Dejavu

The eels are now also $25 each in the backer kit instead of $50

The more I look at the Abyssinian engineers the more I think they really help advance, support and optimise the faction, just like engineers do in real life (an opinion that's totally not biased my chosen profession). Free card draw every turn for existing is amazing. This is partly comparable to a tactics token per turn. While the tactics token is more flexible the extra card draw frees your tactics tokens for more stratagems, , coordinated strike etc. There is a cost to adding these to your lists but let's say you have basotho cav in your list at 4 points, you could take 4 engineers instead (if you have 4 other squads), then use the stratagem behind enemy lines to summon the basotho cav early in the game for 4 tactics tokens (assume lord of Steel). After reinforcing they do end up one model short, but in exchange you now get 4 tactics tokens worth of card draw each turn for as long as the engineers are alive. With Kassa you could also summon a unit of south Wales borderers with the stratagem instead who seem like they'd be really annoying in an enemies deployment zone early. A unit with an engineer can use the card draw to use a prototype almost for free due to the extra drawn card making up for the discarded one. Not quite as good as the electrocutioners whose ability works if they have multiple prototypes or Prince unathi and can also benefit from an engineer, but it is available to most other units. They add an extra shooting attack to the squad which is accurate, longer range (than the Abyssinian average) and packs a punch. The extra shot with card draw increases the squads chance at flipping to glory. The mechanised infantry especially love engineers due to their tracer rounds ability to the point where mechanised infantry in my mind now cost 9 and include an engineer. Lately when looking at list builds I've had between 2-4 engineers in every list. I've always thought engineers were amazing (again not at all biassed) but I don't find myself wanting other factions adjuncts anywhere near as much. Does anyone else think they are amazing or have other great tricks?

I always end up jumping the gun but I'm itching to pull the trigger on some of these so I can load them into my lists.

I was having a play around with a few lists trying to think what extra holes kings empire units might be able to help fill and I had a few thoughts I'd like to try. One thing I'm not sure of is if adjuncts can be added to units hired through envoy, if so I'd add sharpshooters to some of the long ranged squads. Field intelligence corps: Could help provide some extra pressure on the opponents hand with the potential for some extra card draw. Also could provide some long ranged supporting fire (Abyssinia ranged weapons are mostly mid range). Royal Rifle Corps: Provides good long ranged fire support. Their good defensive stats and point blank on their glory side means could be hard to beat if they're holding your objective marker in scavenge. Empire dragoons: Could help add offensive output to a more mobile force with the lord of steel, baso cav and crow runners. Would be fairly resilient and could help achieve the manifest destiny stratagem. South Wales Borderers: Not sure I'd want to hire them as their defensive stats make them a bit of an easier target than the rest of Abyssinia. Could be interesting to summon with the behind enemy lines stratagem. The two reinforcement tokens could bring back 4 of them bringing them back up to nearly full strength, making them a really annoying tar pit in the enemy deployment zone early in the game. Also the models look cool. There are a few units I'm not convinced by at the moment: Infiltrators: Crow runners have more mobility, higher defensive stats and can be outfitted with prototypes. Token manipulation on enemies might be useful. Grenadiers: Abyssinia has a lot of strong mid ranged shooting units. Motor scout: Low defensive stats could make easier target compared to Abyssinia units, lack of rapid manoeuvring on the envoy card limits ability to zip around shooting.

I added the mechanized infantry as my only additional squad. Having them get increasing accuracy bonuses each time they shoot something looks like it'll go really well with extra shooting actions from an engineer and a prototype asset. They are also a scrip cheaper than the Mehal sefari making them easier to fit into lists (especially with an engineer). Increasing the AV bonus gives them a better chance of hitting the eureka trigger bonus to flip to glory. Having a titan in the squad also has synergies with kassa who I also added on to let me bring units across between kings empire and Abyssinia. Electrocutioners were quite tempting too and I spent a while deciding between them and the mechanized infantry. Their ability to keep using prototype assets without discarding seems amazing as you don't auto refresh your hand every turn like in malifaux. Area attack on their guns seems awesome as there's only the odd couple of area attacks elsewhere in Abyssinia. AV 9 on their claws also seems great for increasing your chances to hit eureka and flip to glory. The lower scrip cost of the mechanized infantry and the synergies with kassa to get two titans in a possible kings empire list is what tipped it for me. The marauder was also a tempting pick as it's ability to take any action after a rush means the squad could rush 18" and then hit an objective marker seems like it could be an amazing late turn objective runner. It does look to have a much lower resilience than baso cav or crow runners which are reasonably quick and come in the commander pledge. It was basically the $ for the marauder that stopped me.

Sorry I should've been cleaner, what I meant by the 3 heal was = 1 from his innate regeneration + 1 from poison healing at the end of the turn if he's in Nico's 'welcoming pain' aura and + 1 from poison healing during his activation from Sebastian's 'catalyst' aura combined with Nico's aura. So it is at best 3, if you're outside of Nico's aura I guess it gets a bit risky. While we're on it I should also add that it'll also only be limited to whatever poison stack size is transfused across, and Mortimer might need a top up. Should I feel bad that the person I wish Mortimer would fling rot on the most is himself? I mean I think his current employment arrangements already aren't the best considering how many spleens he seems to have to hand over.

Between Asura and Kentauroi there seems to be so many possible engines for Nico now. This is fairly similar to something I've been thinking about, biggest difference is I have shadow embrace on Nico instead of Necrotic King. This let's you get poison heals on Mortimer and with Sebastian around Mortimer heals 3 damage a turn, so he's basically regrowing a spleen from poison every round (honestly if I had a poison spleen I'd rip it out too). Nicodem, Maniacal Laugh, Undertaker, Shadow embrace, 7 cache Sebastian, Those Are Not Ours, My Little Helper (can go on Asura instead) Asura Rotten Philip And The Nanny, Transfusion & Spirit Beacon Mortimer, Corpse Bloat, My Little Helper Guild Autopsy The guild Autopsy gives something to transfuse poison from over to Mortimer. The extra poison heals he gets let's him use his spleen for corpses freeing up his extra actions to pull more corpses from bones, or spreading rot around to give others regen +2 if they're near nico & Sebastian. The Autopsy and either Sebastian or Asura will drop scheme markers for Philip. Before transfusion the Autopsy can also try and leak its fluids all over one of Mortimer's many spleens to try to make it come to life. This gives you something else to kill for an extra card from Nico's Undertaker. Spirit beacon is there so if the fluids work their magic and you then kill the animated spleen then you can discard one of the crappy cards in your hand for a seishin. That seishin gives an extra activation and potentially healing for that low card. Finally something with the seishin that I think works but I'm not sure: Nicodem uses decay on a seishin and with an 8+ of tomes gets the empty vessel trigger from the shadow embrace upgrade, the attack will kill the seishin (unless you black jokes) which let's him take the reanimator action at +2 Ca. It's fairly situational but it might let some lower cards be used to get a higher summon out. Having the Doxy seems like it might be useful to keep feeding Philip as well as moving him or others around. Clearly I think this means further testing is needed

I've started assembling my dreamer crew, separately I've been trying to find a use for some of the models in the starter set which set off a chain of theorising and now there's a dreamer Rube Goldberg crew that I want to build and experiment with. Blueprints: Dreamer - dreams of pain & on wings of darkness Daydream Serena Bowman - A thousand faces Doppleganger Mr tannen Bloodwretch Bloodwretch 7ss still to spend and still have Max cache Core machine: A thousand faces on Serena bowman means if she dies first turn then the dreamer gets an extra (1) action, this means dreamer could summon 4 things, release chompy and come back onto the board with waking zero and maximum heals for the 4 summons. Feeding the contraption: To summon 4 things would mean a massive drain on cards. To satisfy this the bloodwretch's the rage builds ability let's you draw 2 cards and discard 1 card and does +1 damage. Using a Doppleganger to copy this ability Serena bowman can be hit twice doing 4 damage to her and drawing 4 cards and discarding 2. Then the bloodwretchs can do the same once each with one of them hitting and killing Serena netting another 4 cards and discarding 2. With wings of darkness and stoning turn 1 that's 17 cards in the deck you can cycle through and keep 10 cards in your hand. Going further down the rabbit hole: With drawing that many cards a quick check of a hypergeomtic probability and you've got a 53% chance of drawing at least one of the two cards needed to summon a teddy turn 1. So I threw Mr tannen in the list. Optional complexity: Say you have the dreamer activite before you kill Serena (only drawing 15 of the potential 17 cards), then after dreamer activates Serena could activate to put black blood on any teddy or coppelius. She can also try and heal and remove slow from 2 of the summons. If Teddy activates after the dreamer has been resummoned by lord chompy bits then you'll have a full health turn just by activating at the start of turn 2 near dreamer. Superfluous extras: Not really sure what to take with the last 7 stones to finish off the list. An extra two daydreams could give some more activation control, letting you push dreamer if you wanted to summon a bit further up the board and give some extra masks for dreamers summons. Pact might be good for dreamer as missing a summon would kill any healing from this plan turn 1. Doppleganger could take a thousand faces and the switch for pact drawing an extra card and ensuring her mimic doesn't black joker. Then maybe an alp to round it out? Things to be disregarded for proper machine operation: So there's a few weaknesses I can already see in this list: 1) Alpha strikes, there's not really anything in the list to respond to that. 2) Lots of activations along with the ability to reach out and plink off the summons while they're on 1 damage while chompy bits and others activate. 3) Black Jokers, a black joker on the summons would ruin your day, potentially add pact to the dreamer. 4) Board position, there's a large chunk of the crew (Doppleganger, Serena bowman and 2x bloodwretchs) that are not leaving the deployment zone turn 1, this is sacrificed to get extra cards and summon harder. Empty night might be able to help with this. Now I just need to finish building the crew. So I know it's a bit of a complex and skewed list but I'm excited to try it, anyone have any thoughts or comments? Any ideas on what to take with he last few ss to finish the list?

As the court of two is lead by a Doppleganger, having a Doppleganger adjunct could be awesome. It could do crazy tricky things like being an adjunct you add to an enemy unit for disruption, be an adjunct where you put it face down in a few different squads and flip it up to reveal itself for effects.

It's listed on the bottom of each stat card, the egg clutch hasn't been revealed yet but you can see the revealed ones at: https://www.wyrd-games.net/tos-gibbering-hordes

I feel people are reacting to the use of PVC without having a full consideration of all the factors in material selection. I think the biggest factor that might’ve pushed wyrd towards PVC isn't cost, I think it's the increased geometric flexibility they would be able to achieve in the molds, this would cut down on the number of pieces and help allow for preassembled miniatures to be feasible. I know I've seen people become quite frustrated assembling wyrd miniatures, so I definitely feel that's a barrier to entry into the hobby. That might not be something that affects some of the people posting here but surely a bigger community from lowered entry barriers is something that could be positive. Also PVC is only one part of the material, there's a whole range of additives that could be used to affect its properties. Then there's also the tooling used for the molds, not to mention you can tweak your sculpts to get the most out of your selection. Because of all that I don't think it's fair to just assume that other manufacturers PVC models will be reflective are there's just too many variables involved.

It's one of those quintessential/stereotypical Australian things, like thongs, singlets, beer and BBQ's, oh and of course drop bears whose primary diet is tourists. It'd also be totally worth the effort if you wanted an aussie army as it would really help give the visual effect of being Australian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_hat Oh also akubra hats would a pretty visually identifiable mod: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akubra

Haha, my bad I miss read the conversation flow, I see his comment was referring to Loki's comment on the cult. I've edited my post above to note my misunderstanding

Edit: Feel free to disregard my comment below, I misread the conversation flow, apologies to Parker burrows. It was clearly something to do with the sanity warping effects of the burning man affecting me. I think you've thought you were posting in the cult forum not the gibbering hoards forum. Which is understandable as the burning man will be the on to deliver us all from this suffocating civilisation we've built. The cult get the egg clutch as their champion model, it is possible that the rules for it make it a really useful thing to have, I agree with Loki though in that the other allegiances get cooler champion models based purely on looks and feel.

Hey I'm a someone lol I'm happy the comment helped, I also love the level of engagement from the design team on this.

That's great Idea, you could hang some corks from the infiltrators hats, widen the brim of the riflemen corps helmets, extend the coats on the dragoons to be drizabone's

Maybe he just gets into a fridge and then can tank any sort of large explosion

If you wanted to implement interesting AI for the enemies then I think you could draw inspiration from zombicide, where a card is flipped each turn which determines what happens (simplifying a lot here as I only want to draw part of the idea). This would be quite appropriate for malifaux as card mechanics are already built in, there could be a custom deck for controlling the boss. This could determine things number & types of actions, could give different bonus conditions for the turn, have pulse effects that trigger, terrain effects (like lava effects for cherufe). Alternatively this could all just be determined by a normal fate decks and have something like the number determining actions to take, and the suit triggering all the extras (or vice versa). This would have the advantage that the same deck could be used for damage flips. A concern I have is that the boss can't cheat fate, which would mean players could have quite an advantage over him, unless his stats are higher, I could see balancing his as problematic. I think this is a great idea, and could be a good source for special edition models allowing people to play a fun single player game on their own or a co-op game.

I held of buying fate decks after I heard about this box, and without them the box looks like fantastic value for money. Also looking forward to giving my 40k playing friends a couple of malifaux introductory games without having to worry about building crew lists. I do like the models in the starter box, some of them lack the amazing flare & dynamics I've come to expect from other malifaux models (especially the scion) but I guess that's a tradeoff for easier to assemble starter models. I do love the orderly who is making the 'shh' motion with one hand and hiding a needle behind his back with the other, it looks like a fantastic creepy threatening pose without looking overtly aggressive. As for the band I quite like the strange eclectic mix going, it's one of the defining features of malifaux for me. The only part I don't like the fit of for the band is gluttony as I really love my complex drum lines, but gluttony himself has this great feel voodoo priest who made a pact to be able to play blues.

I do love the death marshals in the lady J box set (and one of the reasons I like the guild), unfortunately the local store I use is out of stock and living in western Australia means being a million miles away. I did check a couple of overseas online stores I've used before but they are both also out of stock on the box set The ronin were a random purchase a couple years ago for a deadlands game (wild west role-playing), before I ever considered malifaux. I'm mostly getting into it as a side game and the look of the viks box doesn't really appeal to me. I was thinking later of expanding into the outcasts Leveticus, as those abominations look awesome.

I'm thinkging of doing some dabbling in malifaux with my fiancee. We both loved McMourning in the fluff, and thematically we're most interested in ressurrectionists, guild and neverborn. Also I'm loving the look of the new plastic kits. I was thinking of picking up three starter boxes for mcmourning, Seamus and sonnia criid. I also happen to have some ronin, a few models that would count for guild guard and also some zombies around. Would this be a good starting point to give us some varied, and more importantly reasonably balanced games? I'm thinking that because mcmourning will work for either side that helps add some variety, I'm just not sure how sonnia & Seamus are going to balance. Also thanks in advance for your help