LeperColony

The topic of opposed flips crops up from time to time. I am a major supporter of the idea, which in fact was an optional rule in the 1st edition Fatemaster's Almanac. Opposed flips fix a lot of what's wrong with TtB mechanically, at virtually no cost (it's marginally slower). I run TtB with opposed flips, but I use just two decks. One of the fated, and one for Fatemaster characters. In regards to your system: 1. Each player having their own fate deck is fine, but it greatly changes the math of the game. 2. I'm not sure what you're gaining by changing the way cheating works. It feels more restrictive to limit cheating to just suit exchanges. 3. Fatemaster characters shouldn't need any bonus, because they already have printed AVs. All you need to do is add the flipped card's value to their AV.

Also if need be, the Lotus Eaters can remove one (each) for free at the end of their activation, and heal too. Which means you have healing kits just sort of lying around. Koji can also turn them friendly, if need be. A couple of pre-existing elements of Shen's crew synergize to make this new engine particularly egregious. 1) He has multiple totems. Since they can take the 4WP as a bonus, you're able to use your totems to draw cards, which is a significantly outsized effect for 2 stone models you get for free. 2) Chi means his crew is almost always capable of getting a higher stat in the flip. The order chi is added puts additional hand pressure on your opponent since some times it can change the Monk from losing to winning the initial flip, putting cheating first pressure on your opponent. It also means that the monk model can usually be sure they can win the duel if they have a sufficient card in hand. A prospect much more likely if you're drawing a ton of cards. 3) Lotus Eaters are only six stones, so the engine tax is lower than it would be in Misaki (and much more efficient thanks to 4WP). Also, as mentioned above, they have the potential to remove the markers for free and heal, reducing the risk of keeping them around (when that exist even exists). 4) 4WP is itself an incredibly efficient action with no TN (though not without some complexity since its push is flat 6 instead of up to). It is also not limited in any way except for chi use, so if you want to spend master AP to take the action in addition to totems, you can. 5) The Monk keyword has access to cheap and effective healing, thereby reducing the cost of shooting your own people. The Low River Monk is very affordable, and Shen has access to healing through Low River Style. Maybe you don't want to swap styles and lose 4WP, but if you're running Shen2, you can turn one of the Lotus Eaters into a healer by giving it Low River Style.

It would be nice if we could secretly select the models eligible to score for the turn in Covert Operations. Any chance it could work similarly to how models are selected for schemes, except that we'd have the ability to change it each turn?

If Doc Mitchell fails the duel to his Hidden Flintlock, does he have to resolve the After Resolving portion of his action? After resolving effects occur on success or failure. if this were a trigger, it would generate in step 4 (perform the duel) and then resolve in step 6 (after resolving). But this isn't a trigger, it's part of the action's effects. Since the duel is failed in step 4, the Apply Results step (step 5) is "not performed." So no effect from the action is generated, and therefore no pending effect to resolve when you get to step 6. RAW it seems like he shouldn't have to discard, but I'm wondering how Parker players have been handling it.

Is there any chance the hiring pool can be optimized such that models that dual faction models don't show twice? For instance, whenever you make a crew, you're able to see options from other factions because of dual faction masters that are located in your own faction. Is there any way to make it so that each model can only appear once, and if a model shares a faction with your declared faction, it won't display under other factions?

Is a blank trigger still declarable just without effect, or does the trigger no longer exist? Could matter since there's a defensive trigger that reduces damage if no attacking trigger was declared.

This would be fantastic. Even if it can't be tied to individual models, having an area where you can access the FAQ and errata on the app without additional download would be great.

I just came in to spitball mechanics. I'm not sure it needs a change either, except for the fact that like many mechanics in Malifaux I find it would benefit from more counter play.

Honestly it still works even if cards aren't removed at the start, but then it's more of a nerf I think, to tie the maximum number of removed cards to the number of Nightmare models.

I'm not in any way saying my idea is THE idea, but while Dreamer2's first turn would be quite different, Lucid Dreams still works with him because under my suggestion it still sends cards out of game, it just doesn't increase the maximum number of cards you can have out of game. To break it down: Each Nightmare model has an ability that removes one card from the game at the start of the game. Dreamer has an ability that caps the number of cards that can be removed from the game at the number of Nightmare models in his crew. So losing models reduces the number you can have removed, summoning more increases the number. Lucid Dreams still removes cards from the game, but if you are already at the cap permitted by Dreamer, then you have to return a removed card to the discard pile. Since after a Dreamer2 swap the removed from game cache is potentially empty (depending on the number of cards in the hand), Lucid Dreams could fill it again. So for example, if you have five Nightmare models, then you remove five cards at the start of the game, and you can only have a maximum of five out of the game at any time. Lucid Dreams would allow you to cycle what's out, but not increase past five. However, once you've swapped your control hand once, if that number were less than five, you could keep adding to it with Lucid Dreams. For instance, if you have a control hand of 0 and five out of play, you swap and now have 0 out of play. So when Lucid Dreams adds cards to the out of game area, the cards do not exceed the number of Nightmare models, and so remain out of play. So two issues with Dreamer2 under such a system is yes, the first swap would be really odd. And second, if your opponent killed Nightmare models such that it was no longer possible to have five out of game, then Dreamer2 couldn't ever swap. Of course, Dreamer2's swap mechanic could be changed in response. The benefits of such a mechanic include: There is a cap on the number of cards that can be removed, so Dreamer can't sculpt down to all severes Lucid Dreaming retains value because it allows the removed from game cache to be sculpted, and it also provides a mechanic to add to/replenish the removed from play cache if it is ever below the maximum permitted Opponents have counter play with the removed from game effect by killing Nightmare models (and reducing the number of permitted removed cards), whereas currently there isn't really any. It is possibly faster than figuring out which half to keep every turn for Dreamer1 (seems so to me, but if not many cards are out or if the player is quick in deciding, maybe not).

Personally, I would change the mechanic to be something like the following: Each keyword model would have a +1 ability that said something like "after deployment, remove the top card of your fate deck from the game." And Dreamer would have an ability like "Whenever the number of cards removed from the game exceeds the number of friendly Nightmare models in the game, select a removed card and place it in your discard pile" or some such (written on the fly, obviously language could be better). So the number of cards that are removed from the game is fixed and tied to your keyword hires. But since the removed cards are random, Lucid dreaming would allow you to swap them, and summoning would increase the number of cards you can have out of the game. However, there's also counter play, as killing Nightmare models would allow you to force cards back in if there were already a max removed.

What was the strat/scheme pool and the crew hires?

I'm looking at the concept assuming it were employed in a statistical meaningful environment, like say the Vassal World Series. But really no matter how wide spread the meta(s) it is used in, every time it is used, it means (by definition) fewer games with those models during the very errata cycle that would be used to evaluate them. Would the difference in games be significant in terms of evaluating the models? Hard to say but if I had to guess, probably not, unless it became the default for the widest participation online events. But it is a difficult effect to evaluate since I have little insight on how Wyrd decides what to review in its yearly errata, the information they use to make their assessments, and what, if any, testing the changes go through.

Power creep is a serious issue, and part of that is due to the somewhat limited playtest pool, and part of it is due to design philosophy. But a more aggressive errata/faq schedule means that individual changes can be smaller and encompass fewer models (even single keywords) because you're not trying to do everything you feel is important for the entire year. Players playing less than 10 games between each update is not a problem if those games are better, and if errata are more targeted and limited because there's more of them, most players will see no change for those 10 games anyway. What Wyrd should do is create a tier of "Provisional" cards (or some such) that is similar to DMH in that they are clearly identifiable and by default not-tourney legal, though individual TOs could let them in, that represent potential changes. This would allow Wyrd to look at entire keywords and redesign them from the ground up, outside of the private playtest environment (which would still exist and serve as the "first pass" process) to where there could be sufficient games to get an actual sense of how well the changes are working. Changes should then follow a "row, row, row your boat" sequence where various modifications are in progressive states, so that you have the devs working on ideas furthest from release, closed playtesters on "first pass," and then provisional cards being an open beta, with the goal of perhaps an official release single keyword revision once a quarter with two more in known development, subject to design resources, FAQs at a similar rate, and large rules errata yearly as we currently have. At the end of this current release, we'll be looking at maybe ~750 models in Malifaux. Wyrd's current errata philosophy of maybe changing 10 models per year is simply insufficient, unless you want to be playing a balanced game in 2097. One of the issues I see with Balancefaux is it is going to be a negative incentive for the strongest players to play the newly released material if they can't be used in tournaments. We can already see with DMH that models which technically exist, but aren't generally tournament legal, see much less play from the top players, even in their casual games. And it shouldn't be too hard to understand why, and I expect as a result of making new releases illegal for events, we'll see a significant drop in the number of people playing them. That means even if an errata cycle comes by, we're going to have learned a lot less about them and they're less likely to receive changes. Balancefaux isn't inherently a bad idea, but it's not really solving the problem of imbalance, just delaying it.

While obviously you were being facetious here, I do think that Wyrd would be much, much better off with a more aggressive errata/faq release schedule closer to patch notes in video games. And that they also would be better off with a "public test server" section of the app with proposed changed cards.