Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. Today I’m going to tackle a controversial topic that may or may not be coming to Warhammer Underworlds. Warband rotation is the concept of having warbands be tournament legal options for a limited period of time before dropping out of the list of legal choices and having others take their place. This is something that has been talked about in the community since before the release of Embergard, and there have been subtle hints from Games Workshop that they are floating around in their minds as well. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of rotating warbands out of being tournament legal choices.
What Is Rotation?
The idea of rotating aspects of a game out of organized play legality has existed for quite some time. In this case, we’re talking about warbands in Warhammer Underworlds, but the first time I ever encountered it was in the TCG Magic: the Gathering. Allow me to give an extremely brief history lesson on Magic formats before diving back into our lovely board and hex game.
A long time ago, in the distant world of ~*~*The Ninety’s*~*~, Magic was selling like hotcakes. This was great for a time, but the structure of the game meant that new sets were being released with new cards being constantly added while the old cards were no longer produced or sold. Even though they weren’t being made, they were still legal to play. This created some friction for new players trying to get into the game since they could no longer get those out of print cards. The solution that was settled on was the introduction of multiple formats, each with their own restrictions on what could and couldn’t be played. The one most similar to the situation I’m outline here was known as Type II and later renamed to Standard. Here’s a snipped from a post on a Magic Usenet from 1995:
“First, the Magic environment should be ever-changing; seeing new cards appear and disappear from time to time was the original concept behind the expansion sets and the Revised Edition card set rotations. By allowing only the latest two expansion sets and disallowing cards rotated out of Revised Edition, we seek to create the feeling of an ever shifting play environment.
Second, by restricting the environment to only the most recent available cards, we hope to ease any alienation of newer Magic players who never had the chance to get their hands on some of the older, out-of-print expansions (or basic set cards, for that matter!). The Type II tournament by its very nature keeps things current; newer players have the same access to cards as everyone else, and even time-honored Magic veterans should find this type of tournament the perfect battleground to incorporate their newest strategies with new expansions. We think Type II will become the staple of the tournament circuit.”
Aside from the points listed above, it also meant that players were given incentive to keep buying new cards from Wizards of the Coast. They’re not going to come right out and say it, but that’s obviously another factor in the decision. It turns out they were right – Type II (and later Standard) have become the cornerstones of Magic. This rotation model has been adopted in many games since then, from Pokemon to Hearthstone to, yes, Warhammer Underworlds.
Turns out the folks behind Warhammer Underworlds also saw the problem of bloat rearing its ugly head in the first edition of the game. Once the Nemesis format was introduced, they also set up a rotation to cycle the individual Rivals decks out of legality after they had been around for a few seasons. This cycle only happened a few times before they threw the whole system out and released Embergard, but the framework was in place and working. It was actually my pet theory that they were soon going to set up warbands to cycle in the same way, only keeping the last few seasons as tournament legal options and pushing the rest into “legends” along with the older Rivals decks and things like Grand Alliance cards. Turns out I was wrong!
The previous edition of Underworlds wasn’t the only instance of Games Workshop adding a tournament legality rotation in one of their games. My limited understanding is that the current edition of Kill Team is structured to allow each team to be legal for something like 3 years before they rotate out and make room for the newer teams. This keeps the roster down to a manageable size while letting each team have plenty of time in the sun.
Alright, cool. Whatever. What does this have to do with warband rotation in Underworlds?
Does It Even Matter?
First thing’s first. If you aren’t playing in organized events on a regular basis, then the good news is that this theoretical warband rotation wouldn’t necessarily affect you! There are a swath of warbands that aren’t legal for organized play now, but they are still more than okay for playing in games outside of organized tournaments. There are even some events that have been hosted that allow or specifically require using these non-legal warbands. I assume that if any current organized play legal warbands were to rotate, they’d go into that same pool and be perfectly viable for kitchen table games, meet ups at the game store, or events specially tailored to feature these warbands.
Games Workshop is never going to kick down your door and confiscate your models.
Rotation would have more of an impact if your primary focus is on organized play, however. It would specifically remove options from the legal pool of warbands that were there previously. If you are the type of player who plays one or two specific warbands instead of the game as a whole, you might be in for a rough ride. However, the majority of people I run into from playing this game don’t limit themselves to playing a single warband – they usually have a couple in their collection that they rotate between, or they are degenerate sickos like me who have all the warbands. I’m sure folks like this exist, and I don’t want to downplay the impact it will have on them, but it is my belief that it’s a fairly small portion of the community.
Why Have Warband Rotation?
There are quite a few reasons why warband rotation would potentially be implemented into the game. One of the primary motivations would be ease of balance. It’s less work for the design team to try and keep a smaller number of options in the same power band than a larger number. In the post-Spitewood release of the (hopefully) near future, we’re going to have a total of 68 warbands for Underworlds. That is an absurd amount of options for a game. Trying to balance all of those with each other is a monumental task and, honestly, it’s pretty unlikely to be an achievable one. The existence of the 18 “legends” warbands reduces this, but it’s still a staggering 49 options without them included (two from Embergard, two from Spitewood, eight Grand Alliance boxes totaling 32 warbands, five individual releases, and eight with digital rules). For comparison, Warhammer 40,000 has something around 22 factions while Age of Sigmar is about 26. Looking at a game that’s probably more comparable to Underworlds, Kill Team has 36 distinct options available. Meanwhile, Blood Bowl has 30 different teams to choose from. While these are different games and direct comparisons between them are tenuous, it still goes to show that Underworlds has a massive number of playable factions compared to its contemporaries.
Aside from reducing the amount of juggling needed when trying to balance a massive number of warbands, having a smaller pool due to rotation would allow new releases to have a larger relative impact. For instance, if the pool of options is 20 warbands and two new ones come out, that’s going to be a much higher percent of change than if there are 50 warbands and 2 new ones are released. There’s a higher chance that warbands can get passed over by the player base for not standing out when they make up a smaller percentage of the total options available. Conversely, the new warbands could wind up suffering from power-creep or feature-creep just to have something to make them stand out. I’d rather not have new, exciting options get lost in the crowd on one hand or risk being the default choice if you want to play competitively on the other hand. Traditionally, I think both of these pitfalls have been deftly avoided by the design team but it’s quite literally a delicate balancing act. The team in charge of game balance is already walking a tight rope – why would we want to make them do it while also juggling chainsaws?
Outside of the balance concern, there are fewer design constraints when the pool is smaller and this more easily allows warbands to have distinct niches they can fill. There are only so many variations of “three fighter aggro” out there, and when that pool becomes saturated they can start to blur together. Worse, there could be cases where the first pass at trying a certain theme (such as a warband of all Stormcast casters) gets a second pass later in the life of the game and the first attempt becomes a null option. After Domitan’s Stormcoven was released last edition, I never saw a single instance of anyone playing Stormsire’s Cursebreakers. In the current edition, we get something similar with the Farstriders and the Emberwatch. They are both very similar archetypes. While they have some differences to set them apart, it isn’t much and as a result I can’t even count how many times I’ve encountered Emberwatch while playing. I have played against the Farstriders exactly once.
In my opinion, one of the most important reasons is keeping the game accessible for new players. I believe this is also one that aligns with many of Games Workshop’s stated goals for the Embergard edition of Warhammer Underworlds, so I expect this to be a prominent part of their messaging if warband rotation is ever implemented. It doesn’t matter how good of a game you have if the onboarding process is too obtuse and discourages players from trying it out. A successful game needs to have new players for it to grow. It’s not only in the best interest of the players to have a successful game, but also those making and selling the game.
By having a smaller pool of recently released warbands, and thus ones a player can actually find in a store to purchase, the game has a lower barrier of entry. I’m a fairly new player to the game; I picked it up about two years ago and as a result there were many events, both big and small, where I played against people using warbands that just weren’t available for me to buy. A game should not require players to have to go hunting around on eBay just to acquire the pieces needed to play. This was even one of the touted selling points of Embergard that I was most excited about for the long term health of the game. We were promised that everything that was legal for organized play would be available to purchase from Games Workshop or your friendly local gaming store. This has not been the case, however. I have zero insight and can only speculate, but I get the feeling that the 13 “digital rules only” warbands were a last minute inclusion that threw a wrench in the plans. If those rules didn’t come into play, then the statement would have been true for the whole time Embergard has been available.
Finally, as much as I wish this wasn’t true, Underworlds doesn’t exactly have the kind of popularity that Warhammer 40,000 has. This means that stores aren’t as keen on dozens of different releases all taking up shelf space. I won’t pretend to understand all the effort that goes into design, production, and shipping for a game but I’m willing to bet that having fewer items would be easier for Games Workshop to deal with on their back end as well. That’s likely why they have shifted to a single language release of warbands – it’s easier to just throw a few extra warscrolls of various languages into every pack if you’re also going to reduce the number of items in your system by six for every release. Likewise, it’s probably a factor in why the Grand Alliance boxes are sold as they are and not broken up into four individual releases. This approach results in fewer product codes, less shelf space required, and is easier for retailers to manage. While I don’t think this will come into play yet (stay tuned for my predictions), I think it is a factor for the long term life of Underworlds.
Rotation Downsides
Naturally, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. There are a couple of downsides to this concept, although I think most of them are minimal save one heck of a doozy.
The biggest, and most obvious, is that rotating warbands out of legality invalidates prior purchases and means you can’t play with your toy skeletons and elves. This is truly a bummer. I’m not being sarcastic because it does really suck to spend all that time building the models and painting them (or having someone else paint them…) and then have them relegated to being display pieces in a cabinet instead of the game pieces James Workshop intended. Some of my favorite models that I own are my Lady Harrow’s Mournflight, and they neither received a unique warscroll on Embergard’s launch nor are they in the upcoming Grand Alliance: Death box. Trust me, I understand the pain of losing out on some favored models.
That said, there are plenty of other options that I enjoy playing with equally as much. As I mentioned before, there are going to be nearly 50 legal options once Spitewood drops. I acknowledge this is just anecdotal data, but nearly half of these are of high interest to me and would keep me busy for many months just trying to get the hang of them all. Given the consistent track record of Games Workshop releasing phenomenal models and interesting rules lately, I also foresee upcoming warbands doing a good job at filling the holes in my heart made by any previous warbands leaving.
Aside from losing out on our toys, I believe there’s a risk of players who are not as connected or online with the game not knowing what is legal to play. Unless Games Workshop does a good job at making it clear, there’s a risk of someone showing up to an event after not playing for a while with a warband that has since rotated out. There hasn’t been a great track record with this information being readily available (heck, I wound up writing an article at the tail end of last edition just listing which warbands even existed because no such resource was available from GW) but it’s at least all contained in the Organized Play document hosted on Warhammer Community. Whether or not someone will know to check this unless they’re already invested enough to be reading Underworlds blogs, listening to Underworlds podcasts, or hanging out in Underworlds Discord servers is less certain.
Another downside is more of a theoretical one – if some particular archetype has most of its represented warbands rotate out at once, it could be left without many options. This would require Games Workshop to not plan ahead and notice that they’re rotating out all the horde warbands or all the take-and-hold warbands, which I don’t think is likely. Even if they somehow had this as a blind spot, having a fairly large pool of warbands will mean it’s likely each niche has at least some representation.
What Would This Rotation Look Like?
This is where I’m spitballing what I think this hypothetical rotation could look like. I feel like there’s a good chance the digital rules warbands that didn’t see a reprint get shuffled off to legends land. This would mean Spiteclaw’s Swarm, Sepulchral Guard, Zondara’s Gravebreakers, Daggok’s Stab Ladz, Brethren of the Bolt, Cyreni’s Razors, Ironsoul’s Condemnors, and the Farstriders would drop off of the list of legal warbands. My guess here is based on the seemingly last-minute release of the 13 digital rules warbands, along with the fact that some of them are being re-released in these upcoming Grand Alliance boxes. Also, if you check the wording of the Organized Play document, you’ll also notice that warband legality is based on season (right now just Embergard, presumably also Spitewood soon) with the 13 digital warbands called out individually by name.
If this is the case, after the Spitewood releases, we’ll be sitting at 41 warbands legal for organized play. That’s no mean number and there are plenty of options covering every play style, number of fighters, and aesthetic. I feel like this is plenty of variation while still being more manageable for the rules team to try and wrangle everything into a sort of balance. The legends warband count will jump to 26 and contain all the ones from the initial release which have to use generic warscrolls along with the warbands I called out earlier who, presumably, will get to keep their old rules for the times folks play with them.
There are many ways it could go after that, including a second expansion after Spitewood with another set of Grand Alliance boxes and whether any of the previous ones would rotate, but that’s far in the future. I’m not convinced society won’t have collapsed by then anyway, so I won’t waste my or your time speculating that much.
Will Rotation Happen?
I have no idea if Underworlds will get any kind of warband rotation. I’m guessing based on a few throwaway comments made in early Embergard articles from Games Workshop, phrasing in the Organized Play documents, and my gut feeling from how the release of this edition was handled. I wouldn’t put money on it, but that’s mostly because I don’t enjoy betting. I do think there’s a good chance of us getting some kind of announcement about warbands rotating out of being organized play-legal. My hope is that folks can see the good sides of rotation and not turn into frothing-at-the-mouth posters slamming out “GW is killing Underworlds!!” posts again like what happened a year ago with the release of Embergard. If we do get that announcement and someone in your group starts acting like the sky is falling, maybe slide them a link to this article. If you are that person, feel free to yell at me in the comments or whatever. I’m not going anywhere and plan to continue enjoying this game.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website, and more.
