Intro
Welcome back to Path to Glory for another warband review, this time looking at the second edition version of The Dread Pageant! While Thricefold Discord were my primary Slaanesh obsession in the first edition, a little bit of Slaanesh is never enough, we need excess. I always enjoyed playing Dread Pageant to scratch that elite Take and Hold itch, so I was excited to see them return in the second edition. They were always teetering on the edge of being quite good, but were often held back by their overall fragility and corresponding propensity for getting tabled. With a fresh start, the designers had the opportunity to smooth out those rough edges, so let’s see if we think they’ve gotten sufficient treatment to remain relevant.
Warscroll
Inspire
Bucking a trend of individual inspirations for a lot of second edition warbands, Dread Pageant has a universal inspire condition for when each friendly fighter is damaged or there are more damaged fighters than undamaged on the board. Either condition looks pretty difficult to me, but I’d generally have a preference for the latter. Still, we’ve talked in the past about the idea of spreading out damage rather than focusing down particular targets and we often land on concentrating damage for kills being the preferable option. Not only are you removing options from your opponent in doing so, but you are also scoring glory off the kills, which is particularly relevant in a case where every warband yields 7 Bounty. While one-shots are harder to come by these days, you’re either relying on your opponent to do a lot of spread damage work for you or inflicting a lot of damage onto yourself by design to get this done. Additionally—and this will apply to later analysis as well—the lack of lethal hexes in this edition will make it much harder to game this out than previously. If the meta is more elite-leaning, it becomes moderately better, but this just seems like one of the hardest inspire conditions out there, which I suppose is not much different than we are used to from the first edition.
Speed of Slaanesh
Your only reusable ability on the warscroll, Speed of Slaanesh grants you +1 Move on a charge for inspired and damaged friendly fighters. Yep, that is all it does. Given that we just talked about how difficult it will likely be to get inspired (at least in the early game), I feel like this should have been a far more potent effect than this. With the push towards interaction from the new boards and, cheating ahead, a very respectable base Move 4 across the warband (as well as a good amount of Range 2+ attacks), this doesn’t really strike me as a benefit you’d often need anyway. Given that the warband still seems pretty fragile, I would much preferred to have kept something like the self-damage/heal ability we saw for Slakeslash and Vasillac in the first edition as the reusable ability, particularly since it would work towards their inspire condition.
Cruel Pangs
Cruel Pangs, thankfully, appears to work as it always has, allowing you to ping any fighter holding a treasure token during the Power step. It is worth noting that this wording is not consistent with other warbands’ Power step abilities, as it does not specify to do it instead of playing a card, but the rulebook text is at least clear here in that you’ll still sequence it as such. A warscroll ping is always good, and doubly so when there is no restriction on the fighter being undamaged, so I like this one quite a bit. It’s borderline essential for supporting their inspire condition, but more generally is just something you should be looking to use every game. Nothing wrong with simply driving a vulnerable fighter back onto a token and then finishing them with the ping. This will get plenty of value.
Swift as Desire
Swift as Desire is our next once-per-game ability, granting you the ability to push each damaged friendly fighter 1 hex in the Power step. In general, pushes are some of my favorite abilities to see on warscrolls because they can support any playstyle. While some work needs to be done to access the effect, a potential multi-Sidestep is always good, so I’m on board for this ability as well.
Drown in Pain
Our final Power step ability, Drown in Pain drops guard tokens onto all of your damaged fighters. Definitely my least favorite once-per-game ability on the warscroll, this one seems to be aimed at giving you a little bit of that survival tech back, but in a form that I feel is not sufficient to overcome the stats we will encounter momentarily. Furthermore, the name taunts me given the potential low-hanging fruit of just copy/pasting [
Shared Pain] into the warscroll, which always felt so thematic, unique, and mechanically impactful. This doesn’t really check those boxes for me, even with guard gaining a bit of value in this edition. I suppose it’s not bad so much as it is just boring
Gross Hubris
The final once-per-game ability (as well as the only surge ability) on the warscroll is Gross Hubris, which triggers after you’ve made an attack roll with a damaged friendly fighter that contained no successes, giving you the option to re-roll any number of those dice. While I think stagger will be more prevalent in this edition from what we’ve seen so far (no longer gets removed by guard, delving still exists and is a prominently featured mechanic in a strong Rivals deck) and that may reduce the value of re-roll abilities slightly, more accuracy = more successful attacks = more damage. While I really don’t love that 4 of your 5 warscroll abilities can only trigger when you are damaged, the mechanical potency of this one at least warrants some kind of conditional restriction, so I’m willing to overlook it in this case. Re-rolling multiple dice is great, especially with so many of your fighters hitting on swords.
Fighters
We’ll start with Vasillac, the leader of the warband. He’s got a pretty standard profile of 4 Move, 1 Shield, 4 Health, but yields a whopping 3 Bounty as another victim of the Bounty restructure. His weapon profiles are fine at 1R/2H/2D and 2R/2H/1D, but you’re really going to want to get him inspired, as his physical profile jumps up to 2R/3H/2D with grievous. Yes, the grievous does cap his damage output, but it’s been pretty rare so far that we see this combination of accuracy and damage at Range 2 in this edition. Unfortunately pretty fragile for a 3-Bounty fighter, but at least that 6-hex threat range means you can play him pretty cagey, as well as lean further into positional play than with his uninspired Range 1.
Interestingly, Slakeslash has exactly the same stats as 1st edition, still on 4 Move, 1 Shield, 5 Health with a 1R/3S/2D attack and yields 2 Bounty. Likewise, he simply inspires to add a die to his attack, which is definitely helpful given the significant reduction we’ve seen in accuracy at only 3. He’s a great tank still, especially with it generally being less common to see those big 3-Damage swings. I would have liked to see a little bit of an accuracy bump somewhere given the new dice math (maybe cleave and/or ensnare) but he’s certainly decent. Worth the 2 Bounty as well.
Next up is Glissete, who sports a physical profile of 4 Move, 1 Dodge, and 3 Health with two weapon profiles at 1R/2S/2D and 2R/2S/1D while yielding 1 Bounty. This is the first fighter in the warband who, uninspired, I would consider to be woefully under-statted. It’s just not really clear what you’re supposed to do with her anymore. She’s extremely fragile, woefully inaccurate, and can’t hit particularly hard. She becomes a lot more interesting when inspired, gaining a die on both of her weapons and her Save characteristic, which works particularly nicely with Drown in Pain to access guard (hmm… 2 Dodge with guard does sound nice). I just have a hard time seeing how she’s not going to get sniped early in the game given the interactive board placement in this edition, especially with the wealth of +Move and teleport effects we’ve seen so far.
Our final fighter is Hadzu, who has the same physical profile as our previous entry at 4 Move, 1 Dodge, 3 Health, and 1 Bounty. However, at 3R/3S/1D with grapple, I find him much more enticing due to his ability to enforce board control. We already talked about this a bit in the Krittatok vs. Nitch debate for Tunnelpack, but I value that ability to swing multiple feature tokens way more than bad-to-mediocre melee attacks. Furthermore, Hadzu inspires to access that coveted Range 4 attack while also bumping up to 2 Dodge, making him the perfect token caddy and disruption piece (to the extent that a 1-Bounty fighter is liable to fit into that category).
Conclusion
As hard as it has been to turn off my first edition brain, I think this is the first warband I’ve written a review for in the new edition—for reference, the other 3 as of the time of writing this were the core set plus Kainan—and simply do not like on face value. I find them pretty boring. With very basic effects on the warscroll, it seems like this really could’ve been just about any warband. They have a couple fighters with some decent stats, and a couple useful, yet generic abilities. GW has dubbed them as a Flex warband, and I do at least see that in the warscroll, but only in the sense that the scroll has some abilities that help with killing and some that help with holding. You might say “Mark, that sounds like Flex to me,” but it just feels a bit disjointed, rather than a cohesive strategy. Outside of using Cruel Pangs to ping your own fighter (which I don’t typically recommend), I don’t see a ton of synergy between the abilities, nor do I get much of a sense of uniqueness for the warband as a whole. You might at least have that feeling of “we are Slaanesh, we like pain,” but that’s about as far as it gets. They feel a bit like an afterthought to me in this transition. I understand that it’s a lot to port over to the new edition, but I just feel like the warband maybe didn’t have a strong enough champion in the design process when compared to some of the other teams to make sure they had a strong identity, particularly given how cool some of the launch download and other box release warbands came out.
To end on a more productive note, from a competitive lens, I think that the warband will still be decent—although I doubt if they will ever be “good”—in the Flex bucket that GW has assigned them. Wrack and Ruin (WaR) seems like a pretty mandatory pairing for them in Nemesis, given how important it is in this iteration of the warband to access those inspired stats as fast as possible. As for the second deck, you’ve got some options. Since only two fighters in the warband have much potential for a “stat check,” I do like the idea of opting for a hold-leaning flex with something like Emberstone Sentinels, which can push for some decent glory ceiling as a WaR pairing, as both Supremacy and Iron Grasp make for an enticing end phase package with Alone in the Dark and maybe even Stay Close. It also adds in some decent ability to deny driveback in addition to some defensive boosts from the power deck. For similar reasons, I could see opting for Countdown to Cataclysm (CtC), which has, if nothing else, two of the better end phase objectives for this kind of playstyle in Spread Havoc and Set Explosives. CtC also brings along some ping of its own, as well as a nice defensive piece for either of your two big guys in Utter Conviction. Finally, while a bit more aggressive and lower on objective deck glory ceiling, I would be remiss not to point to Blazing Assault, as I suspect I will with many warbands, for just packing in some elite power card options in both the ploys and upgrades. I have a sneaking suspicion we might be talking about that deck quite a bit in our Worlds wrap-up.
Well, that’s all I’ve got this time. While I personally (and perhaps ironically, given that it is Slaanesh) don’t feel much attraction to this warband, I am hopeful that one of you can go out and show me some unique Dread Pageant gameplay that makes me want to join in on the fun. However, until next time, all I can do is wish you the best of luck on YOUR Path to Glory!
