Introduction

It can be difficult to know where to start when getting acclimated to a new card game. As someone who didn't grow up playing Magic: the Gathering, I have to say that learning the ins and outs of deck building and play strategy for a massively popular game can be quite an intimidating prospect. I've grown quite attached to a relatively new card game of the Living variety. Warhammer: Invasion by Fantasy Flight Games only has four releases at this point, so there's no time like the present to find out a little more about the factions of the games and figure out which race you'll fight for in the world of Warhammer. The four releases include the Core Set and the first three parts of the Corruption Cycle: The Skavenblight Threat, Path of the Zealot, and Tooth and Claw. This is the first of a six-part series of articles looking at the six factions of the Warhammer Living Card Game (LCG) up to this point in the release schedule. If this is your first exposure to the Warhammer LCG, you could head over to my recent article, an introduction to the Core Set that gives a rundown on the basics of the game. For the purpose of this series I'll assume you either have a familiarity with the rules or have read my article. On to the Dwarves!

Background

The Dwarves in Warhammer have often been described as Tolkien's dwarves on steroids. When playing as the Dwarves you'll realize that they not only have a lot of familiar fantasy tropes (blacksmiths, gigantic beards, axes/warhammers as the main weapons, etc.), but they are actually much more industrious and technology advanced than those of Durin's Folk. Guns are not unusual amongst the Dwarves, although they come in the large cannon variety rather than pistols or more portable types. They still end up preferring axe, warhammer, and shield along with a good set of armor to protect their hides. They are masters of the siege both offense and defensive, and you get a real feeling of this in their strengths in the card game. Dwarves also practice a magic of a sort, but it tends to be an aspect of their smithing and engineering. They don't trust magic in combat besides what's been built into their walls and weapons.



Heroes

The Dwarves have three heroes so far: Durgnar the Bold, King Kazador, and Gurni Thorgrimson. Durgnar the Bold is probably the least useful of the bunch. His power kicks in when one of your capital sections is burning, which means he's only really useful for a late-game rally. One of the main themes of the Dwarves, preventing and repairing damage to your capital, means that Durgnar will not see much action in his booster form. If you're playing a faction-pure all Dwarf deck, I can't see getting much use out of him as he'd just clog up the hero spot in the section of your capital he sits in. In the case that he does become useful, it's likely too late to make a come-back anyway. I could see him in a dual-faction deck with the Empire or High Elves, but even then he's only useful late-game.

King Mazador is a big old beat stick with staying power to rival any other character in the game. He requires a lot of resource matches and a big price to boot, but he could easily make the difference in a game with both toughness and a touch of effect immunity. Drop him in your Kingdom for a big boost to your income or your Battlefield for an unstoppable beatstick and defender. Warning: he does not work in rush decks, but Dwarves will not be rushing anytime soon.

Gurni Thorgrimson is an interesting card in that he's boosted through attachments on him, but there aren't a whole lot of attachment options in the game right now. If you can get an attachment on him, his power's going to quickly outpace any other character in play as most Dwarf attachments give power in one scenario or another. Where King Mazador only really fits in a single faction Dwarf deck, Gurni's power would likely increase when throwing another faction's attachment options in the deck building options.

Grunts

The Dwarves are builders, and even in their characters, the most straight-forward strategy is to build a wall of characters and support around your capital in order to hold off the oncoming hordes of orcs, demons, pesky humans, and stuck-up elves. With a few notable exceptions, Dwarven units tend to prolong the game and stick around. If you're looking for the faction with Toughness as a keyword theme, the Dwarves far outpace any other faction with characters like Hammerer of Karak Azul and Ironbreakers of Ankhor. Toughness makes these characters stick around from turn-to-turn while still including them in action. Each attach they take is reduced by a certain number of toughness, so opponents need to push a lot of damage at a toughness character to take it down.


Along with their toughness walls, Dwarf units tend to buff each other up or buff their capital. If you're looking for debuffs to take your opponent's key characters down a notch, you'll have trouble playing the Dwarves. Focus instead of defending your capital and making it difficult for your opponent to attack any side without heavy losses. There are some offensive options with the dwarves, but they traditionally attack a side of your opponent's capital instead of being able to snipe off specific characters. The Dwarves have a good selection of Battlefield-only characters with the Defender of the Hold, Troll Slayers, and the newer Gurni's Elite. These tend to be light on the hit points and cause explosively-high damage for their cost before burning out to the discard pile.

Support

Much like their characters, the Dwarf support cards all tend towards defense and a general turtling strategy. That's not to say that the Dwarves are boring to play against. I think it can be quite a thrill to have a Dwarf opponent and try to figure out which character or support card to target to explore the crack in the wall and bring it all down. Even with that being the case, some critical cards like the Keystone Forge seen below or the newer Gromril Armor from the Corruption Cycle that grants the attached character toughness (a great match for Gurni Thorgrimson for the low cost of 0!) can be tough nuts to crack.

In addition to these direct defensive and healing measures, the Dwarves have access to several support cards which increase the cost for opponents to play effects on your characters or your opponents items. When it comes to support cards, you won't be paying a bunch of money on your end for the high-end dwarf weapons and armor. Most of their straight defensive support cards like Organ Gun or Grudge Thrower give you ways to directly increase the power on defending characters - making it a dangerous prospect to launch an attack on any defended position when a Dwarf player has these support cards out. I'm looking forward to more neat armor and weapon attachments in the future as the Corruption Cycle seems to really be promoting character attachments with the above mentioned Gromril Armor as well as the Anvil of Doom recently released.


Tactics

I've found that the strength of the Dwarves lies in careful application of characters followed by support with a dash of tactics cards thrown in to help compensate for their weak spots. There are a lot of effects here that allow you to redirect damage or reduce general damage. The goal with a lot of these cards is just like the other above: hold off the advances of your opponent on their turn so you can continue to build your walls and wait to deck your opponent on your turn. There's an interesting secondary theme of recursion as well. Let's take a look at the Core Set card Stand Your Ground.

Remember up above when I was talking about several Battlefield-only units that are purely offensive and burn off after a turn? Events like Stand Your Ground as well as Burying the Grudge allow you to take advantage of these glass-jawed dwarves and fuel the rest of your deck. The general strategy here is to build your wall and send out these cheap offensive units to die off. You then play a response to a character entering a discard pile, and profit! There's not much in the neutral department at this stage that will augment this strategy with more cards, but given my experience with both A Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu LCG's (both designed by Nate French and Eric Lang, who also designed Invasion), I imagine we'll see some neutral discard pile recursion before too long, if not this Cycle, then in the next.

Building the Wall

The Dwarves play conservatively, but thankfully it doesn't take long to build your defenses up for each side of your capital. Like the other factions, early on you need to concentrate on your Kingdom zone to build your income. At this point you'll need to assess which of the Battlefield or Quest zones have taken the most damage and go for broke defending the healthier of the two remaining zones. You don't need as much card draw as other factions since, in general, your units stay in the game a lot longer than your opponent's. You have a couple of different options when playing Dwarves currently, but since most of your cards will depend on you defending at some point, so a speedy rush kind of deck will not be the most effective way to use your heavily-armored units.

That's all this week - come back soon for Part 2 of my factions series where I explore those pesky humans and their tricky maneuverability when I look at the Empire in all its glory.

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