Hello everyone,
After describing the Shadespire project in this article, we will now introduce in this article the Stormcast Eternals warband, the Steelheart’s Champions, one of the warbands from the season 1 core set of Warhammer Underworlds : Shadespire. The painting of this warband was done by Giuseppe Chiafele from the Axia Painting studio. For this project, he chose to move away from the traditional Stormcast Eternals color scheme, usually dominated by gold and blue. Instead, he took inspiration from the characteristic hues of the Blades of Dawn, opting for a colder palette.
Let’s now dive into the deck that will be used during the first game of our small Season 1 tournament. This is, of course, an initial test, and some cards may evolve over the course of the games, depending on our impressions and the adjustments needed.
The Steelheart’s Champions are a small warband that combines defensive resilience with striking power. Despite this, we chose to focus on an objective-capture strategy, a game plan that isn’t necessarily the most natural for this warband, which is traditionally more comfortable controlling the board through strength and durability.
The deck is highly situational, and you need a bit of luck to draw the right Objective cards at the right time. Mobility therefore became a priority for this warband. Given the small number of fighters, it’s clear that some objectives will need to be completed in the first round, as the loss of even one of them can severely hinder the warband during the game. A few objectives requiring enemy fighters to be taken out of action were added as well, to provide a secondary way to score points. If this approach turns out to be too difficult or too constraining, we won’t hesitate to revise our selection of objectives and rework the deck after a few games.
For the Ploys cards, we focused on mobility, defense, and a few attack bonuses. The goal is to protect the fighters as much as possible using these tactical tools, while taking advantage of any opportunity to eliminate enemies who get too close to the objectives in a single strike. This combination should allow us to secure the board while maintaining constant pressure on the opponent.
For the Upgrades, we chose to limit ourselves to cards that complement and strengthen the effects of the Ploys cards. Their number was deliberately kept low to place more emphasis on the element of surprise and the game-changing opportunities provided by the Ploys. The idea is to maintain a reactive and unpredictable gameplay dynamic, while adding a few well-targeted Upgrades to reinforce our strategy when the opportunity arises.
We hope that this deck will perform well, even though it isn’t particularly forgiving. The first games will allow us to assess its viability against other warbands and identify any necessary adjustments. We’ll be back very soon to present the second warband of this Season 1. In the meantime, here’s a look at the Blades of Dawn color scheme, which served as inspiration for this painting.
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