Everybody loves tier lists; they provide a snapshot of the competitive scene from the writer’s perspective and fuel lots of debate and speculation. But tier lists don’t exclusively have to be about competitive power. Two weeks ago, we launched a community vote to determine that most fun nemesis pairings. After 173 responses, we have ourselves a list!

This article is a part of the ‘avin a Good Time series, and you can see other entries here.

Nemesis Rankings

First off, let’s check out the Top Ten most fun Nemesis Pairings from your voting:

1. Cata/Wrack
2. Blazing/Reckless
3. Emberstone/Cata
4. Blazing/Pillage
5. Blazing/Deadly
6. Emberstone/Pillage
7. Edge/Deadly
8. Pillage/Cata
9. Blazing/Raging
10. Emberstone/Wrack

This tracks pretty well – these decks are competitive, generally speaking, and give you things to do and work towards while playing the game. Cata/Wrack won this contest by a huge margin (it’s my favorite too!), and the only deck that came close was BA/RF. I personally also enjoy ES/CC, BA/DS, and EK/DS out of these top ten offerings. I’m heartened to see such a wide variety of playstyles in this top ten – from blitz aggro to token control, positional management and flex play, this suggests that people don’t feel pigeonholed into one playstyle in the current meta and that there’s something fun out there for almost everyone.

Another interesting wrinkle is that of the top ten, only one (Edge of the Knife/Deadly Synergy) comes from the Double Plot/Unlocked combos. It’s possible that these might have had a stronger showing if I ran this survey further out from the plot lock removal, since people haven’t really had the chance to explore them all fully. If you want some insight into what those new combos might look like, I wrote up a rundown you can read here.

Next, for the full tier list of which decks are the most fun to play:

Snap judgement takeaways: BA/CC has fallen from where I imagined it would be, probably due to the multiple nerfs to cata making that pairing much less reliable than it previously was. BA/PP and BA/DS sems to have overtaken that playstyle in terms of enjoyment. ES/HG came in relatively strong, and was the best showing HG got which isn’t super surprising – the biggest surprise was that PP/HG isn’t on the list at all despite being what’s probably HG’s second-strongest pairing. BA/Wrack, PP/Edge, and BA/Edge fell further than I would have thought as well – all three are pretty fun and maybe it’s their competitive deficiencies that held them back.

Rivals Decks Analysis

To further sort the data, I decided to bin everything by Rivals Deck and get the ranking of the individual rivals decks’ popularity in a Nemesis context.

Or, put another way because we all like pictures (and I could use weighted voting scores to rank into tiers, which everybody also loves):

Checking out the S tier, one funny little thing that emerged is that while both BA and ES had very strong fun scores and were included in tons of popular decks, the two in combination was only the 12th most fun deck and only landed a C tier ranking. Otherwise it makes sense, these two are backbones of traditional strategies in Underworlds: Aggro for BA and Hold for ES, and made their way into combos with other decks as the scaffolding you build your customization around. I’ve played over 100 games with both Rivals decks and will probably continue to do so.

In the A tier, Pillage surprised me. Maybe it’s personal bias, but I don’t find it incredibly fun to play with or play against. I’m happy to see that I’m in the minority here! Wrack and Ruin is my personal favorite Rivals deck, and I’m hyped to see it fall in 4th place despite its relatively weaker competitive record. Cata is fun and strong and remains so despite the multiple rounds of nerfs. Deadly Synergy rounded out the group, and it’s good to see that new stuff can still rise so high in the fun rankings.

Reckless Fury fell into the B tier, and that’s largely because outside of BA/RF (which was the second place Nemesis combo), it wasn’t selected as often among people’s favorites to play. Whether that’s a result of the multiple Forsaken cards or the ABC playstyle being less appealing outside that combo, I can’t say. An awesome surprise is seeing Edge of the Knife up there alongside it – the deck is fun, even if it’s hard to win with.

C tier had only one representative: Raging Slayers. I’m going to chalk this up to the fact that the Objective package is atrocious and half the power cards aren’t that good either. Rerolls are cool, and the auto-pushback is a fun puzzle, but I think the competitive deficiencies dragged this down.

In the D tier, Hunting Grounds stands alone. Potentially because it’s new enough people haven’t figured out how to best use it, and also because of the potential for passive standoffs that don’t let you score or use your cool tricks.

And now for our sad F tier deck: Realmstone Raiders was included in one third place vote, one fourth place vote, and two fifth place votes, and that’s it. Not only is RR not being featured in many competitive decks, (even being se ‘weak’ as to be completely absent from the most recent set of World Championship decks), it’s apparently not even that fun for most people. I’m not sure what RR needs, but it definitely needs something. Mark from Path to Glory has a few good ideas.

If you want to try and make RR work in competition, it is possible. Drex grabbed first place at the Tacoma Open with this Mollog RF/RR deck (Love Letter/Deck guide to be found here), and Kevin won the Benelux Clash and had a strong showing at the World Team Championships with this Emberwatch ES/RR deck (you can read the Love Letter/Deck Guide here). If you so happen to figure something else out for Realmstone Raiders, I would hope you’d be willing to cook up a love letter of your own!

Selected Commentary from Voters:

• I love reckless fury WITHOUT blazing, as it allows for some crazy positional scoring and control aggro which I really enjoy! Especially playing Emberstone/Reckless with Hexbane or more recently Jaws has really sparked my love for the deck!
• I love decks that have a specific trick they’re trying to pull. I want to have weird combos and synergies and love the synergies these decks encourage even if they’re not the strangest.
• Cata/Wrack is the epitome of fun. First of all, you get pings. When deck building, I particularly enjoy putting pings into my deck. Also, pings are life, and CataWrack has pings. Rumor has it CataWrack also has some good passive glory (Low on Options, Ploymaster, Spread Havoc) which you get for playing the game, but I can’t confirm that as I only look at the ploy cards and Rock Splitting Tread. But overall, I would say my favorite reason for this pairing is that it can do around 8 damage a game through power cards (I like to call those pings.)
• Cata/Edge is the best of Double Plot decks because you get to play so much stuff that you score for just playing the game. You basically get to have a lot of fun for just attacking and hitting stuff.
• Cata/HG I am hellbent on making work because it’s a really fun playstyle of ‘I am going to sit back and score my stuff, stop me if you can. Oh wait, now you’ve fallen into my trap and you’re dead’. The main issue is the enemy knows there is a trap so often times they don’t fall into it, which is quite annoying.
• Wrack and Ruin is my favorite deck since its one of the few decks have a large number of positional scoring cards without the importance of Treasure Token. Combo that with some really neat power cards like Flee!, Fireproof, and Desperate Defense to name a few. The damage reduction in this deck gets overlooked by the easy score packages from some of the other decks.
• Whatever deck allows for a lot of stabbing for DAGGOK!
• Emberstone and Pillage feels very rewarding to play, as most times there is something you can do to win and all you have to do is find it and play to your outs.
• New deadly synergy deck is a lot of fun but the people yearn to stand on tokens
• I love BA/Wrack because of the power deck. The positional scoring also makes for some fun playtime’s. Sadly the pairing is a bit of a meta call and with too many hordes the scoring gets iffy
• Cata Wrack is an all time favorite. Pings and positional scoring and it also plays well with lesser seen warbands like Zikkit, Cyreni and Ephilim.
• I ❤ no plotlock
• Deadly Synergy is one that I really like due to the positional nature of the deck in general. It rewards good play with accuracy and defense buffs from the plot card while unlocking many excellent scoring cards. Its a well rounded fun deck too.

And my personal favorite response from somebody who obviously likes to ‘ave a good time:

I would like to nominate Cata/Wrack as my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth choice. Seventh can go to Cata/Edge. The reason for this is it has pings.
C – Can kill
A – Anyone
T – That
A – Attempts
W – Whatever
R – Reckless
A.- Actions
C – (they) Can do
K – knowingly

Wrap

What do you think? Does this list of most fun nemesis decks match your expectations? What changes to rivals decks do you think are needed to make things more exciting to play?

If you have a nemesis combo that you love and others have overlooked, please consider writing a Love Letter and sending it my way at SpentGlory@gmail.com so that others can see what you’ve seen and find joy in your favorite pairings. Until next time, whatever combos you like most, I hope you enjoy spending glory in Spitewood!