Welcome to another installment of Starting Hex, a series about Warhammer Underworlds. Today, I'm going to highlight an effect that makes a fairly limited appearance in the game – healing. There are a handful of power cards that provide healing and a few warbands sport some additional sources of healing on their warscrolls. The main use of healing effects is the obvious "keep your injured fighter alive" but there are a few nuances that are worth considering on when and where to utilize the effects.

Heal Mechanics

Within the rules framework of Underworlds, heal has a specific meaning. The rulebook explains heal working as follows:

When an ability tells you to heal a fighter, remove 1 damage token from that fighter. When an undamaged fighter is healed, nothing happens.

It's a straightforward rule, but we can still dissect this a bit and pick up some nuances.

Abilities will say something like "heal a friendly fighter" and that means removing just a single point of damage, not all the damage that has been inflicted so far. There are very few effects right now that can remove multiple damage tokens at a time; the majority of power cards and warscroll abilities are healing one damage per use.

There's also a call out here saying that undamaged fighters are able to be healed. Normally, if you can't perform every action that an ability tells you to do, then you can't use that ability at all. This clause means heals are exempt from this small but key rule for Underworlds. The main reason this is here is so you can still use abilities that heal and Do Something Else to still take advantage of that other effect, even if your fighters aren't damaged. This is relevant for some warbands more than others, but it's always something to keep in mind when playing.

There are also some very niche effects like using Healing Potion on an uninjured Spiteclaw's Swarm fighter to inspire them, or using it on an uninjured fighter just to play a ploy in order to score Low on Options from Wrack & Ruin or to pop Canny Sapper from Pillage & Plunder.

Spiteclaw’s Swarm. Credit: Rockfish

When to Play Heals in Your Games

The baseline here is to play a heal when one of your fighters has been damaged, requiring your opponent to deal more damage to kill them. Duh.

There's a little bit more to it than that, though. Instead of firing off a heal on your first opportunity, you instead want to make sure you're getting value out of it. Look at the board state, particularly the damage output of your opponent's fighters and the remaining health of your own damaged fighters. Take note of which of your opponent's fighters have charge or move tokens on them – that further restricts what attacks you can expect to be coming on on the next few turns.

It's also helpful to know some of the tricks that your opponent could pull out to surprise you. Blazing Assault, for instance, has Twist the Knife for a surprise grievous on an attack which can catch you off guard if you were planning to save a heal for just one more activation. Most of the other damage enhancers are going to be played at ploy speed (Great Strength, Push Through, etc.) or they're publicly available information (Ylthari's Guardians' damage boost from Everdusk, grievous from various warscrolls like Wurmspat or Skinnerkin) that you're ideally remembering to play around.

Ylthari's Guardians warband. Credit: Keewa

Don't blow your heal on a vulnerable fighter if all of your opponent's fighters are threatening two damage, for instance. You're wasting a resource that could be put to better effect elsewhere. I'm honestly pretty bad at this and it's something I am striving to improve on. I'll have a four health fighter get whacked for two damage, then I'll immediately play Healing Potion without realizing that fighter is still in charge range of a three damage fighter from my opponent. Whoops.

Still, there are times when something like that is the right play. Maybe you want to make the opponent commit that three damage fighter and you're using a heal to force their hand. Maybe your fighter has multiple save dice and/or rerolls available and you're gambling on being able to roll a defensive critical to trigger Stand Fast. It might not be the ideal play, but it could still be the best play available to you.

Is the fighter that you are thinking about healing a key part of your gameplan? Maybe it's a fighter standing on a treasure token that will score you both Supremacy and Iron Grasp if you can just survive one more turn.

There's also healing as a method of denying your opponent's objectives. There are a few objectives out there which require enemy fighters to be vulnerable or damaged. They include Fields of Blood, Hounds of War, Wreckers, Aim for the Top, Bloody and Bruised, Calm Before the Storm, On the Edge, Bloodscent, and a huge payoff for Trial of the Tempered.

When to Include Heals in Your Decks

Heals are great. They're flexible, they prolong the presence of your fighters which enables more scoring options either from objectives or just being around longer to hit things. They're also pretty darn good at thwarting your opponent's plans. Sounds like you'd always want to include them, right?

Well… maybe? I've twice taken some very aggressive warband and deck pairings to an event and wound up cutting all the heal cards during my various practice games. My Morgok's Krushas with Blazing Assault and Reckless Fury that I took to NOVA as well as my Thorns of the Briar Queen with Blazing Assault and Deadly Synergy that I took to WCW both eschewed the GOAT Healing Potion and even the pseudo-heal Great Fortitude. Those deck pairings have a plethora of strong power cards available, and I had chosen to skew heavily into the aggressive option by focusing on cards that aided my positioning and offense. I won't say it was objectively the correct choice given that I went 2-1 and 5-5 respectively, but it was a conscious decision on my part that I don't necessarily regret.

Morgok's Krusha's from Warhammer Underworlds. Credit: Magos Sockbert

If you aren't playing pedal-to-the-metal all-gas-no-brakes aggro, skipping heals becomes a lot more questionable. When your objectives require you to have fighters in specific locations, you want to make sure they live long enough to score them for you. It's no coincidence that Emberstone Sentinels, the premier "go stand on this token" deck also includes Healing Potion.

Like any other effect in a card game, your heals become more reliable when you have more copies of them in your deck. This is tricky given how scarce this effect is in general, but when you're able to combine two or three healing effects in your deck along with a healing effect on a warscroll, the effects can add up quickly.

The health of your fighters also plays into whether you can expect to take advantage of heals. If you're rocking a warband where all your models have five health, it's going to be incredibly rare that any of them will be taken out in one attack. This gives you plenty of time to play out your heals. Conversely, if you're running a warband like the Sepulchral Guard or Hexbane's Hunters where the majority of your fighters are in danger of going from full health to dead in a single attack, heals are going to be much harder to use.

Power Card Heals

So what tools are out there to heal your fighters? As of now, there are eight decks that provide at least one source of healing in their power cards. Some are guaranteed and easy to trigger while others have a set of hoops to jump through before your fighters can benefit from removing damage.

There are plenty of power cards that offer healing to your fighters. credit: UnderworldsDB.com

The strongest of these power cards is the classic Healing Potion which can be found in both the Blazing Assault and Emberstone Sentinels decks. There are zero restrictions attached to playing this ploy, making it one of the most reliable heals available in the game. If you're the underdog, it even has a 50% chance of healing twice which also makes it the healing effect with the strongest single target throughput. Basically, if you want a heal effect and have access to Healing Potion, take it.

Prideful Duellist from Pillage & Plunder is another ploy that can heal one of your fighters, but only after they make an attack in enemy territory. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be successful so as long as you can get a fighter into position, you can reliably heal with this.

What Pain? in Raging Slayers is unique in that it can heal up to two fighters. There are more hoops to jump through (they need to be enraged, you need to spend their rage tokens, and they wind up being staggered afterwards) but this is an effect not found anywhere else in the game yet. Meanwhile, Defiant Duo from Deadly Synergy only heals one fighter but does throw out a guard token as well as long as you're able to set up the united state.

For upgrades, there are a few options. Driven by Pain is found in Countdown to Cataclysm as well as the new Nexus of Power and can heal the equipped fighter if they're driven back. I've found these to be pretty underwhelming because if you need the heal, your opponent will simply choose to not drive you back. Meanwhile, if you need to be holding a token then your opponent is often willing to give you that health back just to deprive you of it.

Brightstone Vigor is a weird and expensive upgrade, but since it's from Realmstone Raiders that's par for the course. You'll be limited by which warband your taking whether this is worthwhile or not, but if you have multiple high damage fighters it's possible that it can be a somewhat reliable heal after an attack. There's still some uncertainty on how grievous interacts with this card – does a 2 damage plus grievous attack mean you can trigger it on a 2 save fighter? It can be argued either way, so check with your TO if you plan to take this to any events until we can get GW to answer in an official FAQ.

Speaking of expensive upgrades, Gifted Vitality is one that functions somewhat like stapling an Aqua Ghyranis token to one of your fighters. The guaranteed heal at the end of each round is helpful (and the timing even puts it after you gain your end phase glory, so that can help pay for this upgrade) but it is a pricey two glory. Due to the timing, it may not be providing the heal when it's actually needed and it really needs to go down in the first round to feel worthwhile. It's wins the crown for the most theoretical healing from a single power card, although healing at the end of round three is rarely impactful.

Warband Heals

Along with cards from Rivals decks, there are heal effects that come on some warbands' warscrolls. These have some inherent extra value because, like any warscroll ability, they're always going to be available from the start of the game – you don't have to hope that you draw into them. On the flip side, it's also open information so your opponent will know you have access to it and (probably) plan accordingly.

Starting off with what is technically a healing effect is the Gorechosen of Dromm. Their Final Frenzy ability can heal away the lethal damage that a fighter takes, leaving them vulnerable until the end of the round when they'll finally realize they are dead. It's a temporary effect but sometimes that's all you need, especially if you're getting another attack out of Dromm or the Gorehulk.

Grandfather's Gardeners have Reap a Harvest on their warscroll, which will go off multiple times in a game. In my experience playing against them, it is a righteous pain in the butt to plan around. It also has the distinction of being able to save a fighter from death if it triggers as they suffer lethal damage, making it feel even more powerful. While you don't have any direct control over firing this ability off when piloting the Gardeners, you can still do some treasure token manipulation to speed it up by a couple of turns.

The Crimson Court have a cool ability in Dark Transfusion. It's thematic in that one of your vampires is draining away the life force of an enemy and rejuvenating themselves with it, plus it's also just a solid in-game ability. The damage is guaranteed, as is the healing, as long as your fighter is in position. Being able to have effects like this without relying on a dice roll is always welcome. It does come at the cost of being a core ability so you have to dedicate one of your 12 activations to using it, but it's still one of the stronger abilities on this warscroll. Remember you can use heal effects even when undamaged, so if you really need to get one point of damage onto an enemy you can still fire this off even with uninjured fighters.

Zondara's Gravebreakers have their recently changed Undying Love which is another combination heal ability. This time it's a massive three hex push along with a heal, but you're restricted to using it with the happy couple of Zondara and Ferlain. The February 2026 update changed it to be usable once per round instead of once per game, so (in theory) you can get three heals off per game now. In practice, one of the lovers is probably going to die by round three but it's still quite powerful and I've been less tempted to sit on it waiting for the "perfect moment" with this change.

The Skinnerkin with their reusable Quick Nibble have the highest healing ceiling of all the warbands. If you're able to generate enough haunches, you could theoretically heal 12 points of damage off of your fighters over the course of the game. That's insane. Consider that the average health of an entire warband usually ranges around 15 to 16, this is almost doubling the amount of health an opponent needs to chew through (get it?) before the Skinnerkin are tabled. The downside comes when your opponent is capable of hitting them hard enough to one shot the relatively fragile fighters or when haunch generation just isn't cooperating.

Troggoth Regeneration in Mollog's Mob does a good impression of the Gifted Vitality upgrade mentioned earlier. It's quite handy because Mollog is absolutely going to take damage in 99% of games and he has a high enough health pool to probably survive to at least one end phase for this to take effect. The troggoth already takes quite a bit of effort to bring down, and by combining the warscroll's regeneration along with any of the other healing effects mentioned above can make it even more punishing for Mollog's opponents.

The Farstriders can in fact heal when utilizing the Vanguard ability, but it has quite a few restrictions baked into it. You need to have a vulnerable fighter, they need to be in enemy territory, they need to be inspired, and they have to have just used a core ability. In return, you can uninspire them and heal them… or instead have a 50%/75%/88% chance of pinging an enemy. This is far too many hoops to jump through for this effect. If anyone has been able to get Vanguard to do anything useful, I'd love to hear.

Xandire's Truthseekers offers a sort of consolation prize in Blazing Purity when Xandire herself is slain. It can throw out a single heal to two fighters or two heals onto a single fighter. This can be helpful, but there's always the chance of your opponent killing Xandire first before damaging any other enemy fighters. If damage is spread out, though, it means that not only will the remaining Truthseekers inspire but they'll also get a dose of healing to go with the improved stats.

Wrap Up

That's it for healing, but I'm sure I missed some cool use case for how these various effects can be utilized in the game. If you have any, hop into the Goonhammer Discord and let me know or leave a comment here!

I've been enjoying these dives into various mechanics and rules of Underworlds. It's not explicitly a series, but there are also articles covering damage three fighters, pushes and teleports, and weapon upgrades. This sort of examination of mechanics is the kind of thing I do in my free time anyway, so hopefully it's a good springboard for your own exploration of the game.

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Tags: warhammer underworlds | Starting Hex