Warhammer Underworlds: Thanatek’s Tithe Is Awesome – But Don’t Pair It With Nexus of Power

Two New Ways to Fight Over Bones and Treasure

Warhammer Underworlds always feels best when a warband and its deck are pulling in the same direction. You feel it with things like Zarbag’s Gitz swarming onto objectives, or Magore’s Fiends doing what they do best: getting right into people’s faces and swinging. With the release of Thanatek’s Tithe and the Nexus of Power Rivals deck, Games Workshop has dropped two very distinct ways to play the game… that almost feel like they’re arguing with each other when you try to combine them.

On one side you’ve got a five‑fighter Ossiarch Bonereapers warband that thrives on movement, target selection, and managing cadaver tokens. On the other, you’ve got a Rivals deck that basically tells you to sit on a treasure token and dare your opponent to come dislodge you. Agile corpse‑reapers versus treasure‑hoarding turret play. They both have clear, interesting identities-but they’re pointed in opposite directions.

First Impressions: Clean, Creepy, and Readable on the Table

The first thing that stands out about Thanatek’s Tithe is how immediately readable the warband is. You’ve got:

• Thanatek himself, robed and laden with bone talismans and arcane tools.
• Two Mortis Reapers, all blades and aggressive forward momentum.
• Two Retainers with those wonderfully unsettling coffin‑headed silhouettes.

From across the board you can instantly tell who’s who, and that matters in Underworlds more than people admit. When you can glance at the table and know, “Those are the Retainers, those are the Reapers, that’s the leader,” your brain is free to think about sequencing and lines of play instead of squinting at sculpts and cards. It’s the same sort of clarity the newer Ossiarch Bonereapers ranges have been leaning into: weird, intricate, but still practical on the tabletop.

That visual clarity carries into the rules. All the Mortis Reapers share a profile. Both Retainers share a profile. Thanatek is his own thing. Once you’ve scanned the fighter cards once or twice, you’re not checking them constantly. The complexity comes not from memorizing stats, but from how the warband interacts with cadaver tokens and positioning.

Thanatek’s Tithe: Corpse Economy and Relentless Stalking

Conceptually, Thanatek’s Tithe plays like a group of methodical bone harvesters. They don’t crash into the enemy in a single wave; they advance, mark a victim, and then slowly turn that fighter’s demise into fuel for the whole engine.

At the start of a round, Thanatek can name an enemy fighter as the possessor-essentially putting a spiritual bullseye on them. Whenever that unlucky soul takes damage from one of your attacks, your Retainers each get a free push toward the target. You’re not just dealing damage; you’re tightening a noose around one specific enemy model, shifting your board position without burning activations or gambits.

This is where the warband starts to feel pleasantly “thinky.” Those free Retainer pushes matter. They’re not fast fighters on their own, so those little positional nudges are how you get your cadaver engine going. You want Retainers close enough to the action that they can watch people die-and that sounds grim because it is. The more fights happen near them, the more your warband starts to snowball resources.

Cadaver Tokens: Your Real Win Condition

The core of Thanatek’s gameplay is cadaver tokens. Whenever one of your fighters hits an enemy that’s adjacent to a Retainer, you pick up a token. It doesn’t sound dramatic on paper, but cadavers are a flexible currency, and that flexibility is what rewards precise movement.

During the power step, those tokens turn into powerful options:

• Resurrection: Spend cadaver tokens and roll that many dice to try to raise a dead Mortis Reaper. If the dice cooperate, you get a serious second chance on a key fighter.
• Bonus attacks: Trade cadaver tokens for dice to have Retainers lash out at adjacent enemies, effectively turning stored corpses into extra swings.
• Inspiration fuel: Remove cadaver tokens equal to a fighter’s bounty value to Inspire them, pushing their profile up a notch at the exact moment you need it.

All of this hinges on playing a very deliberate positioning game. Retainers need to be there when attacks land, but not so far forward that they’re deleted before they can bank any value. Mortis Reapers are your heavy lifters, but they’re also your resurrection targets, so throwing them away recklessly feels awful when the dice fail you. Thanatek himself can sit safer, constantly setting up possessors and, crucially, leveraging his Soul‑Linked Constructs ability.

Soul‑Linked Constructs lets Thanatek make his melee attack as if he were a Retainer. That means your leader can project his threat through those coffin‑headed minions without needing to stand in the front rank. Once the Retainers are in place around a possessor, the warband plays almost like a puppet show: they move, they watch, they gather cadavers, and Thanatek pulls the strings from behind.

How Thanatek’s Tithe Actually Feels to Play

On the table, Thanatek’s Tithe leans heavily toward mobile control and attrition. You’re not just rushing for early glory; you’re identifying high‑value enemy fighters, hounding them, and turning their suffering into your advantage. The warband:

• Rewards you for picking one target and staying on them.
• Asks you to think two turns ahead: “If I kill here, are my Retainers close enough to see it?”
• Punishes sloppy positioning—if your Retainers drift too far from the action, your cadaver economy collapses.

It’s not a beginner‑friendly “run forward and swing” warband. There’s a bit of bookkeeping with tokens, and you need to internalize when to spend cadavers on resurrection versus inspiration versus bonus attacks. But if you enjoy that feeling of gradually tightening control and squeezing value out of every combat, Thanatek’s Tithe hits a satisfying niche that isn’t just “more aggro.”

Nexus of Power Rivals Deck: King of the Hill, But Make It Arcane

Now swing the pendulum the other way. The Nexus of Power Rivals deck is built on a simple idea: treasure tokens are your whole world. Not objectives—treasure. Where Thanatek wants to roam the board, Nexus of Power wants you to pick a spot and dig in.

The key word here is covetous. Friendly fighters become covetous while they’re within 1 hex of a treasure token. If they’re holding a treasure token, their Range 1 melee attacks (from their fighter cards) gain +1 Range. Suddenly, your standard pokes are reaching two hexes instead of one, but only if you stay glued to your shinies.

Almost every part of the deck is gravity‑locked to that one mechanic. The objectives pay you for:

• Making melee attacks close to treasure tokens.
• Getting covetous fighters into enemy territory.
• Landing critical hits with covetous fighters.
• Generally doing things while you’re hugging or holding those tokens.

The power cards follow suit. You’ll see very familiar effects—pushes, range boosts, adding Grapple or Brutal, and so on—but with a twist: they only unlock their full potential if the action is happening within 1 hex of a treasure token. In other words, the deck is constantly asking, “Are you sure you don’t want to stand right here?”

How Nexus of Power Changes Your Game Plan

If you bring Nexus of Power to the table, you’re basically agreeing to a mini‑game of area denial and baiting. You want a warband that’s:

• Comfortable staying relatively static.
• Durable enough to survive being the obvious target.
• Happy to fight over a small footprint of the board rather than sprinting around.

Your ideal scenario looks something like this: you plant your fighters around a cluster of treasure tokens, you get them covetous, and you force your opponent to come to you. Once they do, you’re swinging at two‑hex range, layering on upgrades that only work near treasure, and racking up objective cards for doing exactly what the deck told you to do from the start: don’t leave the pile.

It’s a very different rhythm from most stock decks. Instead of fanning out to grab objectives or racing for early kills, you’re constructing a murder‑castle around some tokens and inviting the enemy inside. If you enjoy playing the anvil rather than the hammer, Nexus of Power scratches that itch nicely.

Why Thanatek’s Tithe and Nexus of Power Don’t Really Get Along

On paper, pairing a mobile, cadaver‑driven warband with a treasure‑centric Rivals deck sounds like it could give you interesting tactical tension: do you chase possessors or hold your ground? In practice, the tension mostly feels like being pulled in two incompatible directions.

Thanatek’s Tithe wants to move. The possessor mechanic encourages you to hunt down a specific fighter. The cadaver engine asks you to get Retainers into the thick of things so they can watch fights unfold. Your resurrection and inspiration options hinge on your fighters having been in the right place when damage happens. The whole kit screams, “Stalk your prey, reposition constantly, stay right on top of the action.”

Nexus of Power wants to stay still. It’s happiest when your fighters are parked near treasure tokens, stretching their melee range, and repeatedly trading blows in a tight radius. Every time you wander off, your covetous bonuses and power cards get worse. The deck punishes you for chasing fights across the board instead of dragging the fight back to your hoard.

So if you try to slam these two together, you end up with awkward, half‑measures:

• You mark a possessor and feel like you should go take them apart… but your best cards are telling you to stay near your treasure.
• You push Retainers forward to farm cadavers… and suddenly they’re no longer within 1 hex of the tokens that power your Nexus effects.
• You find good terrain for a Nexus “camp” but the possessor is somewhere else entirely, undercutting Thanatek’s kit.

There’s certainly a challenge in trying to reconcile those game plans, and some players will enjoy the puzzle of “how do I make this work anyway?” But where other warband/Rivals releases often feel like they slot neatly together as an out‑of‑the‑box package, this pairing lands more as two separate products that just happened to launch at the same time.

Who Should Actually Use These?

Thanatek’s Tithe is best for players who like technical aggro-control. If you enjoy:

• Tracking a specific target and setting up a slow, inevitable takedown.
• Managing a resource (cadaver tokens) with multiple tempting ways to spend it.
• Fiddly, positional play where tiny pushes and fighter placement matter a lot.

…then this warband offers a ton of depth. It’s not the most forgiving choice if you’re brand new to Underworlds, but it’s also not rules‑overloaded. The trickiness is in the decisions rather than a wall of keyword soup.

Nexus of Power is easier to grasp conceptually—“stay near treasure, get paid”—but can be brutal if you misread the board. It’s ideal if you:

• Like building a fortress and forcing the opponent to break it.
• Have a chunky, low‑model‑count warband you already love.
• Prefer clear positional rules to complex, multi‑step interactions.

For newer or more casual players, Nexus of Power can act as a good teaching tool for why positioning around specific hexes matters in Underworlds. Just be aware that highly mobile, objective‑focused opponents can try to dance around your “kill zone” and starve you of good fights.

Production, Rules Clarity, and Table Feel

On the physical side, Thanatek’s Tithe is exactly what you’d expect from a modern Warhammer Underworlds warband: crisp detail, clever posing that sells motion and menace, and sculpts that paint up nicely whether you’re doing quick tabletop schemes or obsessive edge highlighting. The contrast between the coffin‑headed Retainers and the more aggressive Mortis Reapers gives you some fun opportunities to play with different bone and cloth textures.

The cards themselves are laid out clearly. The cadaver rules and possessor mechanic are easy to parse once you’ve walked through them once. The only real “gotcha” is remembering all the ways cadaver tokens can be spent and not leaving value on the table. Nexus of Power’s wording around covetous and treasure adjacency is very straightforward, to the point where you’re mostly thinking about the board state rather than rereading card text.

Taken separately, both products feel like solid additions to the game’s ecosystem. Thanatek’s Tithe adds another flavor of undead that isn’t just “slow grind” or “mindless rush”; Nexus of Power gives defensive players a new toy that isn’t simply objective camping, but a distinct “guard the arcane cache” experience.

Final Verdict: Better Foes Than Friends

Looked at as a “boxed pair” you might buy together, Thanatek’s Tithe and Nexus of Power send mixed signals. You can absolutely play them as one package, but the whole time you’ll feel that friction between what the warband wants (movement, focus fire, cadaver farming) and what the deck demands (sit tight, hug your treasure, swing from a fixed position).

Judged individually, though, they’re both pretty compelling:

• Thanatek’s Tithe is a stylish, mechanically interesting warband that leans into resource management and positional play without becoming a bookkeeping slog.
• Nexus of Power is a clean, thematic Rivals deck that carves out a clear identity as the “treasure hill” package, great for sturdy warbands that already like standing their ground.

If you come into this release expecting a perfect, synergistic combo out of the box, you’re likely to be disappointed. If you treat them as two separate tools—one aggressive, one defensive—that you can slot into different rosters depending on your mood, they’re much easier to appreciate.

Score: 8/10. As a pair they’re awkward, but as individual additions to Warhammer Underworlds, both Thanatek’s Tithe and Nexus of Power offer sharp, distinctive playstyles that will absolutely find fans.

TL;DR

• Thanatek’s Tithe is a five‑fighter Ossiarch warband built around cadaver tokens, targeted aggression, and clever Retainer positioning.
• Cadaver tokens can resurrect Mortis Reapers, fuel bonus attacks, or Inspire fighters, rewarding tight, deliberate play.
• Nexus of Power is a Rivals deck that makes fighters covetous near treasure tokens, extending their melee range and powering up actions if they stay close.
• The warband wants to roam and hunt, while the deck wants to camp and brawl around treasure, so they clash more than they complement.
• Both are strong, flavorful options on their own: Thanatek’s Tithe suits technical, control‑leaning players; Nexus of Power suits defensive, area‑denial fans.
• Treat them as separate tools in your Underworlds arsenal, not a unified starter combo, and they’re easy to recommend.