Also, as to the topic of the thread.... (though technically I'm thinking of 'Destruction post Silent Forge')... after testing my two ideas today (Chaos aggro and Orc aggro) I am going to flat out say this:

There are no viable destruction decks in the game right now.

Reclaiming the Fallen makes unit-control strategies irrelevant. Outpost of Tirranoc makes Bolt Thrower fast enough to beat Grimgor decks. Grimgor decks lose to dwarves.

But the main culprit? Mining Tunnels. Card is ridiculously, absurdly broken and without a resource-ramp equivalent, I do not think destruction based decks can be competitive right now.

I would love for anyone to post a destruction list they feel is competitive, but I am pretty much giving up.

I'm not so sure it's quite as simple as boiling down to Tunnels, although they are clearly way over the power curve. As a general rule of thumb, anything where you would cut one of the core 9 (Warpstone, Innovation, Village) to keep the card is too good. I think the Grimgor + Vomit plan was totally viable before Reclaiming the Fallen. That card is just such a savage hoser to Destruction in general.

Maybe there's a mill deck in there? I know people have been playing DE mill, although really it seems to come down to Plague Monks being the main mill source. Chaos has a fair number of spells. I know some people on the boards have been playing around with mill for a long time but I haven't looked into it.

Clamatius said:

Sadly Reclaiming the Fallen hoses mill worse than it hoses anything else. In my experience with a DE Mill deck, your first zone is almost always going to get burned before your lockdown truly kicks in. All they need is 1 Reclaim to wipe you out completely, and your milling helps populate that attack. Dwarves are dumb.

Clamatius said:

Yeah, destruction needs some work and it finally appears that we're starting to build up a few cards worthy of banning or errata-ing. Sigh.

CAlexander said:

Yeah, I think this is a big problem in the game right now for the competitive scene (as much as one exists).

It seems like Dwarves are supposed to be good at economic development (Cannon Crew, Mining Tunnels, Ancestral Tomb). But they also have the best point support removal in the game in Demolition, Master Rune of Spite (which singlehandedly devastates aggressive strategies) and now Reclaiming the Fallen, which is crushing for unit control strategies.

Thrower on top of the Dwarf resource engine is also problematic. You can run that deck out of a HE board though - it won't be as good but it's still very powerful and hard to beat without specific hate (e.g. Grimgor, Mob Up, Bloodthirster).

As for a solution other than wait or ban a bunch of stuff for a few months, I don't really have one, honestly. I think the game is in a pretty bad place now competitively speaking in terms of diversity of metagame. It was bad at GenCon and the last BP was disastrous for the game, between Outpost of Tiranoc and Reclaiming the Fallen. Even Single Set is probably broken right now because the meta would be wall to wall Dwarves.

I guess my current watchlist for seriously overpowered cards would look something like:

• Warpstone Excavation
• Mining Tunnels
• Reclaiming the Fallen
• Repeater Bolt Thrower

Outpost of Tiranoc is actually fine once the Bolt Thrower is gone - the HE indirect aggro deck with Outposts is pretty fun. Derriksburg Forge would probably make the list except that the rest of Empire is not that good.

Anyway, I suspect the game would be significantly healthier without the listed cards but I'm not quite ready to start arguing for banning all of them in competitive settings yet. I guess when considering bans you can skip Warpstone just because it doesn't constrict metagame diversity. If I was a tourney organizer I would be seriously considering banning the rest though rather than trying for weird hacks (e.g. the 1/2 your deck matches the board rule, which just further rewards Dwarves).

Overwhelmingly agree that Silent Forge is the worst battle pack printed to date from a development pov. I like the design of a lot of the cards (as you mentioned, outpost when played fairly is a blast in the HE deck), but they are just wrecking the competitive landscape right now.

Regardless, only bolt thrower is a true candidate for banning IMO - its pretty clear FFG has embraced cheap resource/card draw (see: forge, tunnels) as a balancing mechanism. I think this is a truly, truly terrible idea that is incredibly bad for the game, but its obvious that's what they want. At this point banning Warpstone would just make dwarves that much better than everyone else. On a similar note, Reclaiming the Fallen utterly hoses all of destruction by itself, but its not as if this is a tricky card whose use is non-obvious during development. Clearly they were OK printing a card that says "unit control is no longer a viable strategy". This is an odd move considering every destruction faction is pretty much based on competing along the unit control axis, but maybe the upcoming battle packs will see functional reprints of spider riders and choppa, or a Troll Vomit without the "play on your turn" restriction, or something...

Clamatius said:

I don't think banning is necessarily the way to go (for the most part), as the first two items on the above list could fairly easily be balanced by making them Unique. Both Mining Tunnels and Warpstone are completely fine by themselves, but when you start piling multiples they get abusive as Mining Tunnels gets exponentially better and Warpstone no longer has a drawback.

I think it can be agreed that RBT could be easily fixed by making it once per turn. It may turn it into a coaster but I don't think that would break too many hearts.

Reclaiming...well that one is just frustrating and any fix would involve redesigning the card completely. Maybe make it a 10 cost epic spell

Mining Tunnels is 2 hammers for 2D (one of them required to be in quest), provided you develop once a turn, no matter how many of them you have out. It does not "get better in multiples" it is just absurdly broken and should never have been printed.

Same thing for Warpstone Excavation.

I mean, I guess it "gets better in multiples" in the sense that it is pretty hard to lose when you have more than one in play, but thats not really scaling or synergy its just winning because you have a lot of broken cards.

Also, @ balancing them via errata... not in favor. Confusing for new players why their cards don't do what they say they do. Better to just ban them from competitive play and print new, "fixed" versions.

Clamatius said:

This hack is not thought for Constructed. We will have 5 tournaments at Stahleck.
1xHighlander - should kill Thrower and Hardcore Dwarfs
1xConstructed - it is the half-official european championship, so FFG rules count
1xDraft - no Thrower with parallel 1x Peasant (Single Set) perhaps
1xTeam Cup
The 50% rule is for the the team cup. Each team has to build 6 decks, 1 for each race with 50% cards of the race.

I will probably take a fun Empire Knight Deck to Constructed and concentrate on Draft and Highlander, seems to be more fun.

After I got March and played my first games this was one of the more successful decks. This deck can have some powerful starts and getting Grimgor in 3rd or 4th turn is not unusual. Great Cave Squig and RIP are so good in getting Bloodthirster and Grimgor into discard pile where you can easy Raise them. You can also RIP Iseara at the beginning of your turn to get the Lobber Crew Loop one turn earlier and cheaperif you need to. Even on defense RIP can be a really good tool.

In my latested build I changed Beguile in for Followers of Mork as it also can set up Squigs and Boarz but I can also use it to disrupt enemys battlefield. But I didn't play it already with it so I can't say wether it is a so called "terrible card".

I didn't design it especially against dwarfes (seems like a hopeless undertaking*) but it's fun to play and in our playgroup we play different decks and in this case early Grimgor and a Iseara Crew combo are never a bad plan.

units:22

3 Clan Moulder's Elite
3 Lobber Crew
3 Squig Herders
3 Boar Boyz
2 Great Cave Squig
2 Countess Iseara
3 Grimgor Ironhide
3 Bloodthirster

tactics:15

3 Innovation
3 We'z Bigga!
1 Wolf Rider Assault
3 Rip Dere 'Eads Off!
2 Beguile
3 Raise Dead

support:13

3 Warpstone Excavation
3 Contested Village
2 Chaos/Orc Alliance
3 Grimgor's Camp
2 Squig Pen

*

I also tested a darkelf deck with handdiscard, slave and corruption effects in it. I think one way of dealing with Reclaim is not destroying dwarf units but rather letting them in play (corruption/Word of Pain for example) or taking them over (DE tactics). Grudge Thrower and the fact that dwarfs have so much "necromancy/undead" mechanics are still a major pain in the *** but maybe there lies the key.

Will of Tzeentch and Blood Frency are some good tools with chaos but they are so bad in controlling support cards and are lacking useful 2/3 cost units with low loyalty for getting a faster early game. Chaos has so many effects that let them corrupt their units but no way to uncorrupt more than one a turn, like Rat Ogres can do it for skaven and Warpstone Excavation further weakens mono-chaos beside its value as a card.

Leaving the dwarf units in play but nerfing them via Word of Pain, corruption, etc. doesn't work. They will just drop a grudge thrower and sacrifice them. Reclaim the Fallen is just a mistake and hopefully FFG will get rid of it after it's had it's time (I don't expect them to do anything in the short term).