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 End Phase 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

Objective Deck 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 Surge Objectives, and this time we will be looking at End Phase cards.

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.

I’d like to throw a quick note here and say that some decks succeed with 7 or more end phase objectives. There are times and places for that, but seeing as this is a beginners’ guide I’ll just say that most of the time with most decks and most warbands you will find more success taking the 6 best available to you and not diluting your available pool, reducing the frequency of surges you draw in round 1, and so on. Go past 6 end phases with experience but also caution! With that in mind, let’s look at what to focus on while making your selection for End Phase scoring.

Assessing End Phase Objectives

After your surges have been chosen, the other six (or more) cards you’ll need to take will be cards that score in an end phase. I lump these into very similar categories as the surge cards, but they aren’t ranked with the same reliability. I do have a similar caveat: much like you want your surges scorable in the first round – you want to be able to score your end phase cards in any round you happen to have them. I try to eliminate cards that are only realistic in the third end phase – if I draw it in the opening hand (or worse, mulligan into it) I’m guaranteed not to score it that round and then either have it clog my hand all game (and even then maybe won’t score it) or have to throw it away in the first End Phase. They do often come with huge rewards, but try to limit yourself to one or you’ll increase the odds of drawing one too early. Other cards are potentially scorable in round 2, but will be really hard to score until then (multiple enemies out of action is a common one). Be discerning when selecting these. End phase objectives where ‘xyz happened in previous round’ can be rough too – say the card asks that the enemy leader be taken out of action in the previous round, but their leader was killed the round prior. These in effect are ‘Surge Lite’, and should be avoided in preference for ‘the enemy leader is out of action’ without a timebound component. Make sure they’re as reliable as possible.

Categories of End Phase Objective

Action End Phase Objectives – Move end phase objectives: Since the same fighter can make multiple moves, this is a great option. They’re often ‘Surge Lite’, requiring you to have made some number of moves in the previous action phase, but that’s usually something you can control unless you’re very short on fighters and need to charge. Many decks have gambits or upgrades that let you do additional moves, as well as some warscrolls assist here as well. Less good if it requires the same fighter to have made the moves, but still hard to pass these cards up.

Other action end phase objectives – Did you do a fighter specific action this round? Here’s a glory. Hard for your opponent to stop and rarely require dice. Pillage and Plunder is FLUSH with these, and part of why the deck performs to well. Sometimes they come with the requirement that the fighter in question is still alive or did the action in a specific territory, but generally speaking I like these.

Attack end phase objectives – These can be hit or miss, depending on their conditions. Make x number of attacks this round? You were probably doing that anyway. Make x number of attacks with a specific fighter and/or in a specific territory and/or needing to be successful? Much harder to include. If it fits your gameplan and you think you can pull it off, go for it, but understand you’ll need sufficient glory reward to offset the risk.

Charge end phase objectives – similar considerations to the attack action end phases, but generally worse because you may not be in a position to charge or may prefer not to for various reasons.

Board State End Phase Objectives – These come in three general flavors, which well peek at below.

Hold Treasure/Feature Token end phase objectives – a classic end phase type, and often come with big glory rewards. Hold some number, hold with some bounty worth of fighters, hold with a type of fighter, hold in a territory/multiple etc. You run the risk of your opponent having the same plan and you won’t be able to stand on them uncontested, and it’s generally pretty obvious when Take and Hold gameplay is your plan so your opponent may try to drive you off of them. Depending on how things are going you may find them difficult to score, especially toward the end of the game when you’re low on fighters (or early when there are too many enemy models to compete with).

Delve/Treasure count End Phase Objectives – these refer to how often you’ve delved, which things you’ve delved, or how many Treasure tokens are on the board/in a territory. Sometimes they’re great because they have effectively no counterplay – once you’ve done the delving, it happened. Others have more counterplay potential – your opponent could un-delve one or slip another to mess with your plan – but still relatively strong and predicable cards if this is in your general gameplan.

Positional/Territory end phase objectives – Have some fighters in multiple territories, more than your opponent in a given territory, fighters adjacent/not adjacent, in an edge hex, etc. Depending on how many fighters your warband has (and are still alive) this can range from easy money to pretty hard to pull off. It needs to fit your gameplan, but there is a place to include these if you have the numbers/mobility/durability. It’s more difficult if it requires enemy fighters to be in specific places since you have less control over that, and sometimes they may be all up in your grill. That said, these are my favorite type to play from a fun chess-match perspective.

Ploy end phase objectives – Play some number of ploys this round. As long as you had them in your hand, you probably did this just by playing the game. Beware that you might draw into an upgrade heavy hand, and may not have the draw tech you need to get more without burning activations on Focus (and even then may not get what you need). But generally your opponent can’t stop you from playing a ploy and you don’t need to roll many dice, so this is a relatively reliable end phase objective classification.

Upgrade end phase objectives – Have a fighter with multiple upgrades, have multiple fighters with an upgrade, etc. These can be a little tough to include for me in most decks, as it’s hard to score early if you don’t have enough glory to purchase them or your hand doesn’t include enough upgrades to play, and hard in the later game because your number of surviving fighters will dwindle. If you go for one of these, I prefer the Voltron flavor where you load up a single fighter, but be careful they survive to the end phase so that you can cash in.

Kill/Out of Action End Phase Objectives – these also come in multiple varieties which we will examine below.

Number of fighters: These come in a few varieties, but if you’re going aggro then you’ll be more generous with including them. The unquestionable best is “x number of enemy fighters are wounded/out of action”, where you don’t need them to have been damaged or taken out in the previous round. When you start layering on requirements such as in the previous action phase they become much harder to include. You’ll run into these a lot, so be realistic about your chances of scoring them, but they’re not wrong to include. Depending on your opponent, who may only have three tough fighters, having 2 or 3 out of action may not come to pass when you draw this card early (or at all). You’ll definitely want to take accuracy/damage/extra attack cards where available to help you score this category of objective.

Board state of fighter: Often a Surge Lite, this kind of card will ask for a fighter on a treasure token to have been taken out of action, or you take an enemy out of action in a specific territory, or with 2 or more upgrades, etc. Unless you have multiple fighters that can satisfy the condition, or lots of ploys to help you get into the board state, they can be hard to score.

Type of fighter: Kill someone with your leader, or kill their leader (or get a kill with a keyworded fighter, somebody with a keyworded upgrade, etc). These cards are asking a lot. They’re almost always Surge Lite, which is bad enough, but they layer lots of extra conditions on top. Your minions may not be alive to score the kill, your leader is in the wrong spot, you don’t have the right upgrade keyword, their leader is well protected and their best fighter with 5 upgrades, etc. If you have one of these and it’s only awarding 1 glory, leave it at home. If you have one of these and it’s 2 or 3 glory, you’d better be pretty dang sure you can swing it.

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 now that we have our End Phases and can couple them with the Surges from last article, you’ve picked your 12 (or more) Objective Cards. Remember to limit the number of late-game cards where possible. Make sure your deck has a plan and can take a hit, and then you’re on to picking your Power cards! I hope this guide is helpful to some of you. 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!