Long Time Malifaux player, new Arcanist

[Jugan0ght]

So recently I have been getting bored of playing, I think this is because I play so often at my local store. My regular go to was always Outcast and Neverborn. 

Then randomly someone offered me their Ramos to use. I have always scoffed at playing Arcanists as the same masters seem to pop up so often. After that first game I'm hooked. I've created this post to record some games and keep track of what I have been doing. 

So my first game as a  Arcanist game with Ramos, I had tried him before but found him repetitive, this time I only had 3 Spiders to summon (because of lack of the models) this I thought would hold me back. Instead I think he might be my go to very often now. 

It was against a Levi crew because you know, my friends think that would be a fun introduction. Ramos started summoning his spiders as you would expect, the normal boring Electrical creation having been blown up. Then turn 2 I BJ the flip to summon! I literally stood there not knowing what to do then I noticed my opponent was attempting to summon a Desolation engine with Alice and he already had 3 Abominations. Instead of hanging back like I usually see Ramos being played I decided to throw his plan into disarray. I had never noticed how efficient his Magnetism was before. A walk, zero action and then bam! I was 10 inches up the board, his ranged attack finishing off the damaged Abomination. He then spent the whole game throwing fire around and soaking up attacks. 

Since the game I have been loving him as an aggressive support master. 

Models I have been enjoying with him. Please bare in mind I have only played 6-7 games so far. 

Joss - I love him. He tears people apart and ignores alot of Defense triggers and other survive tricks like Armour, Hard to wound and my favourite Hard to Kill. The amount of time my opponent cheated in to Severe damage and it was reduced by 2 and then stoned away. It can become very frustrating. Then he can reactivate when he reaches one damage. Its amazing. Take him! some people say he is slow but with Imbued energies this is countered when necessarily. Or even better the Brass Arachnid.

Langston - Target! massive target. Put frame for murder on this guy. People will kill him no matter how many resources it takes. I used him twice first time he spent the whole game trying to kill a rail worker and I realize it came down to bad flips but he was beaten down. I dont like that a 13ss model cant stone. This guy is brilliant but hes not for me. I prefer a sledge hammer for 13ss rather then a scalpel.

Brass Arachnid - This guy is epic. Cant see when I wouldn't take him. He reactivates himself then receives free Tomes. This then allows him to reactivate a big hitter. Sometimes two with the right placements. 

Rail Worker -  I love them, Hard to Kill and Metal on Metal makes even a 1 of Tomes amazing. Throw it down and they reduce damage by 3! dis guard a card and boom they get positives to attack and damage.

Rail Golem - This is my baby. This boy will stand his ground anywhere you need it to. Unless a Ronin or some such nonsense pays him a visit. His Armour 2 is amazing. With locomotion it means those Tomes to small for Ramos are used on him. He crushes everyone in front of him and builds up his burning turn by turn and by defense. 

Steam Arachnid -  These I would never summon but being DF6 and WP6 are amazing summons. Armour one. This makes the models amazing. They lower DF and just generally drag people down. Also WK6 makes them amazing scheme runners. They ignore pulses.

Electric Creation - I love this little dude. I hated building him but I think hes great. I don't just use him as a Scrap dropper when he dies. I have found that he is great for finishing models off. I like summoning him then moving him into base to base with another model. This causes one wound. Then I kill him and he does 2 more damage to models but not spiders (Arachnids) as they ignore the pulse so it doesn't matter if they are in the radius when it explodes.  I usually take the upgrade to summon this guy and I also hire one to create scrap for the spiders. 

I have been playing with his Wave 4 upgrades each time. Opinions - 

• Leviathan Power Core - I think this will be one I auto take, Just the extra range of his Electrical Fire is worth it, the fact it doesn't randomize is amazing. I found that it was easy to get the Powering up condition upto 10 very quickly by applying pressure on the enemy or if they ran a summoner. Going fast only happened once because I never really needed it due to the zero action movement trick, but going fast is never bad. Cast +1 is handy and dealing +1 damage is situational but people just don't see it coming. 
• Vox Populi - This I found very situational and I think I will only take it if I wish to deny someone parts of the board or in Interference (basically one and the same). The Zero action to turn someone into a Peon for Encounter purposes until his next activation is handy but I only found it good during Interference but even then they can still engage someone to stop them scoring. I find alot of big hitters are WP 7 (going by Nekima, Rusty Alice standards) so it required me to cheat to get it through, this meant things like hunting party was still being scored by my opponent. Don't hold me to this, I will update the thread as I use it more.
• Arcane Reservoir - This is something I have taken every game, for obvious reasons. That one extra card can change the game or just let you hold more rubbish haha. I have found when you have 5 rubbish cards I rarely stone now unless I am desperate as one good card doesn't always make a hell of a difference. Ramos isnt necessarily a suit heavy master but those Tomes do make things alot easier to play him with. 
• Field Generator - This I havent tried yet, as I have been running him as an aggressive master I maybe should take this alot more, the + to defense would be handy, when i started Malifaux alot of stuff was MI5 and the Steam Arachnid defense of 6 was amazing, now alot of wave 3/4/5 has added a slow power creep and MI6 is now the average so positives to their defense doesn't seem like it is worth the upgrade space, again this might change though.
• Combat Mechanic - This seems interesting and makes sense with the chain activation but who cares if a Arachnid can chain activate? I realize Joss or someone else could chain activate but it seems to me like the point of Ramos is that he out activates his opponent. Very situational. The heal is a one action and can heal a target construct but it requires an extra suit which is understandable but doesn't seem worth it. If i needed someone to tank in a game this is an upgrade I would consider. 
• Electric Summoning - This is something I do take most games, not necessarily because of the extra scrap. This is handy (and sometimes essential) but I like it more because the Electric creation has been very fun. I will list more later on this.
• Under Pressure - This is fun but I forgot the positives alot. It is a very handy upgrade, I took this alot because of the CA, this messed alot of my opponents abilities up but again this is something I forgot regularly. Despite this I still took this in nearly every game. 
• Open Current - All non constructs in a certain radius suffer - on defense. This is very funny and since using this I have been asked to stop using Ramos. Take this every time you plan on getting him into the middle. 
• Imbued Energies - Gives Fast when dis-guarded or gives you 4 cards when the model it is attached to it killed or sacrificed. Great upgrade but not for Ramos. He doesn't need it due to the Leviathan Power core mentioned earlier.

I'll add more when I get more games and use more upgrades. I have recently purchased Ironsides, Mei and Collet to use

 

[WWHSD]

If I take Howard, I give him Imbued Energies. If he gets nuked, I get cards. He always gets nuked. Fast + Nimble + 2 normal AP is nice on Howard when you need it as well. Well Rehearsed can also be nice.

If you like a shootier Ramos that is less dependent on his summons to get work done, look at putting Powered by Flame on Joss. It lets all of your constructs in range add Burning +1 to their attacks.

The Brass Arachnid is awesome, and the trick to have it reactivate itself to be able to reactivate two constructs is cool but it can be a huge card drain since it needs a 10+ for each Reactivate.  



 

[Jordon]

I've recently taken a liking to shooty Ramos. By taking his new LPC upgrade you gain access to the increased range as well as either +1Ca or +1 Dmg. Combine this with powered by flame upgrade and the arcane effigy to give a potential +2 burning to his attacks. Lastly if you really want to dish out the pain then you can hire the mobile toolkit to give him positives to damage.

When/if you manage to get it all setup then your looking at a Ca7, 3/4/5 damage, burning +2, with a positive to damage, ignoring engagement and armour.

Even Levi will blush at that kind of ranged damage output. Bare in mind that there is a lot of moving parts in getting this to work but it is funny when your summoner is killing most models in the game in a single activation

[spooky_squirrel]

50 minutes ago, Jugan0ght said:

Since the game I have been loving him as an aggressive support master.

I'll add more when I get more games and use more upgrades. I have recently purchased Ironsides, Mei and Collet to use

Ramos has some interesting tricks up his sleeve, especially with his new Wave 5 upgrades.

For your other masters, here's some things I've found in my experiences with them (yours may and likely will vary, because meta drives things):

Prior to Wave 5 Ironsides looked like a beater, but was typically better off playing as a controller unless your opponent played into her strengths instead of weaknesses. With Wave 5 she can go into full beatstick mode without counting on your opponent doing something silly like being engaged with her. Not being required to tick down Adrenaline every turn is big, as is being able to tick up Adrenaline every activation (without the Emissary it's +1, with and within the range it's +2). This lets you accumulated Adrenaline on your own, which she then spends to do things like get a (2) attack as a trigger on a (1) attack, or teleport into base contact with an enemy as a (0), or even dump all of her Adrenaline to fully heal (upgrade). Barring running into things that turn off your triggers and healing, she can be a lot of physical pain for the opposing crew. Even if you do run into those things, she can still play as a controller, pulling models into and out of position. This mode of play is one of the reasons I like playing her into table quarter strategies.

Mei Feng is another master that looks like a beater when you're looking at her attacks and triggers. That can be misleading, as she doesn't have the resilience to be on the front line and doesn't normally hit hard enough to guarantee clearing out the sort of things that will be rushing into her. It doesn't help that she can (base card) rail walk and trigger a kick (built in), thus starting off the series of attacks with a non-linear threat vector that can reach around corners if someone is close enough to a scrap marker or friendly construct. Otherwise, her charge range is a 10" threat from whereever she ends up declaring the charge at. Being immune to paralyze and slow is just icing on the cake. However, I've had better success using Mei Feng as a denial controller than as a beater. In this mode of play, she's hanging out with her crew Venting Steam a couple of times to keep them under some serious antimagic/antishooting protection. This makes it so that luring and shooting crews are forced into burning more AP to achieve the same results they would normally. Every AP they spend not working the strategy and schemes is an edge to you, provided your crew is doing its job. At some point the denial aspect won't matter any more, and then it'll be time to cut loose and let Mei Feng bully/kill support models or scheme runners that have gotten within her threat range or to complete a scheme that requires greater mobility.

Colette, prior to her errata, was typically misused as an AP battery for the likes of Howard Langston. I say misused because it focused entirely on her Prompt ability and ignored everything else that she does. This may be an unpopular opinion with people who feel that being able to prompt a min damage 4 nimble model 4 times and giving it reactivate is not an over-the-top ability, but I suspect that if your concerns are about boring play, you'll probably find yourself enjoying the post-errata Colette. There are a lot of things that she can do, moreso with her Wave 5 upgrades. She can still potentially summon doves and explode scheme markers for additional AP in her crew, she can still prompt, she can still teleport herself or another showgirl a not-insignificant distance up the board, but she can now use her (0) attack as a (1) attack and hand out Slow at the cost of a scheme marker. If you're running with A Lady's Secret the triggered attack doesn't have the scheme marker cost and can reach out further, letting you get potentially more of an AP edge by slowing a second model. Moving away from prompting beaters/shooters, Colette likes to have minions (showgirls too, but we have some seriously good minions) working for her, even before her Wave 5 upgrade that gives them Focused +1 just for activating near her. Combine that with the new (0) from the same upgrade and you're not just multiplying your own AP, you're dictating one of your opponent's minion's AP if they get close enough to end up being a participant in the show. Do that to something that was slowed and you own their activation. Colette's also one of those masters that can still be clearly winning the game even as everything in her crew dies, the only schemes that you get hurt on with her crew box are ones that require you still being alive and in certain regions of the board. Anything that involves scheme markers and interacting with things? She has that down cold.

All three of these masters introduce some kind of control to the board in a way that can be headache-inducing in your opponents when they're trying to figure out how to work around what you can potentially be doing and still effectively work against what you are actively doing. Ironsides with positioning control, Mei Feng with denial, and Colette with AP, positioning, and scheme control. For me these kinds of controlling effects can make the game a lot more interesting and interactive.

 

An interesting use I've been exploring with Ramos is using his summoned spiders as teleport nodes for Blade and Claw (on Joss). The full set up requires hiring in a Raptor for turning people like Johan and/or Joss into Beasts, or otherwise hiring a crew that's got a Beast beater or two on the onset. It's kind of counter-intuitive to the whole "Ramos runs constructs" assumption, which makes it more interesting for me off the bat, but it also means that you've got some highly mobile beaters that aren't necessarily relying on Ramos' various auras for effect. Luther (Blessed of December) wasn't getting positives from Under Pressure anyway, so using Joss to fling it further up the board lets it hop into things that thought they were safe. Similarly, if Joss has been turned into a Beast by the Raptor's trigger, Joss can fling himself up the board as a (0), giving him extended, non-linear threat. The first time I played that at a tournament, my opponent was caught flatfooted. It both extends your charge range and lets you potentially place in range to use your (2) attack instead of taking a couple axe swings, and Joss also being a Construct can use himself as a node for another Beast in the crew. Once Vogel hits the street, he's going to be running alongside Joss in this mode of play.
As @Jordon mentioned, Ramos himself can be dialed up for damaging things as well, which really makes things interesting.

[hydranixx]

I must mention the obligatory "put Bleeding Edge Tech on Joss" comment. The aura is the main draw to the upgrade, but his lack of Ca Actions and lack of an innate (0) means he can use its active disrupt nearby casting every turn. As long as he's not on Ramos' toes anyway.

It's superb at screwing with summoners and other cast-reliant models.

I quite like the idea of running the buffed Electrical Fire based Ramos myself, shooting twice and summoning, shuffling around with Magnetism as required. I just wish it didn't take as many lot of moving pieces to give him this decent attack. (I look at Collodi's Attacks and get jealous). 

[Mxbedlam]

My Ramos list is pretty similar to most people's though I've added some new toys, mainly Anna Lovelace. She is a solid threat on her on, and her anti push and place aura can stop crews like the Viks from moving in and ruining Ramos' day. I don't think I'll ever run Vox but LPC isn't too bad. Post wave 5 my Ramos crew will probably be Resevoir, Field Generator, and LPC. With Joss (BET, PBF), Anna (Energies), Angelica (PP), Mobile Toolkit, Mech Rider, with the flex to schemes and strats. I've strayed from the Brass Arachnid just because he tends to get outpaced by the rest of the crew very quickly and I find myself having to shed cards for him I'd rather have elsewhere. I don't play Howard or Rail Golem because they do become giant targets. I will take them if I see a specific need for them. 

[hydranixx]

I like it. In particular I rate Anna very highly, good to see someone getting some value from her in Arcanists.

[Thottbot]

speaking of Anna, what summons would you recommend with her? the mindless zombies or the seishin ghosts? as a non resser

[Noah]

A good model to look into is firestarter. He is THE scheme runner if you give him imbued energies. Super fast, able to burn imbued energies to move a second time. Only problem is how fragile he is, but at 7ss, he can get the job done. Also, an observation I have personally made: Rail Golem is not as good as expected, imo. He is too slow, and event with his flames being stoked and reactivation shenanigans and all that he doesn't seem to do much outside of draw enemy fire. My standard 50ss Ramos crew is Ramos with Electric Summonings, brass arachnid, Joss with bleeding edge (he can stand on an objective and never need to move), Howard Langston, Firestarter with Imbued Energies, Willie (because he is fun, a good distraction unit, and I have the Miss Fire sculpt), and a single arachnid. Obviously pop the arachnid with Joss immediately, send Firestarter and Howard to do scheme running. Pull Howard off schemes to do killing is needed. Brass Arachnid is fun for chain activations as needed. Willie just does some exploding shenanigans and draws the opponent's attention as he can do some crazy stuff of left alone. Ramos summons spiders and a creation turn one, then does other things as needed. I try to keep Firestarter for a late activation turn one, then activate him early turn two, saving imbued energies for an emergency escape if needed. Bolt him all around dropping schemes and maybe burning things if you can safely do that.

[WWHSD]

50 minutes ago, Noah said:

My standard 50ss Ramos crew is Ramos with Electric Summonings, brass arachnid, Joss with bleeding edge (he can stand on an objective and never need to move), Howard Langston, Firestarter with Imbued Energies, Willie (because he is fun, a good distraction unit, and I have the Miss Fire sculpt), and a single arachnid. Obviously pop the arachnid with Joss immediately, send Firestarter and Howard to do scheme running. Pull Howard off schemes to do killing is needed. Brass Arachnid is fun for chain activations as needed. Willie just does some exploding shenanigans and draws the opponent's attention as he can do some crazy stuff of left alone. Ramos summons spiders and a creation turn one, then does other things as needed. I try to keep Firestarter for a late activation turn one, then activate him early turn two, saving imbued energies for an emergency escape if needed. Bolt him all around dropping schemes and maybe burning things if you can safely do that.

If you hire an Electrical Creation instead of the spider you can kill it with the minimum damage from Joss's ranged attack. The Electrical Creation activates and moves forward, Joss shoots it and then does something else with his second AP.

[spooky_squirrel]

4 hours ago, WWHSD said:

If you hire an Electrical Creation instead of the spider you can kill it with the minimum damage from Joss's ranged attack. The Electrical Creation activates and moves forward, Joss shoots it and then does something else with his second AP.

The flaw with this method that I've run into is forgetting to use Joss' second AP. Turn 1 for me usually features "Joss' job is to generate scrap, he will shoot twice if necessary"--and especially when I was first learning the spider factory (and not using Blade and Claw) I'd forget to move him up afterwards. Once you get some practice in (playing in general) this flaw is easy to avoid.

[WWHSD]

49 minutes ago, spooky_squirrel said:

The flaw with this method that I've run into is forgetting to use Joss' second AP. Turn 1 for me usually features "Joss' job is to generate scrap, he will shoot twice if necessary"--and especially when I was first learning the spider factory (and not using Blade and Claw) I'd forget to move him up afterwards. Once you get some practice in (playing in general) this flaw is easy to avoid.

I like not having to dedicate 2AP from Joss to making scrap. I've flipped a Black Joker before when trying to blow up my Electrical Creation.

[spooky_squirrel]

1 minute ago, WWHSD said:

I like not having to dedicate 2AP from Joss to making scrap. I've flipped a Black Joker before when trying to blow up my Electrical Creation.

The good news is is that so long as you relent and the Black Joker comes up on the attack and not the damage, you're fine--you still hit because no TN involved.

[WWHSD]

4 minutes ago, spooky_squirrel said:

The good news is is that so long as you relent and the Black Joker comes up on the attack and not the damage, you're fine--you still hit because no TN involved.

Oh crap. I totally misplayed that.

[WWHSD]

On 9/12/2017 at 2:26 PM, Jugan0ght said:

 

• Combat Mechanic - This seems interesting and makes sense with the chain activation but who cares if a Arachnid can chain activate? I realize Joss or someone else could chain activate but it seems to me like the point of Ramos is that he out activates his opponent. Very situational. The heal is a one action and can heal a target construct but it requires an extra suit which is understandable but doesn't seem worth it. If i needed someone to tank in a game this is an upgrade I would consider. 

I've always been kind of down on Combat Mechanic but I've been thinking about trying it with the Steamfitter to make sure that I can always snatch back the card that Ramos uses to summon.

It seems like it might pair well with electrical summoning, allowing you to summon an EC and launch it at someone before that can react,

[Noah]

10 hours ago, WWHSD said:

If you hire an Electrical Creation instead of the spider you can kill it with the minimum damage from Joss's ranged attack. The Electrical Creation activates and moves forward, Joss shoots it and then does something else with his second AP.

This is a good point. I havent tried it out sadly, as I didn't have creations when I began playing him so I got super used to using a spider and just forgot I cold do this 😂

[Noah]

Just now, Noah said:

This is a good point. I havent tried it out sadly, as I didn't have creations when I began playing him so I got super used to using a spider and just forgot I cold do this 😂

Also, I suck at typing if yall can't tell!

[Fictor]

I usually want wear Seize of the Day and Combat Mechanic, many times I'll you play agresive and I can do that:

Ramos summon 3 spiders in contact with the miniature you want die, shot him 2 times with -3df and chain activates Joss to charge him for 2 hits more, with  if you wear Under Presure too.