Warband Deconstruction: Offensive Steelheart’s Champions (The Deck)

Welcome to the first in my series of articles looking at specific warband breakdowns, beginning with my ever-faithful Steelheart’s Champions

I get a lot of requests asking me to cover deployment, card usage and positioning but to do general coverage would be too broad and take far too long to type out or even speak about. Due to the varied nature of Shadespire in terms of warband construction and player choice, you can generally build a warband to do whatever you want. This means that deployment options for a single force can vary completely depending on how you run them.

This series of articles will allow me to do in-depth coverage of specific warband builds encompassing: deck construction, deployment options and general strategies. Generally it will be done on warbands I run/have run but also more popular and commonplace builds that you are likely to run into. It also helps me show you how such warbands are played competitively and the thought processes that go into them.

Firstly, let’s look at offensive Steelheart’s Champions. This style of warband is one I played for about 2 months and took to the Warhammer World Grand Clash in March where I managed to place 11th out of 68 people with. I also took them to 3 other independent tournaments to which I placed 1st in all of them.

So how did I decided to play such a warband? Well firstly I approached them the same way I do for all my warbands when I build decks (see my deck building article). I had been playing Orruks since the game launched but found them quite inconsistent. When looking at Stormcast I noticed they had very good defensive stats built-in as well as excellent damage output. At the time, people played them very defensively but I saw that they could be played aggressively instead. It wouldn’t take much work to do so as their tough stats meant I didn’t need to do much to protect them so I could instead focus on their offensive output.

Here is the deck I made after some refinement. It was done upon the Skaven and Fyre Slayer release so it has not been updated for the recent set of brand new cards. I won’t go over all the cards individually but I will cover some of the key cards.

The power deck is also 22 cards. This is because Stormcast only have 3 fighters so I usually spend the first activation of very action phase to draw a power card. With Duel of Wits, it helps cycle through the bigger deck.

Objectives

While the usually killy objectives are there to get the glory ball rolling, I also included some cards that I could achieve while not killing to help stand-offs (Escalation, Ploymaster, Seize Ground, Consecrated Area). Annihilation isn’t a necessary card but I feel it is for anyone running aggro decks playing in tournaments and events to help with placements via glory differential. The deck also has 5 instant objectives to help cycle through the deck and also chain glory.

Ploys

Steelheart’s Champions have a great selection of cards. With Peal of Thunder and Distraction you have 2 push cards. Spoils of Battle is there to help get first-turn upgrades off when the killing hasn’t started as well as Ready for Action and Time Trap to allow extra attacks. I like Parry but it can be swapped out for Mighty Swing etc. I ran it to discourage charges and add a little more chance of inspiring from attacks.

Upgrades

As Steelheart’s Champions have their own wound upgrade, I included 2 to make it hard to one-shot 2 fighters or make one a monster of 6 wounds. I also included Cursed Artefact for a 3 Defence Stormcast, extra fearsome on Brightshield. Sevrin’s upgrades (Heroic Stride and Fatal Riposte) are also excellent as they allow extra moves and attacks based on your opponent coming in and attacking you.

So there you have it, the first part of the focus article done. Tune in next time for when I’ll be looking at how to deploy the warband against various opponents. It will even include crits.