Warhammer Underworlds: Beta Rules For Shadespire
Games Workshop has pitched Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire a premier competitive miniatures combat game. While the game is deeply tactical and very competitive, it’s also up to GW to stay on top of the competitive scene – and they are! These new Beta Rules are aimed at keeping the game sharp.
It’s hard to claim a game is a competitive game when you ignore the meta that is developing around it. Since GW has launched Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire, they have had quite a few events to analyze the data from. The meta has been forming and GW has taken note – this is a good, healthy sign that they are serious about keeping the game competitive and relative.
“As part of this ongoing commitment, the Design Studio have been closely monitoring the kind of decks and games that are performing well at Grand Clashes, and they’ve noticed that decks based around the Katophrane Relics are over-performing and leading to reduced interaction between players on the board.”
If you’re not familiar with the Katophrane Relics – it’s a set of armor that you can “equip” on a character in your warband. Each Warband that has been released has had 1 item from the set included in their deck. And they combine to make a pretty potent character. While it’s not an ‘auto-win’ it can certainly make the odds tip pretty heavily into your favor. It’s so heavily slanted that this was impacting how players were interacting while playing – ie, they were not. So, in an effort to keep the game competative, GW is releasing some Beta Rules:
This change doubles the cost to get the relics on your character. The reasoning is that this should cause players who want to equip the relics play more aggressively and engage more with the opponent. It also gives the opponent a chance to react and attempt to stop you from getting the necessary glory or going for a play of their own.
Games Workshop is making it clear that these tweaks may not be final – they are putting them out to the community so that players can use them and send them feedback on Facebook and at [email protected] – the official feedback inbox.
Personally, I do like this tweak to the rules. Getting all six relics out can be difficult and rewarding – but can lead to some pretty boring strategies. By doubling the costs of the Relics, it’s going to force players to not rely on fishing for Relics and actually have a plan other than “mill my deck for Relics and stay alive.”
What do you think of these changes? Let us know if you’ve used them and how they worked out in the comments below!
