Warhammer Underworlds

[The Other Dave]

So some random musing: Robin or Pete from Agents of Sigmar (I can never keep them straight) posted a video musing about a new season, and raised the new-to-me idea of rotating out warbands, in part because it's getting harder to keep a lore connection to the Mirrored City and in part to allow for tighter balance control and the cycling out of some of the more problematic warbands from the past*. This is sort of a new idea, as GW has pledged before that old warbands will always be playable, BUT on the other hand they didn't say anything about card rotation before that happened, and phasing out old warbands in certain organized play formats while leaving them still legal in Relic wouldn't be technically phasing them out entirely... Really, the only people they'd potentially alienate are old hands, who are pretty much guaranteed to fall into the "but you own all the warbands" category anyway.

The more I think about it, the more I think it may be a net good idea - a revised Championship format that only allows warbands from the two "active" seasons would make the game much stronger (not to mention newbie-friendly).

*I say it with some regularity to anyone in earshot, but it's really pretty impressive to me how the Direchasm warbands are so strongly designed - the "weakest" DC warband is arguably Ravagers, who have really good stats and are only held back by a mechanic that makes it easy to score some Beastgrave objectives against them (and they're nowhere near as weak as Eyes of the Nine or the weaker Shadespire warbands), and while the jury is still out on the "strongest," even Kainan's probably aren't as oppressive as even the Krushas, let along Mollog or Hrothgorn. Just look at how popular Vanguard seems to be!

[The Other Dave]

OK, a thought, and an announcement / call for feedback!

Thought: Since I now have 35 of 36 warbands existing in the game painted up, and the Krab Krew will get here this week, I'm embarking on an Epic Task: I'm going to play, in person, at least one game with each of the warbands, in release order. Which will take a while, especially with having to also get 10 games in with one warband of choice in the next 3 months for the shop league.

Announcement / Call for Feedback: With the vaccine finally squeaking out (as a full-time educator I'm fast-tracked to get my first jab at my earliest convenience, yay!), I think I can start planning for that tournament that got cancelled last year. My current thoughts are:

When: In Q4 this year, probably November / December, just to be on the safe side
Matched Play Format: Since it'll be early season 5 (if the release schedule follows the usual pattern, knock on wood in this time of globally-fucked shipping and the worrying fact that the latest FAQ is now a year old), I'm thinking of a "Season 4 and Season 5 Vanguard" - only warbands and universals from Direchasm, the next season, the Starter Set, and Essential Cards. Partly for attractiveness to newer player reasons, partly for balance as that conveniently cuts out Mollog and the Krushas, who again can be a bit oppressive for newer players.
Tournament Format: I think we could do a "5 games best of one" Swiss ranking style tournament* in a single day with a nice unhurried pace. Best of 1 because it'll let participants play as many different opponents as possible, and I hope this would mostly be a community-building / outreach thing, with the primary goal being meeting people and (in the best of all possible worlds) making connections between semi-local gamers.

*Meaning the first matchups will be random, then each round will be arranged in ranking order by wins -> losses -> net glory scored across all games.

Interest? Good or bad weekends in that timeframe? Thoughts on format? Et cetera?

[Jye Nicolson]

I'm in, though this far out no idea of which weekends are good or bad.

Format sounds good - would the Castigators and Wraithcreepers be in?

[The Other Dave]

Format sounds good - would the Castigators and Wraithcreepers be in?

Yes, Starter Set and Essential Cards would both be in.

[Konrad]

OK, a thought, and an announcement / call for feedback!

Thought: Since I now have 35 of 36 warbands existing in the game painted up, and the Krab Krew will get here this week, I'm embarking on an Epic Task: I'm going to play, in person, at least one game with each of the warbands, in release order. Which will take a while, especially with having to also get 10 games in with one warband of choice in the next 3 months for the shop league.

Dave, you need an intervention, not a tournament.
We're your friends. We care about you and we are very concerned about your plasticrack use.

[Jye Nicolson]

35 teams is only about 140 figures, which I believe Primarch would count as a "morning warmup".

[Primarch]

[The Other Dave]

Oh, absolutely! It's taken me years to paint them too! (well, mostly because of how they're released, but still)

[me_in_japan]

I’d be interested, vaccination status dependent, of course.

[The Other Dave]

After a full year, we finally got a new Errata! Top-tier players will likely still gripe that there isn't guidance on the exact timing of when Primacy is awarded, and the posted errata to Championship seems to be completely lacking the FAR list, only verifying that Essentials Pack cards are legal. Still!

Mollog got a big hit with the nerf-bat, being unable to take superactions if he has a Charge token while Inspired - he can smack people with his club, but no charging or sweeping attacks. This will probably do a lot to tone him down. Also there's a beta rule making Khagra's inspire more easily, needing only two desecration counters on the board instead of three - still might not make them really competitive (as their main weakness, being unable to contest hold-more-objective type cards, still exists), but it should give them a boost. So not a lot of new rules or clarifications, but it's something!

Most importantly, hopefully this movement means we'll get a full FAQ and updated FAR list soon - I know all the various bloggers and podcasters have been upset to varying degrees by the lack of communication, but personally I expect it comes down to GW not wanting to "legitimize" online play, be it TTS or Vassal or the various webcam tournaments they've been running. Which, you know, fair, but OTOH 40K has been getting their regular post-codex FAQs all this time. :shrug:

In local-organized-play-planning news, it looks like I can rent an appropriately-sized space in downtown Nagoya for roughly 10,000 yen for the day even as far out as this, so it shouldn't be a problem on the pure-logistics end. It's just a question of seeing how long I want to wait to pull the trigger to make sure things'll be open enough to run. (The Tokyo Tactical group is running full-on 40K organized play events, so I probably shouldn't worry too much about something 4 or 5 months out, but who knows.)