Welcome to another Warhammer Underworlds preorder day. The Realmstone Raiders Rivals deck is up for sale and it introduces yet another plot card deck to the game. Additionally, the Knives of the Crone warband goes on preorder today. If you want to read about them, head over here but in the meantime let’s dive into this new deck. Thanks to Games Workshop for providing it for review.
This review will cover the theme of the Realmstone Raiders deck, briefly examine each of the cards it contains, and highlight some of the cards I am particularly excited about.
This deck is another plot card deck, so in Nemesis it cannot pair with Countdown to Cataclysm nor Edge of the Knife. It’s also classified as a Mastery deck by Games Workshop, which doesn’t really give any insight to how it will behave other than “it might be a little weird.” Thematically, the deck is about your warband raiding to obtain the special plot resource of Aqshy – emberstone. Some of the cards in this deck have the Emberstone Ploy or Emberstone Upgrade tags which allow them to interact more strongly with this mechanic. Let’s examine the plot card to see the details of how this all will work.
This is a much more substantial plot card than what we saw in the previous deck, Edge of the Knife. I’d say it breaks down into roughly two parts.
The first explains what the raid mechanic is and how it is performed. Raiding is the key gimmick for this deck, so it’s worth taking a close look at before we get into the cards. You get to raid after (a) the first (b) successful melee attack (c) in an action step. Both of these are important to note – failed attacks won’t do anything, ranged attacks won’t qualify, you can’t benefit from any attacks in the power step, nor do any additional attacks in the action step help. The amount of cards that you raid is tied to the bounty characteristic of the enemy fighter you attack. This isn’t something that’s really in your control. You can choose which fighters you attack of course, but you can’t choose if the opponent is plopping down juicy 3 bounty targets from Gorechosen of Dromm or a slew of 1 bounty fighters from one of the swarm warbands. Additionally, there’s a downside of the various 0 bounty fighters not letting you raid at all. This includes little critters like Sotek’s Venomites and Tik Tik, any fighters with raise counters on them, or even fighters number 8 and 9 from Zarbag’s Gitz.
The second part of the plot card tacks a few extra lines onto you Emberstone Ploys and Emberstone Upgrades. If you reveal any of those cards via raiding, you can go ahead and play them immediately (provided you have enough glory to play the upgrade). You’re not drawing these cards; instead, they’re just being played straight from your power deck. This is an optional ability like any surge, so if you don’t want to play them you still have the option to leave it on the top or chuck it to the bottom of your power deck.
Alright, that’s a lot of restrictions and I highlighted potential downsides. With that out the way, what the heck does raiding even do?
In a vacuum, the raid ability is a potent mechanic. I recently wrote about the importance of card draw and deck size which touched on how smaller deck sizes makes your game more reliable. Being able to filter through your cards with the raid mechanic isn’t quite card draw, but it is pretty darn close for the Emberstone cards in this deck. You take a peek at the top card and if it’s an Emberstone card, you get the option to leave it on the top to draw later, put it on the bottom of your deck to get it out of the way, or play it immediately (provided you meet any requirements). This is one of those mechanics that could get out of hand pretty easily. Without giving away the whole review, I think Games Workshop was aware of that danger and designed this deck to be on the lower power level side to avoid the pitfalls of a dominating mechanic.
Since your deck is never going to be made up solely of Emberstone cards, even if you’re playing this deck as a straight Rivals list, it’s worth noting that when you raid a non-Emberstone card you don’t get a choice in what happens to it. It goes right to the bottom of your deck. Do not pass Go, do not collect 200 embercoins. To borrow a term used in Magic: the Gathering discussion about set design, this would be considered a parasitic mechanic. That means the mechanic requires other cards of that same mechanic type to even do anything. The Realmstone Raiders plot card is severely hampered if you don’t play any Emberstone cards, so the usefulness of the entire deck is hinged fully on whether those cards with the keyword are any good. If you’ve been around for a bit, you could remember similar decks from the previous edition like Rimelocked Relics and Malevolent Masks. These both turned out to be pretty solid because enough of the cards with their load bearing mechanics were playable. Is that how Realmstone Raiders will be? Let’s see…
Objective Cards
For any deck that relies on its inbuilt mechanic, it’s a good idea to see how many cards actually hinge on it before looking at the cards in detail. For the objectives in Realmstone Raiders, all six surges will require you to raid and five of the end phase objectives require you to raid. That’s a full 11 of the 12 objectives. Wow. That already tells us that if we’re going to try and score any objectives out of this deck, we have to count on raiding. And not just raiding – nine of these objectives care specifically about raiding an Emberstone card, so the ease of scoring these is going to be directly related to how many of the Emberstone power cards make it into your final deck.
Surge Objectives
As usual, let’s start with the surges. First up is A Sure Bet. It’s reminiscent of Overwhelming Force from Countdown to Cataclysm with some tweaks. You’ll need reliable access to 3+ dice melee attacks to even have an opportunity to score this, to start with. Even landing a successful attack won’t guarantee this can score since you’ll also have to raid into an Emberstone card. If you don’t have a high ratio of Emberstone cards to non-Emberstone cards, or if you’re attacking low (or zero) bounty fighters, this could be a frustrating tease that sits in your hand for multiple actions.
Critical Risk is another surge that reminds me of a card in another deck. In this case it’s Critical Effort from Blazing Assault. Anyone who has played Critical Effort knows there are times where you just can’t roll a crit and it taunts you. Conversely, if you can roll enough dice and/or get lucky, it’s a piece of cake. Critical Risk takes all those same restrictions but also tacks on the requirement that you raid an Emberstone card as well. That’s an awful lot of gambling.
Speaking of gambling, Looted Realmstone is a gamble on whether it’s going to be possible to score before you even sit down. If your opponent plays only 1 bounty fighters, this is a dead card (barring support from a single power card we’ll see later). Even if you are taking swings against Mollog’s mighty 4 bounty, you’re still hoping to flip two Emberstone cards. You can’t even leave one Emberstone card on top and raid it multiple times due to the requirement for different Emberstone cards. If half your power deck are Emberstone cards, this only has a 50% chance of scoring off of the highest bounty fighter in the game. That’s a huge ask. I prefer my surges to be much more reliable.
Pillage (minus the Plunder) is like Looted Realmstone but with even more restrictions on the enemy fighter’s location. What the heck? Take everything I said about the previous surge and dial it up a little bit to apply to Pillage.
Ragerock Strike almost tricks you because it doesn’t say it needs you to raid to score it. That said, the only way to resolve Emberstone Ploy or Emberstone Upgrade is to raid so… yeah. Luckily this is a lot less demanding than the previous few surge objectives and has a pretty good shot at scoring as long as you are making attacks, provided you have a decent chunk of Emberstone cards in your power deck.
The final surge objective is Reckless Gambit. Much like Ragerock Strike, if you are attacking then this is one that’s likely to just happen through the course of the round. With all the usual caveats, of course (sufficient bounty characteristic on enemy fighters, enough Emberstone cards in the power deck, a bit of luck, etc.).
End Phase Objectives
Dipping into the end phase objectives, our first one is Certain Aggression. It’s really two unrelated requirements that you’ll have to juggle to score this. The first should be fairly doable since it doesn’t require Emberstone cards so any successful melee attacks will trigger raiding. The tricky part will be ensuring no enemy fighters are in your territory. The 2 glory reward is certainly enough to make me consider it, but given how many other decks are already incentivized to get into your territory just to score their own objectives, let alone deny yours, this is not going to be an easy score.
Emberstone Stash is next and is much less lenient on the raiding requirements. Raiding 4 or more different Emberstone cards is going to require a lot of raid triggers – again, if your opponent is playing with low bounty fighters or you aren’t packing your deck with the maximum amount of Emberstone cards, this is going to be highly unreliable. I don’t know about you, but when I think of 1 glory end phase objectives, I definitely don’t want ones that are highly unreliable.
Hoarder’s Hovel is the only objective in this deck that doesn’t care about raiding or Emberstone cards and it’s a 2 glory reward. I am intrigued! It’s also pretty weird in that it’s a reward for holding a treasure token and the rest of the deck doesn’t really care about that. I do like how it’s more interesting than some of the other hold objectives – the ones in Emberstone Sentinel that are just “hold 1 or 2” or “hold 3 or 4” are rather bland. With the right warband, this is going to be somewhat similar in that you have the option of two treasures to try and hold. The true horde warbands where everyone is only a single glory are going to be harder, but there are a couple of warbands out there with three different bounty values spread among their fighters. Zikkit’s Tunnelpack even has four (although one is zero so that’s not going to help here).
Next up is Invade and we’re right back on the “raid some Emberstone cards” train. This one is going to be entirely dependent on how common opponents holding treasure tokens is. In the current meta (at least the one I’ve been playing in) there’s a lot of treasure holding, but typically by lower bounty fighters. If we’re ever in a situation where Mollog is holding treasure tokens this will be a shoe in!
Realmstone Raid has some ambiguous wording. “Raid 3 or more times” is straightforward but “different friendly fighters” is less so. If just having two different fighters raid can score this, it’s a pretty nice 2 glory end phase. If all three of those raid occurrences have to be done by different fighters, it’s a lot less appealing. The saving grace here is that it doesn’t mention Emberstone cards at all, so any successful melee attacks at all will count toward the goal.
Roused Violence is the last end phase. Another 2 glory objective, this one tosses in the requirement to delve treasures during gameplay to score it (typically). If you can ever raid five or more Emberstone cards in a battle round, it’s an auto score which is amazing considering the glory reward. Typically you’ll want to mix it up with some delving, perhaps boosted by Pillage and Plunder in a Nemesis environment. Interestingly, this doesn’t require different Emberstone cards to be raided, so if you just keep leaving the same card on top of your deck, you can rack up that count at the cost of not advancing your power deck or taking advantage of the “free” power card playing through the plot card mechanic.
Objectives Thoughts
Well this sure is a deck that wants you to raid and also pack your power deck with Emberstone cards. It’s 100% going to be dependent on how many power cards carry the keyword and how good they are. Most of the objectives that seem the most interesting to me also happen to be the 2 glory end phase objectives. Some of those even seem easier to score than the 1 glory ones, which feels… wrong. Alright, enough beating around the bush. Let’s look at the power cards.
Power Cards
Skimming ahead through the list, we have 6 Emberstone ploys (out of 10) and 6 Emberstone upgrades (also out of 10). In Rivals, this means that 60% of your raids are going to turn up an Emberstone card. In Nemesis, this means at best you’ll have that 60% mark, and that’s only if you include all of those cards over your other options and you keep your deck size to the minimum allowed. From a game design perspective, the fact that all of these Emberstone cards have upsides from the plot card baked into them, I would assume they wouldn’t all be at absolute banger level to keep them from being solid power cards that also score your entire objective deck and also can be played off the top of your deck when raiding.
For clarity, I’m going to mark any of the cards that are Emberstone Ploys or Emberstone Upgrades with an asterisk (*).
Ploys
Ambush is our first ploy and it simply allows a ranged attack to also benefit from being able to raid. This isn’t going to be enough to tempt a warband like Thundrik’s Profiteers into using this deck, but it could come in handy for either a mixed melee/range warband with one token archer or one of the Stormcast warbands where every fighter has both melee and ranged attacks. It’s such a low payoff that I’m not looking to include it even in those situations, though. Especially when you consider it’s directly competing for slots with other Emberstone Ploy cards or generically useful ones that won’t trigger a lot of your objectives.
Angered Focus* is our first Emberstone Ploy. This is… interesting. It’s a ploy that can help score some objectives and if you have enough other Emberstone cards, can net you some card advantage in the process. It’s no easy feat to get onto a treasure token without move, charge, or stagger tokens so unless your warband has some niche tech or you’re willing to use push effects like Sidestep, this might have to wait until the second or third round to be able to use. I do like how it’s tying in even further to the “bounty characteristic matters” sub-theme that this deck has.
A Step Ahead* is a push card. Pushes are such a strong effect that even if you lump restrictions onto them, they can often make the cut. Putting both location and direction restrictions on this is skirting that line, but the extra benefit it picks up by being an Emberstone Ploy makes me cut it a little bit of slack.
Fortune Faded is a take on the symmetrical ping ploy that Games Workshop has been trying. Like any symmetrical effect, you’re not going to ever be in a situation where it’s truly symmetrical because if that’s the case, you just don’t play it. It’s one card to get two damaged fighters for something like the Dread Pageant’s inspire or the Bloody and Bruised surge objective in Wrack and Ruin. Shame it isn’t an Emberstone Ploy, though…
A card that is an Emberstone Ploy is Hidden Knowledge*. It’s a much more niche effect than a ping, but being able to throw a wrench into an enemy melee warband’s plans by stopping them from charging and/or keeping them from being able to achieve the “charged out” status is rude (positive connotation).
Intoxicated with Rage* weirdly doesn’t do anything like the name implies. It’s the most restrictive of all the “give a fighter a guard token” ploys that exist currently. While you can play this before activating a fighter, the fact that making a charge action causes you to remove any guard tokens does limit it somewhat. Feels pretty good if all you want to do is move into position with a fighter on guard, though. It’s another Emberstone Ploy that feels like a worthy inclusion in a deck.
Next up is Manipulated Fate. For a deck that doesn’t really care about holding feature tokens, it has some appealing cards to make that easier. This is a very solid defensive option that will let you both reduce damage and negate a drive back. Perfect for anyone who wants to stand somewhere and not die or be pushed off. It’s like Twist the Knife in that it can really throw your opponent for a loop if they were expecting the math to line up a certain way.
Misstep* is pretty straightforward. Multiple decks have these types of stagger effects and this is one of the more tame variants of it. Again, however, the fact that it’s an Emberstone Ploy helps you with the other moving parts of the deck so it’s something I’m willing to forgive. Stagger does have the added benefit of helping you raid more reliably here, too.
Raider’s Rapture is the only domain card in this deck, and domains in general are pretty rare so far in this edition. There’s a good chance that when you play this, it’s going to stick around until the end of the round. Digging an extra card deep for every raid you do can be quite helpful, particularly when scoring the objectives. If you’re playing this deck, you’re going to raid. You’re going to want to raid as much as you can. This card helps with that.
Update: While re-reading this article before submitting it, I think it actually doubles the amount of cards you would see when raiding. The plot card says you raid a number of times equal to the target’s bounty, then defines raiding as revealing one card… Raider’s Rapture reveals an additional card when you raid, so my interpretation is that this is even better than I initially thought. Neat!
Raider’s Premonition* is the final Emberstone Ploy of the deck. In essence, it applies some of the top-deck manipulation that this deck does with the power deck to your objective deck. This is the kind of card that I wouldn’t feel great about playing from my hand, but would be fine with firing off the top of my deck if I raided into it. If you are on track to score all of your objectives in a game, this helps you shuffle them around to be more conveniently scored.
Upgrades
Armour Piercer* was one of the previewed cards when Games Workshop announced this deck a while back. At the time, I was pretty down on the card. After getting the context of the rest of the deck… I still think it’s pretty awful. Drawn attacks (not just a failed attack) are pretty rare, but you also have to have a fairly high damage attack (2 or 3 damage) to even trigger this, plus it has to have already been on the fighter before making the attack, and it costs 2 glory? Pass.
Brightstone Vigour* continues the trend of being an upgrade that grants an “after an attack” surge. Fortunately, this is after a successful instead of drawn attack. The downside is that it still has to be on a higher damage fighter and it still costs 2 glory. Typically, the fighters you have with the highest damage attacks are also going to be the beefy ones that you’ll want to heal, so that works out here. These one-shot upgrades are weird because they feel a lot more like ploys.
Call to Power* digs a little deeper in your power deck. It’s not something I’d normally waste a card slot to include, but the fact that it’s an Emberstone Upgrade makes me a little more inclined to include it. It’s a telegraphed, slow cantrip but it has the fancy keyword.
Emberstone Edge* is the first weapon upgrade in the deck. Sheesh, this is bad. What the heck, Games Workshop? Even if you gain the additional attack dice, it’s a pretty mediocre weapon profile and still costs 2 glory to play out. Not even the Emberstone tag is enough to salvage this in my mind. The offered three hammer attack is a pretty accurate one, so if you are really desperate to land those hits to raid and score some objectives, maybe it has a niche use case… but this is likely to never make the cut in my Nemesis decks.
Forgotten Fortune* is one of a pair of similar cards. There are enough decent Emberstone Ploys that I could see wanting to reuse one in a game.It’s pretty slow and telegraphed due to being an upgrade, but getting an extra guard token from Intoxicated with Rage or a vital push with A Step Ahead isn’t something I’d turn my nose up at.
Reforged Aid* is the pair to Forgotten Fortune. Normally you’d only have upgrades in your discard pile from fighters being slain, but so many in this deck get discarded when you use them. That said, I don’t really want to reuse too many of them so this has less appeal to me than Forgotten Fortune.
Great Fortitude, Great Speed, Great Strength, and Keen Eye are all well proven reprints that have appeared in a few decks by now. They’re all good cards. Not a whole lot to say there!
Power Card Thoughts
This entire deck lives and dies by its Emberstone cards. Of the 12 available, I could probably justify including 9 in a deck. If you stay with a 20 card power deck, that’s putting you at only a 45% chance of each raid hitting an Emberstone card. Those aren’t great odds, but they could still work. It’s another ball to juggle when choosing whether to mulligan at the start of the game, but you could choose to keep a hand low on Emberstone cards or throw a hand back that had a higher than average amount of Emberstone cards. This would increase the amount in your deck and make those raids more likely to hit gold. Er… emberstone. On the whole, these cards aren’t stronger than what you can find in other decks’ power card options, but they have the hidden factor of these being pseudo card draw and helping make scoring more reliable. Is that enough?
Jake’s Picks
The surge choice here isn’t an easy one. There aren’t any that are particularly innovative or weird which is what I often choose, and a couple of them make me grimace when considering them in my deck. Ragerock Strike might be it – it highlights the mechanics of the deck well, it’s something you can (somewhat reasonably) score, and there will be times in the game that it forces you into making a tough decision – do you save an Emberstone card for when it would be more useful or do you burn it now and score this surge?
Hoarder’s Hovel is a fun pick for the end phase partly because it doesn’t directly highlight anything this deck does, which makes it stand out. It does, however, play into the “Bounty value matters” theme but points it back at your own fighters instead of the opponent’s. I like that the usefulness of this objective is going to vary strongly based on what warband runs this deck. Roused Violence is close second because it has two different approaches to scoring it and threading the needle on which way to approach it will likely leave me scratching my head in a few games.
Manipulated Fate letting you triumphantly slap the card down and save a fighter from certain death is going to be bother very fun and very frustrating, depending on what side of the table you’re on. I’m going to focus on the times that I’m the one playing it and allow myself to enjoy those moments.
I feel like it’s not a great sign that my favorite upgrade is probably one of Great Fortitude, Great Speed, Great Strength, or Keen Eye.
Closing Thoughts
Man, what a weird deck. I was initially pretty down on it because I was evaluating the power cards as if they were just any other power card. By their nature, Emberstone cards have to be a little weaker than another deck’s power card because of all the additional upsides they have simply for existing. They score your objectives, they draw extra cards, they reward you even more for landing successful attacks. It’s also a concrete example of ensuring your power deck supports your objective deck. You always want this to be the case because gaining glory is how you even win this silly game, but these power cards are literally the key to unlocking so much of the deck’s scoring.
I’m not sure how competitive it will wind up being, but it does have a lot of moving parts and card flipping that sometimes results in things happening. That appeals to me.
As far as warband pairings, my hunch is you don’t want a warband that has a bunch of built in card draw. Warbands like Zondara or Ylthari will often have you run through your whole power deck in a game anyway, and if you add in raiding you’re going to run dry even faster. That would be extra bad here because you can’t raid if you run out of power cards which will make scoring quite difficult. Raiding is keyed off of melee attacks, so the ranged heavy Thundrik and Ephilim warbands don’t feel like good fits.
For various reasons, I wasn’t able to take this deck out on a test spin before the review so I don’t have first hand experience, but my impulse is to look at the elite brawler warbands particularly for Rivals. One like The Gorechosen of Dromm, Morgok’s Krushas, or Ironsoul’s Condemnors have the accuracy for raiding and already lean toward smashing face. The Headsmen’s Curse already want to take swings at the largest enemy fighter so getting rewarded from both the deck and warscroll for doing so is tempting.
Nemesis pairings are a lot more difficult. Raiding requires landing melee attacks, which makes me want to look at Blazing Assault, but the strength in that deck are the power cards… but this deck almost monopolizes those slots. Countdown to Cataclysm and Edge of the Knife are an immediate no-go because they also have plot cards.
Pillage and Plunder has a pretty nice suite of surges which can shore up the weaker ones in this deck. There’s a tiny bit of overlap in the end phases, particularly Roused Violence/Torn Landscape/Strip the Realm. For the power cards, there are three honestly bad Emberstone Upgrades that I can’t see me ever putting in a deck, plus the four reprints that are generally good inclusions anyway. That leaves 3-7 slots to flex around and that’s about how many P&P upgrades make the cut in my decks. Ploys will be tighter, since you’ll need to make up for cutting so many upgrades. Maybe swap out Ambush and Fortune Faded for Sidestep and Brash Scout.
I look forward to someone better than me at math doing a breakdown of the raiding percentages against various bounty targets and the likelihood of scoring the different objectives in this deck. The nature of the deck is kind of all-or-nothing – either you cram it full of Emberstone cards and raid cards to reach that critical value, or you don’t and then there’s no point in running it. I’ll be quite curious to see how it gets adopted into the current meta. Some of these decks aren’t making as much of a splash, either due to their own sake or because they’re overshadowed by some of the four initial decks that came in the Embergard box. There should be enough time between the release and the Maryland Goonhammer Open for folks to get some reps in, so I can’t wait to see how many copies of Realmstone Raiders (if any!) show up at that event.
Speaking of the Maryland Goonhammer Open, tickets are available now! It will be in Baltimore on July 6, 2025. There’s an invitation to the World Championship of Warhammer on the line along with a bunch of other prizes – and it won’t just be podium placers who can walk away with swag! Check out this post for more details.
If you haven’t already, check out the write up for Knives of the Crone – the latest warband that is also on preorder now.
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