Interestingly, one of the things that really hurts the Empire deck is that people may choose Innovation over Warpstone Excavation if Empire is strong in the meta. Empire was very happy if people played WE since then the Haunted City was going to move it to the battlefield - which essentially made it a dead draw against Empire since you couldn't risk playing it.

Which restricted card do you pick for the Empire? It's not clear. Mining Tunnels and Innovation look like the lead contenders to me. Friedrich is a great finisher instead of Wilhelm but he's vulnerable to Master Rune of Spite. Hopefully Dwarves are enfeebled enough that MRoS isn't a big worry.

I think the first place I would go with Empire is the Order in Chaos setup to loop Verena. It has the big problem that if you don't draw Verena a lot of your deck doesn't do anything, although at least Hidden Grove gives you some improved defense till the Judgement shows up.

Overall, I think this restricted list is a great improvement for the game. I like the way that it knocks out the core 9 too since you have more "actual" slots in building.

It took them FAR too long to get here, but they finally have. Better late than never I suppose. There might actually be some hope for the game if they are willing to admit their horrible design mistakes and take steps to address them.

@ Clamatius - if dwarves & MROS aren't a worry, maybe its time to build a Skaven deck? Can empire handle that kind of speed? IIRC it spends a lot of time durdling with support kill in the early turns, and its non-Friedrich dudes all suck horribly. Not really feasible for them to play MROS w/out tunnels either since they are certainly going to choose Innovation or Warpstone for their restricted card.

Wytefang said:

Oh, of course they suffer. But there were some posts earlier in the thread that implied Dwarves are now weak, and I disagree with that. They have been weakened, but they are still very strong. It was actually difficult to keep a Dwarves deck down to 50 cards because they have so many good ones.

Chaos and Orcs can choose between Warpstone Excavation, which is a liability with the Haunted City around, and Innovation, which has been weakened due to the need to develop all zones now. Dwarves can choose between these and MT and RtF. I'm sure the little guys can handle that sort of weakening.

@Mallumo, can they though? Card power level in a vacuum isn't good enough to say. I agree with your point that Dwarves have some very powerful cards, but Dwarves as a deck worked well because of the inherent synergy between its powerful cards when it came to having solutions to the problems posed by the other decks in the metagame.

If you opt for RTF, you slow down to the point where, by the time you need to RTF, you havent been able to play enough guys to trade with & deal enough damage to have RTF be lethal. If you opt for MT, you still slow down a bit relative to the other decks (esp empire) who don't have to make a similar choice, and now you have no "i win" card to handle unit-attrition matchups.

See where I'm going with this? I agree dwarves is better than many people will give it credit at first blush, but it took a MAJOR hit here.

Anyhow, on the testing front Skaven fared reasonably well, taking 1 of 3 quick games we played at lunch vs. Empire. I need to ramp back up on my ability to pilot the deck since its been a while, and we badly need to tune the list, but the potential is definitely there.

Orc control I am a bit more sketchy on - in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the final product incorporates some elements of both decks. The one thing we've gathered so far is Empire's biggest weakness is to fast decks, so that's what we'll be working to exploit for a while.

I think I agree with your meta evaluation ddm.

I do like the concept of this list and overall I think they got most of it right. The one exception being I would have put Judgement on here rather than whilhelm. What do you guys think are the strongest cards in the game overall? for me its these:

1. Mining Tunnels

2. Warpstone Excavation

3. Innovation

4. Reclaim the Fallen

5. Contested Village

6. Judgement of Verena

7. I feel there are many cards here, I'm not sure I could pick just one. Troll Vomit, Master Rune of Spite, Clan Moulder Elite, Death Master Sknitch, Slave Pens, Wight Lord etc....

TL

#1 - is there a good online search engine for WH anymore? I had one...they stopped putting cards into it. Then I changed it to another (Zandri) and it looks like they stopped. Anyone?

#2 - great idea. Just awesome. Way better than the 1X (which becomes a luck thing). Can't wait to change my decks actually. I thought this game had more auto-includes than almost any game I had played.

Dwarves took a pretty decent hit, but not as big as some people think. Personally, I will keep the Innovates for the 3+ on the first turn action that you can get, over the semi-card-draw of the Tunnels or the 'speed with a drawback' Excavations. But they do lose out a bit. They still have cost-effective control, and very strong units. Especially if the pendulum shifts back to speed, which they can deal with pretty easily.

Should be interesting...

rings said:

Here's a link to deckbox:

deckbox.org/games/whi/cards

Advanced search is very useful depending on what you are looking for.

Usually I'm not a total downer, but this particular list ist just a total WTF to me.

First off, good job nerfing dwarves after they already are the #3 deck. People have been blindly hating on dwarves for a long time now not noticing that there were stronger or equal archetypes for a long time. This just shows FFG will give in to forum whining.

Secondly, random restrictions much? This list basically nerfs the #2 and #3 decks and barely hurts the top deck (verena). I see some comments on here about how empire is hurting from losing some cards in thier deck. I personally don't play with mining tunnels or warpstone (MADNESS) and I still roll people. Perhaps FFG is going to release some development spam cards soon, but due to thier past lack of initiative and foresight, I find this to be unlikely. My conclusion here being: Verena should definitely be on the list as the card in particular is more game warping than anything to date in my opinion. Tbh, pull wilhelm and put verena on the list.

As to the formatting of restrictions, I'm still forming a final opinion, but it just doesn't sit well with me atm. This is due in part to being used to other card games which usually use the limit one version of restriction. Basically this type of formatting seems to be trying to break up synergy blocks as opposed to removing actual problem cards. Time will tell on this one.

Overall, not impressed by this move, but I suppose the rest of my post wasn't already steeped with disaproval.

To some extent, I do agree with our GenCon World Champion Vitamin T and also with Grove.

Verena probably should be on the list over Wilhem (why him? I'm not seeing any compelling reason, personally.) I also think it was unnecessary for them to put Soul Stealer on the list at all.

Wytefang said:

I don't understand the reason why Soul Stealer is in the list...Maybe some "future" interactions...Who knows...

But...Please...Wilhelm? I know you don't believe me, Wytefang...but...Wilhelm is totally broken in the Verena deck...Alone is a good Unit, but in that archetype is insane...

Willy and Verena have to be togethere in the list.

I've never played an uber competitive Verena deck, how does WIlhelm work? Does he shift units to zones where there are few developments that can be controlled to kill that unit as well? or...

He's basically a control mechanism. Moving units to one zone without devs so hidden grove nulifies thier power or, scooping them into a zone and then WotE and Verena. He is a very powerful card even without verena, but he is not the "broken" part of the deck. While you can control a player to some extent with him, most decks can play around him. They can't play around a reset to turn 0.

To all the Verena-whin0rs out there:

Please take a deep breath. We don't know yet how the curent development -focused cycle is going to evolve. Maybe players are able to speed up the amount of developments in the near future so that Verena is not so dangerous anymore.

I really don't understand why soul stealer is on the list, there are so much more powerful cards in the game...

Philos said:

+1

Thanks for the explanation Grove (and I don't see why soul stealer is on there either to reply to another post). But by 3+ turns isn't it impossible to reset to first turn as they will have enough development they can at best be grouped into a single zone?

JayDe said:

The problem is that will be either Kingdom or Battlefield depending of the deck as you wouldn't allow rush to have a healthy quest or battlefield zone. Having 6-7 resources and drawing 1 card while you are still forced to developments is always a game quitter if you aren't close to victory. With Infiltrate you can crush all other zones despite quest and still have it to have the same effect. And who says that the developed zone has anything in it?

Wilhelm basically makes Verena more effective and versatile as you can move one more unit from a save zone into one you are destroying at the end of the turn.

Breaking my Empire Aggro-Control.

But probably a got decision.