Warhammer Underworlds

[me_in_japan]

Did today's warcom article just say that no warbands that aren't currently in production are legal for use in tournaments? Because if that's the case, it's a very, very tiny step from that to "all y'all warbands are getting legended".

*Suspicion grows*

I do appreciate that fifty-something warbands is a lot, but since they've yeeted every single card out the window, and are only going to have to produce these fifty or so warband sheets once, could they not have just, yknow, designed em so they're balanced? It's not the huge ask it might've been had the cards still been involved, and it seems a far better option than telling people in such an underhand "hey! This is a good thing!" kind of way that they could not, in fact, use all their old stuff.

I dislike their bamboozling flimflammery. If you're going to remove a bunch of stuff from playability, at least say so clearly.

[The Other Dave]

You can use your old stuff though? Everything is getting rules, they're just limiting official event play to models you can actually buy. I mean, I'm one of the most active players locally - maybe in Japan - and approximately 0% of my play is at official events. AFAICT every warband will have rules and be playable casually, and will presumably be as balanced as 50-odd disparate warbands could be, and I'm not sure what one could want more than that. If they said "we're not even making rules for old stuff, you can't use it at all, sorry not sorry," that would qualify as flimflammery, but this ain't it. I guarantee that none of the local players you might get a game with (namely, me and Jye, I guess) will have any problem with use of "lengended" warbands.

Honestly, I've noticed more and more that in our Ichinomiya group, excited new members get an "aw, heck" look on their face when I have to tell them the cool-looking warband I'm playing with is simply impossible to get for love or money, and I can see GW wanting to avoid that feeling. From a gameplay perspective, the pressure on the game to keep every single warband ever produced balanced was putting a lot of weird pressure on the game, in addition to making a 20-page FAQ / designers notes document required reading (and required knowing) for serious play.

[me_in_japan]

Counter point: those new players that are disappointed they can't get the cool old stuff are not the players who will be affected by that "no tourneys" rule. If it's ok to use older warbands in casual play, then it's going to be the new players who'll be running into them. The no-tourney rule is going to exactly affect those who already own the warbands, and pretty much nobody else. It feels unnecessary, unless it's as a precursor to shuffling those warbands as out of sight as possible.

While I absolutely see the validity of the complexity issue with 50+ warbands, this big reset should really be the point at which that gets fixed, not the point where they say "eh, this is hard. Let's get rid of them so the enfranchised players have to buy more new stuff"

*Edit* I realise I'm coming across as a grumbly old fart at this point. From here on in I'll dial it down, as it doesn't fairly represent everything I'm feeling about this new release - bits of it are good, and it has rekindled my interest a bit. To be honest I wouldn't really be that bothered by it if they hadn't presented it as "hey, here's a good thing! You can't use the things you have! Yay!" Disingenuousness just grinds my gears

Incidentally, it strikes me that releasing the stl files for the old warbands would be a really smart move. Never going to happen, but still - it'd solve a lot of problems...

[Primarch]

@M_i_J - Not wanting to be the one to leap to GW's defence, and not that I agree with legenderizing expensive minis, but how many official tournaments for any GW game have you attended in the last 20 years, and is that likely to change in the foreseeable future?

[The Other Dave]

Yes, the first point in Nick Bayton's article was cheerleading the change*, but fundamentally I don't see what's disenfranchising about saying "official events only allow warbands that are currently in rotation". 16 of the 20 warbands that'll be legal "soon" after launch will be old ones, and again in approximately 100% of the situations most people play in every single old warband is explicitly legal to play and supported with rules. You can use your old stuff (I'm certainly going to!) and once the pdfs are out there it's literally impossible for them to make you stop until they release a 3rd edition and do another ground-up rules refresh.

*And firmly aimed at the by-all-accounts large number of interested or lapsed players who see the sheer volume of stuff they're expected to know about (or, worse, find on eBay) to get into the game seriously and balk.

[Jye Nicolson]

Yeah I think it's actually good for tournament players. They're definitely better off with a rotation (and I doubt anyone who wants to actually win shade glass would mind picking up a warband every two years) than with something they *can't* buy being meta.

It's a bit silly for me to offer an opinion on tournament play in this thread where we'll collectively play zero tournaments (other than any Dave organises), but two of us here do own every single warband that's getting rotated and we'll just...play them? I know I'm not in my burned out on GW arc yet (coming in a future season, I promise) but the "if it's not allowed in competitive it's unplayable" psychology is a problem the community inflicts on itself. GW has largely been bumbling in the right direction by both treating competitive more seriously and providing more support for non-competitive modes. The problems there are more around how weird they get around delineating their brands (30k vs 40k, Old World vs AoS) than ending up with minis you literally can't use.

*Cardboard* you can't use, that happens a lot. I have more Underworlds cards I can't use than 40k/AoS cards I can't use but because I'm a sucker who buys Marine and Stormcast cards the ratio is worse than it should be TBH though I was mostly not using those Underworlds cards voluntarily anyway because using rivals decks with different teams was more fun than constructing decks. New edition changes a lot about what I could theoretically do, not that much about what I in practice do.

[The Other Dave]

Well, technically, the existence of a local GW store means I might do official GW underworlds events, y'know, ever, but yeah. If I have to limit myself to a relatively small subset of the warbands I own for the one or two events I go to there during a year it's no skin off my back.

The one thing I'm personally making myself nervous about is whether they'll make the cards for the re-releasing 16 warbands available online (the article said "most" warbands will get pdf support immediately) and if not, whether I'll be able to just buy the cards alone. Getting Rivals of Mirrored City just for the cards turned out to be a financial / unnecessary boxes of plastic PITA and having to do that four times over would be a bit ugh. But we'll see, sooner rather than later!

[The Other Dave]

OK, in an unusual move, GW adopted what I was mentally wishing for as a "pie-in-the-sky best possible case" approach for the new releases:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en- ... -releases/

The 16 returning warbands, pretty much as I predicted as the number was suspiciously divisible by four, will be in 4-to-a-box sets by Grand Alliance (which is sub-optimal for telling new players "this is all you need to get" but does produce a manageable number of SKUs - but new players who want a cheaper buy-in would be able to buy the new warbands individually I guess), with a single card pack sold separately with all 16 of those warbands' cards for people like me who already have the models. Actually I'd guessed this would also probably be four packs, so that's a nice surprise. All the other warbands will get pdf rules, and again it states the only time they don't want you to use them is in official GW events - I guess this is pretty much exactly what they're doing with Kill Team too.

The yearly roadmap is also slower than it's been, which considering one of the big complaints over the past couple years had been "there's too much product to keep up with" is also a good move. This year there'll be two additional warbands (for 20 total) and two new rivals decks (for 6 total) and in 2025 it looks like they'll release a single warband and a single rivals deck per quarter.

Also quarterly balance updates, but they've never been too bad about giving us balance updates periodically, it just makes it an official part of the schedule now.

It's not on the roadmap but I would guess a new corebox about this time next year, with another set of four grand alliance boxes that'll stay on the store for that next year - they do say that some number of the old warbands that aren't in the initial 16 re-releases will be getting re-releases in the future, so presumably that's with warband rotation at about that time.

[Jye Nicolson]

I'm glad there's a 16 box for the existing warbands, I'll probably pick that up to save the trouble of printing and have nicer cards to use. 4*4 probably wouldn't be worth it.

All sounds good to me. Slightly slower roadmap may mean I sometimes use cards I've seen and read before though.

[The Other Dave]

I'm actually finding myself wondering if I should track down a box of the Headsman's Curse since it's the only one of the 16 I don't have. *shakes fist* Curse you, GW!!

(On the other hand, 17 GW-event-legal warbands with fancy cards and 30-odd casual-play warbands with printed cards for all the games I don't play at GW stores will keep me busy for the forseeable.)