Please note: This article was written for the first edition of Warhammer Underworlds and as such some information may not be applicable to Embergard/Second Edition. The new Contender Series for Second Edition can be found here!
This article is a part of the Contender Series, the goal of which is to encourage players to begin participating in Organized Play events, attending tournaments and Grand Clashes, and overall up their competitive game to improve as players and ultimately win more often. While I am not personally some competitive ace taking home glass every weekend, I do have advice to help get newer players off the ground and set you on the path to success, and also can point you to better players than myself where you can get more focused advice when you’re at that stage. I will attempt to keep this article series ‘timeless’, so while I’ll reference specific warbands, cards, and mechanics occasionally, I want it to be relevant for years and so will try to refrain from focusing too much on today’s current competition climate. With those things said, let’s dive into this article’s main topic: Evaluating your opening hand and deciding whether or not to Mulligan.
Check out the rest of the Contender Series for more competitive pointers:
Warband Choice
Deckbuilding Overview
Deckbuilding: Objective Cards
Deckbuilding: Gambits
Deckbuilding: Upgrades
Board Choice and Placement
Objective Placement
Mulligan
Fighter Placement
So you won the roll-off, do you choose to go first or go second?
Practice
Check out other tournament related articles:
Participating in your First Tournament
How to Run a Local Tournament
Counterplay series: how to prevent your opponent from scoring
Overview
At the start of the game, following board and objective placement, you will draw five power cards and three objective cards. One of the major ways to improve your competitive prospects is to get better at evaluating this initial draw and making the best decision about whether to ‘Mulligan’ this hand or keep what you draw on your first pass. In the original renditions of this game, throwing away that opening hand meant those cards were discarded and lost, making this a very punishing decision, but nowadays you shuffle the mulligan-ed cards back into your deck after drawing replacements. You can independently redo Objectives, Power Cards, or both. For completeness’ sake I’ll link you to this old Steel City Underworlds article (RIP), written when the cards could not be reused, but many of the same principles apply.
Let’s tackle a few different things in turn:
Knowing what else is in the deck (what are you fishing for)
Objective Hand
Power Hand
The Whole Picture
Deck Knowledge
Depending on the format you are playing and how much familiarity you have with the deck you’ve built (or have chosen in Rivals), you may not know exactly what you could draw into. If you’re playing in a competitive event, this is something you’ll want to fix! It’s difficult to assess whether or not you need to Mulligan if you don’t know what else you might draw into. Sure, this hand might stink, but is whatever you’re going to replace it with going to be any better?
Once you have an understanding of your deck and know what else there is to go for, you can use that information to better evaluate your chances of a better hand. I do want to call out specific things that people refer to as ‘fishing’ or using a ‘Hard Mulligan’. There may be a specific card that you feel you MUST have in your opening hand if you want to win in a given matchup, board orientation, etc. In that sense, some players say “I don’t care what’s in the hand, if it doesn’t have that one card I’m scrapping it and hoping I get that important card”. Mathematically, if you Mulligan your hand, you’ll have seen 3+3 Objectives or 5+5 Power cards, which if you’re using the minimum deck size, is 50% of your possible cards. In a Hard Mulligan, you have a 50% chance to get that all-important card on either your first or second draw. This means in half the games, you won’t have it in your opening hand no matter what you do, and if you Mulligan into an otherwise worse starting hand, it might be the decision that cost you the game before you even make an activation. I don’t want to say you should never Hard Mulligan, but you’d better want that card awfully bad, or at least be able to adapt to whatever else you draw into instead.
Alternatively, you might find yourself in a position where you’re holding the golden card that solves all your problems, but the rest of your hand stinks for the situation you’re in. You’ll have the know the deck and decide for yourself if that must-have card is worth keeping if the rest of the hand doesn’t support it, or whether you really need to toss it to get a better overall hand. My rule of thumb is that your Power hand needs to be able to support your Objective scoring – if you have the ‘best’ Power card but it doesn’t help with your Objective cards in hand, maybe dump it to get things that help you score (especially if your special card is an Upgrade – how will you afford it?). Remember, you win the game of Warhammer Underworlds by having more Glory, and you usually do that by scoring Objectives.
It’s also worth noting that you can Mulligan your two hands independently of each other or together – say you like your Objectives but not your Power cards, you can toss your Power cards and redraw without tossing your Objectives. HOWEVER – you do have to make the decision at the same time. You may just draw into a new Power hand that does not help you score those Objectives you held on to, and now you can’t cycle those out since it’s too late. Deck knowledge and practice are what’s going to give you the edge here – it allows you to better asses when to throw both vs hold one vs hold neither, and your odds of winning are quite improved by knowing the full suite of options.
Let’s review the two hands in isolation and look at how to decide. Because after all –
You got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away…
Man, what a classic. I understand if you prefer the Johnny Cash version (I see you). Did you know they were both covers of the Don Schlitz/Bobby Bare original, and were recorded separately on the same day? Truth is stranger than fiction, and I’m sure I look awfully ‘Murican to some of you right now. Anyway, back to the Underworlds content.
Objective Hand
In the ideal scenario, you have three Surge Objectives that you can score easily in the first round, all using the same gameplan. The more Surges in your opening hand the better, since that gives you an earlier chance to get ‘Seed Glory’, allowing you to get some Spent Glory when you grab those upgrades. Waiting until the End Phase not only slows down the speed your Upgrades come out, but also delays when you’ll see your next Objective card.
In the disaster scenario for your opening hand, where you will be able to Mulligan as a no-brainer, you are holding zero Surge Objectives, and the End Phase Objectives you hold are difficult or impossible to score in the first round and/or are asking you to do contradictory things. Ideally you don’t have too many contradictory plans built into your deck, but if you’re playing Rivals you don’t have much choice, and in Nemesis sometimes you’ll be forced to take your deck in two directions. Either way, if you’re staring down the barrel of scoring one or zero of your opening Objective cards, and not until the End Phase, toss it.
The tougher call is what to do when you have something in between these two situations. A rule of thumb I like to use for myself is I’ll toss a hand if it has only one Surge as I prefer two, and the odds are in your favor after seeing a hand with only one. I’m a little more cautious about this when I like both of my end phases and think they’re scorable in round 1, or I know that I have some later-game End Phase Objectives lurking in my deck that I’m scared to draw into. If your opening hand has one of those “score this in the third End Phase” cards, or an any End Phase card that has a very difficult round 1 condition, I’ll usually toss that hand as well if it only has one Surge since I want to see that card later in the game and don’t want to be playing with really only 2 objectives in my hand.
The hardest call of all is when you have two Surges, but an impossible-in-round-1 but very valuable End Phase card. Some decks have the big ‘Glory Bomb’ card that makes up a big portion of your scoring – think of a card that rewards 3 or more glory for doing something you will not achieve round 1, and probably not until round 3. If you keep the hand, you know you will not be scoring the Glory Bomb this round, but you could hit your two surges. However, you’re not scoring that card, and then have to make the decision again to keep it or toss it at the end of the round. If you hold it, you may never even meet its condition, and were effectively playing short a card in your Objective hand all game. If you toss it after the Mulligan phase, you free up hand space but guarantee you’ll never get the big Glory payoff. The risk you run using a Mulligan to recycle the Glory Bomb is that you might draw into a hand without any Surges and be in a worse spot, but the reward is you actually get to score the big card when you draw it at the right time.
It all comes down to how you think this matchup is going to go, and whether you can scrape some glory out via bounty from kills to get the ball rolling. This of course is less relevant if your Power hand contains no Upgrades, since you can’t buy any of them, so you’re a little less dependent on the need for that Seed Glory if your hand only has one or zero upgrades, but then you’ll need to think about the Mulligan on your Power hand, which we’ll get to shortly.
A last thing I’ll touch on is that you need to contextualize the scoring of your Objective cards in relation to that power hand – if you have a card that wants you to play three Ploys in a round, you’ll need to make sure you have those Ploys (and their playable conditions are likely to occur!). If you need a fighter with an Upgrade that has a keyword to do something, you need to make sure you both have the keyworded Upgrade in your hand AND that you can get the Seed Glory to buy it AND that you can apply the Upgrade to a fighter early enough for them to accomplish the ask from the Objective card. How likely you are to hit those cards is in part dependent on what’s in your Power hand, so you can’t make the decision to Mulligan those Objectives until you’ve assessed your Power cards.
Power Hand
Check out that professional transition! Let’s talk about the ‘ideal’ Power hand – I’ll note that it isn’t as universal or obvious as the Objective one. The disaster scenario here is five Upgrades, since you won’t have any Ploys to help you score objectives or get kills for Seed Glory, and then are less likely to be able to apply any of the five Upgrades you hold. That said, the opposite hand, with five Ploys and no Upgrades isn’t necessarily a ‘good’ hand either, though it is probably better, or at least more worth holding on to.
Be cautious when opting to Mulligan these Ploy heavy hands. Sure, you want an Upgrade or two in your opening hand (what good is early Seed Glory if you have nothing to spend it on?) but remember the earlier segment about knowing your deck. The four or five Ploys you’re about to Mulligan make up 40-50% of all the Ploys in your deck if you’re playing the minimum deck size. That means, in the cards available to you in your Mulligan re-draw, you only have 5-6 Ploys remaining. That’s only 33-40% of the available cards! Your odds of drawing a 4-5 Upgrade hand after a Mulligan in this situation is higher than I am usually comfortable with and you need to be able to operate with two or fewer Ploys in round 1 if you’re going to take this risk. Would you rather have 4-5 Ploys, or 0-1?
An “ideal” power hand is, in my mind for most decks, two Upgrades and three Ploys, or one very good Upgrade and four Ploys. If you have four or five Upgrades, you probably need to Mulligan since you won’t have the Ploys you need to make good moves and score your Objectives in round 1. If you have three Upgrades, but your two Ploys are very strong and you really want those three Upgrades, you’ll be in a tougher decision spot and will have to reflect back on your Objective hand to see if what you’re holding works with what you will be trying to score for the round. Do you NEED those keyword Upgrades, and you have one? Maybe keep the hand since you might not draw one after a Mulligan. Do your Objectives require you to do something you can’t reasonably achieve without good Ploy support? Better Mulligan. Of course, if you’re going to Mulligan your Objective hand, you have to make an educated guess about what cards you’ll draw into and whether this Power hand will help that theoretical scoring.
The Whole Picture
You have to make the decision to Mulligan or not for both your Objective and Power hands together at the same time. While it’s tempting to say “I’ll throw this hand out, and once I see what I get to replace it I’ll make a decision on the other one”. I played this way for a couple months when I started playing because I didn’t realize it was cheating, but it totally is! Be better than me. Being able to ‘peek’ in this way is a major competitive advantage and is unfair to your opponent who won’t be doing the same.
The last little bit I’ll say is that in a competitive situation, part of the mental game is being able to figure out what your opponent is planning to do so you can work to prevent it, while keeping your own plans a mystery. Per the rules, if you Mulligan a hand, you must show your opponent the cards you are getting rid of before you draw their replacements. This means, when you Mulligan, you tell your opponent lots of information, such as ‘I’m definitely not scoring this card this round, but look out for it later’, ‘this is my deck’s general gameplan’, and if you’re playing Nemesis without a Plot Card, ‘this is what my deck pairing is’. In a best of three situation they’ll end up learning a lot of this information as the match proceeds, but you want to keep them guessing for as long as possible. Tipping your hand, so to speak, gives your opponent an edge they wouldn’t otherwise have, so it can often be wiser to hold onto a hand instead of trying for a Mulligan when the cards you got give away a lot of your secrets.
Wrap
That’s it! After you’ve drawn your cards and made your Mulligan decision, you’ll head into deploying onto the board with Fighter Placement. Stay tuned, and until then, just keep singing:
Spent Glory 
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