fauxreigner

Date?

So, one issue I have had so far with Parker is survivability. While the doc+survivalist allows him to heal up quite efficiently from small hits, he can go down quite easily from a fast mobile beater (hello Yasunori), which could be problematic going forward with Eliminate now coming up in approx. 1/3 of games. Speaking to some of my regular opponents, they all see Parker as a pretty soft target for Eliminate, and think they would be likely to take it against him. Now Eliminate is an incredibly swingy scheme because losing your Master is always bad, but losing him AND giving up 3 VP for it can spell game over. This made me think long and hard about what I can do to further boost Parker durability. Human Shield is a nice option that one big hit per turn, but the only models I usually find within 2" of Parker are the Effigy and the Doc, and I don't really want to lose one of those models either. The I dreamt up the idea of the Rat Shield. You take the Obedient Wretch (in the above crew she would replace the Abom), and throw a rat at Parker each turn after he has moved, or throw a rat at an existing rat, as long as it ends up within 2" of Parker. Now Parker will always have a little buddy nearby who he can happily sacrifice to prevent one big hit per turn. It means Parker is stuck cycling the Human Shield every turn rather than using more interesting upgrades, but its a whole lot better than losing him. Plus, the Obedient Wretch can be pretty useful even if becomes obvious your opponent is not trying to Eliminate Parker. She's a 4ss significant Minion so can score a lot of schemes, and rats are great for engaging stuff in Interference, or blocking a Claim Jump marker. Thoughts? Rat Shield??

The extra 1" of movement might seem small, but it adds up. Actually, it makes the difference between scoring Leave Your Mark on Turn 2 or not, given that 18" puts you close enough to drop a scoring marker, and 15" does not (assuming standard deployment).

With Hamelin you will have so many rats on the table, that I certainly wouldn't try to have a card out for each one. I would just have a single card out to consult the rules, and then track wounds and conditions on the table itself, with small dice next to each rat.

Thats an interesting approach to Parker, gotta say I never really considered the Emissary and Aionus with him. I have a slightly different take on Parker after 5 games with him, which is that he is primarily a resource cycler, i.e. subset of control master. That is, he can usually be counted on to ensure that the right cards for any job cycle through your hand on a given turn. When building a crew, I tend not to worry about synergies between models, and instead just select either solid individual models that can achieve great things when they have the right cards available, or models that further amplify the whole resource cycling mechanic. Here is the build I have converged on (again only after 5 games, so still premature): Parker w/ Highwayman, Oathkeeper, Survivalist, 4ss cache Doc Mitchell Ashes and Dust Sue w/ Return Fire Johana Wokou Raider Hodgepodge Effigy Abomination The crew kind of works like a big resource engine. Thanks to Parker's ability and the Hodgepodge Effigy, I can stone for cards most turns. Combined with Sue, the Abomination, Highwayman, and Go Through Their Pockets it means that 12-13 cards are cycling through my hand in a good turn. High Rams/Tomes are snagged for Sue, high Crows for A&D, high Masks for extra Parker movement, medium Masks to get 2 zero actions, medium Tomes for Wokou's zero action, medium Rams for condition removal, and low-medium Crows for Return Fire. As for Parker's setup, I consider Survivalist pretty essential because I like to play Parker forward enough to generate enemy scheme markers with his gun that are close enough to spend on upgrades. Then I can net a stone and 2 cards through the cycle of discarding an upgrade and attaching a new one by spending the enemy marker. Also now that Eliminate is on doubles people are going after him more aggressively. I choose highwayman because I prefer the card draw to an extra stone. Oathkeeper is dropped on Turn 1 and replaced with Dynamite or Hail of bullets if there is a good play available, otherwise Stick-up. Throughout the rest of the game, if there are no great plays for the situational upgrades then I just cycle Stick-up every turn for an extra walk action, or cycle Highwayman to allow a non-bandit to take an attack. The Wokou is still somewhat of a trial, but I have found repositioning Claim Jump markers late in the turn to be very useful when opponents try to counter it. The Abomination would likely be replaced by a Winged Plague if I want to play for Leave Your Mark. It certainly seems like a lot of different builds are viable with Parker, ranging from his thematic bandit crew to some more out-there choices. I'd love to see some more examples of what people are using.

Yeah, I'm in agreement. If we were being pedantic, we could say that Remember Injustice does not cause a damage flip (it causes a fixed amount of damage) so the Errata does not cover this. But I think the intention is clear. For the Firing Squad Injustice bonus, it seems pretty clear cut. Every time the model holding it takes damage, you just need to ask "Did this damage come from an Attack Damage? If yes, deal +1 damage". Given that Remember Injustice is part of the original Noose attack, then yes, the damage did come from an attack action, so deal +1 damage. I guess the same logic applies to Bigger They Are, but I still having a lingering doubt that the different wording there might change something. So, if this is correct then Jack can deal a rather ludicrous amount of damage from a single charge: 10 on a model that didn't originally have an upgrade, or 11 on a model that did. Given that he has 3AP and (presumably) Oathkeeper, this makes me feel a little bit dirty for recently starting up a Jack crew. But only a little bit .

Why would Remember Injustice do 3 damage, and not 4? +1 for Firing Squad and another +1 for Bigger They Are? In my opinion, the wording on Firing Squad seems kind of clear. "When this model suffers damage from an attack action...". It suffers damage once from the original Noose, and once from Remember Injustice, and both are "damage from an attack action", meaning that both should receive +1. But I think that the slightly different wording on Bigger They Are leaves the door open for your interpretation. "This models close actions deal +1 damage..." could be interpreted that the entire action (including all triggers) can only deal +1 in total. But, digging into the weeds on this makes my head hurt and I'm hoping some more accomplished rules lawyer can make a definitive case *flips to summon rules lawyer*.

Apologies because I know this has been discussed before, but I don't know whether a final consensus was ever reached - I've seen contradictory posts about how this works recently on A Wyrd Place. The question is, whether the trigger Remember Injustice on Jack's Noose attack can benefit from extra damage due to Firing Squad Injustice and The Bigger They Are. Lets take Firing Squad Injustice first. It says "When this model suffers damage from an attack action, it suffers +1 damage". Because Remember Injustice is part of the initial Noose attack action, it seems that this damage source should also benefit from +1 damage due to Firing Squad. But then I've also seen it argued that the overall Noose attack action can only receive +1 damage in total. So if you have applied this +1 to the original hit, you can't apply it again to the trigger damage. However, that interpretation seems counter intuitive to me. The Bigger They Are is worded slightly differently: "This models close attack actions that deal damage +1 damage to non-Masters with an upgrade attached". Again, Remember Injustice is considered part of a close attack action, so on face value you would expect the +1 to apply again. But I've seen the same counter argument outlined above applied here as well. So can we resolve this once and for all? Exactly how much damage should Remember Injustice do to a model with Firing Squad Injustice, if Jack has Bigger They Are?? NOTE: posted this here rather than in rules forum, to gain more exposure to those in the know (Outcast players).

Of course. But this is an ever-changing world of new models, rules changes, new schemes, top players switching factions etc etc, all of which affect the tournament results with differing degree of lag-time. There will never be a time when the results reach some steady-state that perfectly reflects the current state of the game, so all we will ever have to work with is imperfect data. Better to try to make some sense of imperfect data (while acknowledging the caveats) than to ignore it. In this case, the imperfect data suggest that pre-errata Guild were either (slightly) underpowered, or were not being played to their maximum potential at the top level. But it can't tell us which one is true, and that will be the interesting question moving forward.

This is also the question I'm most interested in, and given all the recent shakeups, the final answer has to be "wait and see". However, to approach a preliminary answer we could look at the available data since the first major shakeup (Wave 4 release), and then hypothesize the effect of the more recent shakeups (Errata, GG2017). I took a quick a glance at the UK and USA Malifaux ranking websites, which compile tournament results from those countries (thanks so much to everyone involved in these efforts - they are excellent resources). I counted up the number of podium finishes for each faction in all large tournaments (arbitrarily defined as 20+ players) since August 2017, the official release date of Wave 4. In the UK, Guild had the least podium finishes but not by a very large margin (Guild=3, Ressers=8, Arcanist=9, Neverborn=15, Outcast=5, Gremlin=6, TT=7), and exactly the same story emerged from the USA data (Guild=2, Ressers=5, Arcanist=5, Neverborn=4, Outcast=3, Gremlin=5, TT=3). Taken at face value, this would suggest Guild have been the least competitive faction at the top level since the Wave 4 release, but only just. Now to consider the effect of more recent shakeups. I cannot speak for the UK scene, but I know that the two USA Guild podium finishes were players (D.Bilz and N.Blackmer) using exclusively Sonnia with papabox and two austringers. So, while Guild did receive some nice bonuses in the Errata, cuddling the most competitive build (in USA at least) is obviously a blow to the faction in terms of top-level play. As for GG2017, I tend to agree with views above that losing our "easy" points from Hunting Party and Show of Force will be the biggest changes from the Guild perspective (but I could easily be wrong). So again at face value, one might expect the number of podium finishes to decline even further relative to other factions following these changes. That might all sound doom and gloom, but there are of course some major caveats to the above arguments, which might shine a rosier light on the situation. First, it takes time for everyone to obtain and master the new models, so the data above likely don't reflect the full power bump that Nellie and Wave 4 represent. Second, in the very first post on this thread, I proposed the alternative hypothesis that Guild were always perfectly competitive, but the rather simplistic playstyle (focus on direct damage) did not appeal to the top players. In this case, the addition of Nellie and Newcius with their subtler playstyles might well attract more top players to the Guild, which will bump the perceived power of the faction without directly changing anything. After all that, my conclusion is still the same: Who knows for now, let's keep on eye on the tournament results and see.

Wow, so much has changed since I originally posed this question that my current answer has to be "who the hell knows". To break down my thoughts slightly: Wave 4: Nellie fills a massive void in our master lineup, and does so in a very powerful way. Phiona is a solid beater that can fit into any crew and has extra utility in GG2017 (see below). More importantly, we received outstanding generic upgrades including the frankly-too-good Debt to the Guild, which gives us much-needed resource flow and boosts our already impressive damage output. Also the fact that you never discard it makes in the ultimate Show of Force upgrade (although see GG2017). If you stop the clock here, Guild have definitely risen in the power rankings relative to other factions. January Errata: It was a mixture of buffs and cuddles, but overall Guild were one of two factions hit hardest in my opinion (the other being Gremlins). Yes the Lucius rewrite is nice, and there will be scheme pools where he is now a viable alternative to Nellie, McMourning and McCabe. But those were already strong options, and its hard to imagine a scenario where New Lucius (Newcius?) stands head and shoulders above one of those existing picks. On the other hand, the Austringer cuddle puts a solid dent in the faction as a whole because (lets face it) most top tier lists took two. Which in itself means that Austringers did need to be tweaked, but it hurts us nonetheless. I know that Austringers can now focus into combat, but that doesn't compensate for losing the board control provided by 18" threat range against scheme runners and high-activation-count crews. It is telling that some top-tier players (e.g. Alex Schmid podcast) count the Austringer cuddle as an important buff to their own factions. Finally, losing papabox (while a very sensible ruling) neuters our one build with a proven track record of winning big tournaments, and it might telling that the pilot of that list has recently jumped ship to 10T (alternatively he just got bored). So overall, the January Errata lowers our stock IMO, but probably not enough to overshadow the Wave 4 buff. GG2017: Its still too early to say anything for sure. For the timebeing some thoughts on the common (always/doubles/suited) schemes... Claim Jump is harder for us than Convict, but thats probably true for all factions. Eliminate moving to Doubles has little effect because our masters can be hard to take down when played correctly. Losing Hunting Party from suits might be serious blow, because it was the best way to score points while simultaneously performing the necessary crowd-control on summoning crews that would otherwise overwhelm our small crews. Losing Show of Force slightly tempers the buff we got from Debt to the Guild, and gaining Frame for Murder makes our killy henchman-heavy crews more of a liability. On the other hand, we have one of the best Dig Their Graves models in the game, in the form of Phiona+Transparency, and I expect her to see plenty of play. Overall: Its obviously too early to say, but if I had to guess I would say that in the last 6 months the faction has become slightly more powerful from the perspective of the average Guild player due to the new options and upgrades, but less likely to pull off the big tournament wins in the very top-tier, because the main "power build" was (rightly) targeted by the Errata. But maybe Nellie/Newcius will give rise to even better builds once people have had some time to adapt? Only watching the tournament results will tell us. I for one am excited for the next year of Guild!

Are you opening up more spots in the Gaining Grounds tournament? Its currently showing Sold Out at 58 players. Its awesome to see tournaments of this size happening stateside, but sad for those of us who missed the boat .

The bundle option is nice. Thanks for all your work on the Errata and GG2017 @Aaron - while I'm not delighted about every single change, on aggregate they are both very positive and I think the game will benefit greatly.

Nice episodes, and I'm glad you guys are recording again... I really enjoy listening to you. Hope you can find time in the new year!

Oh yeah you're right, passing the dual means you can only do it once.