Warhammer Underworlds

[The Other Dave]

Success! Thanks mij for the games! It's really a nicely-built mod.

We played my Wurmspat vs mij's Krushas, which is tricky for the Stinkies as their damage output can be lackluster - TBH I probably coasted through on familiarity with the game and won I think 8 to 7 in our second game despite being tabled? Excellent fun and a slick TTS mod, two thumbs up!

[me_in_japan]

Big thumbs up for the TTS mod, and many thanks to Dave for initiating and organising this. Despite losing both games, much fun was had. Those orkses are really quite smashy up close, and double ‘ard, to boot. Sadly, my lack of experience (and, um, skill...) meant that despite the ladz’ mighty muscles, we lost our games. But we’ll be back, oh yes we will...

[The Other Dave]

Hmm, the cards for the Bonereapers warband (up for preorder this weekend already) are up.

And I dunno, just after I've spend a month or so crowing about how balance is so good this season, it looks on the face of it like we might have yet another big-guy-focused meta-warping warband on our hands. Kainan is pretty gross all on his own (2 hammers, 3 damage, range 2 uninspired, up to 4 damage inspired - and 6 wounds, naturally) but most of his little minions are also hitting on hammers, for mostly 2 damage, and potentially doing bonus damage when supported. And they all defend on shields, and two of them go up to 2 shields when inspired. That's just a lot of really good stats - other 6- and 7-fighter warbands are giving these guys the side-eye for sure.

Their only balancing point (aside from a lackluster-but-not-actually-bad speed of 3 across the board) might be that tithe counters are relatively hard to come by. There's a couple cards you can use to get extras, but in general you'd need to kill 2 4-wound fighters or 3 smaller guys to inspire, which is not trivial even with their stats - this also limits Kainan's ability to beef himself up even further by spending them, which seems gratuitous anyway.

[Jye Nicolson]

They look pretty good yeah. The big guy is not going to be a Mollog esque terror but it looks like the Morteks have a lot more game in them than the weirdo cave squigs or the gnoblars so pretty dangerous.

I still think *being* a 6 model warband is weakness enough in its own right, particularly with some incentives to push the Morteks forward where the Orruks, Stormcast etc want them, but not going to lie, my interest in these guys has done a 180.

[The Other Dave]

Yeah, it's going to be hard to keep morteks alive against most warbands, and they definitely lack the rules-breaking shenanigans that Mollog and, to a lesser extent, Hrothgorn have - if you're careful with positioning and pushes, Kainan should be relatively easy to handle, and they only mess with the action economy with their move reaction thing. Getting a new FAR list, with Ferocious Resistance on it, will help keep them in check too, of course.

But man, that's a lot of hammers. (I mean, a scrub with a 3-hammer arrow attack! What even!)

[me_in_japan]

Many thanks for the games this evening, Dave. Clearly the builder of that Pageant deck knew what he was doing! I'll try to build my own deck for next time and not be a filthy net decker. Hopefully we can roll some virtual dice again next weekend

[The Other Dave]

No shame in net-decking! I need reminded to stay on my toes, ha ha. Also gave me some things to think about in terms of tuning my wraithcreepers deck a bit - I have a lot of “get everyone into enemy territory” cards in there, while the Patrician with his drum really wants to hang back and let the others do the dirty work.

[The Other Dave]

Musings on games on Friday and Saturday!

Jye used Kainan's Reapers a couple times on Friday (hooray for underworldsdb and the tts mod group for getting the assets in even before the models are available!) and they seem very interesting! Strong, but not oppressive, as seems to be the case with lots of warbands this season. I got the feeling they're all about making the opponent make hard choices, not only in the obvious way through their "let me either inspire or reroll this attack" gambits, but also via choosing between focusing on Kainan to take him down (in which case you'll have three or four angry, buffed up Morteks up in your business) or between taking down the Morteks for relatively easy glory (in which case you'll have an angry, buffed up Kainan to deal with). And that decision will depend to some extent on sussing out whether the Kainan player is leaning in to Morteks or leaning in to Kainan, too. Very thinky!

As he says above, mij took a very nice tournament-winning Dread Pageant net deck on Saturday, which is all about buffing either Slakeslash or the leader through the roof and playing the objective game, which works really well when it works! I was using the wraithcreepers, and while they're really good at floating around and in a leisurely fashion accurately stabbing people, most of their push tech is "push one or more wraithcreepers toward an enemy" which isn't quite flexible enough to really contest objectives unless you're quite lucky. Plus I bricked a couple objective hands with "have all of your guys in enemy territory" (where activating the Patrician at all is often inefficient, so he tends to lurk in the back) or "have everybody take a move or charge action" (where the constant floaty pushiness means I had some turns where nobody took a move or charge action at all), so I have some tuning to do!

[The Other Dave]

The card previews for the final Direchasm warband, the Krab Krew, are up: https://www.warhammer-community.com/202 ... ese-cards/

Like a lot of warbands this season, they look rather finessey and "thinky", but perhaps a bit hard to play? They only have 3 models who can hold objectives, and they're all various degrees of elven weediness. They have sort of odd inspire mechanics, inspiring automatically in the second round and (thematically to how they work in AoS) uninspiring automatically in round 3. Also oddly, they don't seem to gain too much when inspired (a touch of accuracy, usually through gaining cleave and/or ensnare, and sometimes a bit of defense) while when uninspired they have a potentially really powerful "move or charge with a move token" ability. TBQH I'm not quite sure what to make of the stats! The fish is a bit weird too - not worth any glory, it's basically a supporting fighter / movement blocker that you can move around pretty freely? Since you have to telegraph where you place it, you can also (it seems to me) force the opponent to make the choice of moving somewhere they weren't going to in order to block its placement or letting you sit it annoyingly on an objective or whatever.

On that note, they do seem to be the "MtG blue deck" force, with a number of cards that give their opponent the choice of discarding power cards or having something bad happen, which is basically unique to them, and potentially interesting. Seems like they might have a lot of control, countered by struggling to play the objective game.

[me_in_japan]

On that note, they do seem to be the "MtG blue deck" force,

Sold!