Hello, it’s been a while since the last time I posted. I haven’t had much time to play — or write — lately, but I’m back with some playtime and most importantly, time to think the game. Today we’re gonna have a look at my favourite warband for a format I never wrote about: nemesis. If you’re a faithful reader you’ll know I’m a championship die hard. However, I have been playing nemesis semi-regularly. Enough to have a pretty good grasp of what works and what doesn’t for Elathain’s Soulraid in that format. I’ll go through different options for them in Nemesis, with the pros and cons of each association with a universal rivals deck.
Old favourite — Daring Delvers
There’s a lot to like for Soulraid in Daring Delvers, even more now with the new Plunder rule. As to what token to place when you kill, I think it depends on the board state, but I’d generally go for blocked hexes. These go away at the end of the round, which means you can bring the tokens back later to get even more exploration count. They can also be used to break line of sight from enemy fighters with range 2 or 3. Daring delvers has two fairly easy surges for Soulraid. Pathfinders is easier than ever to score now that you can place feature tokens after taking an enemy fighter out of action. Stealthy Advance is good as ever, works into increasing your exploration count, and your plan to invade the enemy territory to score cards like Speed of the Flood Tide.
Delvers also comes with two great 2-glory end phases: Sleepless Sentries and Cautious Venture. The first one plays straight into your game-plan, and can be scored with only the fish remaining if you were to get tabled. Spinefin and Duinclaw with their respective passive mobility are great tools to score this in every game. Cautious Venture with the new plunder rule got even easier. Some of the upgrades like Plundered Knowledge, any of the Explorer upgrades or some ploys can help you further increase the Exploration count. Note that Plundered Knowledge and Plunder have 2 different reaction windows, so you could get a whopping 3 exploration count if needed, or 1 exploration count and 2 power cards from a single kill. Getting to 3 exploration count was almost never a problem to me even in championship during round 1, I can’t believe that you wouldn’t manage it in nemesis, even less with the new plunder rule.
The rest of the objectives sadly aren’t as good as these, so you’ll have to make do with the rest of them. The only cards I could see myself taking are Brave the Rootmaze, or Terra incognita though you’d have to tool into domains to make it reliable. The end phases are kind of hard to score reliably for their glory rewards.
The good ploys include Quickroots that you should always take, Significant Find and Temporary Haven for the exploration count increase and contingency feature token placement. I also like Grasping Rootgrave, even though that one is a risky one to play given it can hit your fighters as well. You have a lot of good ploys to pick from your faction deck (Cloud of midnight, Spinefin Toxin, Phantasmal Forms, Terrornight Venom) but I think you can do a 4/6 split or 5/5 split.
For upgrades, you’ve got at least 5 good faction ones to take. My Daring picks would be Plundered Knowledge, Nine lives to protect your fighters from pings which are abundant and game breaking in nemesis, Dowsing Limb (remember that if you don’t like the result you can push 1 or 0 hexes). Claim Jumper can be a filler, if you play Zone of Control it’s a good way to make sure you’re the only one benefiting from it, it’s a bit of a niche pick however. Prospector is one of my favourite cards in the entire game, it’s great to place a cover under one of your fighters, and to set up a nasty Grasping Rootgrave.
Voidcursed Thralls
This one could strike as a weird choice, because of the downsides of Voidcurse including that you cannot make range 3+ attack actions, and that having a stat of 1 block is a downgrade on Fuirann and Duinclaw, and a side-grade on Tammael (better R1 and 3, but worse R2). This choice is mostly motivated by what is strong in the current meta game. Ephilim hates getting Voidcursed, Leona and Sarpon as well to some extent because they lose defence and cannot use their spell attack action. Hexbane cannot even attack if he gets Voidcursed early enough. There’s also some nice interactions between Flood Tide and Surging Tide and the free movements of Voidcursed Thralls. Not being able to drive back Elathain can be a problem for your opponent, since you have 2 in faction upgrades that make him harder to kill when the opponent is adjacent to him. Since Voidcurse also makes range 3+ attacks impossible, it further increases the value of these cards if you can voidcurse your opponent’s ranged fighters.
The plan is to Voidcurse Elathain, and use the good Voidcursed restricted ploys and upgrades on him. If he was to die, you could always Voidcurse Spinefin, or Tammael — once he’s in range anyway, the range 3+ attack action loses some of the oomph. It’s still a strict downgrade for his accuracy if he has supports, but he’ll be ok hitting on 2H. Voidcursing Spinefin is only ever useful to not voidcurse any of the other 3 fighters, or use the ping with him. Fuirann could be a late game option for voidcursing. If your damage reduction and wound upgrades haven’t been played yet, she could very well be impossible to kill regardless of the fact she’s only got 1 shield. There’s a potential to reduce damage by 2, and to put her on 4 wounds. That’s quite hard to take down. A 3 damage fighter needs 4 hits to kill her in melee.
The objectives aren’t very good, that’s the issue of this deck. You’ll have to lean heavily into the mechanic. Involuntary Interdiction is an easy score. Killing has never been an issue for these guys. Lashed into Motion is fairly doable later in the game, I wanted to try it because of Flood Tide, but it appears that if you don’t get the Refashioned Reactions/Priorities upgrades, or Forced Movements or a second Voidcursed fighter, it’s kind of hard to score. Perfect Thrall could be a nice option, though the range 1 is restrictive on Elathain. Surrendered Will is a total must take. If you’re greedy you could go for Gathered Thralls, but know that voidcursing Spinefin is going to be very hard. You could do it with Duinclaw or Tammael + Elathain, or 2 enemy fighters and Elathain, but it’s not that easy to spread the curse.
Uncounted Cost is a fairly straight forward card to score, just make sure you voidcurse enemies before you kill them! Unceasing imperatives and Unwitting Guardians are two fairly easy cards to score as well. Threatening Presence is worth a try imo, but it might clash with Speed of the Flood Tide for example. I’m not super sold on Reshaped Realm because you don’t necessarily want to spread the curse too much among your own fighters, and Spinefin himself can only be voidcursed by a few ploys.
For the ploys, you have to take Forced Movements, Involuntary Advance, Reshaping Snare, Unbearable Energies, then your selection of another source of Voidcurse. I’d like Voidcursed Assault a lot more if only Spinefin could attack (remember he cannot make ANY actions). Reshaping Demise and burst each have their own qualities.
For the upgrades, I would take both Refashioned upgrades. If you have them on two different fighters you can outmanoeuvre an enemy fighter making a charge attack action, which is very valuable. Thrallmaker is a must have. It helps you score a lot of cards, spread the voidcurse to make ranged enemies harmless, it’s just great. You can even use it on Tammael’s range 3 attack. Unnatural Resilience is another must have card. Synergies very well with Sanguine Pearl, and with the spreading of the Voidcurse itself. Singular Reshaping is another must have. You could also try Surging power to get another way to Voidcurse one of your fighters if needed, or get grievous 1.
Toxic Terror
A lot of people talk about Toxic Terrors for Soulraid. I didn’t see it because I looked at it mostly from a championship perspective for a good while. However, the objectives get a lot of support from the deck and Soulraid has 2 good persisting poison to make enough surges worth it. My picks are Taking Advantage which is kind of trivial, and can even be two glory early on. Deluge of Toxins is fairly doable since you can pack up to 6 persisting poisons in the deck, and Toxic Demise works with 4 of them. For the end phases, Capable Poisoners, Lurk in wait, and Venom Gorged are flexible enough to my liking. I think you’re going to have to play Superiority Confirmed, and I really don’t like that card. The hard part will be to keep Elathain alive.
There are great ploys in that deck. I love Freezing Venom, I love Ill-prepared, I love No Safe Ground, I like Keep the Forest at Bay, but the other poisons I just don’t like them that much, and neither Ill-prepared or Freezing venom persist once you deal damage, which is just a pain in the *ss with most of the objectives and some upgrades, like Poisonmaster. The nice thing is you have 2 poisons yourself in your deck to help with that. I would add Bleeding out and Spit Venom to the list of poisons to take. Don’t be like me and don’t forget that bleeding out reduces movement by 1!
Blighted touch/aura are depending a lot on getting your poisons too. Callous can be complicated if you don’t go all in on the poison upgrades. I would take 5 of them, mostly to make Callous better and help with the end phase scoring. Venombite weapons, Callous, Wicked Hunter, Blighted Aura, and Poisonmaster.
I don’t find this deck to be very elegant because there is a lot of dependency on other cards to make most of the deck work, but I think it’s good enough in nemesis because most people simply won’t have better choices.
Discard master — Force of Frost
The last deck I’d like to talk about is Force of Frost. It might strike as odd given we don’t have a wizard, but there’s are cards in there that I like for Soulraid.
For the objectives there are copies of cards we already have in the Soulraid rivals deck: Cold of the Void, and Frozen Fate namely. We can also take Cold Blooded and Chill of the Grave to complete the objective deck. You’ll have to take Smothered Memories in that deck as well.
For the ploys, I will take Icy Foreboding then lean super hard on the Soulraid power deck, with most if not all the “discard or do X” cards you have in there. Phantasmal Forms, Cloud of Midnight, Spinefin toxin and terrornight venom are also very good all around cards. I’m kind of tempted to take Brain Barnacles with all the wizards we see currently though. Making them have a Fury attack profile makes them unable to cast attack action spells at all! I also like Frozen to the Spot and Falling Shards.
In the upgrades I take Lurelight to combine with all that card discarding. The idea is to force them to give you glory. You then take the 5 good upgrades from the Soulraid deck. Finally, Frostwyrm Cloak, Chasm Key, Blizzard Darts, and Armour of Ice to complete that selection.
The deck has a high potential to make Elathain hard to kill. 2 shields, damage reduction twice, -1 dice to adjacent enemies… I like this one because it’s finally a deck that helps making Smothered Memories a card you would pick. I like the design space of these “do X or discard” cards. It’s probably not their best pick but I think it’s solid enough and fun enough to deserve an honourable mention. Special points for breaking Burnt Out for your opponent.
Decklists
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this article, I’ll probably come back with Cyreni’s razors and my attempts at making them decent in nemesis in the near future. See you around!
Underdogs - Certainty of Death 
