Aggro vs. Hold – What is better, objectively? (June 2026) – Staggerers

Michael: Hello folks! Today I am back with controversial articles because these are the most fun to write!

Not too long ago, Spent Glory published this very epic article which basically talks about a perfect Hold Deck. In this article Fishmode also made the apparentely-quite-controversial statement that Hold is worse than Aggro, which sparked days of discussions on online forums. Being the psychopath that I am, today I aim to prove Fishmode right – or wrong, idk. But ill prove something even if it’s that I am a psychopath.

UCL’s investigation on this topic

HYPOTHESIS

This section I’ll write before any experimentation gets done so I have something to look forward to and also so you can tell if I have any bias towards any side.

Objectively speaking, Hold should be better. Cause treasure tokens used to be called Objective Tokens. However, this argument is very bad so I abandoned it.

From my personal experience, BA/RF (so aggro) is by far stronger than Hold but Hold isn’t weak by any stretch of imagination. By ‘Hold’, I mean primarily token-focused play patterns. So ES/PnP WOULD qualify, PnP/CtC would also qualify, but BA/PnP is less token focused so it wouldn’t.

Since September last year, I have been in about 5 Finals in events around the world. Out of these 5 Finals, I have lost 4 (which is lowkey depressing but like i guess i am consistent haha)

Austrian Masters Finals 2025 – lost to ES/PnP Jaws (hold)
Worlds 2025 – lost to Wurmspat BA/RF (aggro)
Copenhagen 2026 – lost to Emberwatch BA/RF (aggro)
Vassal League Finals – won as Spiteclaw PnP/DS (flex?)
Austrian Masters 2026 – lost against Jaws ES/PnP (hold)

So from my experience, hold and aggro should both be equal. Right? I guess, but still personally I feel like aggro is waaaay stronger for several reasons. In the hold games above, the first one was very close and the last one I don’t want to talk about (long story short – Ben kind of deleted me). I linked the tournament reviews to the other 2 games so you can check them out, but as a trend the aggro games felt WAYYY harder to win compared to the hold ones.

Versus hold, you kind of know what you need to do. Just memorize all the hold cards and don’t let them score them. It’s much easier to prevent a Strip the Realm than an Unrelenting Massacre. Versus aggro? Just… don’t let them attack? Which is a LOT harder to do than ‘push random guy off a token’. Even if I am playing a lockdown build I can’t prevent my opponent attacking me 100% of the time. I have a deck for Thanatek which focuses entirely on not letting anyone reach Thanatek but it STILL fails to prevent all attacks!

So my guess? Aggro is stronger. Now let’s see what the numbers say. (ill do my best to make them talk without torture but no promises)

Comparing Signature End Phases

Let’s start by looking at end phases.

End phases need to give you a dedicated game plan while also rewarding you for doing so, so we’ll see who does this better.

Aggro has several decks which can fit it – Blazing Assault, Deadly Synergy, Edge of the Knife, Reckless Fury, Raging Slayers, and Realmstone Raiders. So if there’s an ‘R’ in it it’s probably aggro.

These 6 decks will be team ‘aggro’.

The ‘hold’ side will feature cards from most of the other decks.

3 Glory Aggro end phases are, as a whole, harder to score than 3 Glory Hold end phases.

Aggro has Unrelenting Massacre and Trial of the Tempered, while Hold has Supremacy. In a nutshell, Supremacy is about inifnitely easier to force than the aggro stuff. Just get on two tokens and stand there. Sure, some may argue that the denial factor of Trial and Unrelenting makes them ‘worth more’ but just as written Supremacy is infinitely easier to score.

Now, let’s talk Denial. Supremacy doesn’t deny anything from an aggro player. In fact, it stimulates them into charging you because you are quite literally asked to be a sitting duck. On the other hand, Unrelenting and Trial both ‘score’ you glory in unseen ways – namely discouraging interaction.

Unrelenting Massacre forces you to not charge. Charge is very conveniently one of the most common Core abilities one can take. In addition, RF has ‘Catch Weapon’ which discourages ATTACKING. This means that by just picking RF or RS as your deck, you deny glory cause your opponent is now scared of attacking you. This obviously denies kill glory.

Trial does similar things in that it encourages you to sit in a corner ~~and cry~~ and avoid any and all run ins with an enemy. It’s a lot harder to stop unless you have a single Heal ability in which case Trial becomes literally unscorable. Still, it does make you think twice about attacking enemies, which once again (you guessed it) prevents kill bounty.

So from a 3 Glory End Phase perspective, we have gleaned that while Hold is easier on paper, in the long run, Aggro actually can score 3 if not more Glory from just having their ‘glory bomb’ in hand.

One can argue that it’s ultimate tech to just like give your opponent Unrelenting Massacre/Trial of the Tempered and murder them all anyway. That is certainly a way to play the game and while I might not do it myself you can certainly try it and let me know how it goes haha

Now onto 2 Glory End Phases. There’s a lot of them so I won’t cover allllll of them but I will do the major ones (this still keeps the analysis valid cause like you shouldn’t be playing the bad ones anyway).

The most ‘powerful’ Hold objectives are Broken Prospects, Iron Grasp, Set Explosives, and arguably Skin of their Teeth? So as a common trend we see that most of them read ‘hold 2, score 2’.

The most powerful aggro cards are Bloody Momentum, Arena Mortis, Realmstone Raid, technically Calm Before the Storm and Aggressive Unity/Outmuscle. A lot of these boil down to either ‘charge’ or ‘attack 3 times’.

Most hold objectives barring Broken Prospects have the HUGE caveat that they require you to be in a certain position at the end of a round rather than do something during a round, which aggro cards usually want.

This inherently makes aggro objectives harder to deny just as an idea, cause it’s much easier to prevent a position at one point in time (like hold wants to) compared to denying your enemies doing something over the course of a round (like aggro wants to).

However, we must also consider that hold gets a LOT more power card support to score their stuff, such as Sidestep, Confusion, and the Guard Core Ability. Assuming you aren’t playing RF (R-estrictthiswholedeckpls-eckless Fury), there really isn’t any power card support for making more attacks/charges unless you count Improvised Attack (which is busted).

This means, in a nutshell, hold and aggro are pretty even on a 2 glory end phase level. While aggro is more steady and slow, being more like an ‘immovable object’ in that it pretty much WILL happen, hold is a lot more aggressive in that one power card can set up an entire 6 glory end phase.

So which is ‘better’?

Early game, hold is stronger but aggro is by no means weak either. Hold is stronger because it needs a) fighters alive and b) power card support so in early game you still haven’t expended all your resources. It’s also super hard to prevent hold stuff early on unless you aren’t on the ‘aggro board’ which makes it even better.

the ‘aggro board’

Mid game (so round 2) aggro DOMINATES. By a MILE AND A HALF. By this time, your upgrades are online (and we haven’t talked about this yet but just trust that aggro has better upgrades), you still haven’t blown all your good cards, you still have some warscroll usage but most importantly there is a decent amount of fighters still on the board. Also, aggro removes fighters at a faster rate than hold does. Which means hold loses more by midgame compared to aggro (and as such loses access to more end phases).
Long story short, aggro end phases are way easier in R2 compared to hold end phases due to the closer distance between fighters.

Round 3 (or ‘late game’), both end phases kinda suck. For hold, they tend to drop in value due to a slight lack of fighters on the board. Obviously Iron Grasp/Broken Prospects is still scorable but apart from those two you need at least two fighters on the board, which is never a guarantee. Aggro also gets weaker but for different reasons (it’s actually the same cause but you’ll see). Most of aggro’s cards suffer if aggro works a little too well in the earlier rounds. Some cards become genuinely unscorable if you kill the enemy too quickly. Arena Mortis, Aggressive Unity + Close the Vice all become impossible if there aren’t any enemies to attack. Which is like the epitome of suffering from success.

However, it’s important to note that for both archetypes, Round 3 is only bad assuming everything is dead. Let’s assume everything is alive still. In this case, aggro EPs tend to pull ahead because aggro is typically already upgraded out. Hold upgrades (as we will see in a bit) don’t really help with holding as much as aggro upgrades help with killing stuff and extracting glory from cards or other sources.

Final verdict? I just gave it to you. It’s 4 paragraphs long, sorry.

Power Cards Comparison

Now time to take a look at power cards!

(awkward silence) (elevator music)

Now time to take a look at ploy cards!

Ploys typically serve to advance the goals of the archetype in the short term. Or long term. Or they serve to throw a wrench in enemy plans but we’ll get to that later. So we will judge how good different archetypes are supported by power cards rather than how good their power cards are.
Note on decks – I’ll consider cards that the archetypes are likely to run. So don’t expect hold benefitting from Illusory Fighter too often cause BA+HoldDeckOfChoice is not a common pairing outside of BA/PnP.

Ploys that advance the goal of hold are relatively few compared to aggro but they tend to fall in the following categories:

Guard ploys (because anti driveback and more save)
Anti driveback ploys (if you can’t figure this out we have other issues)
Save buffs (don’t rlly exist yet?)
Pushes/tps (get on tokens)
Confusions/Distractions (get enemies off tokens)
Heals/ways to stay alive (to survive to R3 to score stuff)

This is really all hold needs! Let’s compare that to what aggro wants/doesn’t hurt to have:

+Dice
+Damage
+Move (to reach stuff)
Braced/other ways to get charge tokens (get it done?)
Distractions (to pull enemies closer)
Sidesteps/tps (to get into better attack positions)

The moral of this story is that we need more tp cards.

Obviously hold also likes aggro cards cause like less enemies to attack you = more easy to score EPs and aggro likes hold cards cause less drivebacks = more attacks but we’ll ignore these overlapping cases for now cause they in theory should cancel out.

In both cases, cards typically offer a better chance to score stuff. Whenever you sidestep, there’s always a risk an enemy will push you back off. Whenever you pop Determined Effort + Viscious Intent while underdog and against an undamaged Surrounded enemy, there’s always a chance you roll 7 swords. The chances are abysmally low, but it can happen.

In the ploys department, aggro cards actually tend to counter the hold cards. This is because the ‘generic’ aggro ploys of buffing attacks in all but ONE case counter any Guard, anti-Driveback, or potentially too early Sidestep (the one case is Manipulated Fate). On the other hand, a single guard ploy can wall off an aggro player – especially in Round 1. This is because in Round 1 aggro is often weaker due to (as we will see later) their upgrades being very strong, and R1 is when there isn’t much upgrades on the board.

If we look for Distraction Effects in the game (as both archetypes like them), we find two. Violent Blast – in CtC, which is a neutral deck – and Lure of Battle, which is in BA. If ANYONE says I missed Barge i’ll say pay attention more because this is the PLOYS section. Violent Blast can be counted out, because both archetypes play it and a double Violent Blast will often result in no one on a token (which inherently makes it better for aggro). Lure of Battle, on the other hand, is the biggest swinger of all ploys in my opinion. It not only enables aggro by giving them a HUGE advantage in being able to reach people but also is the single biggest counter to holding that aggro has. Because it’s only counter is another push effect, aka, a ploy, aka something that hold will be saving for other objectives anyway.

So what’s the verdict?

Early game, hold ploys are stronger in a significant % of cases. This is due to guard ploys often walling off aggro for an entire round (since Guard is insanely OP now), Sidesteps and other pushes having more value because Lure of Battle is harder to play due to larger distance between fighters, and fighters being still on full health means they benefit a lot more from anti driveback effects like Hold the Line.
Mid game, i’d argue it depends on the game cause if you really think about it the archetypes are pretty balanced. Most ploys cancel each other out. Obviously a Twist the Knife can be fatal but so can a well-timed Healing Potion or a Hidden Paths/Organized Efforts. Still I do think aggro has the slight advantage in that attack buffs are vital here since some defensive cards are already out, making them wayyy more valuable.
Late game, it obviously depends on the board state but once again I’d argue aggro pulls ahead and it’s literally only cause of Reckless Fury. RF ploys are INSANE in late game. Braced, Reckless Attitudes, Diving In, hecking CATCH WEAPON are all absolutely BUSTED in Round 3. Hold really has no answer for the sheer amount of control that aggro has access to in the ploys department. I guess you can like do a very clutch Hidden Paths or Tunneling Terror (very misrecarded btw) but aggro simply has more options here.

So final verdict is that aggro ploys are actually stronger due to:

their sheer power
them ‘vetoing’ hold ploys because if hold isn’t alive then hold can’t score.
Reckless Attitudes.

Upgrades are probably where we see the biggest difference in power level – sorry for the spoilers, but we all know it’s true.

The strongest upgrade right now in a ‘hold’ deck is either Sharp Reflexes or Canny Sapper. Meanwhile, aggro has:

Great Strength
Keen Eye
HEADLONG CHARGE (omg i hate this card so much but that’s for another day)
Titan of Combat
Haymaker

Long story short, there’s like 5 more aggro upgrades that make you cry when they come on the board compared to hold upgrades.

Hold upgrades tend to come in the following forms:

Anti driveback (Brute Momentum)
+Health (which both like but hold likes it more)
Save buffs (same as +health)
Mobility (either +Move or Wary Tread/Canny Sapper)

Meanwhile, aggro has:

Accuracy buffs (Hidden Aid/Keen Eye)
Runemarks (Cleave/Ensnare/Griev/Lethal)
Mobility (both archetypes like it for different reasons)
Weapons (Hurled Weapon/Coordinated Deathblow)

I’d argue aggro pulls WAYYY ahead than hold in upgrades. I mean, what’s the point of anti-driveback if you get one-tapped by Grievous/Haymaker, what’s the point of +Health for the same reason (though it’s wayyy more effective), what’s the point of +Save if your enemy has Cleave Keen Eye and Hidden Aid, and what’s the point of mobility if – ok mobility is pretty good.

decapitation – the most effective counterspell of them all

Speaking of mobility, the best mobility cards that hold has are teleports. To be precise, Canny Sapper. You can argue Cautious Attitudes is up there as well but ehhh… Meanwhile, aggro has Headlong Charge as their signature move card. Both cards are extremely nuts, and proves that mobility is actually the one place that is decently balanced across the archetypes. I’m personally WAYYY more scared of Headlong Charge but maybe that’s just my bias showing so I’ll lean towards a more equal result here.

As stated before, Anti-driveback is such a trash upgrade category – right up there with stuff like Burnt Out – becasuse A), it has a solid 2-3 cards in it, and B) it gets hard countered by getting slapped outside of Round 1. In Round 1, Brute Momentum is bonkers. In Round 2, it’s in the discard pile cause the fighter bearing it ran into 4 guys and got one clipped because Gorl connected an attack with Keen Eye – or Great Strength! Notice how both upgrade categories just absolutely nullify the anti-driveback one, showing how aggro as an archetype counters it.

Save buffs are really strong this edition. However, there’s one caveat – there’s only two of them that stack past two Save (Utter Conviction will be excluded as CtC is the ultimate flex deck). These are Impossibly Quick (one attack), and Goading Defender (doesn’t work outside of your territory + breaks fast). This means hold has a ‘hard cap’ of 2 Save by just upgrades. Enter aggro, who can stack:

Keen Eye
Hidden Aid
Sharpened Points
Accurate

All on ONE FIGHTER for +1 Die, Reroll. Cleave, and Flanked. And the nutty thing is that all of these cards are from ONE DECK. So if you are playing a dedicated, aggro-centered, run it down style of deck, chances are you could care less about Zarshia going to 2 Dodge because you just roll a bajillion dice. It is important to acknowledge that (following the trend) Save upgrades are notoriously strong in Round 1, when aggro still doesn’t have access to their +16 Dice. In fact, a well timed Sharp Reflexes can potentially nullify 1-2 rounds of an aggro player just whiffing attacks.

Finally, +Health buffs. This is probably where hold has the most consistent advantage over aggro. While hold and aggro do share the best +Health cards (Great Fort and Desperate Defense), hold makes about 6x better use of them with their token gameplay. There are several ‘health breakpoints’ I like to talk about, but the most useful one is 5 Health because the most common damage in the game is 2DMG and therefore it boosts the amount of attacks taken to kill you from 2 to 3. Since a lot of hold warbands have a 4 Health fighter, Health buffs are SUPER good. Even though aggro does have Grievous to counter it, Hold has the age old strat of ‘rolling crits’ to counter that!

Now for Early-Mid-Late Game to decide a final verdict:

Early game, hold is ahead and it ain’t really close. Some aggro upgrades coming online R1 are insane (Mobbed anyone?) but as a trend hold upgrades are not only cheaper but also benefit more from the weaker stats of R1.
Mid game, the trend so far has been that it’s been equal. However, with upgrades I’d argue aggro pulls ahead because of the simple case of Sharpened Points/Deadly Aim. These two upgrades completely nullify hold’s answer of Sharp Reflexes or other +Save stuff. In addition, they cost ONE GLORY making them super op. Aggro also has a ton of other 2-Glory cost cards coming online making mid game the ‘tides turning’ in favor of aggro.
Late game, aggro is ahead by a mile and that’s cause there’s only one deck in the game that scales with Round number and it’s CtC – The Flex Deck. By late game, you’ve drawn most of your aggro cards, and unlike hold, aggro upgrades become stronger the more cards you already have out. Exhbit A – Keen Eye + Hidden Aid demonstrates this perfectly. Until hold gets a ‘This fighter is on Guard’ upgrade, this will remain the case.

So yeah, the final verdict is aggro is wayyy stronger in upgrades. That fact that I had to keep pulling Hold stuff from different decks while not even touching on cards from decks outside of Blazing Assault aside from a few edge cases even furthers the fact. Like, aggro is NOT starved for upgrades right now.

RULEBOOK BIAS

I touched a bit on this in the objective section already but it doesn’t hurt ~~too much~~ to go back and focus solely on how the game design favors a playstyle.

Aggro likes to get in there and HIT STUFF YAAAY. Arguably the strongest core ability in the game is aggro-centered. (yes i meant Danse Dynamic you really thought I meant Charge?) Charging is extremely OP for aggro, because it’s A) simple to use B) lets you not only position properly for denial purposes but also kill stuff and C) it doesn’t prevent you from doing anything permanently cause Charged Out is a rule.

Charged Out as a rule also heavily favors aggro. It supports pretty much the entirety of RF as a deck in the objective department as an added bonus. Also, there are a lot of warbands that can hit Charged Out in Round 1.

Most people will say that Hold is extremely lacking rules-wise compared to aggro which gets a dedicated rule to support it’s play pattern. However, Hold also benefits a lot from the Charge core ability for the same reasons as aggro does – it gives Hold a chance to not only get on tokens, but also keep kill pressure up. With the ‘new’ Nexus deck, warbands like Klaq-Trok can reliably get on a token and DELETE A TWO SHIELD RETAINER OFF THE BOARD LIKE WHAT THE BALANCE

pure terror

Anyways, charging allows for hold to keep kinda even in kill bounty with aggro which is important because as a ‘rule’ objective glory has been standardized to 16 a deck and kill bounty to 7. This forces hold to run some sort of kill pressure unless you’re him and elect to not stab-stab and pure skitter-scurry and spam Guard.

Speaking of Guard – it’s arguably the most OP rule in the game for hold. Guard not only makes a fighter 3x harder to kill, it also prevents driveback, and there’s only ONE ABILITY IN THE ENTIRE GAME that can forcibly remove a Guard token (it’s on Thanatek btw for anyone interested). The only other way to remove a Guard token is for the fighter with the Guard token to Charge, which is obviously the player’s choice. But if a hold player is Charged Out, why should they care? They can go on Guard anyway!

Thus, I’d say Core Abilities and Rulebook design actually favors HOLD more than aggro. Hold benefits more from charging than aggro does, and the Guard core ability is SUPER op and benefits from the Charged Out rule as well.

However, aggro is favored in the game’s current idealogy and GW’s vision for the game, from a purely analytical standpoint. The ‘rule’ that all warbands must be 7 bounty and all decks must have 16 glory heavily favors aggro to the extent that aggro has a waayyyy easier access to the 7 kill bounty while also having very not-shabby end phases of their own (arguably better than hold’s!). This means that aggro has easier access to glory. Idk if you know this, but having more glory = win the game, which means aggro has easier access to win the game from the game design standpoint.

So, TLDR:

Hold has more rulebook support
Aggro is favored by the game’s current design.

WARBANDS AND WARSCROLLS

I wasn’t going to do this section but then I realized Starblood Stalkers exist so yeah here we are.

In the current edition of the game, there are X Hold warbands and Y aggro warbands but I can’t be bothered to count them so very sorry about that.

The current meta warband are Elathain and Stalkers, with close runners up being Spiteclaw, GSP, and Thanatek. However, Thanatek is arguably a flex warband so it will be discarded for this analysis (tragic).

Most of these warbands are actually built for holding – which is really interesting cause most tourney winners are aggro warbands – even though their ‘holding’ usually revolves around ‘pillaging and plundering’. Elathain is the BA PnP merchant, Stalkers make ES/NoP/PnP absolutely unbearable, GSP are basically less broken Elathain, and Spiteclaw is the definition of PnP.

Most of these warband’s warscrolls are built to support holding, such as Elathain’s minion scuttle, the Starblood Stalkers warscroll in its entirety, GSP’s first activation warscroll spam, and Skritch’s Justified Paranoia. This got me thinking about aggro warscrolls in the game and well…

Rippa is probably the most ‘aggro’ built warscroll (which ironically is insane for holding as well) due to their wolf bites making attacking 60 times feasible. Ironsouls are also very aggro centered with abilities built to increase range and accuracy allowing for more attacks. Dromm is also insane, having Enrage (the RF RS enabler) and Call of Blood to make reaching targets easier while also having a Raise to get more attacks in. Arguably the strongest aggro warscroll in the game lies in Ylthari’s Guardians though, because they can not only draw 8-9 power cards a game but also get once a round Determined Effort+ or Twist the Knife++ as well as some really nice mobility tech.

Warscroll wise, most of the strongest abilities in the game favor hold centric playstyles. There isn’t really any busted aggro ability that comes to mind when someone asks ‘what’s the most op warscroll you can mesh out of all the warscrolls in the game’, but the above-mentioned Push/Guard abilities almost always appear. Heck, arguably the best ability in the game – Zarbag’s Scurry (or Slippery Gitz) – is wayyy more hold suited.

Sepulchral Guard (this was way funnier in my head)

Warband stats are also really important. Stats this meta really favor aggro because in Spitewood GW decided to give every warband not only a base 3 damage attack but also an attack that can hit 80% of the time. While save and tankiness also went up, the offensive buffs are wayyy more noticable. Look at Elathain, the Wurmspat, and GSP for the obvious ones. For a less obvious one, look at Starbloods – who for a hold warband have WAYYY to insane stats.

Overall, warscroll abilities tend to support hold playstyles more. This is because ‘hold’ centric abilities are often very flexible such as ‘push one hex’ or ‘move twice’, and while aggro also benefits a lot from them, the benefit for hold is way more apparent. On the other hand, warband stats these days make for a really glass cannon meta with a stronger emphasis on the ‘cannon’ and less on the ‘glass’.

FINAL VERDICT

Right, now for the moment we’ve all been waiting for:

Before that a quick summary:

Here’s another break just to build up suspense:

TLDR – In terms of winning games, aggro is stronger. However, the current rules and design of the game pretty seriously favors hold, which is paradoxical.

Now for the long version – Aggro is the clear winner in terms of deck design. They have way stronger surges, their objectives are levels of magnitude harder to deny, and while ploys are *somewhat* even the upgrades absolutely blow out of the water AND the atmosphere.

Aggro is also infinitely stronger at extracting glory from kill bounty for these reasons. They have better cards to get the kill glory, but the way aggro objectives are designed also incentivizes opponents to NOT attack aggro, which means aggro stays on the board longer, which means they get to kill more and so on and so forth.

Despite aggro clearly having the advantage in terms of cards and stats, the rulebook on paper should favor hold playstyles – the combination of Guard, better warscroll abilities, and some other rules like Stand Fast and Overrun (both super hold-sided) are blatantly in hold’s favor. So why is aggro still stronger?

Well, simply put – hold just doesn’t have their own deck yet. Aggro decks are super strong compared to hold decks – they not only score the same amount of glory in easier manner while being harder to deny, they also have better power card support. Yes, hold has the notorious PnP on its side, but aggro has way bigger titans. Nexus is a huge boon to hold warbands and more people should play it imo but it’s quite easy to counter play compared to aggro.

So that’s pretty much it for the analysis. I tried to be as objective as possible – and even then turns out aggro is stronger, like I gave multiple pieces of evidence so it must be true – just like everything else on the internet. So you want to win a tournament? Objectively speaking – aggro is the play in this meta over a pure-hold style.

One super important factor I didn’t even mention is player preference. Some players (like myself) simply cannot play RF for the life of them. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t work for me. On the other hand, I know players who struggle to sit still on the same hex for more than two turns. Some players prefer one or another playstyle and obviously it will affect the supposed strength of the playstyle.

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

It won’t be a Staggerers (or at least my) article without me going completely off topic!

I want to try to address some potential balance changes (WHICH ARE SHOWING UP NEXT WEDNESDAY GUYS TRUST SURELY ITS THIS ONE) that would make the playing field more even.

The obvious change is to simply remove the 7 Bounty, 16 Objectives rule. This heavily favors aggro because it caps glory in total and aggro is way better at killing stuff so it has easier access to the 7 glory.

In the event of this change, I propose hold style decks go UP in glory – so around 17-18 – which aggro decks either stay the same or go down (going down might be sad though). In addition, lowering the bounty on some warbands or RAISING it on others would go a long way. For example, Thanatek. Pls reduce him to 2 bounty. Starblood Stalkers – make them 8 bounty (though this goes against all my points of hold being weak bla bla bla). Some 4x4s can be 8 bounty. Elites can stay 7 or go to 8 bounty to make killing them more rewarding for a hold player.

Another elephant in the room is hold’s damage output should go down if the other two changes were to go through. WHY DOES A HOLD FIGHTER HAVE THE BEST ATTACK IN THE GAME. Like, if hold were to get better objective cards, make their damage lower to reduce their kill bounty capability.

If we move away from balance changes, obviously a new hold deck is in order, one that can compete with aggro’s cards. Maybe a charge/hold deck, or a second delve deck, I don’t mind – also Fishmode talked about this already so check his article out again!

There are obviously other solutions such as restricting half of BA, the entirety of RF, and unrestricting Spread Havoc (unbiased) but those will take a long time to talk about and I’m already at 5,300 words soooo not sure you want to read those (I do have another restricted list article here which touches on the subject though)

CONCLUSION

With that, I can finally say thanks for reading! This article isn’t meant to be an attack on anyone, I was just genuinely interested in which playstyle was objectively better in this game now. Personally, I am still a Steel Garden/Pingstorm player at heart but I’m open to trying to new stuff (like PnP for the fifth tourney in a row ^^)

Do you agree with my very objective takes? I’d love to chat more on the Staggerers Discord server about this topic – so join it and we’ll talk 🙂
With that – thanks a lot for reading, and I hope to see you again soon!