As I seem to be one of the Uthuk diehards, or at least one of the noisiest, I’ve debated about writing something up as a pseudo strategy guide. A sort of collection of writings focusing on individual Uthuk-only upgrades or upgrades that speak very well to Uthuk. Here’s my stab at it. Feel free to say “insightful” or “useless” or whatever. I’m hoping to generate conversation around strategy.
NOTE: as of writing this, we have not seen the Uthuk archers. I’m only going to mention abstractly if the specific upgrade might be more ideal for archers.
Blood Diviner (2/1, 3 points): at the start of each round, you may look at the top [Stable] cards of your morale deck. You may exhaust this card to discard 1 of those cards.
When a unit at range 1-3 loses one or more figures, if this card is exhausted, you may ready it.
The first thing to notice is the refresh text is so easy to trigger you can essentially ignore it when looking at the upgrade. There aren’t many turns in an Uthuk match that don’t involve figures dying.
Being able to view the top [Stable] morale cards amounts to “knowledge is power.” In practice You aren’t really using this to fish for a severity three morale card as much as you are trying to avoid the less useful severity one cards. For example: avoiding the ones that your opponent has steadfast against. The scenario where this card strikes me as most useful is sitting in an archer formation in a berserker heavy army running 2+ Cacophony Reavers (multiple 4 trays or more of Berserkers). It is a little counterintuitive as the faceup card from Cacophony Reaver doesn’t/shouldn’t stack with the peek at the top card. Though it does allow you to discard it if you don’t like it. This upgrade’s text now can result directly in an increased damage output instead of a nebulously effective but never negative ability to weigh in on the first morale card coming up.
Full disclosure: this is a card I barely run or consider. Honestly, this figure suffers not because it is bad, but because the other champion slot options are so good.
Below are the combinations and synergies that I’ve been able to identify. In general, for Uthuk, Champion/Heraldry synergies are most desirable as you can put them together on one unit for the least cost. This isn’t to say that a double champion figure upgrade won’t be worth it, but you need to be planning to get more out of both those 2x2 berserker formations than just that combo.
Combinations/synergy:
-Blood Diviner/Cacophony Reaver(s): Reavers start with an average 1.73 Lethal from the morale deck. The ability to discard a severity one morale card raises that average to 2.1. If you include the turns with two [Stable] and fishing for a severity three under a faceup severity two gets you up to around 2.15. This does not consider sitting on severity three cards. I also don’t know how to quantify reliably the effects of draining the morale deck. Diviner becomes a force multiplier for multiple Reavers.
-Blood Diviner/Mutilated Grotesque: Knowing the top morale card or two could let you know if exhausting MG to add that morale icon is worth it or not.
-Blood Diviner/Rage Spine: Rage Spine lets you double the effects of a severity one morale card. Blood Diviner lets you sift those top command morale cards so that you can try to find a severity one that is helpful. It doesn’t strike me as a powerful combo, but it isn’t expensive and there seems to be a synergy here.
-Blood Diviner/Bannerscamp: Diviner allowing you to peek at he top morale card makes it so Bannerscamp’s ability to give your enemy panic tokens equal to the severity of the morale test means that you can sit on that Betrayal or Flee in Terror (since you know it is coming) a little longer and wait for it to be used against a proper target or avoid revealing it during a severity two morale test. Similar to combining with Rage Spine, this isn’t super powerful but you also didn’t pay much for it.
-Blood Diviner doesn’t really have a strong synergy that I’ve seen with any of the Shriekers, Warsprinter, or Grotesque Slasher.
By all means, anyone reading this can go after anything I’ve listed or said. It’s an opinion piece.