Today I’d like to discuss a change to the game I think the Rules Team at GW should consider, and a topic of conversation I think we as a community should have: Adding or expanding the FaR (Forsaken and Restricted) list to the Nemesis format. There are pros and cons to any change, and I’ll list the ones that seem the most apparent to me, and I absolutely welcome any opinions you might have about the issue. Think for yourself, I may be wrong!

UPDATE July 23rd: The Agents of Sigmar Youtube channel has published a discussion video about this very topic, and argue compellingly against the inclusion of a Nemesis FaR. This is in no way a settled debate!

FaR: A History
For this who may not be familiar, I will give a brief background on the FaR and its historical use in the Championship format. You can find the FaR in the championship section of the Relic document ++HERE++ for reference.

In brief, once upon a time the Championship format allowed for the use of your warband’s cards and any universal card that had been printed, so long as you had exactly 12 objective cards and 20 or more power cards, with no more than half being ploys (gambits). With the Shadespire season being designed by a small team in a limited amount of time with minimal playtesting, this unfortunately led to some cards being significantly more powerful than others. By the time Nightvault had rolled around, the card pool was somewhat larger, but the community as a whole had come to find certain cards being included in many top decks because they were simply ‘too good not to take’. As a result, you might end up going to an event where many of the decks you faced had the same cards and variety of play was lacking. It’s an exaggeration to say that everybody ran the same deck, but I didn’t play a game without Ready for Action, Awakened Weapon, and My Turn in either my deck, my opponent’s, or both for months on end. It started to get a little stale, at least in my local meta.

In came the “WUBAR” as it was affectionately known – the Warhammer Underworlds Banned And Restricted cards list. Certain cards were removed altogether from competitive play (known as Banned at the time, and now referred to as Forsaken) because they simply couldn’t be errata’d or FAQ’d into being fair, while others were ‘restricted’ – you could only contain a certain number of them in your deck. For many this was a time of much rejoicing, but for others, they realized 70% of the deck they were bringing to an event that weekend would need to be scrapped and they were starting all over. The FaR has been sporadically updated since, and covers whichever cards are ‘in rotation’ (the last two years of releases, generally), which in theory improves the competitive nature of the game and smooths the experience across warbands of differing power levels.

The Current State of Nemesis
As it stands at the time of this writing (June 2023), the FaR exists for the Championship format; when building a championship deck, you can’t take any forsaken cards, and can only have three total restricted cards in your deck. Some warbands have warband specific cards that are restricted, really limiting how many cards from the universal pool they can lean into, but this generally only affects warbands with very strong ‘rivals’ decks. At this time, the existing FaR does not apply to Nemesis or Rivals, nor is there a separate similar list in use. Excluding the FaR makes sense in Rivals – you don’t have a choice of what cards to take, so counting how many restricted slots you’ve occupied or throwing away a forsaken card might leave you short, and it’s not like you built the list! The lack of deckbuilding and ease of getting started is a major draw for Rivals and I wouldn’t advocate for a FaR here, even if it does mean that Hrothgorn gets more than 6 surges or some warbands would have multiple restricted cards.

The situation in Nemesis is a little different in my opinion. This is a limited deckbuilding format, so you don’t have access to the most potent cards from multiple rivals decks, sure. It’s harder to exploit the kinds of things that the FaR was originally intended to curb since you can’t pick and choose the 32 most powerful cards across the entire pool. A counterpoint to this, however, is that the more limited deckbuilding format may actually exaggerate power level differences between warbands and rivals decks, which many, including Aman from Path to Glory, argue makes nemesis LESS competitive than championship, not more. And that guy is pretty much the authority on Competitive Underworlds. Seeing as I am a big advocate of Nemesis play, I am proposing either carrying the FaR over to Nemesis, or creating a Nemesis specific FaR list to help combat some of this difference in equality.

The Case for a Nemesis FaR
I have 5 general reasons a FaR should be implemented in Nemesis:

1) Creates a More Even Competitive Playing Field
Nearly all modern competitive games have some mechanism that allows for ‘balancing’ to occur within a meta game. If you’ve ever played an online computer/video game with a PvP component, it’s pretty standard to see patches come however often increasing the damage of X or reducing the cooldown of Y, etc in an attempt to improve competitive balance and keep players engaged and happy. Even big Warhammer in 40K and AoS have balancing changes, where points values are adjusted, special rules are changed, and so on in response to certain factions winning or losing more often than is ideal in competitive events and in response to player feedback. As of now, Underworlds only has the FAQ and Errata to lean on in the Nemesis format. While the FaR has at times felt a little lackluster and usually ‘slow’ to come out compared to how the community would like, its exclusion from Nemesis means that this balancing aspect is absent altogether. Should a combination be found that is much more powerful than the others, being able to restrict a few cards might help tone down that imbalance. Today for example, you can take many ‘ping’ cards with Ephilim’s Pandaemonium which are strong on their own, but are even more so in a Daring Delvers build where you have access to even more of them on top of the two glory surge in Sudden Demise. A Tooth and Claw/Gnarlspirit combo can potentially have 6 restricted cards in Nemesis, which may of their opponents may only carry 1 of zero. Conversely, while it’s unlikely that I’ll win any Grand Clash glass with the Sons of Velmorn (but boy howdy am I going to try!), I would have a much easier go of it if the Gnarlspirit Pack, Headkrakka’s Madmob, Exiled Dead, or Rippa’s Snarlfangs players I run up against had to think a little more carefully about which cards to include in their decks an couldn’t take all the ‘best’ choices. The FaR substantially improved the competitive balance in Championship even if it didn’t do so perfectly, and I believe it could do the same for Nemesis.

2) A FaR Can Potentially Reduce ‘Negative Player Experience’ (NPE)
Some cards, let’s be honest, just feel bad when they’re used against you. A classic example of this is Daylight Robbery. This card exists within the Essentials Pack (to the chagrin of many), and was eventually restricted. For those blissfully unaware, the card was a gambit that allowed you to take an unspent glory point away from your opponent if you rolled Hammer or Crit on a single attck die. Statistically, it wasn’t great odds at only 50%. A one glory swing also often doesn’t decide the winner of a game. However, if somebody used it successfully to steal the first glory you earned before you could buy the upgrade you were looking at, you felt pretty bummed. Other ‘feel bad’ cards might even have more potent competitive effects, and I personally think this game should be fun and everybody should get to do the things their warband is good at. If you end up with a card that not only makes you feel bad (looking at you, Ill Prepared & Freezing Venom) but is also pretty potent competitively, it can potentially feel oppressive to go up against a deck filled with those as well as many other powerful faction cards. You might feel like you just can’t compete, and a newer player might just put their Looncourt on the shelf and never return to Underworlds. A FaR could prevent that power imbalance from steamrolling the weaker player too hard, which for the health of the player base can only be a good thing. Plus, if the only reason you’re in this community is because you love grinding n00bs into the dirt while you laugh at them, I’d like to suggest you play something else. Maybe stop playing games altogether and re-evaluate your priorities.

3) Increase Sense of Being Heard
A FaR gives players the sense that the design team hears and responds to their feedback. Occasionally, you or someone in your group might say ‘you know, this one warband seems way too strong. It’s just not fun playing against them’. Or perhaps ‘I think this card is just too good. Every time Alicia plays it she gets three glory! I legitimately don’t know how I’m supposed to stop her’. The usual recourse here is to submit an FAQ request (certainly it can’t be as powerful as we’ve been playing it, right?) and without a FaR, the only recourse is something like a Beta Rule for the warband (which is Beta and therefore not official, and might be too heavy handed across the entire warband) or to try and Errata a card into a more ‘fair’ situation. This alludes to the “confusion relating to separate documents” I’ll reference in the “arguments against” section later, but even putting that aside, sometimes the very powerful way you have interpreted the card is in fact the way it was meant to be played and they won’t errata it to be less powerful. A FaR list can allow them more nuance to say something along the lines of ‘yes, that card truly does ‘Go Hard in the Paint’, but at least your opponent won’t be bringing more than three cards of that potency’. This has worked in championship to alleviate fears of ‘Dead Game’ and help keep the community thriving (and even get two people in my area back into playing once they updated it in Nightvault), but I fear what we might see in terms of the community growth if the same Nemesis lists continue to win major events without any official addresses to balance.

4) Bring Championship Players Into Nemesis, or Prevent Their Quitting Altogether
There’s a “Sky is Falling” Chicken Little effect in pretty much any online community whenever things change, and Warhammer Underworlds is no different. Some people in forums threatened to leave with the switch to Nemesis focus, some big-name players seriously considered stepping away, , and others tried to unify/persuade people not to bail. Many others I presume just left without making any goodbye posts. There’s a fine tightrope to walk here, and you really can’t make all the people happy all the time, as they say. Ultimately I believe (without numerical evidence, just anecdotes from my own experience) that the switch to Rivals/Nemesis focus was good for the health of the community and number of players in the game. It most certainly did put off some Championship players and it’s hard to begrudge them walking away when it feels like their preferred format was backburnered and on its way to the Relic dustbin. I feel, perhaps too optimistically, that some of those people might be persuaded to stick around or at least play Nemesis more often if a FaR was implemented as well. Is the deckbuilding easier in Nemesis? Absolutely. Potentially even to the point that some Champs diehards find it too simple to consider worth their effort. Injecting a FaR might make those choices a little harder, spice up the deckbuilding experience, and engage them more. This goes in tandem with the tighter competitive experience from point #1 – and I would hate to see some of the best and brightest veterans of our community leave or spend their days locked in the Vassal Discord with other Champs players rather than helping grow our population and/or attending in person events.

5) (Irrelevant Alert!) Drives Sales of Newer Products that Haven’t Been FaR’d Yet & Moves the Meta Forward Faster
How long does it take for a FaR to come out? 3 Months? 6 Months? 12? That’s how long you have to go bananas with the newest box and abuse whatever combos there are before some FaR levels things out. Come on GW, you like money right? Compel me to buy the new toys! Restrict the old stuff so I ‘have’ to keep up with the Joneses! All jokes aside, a FaR could help new players feel less hopeless against out of print warbands. Say a universal Rivals deck comes along that makes Thorns of the Briar Queen or Hrogthorn the best Nemesis gang in town. You don’t have those warbands, and they go for $200 on eBay? Too bad, loser! If the FaR, which hit their faction cards pretty heavily, were in play in Nemesis as well, it would alleviate some of the burden on a new player and reduce the friction of hearing “Well if you want to win a real event you’re going to need to hunt down an out of print warband” – or at least reduce how often they feel that way. This was a big part of what slowed the game’s growth down pre-Covid, and while warband rotation is a huge topic for another time, the FaR could go a long way to lessening a perceived need to ‘buy everything’.

Arguments Against
I have 3 arguments against a FaR for Nemesis, and while these are admittedly weaker offerings coming from my biased viewpoint, they’re worth considering in this discussion. I also would like to restate that I would love to hear your perspective, ESPECIALLY if it conflicts with my own.

1) A FaR Would Complicate Deckbuilding and Reduce the Appeal of Nemesis to New Players, and Potentially Drive People Out of the Game
One of the huge benefits of the nemesis format is the fact that you grab two decks and slap them together however you see fit, without having to reference any separate documents or check for ‘updates’ to some FaR or equivalent. I’ll admit it has felt incredibly freeing to be able to build a deck on my lunch break at work – I not only can cobble something together in 10-20 minutes, but I only have to bring 64 cards to sift through rather than 300-400. While not quite to the level of headache and complexity as building a Championship deck, the addition of a FaR would admittedly slow that process down and for all you know, your opponent at the next casual meetup is going to show up with a forsaken card and 5+ restricted cards anyway because they won’t know about FaR or didn’t see that it was updated last month etc. While I might grumble a little about having to check the FaR, I think the biggest vulnerability is the pressure it might put on burgeoning deckbuilders and new players. To veterans of the Championship format, it’s pretty simple to make a nemesis deck even in the context of an evolving FaR, but that isn’t the case for every new player. Some people struggle to put together a nemesis deck at all (several in my group exclusively play rivals because it’s too intimidating to deckbuild) and the more confusing and restrictive you make that process, the less likely some people are to try it and the more likely they are to stop playing or never start in the first place. I suspect this is a major reason why the FaR hasn’t made it’s way to nemesis yet, and it’s pretty hard to hold it against GW if this is the case. Underworlds hasn’t rebounded after Covid the way many other games have, and I don’t have a crystal ball to say whether the increase in balance will retain more players than the increase in complexity will drive away.

2) Lets People Play With Their Toys
It feels bad to buy cards and then get told you can’t use them. A major reason why the Relic Format exists is so that the (admittedly quite small) contingent of people who want to keep using their old cards have an ‘official’ way to do so. If you’re playing straight out of the box Beastgrave with your roommate and don’t want to buy anything new, the GW police aren’t going to come into your apartment and take the cards away, but it does throw a bone to somebody if they did ever want to make a ‘real event’ out of older cards. That said, it can be a letdown to buy something and later be told you can’t use it. Right about now there are a few people throwing a bit of a fit online about not being able to take Horus Heresy Dreadnoughts into their 10th edition 40K games. Saying you can’t use one card in a pack of 32, or can’t take a couple of them in combination isn’t as much of a downer, but can still dampen somebody’s mood and potentially put them off buying new products or playing more games because “they are just going to restrict them anyway, why waste my time and cash”. I made light of the ‘money grubbing executive’ in my point #5 of the ‘For’ section above, but for some pessimistic members of the community it’s a real presence in their mind and a FaR could look like invalidating old purchases and driving people toward the newer stuff. While I don’t personally agree, I’m also not so callous as to discount these feelings when and where they are voiced in legitimate venues rather than spamming “GW Bad, 3D printer goes BRR”.

3) (Strawman Alert!) – The Design Team is Bad at Restricting the ‘Right’ Cards
This is more tongue in cheek, but in the past people have had gripes about the design team’s decisions about what is and is not included in the FaR. The current one excludes Cursed Boarding Pike, for example, which is a very strong card in Championship and makes its way into most decks seeing as it is not restricted(++UPDATE: it has now been restricted as of September 2023++). If, in a potential Nemesis FaR future, what would happen to us if they restricted a bunch of cards appropriately but missed something potent? Wouldn’t that cause too many nemesis decks to pair with the same universal deck that had the omitted card? I can’t deny that possibility entirely, but I believe the benefit still outweighs the risk. Maybe one rivals deck has a card or two that stands out as being ‘missed’ by a FaR, but I would be surprised to find that leading to everybody choosing that nemesis pairing so much more often, especially if it doesn’t work as well with your preferred warband. I don’t think this is an overwhelmingly compelling argument, but there is some validity and I wanted to put it out there for consideration.

Conclusion

So there you have it; My rambling take on the issue. Thanks for suffering through the marathon if you’ve read this far (FaR?) – I do honestly believe the good outweighs the bad in this instance and we should consider expanding the FaR to cover Nemesis, or at least make a nemesis-specific list of some sort. I’m open to discussion, however! Hit me up if you have something to say in this regard, and if you feel strong enough you can always send your thoughts on to the bigwigs at GW by emailing whunderworlds@gwplc.com. For now, my glory is spent! Until next time, friends.