Warhammer Underworlds

[The Other Dave]

The messaging could be clearer, yeah - really we know so little about what changes are going to be made to format, and it'll probably remain that way until the pre-order videos start dropping on Saturday.

My main beef currently is that (as you've alluded to) a lot of people online seem to be taking that lack of news and running with it. Tabletop Sydney just dropped a video with the very clickbaity title DEATH OF UNDERWORLDS...

[Jye Nicolson]

I'm not too concerned about the online discourse. Evergreen discourse about price does not seem to have reflected any real price sensitivity in the GW player base after all

Likewise even if the game *is* dying there's six warbands on the roadmap (and probably eight for the year) so it's not like I'm going to run out of stuff to play anytime soon.

Tournament play is probably more down to how things go opening back up, and since in person 40K events seem to be going fine I don't see any reason why Underworlds couldn't. I do think now is a good time for some introspection on the game and the change is probably timely, but as an existing player that doesn't do tournaments, I'm not sure anything *will* change for me, really.

[The Other Dave]

Yeah, when I think about it calmly, none of the drama will effect our little play group at all (well, aside from maybe making English-speaking folks disinclined to try the game, but we have the power of our charming personalities to counteract that ).

Since it's preorder day, rules summaries are dropping. Can You Roll a Crit's is (and very on-brand for him at the moment) extremely negative about basically everything, but the dads over at Agents of Sigmar have some nice "just the facts" coverage. There are a couple pretty big rules changes!

-When you mulligan, you reshuffle the cards of your initial draw back into your deck. I'm inclined to agree with the Agents' take that this is generally good, as it no longer means that drawing your third end-phase cards in your opening hand is basically an automatic loss, and it may actually make third end-phase cards a bit more attractive.
-Lethal hex placement is gone (lethals printed on boards don't go away, of course), and I kind of agree that it was probably an experiment that didn't work out too well. It made one-shotting mid-size fighters a tad too easy, and the fact that several warbands outright ignored the mechanic was also iffy. Lethals are basically replaced with "gloom" hexes, which let double supports count as defense successes for people standing on them. *shrug* You can also flip a hex you have a fighter standing on instead of playing a power card, just in time for Feed the Beastgrave to be gone.
-Some changes to objective hex placement, which if it has an effect on gameplay is way above my play level.
-A new "stagger" status, which removes Guard and lets attackers re-roll misses.
-Lots of codifying, tightening up and keyword-linking of mechanics that have been in the game for a bit.
-It looks like older warbands will retroactively get their appropriate Grand Alliance applied to them, which is nice.

[Jye Nicolson]

Yeah I think the changes are mostly good for us. Mulligan change is good in particular for casual play, even though I expect CYRAC is right and competitive players will mulligan constantly - it's worth it to get out of bad feeling no-surge draws or whatever without tanking your total glory chances.

Placeable lethal hexes changing to placeable gloom hexes...almost inclined to think they should have just got rid of that step since gloom seems much less impactful. But it's probably paired with the objective tokens starting on their Gloom side - essentially all of this slows the game down. It's harder to take people out (less lethals to punt them into) and it's harder to score objective control surges. That's good for casual play again - it definitely puts some friction in front of the decks that while maybe not tournament winners will absolutely score everything they have, which makes winning more realistic for less tuned decks.

(this also really hurts my Castigators, but I've won more games with them than they probably deserve so all good )

[The Other Dave]

Aside from the cases where an initial draw is straight-up obviously bad, I kind of expect my own decision to mulligan will depend a lot on a "how much of a PITA do I at this instant feel like reshuffling my deck would be" calculation as much as thoughts of what cards I want.

[me_in_japan]

I read CYRAC's review, and yeah, he's certainly a bit CRITical of the new box. But one thing he's not wrong on is that mulligan rule. As someone who plays a fair bit of MtG, and reads a lot about far better players of said game, being able to mulligan for free in a deck that size and not even return your original draw to the deck before you redraw is bonkers. Just whaaaaaaat were they thinking? Even in a 60 card MtG deck you are punished for mulliganing - you draw 7 initially, and if you mull you shuffle your original draw back in, draw another 7, and then discard a card to the bottom of your deck from your hand. This penalises you by giving you 1 less card than your oppo if you choose to mull. If you mull twice, you put two cards to the bottom, and so on. The point is, it's a cost. In underworlds, with zero cost involved there's no disincentive to just decide whether your opening hand is optimal. If it's anything other than optimal, mull. You'll just do better, it's almost guaranteed. On the plus side, it reduces the element of luck in determining who will be the winner of games. On the down side, good players will leverage the shit out of this to make really, really oppressive decks.

yikes

[The Other Dave]

Hmm, I wrote up a reply last night but it disappeared.

I don't know, I kind of come down on the side of the Path to Glory guys - with the deckbuilding rules, I don't feel like there's really that much you could do to abuse the system. It's different, certainly, and it'll smooth things out (I think we've all had a lot of games where we're on the back foot from turn one because of a bad draw or having to mulligan some important cards, and that's not a great feeling), and probably make more "adventurous" deck-building possible (like, having any third end phase cards instead of zero, or having more freedom to try out combos and such), but it's hard to imagine something really oppressive as such. It remains to be seen, I think! (It does give someone with a really finely-tuned deck a leg up on someone who doesn't have a great deck, but they already had that anyway.)

Speaking of, it's been interesting seeing the, er, interest in the Rivals format - the Agents of Sigmar dads are having fun with it, and Tabletop Sydney is running a straight-up Rivals tournament. I don't know if he's following the thread (it's sort of devolved into inside baseball mostly thanks to me, I know, heh), but I know @Balloonacorn expressed a bit of interest in the format, and it would be a really good way to have interesting games between newer / more casual players and veterans. Or even veterans and veterans! Seeing the TTS guys have to think about how to effectively use the less-optimal but more-thematic cards that show up in the faction decks has been really interesting.

[Jye Nicolson]

I feel like the mulligan rule is good on the objective side, and while very much lends itself to fishing on the power card side I'm not sure I care too much. I'd probably agree it's aimed at casual play more than competitive but, in spite of buying everything and being a bit of a tryhard, I'm ultimately a casual player and I don't have any interest in my opponents getting screwed for drawing a full hand of end of turn objectives that they probably can't even score.

Also it plays *very* well into the Rivals format since drawing a bunch of weird garbage at the start is reasonably likely with some faction decks - even if those same cards would be flavourful and fun coming out later in the game (or if you held on to one of them or whatever).

[me_in_japan]

I do totally agree that the mulligan rule will favour smoother games, and for newer players that's a good thing. I still think it leaves the door wide open for abuse by the better players, though, and I suspect that somebody somewhere will leverage it, post their list, and then that'll be it - everybody'll do it. But we'll see. Maybe I'm just projecting MtG players' behaviour onto WU players unfairly

As for rivals, I'm not a fan. If you're not deck building, why are you playing Underworlds? Now, in a one-off, rushed throw down where you havent had time to build a deck, sure. It's fine for funsies, but then, it was always an option to do this anyway? I don't see how it deserves to be called a "format". But I don't see the point of organising a game of Rivals in advance. The deck building is half the strategy, or perhaps even more than half in the hands of a decent player. I just don't see the point of a player with any experience deliberately choosing to play rivals, in situations where they have time to plan their own deck if they wanted to.

[Jye Nicolson]

Oh you're being fair, they'll totally do it, hell *I'll* do it, I just don't anticipate it being that harmful. A bunch of objectives become safer and you'll have a better first turn hand of power cards on average but that's symmetrical. And at least the chance of screwing yourself by mulliganing a good but not optimal hand into a no surges or no ploys hand is there.

Rivals will not be the favoured way to play between experienced players for sure but it will be an extremely good way to play with beginners and more casual folks that have limited libraries, and the generic Rivals decks should be fun to see how they work with different teams. It'll also be a good way to use all those extra teams experienced players have without bothering to build decks for them (especially when your main teams already have all the staple cards).

It might have legs, it might be an occasional diversion like the multiplayer variants, but either way I think it has a place. Also the Rivals decks will be an actually optional purchase, which is nice.