Actually I've found 3 very potent anti-Deathmaster cards and/or effects to limit him (that aren't just kill-cards). BUT that doesn't mean he's easily neutralized, I'll give you that much.

Yeah, I have 3x Isha's Blessing in my HE deck and the Deathmaster is about 50% of the reason. The other 50% is that your Dragonmage or other nearly indestructible guy that you'd really like to have on sentry duty seems to have a bad habit of getting corrupted and the zone behind him catching fire. Of course I'll pretty much always blow the Deathmaster up with a Zealot Hunter instead of Blessing him if I can. I wish Stand Your Ground would work on the Zealot Hunter...

Anyway, Isha's Blessing. It's not a very good card at all and of course it's totally dead if you are playing against Order. At least it costs 0. If you could play it as an action then I'd be much happier about having to run it.

As cyberfunk says, the Skaven deck right now actually gains from sideboarding since you can maindeck all the hate you want and you still won't hit 50% win rate. Then they can sideboard Mob Up!, Veteran Sellswords and maybe Poison Wind Globadiers for the mirror. It's quite unusual because you would expect a deck like Skaven to lose ground when you have sideboards. The real reason it doesn't is that there simply aren't good enough answers to the deck in the card pool currently.

I will do some testing tonight,but I have been running a DE hand attack deck that appers to do well vs skaven, but then my bro's deck is not as tunned as it could be, although it is pretty darn good, if not as trimed as many. But the DE attack the hand/snip deck does pretty good. If it works out vs a more tuned skaven deck, which I intend to build this after for him to play with, I might have a winner for you.

Bhah futher testing has me running a 4/10 with a more highly tuned skaven/orc deck.

However I am having a bit of luck with an empire/dwarf judgement deck. But not enough games to say if they will do it.

This is the DE/Skaven List that I got second at the Super Regional with. It is realistically maybe 50% against orc/skaven at best but I just didnt want to play what I thought everyone else would be playing.

3-Clan Molder Elites

3-Clan Rats

3-Greyseer Thanquil

3-Deathmaster Sknitch

2-Gutter Runner

2-Rat Ogre

2-Poison Wind Globadiers

3-Dark Initiate (This definitely should have been Walking Sacrifice Instead)

3-Shades

3-Vile Sorceress

3-Har Ganeth

3-Chillwind

3-Dark Visions

3-We Need your Blood

2-Sack Tor Anderias

3-Innovation

3-Contested Village

3-Warpstone Excavation

I have a deck that overall beats your deck - out of 200 games it won 106. I feel with some small changes (getting rid of Gutter Runners, Shrine of Nurgle) it could be a very, very good deck - but I have been lazy making copies of card to test decks (I photo copy cards to try them out - there is no need to have 6 real copies of Deathmaster Sniktch).

It is a Chaos/Skaven build, because I have not found an Order deck that can compete over the long haul.

Supports

3 x Shrine to Nurgle (Core Set 98)

3 x Contested Village (Core Set 111)

3 x Warpstone Excavation (Core Set 116)

2 x Warpstone Metor (Core Set 96)

2 x Fellblade (Corruption Set 100)

Total Supports = 13

Tactics

3 x Seduced By Darkness (Core Set 99)

3 x Nurgle's Pestilence (Core Set 101)

1 x Blood for the Blood God (Core Set 103)

Total Tactics = 7

Units

3 x Clan Rats (Corruption Set 16)

3 x Deathmaster Sniktch (Corruption Set 79)

3 x Greyseer Thanquol (Corruption Set 15)

3 x Clan Moulder's Elite (Corruption Set 57)

3 x Gutter Runners (Corruption Set 56)

3 x Rat Ogres (Corruption Set 55)

3 x Festering Nurglings (Core Set 83)

3 x Savage Marauders (Core Set 82)

3 x Savage Gors (Core Set 90)

3 x Servants of Khorne (Core Set 81)

Total Units = 30

Total Cards = 50

The point of this deck is to have a semi-fast attack and still able to control the board. You need to be able to pull 5 resources a turn - Savage Marauders are great for this and you need to have a draw of 4-5 cards a turn in order to keep Blood for the Blood God and Nurgle's Pestilence in your hand.

You have several cards that can corrupt - Seduced by Darkness, Festering Nurglings, Warpstone Metor, and Fel Blade (if you have to use it on an enemy Deathmaster Sniktch). I like to get my Deathmaster Sniktch out 2nd in order to counter an action of another Deathmaster (last action in is the first action out). Other than that it is a typical Chaos/Skacen deck.

I believe this deck woule be better (at least I feel) if I take out Shrine to Nurgle and add in Dark Elf/Chaos Support (Core Set 126) and take out the Gutter Runners and add Chillwind (Attack Set 39), but it has not been play tested. The Fel Blades have won games, but only a few, so they need to go for some stronger cards, but I cannnot decide what. My first thought was Vile Sorceress (Core Set 107), Cauldron of Blood (Core Set 109), We Need Your Blood (Corruption Set 14),and Shades (Attack Set 25).

Try this deck out and if you have the same findings then I would really like my cookie.

Any other thoughts about this deck would be helpful for regionals.

Vitamin T said:

This isn't meant as a rip, honestly, but that's not really terribly different from the current Tournament environment from what I've seen so far. Yeah, you have a few different cards but nothing really crazy either. The current environment, if unchanged by new cards, would be consistently Orc/Skaven followed closely by Dark Elf/Skaven, like you have here.

Still it IS a good deck and nearly won so you can be proud of that, if not of any real originality, per se.

Tulsy said:

Other than that, yeah, it looks like a pretty typical Chaos/Skaven deck. Generally solid. As you say, Fellblade isn't great, so I'd cut that for sure. Running the Pestilences as a reset is interesting - of course they will kill your team more than the opponents against non-Skaven decks. We did consider that in our Chaos build but ended up not doing it because we figured that there would be other decks in the metagame and it would mostly be dead against them. Sigh.

Shrine to Nurgle is playable just because it's a Chaos symbol on a standard-costed support (the nerfed version pretty much never triggers) but obviously you can cut it if you go into Orc or DE. I'm not sold that it's worth going into DE for We Need Your Blood. Maybe give Tzeentch's Firestorm a try - the 2-for-1 is pretty nice, you can cast things that cost 4 and double loyalty is more doable for you than the triple on Flames.

Vile Sorceress is not as exciting as you would think against Skaven - Poison Wind Globadiers are actually better, I think. Not that they're great, they're just better than the Sorceresses.

I would also try one or two Wolves of the North. Greyseer on WotN wins very fast if they don't kill him immediately and Rat Ogres are also pretty nice on that quest.

You'd probably like to cut Gutter Runners but the cheap Chaos units are pretty bad, so I'm not sure you can. After Nurglings and Savage Gors you're pretty much out of options right now.

As you probably know, I am a huge fan of Innovation in virtually every deck. Looking in my deck box, I have 8 decks made right now and only 1 doesn't have Innovations. I do not know whether you can run it in this deck given the Gors - I'd have to try it to know.

I thought I might be running Deathmaster wrong, so it is back to the drawing board for more testing and I am going to try the editied deck with the DE splash. I should have it tested in a few days - I feel 200 games gets a good feel for data.

Clamatius said:

I feel in regionals I will only run into Skaven decks or DE decks (due to their recent success), so I think it may be wise to include it in a deck - if not it will be a good card to put down as a development to use for Innovation, which will probally find its way into the deck. I hope someone braves up and comes with an Order deck, but that is doubtful.

Have you play tested the deck on itself? I am curious what the trigger would be to declare the winner. I feel it would be the 1st Deathmaster out, but I am not sure what it would be if there was not a Deathmaster present. Its kinda sad that you have to build a deck around 1 card in the game >_<.

I would never claim that my deck was very original. Honestly when you put skaven in a deck you have already decided about 1/2 of your cards between them, warpstone, contested village, and innovation. Really with so small of a card pool it is pretty difficult to come up with a wildly different deck that would be any good (I'm sure its possible).

To me building a deck that can win with few or no skaven in it is more the challenge than building a skaven deck that can get up to 51% against orc/skaven while using a different capital board.

Vitamin T said:

I'm sure its not possible... good lord we have tried just about everything from Verena nonsense to aggro-order to HE/Dwarf ramp to Chaos control to DE aggro control to Orc control to Orc rush.... yeah, you get the point.

I am not sold yet on which build of Skaven is best because, as Clamatius has said elsewhere in this thread, its hard to tell. We've had ridiculous double-Warpstone, Lobber Crew, Innovate, Alliance type starts that lose because the other side gets an active Deathmaster and all yours are sitting on the bottom of the deck. So many cards in the Skaven mirror just do not matter at all.

So yeah. This Orc/Skaven build maximizes speed and disruption, and that seems like a good place to be. To be fair, given tournament data that everyone is running Skaven I could see re-evaluating and building in a different direction. Counter-intuitively, things like Dark Visions, Chittering Horde, Altar etc have been pretty poor for us despite what you'd think would be a better chance of drawing into Deathmasters. Maybe we just need to test more; what we have learned is small edges in resource production assuming similarly timed Deathmasters will tip the game in favor of the faster player. The clocks these decks put on each other are no joke. But just getting an active Deathmaster without developing your board is often not good enough. Deathmaster chews away about a turn and a half or so worth of tempo as soon as he hits the table; but if you wasted the time he bought you by spending your resources & time finding him, you're net zero gain. Of course, if you dont find him, you lose. Its a frustrating match to play.

Wytefang said:

Wytefang, half the skill in this game is building the deck but the other half is actually playing it well. If everyone has the same deck (which looks like the case at this point), then it's actually the best player who wins. While the designers might have intended this game to be a rock, paper, scissors type, it has turned into a rock, rock, rock game. So whoever can use the rock best wins and I'm ok with that.

By the way Clamatius, this deck is VERY good. While Tulsy's deck may beat this one 53% of the time, I still don't consider that a big enough difference to say it is a better deck (maybe just as good though). Good job and I'm sorry you aren't playing in a tournament.

Yeah, it took a lot of games to get it down to this list - if you hunt around somewhere on the forum you'll find the earlier version which was more tuned to beat up on other deck types (e.g. with Veteran Sellswords, etc.) before we figured out the best ways to make it more consistent. This version is much more resilient to Pestilence etc. than some of the more creature-heavy versions and has less cards that are sometimes dead or just slow draws (Waaagh, relics, etc.).

Clearly you can still beat it with most reasonable decks - hell, I managed to go something like 3/5 the other day with a shoddy Empire Verena deck since I am skillful enough to draw Will/Verena like a champion (go Errant Wolf go!). As an aside, I think Empire is the weakest capital board right now, worse than both High Elves and Dwarves - and all the Order boards are weaker than Destruction right now just because they can't play Skaven.

Looking in my deckbox, right now I have:

Orc/Skaven

Dark Elf/Skaven

Chaos anti-unit

High Elf blockers

Dwarf/Empire aggro

High Elf/Dwarf Bolt Thrower

Empire/Dwarf Verena

Orc w. Troll Vomit

There's obviously a Chaos/Skaven deck and a Dark Elf control deck too which I should probably build for completeness. All of those together seem like the major obvious archetypes. There's a fair number of different ways to build each one, too. I've beaten Skaven with every one of the non-Skaven archetypes, I just can't do it consistently because the answers are not good enough to Skaven's threats and disruption.

And Toberk, as for your point about the best player that wins since the decks are the same, sadly that's not really true in the Skaven mirror matchup. Assuming there isn't a huge mismatch in player skill, it mostly depends on who is better at drawing Deathmaster. Not always, but mostly.

Clamatius said:

Stack order does sometimes matter with dancing Deathmasters, since there will be one fewer Skaven in play after one of the DM activations resolves. Since you check target legality again on resolution, the Deathmaster that fired second would live if there were only three total Skaven initially.

Re: Tulsy's deck

I agree with Clamatius that DE splash is probably not worth it and that Wolves and Tzeentch's Firestorm are the best cards not already in the deck. I might also consider running a weird suite of tactics like 2 Brutal Offering, 2 Firestorm, and 2 Pestilence or something. Since so many guys are dying anyway, it won't be tough to find a "sacrifice" for Offering, and it gives them another card to play around. Alternatively, you could go 3 Pestilence, 3 Firestorm, and a couple Ancient Waystones (for the ability and another support that survives Pestilence).

Innovation is good in a lot of Skaven decks simply because they don't have any way to spend three barrels on turn one other than Village, but this deck has Marauders and Servants of Khorne, which I think gives it plenty to do with three barrels. It's also playing more hammers to Kingdom, in general, than most Skaven builds. And with Pestilence, you don't necessarily want to be in the position of having more of your cards on the table while more of theirs are in hand. Also (last point, really), the two-cost guys in this deck aren't exactly stellar opening plays; Innovating into Savage Gor and Festering Nurgling is using four cards to do the job of one. It does suck that Savage Marauders are so vulnerable on turn one, especially against DE; but, if you aren't willing to open with them, they probably shouldn't be in there at all.

I dont think empire is weakest. It beats Dwarf and HE quite often.

cyberfunk said:

Doesn't matter. Deathmaster doesnt have an intervening 'if' clause - the number of Skaven in play is checked only when the ability is announced and put onto the stack. As long as the target is legal when Deathmaster's ability is used, the ability will resolve and destroy the target.

Clamatius said:

Can you link to the ruling on this or go into it a bit more. I'm not remembering this being discussed (but in fairness I only take in the Rules section every once in a while - not as much as I probably could or should).

So if my opponent has a DM and then I put mine down, and he activates his, I can activate mine right back. The stack would have my effect, then his. My effect should kill him, and you're saying his effect would still remain on the stack, despite the fact that the original source (his DM) is now long-gone? That strikes me as some more timing shenanigans. Grrr....

Wytefang said:

Yes Wytefang both DM would die. Just because the unit the action is coming from is destroyed, does not mean the action is lost.

That scenario you just described is exactly how it works. However, I'm not so sure that the ability does not check (again) that the target is legal upon resolution.

So if there was exactly one other Skaven card in play at the beginning of that sequence, would the first Deathmaster ability (second to resolve) resolve successfully, even though there would no longer be more Skaven cards in play than the Deathmaster's 2 HP?

I sent it in to James as a general "when do targeted effects check for target legality" question. I also threw in the same situation for Har Ganeth - if the target unit gains HP in response to HG's action, does it return to hand?

Good job, Clamatius. Can you send it to me via my Email address and I will ask James personally at the FFG Event Center this Friday (if he is there)?? Then I can post it right away (perhaps quicker than he might normally get to reply).

It's not as clear as it could be, but the FAQ states:

Target
Targeting is checked when the card
is played and when the card effect
resolves. A card effect to is considered
to be targeting as long as it says
“target” in the card text.

James told me some time ago, in a ruling, that target legality is checked on resolution; I thought that made it to the unofficial FAQ thread, but maybe not. The specific example I gave him was a Smash-Go-Boom targeting two developments, with a Will of the Electors being played in response to move one of the developments. That situation comes up all the time, right? Anyway, he said that the moved development would no longer be a legal target on resolution (SGB says "in one zone"), and thus would survive. I saw several other ways to interpret this situation, even given that you are checking legality again, but I didn't think any one made more sense than the next.

Actually, the FAQ goes on to say, in another entry:

Illegal Targets

If a card effect specifies targets, it checks
whether the targets are legal when it is
played and when it resolves. A target can
become illegal if it is removed from play, if
it is removed from the zone specified in the
ability, or if any specific characteristics on
the card that were targeted have changed. If
all of the targets for a card effect become
illegal, then the card effect is cancelled. If
any of the targets are still legal when the
card effect resolves, then the card effect will
resolve normally, only affecting the legal
targets.

If so : har ganeth + WNYB is not a legal combo