Starting an Underworlds League

[Oreaper84]

So...with organized play dropped on the Warhammer Community website....and the hype a buzzing about I stop into my Local GW and have a chat with the manager. Fast forward 2 hours later, i have been given the privilege of running a league and later potential grand clash for the late 2018 early 2019 season.

I wanted to start this topic for any aspirant league organizers looking for guidance or offering suggestions. Aside from the regular weekly play id like to do some fun events here and there to give away the swag that comes in the organized play kit and Im looking for ideas. Underworlds really is (IMO) one of the best specialty GW has released, and i'd love to see it grow in my community and beyond.

Any advise/sage wisdom/pit falls to avoid would be worth their weight in shadeglass!!

[Gash Bauer]

My local GW manager has had the league system in place in our store from the start rather than a 1 day tourney for the prize packs.  It is a three month cycle and we have a fair bit of guidelines in place.

• One day only, we call it Underworlds Friday (absolutely no outside games count to league score)
• 2 games count to your total score each week, this must be decided prior to the game beginning (no picking best games from the day)
• 3 points for a win - 1 for a true draw - nothing against you for losing
• We are only able to switch warbands 3 times during the league and keep your total score (exceptions for new releases, its GW and they've got to make sales after all. AKA counts as a free switch as long as it was purchased from my manager)
• Total cumulative score determines the trophy winner etc..
• Deck adjustments are free and encouraged so as to create a more competitive and fun experience for all, no one likes losing consistently because of your deck choices.
• You chose your opponents (no bracket system in place) HOWEVER you cannot play the same person twice in a row for "league scoring" games unless you are the only two people in store. (Prevents preying on newer or less experienced folks)
• Once the trophy ceremony is complete we have one absolute bye week to let everyone feel out new warbands etc.  (This rotation was a two week one as Nightvault, Zarbag, Eyes came out so close to each other.

It's really laid back and all of us are good friends because of this atmosphere, there are some front runners every "season" but we always help the newer players with their decks and tactics to create a more competitive atmosphere.  

EDIT: Swag wise my manager saves the deck boxes, acrylic tokens, alternate art warband cards for the final day.  The alternate art ploys and objectives get dolled out periodically to us as just fun add ons.

[Oreaper84]

11 minutes ago, Gash Bauer said:

My local GW manager has had the league system in place in our store from the start rather than a 1 day tourney for the prize packs.  It is a three month cycle and we have a fair bit of guidelines in place.

• One day only, we call it Underworlds Friday (absolutely no outside games count to league score)
• 2 games count to your total score each week, this must be decided prior to the game beginning (no picking best games from the day)
• 3 points for a win - 1 for a true draw - nothing against you for losing
• We are only able to switch warbands 3 times during the league and keep your total score (exceptions for new releases, its GW and they've got to make sales after all. AKA counts as a free switch as long as it was purchased from my manager)
• Total cumulative score determines the trophy winner etc..
• Deck adjustments are free and encouraged so as to create a more competitive and fun experience for all, no one likes losing consistently because of your deck choices.
• You chose your opponents (no bracket system in place) HOWEVER you cannot play the same person twice in a row for "league scoring" games unless you are the only two people in store. (Prevents preying on newer or less experienced folks)
• Once the trophy ceremony is complete we have one absolute bye week to let everyone feel out new warbands etc.  (This rotation was a two week one as Nightvault, Zarbag, Eyes came out so close to each other.

It's really laid back and all of us are good friends because of this atmosphere, there are some front runners every "season" but we always help the newer players with their decks and tactics to create a more competitive atmosphere.  

EDIT: Swag wise my manager saves the deck boxes, acrylic tokens, alternate art warband cards for the final day.  The alternate art ploys and objectives get dolled out periodically to us as just fun add ons.

That's a great bit of advise and just the type of atmosphere i was looking for thanks!

Another topic came up during the discussion, and also after listening to the "Claim the City Podcast" (shout out these dude are great!) is whether there should be a seasonal format or not. One thing that i have heard is that there is a bit of barrier of entry to try and make "good" decks these day with a total of 10 expansion packs and a starter set. All that just to get the right cards, couple with some of the more abusive cards are in the shadespire set. Is limiting the cards to faction specific and Nightvault universals a reasonable concept? From what i have seen there isn't much that is extremely OP that has been released in Nightvault, the only possible outlier being stormsire...but its not that bad.

Is a seasonable format a valid way for approach? Would it keep some of the more abusive build from ruining the newer players day?

[Gash Bauer]

I've struggled with this myself honestly, as I too listen to their wonderful podcast.  It is a huge barrier to entry however something I have observed is that generally, most of the new ploys and objectives favor the newer warbands more so than the old ones.  What I mean by this is that cards like ready for action, which was in my Fiend's deck, don't really have an analog in Nightvault.  This was intentionally done to support other play styles and therein the new bands, but I can't help feel that removal of Shadespire cards could cause older aggression based warbands to falter really hard.  Granted my Nightvault binder is so empty card wise, but from what I have seen it looks like many aggression based play style cards seem to be staying in Shadespire.  This could just be me tinfoil hatting obviously, but I know a lot of brand new players are heavily interested in the older warbands and consistently ask me if they think they would be a bad purchase.  I personally think not enough time has passed to really allow the Nightvault cardpool to develop into something that can detach itself from the Shadespire set while also supporting the warband specific cards.  I think that question would have a near definite answer once the next two come out, but by then would it really be worth it to detach?  This is a very hard decision for me and I've thought about it a lot, and I personally don't have an answer I'm comfortable backing up yet.

[paul7926]

The 'seasonal' decision is a big one and I don't have an answer either.  

One thing that I did think about however came from my old MTG days.  Yes the barrier to entry is quite big for a new player who only really wants to play a season 1 warband but then if you have a core community of a few guys/gals with everything then might it be possible for them to loan some of the cards they are not using in their warbands to help out the newer people?

You have to guard against peoples cards going missing but it worked well enough when I played MTG.  New people would borrow cards from the 'old hands' and we simply just kept a little book of who had lent who what.  A quick reminder at the end of the night to 'return anything you borrowed' was usually enough to ensure everything got back to the owners.

I'm not up enough on competitive Underworlds to know if there are enough 'spare' cards that are viable to loan out or if everyone is using the same things so they are never 'spare' because unlike MTG you don't end up with that many multiples of things.