Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. The Nemesis format is the de facto tournament format and is also the lens that I view Underworlds through most of the time. It involves an approachable element of deck construction, and as such I want to talk about one aspect of deck building that I always try to strive for in any game where I have the option – redundancy. By choosing some redundant card options, you can increase your deck’s consistency and (hopefully!) make your game plan more reliable in the process.

Welcome to the Department of Redundancy Department

First off, let me clarify what I’m talking about when I refer to redundancy in deck building. In most competitive games with randomness as a factor (either through dice, cards, or other mechanics) a very common tactic is to find ways to reduce the impact that randomness can have on you while playing. This allows the outcome of the game to be decided less on random chance and more on player skill. This can be good or bad, depending on what you’re looking for in the game and your own skill level. Some people thrive on the chaos of unpredictability, choosing to just see how things fall out or challenge themselves to adapt to the unknown. Others want to do as much as they can to stack the deck in their favor without, you know, literally stacking the deck.

You can do this in a variety of ways in Underworlds. If you’re trying to land an attack to score an objective, you could spend a resource like a ploy to give yourself another attack dice to roll or grant yourself a re-roll. You could position other fighters adjacent to the target for flanked/surrounded statuses to increase the number of faces on the dice that will count as successes. Even something as simple as picking a fighter with a more accurate attack to begin with is seeking to minimize the impact of randomness on your chosen game plan. Or I guess you could use weighted dice.

Dice aren’t the only elements of randomness in Warhammer Underworlds. The order in which you draw your cards is arguably even more important – not only are your objective cards the literal key to scoring the glory that determines the game winner, but your power cards are the tools you can utilize to pursue scoring your objectives and preventing your opponent from scoring their own. Anyone who has had the misfortune of having their surge objectives hide on the bottom of their deck can tell you how much of an impact the random card draw order can have on a game. You can’t exactly flank your deck to increase the odds of drawing the right card, nor do any of your fighters have the ability to land a 3 hammer attack to make you draw that critically needed Sidestep. One way to increase the odds of drawing the desired card in your deck would be to include more copies of it, right? Unfortunately, that isn’t a legal option since every card in a deck has to have a unique name. Sure, the two Rivals decks that you’re combining into the card pool for building your Nemesis decks might each have a copy of a card with the same name, but you’ll still have to pick only one of them to include in your deck per deck construction rules. Alas. I know I’d love to play a game where all 10 of my ploys are Sidesteps and I bet a non-zero amount of fellow sicko readers would as well.

Krushin’ Randomness With Redundancy

While you can’t have duplicates of a card in a deck, you can include cards that are sort-of-almost copies of another card. I’m going to use the Morgok’s Krushas deck that I took to NOVA 2025 as an example for this discussion. This article isn’t meant to be a deck breakdown, so I’m not going to go super deep into it, but it just happened to be what I took to my most recent event and also highlights the concept of redundancy in deck building quite nicely. My goal with this deck was to build the most consistent pile of cards that I could while having a game plan that hinged on getting a little lucky with dice on the day of the event. I was hoping that by limiting the randomness to my attack dice (as best I could), I could possibly roll a little hot and rely on that to help balance the scales when playing against better players. You might be able to outplay me, Mark aka Baconborne, but can you outplay my dice when they’re rolling crits?

(Yes, he could and did – I went 0-2 against him in the first round but it was a fun set of games! Thanks for starting the day off pleasantly, Mark.)

This isn’t a convoluted or terribly innovative deck. The Blazing Assault and Reckless Fury pairing has been a staple for aggro warbands since the release of the game at the World Championship of Warhammer last year. The game plan is a very simple and straightforward one in which I want my orcs to run forward and hit the opponent. The card choices I made are to enhance my chances at both running forward and hitting the enemy as much as possible while also having the objectives align with that plan. In a perfect world, every objective would be something like “make an attack” because that’s what I want to do in all 12 activations anyway, and all the power cards would just help me in making those attacks.

At a very high level, five of the six surge objectives are “make an attack” with various stipulations added on while the last one is “have charge tokens in enemy territory” which is most easily achieved by, you guessed it, making attacks. The end phases are similar in that they’re focused on making attacks, there being slain or damaged fighters, with a few higher scoring payoffs for doing a little more work. This means that without having to put a ton of mental effort into it, I can take a mental shortcut of telling myself about 10 of my objectives can be reasonably scored if I just charge and attack. There are some positional requirements thrown in, but by only having a few outliers it means a much more consistent experience while piloting.

The power cards are similar. I can’t take multiple copies of Wings of War, but I can take a whole pile of cards that effectively do a similar thing. Between Wings of War, Sidestep, Commanding Stride, Illusory Fighter, Diving In, Lure of Battle, Headlong Charge, and even the Get A Move On, Ya Gitz! ability on my warscroll, I can very safely assume I will have access to at least one effect to give my fighters an increased charge range during the first round. The redundancy of having multiple copies of the same effect meant I could safely build my strategy around having access to these cards – or at least something that’s functionally similar to them. Similarly, there’s a whole package devoted to increasing the accuracy of my attacks – you know, those things I’m basing my entire game plan around – in the form of Determined Effort, Brawler, Hidden Aid, Accurate, Deadly Aim, Sharpened Points, and Keen Eye. They all do it slightly differently, so the raw redundancy isn’t quite as high as it is for the other sets, but the same idea was applied here.

I had experimented with some other cards for a while before settling on this list. Good cards that didn’t make the final cut included Great Fortitude and Healing Potion because I wanted to go all in on the aggressive approach, as well as an experiment with Living Bludgeon. The idea for Living Bludgeon’s initial inclusion was the “free” guard token I could gain from the Ded ‘Ard warscroll ability, but I found in my few practice games with it that it was splitting my focus a little too much when I couldn’t get things to align properly. The inclusion of these cards over some of what I wound up taking might make for a stronger deck overall (I did wind up in 6th place, not 1st!) so I’m not necessarily saying I made the right choices. Merely that I made a choice and that choice was to create the most redundant deck I could, both in terms of cards and game plan.

Implementing Redundancy in Your Decks

Forcing this amount of redundancy in your deck isn’t always going to be possible given how small the card pool is for a Nemesis deck – you’re putting together approximately 12 objective cards and 20 power cards out of pools of 24 and 40 respectively, so you don’t have a ton of wiggle room. Sometimes the options just aren’t there. When they are, consider if you want to focus your deck harder in one direction. Perhaps you value flexibility and being able to adapt to different match-ups more highly than packing as many duplicates as you can. A sledgehammer is great at its application of breaking stuff, but sometimes a claw hammer is going to be the right tool for the job. I hope this analogy makes some sense.

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