’s something I’d at least like to try out a few times. A little more in line with what the surface level of this deck puts forward, Gorechosen of Dromm have two different 3+ bounty fighters to help with the objectives that care about that, and they’re honestly just flat out terrifying. Morgok’s Krushas likewise are solid stat balls, and their warscroll has ways to both grant them guard tokens after a charge and give your leader a charge token (with extra upsides).

Nemesis: The straightforward idea here would be to take this Strike deck, pair it with the Blazing Assault Strike deck, and get a warband that wants to go smash face and get to it. Honestly, this sounds like a great plan. You could either lean heavily into the “charge tokens matter” mechanic in Reckless Fury and take generically good cards from Blazing Assault, or cherry pick the few cards in here that aren’t overly charge focused and splash them in with the Blazing Assault cards. My affinity toward Pillage and Plunder rears its head again and I’m considering that pairing – you could take some of the pushes and teleports, Wary Delver to give a guard token to a fighter with a charge token, Explosive Charges to give extra range on your charges, and the two ranged attack upgrades to help you still land hits on far away targets when making those charges.

Jake’s Picks

Bloody Momentum: I’m drawn to end phase objectives that are worth more than 1 glory – going into Nemesis, being able to pick a few of these to boost your deck’s total glory is going to be important. Bloody Momentum feels like a solid contender for this slot, but it has a decent amount of counterplay baked in. You obviously won’t be able to score it if you run out of fighters, either number-wise or bounty-wise, but a savvy opponent can also just effectively flip boards on you by rushing into your own territory. It’s going to be hard to have your fighters gain charge tokens in enemy territory when there are no enemies over there to charge!

Lost Legacy: I know it’s just my broken brain that has been shaped by decades of Magic, but seeing anything that grants card advantage automatically makes me pay attention. It’s probably for the best that you can’t get multiple uses out of Utter Ignorance with Lost Legacy, but even getting to use Keen Eye, a weapon upgrade, or Great Fortitude twice in a game will have an impact. Plus you get to draw another power card!

Bellowing Tyrant: Initially, I wanted to put Utter Ignorance here because I think it’s one of the best upgrades in the deck, but I want to try shenanigans with Bellowing Tyrant. Using it in a Thorns of the Briar Queen build would let you effectively use their push twice in a round, with the added benefit that using it later in a round can shove even more fighters around and allow one of them to get a charge off again later. Elite warbands might struggle to find a way to get solid use out of burning a turn on Bellow, but that’s okay. Some times the little guys want to shine, too.

Wrack and Ruin is a Mastery deck that has a focus on fighter positioning and dealing damage with ploys. Ping was an off and on problem in the previous edition, so many players are eyeing this deck with trepidation and wondering if games will be full of “In the power step, I deal a bunch of damage and kill your fighters.” Let’s see if that’s a glimpse into our future, or a relic staying safely in the past.

Objective Cards

There are roughly three main categories of objectives in this deck. First off are the ones that care about where fighters are on the board. Then there are the ones that care about playing ploys. The last large category are ones that care about specific amounts of damage being distributed among fighters or dealt to fighters. Plenty of these card bleed from one category into another, and there are a handful that don’t neatly slot into any of these categories. It’s just something that stood out to me while flipping through them all.

For surge objectives, first up is Careful Advance which scores after a friendly fighter moves as long as 2+ friendly fighters are in enemy territory with move tokens. Reliable, straightforward, and useful to a variety of warbands. You can do it the slow and fair way of just taking two turns moving, or use warscroll/power cards to get an extra move.

Unsafe Ground cares instead about where your opponent’s fighters are. This surge scores after your warband (a distinction that is important) inflicts damage on an enemy fighter in an edge hex. If you are the underdog, that enemy fighter can instead be within 1 hex of an edge hex. The knowledge that this card exists is going to incentivize your opponent to not hang out in edge hexes, which could come in handy later when we get to the end phase objectives…

Next I’d like to consider Predictable End because this surge objective scores after a Wrack and Ruin card inflicts damage to an enemy fighter holding a treasure token. The distinction between your warband dealing damage and your cards dealing damage is an important one for this deck in particular, because there are a number of cards that care about one or the other. It’s also worth re-reading any similar cards in other decks for potential Nemesis pairings. There’s a section of the rulebook that covers “Who Inflicted Damage?” and it boils down to if it’s part of an attack, the attacker and weapon did the damage. If it’s from an ability, then the ability did the damage. Your warband is not your power deck and vice versa, so keep that in mind when evaluating this deck and potential combinations with it. As for Predictable End, this feels pretty narrow – even though many of the ploys in this deck can ping, there’s no guarantee that your opponent will be in position when you want to. Useful against a hold warband and potentially dead against others is not a category I want my surge objectives to be in.

Continuing on the damage infliction train (what a horrible train to ride on), there’s Bloody and Bruised with a very unwelcome closeup of the gross entrails of Ghulgoch. You’ll score this after your warband inflicts damage on an enemy fighter, provided 3 or more fighters are damaged. This one feels much more reliable, especially considering your own fighters can contribute to the tally. Again, this keys off of your warband doing the damage, so you’ll need to land an attack or utilize a warscroll ability to score it.

Low on Options instead focuses on the “ploys matter” theme within this deck, scoring after you discard a power card if you have 5 or more ploys in your discard pile. The wording in the rules says that after you resolve the effects of a ploy, you discard it, so this is much easier to trigger than I had first assumed when doing a cursory glance. This feels particularly juicy if your warband has any ways of drawing more cards (Zondara or Ylthari, perhaps?) and you can reliably get through your power deck to play those ploys.

The final surge is a pretty straightforward one in Strong Start, a basic kill surge that scores if you slay an enemy fighter and that was the first fighter slain this combat phase. I’ve had dicey luck with these in the past – you’re banking on a few things going right for you and you only have control over a few of them. It’s going to have more value when you’re rocking a warband of fighters that are inherently hard to kill such as Gorechosen of Dromm or Morgok’s Krushas, and likely something you’d want to avoid if you have a large pile of fragile fighters like Sepulchral Guard or Thorns of the Briar Queen.

Moving off the surges, let’s take a look at the end phase objectives. Starting with the positional ones again, there’s Alone in the Dark which is worth a nice 2 glory and scores if no fighters are adjacent. Another objective that is partially out of your control on whether it can score, but it can have the odds increased if your warband has a low model count and also possesses ranged weapons so you can engage while maintaining your distance. I’ve said before, but I like it when these higher payoff end phase objectives have some counterplay built into them. I think that’s healthy for the game.

Spread Out! is up next, and it’s a single glory awarded to you if you have a friendly fighter in each territory. A fairly easy objective to score with a comparably low payoff of just 1 glory, provided your warband has enough bodies to pull this off reliably. I’d be wary of taking it in a 3 fighter warband, for instance.

Out of the Frying Pan yields 2 glory and looks absolutely rad while doing so. Ennias is here looking incredibly menacing. The more I see these new cards, the more I am growing to like the miniature photography art. Anyway, if you can manage to have 3+ damaged friendly fighters in enemy territory and they have move and/or charge tokens, you’ll earn 2 glory. This is twice the glory of Spread Out! for what feels like it will be four times the effort. Spoiler, there are some ploys in this deck that will result in your fighters being damaged, and there certainly are warbands out there that would love to spread the damage around amongst themselves (Dread Pageant says hello!), but for others this might be tricky to pull off.

If you remember Unsafe Ground from the surge step, you might want to pair it with Stay Close – this end phase objective is worth 2 glory and will score if there are no fighters in edge hexes. These two together have some great push/pull. Does your opponent want to stand on an edge hex to deny you Stay Close, or do they want to keep those empty to deny Unsafe Ground? The dream would be to kill their fighter in an edge hex, score Unsafe Ground and then score Stay Close in the end phase.

Living on the Edge is appropriately named. Earning you 2 glory, you’ll score this if you have a vulnerable friendly fighter in enemy territory. That’s definitely flying close to the sun, but it’s a tempting payoff for doing so. It’s more tempting when you consider using abilities like the Emberwatch’s Vanguard Dash or the Pillage and Plunder card Tunneling Terror to teleport a vulnerable fighter into enemy territory, but away from the brawl, right before scoring.

The final end phase objective is Ploymaster which, probably unsurprisingly, revolves around using ploys. This time, you’re going to score 1 glory for playing 3+ ploys in the battle round. It’s a more narrow window than Low on Options since you have to play them all within the same battle round instead of allowing for them to be strung out over the game, but as long as you don’t have too many situational ploys this can be a fairly reliable scoring objective. Doubly so if you factor in how much card selection you can get from using the focus core ability – dumping a couple of upgrades from your hand and drawing that many plus 1 power cards can set you up comfortably. Just don’t forget you have this objective and blow all your ploys early, leaving yourself unable to score it.

Power Cards

Since we’ve established a pattern, I’ll start with the positional ploys. Confusion is a returning classic that’s in other decks and will continue to shine here. You pick any 2 adjacent fighters and have them swap places. It’s great to steal treasure tokens, extend a fighter’s threat range, set up flanked or surrounded, or help set up many of the scoring options in this deck and other decks.

Sidle Up allows you to push a friendly fighter up to 2 hexes, provided they end adjacent to 2+ fighters. It’s going to require some more setup to pull off, but having access to a 2 hex push is substantial.

If a push doesn’t quite get you where you want, there’s always Flee! This ploy picks a friendly fighter in friendly territory and gives them +3 move in your next action step. If they move, they must end outside of friendly territory. As a reminder, when you choose to charge it’s resolved by making a move and then attacking, so this would also extend the range of any charges from your territory by 3. Compared to Wings of War in the Blazing Assault deck (a surge ploy to give +2 move), this will give you an increase to your move distance but also tacking a few riders onto it to make it not just flat out better.

Fully half of the ploys have the phrase “Inflict 1 damage” so it’s clear how some of these ploys in this deck are going to support the objectives above. Starting with what is clearly the weakest of the bunch, we have Deadly Traps. This surge ploy can be played after (a) a friendly fighter’s drawn attack (b) if the target is not vulnerable and (c) was driven back. Drawn attacks aren’t terribly common in the first place, and additionally making it not work against fighters with a guard token, who manage to Stand Fast, or have any other anti-drive back tech is needlessly excessive in my opinion. That said, even if this card was a blank (which I feel it will be a lot of the time), this deck still has 5 other cards that can ping.

Working down that ping list, we have Fault Lines that can inflict 1 damage to an undamaged enemy fighter, then your opponent gets to choose any fighter and inflict 1 damage to them. Like many symmetrical cards in various games, at first blush this feels “fair” because it does the same thing equally to both players – it’s more restrictive for the player using it than their opponent, even. In practice, these symmetrical effects wind up waiting in the player’s hand until the effect is not symmetrical. It can be played to soften up an enemy fighter right before a charge, putting them into lethal range. Additionally, you’re not going to play this haphazardly when you have a vulnerable fighter. This is a strong card that asks just a bit of setup before it is played.

In a similar vein is Volcanic Eruption, a card that has you pick a fighter and your opponent pick an enemy fighter. A number of attack dice get rolled for each fighter equal to their bounty (minimum 1), and if any results are a hammer that fighter takes a damage. I like this one because it’s going to be more effective at landing damage on what is likely to be a priority target anyway – Mollog or Blackpowder are just about guaranteed to take a damage if they’re picked for this card, while a more swarmy warband with low value can be relatively safe. Anyone on Grinkrak’s team, for instance, only has a 33% chance of getting bonked. Worth noting, this has no restrictions about targets being vulnerable.

Damned if you Do and Ominous Rumbling are both similar in that they present your opponent with a choice. Damned if you Do has your opponent choose either for you to pick an enemy fighter and push them 1 hex or for you to pick an enemy fighter that is not vulnerable and deal a damage to them. Ominous Rumbling’s choices are either you pick 2 enemy fighters and stagger them, or pick an enemy fighter that is not vulnerable and deal a damage to them. The choice on these cards means that your opponent will always (theoretically) pick the option that is the least bad for them, and you can’t rely on these ploys as sources of pings but they are still potent. I imagine the push from Damned if you Do is going to be more universally helpful than the two stagger tokens from Ominous Rumbling, but there are certainly warbands out there which would love to have the additional accuracy on their attacks from the latter.

The last two ploys are in a more generic line. Fireproof makes it so the next time a friendly fighter is dealt damage in the next turn, it’s reduced to 1 damage. This is pretty nuts against the likes of warbands that rely on single bursts of damage, like Headsmen’s Curse or Gorechosen of Dromm. Viscous Intent is a surge ploy that you use to boost a weapon’s accuracy – the weapon gains +1 attack dice, or +2 attack dice if you’re targeting an undamaged target. As strong as Fireproof is against those heavy hitters, Viscous Intent is equally strong when used by them to make sure those impactful attacks land.

Moving on to the upgrades, one thing I noticed is that while the average cost of upgrades in this deck is 1, the costs are distributed – there are 3 that cost 2 as well as 3 that cost 0.

The highlight for the upgrades to me is Barge, which is amusing because it means that the new edition of Underworlds was only “barge-free” for a brief period of a few weeks! This upgrade costs 2 glory and grants the fighter a core ability named, appropriately, Barge. Unlike the barge action in the previous version of the game, this feels like it will have more use. This ability can be used by a fighter with no more and/or charge tokens. The fighter moves, ending adjacent to an enemy, and gains a charge token (along with the move token from moving, if I understand it correctly). Then you pick an adjacent enemy fighter and push them 1 hex, then stagger them. It’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to make use of this more than once per battle round due to how many tokens it sticks on your fighter, but having access to a guaranteed push and stagger effect is strong. Shove fighters off of treasure tokens, push them into or out of a clump to score objectives, or even knock them out of the edge hexes. Since it’s a push without any directional restrictions, there’s nothing preventing you from barging into a fighter and pulling them along the side of your own fighter – it does not have to be “away from” your barger. Neat!

Great Speed shows up in this deck as well, being a simple 0 cost upgrade that grants +1 move. Fiery Temper is another 0 cost upgrade, but this one grants a surge ability to the fighter. If the fighter is picked to be pushed, you can inflict a damage to the fighter and not be pushed instead. Phenomenal if your gameplan involves standing anywhere in particular. Note that the drive back from an attack is counted as a push, so this will prevent those as well. The last 0 cost upgrade is Misfortune and, well, it’s weird. It also grants a surge for the equipped fighter. After the fighter uses a core ability, you can inflict 1 damage on them. Then you can move this upgrade to another one of your friendly fighters. If you’re playing into some of this deck’s objectives like Out of the Frying Pan or Living on the Edge, this is one way to help damage your fighters. I’m of the opinion that most of the time my opponent is going to help me with that, so including this upgrade is suspect. There’s a potential exception for the Dread Pageant, or any other warbands that like damage to be spread around the table and grant you extra bonuses for that being the case.

Jumping back into the expensive upgrades, Desperate Defence costs 2 glory. Whenever the equipped fighter is the target of an attack, the damage is reduced by 1. However, this upgrade gets discarded when the fighter is damaged by an attack. There was a similar card in the previous edition, but the wording on it had it discarded whenever the fighter took any damage – which often resulted in my fighter getting pinged after putting that card out and making me feel extra dumb. The fact that this is guaranteed to stick around until it does something is nice, even if the initial cost of 2 is hefty. At least you’re able to reuse that glory once this is discarded.

Unstoppable is the last of the 2 cost upgrades and it’s potentially a doozy. Any time this fighter is vulnerable and is dealt 1 damage, reduce that damage to 0. Against some warbands that have a lot of 1 damage fighters, this is going to absolutely ruin their day. You can combine it with other effects like Desperate Defense or the Thricefold Discord’s Evasive to drop 2 damage attacks down to 1 damage, then completely negate them. I’m anticipating shaking my fist at this card when I see it across the table but also feeling giddy when I get to use it.

Henchman is an interesting card, particularly if your warband cares about flanked results on attacks. For 1 glory, this grants a surge ability to the equipped fighter that allows them to change one attack dice result to a flanked face, but you cannot reroll any attacks for this fighter. That last clause is nestled inside the surge ability, so my understanding is that you can reroll dice if you elect not to use this ability, even if it’s equipped to the fighter. It’s pretty straightforward and an easy way to increase your accuracy provided you can engineer situations to have a flanked attack.

Sundering Weapon is a variant on something we’ve seen in multiple of these decks. It costs 1 glory and grants cleave to the fighter’s melee weapons. Cleave is handy to have access to, moreso than it was previously, but keep in mind this is restricted to melee weapons only.

Finally, we have two treads. Rock-splitting Tread costs 1 and also grants a surge ability (there’s a lot of those in here!) called Stomp. A fighter can Stomp after your last action step in a battle round. It inflicts 1 damage on an adjacent, non vulnerable enemy fighter. Then you have to roll an attack dice and discard this card if a hammer is rolled. There are some real Bane of Heroes vibes coming from this card, but in a more reasonable way. The timing of this card means you cannot simply play it during your last power step and get an effect from it, so make sure you’re playing it at the least in the second-to-last power step of a round.

Wary Tread is a more defensive upgrade. It likewise costs 1 glory and this one triggers after the last power step of a battle round (so it can wait until then to be played). When you use it, the fighter is pushed 1 hex but can’t end adjacent to any fighters. Stepping out of range of an enemy fighter in the upcoming round or shuffling back onto a treasure token / different territory / out of an edge hex are all solid uses of this card.

General Thoughts

The creation of a dedicated ping deck probably sets off warning bells of any players who were around for the last edition, but I feel like the majority of these pings have sufficient restrictions on them that it won’t be as much of a problem. It is a dangerous line to skirt because any future decks with pings can immediately pair into this one for a strong Nemesis combination. Despite the issue of Mastery not really being a playstyle, it’s an appropriately labeled deck in that it’s going to introduce additional goals and lines of play that are going to require some familiarity and effort to, well, master.

Rivals: I think a warband with ranged weapons, movement tricks, and the ability to capitalize on using the pings to soften up targets for lethal hits are what you want. The Emberwatch feel particularly nice with this deck – they all have ranged attacks to allow them to interact while staying in the positions they want, they are incentivized to enter enemy territory to inspire already, and they have a flexible teleport with Vanguard Dash. The normally average damage can get some help with the ping ploys and upgrades. Jaws of Itzl are also interesting despite lacking as many movement tricks or ranged threats because they’re going to be much easier to inspire if you have a grip full of ways to do damage to an enemy fighter in your opponent’s power step. Their Savage Mauling ability is also a baked in, potentially reusable, ping.

Nemesis: When looking at decks to pair with Wrack and Ruin, I’m immediately drawn to Blazing Assault just because it has so many useful movement tricks to help with the positional scoring in Wrack and Ruin. Alternatively, an invasive Take and Hold could pair well by utilizing Emberstone Sentinels could work; I think the sweet spot here is a warband with about 4 fighters because that’s enough to hold treasures even after a casualty without being so many that they’re weakened to the point that your “symmetrical” pings can kill your own fighters. Dread Pageant feels pretty nice for this and I imagine is the pairing I’d like to try with them first.

Jake’s Picks

Alone in the Dark: Like I said when I covered this above, I like how this objective has counterplay opportunities while still being something you can actively work towards. It also tends to favor the warbands with a lower number of fighters, and I often find myself drawn to playing those for various reasons. As a 2 glory objective I think it’s worth planning gameplay around and building your deck to help support it.

Damned if you Do: Both effects on this card are incredibly strong, but the fact that your opponent is the one who chooses which one you have access to helps to temper its overall power. You’ll rarely get to do exactly what you want when playing this, but when the consolation prize is as good as what’s offered here it’s rarely going to be something to be upset over.

Barge: I knew I was going to pick this upgrade if for no other reason than the silly meme value of people hating (rightfully so) on how useless barge was in the prior edition, but I think this is a genuinely useful card. You’re effectively giving a fighter the ability to charge and act as if they have an automatically hitting, 0 damage grapple/stagger weapon. Any time you’re able to get effects like this without having to rely on dice is nice.

Closing Thoughts

With these two decks added to the pool, we are jumping from 6 unique Nemesis deck combinations to 15 unique Nemesis deck combinations which is a hefty jump. The way Nemesis works now means any new deck releases are going to grow the options available at an increasing rate. I’m looking forward to trying these out in various warband and deck combos to really explore the depth this new edition has.

That’s it for the two new Rivals decks released in this torrent. Check out the rest of Goonhammer’s coverage if you want to see what else is in this massive drop of Underworlds content!

Despoilers and Daemons: Chaos Warbands
Revenants of the Realms: Death Warbands
Brutes and Bandits: Destruction Warbands
Heroes and Hunters: Order Warbands
The Jaws of Itzl and Grandfather’s Gardeners

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.