Dipping my Toe into Shadespire

When it first came out I wasn’t too interested in Shadespire, having chosen to end my Fantasy playing days; lack of time to devout to as many games, the demise of Warhammer Fantasy Battle (not that I’d played it in its last two years) and really not liking the look of Stormcast when they first came out.

Overtime the great models that have been coming out for Age of Sigmar have pipped my interest, but the overall blockage that I didn’t enough time to plat mt existing games enough to warrant picking up AoS still stood.  That didn’t stop be picking up some models.  I picked up 2 Silver Tower Skaven Assassins to be extra Gutter Runners for my Skaven Bloodbowl team.  The Dark Elf Assassin was converted to be a second Succubus (with massive Blood Glaive), and I even picked up another Silver Tower model when in a moment I weakness (before the codex) I bought a model to be a Farseer (Doom is just too good of a psychic power).

Shadespire came out, and I thought it would another splash in the pan, and then disappear; Shadow War anyone.  However as with many gaming journeys I was convinced to give it a game by two close mates who had bought it.  One mate, Mike, who had stubbornly stuck to one faction in Infinity had gone all in buying every faction, including sleeves and dice.  We had a few games and was presently surprised and thought it was a good fun game.

The different warbands appeared relatively balanced (let me know your thoughts), and I liked the idea of the deck building aspect (eg. can tweak to be more killing or objective based), but I was weary that it would turn into Magic the Gathering when buying the last few cards for a deck can prove expensive, especially as you can’t buy the cards separately at all from GW.  However I didn’t intend to go to tournaments and the mates I knew would keep thing balanced, and wouldn’t go out and buy the top builds to smash by newbie deck; well not until I starting winning 😉

[I just need Ironskull's Boyz to get free postage - SOLD]

So with the decision made I bought the main game.  Then I made a unusual (for me) decision about painting.  I knew I would never have the time to paint the warbands with all of my 40k, Bloodbowl & Infinity projects., so looked at buying some painted warbands.  My favourite warband so far is the Khorne Bloodhounds, so I quickly found one on ebay at a reasonable price.  I was buying a well painted warband, rather than some of the top notch painting you can find.  Then I found an ebay listing of someone selling the main boxset with both warbands painted.  I liked the unusual Stormcast paint scheme, but thought the Khorne paint scheme wasn’t that good, so I would sell them on ebay.

I managed to pick this auction up for less than the cost that I had bought the brand new boxset for 😊  This gave me lots of cards, and allowed to me to keep he initial starter decks in the boxset complete (to play my son), while I built decks to use against my mates.

My last investment was a custom foam tray, which fitted in the box and perfectly held the warbands, tokens, dice etc.  This made it perfect to take the box and holiday, and I was able to pla a couple of games against my son in the evenings.

So far I’ve been having a ball playing Shadespire, and most importantly having fun with it.  Against my son’s Stormcast I’m 2-1 down (sometimes pesky Stormcast refuse to die!), I’m 3-0 up against Mike (horrendous dice in the 1st game against Undead, and then two close wins with both being equal as we headed into the last turn), and then I’m 1-0 down against my other mate’s Undead (first game playing with the short board edges touching).

[The surrounded Stormcast just wouldn't, even when a 4th Khorn guy joined in]

I’ve recently bought the Ork warband, so my next post will be a review of my first expansion box, and I’ve got my eye on a 4th warband when the Shadespire Season 2 comes out.

Have you been playing Shadespire ?  What do you think of it, and are you excited for Season 2 ?

Rathstar

PS. There are actually some ebay auctions selling the cards from the expansions individually, however in nearly all cases the best cards are sold out, but if you're not playing super competitively there are a nice way to pick up some extra cards.  If you want a lot of cards it might be worth buying an expansion and selling the models (and faction specific cards) on ebay.