More Input: Starting Shadespire (Stormcast Deck)!

   Hi guys and gals, what are you doing in your hobby time these months?
  I have finally decided to start Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire. Of course all of my fellows have already begun the game back in October when it was initially pulled out but I, at that time, was keen on 40k listing and training for an upcoming tournament. After that, you know, that AoS campaign, that Blood Bowl League and (boring) real life took all my time. 

   Anyway it was just my love for both BB and AoS that finally pushed me to dedicate some time to the new game. Well... I have bought two times (first time split) the core set and now I already have orcs and Sepulchral Guard is coming. I think the game is solid, fast-paced and miniatures are beautiful; not even mentioning its wonderful display, lay-out and suggestive setting.

   I'm literally in love with this game right now... I'm only hoping that GW will continue to keep it up to date, at least for a few years. I think it can be considered a mature game when it reaches 16 warbands, able from that point to stay on its own legs, similar to Blood Bowl that, utterly forgot by GW, has managed to survive, and thrive, for years and years.

   For now I'm glad to live this vanilla-time of the game.

   I started with Stormcast as you can easily argue from the first pic and I'd like to share my first "competitive" deck with you. I won a couple of competitive games in the last few days, against well-built decks. Far from a definitive set, actually I'm studying to improve it as much as I can. 

   If you have some suggestions, or would share yours feel free to do this.

   Steelheart's Champions Deck

   Objectives:

Denial

Supremacy

Consacrated Area

Lightning Strikes

Sigmar's Bulwark

Brawl

Ploymaster

Objective 1

Objective 2

Objective 3

Objective 4

Objective 5

   Denial is a great trick to win a game against an inattentive player or a good way to force a focussed opponent to move into your deployment zone. Supremacy works well with all the other secure objective cards and, with Denial, is the only card you have with three glory points score. That means that if you are able to achieve it you'll probably win, but if you can't just don't stick to them, discard and go for something else. It's very important to use, or discard, or achieve, a lot of cards. Remaining stuck is you worst enemy in this game.

   Lightning Strikes, SB, and Consacrated Area are very easy to achieve and will let you gain fast points to spend in upgrades. Ploymaster is suberb... just like Lightning Strikes it makes you earn an objective card and draw a new one during the action phase, and this is a very powerful combo.

    Brawl is a good card, with its 2 glory points score, but I'm thinking to change it with something else because doesn't work very well with Consacrated Area.

    Ploy:

Unstoppable Strikes

Confusion

Distraction

Healing Potion

Shardfall

Shifting Shard

Sidestep

Peal of Thunder

Daylight Robbery

Duel of Wits

   Duel of Wits is a must-have, just like Daylight Robbery. The first one is an always-win card, letting you draw two cards for one. The second will force your opponent (if he suspects something) to use all his glory points as soon as possible to deny you the possibility to steal one of them. Healing Potion will be useful to make your stormcast, few in number but very reliable, more difficult to kill. You can easily afford to lose one warrior, but two will be too much to remain actually in game. 

   Unstoppable Strikes has to be always in your hand waiting that moment when you'll going to punish the enemy in close combat, and Shardfall is another must-have card: you can do a lot of things with it, such cover an objective, protect your warriors, close enemy's routes or forcing him into another way.

   All the other cards are about movement. It's really important to move your warriors with ploys leaving their powerful activations for something else. A good combo is to place a warrior nearby an objective you have to conquer, use your activation to put him in guard and then use Shifting Shards during power step to move the objective marker under your model.

   Upgrades:

Blessed by Sigmar

Great Fortitude

Great Speed

Great Strenght

Legendary Swiftness

Total Offence

The Shadowed Key

Shardcaller

Lightning Blast

Heroic Stride

    The first five of course are all cards for enhancing your already very powerful warriors, making them faster and stronger. Total Offence and Lightning Blast will make them even more dangerous in combat, in those games where you have to play more aggressively. 

   Heroic Stride will help you to control enemy's warriors and protect your own ones, whilst The Shadowed Key combined with Shardcaller and/or Shifting Shards will be your absolute trump card in any game.  

 

I put deck, dice and markers in this wooden box I found in my home. Its my luxury case for my luxury game ha-ha!

I can use it to roll dice as well, oh my, I'm about to cry!

 

Another great Shadespire's quality is its size. This little case, few models, a foldable gaming board. STOP.

Thanks Goddess Magic: The Gathering's times are not coming back to me! Cards are around 4 hundreds and you can have  all of them without any risk to double. Although I have SCE cards double but that's me, I'm beyond any remedy.

   Painting

   Aaaahhh...! My favourite part. I use Steelheart's Champions to improve my Stormcast's huge force and I painted them to fit my Stormhost and chambers... with the exception of the bases. I used their epic bases to practice with airbrush. I'll post soon a brief tutorial about them, for this is not the right place!

Although this isn't the best picture I made... just to let you know what I mean!

   Thanks for reading, have a good day!