Howdy gang – I’m going to preface this one by saying I have no information about rotation – whether it’s happening, when it might happen, or what’s coming. Just a little thought experiment and a chance for y’all to weigh in on what you think.

Rotation: History and Concept

Let’s begin by defining Rotation for those who aren’t familiar. Historically, in first edition, there existed a concept we called rotation to specify which things were competitively valid and which older items had fallen off the list and couldn’t be used in tournaments. At the very dawn of the game, if a thing had been printed, you could take it. At the end of the second year and heading into Beastgrave, GW decided that cards from the first season/Shadespire were not legal for competitive play, and from that point on you could generally only take cards from the current season and the previous year, giving cards a roughly 2-year shelf life. Warbands never ‘rotated out’, and since warbands had their own cards, those were also always legal.

Now, in second edition, we have never seen Rotation and have only limited clues to what it might look like or if it will happen at all. At the launch of Embergard, the promo articles said ‘If it is legal for competitive play, you will be able to purchase it’. This meant that either something would have to be kept constantly in production and on store shelves (as the Embergard Core Box supposedly will be for 3 full years), or you eventually would see older things leave the list of competitively valid items. We may find that in 1-2 years’ time, early releases like Jaws of Itzl or Wrack and Ruin are relegated to casual play. Heck, we might even find some of the ‘online only’ stuff like Ironsoul’s Condemnors and Cyreni’s Razors become invalid for tournament play within the next few months (and again, I DO NOT have information about this and am just speculating).

That said, it’s very unlikely that some products will be in indefinite production and you’ll eventually be unable to buy them, at least direct from GW. Online sources eBay and the like will probably have things for some time, but I know that in my local stores every box of Grandfather’s Gardeners is already gone, and good luck finding a Reckless Fury deck in the wild. If we go based on the ‘it will be available if it’s legal’ announcement, it’s unreasonable to expect them to keep producing new boxes of stuff and keep inventory on shelves when the sales for these products will probably decline over time as new things come out. Imagine a retailer having to stock 50-something warbands and who knows how many card packs!

Realistically, we will eventually see things rotated out just from an availability standpoint, but also for a ‘health of the game’ standpoint. What will go, how many things will stay, and when is an open question, but I’m pretty sure it will go down at some point.

What is the Ideal Number of ‘In Rotation’ Decks?

In First Edition, as we worked though the Nemesis cycle, we actually didn’t quite complete the two year cycle before the game was refreshed into Embergard. At the end of 2024, there existed 14 ‘real’ Nemesis decks (with an expected 16 in the cycle). This felt good from a variety of play standpoint, and while I was sad to see the Gnarlwood stuff go, I did feel it was right to wave farewell and make space for what was coming next. As a card pool gets too large, the meta becomes more and more stale, counterintuitively. The ‘Best’ things eventually have to get dropped from the options or they’ll persist forever – unless you get Power Creep, which is a whole different problem.

There’s a slight difference though – those 14-16 decks paired with more than 50 warbands, each of which had their own set of cards. If you consider those to be rivals decks, we actually had closer to 60+ ‘in rotation’ decks – though those weren’t all infinitely combinable like they are now. Today, the universal rivals decks are the only cards we have, and Plot Cards are the only thing restricting combinations. In the old days, a new deck meant 1 new combination per warband. Today, we have exponential expansion of the options with each new entry. With 9 decks we have 30 combinations.

Looking at the annual cycle to this point, we are expected to see 9 decks out before Spitewood, with 2 more coming in that box. A similar pace over the following year would leave us with a 2-year total of 16 – almost like they planned it this way. As Embergard is expected to last 3 years, those 4 decks would persist, but the other 5 from the first year might drop out, giving us 11 again as we build up to some unknown number to close out the edition.

Ultimately, I feel like with ‘only’ 16 decks (considering there are no warband-specific ones), we might actually be too limited in the new edition’s Nemesis space. With plot cards blocking certain combos (and 4 of our 9 having plot cards), we actually don’t have a ton of combinations available, and some pairings are generally ‘better’ than others. At the top of the meta, we see the same 5-ish pairings repeatedly despite there being 30 options, and while warbands do change the flavor of those decks, it’s not nearly as much as first edition.

For that sake, I would actually advocate that decks DO NOT rotate for these 3 years of Embergard – and hopefully whatever outsourced printing GW does can keep stock for us as we hit something like 24 decks. It would be great to see more non-plot decks to increase our variety further, though I recognize the difficulty in balancing this might cause.

What is the Ideal Number of ‘In Rotation’ Warbands?

Back in first edition, I wrote an essay about the need to rotate older warbands. The argument I made at that time was people keep winning with the same warbands that have overly-strong decks, and you literally can’t buy them anymore. How is a new player supposed to deal with Headkrakka and Ephilim beating them up every week? In Embergard, this situation is much less severe, because it’s far easier to errata/FaQ a Warscroll than a 32-card rivals deck, but it does still exist.

Let’s imagine a future where the Jaws of Itzl remain super good, maybe even more so with a Rivals deck that gets released on a year or so. They become the king of the meta and a must-have for competitive players. Problem is, you can’t find it in any stores. We’ve been promised ‘if it’s legal it will be available’ – but I have my doubts it will remain in production for long. They might not even be producing new boxes already! From a logistics and inventory standpoint you can’t have infinite warbands in rotation if you intend to stock them all, and from a fairness standpoint you can’t have them all valid if they’re not stocked. So at some point, stuff has got to go.

In that previous post, I argued for a 2-3 year shelf life for a warband, which conveniently means nothing has to rotate all of Embergard assuming it does in fact last 3 years. That said, let’s look at our current situation. There are, as of right now, 13 ‘legends’ teams, 16 ‘grand alliance box’ teams, and 7 ‘brand new’ teams for a total of 36. With Spitewood coming out containing 2 warbands and another 4-pack of grand alliance teams, we will be up to 49 (considering 5 of them are re-releases of those 13 ‘legends’ teams).

That’s a ton of warbands. Like, a whole lot. For those to all be valid at the same time, the rules team has to consider a ton of variables, especially as the card pool expands. Competitive players will have to be familiar with an ever-increasing number of fighter cards, warscroll abilities, and more. While some of us might have time to play with and against most things and have a good understanding of the various warbands, most players are going to have a hard enough time just with the variety of cards they might have to learn. The greater the warbands available, the higher this hurdle becomes, and the less likely a newer player will want to engage competitively.

I don’t know how many warbands are ‘ideal’, but I’m going to guess it’s not greater than 50. You want a good variety, especially so AoS players can take something from ‘their faction’ and be more likely to give the game a try, but not so many that it’s overwhelming to dip into and hard to keep up with for semi-casuals.

Wrap

What do you think? How many Rivals Decks and Warbands would you keep valid if it were up to you? What kind of rotation do you expect and when do you think we will see it? Am I a big dumb-dumb who has doo-doo for brains? Let me know in the comments of by emailing SpentGlory@gmail.com and until next time, get out there and Spend some Glory!