Quint: Hey there! This weekend Michael and I attended the Warhammer Open Maastricht, a 5 round Bo3 event (more on that later), organised by the Warhammer Events team at the MECC. Michael is very busy with his finals right now, so his part of the article will be a little short [comment from Michael: Underworlds is cooler than finals so I did my part anyway – don’t do like I did pls]. In this article, I’ll briefly go over my experience at the event, my takeaways, and then I’ll give my thoughts on what GW could’ve improved about the Open.
Michael: Hi! Michael here as well. Unfortunately Ben couldn’t make it with us to the event so the title is misleading but hey Quint and I got to meet some great people anyway! Underworlds Events are always a great place to go to for this, like in the image for this article you can see a great guy named Gijs we met and talked to a lot during the tournament (great to see the younger generation of players rising up!) It was his first tournament and he claims to have had a great time as well so if this is the article you are reading to decide to go to a tournament – I say just go have fun! Hope you enjoy! (the article but the tournament too 🙂 ). Even if you are worried about losing every game – Gijs went 0-9 and his only win was in a ‘for fun’ game in a break against me and he still had a great time so be like Gijs guys 🙂
Prepwork
Since I already had my Golden Ticket, I wanted to play something fun and give my opponents a hard challenge and good thinking contest. I had just received my Ylthari’s Guardians in the mail, so I cooked up a BA/WR deck with them.
The goal was pretty simple: get as much accuracy and damage as possible, then leverage the high burst damage potential of Ylthari’s to get some key fighters off the board. On friday, Michael was feeling a bit sick so we got some really good Indian food at the Spice of India in the beautiful city center of Maastricht. After walking around for a bit we played a practice game, in which I BEAT MICHAEL, after which Valentin convinced me to add Annihilation to my deck, and got to bed.
Tournament Experience: Day One
Overall, day one was really fun. I played against Ioannis with Blood of the Bull BA/PP, Wiktor with Blackpowder’s Buccaneers PP/CtC and Joep with Jaws of Itzl RR/CtC (!), only losing against the latter.
My games went one of two ways:
1. I missed my key attacks and surges and lost, scoring about 13 glory
2. I hit my key attacks and surges and won, scoring about 26 glory.
This led me to having a glory total of 50 after the first round, in which I only played 2 games.
I especially enjoyed my games against Joep, who played the Jaws of Itzl with RR/CtC, a pairing I hadn’t even considered was legal to be played. He piloted them really well and we had two really tight games, ending with him defeating me 2-0.
At the end of day one, I went 2-1, finishing 11th (out of 39). There was a shadow round with the top 8 players to determine the top 4 cut. There wasn’t a lot of clarity around what the other players were supposed to do, so there were some talks about organising our own 5 round bo1 tournament as a side event whilst the (semi) finals were played on sunday. I went out to get some food with Valentin en Rob at the hotel restaurant, and had a nice evening walk back to the hotel.
Tournament Experience, Day Two
Day two started really calmly. I woke up early, grabbed some croissants and walked for a solid hour through Maastricht, before heading to the absolute Doom and Despair that awaited me at the event.
At the event, there was a bit of a split in the community, as some people wanted to play the proposed games of bo3 that GW was organising, whilst others wanted to run a seperate tournament, playing 5 Bo1 games. I joined them, opting to meet more people and get a better view of the meta. In addition, of the 4 people that stayed at the event, 2 where locals I play against all the time, so I really wanted to play against someone else. In the end, 29 of the 39 players dropped in favor of mutiny.
My first game of the day was against Pawel, who played Soulraid NP/ES. This was a really cool pairing, but the dice sadly decided this one. Gallanghan crit defended with one shield 4 times in a row, and by that point I’d taken out most of his warband. We finished 17-9 in my favor.
Game two was against Daniel, who played BA/PP with the soulraid. This was a really fun and tight game that ended by me scoring Perfect Strike after trying for four time, ending in 16-16, where I won on tiebreakers.
In game three I faced against the Exiled Dead, piloted by Jan, who played WR/DS. The game was sadly, once again, decided by the dice, as I didn’t hit a single attack for the entirety of round one, killing only four zombies in the entire game, and missing my 5 hammers + re-roll + cleave attack into Deintalos. It was really nice seeing Jan again though, hope to play you again next year!
The fourth and fifth games were both against Soulraid BA/PP, and had basically the same deck and experience. I lost both games to some miscalculations and dice rolls, but mostly due to my deck choice, as Elethain is really hard to kill apparantly.
In the end, I went 2-3, going 4-4 in total, and finishing 18th in the side event (out of 28).
Takeaways
My deck was really fun, but really swingy. Even whilst making 6 or more 4+ hammer attacks, you still miss, and when playing with Annihilation, you just have to hit every single attack. I did manage to score Perfect Strike with 5 dice, so that was cool.
Out of the four games that I lost, most where decided by the dice during the third round, and after grumpily telling Michael that “this is why I never play aggro”, he smartly pointed out that I haven’t been playing anything but aggro since Worlds. So, expect some Hold Objective deck guides next!
I really struggled into Soulraid. I noticed that my deck was not equipped to deal with Pillage, and I was never able to wipe them due to their insane defensive stats and great HP spread. It didn’t help that I missed a one-shot attack every single game against them, but the deck was mostly at fault. There are just too many cards that you don’t want to get round one (Low on Options, Annihilation, Stay Close), and too many that you don’t want to get round three (Strong Start, Perfect Strike, Keep Choppin’).
One thing that I noticed was my mental. I normally have the problem that if I don’t eat enough my emotions will spike, and I really noticed it on day one, taking some time to eat an apple between the two games, which ultimately helped me pull myself together for the third game. So, take enough food with you! Playing wargames is exhausting, and your brain uses a lot of energy!
If you want to play this deck yourselves, I strongly suggest doing so only if you have nothing to lose. That way, you can delight in making your 5 hammer 5 damage attacks to one-shot a Saurus Oldblood, without tilting about all of the times your accurate attacks will miss.
The tournament ended with Filip Ignasiak taking the win with Rippa’s BA/RF, in a final against Rippa’s BA/DS. I hadn’t realises the power of Rippa, but the warband was also piloted by some really talented players, so that might change my view. Overall, Soulraid was the most represented warband, with 7 players playing them, but they (and other warbands) will be discussed in our upcoming Warband Tierlist! So stay tuned for that. Now, Michael has disregarded my orders and still written his parts, so have fun reading his experience! Afterwards, I’ll give some strongly worded feedback to GW, so if you don’t feel like reading it, you can skip it. Come join us in the Staggerers Discord server to chat, discuss WHU or debate my takes! Have a great rest of your day ❤
Tournament Experience: Day One (Michael)
Michael: As Quint mentioned, I was also present at the Open. Day One I woke up quite sick (I was actually sick the day before but it got worse overnight) so I wasn’t the most enjoyable to play with – sorry to my opponents! I was running my Cyreni’s with Cata/Hunting Grounds.
Day 1 had me face three opponents: Petr and his RS/WnR Ironsouls, Jacek and his DS/CtC Borgits, and Pawel and his ES/NoP Soulraid (as well as Willy’s ES/NoP Stalkers in the shadow round).
The Ironsouls game vs. Petr was quite scary with their ability to reach me anywhere on the board. Luckily, playing HG gave me the advantage as I was able to counter his attacks as well as easily deny his Unrelenting Massacre and Stay Close (I failed to deny Alone in the Dark both games 😦 ). I won 2-0 here!
Jacek’s game was my favorite over the two days. We managed to end with a very solid score of 9-8 in Game 1, which I won by luck as I focused into 3 scorable objectives for a total of +4 glory compared to Jacek scoring only Set Explosives. Yeah, Game 1 we both demonstrated our insane underworlds prowess by having the lowest glory game in the tournament (I think). Gratz to Jacek and myself! Game 2 we actually scored stuff but I did win in the end after killing Uglug with a Desperate Rage + Killing Blow + Sunder the Realm one clip. (also Jacek you’re famous now i hope 🙂 )
Against Pawel I had a tough matchup due to him playing ES NoP into my Hunting Grounds, but I managed to take a game off him, and almost had Game 2 (I needed to connect a 3 Die Audacious Denial and Improv Attack into 2 Shields to win) and then lost Game 3 pretty badly but had a point of breakdown when I whiffed 2 Hammers/Flanked with a reroll Improv Attack and a Total Collapse into Elathain. Looking back I should have Soul Harvested him first but that’s what we have to memorize our mistakes!
Going into the Shadow Round (as I placed 7/39 on Day 1!) I was paired into Willy’s ES NoP Stalkers. I was very scared of them due to Ben’s ability to play them. Hate to take win credit from Willy but Game 1 I had completely under control and then threw it all away by moving two guys into Range of Klaq Troq and his Cautious Attitudes to lose the game by denying myself glory and giving Willy 4 total from kills and objectives. I lost by 1. Never making that mistake again! Game 2 I almost won again because Willy didn’t insta-Bulwark so I drove Kixi off a token with Improv Attack but then Overran giving him Confusion. I then almost killed Kixi with a Crit and 2 Hits but Willy rolled a Double Crit allowing him to survive on 1 health and Inspire. Thing spiralled out of control from there but props to Willy for capitalizing brutally off of this early momentum – he never gave me an opening after by only visiting my territory with a Guard-ed Klaq Troq preventing me from getting Pinned.
Tournament Experience: Day Two (Michael)
As Quint already said, we had a mutiny in Day 2. I was a member of the mutinous, despite preferring Bo3, as I believed that (as I was under the impression at the time the games were casual either way) 5 Bo1s are better than 2 Bo3s. Second, I am a pretty fast player, and Day 1 I spent about 50-60% of the time just standing with how long our breaks were – Quint has some more to say on this later. Anyways, for me Bo1s seemed more appealing. (also I was feeling better on this day thanks for asking!)
I played into 5 very cool Guys – Marcin and his BA/DS Headsmen, Tomsche with his BA/RS Shadeborn, Matyas and his ES/NoP Ironsouls, Daniel and his BA/PnP Elathain and Kevin’s double-hold Brethren.
Against Marcin’s Headsmen we tactically had a draw. Marcin was full in control but then my Round 3 was huge where I managed to Audacious Denial to seperate myself and the Wielder while also pushing his fighters 5 hexes to score Pinned by Violent Blasting someone out of the way, then Mind Your Step, then a 1 Damage Charge then an Improv Attack. Then we both had 5 bounty on the board and no tokens held and 13 glory!
Tomsche was a great opponent and he talks about our game on his YouTube channel but to sum it up he had an insane Round 1 and then whiffed 3 4-Dice attacks and Renglaith stole the win with Utter Conviction and Great Fortitude (while vulnerable, naturally).
Matyas’s game started with a pretty bad round 1 for me where his Tavian Stood Fast to score Supremacy against my whole warband. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to keep up the kill pressure leading to him winning off an Iron Grasp but I have to say I was given many chances with Matyas whiffing a 5 Hammer Cleave attack and a 3 Hammer Cleave attack twice.
Daniel had never won a game against me despite us playing almost every tourney we met. He promised to me that ‘today was the day’ and boy did he deliver! After scoring his whole deck by Round 2 and going into Round 3 empty handed, he managed to absolutely terrorize my remaining Deepkin with a Furiann who had 3 swords with Flanked without moving a single time which was very cool. Congrats to Daniel – but I’ll get you back next time :))
Finally, Kevin absolutely walled me with him making himself insta-unflankable which shut down my No Business Here but also he never visited my territory denying me Pinned. Very well played from Kevin for also abusing Guard when visiting me in my territory, I got absolutely rolled!
Takeaways (Michael)
In my games, despite losing 5 times, 4 of those times was to ES/NoP (and one to Elathain BA/PnP). Out of those games,
- Vs. Elathain (double hold) felt winnable.
- Vs. Stalkers felt like my fault in G1, which was winnable.
- Vs. Ironsouls I got owned but I had the game if there wasn’t a Stand Fast in Round 1 for Supremacy.
- Vs. Brethren – yeah no excuse I was out of my league here lol
- Vs. Elathain BA/PnP – maybe winnable with some different objective sequencing but would still be difficult.
This shows that Hunting Grounds can win versus passive but you need the warband to do so. I really like the pairing but the deck has some glaring issues, namely losing to the Guard Action. Ironically Thanatek somehow shows up as the best warband for this deck again.
Some cards I would switch are Back Off for Too Close for Comfort and I would maybe cut Wreckers or Set Explosives. The power deck felt great, however, and I credit it to most of my wins!
Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll do a bigger deck guide just yet cause I kind of have some pretty important exams coming up in the next month – so I’ll leave this as is for now, even though the tourney review and deck guide is deviously short for me (i promise i wasn’t kidnapped). If you have any questions, you know where to find me – and I hope to see you again soon! 🙂
Again thanks to the Judges at the event – Cyril and Tony – for doing a marvelous job, to GW for making this event happen, to Honza and Co. for leading the mutiny, and for everyone who showed up as well as just the nice folks I met ^^ hope we play again later – and hope to see everyone again soon 🙂
Some thoughts about WHU (from Quint)
Quint: So recently, I’ve noticed a pretty big drop in my motivation for this game, and I want to highlight some issues I see that I think should be addressed if GW wants to keep this game doing well (because it can!), the main one being the way they run their tournaments.
I’ll start by saying that I still absolutely love this game and will keep playing it until my fingers fall off. I just want the game to succeed, and I hope that I can explain my concerns here.
First up, the tournament was organised rather poorly. We got a mediocre player pack that didn’t outline the format, didn’t say anything about a cutoff, and was generally unclear. I had to book a hotel room two weeks before the tournament because I wasn’t sure if the tournament would be one or two days. Only after repeated mailing to GW did we get some answers, but no updated player pack. At the tournament itself, we of course got way too small tables (as usual), and the following schedule:
As you can see, we had multiple 1+ hour breaks, with only two hours to play a Bo3 game. They could’ve easily reduced the lunchbreak to one hour and the second break to 30 minutes to give 30 additional minutes to each round and finish earlier, because, as said, there was a shadow round, that lasted until 22:00 (10 pm), and was in my opinion unsuccessful, as the top 2 players both went 2-1 in the first day, with multiple 3-0 players not making top cut. The decision felt really rushed and made it so some undefeated players didn’t even get the chance for the Golden Ticket.
The event had 39 people, but there was no ringer. That meant, in combination with the scheduling, that if you got the buy first round, you would have to wait 5 hours before your first game, which you paid €50 for. I get not having a ringer for smaller events, but this is probably one of the five biggest Underworlds events of the year, and it’s not that difficult to ask a staff member to play the game. They don’t even have to be good, but getting a buy means that you’ll probably have nothing to do.
I completely understand the frustration of the players that planned the side event on sunday, and want to express my gratitude for their initiative. My fear is that GW will take this as a negative and no longer organise WHU tournaments at Opens, but I hope they take it as a learning point to make the other Opens this year even better.
Something a community player suggested was to, instead of playing 5 Bo3 games, you play 10-12 Bo1 games. That way, there is probably no one that is undefeated, and you get to play a ton more games against different people and decks. I really liked this idea, although it is probably really exhausting to play 5 games of Bo1 for two days straight, since you have to setup and think about so many matchups. Maybe a compromis of both, where it’s Bo1 for 8 games, then finals with Bo3, or some other format. I’m not a TO so I can’t say if this will work or not, but I do hope GW takes a good look at the format.
Then, I want to talk about the commitment and communication from GW regarding underworlds. It’s been clear since the release of version 2 that WHU isn’t their main priority, which makes sense. It has a relatively small, although loyal, community, and requires a ton of effort to make new warbands and decks. However, what isn’t hard, is to communicate with that community. In the original announcement for the Maastricht Open it didn’t even say there would be Underworlds. There was absolutely no advertising for the Underworlds event, and no hype built around it.
Talking about hype, my last point is about the current mechanics and meta of Underworlds. Ever since the release of Embergard, there have been four decks that dominate every event: BA/PP, ES/PP, BA/RF and PP/CtC. Especially Pillage and Plunder has shown up in every single tournament. I no longer think Pillage is truly broken or overpowered, but these four starter decks (except maybe Cataclysm) are incredibly plain, but also really strong. This makes is to that every warband is fit into the same mould of either aggro (BA/RF), hold (ES/PP) or flex (BA/PP), and it’s getting stale. I am always trying to get weird decks of the ground, to play around with something else, but it’s never good enough to do anything consistently. WR, RS and RR all have very mediocre objective decks that make it so you have to pair them with PP or BA to even get 12 (barely) playable objectives. It’s good that there isn’t a lot of power creep in the decks, but this is a way slower and more agonising death. I hope that they start releasing some truly weird decks again, like they did at the end of 1st edition. Stuff like Voidcursed Thralls, Hungering Parasite, Rimelocked Relics and even Fearsome Fortress would work great in this edition! And this might be controversial, but I hope they release a deck that’s a bit overtuned, as long as it’s weird! I just don’t want to sit through another three months of BA/PP slop whilst every deck pairing you throw at it doesn’t cut it.
The main issue here isn’t that the first decks were too good, but that every deck after them is just worse. Both Nexus of Power and Realmstone Raiders are very awkwardly written, with cards not functioning for their intended purposes (Ambush and Wily Prospector for example), because the designers don’t seem to foolproof these decks. Again, I really like both NoP and RR, but especially RR just never sees play because it’s a nightmare to track and just doesn’t work!
Continuing on the point that the decks are getting stale is something that Jan pointed out: Decks in 1st edition could be played in 2-3 ways. For example, you could play Hungering Parasite to buff your own fighters and get free rerolls and pings, or break the upgrade to downgrade your opponents and force them to ping themselves. Now though, the decks in 2nd edition feel very linear, because the cards in them are so mediocre, that you have to take the 2-3 strong surges/endphases, the 3-6 good ploys and the 4-6 good upgrades. This makes every version of Pillage feel the same, it makes every version of Blazing have the same 8 ploys from the deck, and every single Emberstone Sentinels deck have the same 3 End Phases. The only exception is Countdown to Cataclysm, but the objectives in that deck are so atrocious that it doesn’t matter anyways. This problem, along with the fact that every Rivals deck has 16 glory total, leads to every playstyle scoring the same amount of glory. This makes Aggro way stronger than Hold, as the Aggro player will score 16 glory + 4-5 kill bounty, whilst the Hold player will score 17 +1-2 kill bounty. Ultimately, this leads me to the final and most important problem: it feels like every single game is determined by the dice rolls of the third round. Every single game I had this weekend (except one) was determined by dice in the last few activations, leading to a lot of feel bad moments were it feels like you don’t have any agency over the game.
This might be due to me playing a rather aggressive strategy that relies on some key attacks to win, but it hasn’t been an aggro-only problem. Most games are decided only in the last three activactions, where it doesn’t matter how big of a lead you had, as your deck scores the same as your opponent’s!
That’s the end of my rambling. I once again want to say that I still love this game and will keep playing it, but hope that there are some structural changes that GW can make to improve the health of this game. With that, I’ll sign myself off. I hope you have a great rest of your day, and I’ll see you next time.
Staggerers - A Warhammer Underworlds Blog 