WTC 2025: How Team Austria Prepared and Deck Guides

Michael: Hello! Today I wanted to make a special article dedicated to Team Austria’s preparation for the WTC tournament that just took place in Vienna! This article focuses on how to prepare for a team event in Warhammer Underworlds.

Team Austria 1 managed to place in 9th, Team Austria 2 placed in 11th place, and Team Austria 3 managed to make it to 14th. This might not have been the most stellar performance, especially after our last year’s 3rd placement, but we believe that our preparation was still key to our participation. So without further ado, this is how we did it!

Before we start, massive thanks to Tristan for organizing this event. Tristan was kind enough to give me an interview about his experience as a player and TO and there will be excerpts of it throughout the article. Hope you enjoy!

THE FIRST MEETING: MARCH/APRIL

In March, all we did was make the teams. Not much action happened there but at least most of our players were distributed pretty early. Our first real preparation happened on April 2nd, where we had our first official team meeting.

During this meeting, we had a pretty decent turnout with almost every team member making it there. We first did some practice pairings (as we all know WTC pairings are a little weird) to make sure that everyone knew how they worked in order to better choose warbands for our teams.

Whilst we were pairing, we also decided the rough warbands we were picking. This is the meeting where it was decided that I would play Grymwatch, Tristan would play Zarbag, and Sebastian would play Borgits (for Team 1). Florian (one of the team members we were accounting for) unfortunately had to cancel his plans and Stefan (Morpius) didn’t choose his final warband yet (this meeting it was assumed he plays Ephilim).

After the practice pairings we obviously played some games, cause whats a game night without some?

For some unknown reason I thought it would be a bright idea to try Sepulchral Guard. Cause they just got buffed. Unfortunately they did not do well (even remotely) against Tristan’s Gitz, so that idea was quickly scrapped. Tristan’s Wrack and Ruin Gitz proved they can be trusted, though.

Morpius played against Jerry from Team 3, who brought Gitz. Morpius’ Ephilim unfortunately failed at beating them so we later scrapped the idea of Ephilim in favor of his Gardeners.

During our meeting, we managed to explain to everyone how the pairings work, determine the core comp for all three teams, as well as get our first practice games in. This meeting was arguably the first step to our success!

HOW WE BUILD OUR COMP: TEAM 1

This section will go over how we chose our warbands as Team 1! Naturally, we knew we needed a Gitz and then someone (namely myself) asked if we should double down on the ‘Gitz’ style of play and then got to play Grymwatch as well. However, almost every WTC team had this combo so I won’t explain it in too much detail. Passive glory is good.

We gave CtC to Grymwatch because I had already found pretty great success with the pairing as well as Grymwatch benefitting way more from Desperate Rage and Hurled Weapon as well as Raging Tremors making Gristlewel busted in Round 1. Also I am slightly notorious for my ping addiction and Sunder the Realm is the best ping in the game. Being fully honest, I didn’t consider Edge of the Knife Grymwatch before, in order to preserve PnP/CtC for Zarbag (as each pairing is unique) but luckily our Wrack Gitz turned out to be the right choice. Wrack and Ruin works with Gitz because a) you don’t need to play Stay Close/Alone in the Dark in the PnP pairing and b) Snirk helps set up Living on the Edge. Also, Gitz actually have some funny interactions with a lot of the cards in the deck like Snirk+Barge. What’s not to love?

Our reasoning with Sebastian’s Borgits was that he already played them a lot, and apparently he knew how to counter most aggro stuff. However, he can also do a very good flex against other PnP warbands allowing him to be our ‘flex’ player. BA/PnP enabled him to play both aggro if necessary with Uglug and Borgit as well as passive with the minions for some easy glory. Here is Tristan, our team captain, with a bit more on this choice:
Tristan: They are nice mid range warband, we talked about it in preparation that the warbands themselves became less important than in V1, but also more important, because the first most defining factor of play style is deck pairing, and you had these faction cards before, you don’t have that, so now your warband is defined by the three abilities on the warscroll and their stats of course, but stats you can only do so much with a 6 sided dice and the amount of them. Most warbands are a mix of these things so I think the warbands became a bit more interchangeable and it’s a bit more about finding the last percentages, such as this pairing with a warband of this kind should always perform in this way, and then you are checking for each PLAYER which pairing is the best. It’s a testament to the new design philosophy, it’s easier to build a functioning deck but it’s much harder to fine tune it to become perfect since there are much less points of attack.
Michael: So all in all it came down to Borgit’s stats as well as their pretty strong warscroll abilities. Their mid range lets them get away with some shenanigans that others can’t while also being pretty tanky.

Now for Morpius’ Gardeners. Initially, he was meant to play Ephilim as I already said. However, he hasn’t played much Eph this edition and on a month’s notice he felt more comfortable with Gardeners. Our initial plan was actually a BA/CtC super anti-Zarbag Gardeners (with three ensnare upgrades – you can find the deck on our deck repository under the name ‘Undodgeable Rot’) but that plan was scrapped the day of deck submission because we needed that pairing to be free. Instead, he ran ES/PnP to allow for a more traditional ‘hold’ Gardeners. Morpius already had some decent holding experience this edition so this was probably a good switch. The reason we chose Gardeners as a warband is due to their supreme tankiness and high amount of Range 2, which in theory lets them beat swarms!

Finally, Stefan’s Yltharis. Stefan is a proficient aggro player, but he hasn’t played as much this edition so far, so we chose a relatively straightforward pairing and warband combo. Additionally, Yltharis have built in Ensnare and Brutal making them very good at hitting swarms. Other warbands we considered were three fighter elites but those didn’t seem too good in the current meta so we stuck with the accurate tree-elves.

HOW WE BUILD OUR COMP: TEAM 2

Team 2 unfortunately had no volunteers to do a write-up, so I will do one based on what they told me:

Marcel was assigned to Blackpowder. BP works well into Gitz on paper with his new buffs and into elites he is always nice, making him a good all-rounder.

Daniel is playing on Gitz, due to his previous experience with them back in Denmark, and because every team needs a Gitz (I heard they are pretty strong at the moment).

Nikolaus is on Ephilim because they play pretty well into swarms and elites, making them a good all rounder similar to Blackpowder. Nikolaus has also played them in past, particularly in V1.

Marko is on the Emberwatch to have a decent aggro team in the mix. Emberwatch have good attacks, defense, and mainly a super strong warscroll allowing them to be played aggressively. Marko also has previous experience on them which led to the team choosing Emberwatch over something else.

Finally, Nikola is on Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz. They fill a decent flex role similar to Team 1, making them a good pick as well.

HOW WE BUILD OUR COMP: TEAM 3

Ben: Hi, Ben here, and I will go over how we picked our composition in team 3. Me and Jerry were actually supposed to play for Team 2, but when we noticed that we will have enough players for three teams we decided to switch to team 3. We also did not know exactly who our mercenaries would be until early June, which gave us little time to prepare.

We knew we should bring a Gitz player and Jerry has been playing them for a while now, so we decided to give them to him. However, we decided against bringing another swarm, as we found none of us have much experience in them and we would not have a lot of time to prepare.

I have been playing ES/CtC for the entire year with Khagra and Jaws, so I was planning to bring one of them with that pairing. However, once the FAQ and errata came out in May, I changed to ES/WaR, as losing either Supremacy or Spread Havoc and having a huge nerf to Wreckers was devastating. I ended up sticking with Khagra over Jaws as I found their higher defense on more fighters nice and Jaws heavily relied on DRS (Desperate Rage Snakes) to be functional. Also, I had a fun idea for painting them and only enough time to paint one warband.

Patricks Dread Pageant was decided by process of elimination. When we did practice pairings, we were thinking that we would have a BA/CtC and a BA/RF player, so he decided that CtC/WaR Dread Pageant would be a good fit.

Michael: Team 3 also had some British ‘mercenary’ players who were filling in due to lack of British team and lack of Austrian players. Here is Scott’s write-up describing his prep:
Scott: Preparation had some ups and downs; initially England was intending to take a strong team, which would exclude me! I would join as the coach, a non-playing member of the team, as I wanted to go anyway. Abby, my wife wanted to go to Vienna to see her pen pal of 35 years, who was now living in Vienna.
To back up a bit, I’m a painter not a player. My original idea was to attend and paint something special for the event and aim for the best Warband. In January I picked the warband I wanted to paint, I’d already painted Ephilim’s Pandemonium, but second time round I was planning to add a display base. The England Team shrank, and I was in for real. My biggest fear was being obviously out of my depth against the top players who would be attending. Even with practice I would be out of my depth, but maybe I could make it less obvious. At the end of February I started practicing, trying to get a handle on the warband and deck pairing knowing it would change before the event, and started preparing the modelling project. The England Team shrank further and became more unlikely, and other painting projects sat on my desk. The England Team got cancelled, and life events were preventing me from modelling, now it looked like I was simply going on holiday.
Austria 3 – Then came the question, do I want to play as a Mercenary? Yeah… I tried to start modelling but I quickly realised that any modelling was taking away from my preparation time. I decided to stop modelling and focus on my playing skills. As I’d been practicing with Ephilim’s Pandemonium I decided to stick with them. I’d been to a few Bugman’s Rivals Clashes and was confident that Pillage and Plunder was the best Rivals deck for Ephilim’s Pandemonium. I knew that Pillage & Plunder with Countdown to Cataclysm would be a popular choice and that a teammate would want this pairing, so I looked elsewhere. I tried Countdown to Cataclysm with Wrack & Ruin but it was too complicated for me. I went for an easier to use combination, Blazing Assault with Pillage and Plunder. My logic being this was my best chance of playing well for 5x Bo3 games. Playing well meant the best chance of giving my opponents fun and exciting match and this was important to me.
Discussions with other players, playtesting, and deck refinements followed, with the final deck selection made just before the deadline. Played some more games, memorised my objectives and I was a ready as I was going to be. Total practice: 41 games (20 of those Rivals); 6 practice games while iterating deck; 9 games with the actual deck. I would have liked to play more practice games, but I couldn’t fit them in. I got to the event feeling confident in my skills, not confident of winning a match, or even a game, but confident I could at least put up a fight. Hopefully my opponents would find me a decent adversary, and not the “filthy casual” I really am

Michael: Many thanks to Scott and Dan for joining Team Austria in this event! We all hope you enjoyed it 🙂

Finally, Dan played Ylthari’s Guardians with Blazing Assault and Emberstone Sentinels. This allowed him to flex between being passive or aggressive.

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DECK GUIDES: TEAM 1

Before we get started, I would like to announce that every single deck here as well as from every player in each team in the event itself is now up on the Nemesis Deck Repository! You can find each and every deck on there by CTRL+F’ing for the player name and clicking the decklink if you want to follow along.

_{Click on an image to open the decklink.}

Michael: In Team 1, we finalised our decks literally the hour before deck submission through a group call on Discord to make sure we all knew what everyone was going in with and plan pairings properly. I will start with a HOPEFULLY quick deck guide of my own deck (if I get carried away, apologies) and then transition to each member:

I played Grymwatch with PnP/CtC, and managed to place first individually with this pairing . As stated before, we gave Cataclysm to Grymwatch cause they lost WAYYY too much compared to other pairings. Edge of the Knife may have worked but I love glory and pings and Cataclysm has both. Objectives wise, this is the default PnP/CtC deck. Hostile Takeover might seem weird here having one ranged attack but with Improvised Attack and clever In the Name of the King! usage it proved trivial. Obviously I picked Spread Havoc over Delving for Wealth, as I wasn’t hurting on surges.

Ploys-wise, CtC SHINES for Grymwatch. Sunder the Realm is a super good card, sets up Wreckers, kills, as well as a massive Royal Hunt delusion if played well. Same with Total Collapse. Improvised Attack is great with my raise capabilities, allowing me to perform a surgical strike to almost every single hex on the board. Raging Tremors is a card I love for Grymwatch as it makes Gristlewel a MASSIVE threat in Round 1 and just generally good in other rounds. Growing Concerns is ALWAYS good for Grymwatch, either preventing a R1 charge into the Duke (as -1 move is usually enough) or shutting down an opponent’s activation in R2-R3. Countercharge is also fanastic, bringing me in range with my melee guys while also making my two dodge to two dodge+flanked! Most of the other cards are self-explanatory or just nice to have.

Upgrades wise, Desperate Rage is literally the best damage upgrade for Grymwatch. As I said in my comparison article, Desperate Rage is good for overwriting sub-par attacks, and Grymwatch have several fighters who benefit from it! Plus, raising allows me to mitigate the downside of the card. Hurled Weapon is really good for Grymwatch but replaceable with Excavating Blast too. Obviously Tightening Grasp is busted in the current meta. Great Fortitude is the easiest way I can deny Trial of the Tempered or just keep someone alive. Yeah, Countdown is GREAT for Grymwatch and it definitely was a good choice keeping it for Grymwatch over Zarbag in our team, as we found out! Burrowing Strike is also really good for the same reasons as Desperate Rage.

Next, let’s move onto Tristan’s Wrack and Ruin Gitz, which he talks about himself:

Tristan: Pillage and Wrack I have a few issues with, but it’s something you have to work with this pairing. The tested and proven best pairing is still PnP/CtC, which we gave to our Grymwatch so they kill the enemy Gitz with the pairing, and this plan worked out so it’s ok – for many warbands it was one of the worst matchups, and we apparently had a perfect counter for it. In exchange, it made out Gitz worse. Gitz are still a good warband, but the deck has issues.

For Low on Options and Ploymaster, they are quite reliable objectives, but holy cow – they are sometimes forcing you tor really bad plays or even with bad draws become borderline impossible, which sounds super weird because you read them and are like ‘how are these impossible’, but with Ploymaster, I had many rounds where I had two ploys in hand, and you can’t afford with Gitz (who have to many guys and need to do to much stuff) to draw extra cards, so Ploymaster was just ‘not this round’. You can throw it, it is just one point, but you are already one glory behind the PnP CtC pairing and the opponent is constantly killing your guys so I’m losing glory on kills. So it is reliable, you just have to get your three ploys and play them. But sometimes you have three ploys and you only have three archers left, you can’t play Vicious Intent, again you have three ploys but can only play two. Or the thing I had in testing was with Volcanic Eruptions, I play it to ping an opponent and get my Ploymaster but then he gets to ping me. It’s less than 50/50 but still, I get one point and my opponent sometimes gets one point from the kill. That’s the stuff I simply wouldn’t do if I was not forced to it. Not only is there two glory attached to [playing cards], while Ploymaster is an end phase and simple to throw away, it was really felt with Low on Options if I had in my starting hand, it felt like a third end phase despite being a surge. It should especially as Gitz help you get inspired, but it does not help with that AT ALL because it’s basically a late game card. It is an auto-score, but it can brick so hard and just forces really bad plays I think.
Michael: How about Living on the Edge?
Tristan: It was interesting, the first time no one sees it coming. That was a given. It’s also a stretch – it forces some weird plays where I set up to an easy deny from an opponent, especially if I have to start the round and my opponent is like ‘why did you put this one wound guy on my side’. Even if they are not actively knowing the objective, ANYONE in the game can kill that guy now. There is some nice traps you can set. But I think that is the general theme of the deck, it has very nice combo potential, but the floor is much lower. It is not nearly as consistent as PnP CtC, it can spike super hard and make an opponent’s day miserable with loads of different combos, but a few things go the wrong way and the deck crumbles, which was seen in my scores – my warband is Gitz but the score is super low when everything bricks and you get nothing scored. So Living on the Edge you can set up with one bait guy on one side and then my opponent has to move off his tokens and then you score either Strip the Realm or Living on the Edge, I scored it once even though I had first activation with a Sidestep, just push someone into Snirk, even with interesting use of Canny Sappers and Confusions and stuff. You can make stuff happen, but you always need 2-3 card combos and very special board positions, and that was felt. Not only is the deck performance itself worse, but so is the mental strain. It was fun when it worked of course, there is really interesting combos in there, but yeah it’s not the best pairing. But we knew that going in.

I really liked my last minute inclusion of Flee!, that worked quite well, not only in reaching far away tokens but also in threatening guys. Like with Flee I can threaten to kill Crackmarrow, cause yeah, this Snirk with Gloryseeker is now moving 6 hexes, pushing itself onto a token afterwards with Swift Step. The pings as I said, Volcanic Eruption is a card you can usually play anytime but it has its drawbacks. Other than that I’m not too sure you can make the deck a lot better.

Upgrades wise, Rock-splitting Tread felt useless but what else are you putting in there… Wary Tread could again help in setting up an avenue for Living on the Edge but you can’t and adjacent so still no. Rock Splitting Tread being unable to kill someone never felt impactful, but I did use it one or two times to put someone to 2 Health, so a normal Git can kill them. What I really felt is that this pairing does not have Great Fortitude, and yeah even Fireproof and Desperate Defense are nice, but against one damage attacks and pings I really would have liked Great Fortitude… Barge I couldn’t really use a lot. It always felt nice having it, but just due to game flow I had rounds where I started so it loses a lot of value, it was nice to threaten a kill with Snirk if there was a vulnerable enemy, would be IMMENSELY better if you didn’t kill your own guys just standing next to Snirk, like best case someone would Scurry off with Snirk but that is hard to set up. In my games it never made a difference but that was just due to game state, but it could have made a difference each time. Barge is one of the reasons you play this pairing. It is the epitome of the combo wonderland cards with Wrack Gitz. You can Barge/Canny Sapper and scurry with another guy and it’s undeniable damage with Snirk…

Here is an excerpt from Tristan’s interview where he talks about his experience with the deck:

Tristan: I believe my deck performed as expected [going 3-2], not expecting to win all games with the deck pairing but in general be more mixed. I won both my games on Day 2 [2 games] and lost against Jaws and Grymwatch. Michael: Out of the matches you lost, did any surprise you?
Tristan: The Jaws matchup being lost surprised me a bit, but the Grymwatch was an expected lost, as they had the superior PnP CtC pairing which we gave to our Grymwatch, but the Jaws matchup cemented the idea that Elite Warbands can still perform if they just manage to keep up with the tokens. I had not had a game in second edition where my opponent had so much restraint on himself just to do the right thing for scoring, I think in our three games he literally passed 3-4 activations. He went on guard in every game as an action, and drew his whole deck already, and he literally had nothing to do. I was hoping he would take bait and charge off a token but he managed, so that was quite impressive from [Fredrick]. You could see it in his face, he was like ‘I should do something, shouldn’t I?’.

Michael: Now, I’ll talk about Stefan (Morpius)’s Gardeners, having helped built it:

First of all, in the objectives, one may notice that we played Delving for Wealth over Supremacy. In hindsight this made some matchups more harder, but we did get a much more consistent surge package. We only played one Emberstone end phase in order to make the delving aspect much easier. The rest of the deck actually functions similar to the Gitz/Grymwatch.

Ploys wise, we have a LOT of anti-displacement tools and survivability stuff in order to make the Gardeners SOMEHOW more annoying than they already are. Crumbling Mine was there to help set up Iron Grasp and make Torn Landscape easier with the Gardeners low movement.

The upgrades are really strong, giving a nice mix of accuracy, damage, and tankiness. We didn’t play Brute Momentum as we only had Iron Grasp in our deck that required holding and Delving for Wealth made sure we didn’t need to play the ‘don’t be driven back’ surges so Gloryseeker was picked over Brute Momentum.

Tristan comments in our interview on this deck:
Tristan: the most surprise loss we had on our team was these Gardeners losing to Condemnors, as in our prep we had expected the aggressive matchup to be good for the Gardeners, but the Polish [Omega] believed otherwise, and proved to be correct just because the Condemors are so accurate they couldn’t stand on the tokens. This proves from that that you shouldn’t just get on the tokens, but stay on them as well even for denial.

Michael: Now to transition to Sebastian’s Borgits:

This deck was designed to be able to flex between Delving and Invading, and Sebastian played it very well going 4-1. Illusory Fighter was picked over Delving for Wealth as the surges in BA are pretty reliable so no need for Delving for Wealth.

The objectives are the standard PnP package as well as the standard BA package. Branching Fate was picked over Perfect Strike because Borgits can easily become Underdog as well as can go to a lot of dice potentially, making Perfect Strike harder.

The ploys all are pretty standard but Crumbling Mine is Sebastian’s signature card. He leverages it SUPER well and it made perfect sense when we saw that he had it. He can use it to make Torn Landscape trivial as well as to deny enemy Broken Prospects and other cards. Illusory Fighter is really nice for one of the big guys to do a risky charge and have a get out of jail free card, whilst also being super good for counterpunching.

Now to move onto Stefan’s Yltharis, which we worked on as a team due to Stefan being a last-minute replacement for Florian:

Objectives wise, we chose to play every good end phase in Cataclysm as well as the default two from Blazing in order to maximize glory and gain the upper hand in the Gitz matchup. Loaded for Bear was discardable, being only one glory, but was nice to have to up the ceiling. Set Explosives is good for Ylthari’s due to their absurd mobility on the warscroll.

You can notice our choice to play 11/11 power card distribution. This was done because Ylthari’s can draw a hilarious amount of cards from their warscroll. Ploys-wise, I think no card here is a surprise. Shields Up is good for Ylthari’s due to two of the guys going to two defense and it helps with Set Explosives. Sunder the Realm was important as we wanted to pair Ylthari into as much Gitz as possible (we miserably failed at that). Total Collapse is a nice snipe-ping as it’s physically impossible to dodge.

Upgrades wise, I have more to talk about. First of all, you may notice that Brawler is played, which is because we wanted these guys to do a more brawler like play style and get close and personal. This gives them extra accuracy and survivability to do so. Next, you may notice the lack of Tightening Grasp. First of all, my team believed that Sharpened Points is more important than a third ensnare on the warband (we already have Deadly Aim), and second Skhathael already has Ensnare built in. Personally I disagreed with this choice as it doesn’t help in our Gitz matchup but it ended being fine in the end as Stefan never got paired into Gitz or Grymwatch. Finally, we picked Desperate Rage over Hurled Weapon as a) the Guardians already have decent range and b) they lack 3 damage attacks and c) we can do a funny 7 damage attack and potentially one shot Mollog (this was a genuine point made in the Discord call by someone who prefers to remain anonymous).

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A QUICK NOTE ON PRACTICE GAMES

As Team 1, something we found out during practice games is that it’s not always the most helpful to play into what we believe is the worst matchup. This is for several reasons.

First of all, with an example from Round 1 vs Poland Omega, we had our Gardeners placed into a ‘good’ matchup which unfortunately Morpius had not practiced that much, that being an aggressive Ironsouls. As a result, we had no clue that apparentely Hold is not the best against hyper aggro. This goes to show that you shouldn’t just be playing against your worst matchup and practicing it over and over and over again.

Another SUPER important thing to consider which Tristan talks about later as well is that a huge part of Underworlds is how you feel about a matchup going into it – your mental about the game. Playing into bad matchups means often times you will lose, and if this happens during practice, it is super important to maintain a strong mental fortitude and not let it impact your gameplay. Sure, in practice games your win rate may have been a solid 20%, but could it be because you played your Hexbane’s into PnP CtC Zarbag 5 times? Our practice games did lead to some situations like this, where people were not feeling well about a matchup and as a result performed worse in it.

Obviously super important during practice matches is to get insight from your opponent about your mistakes, and even more, your good plays. For example, when I play my Grymwatch, I may be concentrating my efforts onto a Raise that my opponent is extremely terrified off – but for me, it’s a simple power step action, nothing more. If your opponent at the end of the game brings light onto this Raise, I am more likely to repeat it in future games as now I actually know why it was annoying for my opponent.

And yes, for a team event it is super important to get matches in with your team. Obviously it helps to know that some players as a player play better into aggro than hold, as an example. This lets your team create more optimal matchups for each player.

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EVENT ANALYSIS WITH HINDSIGHT: TEAM 1

Michael: Personally I feel our team could have performed a little better. Our first day of the event was particularly brutal, where we lost all three games and a lot of the games (particularly Morpius’s Gardeners) were lost with dice playing a significant factor. Myself, I believe I performed well and now wish that Gitz would be deleted from the face of the Earth – more on this in our upcoming Game Reviews article. Here is a piece of my interview with Tristan, where as captain, he talks about our preparation:

Tristan: I feel our preparation could have gone better. The substitute player was not ideal, also I was stretched very thin between organizing the event and captaining our team, so yeah, there could have been a lot more preparation I think. Also my motivation for the was vexing and waning, like one week I feel so bad and then start thinking about some cool combos again… It’s still kind of early in the new edition and it still feels very different despite disguising itself as the same game. A lot of the stuff doesn’t work as well anymore. Another important thing in testing you have to look out for is you mainly train vs bad matchups, and I lost a lot of those, and that didn’t feel well. Rules questions and the community FAQ put a dampener on how you perceive the game quality. If for a month you have to focus on all the mistakes and loopholes in the rules, what kind of game is this? I think that was a big part, my motivation and being captain I should and could have pushed more for team performance, there was a lot of room to improve but given the situation it was bad for Team Austria. But there was a bigger focus on getting the event going and rolling. If we consider that, we did fine, but there was a lot to improve based on performance.

Performance-wise, I would say we perfomed a little worse than I expected, like we had one guy falling ill and had a last minute sub. I didn’t expect much from the sub, but it was better than having no player at all. Our Grymwatch performed as well, you won every game, but the others… from Gardeners I expected one or two more wins. I performed as expected. I and Sebastian [Borgit] were within expectations, you were over expectations, and our Gardeners were slightly under. It’s hard to call it like that in team prep but our Ylthari’s could have performed better, Ylthari’s on our substitute player were unfortunately the weak point of our team this year. I think that’s basically it.

Michael: In my talk with Tristan we spiraled into a discussion about warbands that we were not expecting to see at the event, and here is a piece of our talk about Zikkit’s from both Spanish teams (who performed stellarly!)

Tristan: Ah yes the Zikkits, we were all like ‘why are they bringing it instead of Zarbags as well?’ What are they smoking? I think everyone thought the same way as well. I think everything else was in expectations. Team Austria 3’s Dread Pageant was expected just because we knew the guys were in it mainly for the fun. Even Zikkit’s aren’t bad per se, but I don’t think anyone expected to take them. Other than that, not much surprises, there are a lot of warbands interchangeable in the roles. A lot of guys said they expected more variance in the roles of the warbands. Ylthari’s got away with 6 of them, but it could have been another Myaris or Stab-ladz. There were other warbands that would have been expected but didn’t appear, but the only surprise in the lineup was Zikkits. They have stuff going for them but same as the Emberwatch they have no weapon keywords on their cards and going in we said some combo of these is mandatory especially if they want to fight. They can get it once through the warscroll with the two damage risk, and the charge thing is potentially very strong but again can kill you. The fighters themselves are OK, the weakness of the warband is the volatility of the warscroll. The fighters are fast which is super useful in this meta especially with the token changes, this one of the only warbands who can still reach deep tokens. They are fast, have rat stats, and can put out some hurt, but the warscroll is such a casino. I would have been less surprised with Spiteclaw’s but I don’t know.

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A NOTE FROM THE ORGANIZER

This section is primarily focusing on Tristan’s experience organizing the WTC event as well as being a player in it. Massive thanks to Tristan once again for organizing this event!

Michael: How did you manage playing and organizing the event?
Tristan: Between organizing and playing myself in the event, it was a huge balancing act, it started months ago with captain’s votes and stuff. The balancing act started because there was always these faults of ‘do I push a ruling I personally agree with as a player, but then does it seem like I misuse my power’. I had to take myself back a bit, and not push as hard for rules that were beneficial to us, that was a concern. WE also had to implement the judges quite early so there was someone who wasn’t me (a player) to take a look at the list. There were a lot of private messages to me about whether I saw the lists, and no don’t worry, I didn’t see them, these two judges did. I would not recommend organizing such a big event and then playing in it, while local events are fine. For such prestigious events like WTC it has to be basically impossible for me as the organizer to cheat. I would not recommend organizing a world championship and playing in it yourself. It was quite stressful.

Overall I would say the event was successful. First day of the event I was not super happy, because we also used a completely untested scoring system this year. That made a lot of problems. Nothing that was unsolvable, but it was just a lot of work and stress on the day, because we had to keep a schedule. Trying and keeping a schedule was hard, we were a bit late every day anyways and that came in as additional pressure as already I had a lot of time planned for stuff to go wrong, but quite some time of that was eaten up being behind schedule. Some people couldn’t get in and name tags didn’t really work for our friends with special characters in there name for the tickets. That was all ok, within expectations, but then I started with one of the more crucial mistakes in the start, that just accumulated minute after minute of lost time. We cut the greeting short. I initially planned to explain the scoring system and cards to the captains at least, which I didn’t for time reasons, so I think some people were so focused on Underworlds that they couldn’t think about the match slips and what they represented. Very few people put in the 5 slots on the slips correctly. This as well put us on some time stress but this is something that I am putting on myself, I didn’t tell anyone, I can’t expect hyper focused players on winning the world championship to have capacity to focus on anything else basically. That’s definitely something that we felt. Day 1 was super stressful and I thought I would never do it again. Day 2, after some sleep and we smoothed everything out it was completely different story. I felt different even going in to Day 2 and in the end it was the big uplift from the rollercoaster of organizing the event: people were very happy about how the event went. There was lots of cheering and applause for everyone involved, and lots of praise and thank you’s and stuff that made everything more worthwhile. But that’s again the problem with organizing something this big – we were on the organizing since the inception of the new edition. It has been going on since Atlanta – it’s unimaginable relief that it was received well and it’s a major push in motivation. Of course, I didn’t do it all by myself like the scoring system and software was done by someone else but I was always involved and the face and the spokesperson and the person people complained too. You always felt everything was going to hell and that it’s all your fault. Lots of people put in work for you and that’s a lot of pressure that has been relived at the end of day two. Everything was running as smoothly as it could.

I’m glad I’m catching a break now, even though I already have a demo game planned for Wednesday. Even Marcel [a Team 2 Austria player] said he recruited two new guys into Underworlds during the event which was great, we had our first year where we concentrated on social media and representing the event and trying to put that into our Underworlds community. Made a lot of pictures and people have fun, it’s important that we show that. It’s something important to focus on next year. The idea and path the event had taken we should broaden and do that more and better and again. It’s only beneficial. Also great success that we had the first intercontinental exchange, with the US team. Also the first time we had the Spanish, Danish, and some British people at WTC. So yeah, lots of nationalities involved that weren’t before, I think they also had a blast. I already wrote to Davy (from What the Hex) that it’s their turn to go next year. This year’s team was basically the Path to Glory team, and next year it’s What the Hex’s turn. But yeah, the event is going strong and there is potential for a lot more. Let’s hope for at least two or more teams next year, eighty people, why not. Hope for 80 and aim for 100.

Michael: And that’s it for this article, but not for the WTC Content Train! Sometime in the next week or two we aim to publish our Game Review articles where Ben and I talk about our games in the tournament. Until then, massive thanks to Tristan for volunteering for this interview and giving valuable insight to organizers of such events for next year. Big thanks to Scott for his write up from the British end. Overall, I hope you enjoyed this article, and hope to see you again soon!