Games Workshop’s upcoming Warhammer Underworlds Gnarlwood starter set will come with a new Nemesis game format, aimed at making the game’s deck-building portion less intimidating, the firm has said. Announced in an article on GW’s Warhammer Community site on Monday, GW says Nemesis mode is “perfect for new players”.
In the Nemesis format, players construct Objective and Power card decks by combining their warband’s faction cards with cards from one universal Rivals deck. It’s a halfway house between two existing formats: ‘Rivals’, which uses pre-constructed decks, and ‘Relic’, where players build their own from a huge pool of possible cards.
As we reported last Monday, Warhammer Underworlds: Gnarlwood comes with four pre-constructed Rivals decks: one each for the included Sons of Velmorn and Gnarlspirit Pack warbands, and two universal Rivals decks that any warband can use, so existing players can experiment with the Nemesis format using their existing teams, while new players are ready to go straight out of the box.
Rivals decks first appeared in Warhammer Underworlds: Harrowdeep. Since then, each new Warband has come with its own Rivals deck, and warband-agnostic ‘Universal’ rivals decks have been released as supplemental products. Rivals decks are ready to play with and pre-balanced against one another (at least in theory), which makes them the quickest way to go from opening a box to playing a game with your warband.
The main competitive format for Warhammer Underworlds is Relic, in which players construct decks of Objective and Power cards from a pool containing their warband specific cards and all the current Universal cards.
It’s a big leap to go from using pre-cons to constructing your own deck, choosing from a pool of hundreds of cards. Nemesis should give players who are new to deckbuilding “a first taste of experimenting with adding and removing cards while still using a manageable card pool,” GW claims in Monday’s WarCom article.
Warhammer Underworlds’ blend of tactical combat and deck-building is one of its unique features, but the deck-building portion can appear daunting at first, so any support for new players is welcome.