Another preorder day has come for Warhammer Underworlds. There’s a bevy of releases available to preorder today and Goonhammer is going to cover all of them. This article will review the two warbands included in the Spitewood Expansion Set both in terms of their gameplay mechanics and touching on the physical models themselves. I’d like to extend thanks to Games Workshop for providing these materials early for Goonhammer to review.
Check out the rest of the Goonhammer coverage of the Spitewood Expansion Set and accompanying releases once you get your fill of deer elves and funny hat dwarves!
You can find all our content for this big preorder day below:
- Spitewood & Grand Alliance Box Overview
- Spitewood Unboxing
- Decks of Spitewood: Hunting Grounds and Deadly Synergy
- Warbands of Spitewood: Kurnoth’s Heralds and The Blood of the Bull
- Chaos Warbands: Reavers of Ruin
- Death Warbands: Morbid Minions
- Destruction Warbands: Gitz and Goliaths
- Order Warbands: Seekers in Shadow
Kurnoth’s Heralds
The Order warband of Kurnoth’s Heralds are the first warband of the Spitewood box that we’ll take a look at. This is a Strike warband that was teased as having high movement and, oddly for Strike warbands, a focus on defense and incentive to hang out in their side of the board. I’m not sure how well that latter part was captured, but they do have a couple of incentives for being in friendly territory.
Warscroll for Kurnoth’s Heralds
Blake: Kurnoth’s warscroll has a couple great tools in it. They get to push a friendly fighter 2 hexes after attacking, once a game. Since you’re gonna be wanting to attack with these beefy profiles, this seems like a very nice warscroll ability to get around the board and help counter the board versus flex/control warbands. Their second ability is a “shoot twice” for Lenwythe. While it’s not earth shattering, it gives you a free shot. And, that shot is highly reliable when she is inspired (3 hammers).
Jake: The inspire condition for these elf-taurs is pretty generous. You just need to make a successful attack after starting an activation in friendly territory. Either attacks against enemies invading your territory or charges into enemy territory (as long as you’re willing to gamble on landing the hit) will be able to flip them over to the much improved inspired stats.This does incentivize you to hang out in your territory at least until inspired, which fits in with some of the other mechanics offered with this warband.
Speaking of incentives, Swift Sentinels ensures you retain mobility in your own territory. Fly hasn’t been quite as impactful in my games this edition, but it still offers the ability to hop over either your or enemy models. The inability to be flanked feels like the kind of ability that will come up once in a dozen games but in practice I’ll forget it even exists because it’s fairly minor. If you play against Hunting Grounds often enough, it will likely stick in your mind though.
The Endless Hunt is the only one-shot warscroll ability that can be used by any of your fighters, but it’s a solid one. Any accesses to pushes often wind up being some of the most impactful abilities on any warband’s warscroll, and getting to push 2 hexes is a sizeable amount of the board. It can be used as a pseudo-overrun to claim hexes your opponent was standing on after driving them back, even from 2 hexes away if attacking with Lenwythe or Ylarin. Since it doesn’t require a successful attack, if your cheeky turn 1 charge into enemy territory to try and inspire a fighter fails due to missing the attack, you can also use it to scoot back into friendly territory for another try.
The archer, Lenwythe, has her own ability on the warscroll. Precision Volley can be used early to give her two shots (pun intended) at inspiring in one activation provided she has valid targets. It isn’t fancy but having two fairly reliable chances at dealing one damage from a distance is useful.
Herald’s Pride is the final ability and it’s restricted to your leader, Ylarin. It’s simply an opportunity to make his attack more accurate by granting ensnare and cleave. Use it to stack the odds in your favor for landing that initial hit to inspire him, or save it to benefit from the improved damage profile of his inspired side. Of note, this doesn’t exclude weapons granted from upgrades or require it be a melee attack, so if you toss a ranged attack onto Ylarin he can increase his accuracy with it once per game as well.
Fighters of Kurnoth’s Heralds
Ylarin is the first of the fighters we’ll look at, and the leader of Kurnoth’s Heralds, sets the bar for how this aggro warband will be statted up.
Sporting 5 health and 1 shield for his save, this is the most defensive profile of the bunch. That’s a very respectable amount of resilience and is accompanied by a higher-than-average 4 move. As a three fighter warband, the glory split here is pretty average which leaves your leader at a hefty 3 bounty but as mentioned, he also has the best save profile so your glory pinata is at least somewhat well protected. None of these value change when inspired, but the baseline is fairly respectable so that’s not a huge deal.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say the warband is focused on having “high movement” but between having the fly rules in friendly territory and 4 move, Ylarin (and company) should be able to threaten anywhere on their half of the board pretty easily.
Offensively, Ylarin shows a trend I noticed in this release. Previously, the “leader stick” weapon profile was pretty standard on leaders in many warbands. It was a pretty generic dual profile of range 1, 2 hammers, 2 damage or range 2, 2 hammers, 1 damage – more damage when adjacent with the flexibility of reaching out for a poke. Ylarin instead is sporting the quite nice range 2, 2 hammer, 2 damage and critical grievous on his main starting weapon. It gets supercharged upon inspiring to pick up an extra attack dice and grievous all the time which puts Ylarin’s offense on par with some of the iconic heavy hitters of the game.
There’s a second attack profile here that’s also shared by all the other fighters in the warband – a fairly middling accuracy, range 1 attack with grapple. I think the idea here is that it’s an attack with their antlers? Or maybe a leg kick? Either way, it’s not going to be the attack of choice for most cases but it’s worthwhile to remember you do have a grapple attack on every fighter in this warband.
Cullon is your other front line fighter and the poor guy is the only one who doesn’t have a unique warscroll ability. His profile resembles Ylarin’s, but the shield save is traded for dodge. That’s a pretty steep downgrade, but having 5 health can help him weather a few hits still. The 4 movement here will be even more useful than on the other fighters, because Cullon is the only one who is restricted to range 1 attacks. Like Ylarin, Cullon’s basic profile doesn’t change when inspired.
In addition to the antler attack, Cullon has a big damn axe. Uninspired, it’s a pretty respectable accuracy attack that delivers 2 damage – nothing crazy, but on par with a lot of the 3 fighter elite warbands out there. Once inspired, though, the dude hits. Jumping up in accuracy by both picking up another attack dice and cleave, Cullon is now dishing out a flat 3 damage on each hit with room to grow if you can grant him access to grievous. You’ll definitely want to play cagey with Cullon early game to survive to the point where you can leverage his inspired profile and run around slicing fools up.
Lenwythe is the archer of the group. She has identical defensive stats as Cullon, but can stretch that a little further due to the fact that she’s likely to stay on the back line when possible.
Unlike the other two, she doesn’t have a melee weapon option other than the antlers, so she might wind up leveraging them a little more than Ylarin or Cullon if you need to score melee attack based objectives. Most of the time, however, she’s going to be firing off her range 3 bow. The base profile is a respectable 2 hammer attack with critical stagger, a fairly rare and (in the current delve-happy meta) not particularly exciting weapon ability. Once she makes a successful attack for her inspire trigger, the accuracy jumps up to 3 dice and the stagger is guaranteed. And, given the warscroll ability for her, this inspire can be pretty likely to happen early on. If you happen to play into an opponent who isn’t staggering themselves constantly, a bow shot from Lenwythe to soften up a foe and make the follow-up attack from Cullon or Ylarin more accurate is going to be very welcome.
Musings on Kurnoth’s Heralds
As is often the case with these bundled box releases, it feels like one of the included decks is intended to pair with one of the warbands for Rivals. Kurnoth’s Heralds have the slight focus on being in friendly territory, and that’s basically what Hunting Grounds is all about so there’s some intended synergy there.
As a strike warband, Kurnoth’s Heralds will also obviously benefit from the plethora of tools and attack-focused scoring in other strike decks like Blazing Assault, Reckless Fury, and Raging Slayers – the latter is known for having some rough objectives, but being able to reroll attacks from being enraged can help secure those early game inspires.
The Blood of the Bull
The Blood of the Bull brings the much anticipated Chaos Dwarf Helsmiths of Hashut release to the Warhammer Underworlds line. This is a five fighter Chaos warband sporting the Mastery archetype, and another warband with built in incentives to delve treasure tokens, following Zondara’s Gravebreakers and Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz.
Warscroll for The Blood of the Bull
There are two separate inspire mechanics for this warband – one for all the dwarves Duardin and one for special little Grisk. Grisk’s is easy; he just needs to stand next to an enemy that one of your other fighters attacks. It doesn’t even have to be successful. The rest of your fighters all require you to spend the special resource that this warband generates on an attack or save in order to inspire. Note the timing is that they inspire after you complete the daemonforge dice roll, so you don’t get to benefit from their inspired stats during the enhanced roll (unless they were inspired beforehand).
Alright, so what are daemonforge dice? Empowered by Spite outlines both how these dice are generated and how you can spend them. The warband shows up to the board with one daemonforged dice at the start of the game which is pretty handy. Further dice are generated by delving with some key restrictions. Firstly, you have to delve a treasure token. If the token has already been flipped to the cover side, you won’t generate any daemonforged dice by delving it back to the treasure side. Secondly, your fighter cannot have a stagger token when delving the treasure. I assume this is there to prevent you from parking a fighter on a feature token in the back of the board and just delving it in each power step back and forth to generate the dice.
A side effect of this restriction is that the dwarves are going to be required to spread out to cover multiple tokens if they want to generate more than one or two dice per round and they’ll want to flip cover tokens back over to their treasure sides near the end of a round to set up dice generation in the next round. It also means the various stagger granting cards and effects of the game have a uniquely detrimental effect on the Blood of the Bull. Lenwythe’s bow is looking a little more useful now.
There are two ways to spend the daemonforge dice, but both Enhanced Arsenal and Reinforce Armoury are functionally the same. You spend one daemonforge dice to add either an attack or save dice to your next roll. Cheating by looking ahead a bit, this warband already has a pretty solid set of accurate attacks and resilient save characteristics, so these effects are going to help you mitigate the randomness of dice even further.
Remember: you can’t bank these dice since they go away at the end of each round, so be sure to spend spend spend if you have them.
One of the fighters, the dwarf with a gun, also picks up a special rule in Infernal Conflagration. It’s a neat implementation of a way to encourage the ranged fighter to get up and close to the enemy (or to discourage the enemy from rushing him) by granting grievous to attacks against adjacent enemies.
Hobgrot Cunning is the final warscroll ability and, unsurprisingly, applies to the hobgrot in the warband. It also really elevates the value of Grisk and you’ll want to do what you can to keep the guy alive for as long as possible. Not only can Grisk set up flanks and surrounds like normal, but he also makes it so both swords and hammers count as successes. This is a huge step up in accuracy, especially for any attacks that rely on the more uncommon swords result. You’ll want to do what you can to keep Grisk safe to set up explosive turns, but that will take some positioning work and support from your deck because he is not an eligible candidate for daemonforge dice.
Fighters of The Blood of the Bull
Zuldrakka’s up first and I want to start out by saying I am eternally grateful that these fighters aren’t stuck on 2 move. I was worried that would be the case. Fortunately, 3 move is the standard across this warband including your leader. Zuldrakka’s also sporting 4 wounds and a single shield for her defensive stats while uninspired. When inspired, she picks up an extra save dice to sit at a very solid 2 shields. Her bounty is 2 so while she isn’t exactly expendable, you’re not hurting too badly if your opponent takes her out.
On the offensive side, Zuldrakka’s sporting a decent range 1 attack with critical stagger – a weird runemark that also inexplicably changes to critical grievous once she inspires. Fortunately, she also picks up another attack dice when inspired so not only is she more likely to land her hits, she also has a slightly higher chance to trigger her critical grievous effect. Even more so if you juice her attack up with a daemonforge dice.
On the whole, Zuldrakka has a pretty solid profile. Being able to rock 2 shields as a baseline save profile in addition to having the ability to boost it to 3 shields (that’s insane!) with daemonforge dice, she can be impressively hard to shift.
Imindrin is clearly the second in command here. Not necessarily because of her bounty value also being 2, but because she has a big ol’ daemon battery powered banner that doubles as a spear. She has the same defensive profile as Zuldrakka aside from being one less health, including jumping up to 2 shields on the inspired side.
Her weapon starts out better than the warband’s leader’s, even – the profile of the two are identical other than Imindrin getting an extra hex of range on her stabby flag. Inspired, she picks up another attack dice but (unfortunately for her) picks up stagger instead of critical grievous. I’ll admit I’m probably extra down on stagger as a runemark due to how often my opponents stagger themselves, but there are certainly matchups where it will come in handy. Even ignoring the stagger runemark, a range 2 weapon on 3 hammers that hits for 2 is a great profile.
The first bearded fighter of this warband shows up! Morudok continues the trend of being 3 move, 3 health, and 1 shield but is also the first single bounty fighter. Once inspired, he follows the ladies’ lead by jumping up to 2 shields for his save despite clearly walking around with two hammers. Maybe he’s blocking with his beard. This low bounty and high durability makes him a pretty decent dangle fighter to put on the front line if you want to protect some of your more valuable fighters early in the game.
Morudok is yet another fighter starting on 2 damage with critical stagger, although his triple sword profile is less impressive than the others we’ve seen so far. Manufacturing scenarios where he can benefit from flanking or surrounded will surely help. Once inspired, he gains a single attack dice and a guaranteed stagger on his attacks. He doesn’t shine as brightly as the other dwarven fighters in this warband, but someone has to draw the short straw. That’s not an intentional dwarf joke.
Tokkor is the kind of guy who shows up to a knife fight with a gun. He’s also the first fighter in this warband to not start on shield defense, but on a single dodge instead. He’s the squishiest dwarf of the bunch, but does at least jump up to 2 dodge once inspired.
Tokkor technically has a melee weapon, but it will be a rare circumstance indeed for you to ever choose it over his flamechurler (what a silly name). With the ranged weapon serving double duty as a range 3 attack and also a range 1 grievous attack, it outshines the melee profile even when uninspired. Once he inspires, the swords accuracy upgrades to hammers while the melee profile stays the same. This means that Tokkor is a fourth fighter in this warband who starts on 2 damage. Surely the trend can’t continue?
Finally, we get to the grimy little hobgrot. Grisk starts on 3 speed like the rest of the warband, but only has a piddly 2 health. Having 2 dodge at least increases the chances that he won’t explode into a cloud of hobgrot bits when the first enemy gets near him, but you’re still going to want to keep him safe if you plan to leverage Hobgrot Cunning during the game. He is the only fighter to bump up to 4 move when inspired, so if you ever do get him inspired (which involves him being adjacent to an enemy) you can at least have him run away if he survives.
He also has the least impressive melee profile of the bunch at range 1, 3 swords, 1 damage. He does have critical grievous, which means every single fighter in this warband can at least threaten the potential of 2 damage on the first turn of the game. For being the weediest grot in the group, it’s not a terrible profile… but it doesn’t improve at all once he inspires, so don’t rely on him for slitting any throats unless you’re in a pinch.
Musings on The Blood of the Bull
As with any warband that has “delve” on their warscroll, looking at Pillage & Plunder as a potential Rivals deck is a solid option. You’re going to be delving to buff up your attack and defenses anyway, so why not score some glory off of it?
Frankly, the stats are solid enough on all of these fighters to take almost any gameplan you want. Three of your fighters inspire to 2 shields and daemonforge dice can take that to a dumbfounding 3, which makes them incredibly hard to hit. Plopping any of these on a treasure token when scoring objectives from Emberstone Sentinels or Countdown to Cataclysm would work fine, even if you want to periodically delve a treasure token away. Their accuracy is high enough to make Realmstone Raiders a fairly reliable raiding deck. Straight up aggro is also an option with the slew of strike decks available.
Final Thoughts
This is truly a solid pair of warbands to be included in Spitewood. The pairing of Zikkit’s Tunnelpack and the Emberwatch back in Embergard weren’t bad at all, but they had much more streamlined mechanics as befitting the warbands included in the starter box. Kurnoth’s Heralds and the Blood of the Bull have more moving parts. There’s a bit more going on, particularly with the dwarves, and I’m eager to see what kind of impact these new warbands have in the competitive scene.
We’re only getting warmed up! If you’re still eager for more, dive into the rest of the Goonhammer coverage of the Spitewood releases!
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