How to play Xandire's truthseekers

There's an optics thing with warbands like the truthseekers where people assume that you have to play a sacrifice game and get one of your dudes killed ASAP to inspire and get your game rolling. But you need to think of the inspire as a bonus, and a late-game second wind, not a necessity. Play them like a traditional aggro team and be pleased when your dudes all get better from the natural attrition every warband would take.

Their overall winning plan is pure aggro. Just charge with everybody (for exception of bird), try to score off your aggro surges and put either damage or accuracy upgrades to continue to provide pressure on your opponent. Quite disagree on most abilities being useless, though. Push of bird allow to use it as body for supports in dice rollings (both attack and defence) and push of Dhoraz allows you to relocate either friendly or enemy fighter, so you could attack needed target without charging, which is really nice.

I think the idea is to create opportunities for your opponent to make bad decisions. You can afford to just go aggro with a fighter or two, and your opponent probably doesn’t want to outright kill a fighter without first weakening at least one other because of how much the warband benefits from inspiring.

Use pushes, healing and upgrades to make whatever fighter they’ve targeted a poor choice so that they either need to kill a very well defended fighter or split their damage, which means your fighter live longer to punch them again.

Usually you want to keep the warband fairly close together so that they can support each other and possibly screen each other entirely to make your enemy’s target priority even worse.

Here's the decklist I've been using for Xandire lately, it's my fourth attempt and I still don't feel like it's fully dialed-in, would welcome any feedback: https://www.underworldsdb.com/shared.php?deck=0,H1,H3,H8,H12,H13,H15,H25,H26,E51,E49,DC480,E48,E40,DC285,E2,DC333,E47,DC366,H264,H27,DC392,E27,E4,E43,AM7,H5,H216,DC315,DC425,DC300,DC342,E36&format=championship

As for play style, keep Stormrider back, and try to advance Xandire and Dhoraz in a way that forces your opponent to divide attacks between the two, rather than being able to focus solely on one. Use Talos for sacrificial support duty. Best-case scenario is to whack someone with Dhoraz and give them a stagger token so that you can follow up with Stormrider who then gets a re-roll.

https://www.underworldsdb.com/shared.php?deck=0,H191,H8,DC273,DC263,H6,H3,H4,DC338,H220,H1,H15,E24,H25,DC483,H246,E49,E51,DC484,DC377,E48,H13,E43,E47,DC392,DC366,AM24,H299,H231,DC285,E27,DC333,E21&format=championship

So the deck is globally draw safe, main things to look for are Fearless Advance that you want to mulligan for, and Bold Deeds that you want to mulligan away if drawn early

Dhoraz is usually your sacrificial lamb, he can be yolo charged, hopefully killing someone, and eat up 2-3 attacks before dying, inspiring the others safely (Except against pure hordes where you might want to yolo Xandire instead and use the scything)

Luxa is your late game monster with Fighter's Ferocity and Gloryseeker + her reaction. Xandire is your super reliable killer

The bird is somewhat of a liability pre inspire, keep it safe unless required for scoring something, and usually always park it on a cover hex. Once inspired it has some decent killing potential

The good thing about Xandire/this deck is that nothing is ever completely bad for you or completely good for your opponent

Use your dying reactions well

You'll probably loose 1 sc + bird, but the survivors can mow down ennemies. No matter who survives you'll always have threats

Bird on an objective denies scant ressources

Bird push reaction helps a lot with placement/can give easy impending doom

Countercharge and Fearless Companion are extremely valuable to advance, reposition, and give support. Fearless works well with bird if bird is far from Luxa, and because of wording, fearless companion also allows Luxa to be pushed anywhere within 2 of the bird

Dhoraz dying usually means 1 "free" attack for Xandire either by pushing her to an enemy or an enemy to her. Or just disrupt objective based scoring

Dying Curse can be replaced with a more conventional upgrade, but I really like it, it either deters people from attacking the bird, or makes the death of a stormcast even more costly for your opponent. Also, the lower the health pools of enemies the more Luxa inspired can react and multiply her damage output

That's it for the basics 😄 If you have questions I'll be happy to answer