20,000 Glory Under the Sea
Movie poster, pose, go!
Bet you didn’t think we’d be back before 2028. Well joke’s on you, here’s a second Hexodus entry in as many months. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is kinda in the eye of the beholder. But we didn’t get very far, because we’re still way underwater. That’s right, it’s…
Do Idoneth have, pound for pound, the best pets?
Elathain’s Soulraid
How did we end up here, so close to where we started? Blame my cross-over partner-in-crime, Jake who has an event coming up and wanted to train this squad up. He’s got a good training partner in Jesse who was one of the two players to make the cut at Worlds with Elathain’s crew.
Have You Played Them Before in second edition?
Nope! And barely played against them either. Although I’d heard a lot about them, thought alot about them in the run up to World’s 2025.
Have You Painted Them?
Nope! 0-2 on that front. But here’s some sweet Soulraid from another one of the Madison crew: Skyler:
That bone/shell vibe is doing it for me.
What deck did you use?
Mooooostly I used Fundough’s Blazing/Pillage deck from Worlds. There’s a few other combos I tried, but this represented most of my reps. If you wanna see a greater variety of builds, I have it on good authority that my partner blog got a little more adventurous. I did also dabble with some Emberstone Sentinels/Reckless Fury and Emberstone Sentinels/Deadly Synergy. More on that later.
Fundough’s Soulraid from World’s 2025
Game 1: I’m cheating a little to include a game that actually dates back to before this series restarted. This was a game when I was still undecided on what I’d bring to World’s. Skyler has a giant Underworlds brain that I can’t comprehend and he loves doing stuff like this particular pairing- Emberstone/Reckless Fury. Frankly, my mind can’t quite wrap around it, but it deserves some more attention. In this, outing, I ran against Skyler playing Starblood Stalkers. This was also played when Fuirann had infinite Stand Fast. I kicked things off with diving a treasure token in Starblood territory with the aforementioned Fuirann. Holding Sally Forth and Unassailable, this felt like a great move to get surges going and deny the inspire. I missed the attack to bump a skink away. Skyler’s confusion removed me from the token. And that was the high point of the game. Despite impressive accuracy on this warband, I didn’t hit much once the lizards got their defense up with the inspire. My memory is that we called this one in R2 after the crab got smoked and I was down double digits. The good news is that this scared me off the pairing which I would not have been ready for at World’s. I think I crushed a tiny part of Skyler’s dreams by not bringing his baby to World’s though….
Game 2: Now on to what I was assumed was a much easier pairing to pilot- Blazing Assault and Pillage and Plunder. So good it made the top cut at Worlds with this warband twice. And I was playing against my own World’s build of Thundrik’s with Hunting Grounds and Emberstone. The first lesson I learned here is one that I learn over and over and over. Just because I can make a particular opening hand work doesn’t mean I should. I held Hostile Takeover, thinking I could generate some standing range 3 attacks and two close to automatic end phases (Desolate Homeland and Keep Chopping). Unfortunately, my son deployed like someone who was trained in Underworlds by a very skillful and handsome coach and didn’t give me those easy attacks. So I chased after him and gave up Pinned. Whoops. I moved heaven and earth to get Hostile Takeover to score, killed Khazgan to get to 5 glory and didn’t score again until the 3rd round. I’d had to spend so much energy salvaging my first round that I was in no position to capitalize on my sweet, sweet round 2 inspired stats. I went scoreless in Round 2 and had a little pity glory to salve my wounded pride and end 9-18.
Game 3: This one I won’t be including in the final record. At our league night, I got paired up with a returning player who was still acclimating to the new edition. So instead of bringing a worlds-qualifying pairing, I went and picked up the random deck pairing generated in our recent episode. So this was Emberstone/Synergy, kinda pulling in different directions, but I could see why Skyler had it in half of his pairing. With some clever positioning you can cover up multiple treasure tokens in a single action. Or if you don’t need to do that, boy are then nifty for setting up United pairings.
Game 4: Revenge match against my son. This time with a rep under my belt, I worked up a better opening objective hand. Fuirann got in early to block treasure and with the help of phanstasmal form and a couple misses, made life miserable for the duardin. The everpresent danger of a big score if you make a mistake against the Pillage part of this deck reared its head and Strip the Realm scored early and the Idoneth were off and running.
Game 5: Back to league night. This one is against Jaz who shattered my hopes and dreams and LVO a couple years ago. We went for an Aelf-off with Jaz running Shadeborn on Blazing/Synergy. In this one, I drew easy surges that flowed into more easy surges that drew into Pillage cards that I hadn’t put as much work into as I should have. I also got Elathain up too far and killed before he could bring back Tammael. Left with a couple of critters and Fuirann out of position, I did what I needed to do:
Looks like a 2 swords attack to me.
Yes, Duinclaw strapped on Great Strength and put Jaz’s boss in the ground. Two swords vs two dodge on a re-roll is all you really need. This ended things in a tight win 19-15.
Game 6: Everyone at league had games lined up, so we just racked em back up. This time I was more committed to geting Fuirann up a little earlier to have that nice defense and phantasmal form in play. Make sure I protect Elathain until round 2. This lined up nicely and I had a monster R2 where I finally lined up my fighters to take advantage of those big stats. It became a total murder fest and I was able to run away with this one 22-12.
Thoughts about the warband after playing it:
Good come uppance for me. I knew this warband was strong, but as is often the case, a really strong warband doesn’t pilot itself, as I demonstrated in early games. Even in a very well known/familiar pairing like PP/BA I found myself in big trouble when holding hands that weren’t a good match for the board state. On the other hand, if I fell behind with a couple unexpected misses, there often wouldn’t be enough damage or time left in the game to make big changes in the game state.
Award for “Good. Not at all exciting, but good.”: Riptide harpoon. Plus one dice when charging is great. In the pairing I used the most, it also got you to a solid three dice attack to improve the chances of scoring Critical Effort and Branching Fate. Happy to have it. This is the sort of ability that would have been a single line on a fighter card.
Award for “Even nerfed, this ability is super great.”: Phantasmal Forms, obviously. It isn’t quite a sure thing- I definitely tried to trigger this on a tied attack, but boy, it sure is close. Good nerf, still a great ability.
Award for “Share some of that defense with your buddy, man!”: I was so used to Cyreni inspiring to one defense (and first edition Elathain) that I consistently forgot that the leader’s inspire picked up another shield in R2. That’s great. Cyreni is jealous.
Award for “Definitely a rule on my warscroll.”: Ebb tide- giving all your melee weapons grapple is… fine. I don’t think I ever used this. Well… I did once, but just to say I’d done it. I can see this as being a little more appealing if you’re trying to score or deny some positional decks like Wrack and Ruin.
Whaddya Know about those Fighters?
Hard to complain. I do really like a warband where the fighters all do pretty different things.
Fuirann is cool- but I often found her attack wanting, either because of range or accuracy. But that’s not what she’s really there for. The games where I did better were the ones I found a way to get her involved early.
Tammael being resurrectable made me a touch to cavalier with him at first. He’s still two bounty the first time he dies and his attack is often very important. I sometimes struggled to find a thing I wanted Fuirann to do. Tammael was a bit the opposite. With that initial range and accuracy, I wanted to do a ton with this fighter.
Elathain was a beast if you could find a way to get multiple uses and not just charged and done (duelist, commanding stride, canny sapper all great here)
Duinclaw’s two shields were sometimes just “two paper”, but boy could it feel nice to lump a tough to move fighter on to an important token.
Spinefin was just kind of a weirdo at the back most of the time. The fish really does bump the efficiency on a lot of the pillage objectives. I think I maybe took one action with him in all the games I played, but it was because everyone else was charged out, and I just needed to float over to another treasure and flip it to score Broken Prospects and Torn Landscape for a chill 4 glory.
The Wrap-up:
This is hard enough without having to do the non-unique warscrolls. Don’t make me un-hide them.
Games to reach first win: 3
Final record: 3-2 (one game not counted)
Overview: Extreme accuracy, positioning tricks, and a substantial damage deficit to make up.
Fun factor: I should have loved this warband. Free pushes, stand fast (mostly) on tap? Multiple build strategies available? But it just didn’t quite click for me. Maybe it was because Cyreni ping fest was so weird, I was expecting another super unique experience? It’s possible that I’m just a little tired of seeing Pillage on one side of the table or the other and the main pairing just took a little shine off the experience. My main regret is that I didn’t get back around to the ES/RF build that flubbed so hard for me before. We’re gonna score it… 3 out of 5 bits of ostentatious bling on Elathain, but I strongly suspect your mileage may vary. A lot.
Other resources: How about Fundough’s love letter to the warband over on Spent Glory? and obviously, Starting Hexodus’s partner entry.
Final note: Thanks to underworldsdb where I stole many an image and built many a deck!
Who’s Next: That’s quite enough order and aelves if you ask me. I’m steering this thing straight to the eight points. Chaos or bust baybeeeee!