Intro
Welcome back to Path to Glory for another warband review, this time for Thanatek’s Tithe. Who else would you expect to be writing about our second OBR warband besides yours truly? As you might expect, I was thrilled to see some more bone boys coming to collect the tithe—yes, the bones are their money—and hopefully also collect some wins while they’re at it. While I do think the sculpts are lacking overall when compared to Kainan’s Reapers (particularly the leader), I do like the mortis reaper minis in this set more than those recently shown off in the larger box, and I like everything about the retainers except what is unfortunately their most prominent feature (the box). Without spoiling too far ahead, I do think my excitement was tempered when I saw the warscroll and stats. I have serious concerns about the warband’s consistency and viability, but let’s not spend any more time in the preamble and instead dig into why those concerns have arisen (far be it from me to spoil a good opportunity for a resurrection joke…).
Warscroll
Inspire and Morbid Retainers
Since it is difficult to discuss one without the other, I have combined the Inspire and Morbid Retainers into their own section. After a friendly fighter’s successful attack, if the target is adjacent to any friendly retainers, you get a cadaver token. By spending cadaver tokens equal to a friendly fighter’s Bounty characteristic in your power step (once per turn), you can inspire that fighter. Functionally similar to how the inspire works for Kainan, so pretty easy to track and remember (I fully intend to continue using the same tithe tokens that were released during the Direchasm season).
My issue here is the manner in which you accumulate the cadaver tokens. I’m cheating ahead a bit, but to get what I would consider to be a “sufficient” number of tokens to get value out of the warscroll, you need a bare minimum of 7, and I’d argue that is on the low side of what you would like to have for any level of consistency. Assuming you attack once per action step, you need to hit 7 out of 12 times (~58%) and those 7 hits need to be accomplished such that at least one of your two retainers is adjacent to them at the end of the attack. Even if you expect to be able to set up that adjacency and frequency of attacking/hitting, the most glaringly obvious miss on this ability is that, RAW, you cannot collect a thing called a CADAVER token if the target of the attack is slain. I am simply flabbergasted. Throw all the gameplay clunk out the window and the fact that something this narratively nonsensical was printed is straight up unacceptable. Even if you allowed the player to grab 2 tokens if both retainers were adjacent, it would still not be enough to feed the engine and to be worth giving up supported attacks on your only two pieces capable of collecting more tokens. This ability needs a major overhaul and, at a minimum, needs to let you collect when the fighter is slain.
Soul-Linked Constructs
Moving on to a much more interesting ability (with which I still have some gripes), Soul-Linked Constructs allows you to make non-upgrade melee attacks with your leader using the retainers as the point of origin. This is a great way to protect the leader deeper in the back of your board while still getting value. Want to charge onto a feature token, but there’s no target there? No problem, just swing through the retainers instead. Already charged with a retainer, but your leader is out of range for the follow-up swing? Have a go anyway! Given that his melee weapon is Range 1, you’ll also have flanked on the attack from the retainer being present (barring something like Brawler). Really cool ability, but…
Of course, I mentioned I do have some gripes here and that is with the first sentence, which states that your leader’s weapons’ characteristics cannot be modified, full stop. No +Dice, no damage boost from grievous, no Range boost from the plot card deck that was literally released concurrently with it. With a rule like that, you would expect he must have some crazy good melee weapon already (SPOILER: he does not)! I can understand not wanting him to rip modified attacks through the retainers from relative comfort and safety, but the fact that he can’t even modify them when not attacking through the retainers is ludicrous, especially once you get a look at the floppy, wet noodle he is swinging around (now is probably a good time to scroll down for a peak and rejoin the conversation). Such a cool idea making use of the warscroll design system to make the warband unique, only to fall flat on its face with an overly restrictive conditional statement.
Elusive Mirages
The first ability I have mostly compliments for is Elusive Mirages, which turns the mortis reapers into Fuirann if they roll a success on their save. Yes, this does mean they suffer from the same silly wording bug that made the ability technically do nothing, but I think the Fuirann precedent is sufficient to say that this works how you would expect. Cheating ahead a bit, both reapers only have 1 Dodge on their Save rolls (inspired or not), but note that they don’t have to roll a Dodge, just a success. Things like cover, guard, and flanked will all greatly improve their odds of hitting the Stand Fast. Even something as simple as moving onto a token and delving to cover will (in the absence of ensnare or brutal), give you a 50% chance to Stand Fast when your opponent hits you (up from 33% natively). Start stacking in re-rolls, guard tech, additional Save dice, etc. and you can be hitting it with relative regularity. While you don’t have 5 Health like Wurmspat, when your opponent hits, your odds to reduce the damage (assuming the attack can be modified) are actually the same in a vacuum (33% and 56% on 1 and 2 dice, respectively) because you’re counting crits and dodges while they are just counting shields. Additionally, as long as you survive the attack, the Stand Fast is denying your opponent potential to Overrun while maintaining your current board positioning. Of course, you can still Stand Fast the old-fashioned way too! If there is a particular niche for this warband to fit into, this is really the ability that would let them explore it.
Unwilling Donors
At least if we have to manufacture adjacency for our retainers, Unwilling Donors is a pretty good way to do it. If you are smart about picking possessors (like a peck of pickled peppers…), each attack you hit can theoretically also yield 1-2 pushes. While the obvious synergy for this is to try and collect more cadaver tokens (since you push before the attack is fully resolved), Kamandora players will tell you this is also a great way to get united (if you’re playing Deadly Synergy) or set up some token-centric scoring. I do wish the push happened after picking the target so that you could set up support more easily, but this is still a pretty good ability. Only other comment is that this can be a bit awkward if I have the first turn in the round, as now I only get 3 action steps to leverage the push instead of 4.
Endless Duty
A power step raise in Endless Duty is always good, particularly since it’s returning an undamaged 3-Health fighter as often as once per round. My bigger concern here is the consistency and economy of the ability. I really would rather not attempt this if I only have 1 cadaver token to spend on it, so 2 feels like the “comfortable” amount, which is a pretty big investment given what we discussed earlier. Even then, the odds are only 75%, so those 25% of the games where you spend 2 only to have the ability fizzle entirely are going to feel worse than almost any other bad luck in this game and will likely tank your chances of winning. I would much rather have had this at once per game but just always work for a flat cost of, say, 2 cadaver tokens. One small upside here is you do get a “refund” of 1 token in that, a la Nohem’s inspire, you will instantly be able to inspire the reaper you just brought back in that power step for “free” now that they are 0 Bounty (assuming you haven’t already inspired someone else this power step).
Necromantic Pulse
The last ability on the warscroll is Necromantic Pulse, a once-per game ability to remove any of your cadaver tokens (remember, per the rulebook, any is synonymous with one or more), then roll that many attack dice. If there are any swords or crits, you ping each enemy fighter adjacent to a friendly retainer. If it doesn’t, you stagger each and remove any guard tokens they have. The upshot here is something like Shared Mutations on the Pandaemonium warscroll, where you get one or both of your retainers adjacent to a bunch of enemy fighters, then drop a mass ping on them. However, that ping can just as easily (in fact, more easily) turn into the stagger/guard removal effect instead. With a 33% chance to ping on 1 die, then just 56% on 2 dice, you really can’t be hoping for a ping result until you’re rolling at least 3 dice, which is not only a ton of cadaver tokens to spend on this ability, but is also still no guarantee at 70% odds. Sure, the pings can kill, which is nice, but the opposite effect strongly encourages you to only go for it earlier in rounds, as going for an end-of-round kill might just leave you with a wasted ability if the roll doesn’t break your way. I think you’re better off just ripping this early in a round on a 1 cadaver spend (ideally at least against a vulnerable fighter). If it pings and kills them, great! If not, at least they’ll be a little easier to finish off with your next attack.
Fighters
Starting with the leader, Thanatek is a 3-Bounty fighter with 3 Move, 1 Shield, and 4 Health and also has the flying trait. He sports a miserable (and, as a reminder, unmodifiable) melee weapon profile of 1R/3S/1D with a much better ranged profile on 3R/3H/1D with crit stagger. If the target is within Range 3, there is no reason to use the melee (except in edge cases of having cleave or ensnare against high Save dice targets). Even accounting for the ability to attack through the retainers, this is the worst uninspired 3-Bounty fighter in the game, and by a significant margin. Things do get better when inspired, jumping to 2 Damage and adding cleave+ensnare to the melee, tacking a die onto the Save characteristic, and upgrading to 4H at range with flat stagger. That’s gotta be the most buffs any single fighter in the game gets upon inspiration, yet still the resulting fighter is just ok when you factor in that this is as good as his weapons can get. A 3-Bounty fighter hard-capped at 1R/3S/2D with cleave/ensnare is simply not enough, even factoring in Soul-Linked Constructs. At least he inspires to 2 Shields, but he honestly should’ve started there given that his death turns off two of your warscroll abilities while also handing your opponent 3 glory. A quick Wings of War plus Twist the Knife could very easily spell doom and it is shockingly difficult to get him inspired prior to Round 2 (and that’s if you’re not spending tokes elsewhere). I get they wanted to make him feel “worth” spending the 3 tokens to inspire, but they backloaded way too many of his stats for him to feel useful. With unmodifiable weapon profiles, I would’ve liked to see a similar bump in stats, but starting from a more solid base than this awful uninspired setup.
Medeb-Ahk and Xar-Tamok are the two retainers in the warband and so are critical to the warscroll’s functionality. Since they are identical mechanically, we’ll cover them together. Uninspired, they each have a physical profile of 3 Move, 2 Shields, 3 Health, and 1 Bounty with a weapon profile of 2R/3S/1D with crit grievous. You might think at first that attacking from Range 2 is a bit counterproductive when you need to be claiming cadaver tokens, but Unwilling Donors can actually fix that problem for you. Attack at Range 2 and, if you miss, well at least you’re not adjacent for their follow-up or, if you hit, you can push up to claim your cadaver token. While nothing too special offensively, my bigger concern for these guys is their survivability. Considering they are top priority targets for your opponent, 2 Shields and 3 Health likely means you are losing one in the first round. Additionally, every time you collect a cadaver token, you are giving up flanked (if not surrounded) on the clapback attack. Even a simple 2H vs. 2S attack jumps from 31% to 44% odds when factoring in the flanked, with 3S vs. 2S going from 32% to 50%. Basically, this means that, if you are doing what your warscroll requires you to do, you are not much better off than the basic 2H or 3S vs. 1S math most warbands are dealing with at the outset of the game and those 2S Save rolls will feel far less tanky than one would hope. Certainly, we can help that a bit with our Rivals deck choices (cards like Brawler, Inviolate, etc.), but it’s a scary prospect having your whole gameplan revolve around just 6 Health. At least you don’t need to feel super obligated to inspire them, as they just bump to flat 2 Damage on their inspired sides rather than 1 with crit grievous. If you are playing Raging Slayers, maybe you can even forgo it entirely to save a few cadaver tokens for more important applications. Even without RS, I think you’ll often just have to accept that these guys aren’t inspiring unless you’re already hitting a lot of attacks, you simply don’t have the resources for it.
Sekhmor and Tukhar are the two mortis reapers in the warband, who we’ll again cover together since they are virtually identical mechanically. They both start on 4 Move, 1 Dodge, 3 Health, and 1 Bounty while packing 1R/2H/1D attacks with crit grievous. The 4 Move is pretty intriguing given how used I am to playing snail-slow skeletons in this game, which would make them effective missiles if they had commensurate attack profiles to pair with that mobility. You’ll note that, with these fighters now covered, not a single member of the warband does base 2 damage when uninspired, meaning you’re in for an awfully bad time against warbands who have warscroll weapon ability negation or cards like Bladecatcher or even just elites in general. As was the case with the other fighters, you also did not receive any kind of accuracy boost to compensate for your pitiful damage output either, meaning it’s not all that easy to actually get the cadaver tokens to inspire. That said, in terms of bang for your buck, they do get quite a bit while inspired, jumping to 1R/3H/2D with cleave (for Tukhar) or ensnare (for Sekhmor). I’d say this generally means you want to use your first cadaver token to get one of these guys online so that you have a more consistent option to collect more while actually throwing out a respectable attack profile. Still, if you compare these to something like the squigs from Gitz (over-statted though they may be), the effort that goes into inspiring this warband is just a lot to obtain what I would describe only as “reasonable” inspired stats. With Elusive Mirages and Endless Duty, I think I actually might have preferred to shift a health from each of these guys over to the retainers. Yes, the resilience on the reapers is pretty solid when you factor those abilities in, and they are arguably the best fighters in the warband, I just think the result is that the retainers and your leader ended up not getting enough for themselves during the design process.
Conclusion
Well, I think if you’ve read to this point you probably already know what my opinion of this warband is, but let’s summarize it anyway. I don’t think this cadaver generation engine is nearly sufficient to let you inspire (or otherwise use your warscroll spenders) at a reasonable rate and their uninspired stats are simply some of the worst I’ve ever seen, like borderline Brethren of the Bolt level bad. Unless you are feeling lucky, you can’t expect to do more than 1 damage with an uninspired attack (short of power/plot cards to help) and you literally cannot do more than 1 with the leader (a 3-Bounty fighter) uninspired unless you give him a different weapon to swing. Literally every other warband in the game starts with at least one fighter capable of flat 2 damage without help. Many warbands even do a minimum of 2 damage across the board at the start of the game. These guys didn’t even receive a commensurate accuracy boost (while uninspired, but arguably even once inspired, given what it takes to get there) to merit the pitiful damage stats.
You might say, “Mark, just play them with the new Raging Slayers plot card so the four non-leader models always hit for 2 damage instead of 1 when enraged.” My answer to this would be to ask whether that really feels like it’s moving the needle. You would be playing a deck with bad objectives that doesn’t actually provide sufficient accuracy to help you generate cadaver tokens just to achieve the normal amount of damage that other warbands put out. You even can’t access the extra damage in cases where warbands have damage reduction/weapon ability negation on their warscroll or Bladecatcher comes out. Do the crits help? Sure, more than for most warbands, in fact. Might RS be one of the better decks they can take? Yes, actually, which is the really sad part and absolutely should not be viewed as an endorsement of the change they made to the plot card. On top of the more consistent uninspired damage, Haymaker grants the warband access to 4 Damage (sadly, only when inspired). Honed Reflexes is also a really cool option for increasing your odds to proc Elusive Mirages and United in Anger can be interesting in combination with the retainer pushes. As far as other good decks for them, Unwilling Donors is always the kind of out-of-sequence mobility that Pillage and Plunder appreciates. Delving to cover also synergizes nicely with Elusive Mirages. Countdown to Cataclysm is pretty close to mandatory to get Improvised Attack for another chance at cadaver tokens, as well as Countercharge to set up easier retainer adjacency, and finisher pings to compensate for your abysmal damage output. My gut feeling says you have to play PnP x CtC to give yourself enough scoring ceiling that you can compensate for what will likely be a deficit in kill bounty most games. ES x CtC could also be on that list to some extent, but the inability to play both Supremacy and Spread Havoc likely gives the edge to ES x PnP, if you were to go that route, but I do think it is tough to give up all that CtC has on offer. If you want to get weirder with it, I could see CtC x HG being a bit of a thing, as you don’t have to worry about scoring all the driveback cards since you probably aren’t even OHKO’ing even 2-Health fighters anyway and you could even try playing for both out-of-sequence attack cards with Audacious Denial in the deck too. Deadly Synergy is certainly OK with the pushes on the retainers to promote being united and the defensive flanked helping out Elusive Mirages, but this once again struggles to pair with CtC due to the Outmuscle restriction, and so would likely have to lend itself to a BA x DS or PnP x DS pairing instead (you know how I feel about the scoring in RS x DS).
As was mentioned on our recently-released New Year’s episode, the warband design process has often been touted as receiving the miniatures first, then coming up with the mechanics based on the minis. It appears that the designers took more of a metaphysical approach to this one and decided the reason for the retainer constructs was to hold all the warband’s Ls. Jokes aside, I don’t think I pulled any punches in this article, and I’m sure that some folks may feel I’ve been overly critical. I wholeheartedly acknowledge that game design is a difficult task and it is way easier for me to Monday morning quarterback how a warband or rule “should have been” than it is to create something from scratch. That said, there simply needs to be a line where accountability kicks in for the design end of things and we as consumers can demand better. I think if you’d never even heard of Warhammer Underworlds before and I asked you what kind of game mechanic might involve collecting “cadaver” tokens, pretty much anyone familiar with the definition of the word would guess it involved killing things, so how is that not reflected in the rules language for Morbid Retainers?
For more constructive criticism on how to fix these guys, absolute bare minimum would be to allow for cadaver token generation on kills. However, with how tough it is to get the tokens even in that case, I’d like to see another means of generating them, as the warscroll is just too cost-intensive for how the ability currently works. If you want to inspire the whole warband, you need 7. Then, to use the raise and have any kind of reasonable expectation for it to work, you want to spend 2. Let’s call it 1 for Necromantic Pulse just to have it do something, since getting a consistent ping result is prohibitively expensive. That’s a whopping 10 cadaver tokens you need to generate. Let’s even subtract 1 and say that the raise was essentially the manner in which you inspired one of your mortis reapers. So, you basically need to make 9 successful attacks, which is an astronomically high number, and manage to get your retainers adjacent for all of them, and, at least without our “bare minimum” buff, you can’t take any kills in there. On top of that, I’ve assumed that 2 tokens for the raise just works, which it does not 25% of the time. After talking it over with George, it is my opinion that there are a minimum of 3 buffs needed here, and they all have to do with cadaver token economy. Firstly, we need that buff to collect them on kills. Secondly, I’d like to see the raise changed to once per game, spend 2 to always resurrect a mortis reaper. Heck, you can even have them come back with a damage on them if you feel that’s too strong. Lastly, you need some other way to gain tokens so that your opponent can’t kite around the retainers (assuming they don’t just outright murder them instead). My preferred proposal would be to also gain one cadaver token after your opponent’s action step if there are any friendly retainers holding treasure tokens. This would force your opponent to approach them to stop the cadaver engine, while risking giving it anyway if you manage to get adjacent for the clapback attack. There’s the old adage of “be careful what you wish for,” but I honestly think these things are all pretty much necessary just to get the warband the level of “functional.” Man, do I hope I’m wrong about that.
I think it is pretty telling that the guy who literally left his wife alone at brunch to pay the bill so he could run home to make it in time to pre-order his copy of Kainan’s Reapers when it went live (not my finest moment, I’ll admit) is now majorly on the fence about even bothering to purchase Thanatek’s Tithe. In fact, I’m actually leaning towards skipping them and the only thing that is making me reconsider is how much I like the mortis reaper minis in the box, not any amount of excitement to actually put them on the table and play the game. It’s not funny. It’s not rage bait. It’s just… sad.
