Post-Relic Meta

Do you remember the dark times?

So it’s been over a week now since Shadespire received the Beta Rules which balanced Katophrane Relics. While I won’t go into the good and bad of this (it’s mainly a good thing), I can go over what we can learn from the whole situation as a whole.

On a sidenote, it is very good to see Games Workshop quickly fix massive problems with the game, showing us that they do care a lot for the game and the community as a whole.

So, what can we learn? Defensive play can be very strong, especially when it revolves around starving you of glory while consistently earning glory of their own. It’s important, going forwards, to remember this and include counters to this with how you play and construct your decks as they will be scoring a lot of passive glory points from ‘doing nothing’. While this tactic is mainly used by Defensive Steelheart players, Hold Objective players can also use a variation of this style.

I’ll go over a few helpful points:

• Balance your decks with mobility cards and easy to score objectives so you don’t get starved of glory and waste phases moving up. Cards like Spectral Wings, Hidden Paths and Sprint are useful for this.

• Practice more with length-ways play to familiarise yourself with it and not get surprised.

• Don’t rush in and think they won’t hit back. They need that glory again so will go for the kill when it’s presented to them.

• They’ll still be denying you glory but when you get in, cause as much damage as possible. Phase 3 will be the make-or-break time generally.

• Hold Objective people will need a lot of pushes to counter their 4 push cards (Earthquake, Great Concussion, Distraction and Peal of Thunder/Scratching in the Shadows/Terrifying Screams). Make them waste their pushes early so you can key-up at the end.
• A Destiny to Meet is helpful for everyone. Sometimes that single glory can change the game.

With all these points combined, it should result with a more consistent performance of your warband. While Katophrane Relics were bad for the game, they showed how greedy a lot of aggro warbands were (only relying on kills for glory) as well as the lack of mobility in a lot warbands too (Hold Objective players included).

But now we can all enjoy what the new balanced future will bring. Every playstyle is back on level footing again so it will be interesting to see what develops with Shadespire and the community, until the next new Underworlds game is released. All I know, is that there will be a lot of crits.