Deck Guide: Anders Bang's Big Sick Energy with the Wurmspat
Anders Bang recently piloted the Wurmspat (paired with Rimewyrm's Bite) to a 1st Place win at Copenhagen Clash, which awarded him a ticket to the World Championships of Warhammer in Atlanta, GA (USA) in November (sadly, he won't be able to attend, but that doesn't take anything away from the accomplishment). We reached out and invited him to provide a deck guide (below), but he's also written a Love Letter for Spent Glory that covers the Wurmspat in general: Hexually Transmitted Diseases. You can also look out for a pending appearance on the What the Hex?! podcast. Now, on to the deck guide!
-Jerod
The deck list: Big Sick EnergyWhat inspired you to pick this combination? What's the overarching play style? What is this deck/warband combo attempting to achieve?
I made this deck because Wurmspat is my favorite warband and Rimewyrm’s Bite is, finally, a deck that makes sense for them in the Nemesis. Wurmspat is a decent warband in Championship format, because in Champ you can actually make up for their faction deck’s many, many, many deficiencies. The surges are horrible, the end phases are little better, and while they have a few great power cards, they still lack the most important tools they need: Usable ping cards that let them inspire faster than by just throwing attacks. But Rimewyrm’s Bite fixes most of this: Good end phases, good pings, even some fantastic defensive cards which just reinforces the warband’s main strength, their incredible toughness and survivability. The surges in the Rivals deck aren’t great (well, one is) but most of them are at least scorable.
Their strategy is simple: Grind the opponent down before they can outscore you. You do this by unlocking the warband’s great inspired stats that first and foremost make you extremely hard to kill but also lets your fighters hit them back very hard. But all the small tactical choices that makes up the game are hard. This is what makes it fun!
Before we talk about specific cards, there is something anyone piloting this deck needs to really understand: You wont score many of your objectives. The deck isn’t smooth enough, and you will end up discarding more objectives than you’re probably used to from other warbands. Your glory score will be low. Like, low low. Across the 10 games in the Copenhagen Clash, I never scored more than 9 glory from my objectives in a single game. My glory total across the entire tournament was the lowest of all the top 10 warbands.
But I still won 9 out of 10 games. The trick is, and I’m sure this is a shock, to make sure your opponent scores even less than you (another trick is to roll a bunch of crits, and I want to highlight that I had some very lucky games, especially in the early matches). You need to deny your opponent’s glory by knowing their strategy, maybe even their individual cards, so you can make their lives hard. But also, you need to lean into your overall strategy: Grind them down. Most warbands can’t score much without fighters on the board. I tabled my opponent in 7 out of 10 games.
What are the three objectives you want to see in your opening hand? Why?
Get Moving, Never Punished, Corralled Like Sheep
Most of my surges are situational and are actually more easily scored in Round 2 and 3. But Get Moving is often easy to score Round 1 - against passive opponents that are hard to reach early game it’s not great though.
Never Punished can be hard Round 1 if you can’t land attacks or even reach your opponent – but it rewards you handsomely for working on your biggest priority early game, which is to spread damage around for inspiration. And your opponent will often try to focus their attacks on one fighter at a time to remove a threat or gain seed glory, making it easier for you to score this.
Corralled Like Sheep is easy for your enemy to block in the early game if they know what they’re doing – but it’s also a card your enemy can score for you, either by charging into your territory or by keeping as far away from you as possible.
As you can see, none of these 3 are auto-scores – and they are probably your best starting hand. Very often you won’t score much Round 1. Don’t let it tilt you. A lot of your objectives are much easier to score the two later rounds, and by then you should hopefully have started decimating your opponent’s warband as well. Play the long game.
What are the three gambits you want to see in your opening hand? Why?
Unnatural Vitality, The Right Bait, Deadly Wards
Unnatural Vitality lets you surprise your opponent and throws their boardstate calculations off balance. As a general rule you want to get stuck it – but against aggro opponents you might want to stay back and let come to you so as not to overextend before your inspired stats are online. Unnatural Vitality lets reach your preferred targets even while staying back. And against HO or passive it’s vital to close in so you can set up good attacks and charges for the later rounds to keep their scoring down.
The Right Bait. Not the strongest ping in the deck – that’s Puncturing Ice Shards – but the most reliable (in my experience it’s easier to set up Puncturing Ice Shards in the later rounds. If your opponent doesn’t know what Rimewyrm’s Bite is capable of and deploys their fighters next to hazard hexes, you definitely want Puncturing Ice Shards in your first hand!). You need to inspire to go the distance. You need to spread damage out to inspire. The Right Bait lets you charge Ghulgoch into two fighters, punch one and ping the other – or it’s a back-up for when you inevitably miss your attack.
Deadly Ward is obviously a way to turn the board into a minefield that makes positioning hard for your opponent by playing it after your own activation. But I primarily use it to get extra damage on the drive back, ie by playing it before my activation and charging someone to drive back into a starting hex. As we learned before, the surges aren’t great for Round 1, so if I can manage to get an early kill that’s another way to get seed glory. And it’s a back-up tool towards inspiration – if my opponent ties my attack, I still get to drive their fighter back into a now-lethal hex.
What are the three upgrades you want to see in your opening hand? Why?
Tough Enough, Inured to Hardship and Virulent Blade
Tough Enough is a crazy upgrade for Wurmspat. If you manage to lower an incoming attack to 1 damage with their innate damage reduction, you don’t take any damage at all (which, apart from being extremely powerful, also helps against the objective Never Punished). And it makes the wearer immune to most pings and a lot of ranged attacks…
Inured to Hardship fulfills the same role as Tough Enough. It makes your fighter extremely hard to kill, it helps with Never Punished. Played at the end of a round, you will heal 2 wounds before next round rolls around, often taking a fighter from one-shot range to being very hard to deal with (again).
Virulent Blade always goes on Sepsimus (well, most upgrades go on Sepsimus in general, but this could almost just say: Restricted Sepsimus). He’s your most important fighter, as his inspired attack has both range 2 and damage 3, which makes it extremely activation effective and very deadly. The only thing he lacks is accuracy - Virulent Blade helps with that.
Are there any other objectives, gambits, or upgrades of note?
First and foremost, you’ll need to keep your two other 2 glory end phase objectives in mind when playing – Spread Out and Blood-soaked Ice. Both get easier as the game goes on, but in certain match-ups are very scorable early game. Most of your surges are situational, so think of them more like targets of opportunity throughout the game when they pop up in your hand than something you need to get the ball running early. An important note: The deck posted here is the one I went with to the tournament, but I have one card that is a sure drop: Seeping Rot. Never scored it once. Swap it for Blessed Endurance (which is match up dependent) or Deadly to All (draw dependent) – I’m leaning towards Blessed Endurance.
I’ll highlight two things regarding ploys: There is a couple of “tax” domain cards (Unstable Footing and Here it Comes!) that are mainly there to reach critical mass of Domain cards in order to score the surge Ruinous Aftermath (and to trigger a few strong upgrades: Like an Avalanche and Up for a Fight). Use them when it makes sense, and don’t hesitate to discard them by playing a new Domain in order to score the surge/trigger Like an Avalanche).
And then I need to mention Puncturing Ice Shards. The spike potential of this card is incredible, but it can hit yourself as well. This is a card that influences your board choice, token placement, deployment, timing of plays and your positioning/landing spots throughout the game. I won’t go into all the different considerations, but I’ll say you want to fully understand how this card works if you want to give this deck a go. As you need hazard hexes to trigger it, your opponent can (and should) make your life difficult by choosing boards without hazards – in this case, you can Plunder (if you can remember to do it - I have done it exactly once in my Underworlds career), you can Delve an objective (just remember to charge away to a safe spot before pulling the trigger) or you can use Earth-shattering Tread. And remember that you have two upgrades that protects you from pings, and Puncturing Ice Shards becomes much easier to play out if your fighters are immune to it themselves.
Boards
Boards very much depends on your opponent. First of all: If you suspect your opponent is running Rimewyrm’s Bite as well, stay away from boards with hazard hexes to make their Puncturing Ice Shards harder to trigger (with one exception: If you suspect they will longboard you AND that they’ll stay all the way back AND are running Rimewyrm’s Bite, you can consider The Stricken Swamp in order to get as close to them as possible).
If your think they’re coming to you, or that you’ll brawl in the middle of the board, I like to pick boards that let you put a lethal hex close to no-ones’ territory, preferably to one side, and without other central hazard hexes. These are boards like The Wyrmburrow, Fleshwrithe Vortex, Moltscape – the two latter boards are good as a first board, as there will be a lethal close to the enemy no matter the orientation if they want to go wide. Don’t be afraid to off-set boards and put a lethal or a blocked hex in the chokepoint/bottleneck against fast, hard aggro.
Like board choice, deployment is very match-up dependent. Against hard aggro, stay back and let them come to you – your fighters are incredibly tough when they inspire, but early game you risk getting blown out of the water. Against horde warbands that want to hold objectives and passive warbands that wants to score from pings and spells (like Cyreni’s Razors, Thricefold Discord and some Domitan’s Stormcoven builds) you need to go get them, so deploy aggressively.
What do you do to beat this deck?
If you can fight at all, you run Wurmspat down before they can power up. Try to kill Sepsimus as soon as possible, as he the warband’s key fighter (and in my opinion one of the best in the game).
If you want to hold objectives, try to split up on the battlefield. Wurmspat excel when they can box the opponent in and let their fighters stat close together to support each other. If the Wurmspat player must split their forces and send a fighter back into their own territory to catch some of your fighters who ran past them, that backtracking fighter can easily end up out of the game. This maneuver also specifically blocks the objective Corralled like Sheep.
If you see Wurmspat on the opposite side of the table and they don’t announce a plot card, they are almost certainly running Rimewyrm’s Bite, so don’t pick a board with hazard hexes.
New player rating? How easy is this deck to pick up and play?
Rating: Bronze plus
The overall game plan is as simple as can be: Don’t die. And make sure you opponent’s fighters do die.
But the small choices are hard.
You need to attack your enemy but can’t overextend because before inspiration the Wurmspat fighters aren’t actually very durable. So, the timing of when to go in, when to charge, is important, and that mainly comes with experience. So does target priority, denial, match up knowledge.
Most warbands need to choose between removing threats by going after their opponent’s most dangerous or important fighters, or scoring “easy” kills for seed glory, but Wurmspat also needs to balance this classic choice with inspiring (which is their first second and third priority) by spreading damage out to multiple enemies.
And as mentioned in the start of the article, the Wurmspat player also needs to be prepared to discard quite a few objectives and not get tilted when the snowball takes a long time to start rolling because you don’t score much/anything in the first round of the game. The surge pack is wonky, and while the end phases in general are pretty synergistic and high scoring (I can tell you that Wurmspat is not used to having four 2 glory end phase objectives!) they are not hard to block by an experienced opponent.
You can find Anders as @anders in the various Underworlds-focused Discord servers if you have any questions or want to chat with him!
