Deck Guide: Thundrick's Profiteers by Zack Newcome
Zack is back with another deck guide, this time sharing with us the Thundrik's Profiteers Wrack-a-Pill'r (Pillage & Plunder + Wrack & Ruin) deck he piloted to 1st Place at the Cherokee Open 2025.
The deck guide starts at the top, but Zack's also written up a report of his tournament experience. Click here to jump to the report.
-Jerod
The Deck
Click here to see the deck in underworldsdb.com
What inspired you to pick this combination? What's the overarching play style? What is this deck/warband combo attempting to achieve?
I love Dwarves [Duardin for the Age of Sigmar readers. -Jerod] and with Thundrik’s Profiteers being the only Dwarven warband available for competitive play, I had to try to make them work. Thundrik’s has always been an interesting puzzle because their damage output seems low, but it is VERY consistent. Their threat range makes it very hard to avoid getting attacked and you can use that threat range to hold objectives. The accuracy also gives you a fair amount of control of the board state to enable positional scoring. All these elements lead me towards Pillage and Plunder’s treasure token interaction elements with the positional scoring available in Wrack and Ruin.
I’ve tried 3 or 4 different deck combinations with Thundrik’s. Thundrik’s has an amazing threat range, accuracy, and the ability to spread damage across multiple fighters. I first tried Blazing assault / Emberstone sentinels, however blazing assault end phase score is very low so it didn’t end up scoring very high. Emberstone Sentinels had several very solid objective cards, but even with the awesomely named warscroll ability “Its mine fair and square” holding objectives was very easy to counterplay and stop the scoring. Countdown to Cataclysm has some great end phase scoring, but again I found it too easy for my opponent to prevent me from doing what I needed to. Countdown’s surge package also was not great for the speed of scoring I wanted.
With Thundrik’s you HAVE to get the ball rolling with some easy surges and end phase cards, because that’s how you inspire your fighters. You get quite a lot out of doing this as well. You get more accuracy from Enrik and Lund. Thundrik and Garrod’s defense stats improve. Khazgan goes to 3 damage, without grievous. Thundrik also gets cleave added to us attacks. With most of your warband starting on 2 move… 3 move feels GREAT when you inspire. All of these things make it VERY important to inspire at least 2 or 3 of your fighters in round 1, and at the very least before your opponent hunts down Thundrik who is needed to enable your inspiration.
I would describe the playstyle of this deck to be Flex. You want to interact with the treasure tokens, but you primarily want to be focused on killing your opponent and counterplay. You want to have stand off style brawl around the treasure tokens while setting surgical strikes on fighters that you’ve wounded previously.
What are the three objectives you want to see in your opening hand? Why?
- “Share the Load” is the first card I want to see. I don’t have to roll dice, I just need to get onto treasure tokens. With the “By the Code” warscroll I ability I can push onto a treasure token, then simply move onto another one. “By the Code” also enables you to surprise your opponent by putting a dwarf 5 hexes from his starting position deep in enemy territory if you need to. If you activate 2nd, you can score this in 1 activation every time as long as you have 2 treasure tokens within 3 hexes of your fighters.
- "Hostile Takeover" is a VERY easy to score objective for Thundrik’s. If your opponent gives you targets close enough you can go ahead and use the “Hail of Aethershot” ability without repositioning your fighters. If you don’t have 2 targets within range, you can always activate “Custom Aethershot Rounds” first to give you that extra range and then make your 2nd shot on the closer target. Thundrik’s is the only warband that can score this card in one activation.
- “Delving for Wealth” is one that I want to see early as well. You should always have at least 1 treasure token deep in your territory where you can park a dwarf on the token and then delve 3 times across 3 power steps. This works great in combination with “Share the Load” as that objective requires you to be on a feature token, not just a treasure token. Unless your opponent has headlong charge or or wings of war in their opening hand, it's nearly impossible to stop.
What are the three ploys you want to see in your opening hand? Why
- “Side Step” is one of the most simple, but truly effective power cards that has ever been printed. You can use it to set up all 4 / 6 surges in the deck and start working towards “Low on Options”. If you can get onto a token without using “By the Code” you are actually able to get onto 3 treasure tokens in 1 power step which REALLY throws a wrench into your opponent’s plans if they also want to interact with tokens.
- “Vicious Intent” can be game changing. Getting two extra attack dice right away is huge. If you can score an early objective and inspire Khazgan. 4 smash, 3 damage, threat 5. Khazgan is coming for your lunch money and he isn’t asking nicely. If you also draw Glory Seeker there is a very solid chance that you are going to be deleting a 4 wound model immediately at the beginning of the game.
- “Fireproof” I want to see early simply because 4 of my 5 fighters only have 3 wounds. Even though 3 damage attacks aren’t as common, making an opponent swing an extra time to take down a dwarf sometimes prevents their glory training from moving as quickly as it would normally. Another use for this card, given that Gardeners are now a thing, you can use this card to stop their 3 damage cycle step. Plus this card has Fjul on it.
What are the three upgrades you want to see in your opening hand? Why?
- “Wary Tread” may be an odd choice for your opening hand choices, but I LOVE seeing this card early because it makes positional scoring so much easier. If you had to charge next to a friendly fighter or an opponent positioned next to you to make hitting you again next round easier. Nope… I am over here now. It can also catch your opponent off guard because their looking at the board state thinking “I’ve just stopped alone in the dark” only to have you put “Wary Tread” on. It also makes Stay Close a little easier if you had a fighter that was pushed into an edge hex against your will. Being further away from melee fighters with Thundrik’s is almost always a good thing.
- “Great Speed” is a surprise to no one, Dwarves have short legs. We need more movement speed. Every game system agrees, faster Dwarves are better. This allows you to get into position or threaten a shocking large area. With “By the Code”, ranged weapons, and “Flee!” available to you your dwarves aren’t that slow anymore.
- “Gloryseeker”, a time honored card that is absolutely terrifying with this warband. If you can get this onto Khazgan right away, he becomes that big stick you can shake at your opponent. They will stay away from him, or come straight at him which you can use to your advantage. Not to mention it's grievous for only 1 glory, not bad… Inspired Khazgan can do 4 damage to a larger fighter and reach DEEP into enemy territory with the proper ploys in your hand. It is also handy to push Garrod and Thundrik to 3 damage, with the number of very reliable 1 damage attacks that extra damage can make a big difference. This can make a high damage melee warband like Dromm or Jaws of Itzl thing twice coming in range of the fighter with this card.
Any other objectives, ploys, or upgrades of note?
This deck has some really interesting counterplay and fear based objectives in it. I will start with Strip the Realm, its a 3 glory end phase. That can be a major turning point in a game, and it's pretty easy to stop. However you have to be intentional to be able to stop it. If you are able to flip several treasure tokens over, your opponent is going to want to flip them back over to try to stop Strip the Realm and Torn Landscape, which is not in the deck, from scoring. That does several things for you, your opponent just spent an entire activation moving onto a token instead of charging you, assuming you weren’t standing near an empty one. This also allows you to pick which fighter your opponent attacks if they want to stop it from scoring, by leaving a fighter next to a treasure token. For melee warbands this can be a huge problem for them, do I go after the 2 bounty fighters or do I try to stop Strip the Realm by going after a lesser reward. If you are able to pull it off its 3 glory, if you don’t it likely forced your opponent to do something they didn’t want to do to stop you from scoring it. Another benefit of this card is that once you’ve flipped a treasure token your opponent has to delve it again to be able to hold the treasure token at some point, if they do it before the last action step you now get the benefit of attacking a staggered fighter. I score this card more from having my opponent not holding any treasure tokens, rather than having all the treasure tokens flipped. It's pretty difficult against a hold objective warband, but with the amount of range and accuracy it's pretty easy to knock them off.
- “Broken Prospects” works in tandem with Strip the Realm. Strip the Realm usually scares people so badly they want to stand on Treasure Tokens during the end phase, however they will usually move off of them during the course of the round because they can’t afford to leave a fighter in one place. Then you just need to walk over there and delve it, once you’ve done this your opponent can’t stop you from scoring 2 glory. I scored this card more often using this method rather than delving 3 different treasure tokens, however in round 1 this is still a very easy 2 glory end phase that is unstoppable once you’ve done the thing. One thing you do need to be careful about with this objective is that the wording “delve a TREASURE token”, if you’ve already flipped all of the treasure tokens you have delve it back to a treasure token and then delve it again. You only get credit for delving a treasure token if the token is number side up.
- “Desolate Homeland” is another one that provides some head scratching. Sure it's only one glory, but if you place your objectives correctly you don’t have to do anything to score it during the game. Once your opponent knows you have this card, sometimes they will put more tokens in your territory to stop the free scoring card, which is already very easy to engineer. This card also gives you another reason to put more than one treasure token in neutral territory to help make Shocking assault and Set Explosives harder.
- “Canny Sapper” was a late addition to the deck, however I really enjoyed having it in the deck. It gives you the ability to yo-yo your fighters to keep them out of danger. This also allows you to position fighters to threaten friendly territory without charging so that you can set up “Hostile Takeover” or provide support to a very important attack. This is also a great escape plan to keep a fighter alive. It was very useful and caught my opponent off guard several times when I put it on a fighter earlier in the game because it's a FREE upgrade, only to use it out of the blue.
- The last card I will talk about is “Damned if you do”. This card in my opinion has a high skill ceiling to it to get the most out of the card. This card can be used to set up several objective cards that require your opponent to not stand somewhere. If you choose the right moment to play this card it will be a damage that can set up a kill or it can set up “Alone in the Dark”, “Stay Close”, and “Strip the Realm”. Sometimes the fear of that 1 damage can allow you to use the push to score a lot of glory. There were several times throughout Cherokee open where I was able to engineer 5 - 7 glory off a single end phase because my opponent didn’t want that 1 damage on one of their fighters while Khazgan was shaking a spear at them.
Which board side and alignment (5s or 9s) do you prefer? How do you deploy?
Note: 5s refers to the board orientation with 5 unconnected hexes in neutral territory, 9s refers to the orientation with 9 connected hexes in neutral territory.For this deck I like the 5s position better because it allows me to put a Treasure token just across the center line in enemy territory to enable a quick score of “Claim the Prize” without losing friendly covering fire on that fighter that I use to score it. Given Thundrik’s movement troubles before inspiration, being able to reach the enemy and their treasure tokens is a little easier.
Thundrik’s does NOT like blocked hexes, they make movement harder and you can’t shoot around them. I always use the side of the board that does not have blocked hexes.
Treasure Token placement is very important for this deck. Especially if your opponent is playing a hold objective warband. If your opponent also wants to hold you want those tokens as close to the middle as you can get them, even the ones in your zone. You don’t want an opponent to run past you and take your treasure. You want to be able to get access to all of the tokens and be able to stand on one token and shoot at 1 - 2 other tokens with your ranged weapons.
Against Aggro opponents though you want to place the Treasure Tokens very differently, especially if they are playing Reckless Fury. You do not want to be in your Territory playing against Reckless fury. You want the Tokens to be spread out so that if you put a dwarf on each token your opponent has to spread out if he wants to prevent you from standing on the tokens which weakens their ability to do what they need to be doing. It also lessens the chance that they will leave a fighter sitting on a Treasure Token just to prevent Strip the Realm.
Enrik is your Danglebro. He is the spicy bait. He also has the most accurate attack of the bunch before inspiration. It makes him a good option to inflict some early pain on your enemy on the front lines while hopefully scoring some glory in the process. He’s also only 1 bounty, so if he does go down early it doesn’t put you in a bad position.
The two fighters you want to keep safe for a while are Thundrik and Khazgan. Both of them are worth 2 bounty. I will usually put them on opposite sides of the board from one another so that my opponent has to pick between the two rather than being in the same space during the early game.
Garodd has your other 2 damage melee attack and he starts with 1 dodge, so I tend to keep him midline to counter punch if Enrik doesn’t keep the enemy at bay.
Lund is your max range threat piece. He threatens 6 hexes uninspired, 7 when he inspires. Even though he has short legs, the man carries a long rifle. He is my other midline fighter that will usually end up in the center of the board somewhere.
You don’t want to be too far back with your three 1 bounty fighters, but you also do want to be too close either.
What do you do to beat this deck?
This deck does interact with counter play a lot, therefore you can stop it by playing well and guessing which positional scoring cards are in hand.All of the 2 glory end phase objectives and “Strip the Realm” can be stopped by standing where I don’t want you to. It's just a matter of guessing where I want you to stand. Paying attention to what cards have been scored and remembering what cards were played in game 1 is very crucial to success against this deck. Game 1 is going to be tough, but it's a fact finding mission for game 2 and 3.
The other way to prevent this deck from doing well is beating me to the treasure, this deck will start to struggle if I can’t get dwarves on treasure quickly. In several of my practice games I got stomped hard by warbands that got onto token quickly because I couldn’t score the surges that I had in hand to inspire quickly.
New player rating? How easy is this deck to pick up and play (Bronze/Silver/Gold> - Does it take a lot of practice? Are there subtleties in positioning or opposing objectives? How important is card draw order? Does it “flow?”)
Thundrik’s is listed as Mastery Warband. This warband can be very tricky to pilot. If you don’t get the ball rolling with easier to score objectives in round 1 it becomes an uphill fight very quickly. This is not something I would give a new player and expect them to do well with, there’s a lot going on. I will give this one a Gold rating.
This deck you need to have practice into several different warbands and styles of play before you’ll feel comfortable with how the deck interacts with each one, you have to play very differently into hold and flex playstyles compared to playing into strike. Your treasure token placement and deployments will be different based on what you’re fighting and which deck combinations they’re using. I’ve been playing Thundrik’s with the intent on taking them to the 2024 Wolrd Championship of Warhammer event and didn’t end up taking them because I didn’t feel I had enough reps to handle what I thought the meta was going to be at the event.
Objective card draw is very important in this deck, if you don’t get a surge in your first hand you’re going to have a bad time. This is very true specifically into a strike style of play because you need to kill them before they roll over you and if they slay Thundrik before you can inspire a couple of fighters, it's gonna get really hard really quick.
The power cards in this deck are important, but the order of them is less important because every one of them gives you a tool to use and most of them do give you a step towards one or more of the objectives in the deck. You just have to gauge if the tools you draw are the tools you want at the beginning of the game.
Cherokee Open Match Talk
Cherokee Open we were running a Bo3, play all 3 format. So that everyone has the same chance to get those tie breakers, or lose them.Round 1
AidenJaws of Itzl w/ Reckless Fury / Blazing Assault
Game 1 : 12 - 3
Game 2 : 17 - 7
Game 3 : 14 - 12
My first match was against the Jaws of Itzl, this is decidedly not a match that Jaws want to see. Thundrik’s ranged attacks do not allow them to inspire easily and the Jaws’ fairly slow movement speed doesn’t allow them to reach a lot of my fighters in round 1.
Reckless fury is also punished very hard by Thundrik’s in general because I am not charging very much. I will push onto a token and then just stand there and shoot, which turns off a lot of his scoring.
Game 1 round 1 I was able to prevent a lot of charges as I got lucky he didn’t draw wings of war or headlong charge. Using Custom Aethershot Round on Deadeye Lund, I was able to make a 5 round shot to push back his leader and prevent an opening round 3 damage charge. I was able to spread out his efforts by round 2 and prevent nearly all of his, even though I wasn’t scoring much either. Round 2 also had some of the most dreadful dice luck I’ve seen in a lot time. Round 3 was pretty much the same story. He did keep my scoring very low by using good play, holding me to my lowest score of the event.
Game 2 ended up being a very similar early game standoff, only my objective cards came out in a much more agreeable order allowing me to be able to work towards some higher end round round scoring. Aiden dice were a lil warmer this game and he was able get some dwarf snacks, however because I wasn’t charging and I ran across the board to his territory he wasn’t able to get many of his objectives scored while, but he did kill 3/5ths of my warband.
Game 3 he started to hit some attacks, his dice just needed to be warmed up by handling them. He drew into his movement cards early, so the race to score my objectives before being eaten by a dinosaur was on. I lost 2 dwarves almost instantly due to a charge from his leader and an early “Twist the Knife”. He put those Vemonites on the center treasure token again to stop an early “Strip the Realm”, but I ended up getting it round 2 after shooting the Vemonites off and delving the token to score “Broken Prospects”. “Stay Close” and “Alone in the Dark” came into play during Round 2 and 3 because he had killed every dwarf except for Thundrik who was taking advantage of his “Atmospheric Isolation” ability and 2 block defense to keep the badly wounded dinosaurs at bay. Barely pulling off a win with those nice positional objectives and counterplaying his Reckless Fury objectives.
Grandfather’s Gardeners w/ Emberstone Sentinels / Countdown to Cataclysm
Game 1 : 16 - 6
Game 2 : 19 - 8
Game 3 : 19 - 11
This is the match that made me want to write a tournament summary, just for all the fun interactions with the Gardeners’ cycle tracker. Every time they take damage, if they hold more treasure tokens than you, or after their activation the tracker moves. Bryce made a count in one of his matches of the number of wounds he was able to heal with this mechanic and was at 12 wounds healed over 3 games which is a pretty serious amount of healing each game.
My game plan into this match up was get on tokens fast and then be able to call out “This is mine fair and square” as many times as I could to prevent his countdown tracker from moving up to fast and to prevent him from scoring things like Supremacy, Set Explosives, and Iron Grasp easily.
Game 1 round 1 I got a nasty power hand that had a side step and was able to hop onto the 3 objectives that were near the center of the board after my first activation. I was able to score several surges quickly and was cruising into round 2 with 3 inspired fighters. The Squrot was shot at some point and did outright kill poor Garodd who was just trying to hold an objective in my territory. Throughout this game I was actively trying to control how much damage output the gardeners were able to do by using ping cards, not holding treasure, holding treasure, and using my hail of aethershot to move the tracker twice. This made it very hard for him to actually kill me because I kept moving the tracker and giving him choices of moving his tracker from one of my pings, or giving me accuracy or knocking him off an objective token. I was only able to slay Squort and one of his other fighters during this game, but was able to keep him off the tokens effectively.
Game 2 I lucked out and the side step made a 2nd appearance in my first hand. This game went about the same where he was having trouble connecting and moving me off of the tokens because I was able to get onto them using my warscroll and power cards to get there first. I ended up being more effective clearing the crops of pestilence this game killing squort and more than 1 gardener. By the end of game 2 I was starting to really see how many wounds he was healing off JUST the cycle mechanic, not to mention healing potion. Since I was only doing 1 damage with most of my attacks it was very difficult to actually take any of the gardeners down unless I shot them once and then came in with a melee attack.
Game 3 Bryce was able to get some scoring going since he was able to get onto the tokens before me and squirt made himself hard to kill by flying up for an early step by step by going on guard. He got the ball rolling and scored more than he had in the previous games, but he was still unable to stop cards like Alone in the Dark, Stay Close, and Broken Prospects because he had to spread out too much to be able to enable his own scoring. He did prevent Strip the Realm until the very end of the game though after I had removed most of his models from the board.
This matchup is a lot of fun for me trying to play that mini game of controlling the cycle counter to give myself advantages and predict when he is going to be able to heal.
Spiteclaw's Swarm - Emberstone Sentinels / Pillage and Plunder
Game 1 : 19 - 20
Game 2 : 19 - 18
Game 3 : 19 - 16
Brandon and I have been playing Underworlds with each other since Season 2. The definition of a grudge match acted between two old foes. Skaven vs Dwarf. We both sat down chuckling and shaking hands, this was going to be a FIGHT.
This is not an easy matchup for either warband. My low damage output in a single activation made taking down rats a little hard and since I wasn’t just removing them from the board it gave him the chance to inspire fighters with guard ploys and his warscroll. So that meant I had to shoot at rats in cover and on guard… Not exactly an easy target and I couldn’t just knock them off because of the guard tech and since my melee attacks are only 2 hammers it made it even harder to move them.
Thus the duel of objective tracking and ploy tracking started. Does he still have confusion in his hand? Has Striped the Realm been carded yet?
Game 1 he started out strong, both of us were balancing flipping tokens to score and giving your opponent an accuracy boost all while trying to avoid each other’s big attacks. I was able get great speed on Khazgan early and made a vicious intent charge to get Krrk the almost trusted out of the way, but then missed a CRUCIAL attack against the Skritch early in round 2. All while trying to keep rats off of treasure tokens. I ended up scoring most of my deck, but couldn’t get Alone in the Dark to score, thus losing the game by 1 point.
Game 2, the one I HAD to win. This game started very well and continued very well, however both of our objective decks were scoring very evenly. I was able to silence Krrk again after some effort, a lot of effort which left him able to focus on other things with the other rats. Positioning and choice drive backs were in this match up to ensure Alone in the Dark, Broken Prospects, and Stay Close. At the end of round 2, Brandon had to discard Strip the Realm in an effort to get some more scorable cards, but that was a BIG turn around for me. I was able to use canny sapper in the 2nd to last activation to bring Thundrik back into the fray to finish off a rat that was on an edge hex, but failing my final attack which would have given me Alone in the Dark, however I defended the one lone objective that the 2 remaining rats were trying to get on finishing the game with a triumphant scoring of Strip the Realm and Stay Close. Winning by a VERY sweaty 1 glory.
Game 3, this game was a bit of a blur at this point between keeping track of what he had scored, not scored, and if confusion had been played or not… Scoring was very even, so much so there was not an underdog for most of the game. I was able to take Krrk out after some effort in the 2nd round and wounded Skritch when Brandon chose to block me from scoring Strip the Realm instead. I had already killed one of the clan rats, which mattered a lot for what happened at the beginning of round 3. He had failed to score Supremacy earlier in the game and needed Skritch’s bounty to do it because Krrk had died already. Round 3 I get initiative, I have Thundrik with Glory seeker within charge range of Skritch who has 1 wound on him. Vicious Intent in hand for one extra dice. The attack succeeds and down goes Skritch for the first time in the match. I was able to overrun onto the objective and scored an objective (it was either low on options for Vicious Intent or Bloody and Bruised for the damage inflicted) and drew into another surge which I was able to score by delving with thundrik. I was able to prevent Supremacy from scoring since he did not have 3 bounty left on the board at the end even with 3 rats. I was unable to score Strip the Realm in the end, but I did get Alone in the Dark and Broken Prospects from stealing back my treasure from Skritch.
That was one of the hardest matches I’ve played since the World Championships of Warhammer last year. Brandon did not disappoint when it came to making me work for my Golden Ticket.
Game 1 : 12 - 3
Game 2 : 17 - 7
Game 3 : 14 - 12
My first match was against the Jaws of Itzl, this is decidedly not a match that Jaws want to see. Thundrik’s ranged attacks do not allow them to inspire easily and the Jaws’ fairly slow movement speed doesn’t allow them to reach a lot of my fighters in round 1.
Reckless fury is also punished very hard by Thundrik’s in general because I am not charging very much. I will push onto a token and then just stand there and shoot, which turns off a lot of his scoring.
Game 1 round 1 I was able to prevent a lot of charges as I got lucky he didn’t draw wings of war or headlong charge. Using Custom Aethershot Round on Deadeye Lund, I was able to make a 5 round shot to push back his leader and prevent an opening round 3 damage charge. I was able to spread out his efforts by round 2 and prevent nearly all of his, even though I wasn’t scoring much either. Round 2 also had some of the most dreadful dice luck I’ve seen in a lot time. Round 3 was pretty much the same story. He did keep my scoring very low by using good play, holding me to my lowest score of the event.
Game 2 ended up being a very similar early game standoff, only my objective cards came out in a much more agreeable order allowing me to be able to work towards some higher end round round scoring. Aiden dice were a lil warmer this game and he was able get some dwarf snacks, however because I wasn’t charging and I ran across the board to his territory he wasn’t able to get many of his objectives scored while, but he did kill 3/5ths of my warband.
Game 3 he started to hit some attacks, his dice just needed to be warmed up by handling them. He drew into his movement cards early, so the race to score my objectives before being eaten by a dinosaur was on. I lost 2 dwarves almost instantly due to a charge from his leader and an early “Twist the Knife”. He put those Vemonites on the center treasure token again to stop an early “Strip the Realm”, but I ended up getting it round 2 after shooting the Vemonites off and delving the token to score “Broken Prospects”. “Stay Close” and “Alone in the Dark” came into play during Round 2 and 3 because he had killed every dwarf except for Thundrik who was taking advantage of his “Atmospheric Isolation” ability and 2 block defense to keep the badly wounded dinosaurs at bay. Barely pulling off a win with those nice positional objectives and counterplaying his Reckless Fury objectives.
Round 2
Bryce MartinGrandfather’s Gardeners w/ Emberstone Sentinels / Countdown to Cataclysm
Game 1 : 16 - 6
Game 2 : 19 - 8
Game 3 : 19 - 11
This is the match that made me want to write a tournament summary, just for all the fun interactions with the Gardeners’ cycle tracker. Every time they take damage, if they hold more treasure tokens than you, or after their activation the tracker moves. Bryce made a count in one of his matches of the number of wounds he was able to heal with this mechanic and was at 12 wounds healed over 3 games which is a pretty serious amount of healing each game.
My game plan into this match up was get on tokens fast and then be able to call out “This is mine fair and square” as many times as I could to prevent his countdown tracker from moving up to fast and to prevent him from scoring things like Supremacy, Set Explosives, and Iron Grasp easily.
Game 1 round 1 I got a nasty power hand that had a side step and was able to hop onto the 3 objectives that were near the center of the board after my first activation. I was able to score several surges quickly and was cruising into round 2 with 3 inspired fighters. The Squrot was shot at some point and did outright kill poor Garodd who was just trying to hold an objective in my territory. Throughout this game I was actively trying to control how much damage output the gardeners were able to do by using ping cards, not holding treasure, holding treasure, and using my hail of aethershot to move the tracker twice. This made it very hard for him to actually kill me because I kept moving the tracker and giving him choices of moving his tracker from one of my pings, or giving me accuracy or knocking him off an objective token. I was only able to slay Squort and one of his other fighters during this game, but was able to keep him off the tokens effectively.
Game 2 I lucked out and the side step made a 2nd appearance in my first hand. This game went about the same where he was having trouble connecting and moving me off of the tokens because I was able to get onto them using my warscroll and power cards to get there first. I ended up being more effective clearing the crops of pestilence this game killing squort and more than 1 gardener. By the end of game 2 I was starting to really see how many wounds he was healing off JUST the cycle mechanic, not to mention healing potion. Since I was only doing 1 damage with most of my attacks it was very difficult to actually take any of the gardeners down unless I shot them once and then came in with a melee attack.
Game 3 Bryce was able to get some scoring going since he was able to get onto the tokens before me and squirt made himself hard to kill by flying up for an early step by step by going on guard. He got the ball rolling and scored more than he had in the previous games, but he was still unable to stop cards like Alone in the Dark, Stay Close, and Broken Prospects because he had to spread out too much to be able to enable his own scoring. He did prevent Strip the Realm until the very end of the game though after I had removed most of his models from the board.
This matchup is a lot of fun for me trying to play that mini game of controlling the cycle counter to give myself advantages and predict when he is going to be able to heal.
Round 3
Brandon "Hussman" H.Spiteclaw's Swarm - Emberstone Sentinels / Pillage and Plunder
Game 1 : 19 - 20
Game 2 : 19 - 18
Game 3 : 19 - 16
Brandon and I have been playing Underworlds with each other since Season 2. The definition of a grudge match acted between two old foes. Skaven vs Dwarf. We both sat down chuckling and shaking hands, this was going to be a FIGHT.
This is not an easy matchup for either warband. My low damage output in a single activation made taking down rats a little hard and since I wasn’t just removing them from the board it gave him the chance to inspire fighters with guard ploys and his warscroll. So that meant I had to shoot at rats in cover and on guard… Not exactly an easy target and I couldn’t just knock them off because of the guard tech and since my melee attacks are only 2 hammers it made it even harder to move them.
Thus the duel of objective tracking and ploy tracking started. Does he still have confusion in his hand? Has Striped the Realm been carded yet?
Game 1 he started out strong, both of us were balancing flipping tokens to score and giving your opponent an accuracy boost all while trying to avoid each other’s big attacks. I was able get great speed on Khazgan early and made a vicious intent charge to get Krrk the almost trusted out of the way, but then missed a CRUCIAL attack against the Skritch early in round 2. All while trying to keep rats off of treasure tokens. I ended up scoring most of my deck, but couldn’t get Alone in the Dark to score, thus losing the game by 1 point.
Game 2, the one I HAD to win. This game started very well and continued very well, however both of our objective decks were scoring very evenly. I was able to silence Krrk again after some effort, a lot of effort which left him able to focus on other things with the other rats. Positioning and choice drive backs were in this match up to ensure Alone in the Dark, Broken Prospects, and Stay Close. At the end of round 2, Brandon had to discard Strip the Realm in an effort to get some more scorable cards, but that was a BIG turn around for me. I was able to use canny sapper in the 2nd to last activation to bring Thundrik back into the fray to finish off a rat that was on an edge hex, but failing my final attack which would have given me Alone in the Dark, however I defended the one lone objective that the 2 remaining rats were trying to get on finishing the game with a triumphant scoring of Strip the Realm and Stay Close. Winning by a VERY sweaty 1 glory.
Game 3, this game was a bit of a blur at this point between keeping track of what he had scored, not scored, and if confusion had been played or not… Scoring was very even, so much so there was not an underdog for most of the game. I was able to take Krrk out after some effort in the 2nd round and wounded Skritch when Brandon chose to block me from scoring Strip the Realm instead. I had already killed one of the clan rats, which mattered a lot for what happened at the beginning of round 3. He had failed to score Supremacy earlier in the game and needed Skritch’s bounty to do it because Krrk had died already. Round 3 I get initiative, I have Thundrik with Glory seeker within charge range of Skritch who has 1 wound on him. Vicious Intent in hand for one extra dice. The attack succeeds and down goes Skritch for the first time in the match. I was able to overrun onto the objective and scored an objective (it was either low on options for Vicious Intent or Bloody and Bruised for the damage inflicted) and drew into another surge which I was able to score by delving with thundrik. I was able to prevent Supremacy from scoring since he did not have 3 bounty left on the board at the end even with 3 rats. I was unable to score Strip the Realm in the end, but I did get Alone in the Dark and Broken Prospects from stealing back my treasure from Skritch.
That was one of the hardest matches I’ve played since the World Championships of Warhammer last year. Brandon did not disappoint when it came to making me work for my Golden Ticket.
