Direchasm - the good, the bad and the ugly

 Greetings! With the Direchasm release cycle complete we can take a look at season 4 as a whole. While this might still be a little bit early for a full retrospective for the season - we’ve just had FAR list dropped on us and it’s still not long since the release of fish elves - certain things about this season do stand out. and I wanted to put them into the spotlight.

I’ve decided to call them: the good for things that were a good idea, the bad for things that were not… and the ugly for terrible things.

The Good

The good thing that has happened is Primacy mechanic. I love it. It’s a kind of a built-in Tome of Offerings thing, that you can opt into. At best, it will give you extra 3 glory to your overall score. To balance this out - it is a spent glory, you’re getting it after the end phase scoring, so you cannot fuel things like Great Gains with it and most importantly… there’s counterplay to it. I do think that this is an excellent way of providing a little bit of extra glory to aggro warbands without having to print another abusable card like ToO. Moreover - your opponent has the means to take the token away from you, so it is something you have to account for, or you’ll find yourself without that extra glory.

Finally - some nice cards interact with gaining, having, or spending the Primacy Token. So, not only Primacy is a way of scoring extra glory, but it is also a resource you might want to spend for potential gains. Those gains come at the risk of failing and simply losing the value of having the token at the end of the round though.

It might be argued that it’s too hard to wrestle the Primacy from some of the more oppressive fighters. Or that aggro doesn’t need that extra glory. But I think it creates the space, where aggro warbands can catch up a bit with their opponent when things haven’t gone perfectly for them. Also, the mini-games of taking the counter and then having to protect it add some extra depth to the game as a whole. I really hope Primacy will not disappear and will continue to receive support in the future expansions of the game.

Honorable Mention: New approach to seasons. This time in the starter set we’ve received more advanced warbands to play. Also, there were no repeats of the staple universal cards that were added to every seasonal box before S4. 

Instead, the more basic warbands were included in a separate box that is supported with an Essential Card pack. That way the core of the game stays the same for new and old players while seasonal starter sets can focus on introducing new things right off the bat. No more wasting space on another Sidestep, Supremacy or Hold Objective 5. I love that approach!

The Bad

So… we’ve got our Good. Now it’s time for a thing that was bad. And the winner is… Hunger! This might not be a surprise to anyone. When hunger mechanic first debuted on some of the cards in the Direchasm starter set people were a bit confused. While Primacy has received a nice card with all (well.. almost all) the rules explained, Hunger had nothing like that. And while confused, people quickly figured out that it’s simply a mechanic that revolves around stacking hunger counters and then having ploys interact with them for extra benefits.

The concept in itself isn’t bad at all. And the development team has been putting in the effort to add new, interesting options to play with. But Hunger has failed. Except for one warband, there’s no innate way to generate it. You have to invest in ploys or upgrades to generate those counters. This means it’s costly. And slow. It’s even harder if you would like to use hunger tokens offensively, to allocate them to your enemies, so you can score some hunger-based offensive objectives for example. There are only a few ways to make it happen. And they’re not bringing much else to the table. 

Another problem is that while you’ve dedicated your power deck to hunger, your enemy is still playing his game. So it’s very likely he’ll be using the most optimal cards for his game plan, while you’re mostly stacking counters. It can be fairly devastating to lose one of your very hungry fighters. Having to generate another 3-4 counters can mean that the game’s fate is already sealed. 

What is the result of this? Among universal cards, there are 47 that relate to hunger in some fashion. The vast majority of them are either considered unplayable or an extended Vampire faction tech. Or both. I think it’s easy to agree that we would like those 47 cards to be something else.

Honorable Mention: Flip tech. I mean… what’s the deal with so many tools to flip the feature tokens in this season? For now, they’re pretty cool, thanks to Feed the Beastgrave. But once it rotates out, most of that tech will be a dead weight.

The Ugly

And here’s our final category - the ugly! And this title goes to the rule updates in form of FAR, Errata, and Designer’s Commentary! Some of those documents were not updated for a year. And a recent release did not contain any FAQ or Designer’s Commentary. That’s a full season with no balancing coming from the GW.

We’re still missing FAQ. And the game has some open questions that - at the moment - are regulated by community consensus. This doesn’t really help when you meet some especially persistent opponent, who for their own benefit can decide to ignore those community rules. That’s… not great for an ultimate competitive game.

Also - the last FAQ has turned Arena Mortis into Restriction City. That expansion pack is either full of SG cards (lol) or restricted universals. So if you’re intending to buy Arena Mortis, better make some R slots free! Because out of few non-raise-token-related cards 6 are restricted. But yeah.. those upgrades in there were rather crazy, so no surprises there.

Honorable Mentions: Khagra’s inspire mechanics, Desecration, and neutralization of their hold objective playstyle. I’m not going to lie - when I first saw Khagra’s models I was hyped. When I heard that they’re going to smear objective tokens with poop and make it smelly and unwanted for anyone - I was really happy. I mean… crapping on Hold Objective is a good thing in my book after all ;) But then a brick flew into my face - Desecration mechanic was released… and it was not good. It is harder to desecrate an objective than it is to clean it up and hold it again. To make things worse - Ravagers had to desecrate (and keep desecrated) three of the tokens. Well.. that wasn’t going to happen. To make things even worse, 2 of the Ravagers can’t even hold objectives. So quick, reliable surges like Hidden Purpose are not an option for them to power up easily.

Latest Errata did change their inspiration to require only two desecrations tokens on the battlefield. Still, this means you have to defend your tokens for at least one round - desecrating an objective is a reaction that happens after the inspiration window...

And that would be it - my list of the good, the bad, and the ugly things in the Direchasm. Of course - it is not a comprehensive list of strengths and weaknesses of this season. For that, I’m planning a separate article offering a more in-depth look into the subject. But I would like to spend some more time with newer releases before writing that article. 

What are your thoughts on this list? What would make up your own? Let me know in the comments!