Welcome boys, girls, and everyone in between, to the Dread Pageant review. This here is a Standard Flex warband I went very heavily into at the outset of second edition, and while they’re not as competitive these days as the meta has evolved, they remain a truckload of fun to play. Today I’ll go over their warscroll and fighter cards to cover what makes them so enjoyable, and provide a few pointers to maximizing your success.
If you’re looking for a vibe check, we covered the aesthetics and cool factor of this warband in an Underworlds Underground episode which you can listen to here. Spoiler alert – they scored really high. And it’s only partially my fault!
Click here to see a Master List of all warbands in the game
Dread Pageant: Lore
The lore segment on the back of the warscroll card tells us the leader is a #BOSS and he knows it. After I got a peek at his inspired side, I knew it too. Getting a range 2, 3 hammers, 2 damage grievous profile is nutty, and you don’t even have to be a Gorechosen player and get haterade for that.
Long story short, Vasillac wants everybody to know about him, and has selected backup dancers (literally) to highlight how HAWT he is. Slakeslash comes along because every party needs a party animal.
I must mention the Direchasm novel which is very good on its own, but also happens to have a feature for Dread Pageant. The warband originally came into the game because they thought it would be funny to torment and torture a living mountain that was very hungry and would know they were teasing it. These are the kind of psychopaths we’re dealing with here.
Dread Pageant: Warscroll
Inspire
The inspiration condition for this warband is one of the reasons they’re such a fun puzzle to play, as it encourages you to play in a different way than you would play almost any other warband regardless of which deck you choose. This warband inspires when there are more damaged fighters than undamaged fighters on the board after an action step. As a secondary condition, you can inspire if every one of your fighters is damaged.
What this means is that the Dread Pageant player will be more interested than normal in ‘spreading the pain’ and hitting many different enemy fighters while not killing any of them until after inspiration. They’ll also be interested in exposing multiple of their own fighters to damage, perhaps even damaging themselves, yet keeping those fighters alive for as long as possible. How you walk this tightrope, and what decisions you make as the shape of the game evolves is going to be a steep challenge at first, but is absolutely thrilling once you pull it off and inspire, especially if your key pieces are still alive for the party.
Then you get to the killing part, and it’s delicious. Peek ahead to those inspired stats and tell me you don’t want to build a mass-ping and self-damage deck just to see what Vasillac can do.
Speed of Slaanesh
In what’s easily the weakest part of the warscroll, you get +1 move when charging if the fighter is damaged and inspired. In >85% of games this never was necessary, and in many where I wanted that extra +1 charge move I wasn’t inspired or wasn’t damaged with the fighter in question. This is a ‘nice if it happens’ thing but really shouldn’t be relied on, and that’s if you even remember you have it.
Cruel Pangs
This is one of the best tools you have. Pick somebody – anybody (yours or theirs) on a treasure and ping them for a damage. There is no range limitation for this. There is no restriction against vulnerable fighters for it, so you can kill somebody if you want. It’s a great tool for helping you inspire, but it’s also a way to meet scoring conditions for cards that care about damage. It’s also a beautiful finisher – tag a guy with an attack, drive them back onto a treasure, then Cruel Pangs them to death. I have absolutely done that and it feels so good.
The rest of our warscroll abilities only turn on if your fighter is damaged, so worst case you can hit yourself with this to activate the other abilities in the scroll.
Swift as Desire
Everybody loves sidestep. This ability lets you sidestep multiple fighters at once, potentially everyone in your warband if you’re all damaged. Other than the fighters needing to be damaged, there isn’t any other restriction so they can go anywhere and do anything. This ability is immensely useful – get out of danger, get into position to attack, get somewhere you need for scoring, you name it.
Drown in Pain
“As a Millennial, same”- Cabanas
Give each damaged fighter a guard token can keep them alive for a touch longer, especially your two dancers and their dodge profiles. If also makes sure you stay in place if you need to be somewhere for positional scoring. This one often doesn’t make or break the gameplan, but it’s never a BAD thing to have.
Gross Hubris
An incredibly flavorful ability, Gross Hubris says if your damaged fighter attacks and rolls zero successes, you can once per game pop this and reroll every one of the dice. After all, it’s impossible that you completely whiffed. I refuse to believe it.
This has won me games and made an opponent cry when I got to turn a zero into 3 successes. This has made me cry when I rolled no successes only to see the attacker was undamaged. I cried again when another fighter rolled only one success and couldn’t use the ability, then missed. Slaanesh wouldn’t have it any other way.
Dread Pageant: Fighter Cards
Vasillac the Gifted
The first thing to take in about this guy (once you’re done checking out his thighs) is that he’s 4 health, 1 shield, and gives up 3 bounty. This is what you might call ‘a recipe for disaster’, as he’s very killable and highly rewarding to an opponent who does so. You’ll need to be very calculating about how you use him and what kind of risks he’s exposed to, and in an ideal world you manage to inspire without him being one of the damaged fighters. Any +health and + defense stuff you can afford him will be paramount.
Once he’s inspired though, it starts to make sense why he is a 3 bounty fighter as he effectively has Dromm’s inspired statline, and that’s well-documented as being ‘busted good’. You’ll hit all day at range 2 and spit out 3 damage for the effort, which is a phenomenal way to collect kill bounty when the time is right.
Slakeslash
Slakeslash is a great piece to deploy up front and get into the mix early. His 1 shield profile means he’ll probably get hit eventually, and his 5 health means he’ll survive that hit, hopefully lasting long enough to aid your inspire. Should he manage to land his 3 sword swing he deals 2 damage, and inspires to 4 swords which is a decent profile, especially if you can arrange for some flanking or surrounding effects.
Glisette
Glisette is, in all honesty, kinda garbage uninspired. She gets hit remarkably easy, rarely hits anything, and is just a liability for you until she’s inspired, at which point she becomes a decent fighter for 1 bounty. The hard part will be getting her there. I usually use her as a third or fourth charge just to keep her safer a bit longer.
Hadzu
Hadzu is my second fighter to activate in most games – he has a reasonable 3 swords profile and with range 3 he can charge onto a token or wherever you need to him to be in order to get the ball rolling. His 1 damage is OK since you don’t want to kill things just yet at the start of the game, and while he picks up a dodge when inspired his grapple doesn’t often do much for you. He does just fine with weapon upgrades though! A fine choice to self-ping if needed to push inspiration.
Potential Pairings
This warband has a lot of generically useful abilities that allow you to play many different styles. Rerolling attacks is great for anybody, guard is really helpful for positional Flex and Take and Hold strats, pushes are awesome for all. Who wouldn’t say yes to a free ping? The challenge is that none of these are explicitly tailored to any one playstyle and thus the warband doesn’t have a glove fit for most decks.
You absolutely could play them as Take and Hold with things like Emberstone Sentinels or Nexus of Power, as they have good range and once tagged they can push back onto tokens and guard on them.
They definitely can play aggro/Strike and enjoy Blazing Assault as much as the next guy. They also enjoy Deadly Synergy as they have many sword profiles and some dodgers who would appreciate flanking, and the deck is focused on hitting rather than killing, which doesn’t interfere with the inspire condition.
Those things said, you’re very, very likely to do best with either Countdown to Cataclysm, Wrack & Ruin, or both. They have lots of ping damage, scoring for the same, added resilience, and the closest to a unified gameplan of any decks and warscroll the Dread Pageant can find. CC/WR is the deck I have performed best with, and nearly all gran clash podium spots Dread Pageant have ever claimed came using that combo. If you’re interested to learn more, I described in great detail why it’s their best pairing in this deck review I wrote in advance of LVO 2024.
In Practice
Data from the Nemesis Statistics Project show that the warband has a 53.8% win rate over 143 games played this edition, which is pretty nice! That’s including early-edition busted stuff like old Dromm, Thricefold, and Zarbag – cut them out and you see Dread Pageant leap to 54.3%, which is almost too strong. Their 55.2% tournament win rate (52.6% in world qualifiers) demonstrate that continued strength, though far fewer games have been recorded with them in the past year. hopefully this article brings some people back on board!
Please submit your own games to this log and help the world see what’s hot and what’s not
I personally have played this warband 30 times with a 63.3% win rate, going 19-11 with a +129 glory differential (averaging +4.3 per game). I’ve regrettably only played against it once in rivals against a new player, but he had fun!
My CC/WR deck ended up claiming second place at the Las Vegas Open 2024 Grand Clash with a legitimate coin-flip away from winning the whole thing. Rules changes since then (AG tokens and mandatory advancement of the Cataclysm Tracker, the FAQ to Volcanic Eruption) have made things a little different, but overall I think it’s just as good now and perhaps slightly better. The deck review is here.
Patrick S took this CC/WR deck to WTC 2025 and did pretty well with it also. A 23-man tournament was held in Granada, Spain and was won by Dread Pageant WnR/CC piloted by Fran Torres. Here’s the deck list for that. Davy of What the Hex!? also won the Madtown Throwdown Q2 event in Wisconsin in June of 2025 with a similar build.
This Blazing/Wrack deck built by Calan “Caelan_TGM” H./Charsh looks like a lot of fun and a more suicide aggro style.
Wrap
There you go, folks! If you’re looking for a brand-new approach to the game, some positional flex play, and trying to neither kill nor be killed, the Dread Pageant are a great way to spice up your gaming experience. Be careful, as all things this fun are bound to be addictive, and Slaanesh is never quick to let go.
Whether you’re cool enough to give it a try (first one’s free) or you’re too chicken to take this kind of risk, I hope you enjoy spending glory in the Spitewood and beyond!
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