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: assessing and selecting Surge Objectives for Nemesis deckbuilding.

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

If you would like a more beginner oriented, less-competitive look at the basics of deckbuilding, here is a link to the ‘building your first nemesis deck’ article for Embergard

Surge Theory

When building a deck for a competitive event it’s generally the right choice to begin with your objective deck. This is going to ‘set your intention’ throughout both the deckbuilding process as well as the game. What exactly are you trying to do? Remember the game is won by the player with more glory, not necessarily the most bounty from slaying fighters, and your objective deck is how you’re going to achieve this. In the last article in this series we covered general thoughts on Nemesis deckbuilding as a whole. I won’t repeat too much of that information here, but it’s worth a read if you’re new to the deckbuilding process.

With very few exceptions, you are going to want to include 6 surge objective cards and 6 end phase cards. I generally look through my surges first and choose my end phase cards afterward, but either approach is fine. Regardless of which scoring window the objective uses, they come in two flavors flavors: ‘Score if you did the thing’, and ‘Score if the thing is true right now’. All things being equal, you will want to prioritize ‘score if it happened’ cards, and deprioritize game state ones since they’re easier for your opponent to disrupt. ‘Make an attack in enemy territory’ is far easier than ‘hold a specific objective after your opponent’s power step’ since it has fewer time restrictions and probably fewer positional restrictions in order to score. ‘if you made three attacks this round’ is easier than ‘are still holding two treasures’ is easier too, since once you’ve done the requirement it is guaranteed to score, and doesn’t need to still be true later on.

Let’s look at what to focus on while making your selections. As I normally begin with Surges when building my decks, we will look at those in today’s article and jump to End Phases in the next.

Assessing Surge Objectives

The way I think about surge objectives is that they get the snowball started. You’re able to score these midway through a round, earn some glory, and very soon thereafter spend that glory on upgrades to help you be more effective throughout the remainder of the round and the game. A player who has more reliable surge scoring is often going to jump to an early lead, which gives them an advantage moving forward, and helps maintain the lead across the game. I don’t have hard data to support this, but it can at times feel like a player who can score 3 or more glory during the first action phase is going to end up winning the game if their opponent can’t manage the same.

This brings us to a key trait of a ‘good surge’ – you want to be able to score this in the first round, preferably in one or two activations, and with as little interaction with your opponent/dice rolling risk as possible. The ‘perfect surge’ would look something like “perform a guard action with a fighter” or “perform your third or subsequent move action in a round”. Understandably these are few and far between, with generally low glory reward for meeting such a simple condition, but I would still take them if available. There’s no way you’re getting six of these slam dunks though, so let’s categorize the general types of surges and look at the main things to think about when picking them.

Categories of Surge

Action surges – score immediately when you ‘do something’. When assessing these, make sure it’s something that you can do reliably, with multiple fighters, at multiple stages of the game. There are many subtypes, and I’ll rank them by general reliability:

Move surges – make moves (or have a move that meets some condition) – often the most reliable, especially if your warband has extra ways to move outside of an activation.

Other action surges (e.g. Guard) – you can do other actions just as easily as moves and your opponent will have a hard time stopping you. These are a little less positive than move surges since you’ll often want to be moving for other reasons, and this can ‘waste an activation’ in order to score it. That said, if I had a fighter with the action ‘gain a glory point’ on their card, I can imagine I would use it a few times a game, so it’s still worth doing here since you also get the benefit of guard/barge/what have you.

Attack surges – Make an attack, make your fourth or subsequent attack, make your second attack with the same fighter, or that targets the same fighter, etc. You’re likely to be making attacks anyway so these are pretty high quality unless you’re playing very passively. Careful of the conditions though – sometimes they’ll require the attacks to succeed and you can’t guarantee that. Sometimes they will require the attack to be done at a specific range or in a specific territory. They might require a specific fighter who could be out of action or out of range. The more conditions (or the harder to meet) the lower your should rank the card.

Charge surges – those are less useful since you won’t always be able to charge, especially if you drew the card mid-round and didn’t know this condition was coming. You may not want to charge if you’re hoping to stay on a feature token or have some other constraint. They’re not bad if they don’t require a hit or a kill, but I would look for other choices first unless your gameplan is the classic ABC: Always Be Charging.

Board State surges – score immediately when a board state is true. These are a mixed bag depending on the state in question and when you have the card in hand. Let’s look at some examples, again ranked by general reliability:

Gambit surges – score immediately when you play a type of ploy, or have played your third or subsequent ploy, etc. Often you can score these without your opponent being able to stop you, and sometimes without using any dice. There are going to be conditions, and it is dependent on your power hand having the right cards, but these are great choices because they can be done in any round, early in the round, and reliably. These are a little weaker if they require a specific keyword or Deck Plot Card ‘theme’, since outside of rivals you’ll have watered down that keyword and will have fewer potential cards to score it. If you jump for these, make sure to include enough of the keyword cards in your ploys so that you can reliably score this. Also beware of drawing into a Surge after you’ve already played your ploys that would qualify for it.

Positional/Territory surges – score immediately if some number of fighters are in some specific territory, within X hexes of something, adjacent/not adjacent, etc. These can be a little tougher depending on the condition. Maybe you don’t have three fighters alive to be in enemy territory. Maybe you are forced into a hard choice between going to the place that will score this card, or going to the place that will be ‘optimal’ for other reasons. I like my surges to be scoreable in the first round, so ‘have all your fighters in enemy territory’ can be a big ask if you’re slow or have many fighters. You also want to be able to score it later if you happen to draw it there, so be careful about the number of fighters required (or the type of fighter) if they could be out of action prior to you drawing it. Some get easier and some get harder as fighters are slain, but these can be a great mind game and loads of fun for me personally.

Hold Treasure/Feature Token surges – score immediately if you are on a feature token in enemy territory, hold three treasure tokens, hold a treasure with a keyworded fighter, etc. These vary in quality based on the conditions and which warband you’re playing, and your opponents’ gameplan. Sometimes they’ll be trivial, but sometimes your opponent will be trying to get those tokens too and it might be a big ask. Be extra cautious if they require the card to score after an enemy activation or after a power step as you’ll have more risk to get kicked off the token.

Out of Action surges – score immediately if an enemy fighter is out of action (not TAKEN out of action), or an enemy leader, two or more, etc. These are much better than “kill surges’ because they just require the condition to be true and don’t care when it happened. They are still rough, because you can’t guarantee a kill. Maybe the enemy leader hides in the back. Maybe you’re playing an elite warband that is hard to kill, especially in the first round, and only has three fighters… you get the idea. Remember you want your surges scorable in round 1!

Upgrade surges – Among the lowest of the bunch for me, though there’s an argument they’re better than Out of Action surges. The reason I try to avoid them if you don’t have a good chance to score them early. You want to score a surge in the first few activations, and if it requires you to apply upgrades, you need glory. But how are you supposed to get that glory, Surges? You haven’t scored yours yet, since you haven’t applied the upgrade! Catch-22. In rounds 2 or 3 they’re all right, assuming your upgraded fighter is still alive, and/or your power hand has enough upgrades in it or you took lots of zero-glory-cost cards. I personally don’t find these reliable enough to score, at least as surges.

Kill Surges – These are probably your worst choices in the surge department. Score immediately when you take an enemy fighter (sometimes with specific conditions) out of action. Avoid kill surges where possible, especially if only scoring 1 glory. You can’t guarantee a kill at any given time. If you draw the card after a kill, too bad. If you draw the card after all enemies are out of action, too bad. If you kill the figher with a power card when it needed to be an attack or vice versa, too bad. In Nemesis you may not be able to toss all of these, so when choosing kill surges you’ll want to have as few conditions as possible. Don’t pick a card that calls for your second or subsequent kill, requires the kill to be from a certain type of fighter, requires it in enemy territory, on a treasure token, etc. You’ll probably do those things throughout the course of the game, but remember, you want to have the card in hand when the deed is done. You might draw it after the fact and can’t score it, or draw it early and then it clogs up your hand while you work toward a kill. Surges are for scoring quickly and ideally in the first round, and kill surges are mighty hard to promise, even for elite aggro/strike warbands.

Review Your Objective Choices

Run back through your selections and make sure they agree with each other. You want to have a single, cohesive game plan (or two synergistic plans), and you want to be able to score any of your cards while executing it. If you have a few cards that say hold something in your territory, and a few others that say kill things in enemy territory, you’re playing tug of war with yourself. If you have cards with too many conditions, and too many of them are the same condition, you may be putting too many eggs in one basket. As an example, say you took lots of cards that require your leader to do something in order to score. If your leader goes down (and you will absolutely be putting them at risk by doing those things), you likely can’t score any of those cards after that happens. It’s ok to include conditional cards, but you probably want to vary those conditions within reason to allow for a backup plan. Missing out on a bunch of objective card scoring because your keyworded fighter dies too early or your opponent is too good at invading your territory (or won’t come into your territory) can be a bummer, and across a long enough tournament you will eventually have to face that situation.

Wrap

So you’ve picked your 6 Surges. Make sure your deck has a plan and can take a hit, and then you’re on to picking your End Phase Objectives! We will cover how best to do that in the next article, but in short you’ll want to make sure you have overlapping goals with your Surge package wherever possible, and can score both sets doing the same general thing. Objective deckbuilding is probably the most important skill to master if you want to become a more competitive player. You can’t have any Spent Glory if you didn’t earn it in the first place!