You’ve chosen your warband for that event you’re planning to win. Your next step is to choose the deck you’ll be using in Rivals, or the two decks you’ll combine in Nemesis. Some deckbuilding sneak peeks are necessary right now, even though I’ll go over the specifics in future articles (and you can get a very beginner-oriented view of in here in the meantime). The most important thing a deck can give you is strong surge objectives that your warband can reliably score. The second most important thing is access to those coveted 2-glory End Phase Objectives – how many of them can you realistically achieve with your warband? Do your two decks have enough between them to share, and do their ploys and upgrades help you score them? Let’s take a look in a more systematic way at these questions.
Articles in This Series:
Articles in This Series:
Warband Selection
Choosing a Deck/Pairing
Deckbuilding Overview
Evaluating Surge Objective Cards
Evaluating End Phase Objective Cards
Evaluating Ploys
Evaluating Upgrades
Deckbuilding: How Many Cards?
Opening Hand and The Mulligan
Board Choice and Orientation
Feature Token Placement
Fighter Placement
So You Won the Roll-Off – Do You Choose First or Second?
Practice
Event Format Considerations
Elites
Big Boys
Hordes (Coming Soon!)
Check out other tournament related articles:
Counterplay Series
Participating in Your First Tournament
What to Expect at your First Grand Clash
How to Run a Local Tournament
Building Your First Nemesis Deck
Picking a Pairing for Your Warband: Rivals Format
Meta Considerations
Despite the inbuilt balance for the Rivals decks – they can each be evaluated as a single unit, and their effects and synergies are in self-contained decks, each with the exact same Glory total – some Rivals decks are simply going to be ‘better’ than others at any given time. It’s inevitable in any asymmetric game, but depending on what recent FAQ/Errata are in play, the stronger or more commonly chosen warbands, etc, you’ll find that certain Rivals decks are likelier to overperform relative to others. This will change month by month, especially in light of new releases and rules updates, but keeping an eye on the shape of the competitive field will help you assess your deck choices. Chances are a handful of decks will be the ‘best’ ones that you can expect to face with regularity at a competitive event. The deck you choose should either be one of those, or one that has a specific advantage over, or a ‘hard-counter’ to those premier choices. Your warband will certainly play a role in this as well – it’s either well suited to one of those top decks or has strengths that allow it to better counter those top decks. With that in mind, let’s jump to the synergy with your specific warband.
Warband-Deck Synergy
An immediate but somewhat murky question is “how does the deck synergize with your warscroll”? A deck on its own may be strong, consistent, and meta-appropriate, but if it doesn’t play well your warband’s warscroll abilities – especially if they are in direct conflict – you may want to look elsewhere. Maybe your inspiration condition wants you to be in a specific territory, but the deck wants you to be in a different territory for scoring. Maybe your warscroll has lots of single use abilities that improve defense like guard, ignore weapon abilities, rerolls, etc but you’re looking at a deck that cares mostly about making attacks or charges. You want a deck that has scoring conditions your warscroll helps you achieve, power cards that help your warband inspire, and so on.
Archetypes
In this game, every warband and every deck has an ‘archetype’ assigned by the designers: Strike, Take and Hold, Flex, and Mastery. You certainly do not need to match these one to one, but it can potentially inform you a little bit. Not every strike warband likes every strike deck, and so forth, so you can’t necessarily just slap two of the same type together and expect to win a tournament. The LVO Rivals winner took Mollog with Pillage & Plunder, which is a Mastery and Flex pairing – so sometimes it behooves you to look outside your niche. However, you can look at Strike and Take & Hold as somewhat ‘opposite’ playstyles, and to some extent you might want to avoid those two together. Exceptions abound, of course! Of all the considerations for choosing a deck pairing for a competitive event, the archetype/designation might be the least informative.
Your Playstyle
We do have to be honest with ourselves – there is probably a way you like to play. Some of us love nothing more than diving in with insane charges every activation. Some like to VOLTRON a single fighter with every upgrade in the deck and let them be the hero. Some people have more emotional resilience than me and enjoy leaning all the way into the high-risk high-reward of Take & Hold. Others might like playing the positional game and like the puzzle of who is standing where and when in order to score. Some of us might even just enjoy counterplay and control-based approaches to shut down their opponent! Whatever floats your gaming boat, you’re going to be better off if the deck you choose fits that approach at least in part. Sure, the ‘best’ thing might be Deck A, but you hate playing that way. It’s boring or hard or both. Play something you have fun with; you’ll be more engaged and have better competitive success, even if it’s less strong (but still has some potency!)
Picking a Pairing for Your Warband: Nemesis Format
So, you’re competing in a Nemesis Format event rather than a Rivals event. Awesome! I love Nemesis. Everything I wrote up there in the Rivals section still applies to you, though you will be able to tailor your list to exclude those weaker cards, unreasonable Objectives, and things that don’t mesh with your warband as well. You’ll still need to assess all the above for BOTH decks you’ll take, PLUS a few more things I’ll cover next. Rivals players can jump to the outro, but Nemesis contenders will need to think about:
Objective Deck Harmony/Overlap
The most important question a Nemesis player can ask when evaluating their pairing is “do the decks work together from a scoring standpoint?” If your first deck wants you to be on tokens, but your second deck wants you to be making charges, you might have trouble lining everything up. A deck that wants you to make attacks and a deck that wants you to make move actions might not align super well as another example. In a perfect world, both decks will have Objectives that say basically the same thing. If you can take an activation and score cards from both decks, if you can pursue a strategy and score cards from both decks, if you can have a specific board state in an End Phase that scores cards from both decks, then baby you’ve got a stew going. If your decks aren’t in perfect harmony, at least ensure that they aren’t asking conflicting things of you in order to score – the last thing you want is to sit there in activation 3 saying ‘well I either can score this card or that card, but not both… do I need to Focus?’ and knowing it’s because of the deck you built.
Power Deck Harmony/Overlap
The second most important question a Nemesis player can ask looks a lot like the first: “do the power cards of one help you score the objectives of the other and vice-versa?” Say one of the decks you’re taking needs your fighters to have certain tokens on them – move, guard, charge, stagger what-have-you. Can the cards from the other deck help hand those tokens out? Do you have a specific keyword or state you need to work towards that requires you to take a ton of cards from that one deck?
Complementary Strengths and Weaknesses
The third question to ask yourself is “do these decks help fill in each other’s holes?” If deck A has great Upgrades but weaker Ploys, look for a deck B that has good Ploys to offset this, ideally without a ton of Upgrades you feel like you’ll need to take. If Deck A has great surges but is lacking in the End Phase scoring consistency, you’ll want a deck B that has solid end phases. You want to be able to shore up a deck’s potential weaknesses with your other deck, so you’ll want them to be strong where the other isn’t. Another consideration is whether they’re both strongest in the same area, which is actually a bad thing if true. Imagine two decks that both have rockstar Surge Objectives. You can only take 6 total, and now they’re competing with each other pretty substantially – effectively ensuring you’ll be leaving great cards at home. If both your decks have bonkers Ploys, you might have a really hard time stripping the list down to just 10 or could end up feeling obligated to take extra Upgrades that are weaker and less useful just to make space for your 11-13 Ploy corner you’ve painted yourself into.
Following the Rules
The next question to ask is “did I actually create a valid deck with this pairing?” As awesome as it might be on paper, you currently can’t take two decks that have Plot Cards in a valid Nemesis pairing. You don’t NEED a plot card to succeed, but you’ll have to make sure you don’t have more than one. You’ll also want to make sure you’re following the other Nemesis Rules Document stipulations – do you have the same or fewer number of Ploys compared to Upgrades, do you have 6 or fewer Surge Objectives, do you have at least a 32-card deck, etc. Don’t get DQ’d before the first dice roll! Another very important thing to look at for rule-following is the Forsaken and Restricted list, which we’ll touch on next.
The FaR List
Finally, a Nemesis contender must ask “Can I make this combination work with the Forsaken and Restricted list in mind?” As rules updates roll out, different cards will come on and off the FaR list to balance the competitive field as needed by the design team. Currently, if a card is Forsaken (F), you cannot take that card in Nemesis – it’s too strong to be fair, causes too many rules interaction problems, or some other issue. If a card is Restricted (R), you can still take it in your Nemesis deck, but you are limited to 3 or fewer R cards across your whole set. When choosing a deck pairing, you will want to keep an eye on how many cards are on the FaR list. Can you still build a decent deck without any F cards? If your two decks have a bunch of R cards, do you think you can make something workable with only 3 of them? Taking two decks that are heavily featured on the FaR list together might not be a good move even if each deck in isolation is very strong, as you won’t be able to take either one at its full strength as they compete for R slots.
Wrap
That’s the high-level overview of what to look out for when choosing a deck to pair with your chosen warband! We will next venture into competitive considerations of building the deck as we move through the Contender series. The next few articles will apply much more to Nemesis competitors as they involve evaluating cards and how to choose which ones to take in our list, but Rivals players can still benefit from looking at how best to assess a card. It can help you know when to Mulligan, when to Focus, decide whether to spend glory on a given Upgrade, and pick whether a deck is actually ‘good’ for what you want to do with it. No matter which Format you’re competing in, I hope you have enjoyed this article and found something valuable to take away – and until next time, get out there and Spend that Glory!
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