Macumazahn

Sammy works incredibly well with Brewmaster. The problem with many of his upgrades (one of the problems anyway) is that it always better to use Swill 90% of the time and Obey the rest. But with Sammy you can go crazy with "Binge"; allowing her to have two, really disrupting, attack actions at her disposal, and what amounts to an obey without limitations, that cannot fail. Sammy becomes a really powerful model at just 8 stones. She can use "Hold Their Head Back" too, wich is particulary useful with Mancha Roja in the crew, but this is not a very good upgrade as you need a ton of poison going around. It's great because, even without upgrades, she has a lot of synergy with Brewie.

That's nice and all, but why would you want to play her, if she's nothing but a boring version of those three? Some upgrades to give her some spice wouldn't go amiss at all.

I, however, thing Ophelia is the easiest master to make viable, simply because her main shctick is not really insane damage, but the ability to get upgrades on the fly. Change her upgrades to ANYTHING aside from dealing damage in slightly diffrent ways, and allow her to cicle trough upgrades, without needing to use them and that's it. I don't know, she could have guns that strip cover, or somethign like the net gun of McCabe so she can paralize, or something that messes with the DF, or armor, of the enemy models... anything but raw damage, and suddenly she brings things to the table that no other gremlin master has.

I use Mancha Roja a lot with Mah Tucket and the Brewmaster; the extra layer of defense that "Challenge" brings to the table is great, especially for Brewie. Imagine the amount of Wp duels you force with some careful positioning, and you can make use of the "Pull their hair back" upgrade of the Brewmaster to one-shot some models.

Pigapult, I'm sure I don't even need to say why. Well now that I mention it: any model in the game that can ignore cover AND LoS.

I don't know how you people manage to engage or even attack the pigapult before being torn to shreds by it's shoting specialy against Ulix, or maybe Somer too, crews. (Excluding the example of the malifaux raptors, but those fall really easy and you probably are outactivated) I used to take rooster riders with Mah and go nuts, but that doesn't work anymore. Somer's skeeters can do the job though. In any case I consider the pigapult an extremely broken and unfunny model; both to use, and to play against.

Look, Brewmaster is my favorite master, but choosing him in a competitive level is a waste of time or, to be more precise, a handicap, especially against guild. Sammy works very, very well with the brewmaster, so does the sow. Apart from that I recommend monsters with very high severe damage like François and Raphael. In any case the crews that have worked better with me, are the ones that can be used with almost any other master: basic gremlin stuff, no fluffy Tri Chi models or any of that.

But good ol' wishkey golem already needs an ap to give himself defense 7, or else he's done, and although he's nimble he also has a pretty big base and a baffling 1 inch reach melee attack (for whatever reason) so not a lot of actions left to do much of anything. Fingers not only gives you your schemes, he also destroys your opponent schemes in two different ways. Same with merris: she's not nimble but she's reckles, she can fly and and she can drop markers for 0 for much less of the cost of the golem. Comparing both of them with the golem is a bad idea because they're not designed for the same purpose. the golem is a tank trough and trough. But the problem is that Gracie cost the same and is more resilient, with more damage and, since she can reactivate, technicaly faster and with more opportunities to make schemes, as needed, in a pinch. Sure she hurts herself, but she can also heal without needing a specific suit. Another model that can take a lot of punishment is Mancha Roja; he can get to defense 7 with a 0, has 10 wounds and hard to wound, and he's a henchman. He also deals more damage and has a variety of triggers that can be very useful for the entire crew. I think as a tank Wishkey golem can be better because of his defense trigger, and Macha Roja is more geared to pure combat and, as such, less flexible, but that would be a problem depending on the rest of the crew.

Well, I don't know how useful it will be, but Taxidermist leaves corpse markers with his melee attacks, and Akanmes push 2 inches and gain +1 poison everytime a model in 6 inches leaves a corpse or scrap marker. So there's some sinergy there. Also first turn both Wesley and the Brewmaster can put enough poison on the akanames to last the rest of the game, and Brewie can use them for his (0) action "One for the Road". But I haven't tested them yet so, no idea really.

I really want to try these lil' fellas, they seems to help the brewmaster to spread poison around, and he really needs that.

So it's like the title says: Why Take Ophelia Lacroix over other gremlin masters? Now, I know the answer will probalby be "Because I feel like it" and, to be honest, that's the perfect reason to take any master. But from a competitive standpoint, why would you take Ophelia over the likes of Somer or Wong? What does she bring to the table?

I actually love to give the upgrade to Sammy, to make the most of it while the Brewmaster goes around swilling everything. But I think that, although is good, is pretty much a nuissance to the opponent and that's about it, very rarely will be an actual danger or something to take into consideration. But for 1 stone that's good enough for sure, and if luck is on your side it's a pain to deal with.

Wait what? What makes you say that? I think is a nice upgrade but not in any way as useful as that, I'm missing something? I'm always very worried about making elite lists with gremlins, less than 9 activations feels extremely wrong to me because the majority of gremlin models, even elite, are very easy to take down with dedicated effort (it's not like a Hoffman bubble for example), and the Hangover of the Brewmaster can only do so much to aleviate that. I guess I should try more these sorts of crews but they haven't worked all that well for me in the past.

The problem I see with the Lenny change with Ophelia is that the combo was very powerful, and made Ophelia the killing machine she's supossed to be. Now she needs quite the amount of resources to actually be that way. If that's the case, why use her at all when you can take the likes of Somer or Wong? They can do the same damage with very little resources, maybe a little less damage? But not much less, and they can do much, much more for their crews and strategies than Ophelia can. I know this was the case before, to some extent, but at least, thanks to Lenny, she was a massive threat and a relatively resilient one at that. And making Lenny keep up with the crew was never a problem, I don't think he limits the mobility of Ophelia at all.

Oh man... The Lenny change is really depresing, specially for Mah.