A Nexus for the Rest of Us: Nexus of Power Review

A special thanks goes to Games Workshop for providing us with an advance review copy of the Nexus of Power Rivals Deck.

Nexus of Power is a treasure-fight Rivals deck that plays like a Flex deck wearing a Hold deck's clothes. The Plot card makes your fighters covetous while within 1 hex of a treasure token and extends Range 1 melee weapons (excluding Upgrades) by +1 Range while holding a token. That "excluding Upgrades" clause matters — this isn't a blanket Range bonus for everything, just your fighter card's native melee profiles.

The real cost: after treasure tokens are revealed in setup, your opponent flips up to two of them face down. You cannot assume all five treasures survive to round one. Build around three and treat the rest as a bonus.

In Spitewood, the Plot card's forward-pressure design overlaps naturally with Waystone and Aqua Ghyranis incentives. The board already wants you pushing forward and standing on valuable hexes — Nexus was designed to pay you for exactly that.

Nemesis Picks

We're recommending a half-deck package: 6 Objectives, 5 Gambits, 5 Upgrades. Everything here was chosen to stay functional when the other half of your Nemesis build is unknown.

Key Objectives

  • Calculated Strike (Surge): Score this after an Attack roll for a covetous fighter includes a crit. You were already attacking near treasure. Sometimes the dice cooperate. Scales nicely with Spitewood's reroll access.
  • Seized (Surge): Score after a successful melee attack if the target was within 1 hex of a treasure token. Rewards threatening the token, not necessarily standing on it.
  • Break Out (Surge): Score at the end of your opponent's Action step if 2+ friendly covetous fighters are in neutral/enemy territory. This is Nexus telling you to move forward, survive contact, and treat the mid-board as home.

Nemesis Objective Additions

  • Audacity (End Phase): Score if a covetous fighter made a successful attack in enemy territory. In Spitewood, the board already pays you for being forward — Audacity pins a glory onto that posture.
  • Domination (End Phase): Score if 3+ friendly covetous fighters are within 1 hex of different treasure tokens. With 4+ fighters, this is just competent token play. With 3 fighters, it's a real ask — swap candidate for smaller warbands.
  • Close the Vice (End Phase, 2 Glory): Score if 3 different friendly covetous fighters Attacked. The Flex ceiling card. Take this when your warband can make three attacks per round without every activation being a suicide run.

Key Gambits

  • Pilfer: Push a friendly fighter 1 hex, ending within 1 hex of a treasure token. Your board-state repair tool when your opponent tries to break your end phase with driveback. We love pushes!
  • Move at the Opening: After a friendly fighter Moves, pick a different friendly fighter with no Move/Charge tokens — they Move too, ending within 1 hex of a treasure token. Turns one Move activation into two forward placements. Action compression is king.
  • Hold the Line!: Fighters cannot be driven back until the end of the next Action step. The most common counter to token plans is driveback. This turns that counter into a wasted activation. Resist the urge to play it early — you want this overlapping your opponent's actual denial attempt.

Nemesis Gambit Additions

  • Organised Efforts: Swap two friendly fighters holding treasure tokens. Fixes charge-lock, rotates an exposed holder to safety, and gets a fresh piece to the front — all in one card, zero activations.
  • Defiance: +1 Attack dice when attacking from within 1 hex of a treasure token. Nexus asks you to score by making successful attacks. You don't want to do that while missing.

Key Upgrades

  • Starmaw (1 Glory): A ranged weapon with +1 Attack dice while the attacker is within 1 hex of a treasure token. Long-range threat projection that still ties you to the treasure game.
  • I Like Those Odds (1 Glory): +1 Save while holding an odd-numbered treasure token. Cheap, efficient, and if you have any agency over which token you claim first, prefer an odd one.
  • Inviolate (1 Glory): Cannot be Flanked or Surrounded while holding a treasure token. Turns off the opponent's cleanest damage math at the chokepoints where it matters most.

Nemesis Upgrade Additions

  • Cautious Attitude (2 Glory): +2 Range on Range 1 weapons while covetous. Lets your token holder attack without stepping off the treasure. Expensive, rarely your first buy, but it changes how opponents approach your position.
  • Mirror Shield (2 Glory): Ranged attacks targeting this fighter have -1 Attack dice. A lot of opponents would rather shoot your holder than wade into the scrum. This buys you end-phase time.

Warband Pairings

Nexus's sweet spot is 4-5 fighter warbands that are some combination of fast, killy, and tough. You need enough bodies to make Domination and Close the Vice realistic, enough speed to get forward for Break Out, and enough combat punch to actually score Seized and Audacity. If your warband can do two of those three things well, Nexus will reward you.

The best fits include Blood of the Bull, Spiteclaw's Swarm, Daggok's Stab-ladz, and Borgit's Beastgrabbaz. Larger warbands like Sepulchral Guard and Zarbag's Gitz can also make it work — the extra bodies make token spread trivial, even if individual fighters are fragile.

New Player Rating

Silver. Nexus is playable out of the box and the basic plan is intuitive — go to treasure, fight over it, score points. But the Plot card's token-flipping downside, the timing windows on Hold the Line! and Break Out, and the need to read matchups for your upgrade sequencing all mean this isn't quite "point-and-click." You need to understand positioning and when to commit your defensive tools, which comes from reps rather than just reading the cards. A newer player will get value from this deck, but an experienced player will get significantly more.