This article is part of the Counterplay series, and our first installment of those articles for Second Edition/Embergard. Today’s entry has been penned by prominent Vassalite and huge supporter of the page Konsul / Mikkel over on Discord. We will take a look at the first six decks in second edition: the four in the Emberagrd Core Box alongside Reckless Fury, Wrack & Ruin, and Edge of the Knife with a special focus on the Surge Objectives in each deck. I don’t have reviews on Spent Glory for most of these decks, so I’ll link out to my friends at What The Hex so you can look at the deck rundowns themselves if you want to reference cards.
So, with that, what Surge Objectives have the best potential to counterplay, and how do you as the opponent block them from scoring? Let’s see what counsel the Konsul has to offer.
Click here to see other articles in the Counterplay Series
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Counterplay – What, Where and Why?
As part of the the “Starting Hex”-article series on Goonhammer, Jake wrote a nice guide of what juicy end phase objectives in the decks released so far to be on the lookout for. I will refer to his guide for your look at end phase objectives to counter and how. I won’t go into that.
The reason I am making this article now is in part that I think the meta has settled enough that we’ve seen some deck combinations come into prominence and that many people have had enough games under their belt to start not only considering their own game plan but also that of the opponent.
I will use a few end phase objectives as examples of some overall considerations when it comes to counterplay and some overall principles. Then I will dig into countering surges.
Counterplay is an integral part of playing Underworlds and something that you have to learn if you want to up your competitive game. This was true in version 1 of the game and while I won’t say it’s more important in the current version, the lack of a faction deck means you will have more matches where you and your opponent play one of the same decks or even the same deck combination. The fact that each player has to reveal what deck(s) they are playing at the beginning of the match means that you can start considering counterplay from the get-go and not wait until you’ve seen a mulligan or a card from a specific deck played.
In some ways counterplay is also more accessible as you don’t have to remember all faction objectives for the 50+ warbands we had available at the tail end of v1. Right now we have seven decks and it’s much more realistic to remember the cards in these and also more feasible to have play experience (either with or against) with most decks / deck combinations.
When two players have the same deck(s) it also becomes very important to try to deny your opponent when you can. In rivals you will have the exact same glory ceiling of 23 (16 from the deck, 7 from the bounty). So you need to eek out every little advantage.
In an Emberstone Sentinels (partial)mirror you’d do well to look out for what cards you are trying to score but also try to look at the enemy’s position to gauge what they’re gunning for. If there is only one token in neutral territory then only one player will be able to score Slow Advance at any given time. That means that even if you’ve scored yours, you should still contest that token or stand on all tokens in your own territory for instance.
When to counterplay and when not to
In a vacuum a lot of objectives have counterplay strategies available. The thing I have noticed is that you risk putting a wrench in your own plans by spending too much time and resources trying to deny an objective your opponent might have in their hand. I do this a lot.
The important thing, and I am struggling with this myself, is effective counterplay strategies. One of these is to identify what cards do I think I should be able to deny without ruining my own chances of scoring.
As an example we will look at the Wrack and Ruin objectives Alone in the Dark and Stay Close. Both of these are easy to counter. Leave two fighters adjacent, have at least one fighter in an edge hex during the end phase. But now let’s say you are playing Khagra’s Ravagers with Emerbstone Sentinels as your deck. You have four fighters and want to be standing on tokens. You can still get on tokens while putting someone in an edge hex and someone next to another fighter. What if you loose a fighter in the first round? Can you still do it? It might mean to much of an investment and leave you out of position for the next round. What if you are playing something like Krushas with an aggro gameplan? Are you able to get someone in an edge hex? Sometimes you will want to drive back to avoid offering flanks or leaving enemies on tokens. Will this potentially hand your opponent Alone in the Dark? And we haven’t even touched Unsafe Ground which does not exactly incentivize you to stay all that close to the edges during the combat phase.
So your warband, you and your opponent’s decks and the overall board state will influence how well you are set up to deny the enemy’s scoring while still bagging your own glory.
Stop the snowball by denying surges
Scoring surges is key to getting the ball rolling, get upgrades out, move through your objective deck. My initial assesment on surges as a whole in Embergard is that many are pretty simple (each deck has its outliers of course). With decks being pretty consistent, being able to stop just one of your opponent’s surges can make a big difference. Example: I had a game where I held on to a less optimal first hand (but not too bad) with only one surge: Collateral Damage. That one is going to score, everyone knows it. I did not loose any fighters during the round and when we got to the end phase, my opponent and I were tied. I had to hold on to Collateral Damage because I knew I was going to score it and couldn’t just toss it in the trash. But it meant I only scored one objective in the end phase, had to discard one and hold on to another which meant I was off to a really slow start. Not what you want, playing Take and Hold Cyreni’s I’ll tell ya.
Having to hold on to or ditch surges sucks. Collateral Damage from my above example is hard for the opponent to actively stop, but maybe there are other surges that can more easily be denied to engineer situations where the opponent has to consider either holding on to a surge through the end phase or ditching it to see more of their deck.
Now lets look at Blazing Assault. This deck has a bunch of surges that score off making attacks – some require specific dice results, some have positional requirements etc., but if the stars align you can score a whole hand of surges making one attack and not even hit. Make an attack roll with two/three different dice faces (depending on underdog status), a crit in the roll and the target in enemy territory? Why, you’ve scored Branching Fate, Critical effort and Get Stuck In. Good on ya and hard to deny for the opponent.
Evaluating surges: how can they be stopped and when?
Surges all score on conditions met during the combat phase. There a few like Low on Options that can be scored during the end phase but that’s rare enough that I won’t get into that here.
The first thing to look for when evaluating the counter-ability of the surge is of course what requirements have to be met: is it solely positioning, positioning of both enemy and friendly fighters, is it an attack or defense roll, is it an attack from a specific position etc. This tells us if it’s feasible to prevent the specific conditions from happening. Quick example: one of the easiest surges in Blazing Assault is Get Stuck In but if you can get all of your fighters out of your own territory it’s suddenly not scoreable at all.
The second thing to look for is the timing: after an action step, after a power step or simply after something has been done/played? This tells us if we have time to react to a specific position being taken of if we have to avoid the position from being taken i.e. are we to be proactive or reactive or both? Shocking Assault is an example of a card that has both a proactive and a reactive counter. You can ensure that your fighters occupy a/the token in neutral territory or you can react once you see that your opponent is on each token in neutral territory as you have a chance to shove them off during your own action step.
Basic questions you need to ask yourself
Before trying to go full Paul Lassiter and get to yell “Oooh access denied” (deep cut, I know) here some questions to consider. I have been known to forget these and go straight into an elaborate plan to counter a specific objective my opponent might have instead of scoring my own stuff:
Will trying to counter the surge put my fighters in a dangerous spot?
Will it help my scoring or be a detriment?
Will countering certain surges help my opponent set up their end phase scoring?
Harking back to the “can’t attack me in my territory if I’m not in my territory” counter Get Stuck In that might not be the best idea if your own plan is to hold or delve treasure tokens and your opponent wants to smack face. You’ve elected not grabbing tokens and put all of your faces in smacking range now. So a simple (simple doesn’t mean easy, mind you) counter to one card might not be the overall best way to deal with a specific deck.
Are you giving up your positioning to mess with your opponent? You are playing into Wrack and Ruin and there is a juicy token next to an edge hex. Are you just going to stay off that token to avoid giving them a chance to score Unsafe Ground?
So before we get to an actual overview of the specific decks and their surges’ deniability I will leave you with this:
Countering surges in Embergard might not always be about full stopping them but about continuously considering what surges might be relevant to make juuust a bit harder for your opponent to pull off. This stretches your opponent’s mind and leaves them prone to making mistakes. The amount of times in both v1 and v2 I’ve 4D-chessed a plan to make all of the stuff ™ happen only to figure out halfway through execution of my scheme that I have just one activation too few to actually pull it off… Don’t be me, be better.
I’ll be back with an overview of the surges from each deck and a take on the deck’s surge package as a whole.
Strike the Head: Play low wound fighters and keep your leader safe. Jokes aside, soft counterplay to this is to keep your leader out of the mix when possible. That might be detrimental to your own plan of course.
Branching Fate: No real counterplay here. Your opponent’s dice will decide if they score this.
Perfect Strike: Again, your opponent’s dice will be the deciding factor. You can try to avoid being flanked or surrounded.
Critical Effort: Pray to the dice gods as a counterplay strat? (Editor’s Note: always works for me. Must be a Skill Issue)
Get Stuck In: again – it’s pretty hard to consistently counterplay this but unlike branching fate, perfect strike, and critical effort, you can make this harder for your opponent by invading. If you’re not in your territory after the first action phase, this is not scoring. This will of course have to align with the rest of your gameplan, just running headfirst into Krushas or Gorechosen obviously presents its own set of issues.
Strong Start: don’t be the first to die. Obviously. A very good overall strategy in Underworlds. Don’t present your opponent with juicy 2 wound fighters from the beginning (or do, but do it in a way that sets you up to exploit that first charge one way or another).
Overall: Not a whole lot of active counterplay strategies one can implement when faced with blazing assault but a lesson I learned by playing rivals a bit is that if you can limit interaction and limit the number of attacks an opponent gets to throw at you, you potentially slow down their scoring a lot. There will still be that game when one attack scores them branching fate, critical effort and perfect strike or whatever. But if you don’t need the interaction, make them work for it. If you have range and don’t need to go forward, charge backwards or charge/move out of range of fighters lining up charges etc. If you’re looking at enemies with range / speed 4+ it’s very hard to play keep away but if you’re looking at r1 move 3 (Krushas) you should be able to at least make it hard for all of them to charge in r1, maybe even two if they don’t have wings of war or similar in hand.
If you have teleports you can also displace your fighters after the first attack or two so they have to consider splitting up their fighters or you can teleport a wounded fighter out of harms way before being hit with a follow-up etc.
In nemesis you’re probably better off paying attention what other deck is mixed into this. Blazing has mainly 1-glory EP objectives so the juicy 2+ glory is coming from the other pairing. With the amount of interaction the BA surges require this sometimes makes for some hard decisions from your opponent.
Sally Forth: push fighters in your territory who have charged off tokens. If you have speed / range advantage you might be able to set up fighters so that no fighter can be attacked from a treasure token.
Stand Firm: same as above but look out for stagger tokens on enemy fighters. They might even be easier targets because of the reroll.
Step by Step: Enemies on tokens in your territory with a move / charge token? Shove ‘em out.
Unassailable: So far the main point in counterplaying Emberstone Sentinels has been to deny your enemy access to tokens (especially in your own territory) and driving them off/ killing them but here is the kicker: if you fail, you might hand them unassailable.
Aggressive Defender: you can try staying out of range of attacks coming from treasure tokens. This is considerably harder depending on your opponent’s access to ranged attacks. No use trying to work around this when playing into Emberwatch for instance with Yurik being able to set up range 5 attacks off the rip and the two others having range 3 attacks. But into a warband with just one or two range 2 attacks you might at least slow it down for the opponent.
Careful Advance: Kill enemies in your territory with move tokens or shove them back into neutral. It’s not a super popular take in nemesis but into bands with extra move actions or teleports you might run into this.
Overall perspectives on countering the surges in Emberstone Sentinels: If you can keep the enemy off treasure tokens completely (hard ask) you can deny five out of the six surges in this deck. If you can keep them off tokens in your territory you can deny three out of six. Seems simple enough.
Collateral Damage: no reason to spend any energy on this, it’s going to score.
Too Close for Comfort: Has counterplay – make sure you position away from at least one of the enemies. This surge isn’t very popular so I’d mainly concern myself with this in a best of three / rivals when you know it’s there.
Shocking Assault: this can be counterplayed in several ways. You can ensure that you place more than one token in neutral territory during setup, you can squat at least one token in neutral territory yourself and you can try to push enemy fighters off tokens in neutral territory.
Nowhere to Run: you can counter this by killing lone fighters in your own / neutral territory or by driving them back / pushing via power cards. This one I’d probably only spend time on if I know it’s there (bo3 or rivals)
Perfect Cut: avoid being attacked and hope for bad dice but other than that nothing
Overwhelming Force: you can try to maneuver around fighters with 4 dice profiles if you suspect this one but don’t waste too much energy.
Aggressive Claimant: this one is definitely something you can try to counter. Don’t sit around in neutral territory if you do not have to, don’t stay on treasure tokens or delve them, if you do not need the treasure side until the end phase (don’t forget to delve back!). Giving guard tokens to fighters on contested tokens also helps and is generally pretty useful. If you need a token in neutral territory you will just have to risk it and it’s not a very consistent surge so outside of rivals I’m not sure you’ll see it much.
Claim the Prize: Has counterplay until your opponent is the underdog at which point it will just score. Don’t waste time on this. Although, playing against P&P it’s always a good idea to deny the enemy access to tokens to make end phases like Strip the Realm, Torn Landscape and Broken Prospects hard to score.
Delving for Wealth: No counterplay early. In the late you might be able to stop it but only if the enemy is down to only a few fighters and will have a hard time accessing tokens at all.
Share the Load: Very hard to counter other than completely camping feature tokens or killing all enemies so…
Hostile Takeover: The more range your opponent has, the less likely you are to be able to deny this card. This one I wouldn’t think too much about until you’ve seen it unless your own strategy wants to minimize interaction and there is stuff you can score. Also depends on the warband in question. If it’s Emberwatch, good luck, if it’s a warband with mostly range 1-2 attacks you might be able to maneuver around it.
Careful Survey: Kill / push fighters out of territories where they are fewest. So usually that will be kill / push out of your territory or neutral territory. Again, you might want to prioritize other targets because of your own objectives but if you’re playing counterpunch, eating whatever is thrown at you is usually the plan anyways.
Best Foot Forward: we’ve been there before with Blazing Assault. Try to make it harder for your opponent to get multiple charges off into your territory.
Frenzied Rush: if you can kill enemies or push them out of your territory you might be able to stop this. If you’re up against an elite band, chances are they can score this with just one fighter so it’s not that simple. If they send in their big glory pinata first chance to try to punish that instead.
Living Bludgeon: Kill fighters with charge tokens before they get a chance to get a guard token?
Sally Forth: don’t be in charge range from treasure tokens, shove enemies off tokens when possible. Some of the heavy aggro teams that like RF don’t have the speed and range to necessarily take tokens and attacks that easily so worth considering. Then again they might not be running this surge.
Savage Sprinter: If they start moving into your territory you might consider murking them and/or pushing them out of your territory.
Vicious Brawl: don’t get tangled up in a midline brawl. The card can be awkward to score in its vanilla form but the underdog condition makes it pretty easy. Question is if people will run it and hope to be underdog. I’d mainly look out for this in a best of three and especially if you have access to ranged attacks so you can attack without getting up close and personal.
Bloody and Bruised: soft counterplay is not to spread damage around but go for take-downs. You should pretty much always do this as default but there can be a lot of reasons not to when the game begins. Maybe you need to make specific number of attacks, maybe you can’t reach the wounded fighter, maybe you want to go to a treasure token etc. Consider if you need to attack can get away with just moving and try to finish your targets when you can.
Careful Advance: We’ve been over this. Kill enemies in your territory with move tokens or shove them back into neutral. It’s not a super popular take in nemesis but into bands with extra move actions or teleports you might run this. Wrack and ruin is also a bit more starved for surges than Sentinels so in this pairing you might see it more.
Low On Options: No counterplay. Hope that your opponent draws mainly upgrades.
Predictable End: Try to avoid damage from W&R-cards. If you’re not on treasure tokens, this will not happen, so delve or stay off tokens if you don’t need them. Other than that it’s still a pretty situational surge.
Strong Start: Same as in the Blazing Assault deck. Kill a fighter before your opponent and/or don’t die.
Unsafe Ground: stay out of edge hexes or stay in edge hexes but in harm’s way. In many ways pretty easy but also not really worth it as when your opponent becomes the underdog and now you also have to worry about not being next to edge hexes. If you’re playing elites you might be able to just go for the brawl in the middle, if you’re five or more fighters maybe leaving one in an edge hex in the back and staying away from edge hexes with the other fighters might be a thing.
Overall: With Wrack & Ruin, the big thing is remembering to work against alone in the dark and stay close, end phases which have a lot of counterplay but are also easy to forget in the heat of battle where you can just hand the opponent four glory if you’re not careful and trying to play around unsafe ground can unintentionally make you play into your opponent’s hand.
Aggressive Defender: Been over that, try and avoid being in attack range from feature tokens if you can
Behind Enemy Lines: keep tempered enemies off feature in your territory
Double Team: try avoid being flanked. This is easier if you are not playing into bands with movement tricks/ warscroll pushes
Immovable: don’t attack tempered fighters when you don’t need to, don’t plink 2-would fighters with your ranged attacks etc. You will often end up scoring it for the enemy but be mindful that the risk of giving this to the enemy is worth the attack.
Power in Numbers: watch out for tempered fighters clumping up with no moves/charges out watch out for adjacent tempered fighters when approaching the end phase and see if you can separate them before the next battle round starts. An awkward objective, not sure you’re going to see it a lot in nemesis
Sneak Into Position: don’t end up adjacent to tempered fighters if you don’t have to. Drive back, push out of range etc.
Thanks Again to Konsul / Mikkel for the thoughtful overview of these decks. There are certainly things you can do to counterplay certain cards if you focus on more than just your own gameplan. Today’s goal was to talk about some of the highest-yield strategies to stop Surge Objectives, gumming up your opponents’ hands and hopefully lowering their total glory count by the end of the game – propelling you to victory! Pop into the Counterplay category to see other articles in this vein – especially once the series gets ramped up more for Second Edition. Let me know how you’ve been able to Counterplay the surges in these decks, and until next time, don’t forget to Spend that Glory!
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