Math Mathonwy

I love it! Different events having different restrictions and rules is awesome in my book. Keeps the game fresh. Not for every event, mind, but it's good that some people think outside of the box. The game isn't perfect so being deathly afraid to shift the balance seems very counter-intuitive. These are very conservative changes - I would favour even more radical changes to really force people to take unorthodox lists but since this is the first comped tournament for Malifaux that I've heard of, I understand the will to start easy. Thumbs up! And be sure to let us know how it went Does this mean that you believe that Malifaux is perfectly balanced?

This is extremely situational in that it slows you down really a lot.

Bete is good stuff, IMO. She does pretty good damage simply through being so reliable. Paralyze - well, I really don't like the post-book 1 trend of making everything non-living, but Slow is pretty powerful in itself. The trouble with her is that she ruins your hand in that you need to hoard a good card, but other than that she is golden, IMO. Eh, if you start comparing stuff to Neverborn, you just end up playing Neverborn.

My suggestion is to get the Criid starter (that's what I did). The minis in both starters work well with both Masters and the playstyle changes significantly just by choosing one Master or the other. I'd go so far as to say that getting these two Starters is one of the best ways of starting Malifaux in a way. As for Guild Hounds and Executioner - Guild Hounds open up the way for Lucius and Guard emphasis for Lady Justice. Drill Sergeant, Austringers, Hounds and Lucius make for a very good crew that I would rate as one of the more powerful ones in the Guild lineup. Executioner, OTOH, is a bit slow and not that superb, IMO, though pretty fun and the mini is great. Not a bad choice, but if you're looking for power, I'd probably choose something else over him for the time being.

Good luck! May you draw only Red Jokers! ...wait, that didn't come out right.

How do you keep Somer from dying to LCB (especially taking into account the cache disparity between the two)? It's pretty easy to box him in so that Squeel won't work and then it's bye-bye Mosquitos. Perhaps I'm missing something.

Oh my, these look absolutely delightful. Love the expression you gave to the second Performer and Cassandra's blue lipstick is a stroke of genius! The doves look excellent and the Mannequin "skin" is awesome. Despite the dark scheme, you've managed to retain some flamboyance to these, which is no mean feat. Seriously, superb work - love 'em!

Don't have the book handy, but it couldn't be done through a bash, could it?

I hear ya That goes very much against the design philosophy behind Malifaux. You're supposed to own a very hefty chunk of your chosen faction in order to be competitive (exception to this being the Dreamer - with him you need only a small set of minis).

It is a legal target, range is checked only afterwards. From Sketch's sig: http://wyrd-games.net/forum/showpost.php?p=222629&postcount=34

You're in such a hurry to up your post count that you can't post even semi-coherently anymore? Edit: that sounded harsher than meant - it was intended in jest.

You do know that as long as Dreamer is withing 3" of a Nightmare, you can't melee him - you melee the Nightmare even if it is outside of your melee range (and therefore the strike fails)? If coupled with a Stitched, Dreamer is completely unkillable for a turn.

My strat was Reconnoiter (IIRC - the one where you take table quarters) - so I figured I needed speed and numbers. Also, Necropunks were actually really good in that Hard Kill makes them durable and their low damage is still sorta enough to kill Alps. Besides, their Slow really nullified one Stitched for a turn when I killed it and it got Reactivate. The problem with Necropunks was their low Wp which meant that Stitcheds targeted them to ruin my hand. OTOH, one more Wp wouldn't have made a difference in the duels that I remember on that front. His strat was the one to keep my Master from his side of the table. Aye. OTOH her killing LCB was kind of a long-shot (I still decided to try as my opponent had the Bodyguard scheme on LCB) so her performance wasn't a big blow either way. Crooked Men might've been a good choice, indeed. I feel that having one model (Pere or Specialist) or two that can deal nicely with Alp bomb is not enough as LCB can so easily kill any model and putting them both into a position to counter the bomb effectively is not easy. This is a very good point. I'm not used to it (my Seamus has died once prior to this game) as usually Seamus is one of the most durable Masters. Unfortunately Dreamer nullifies so many of his tricks and has such absolute battlefield control that yeah, I should change my plans accordingly. I kinda realized that but hadn't truly vocalized or internalized it. Thank you for pointing it out explicitly! Aye, but as you acknowledge, slow really hampers this. And since the flips cannot be cheated I can never be sure of activating a model non-slowly and that really, really crimps my style. I'm all about minimizing the effects of chance and that philosophy has served me well in all other games and in all other Malifaux match ups. I already weigh the odds in my favour by choosing Seamus instead of, for example, Ophelia You might be over-estimating the results of Dreamer mistakes. He is actually sorta forgiving by having such a huge cache and such super easy mobility for the whole crew. Even the squishiness thing is over-stated I feel. LCB isn't squishy, Dreamer is almost unkillable if a modicum of care is employed in positioning him (seriously, not difficult), Stitcheds are very durable in a way, Daydreams are squishy but cheap and easy to hide/keep out of reach due to float and Coppelius is average durability. Alps have poor defenses, but their special abilities make them also non-trivial to kill. In closing, a very well written post, Strumpet, thank you for that! Gave me stuff to think about.

Aye, I tried to kill them ASAP but they are extremely easy to hide due to float. It is, but those Flays hit like a ton of bricks, too. Since he can appear into close combat so easily, he gets three attacks guaranteed, has paired and better Cb than Seamus' Def and a bigger cache. That's seriously easier said than done. Slow is a crazy huge effect. It more than halves the effectivity of a model since it denies things such as flurry and charge actions and really gimped my models. Alps did some wounds but didn't really kill anything except maybe a Necropunk and Seamus (when he had only one wound left), but slowing is the big thing and it's almost impossible to avoid. In Seamus' case I had bad luck since I flipped an ace and then the soulstone brought a three but the whole rest of my crew was way more likely to fail than to succeed in the tests and once slowed, only the Samurai is relatively assured of killing an Alp (let alone a Stitched). I did leave out stuff (like Stitcheds ruining my hand) since it didn't seem all that important. LCB killed two models (Necropunk and Bete) plus basically Seamus, so not that much all in all compared to what he could have done.

A quick transcript of my first loss. I had Seamus, 3x Necropunks, a Belle, Sybelle, a Punk Samurai and Bete. My opponent had Dreamer, 3x Daydreams, 3x Alps, Coppelius and 2x Stitcheds. First turn he gets into position behind a building, I spread out in anticipation of the three Alps keeping the Belle to one side and Sybelle on the other so as to keep one out of the bubble of doom with Seamus in the middle. Second turn starts with a Necropunk leaping to melee the Dreamer - he burns soulstones and suffers no damage. Dreamer paralyzes the punk, flies to me, pops the bomb, turns into LCB and almost kills Seamus burning through my cache and hand in the process. Seamus activates, gets damaged further by Smother, casts Psychosis on an Alp, Coppelius and a Stitched. Can't do much more as the Alp means that meleeing is a death-sentence and there is nowhere to go. Companions the Belle who fails the WP duel and then lures Coppelius to be between her and the Samurai zombie as Alps were situated so that they couldn't be lured. Stitched or Alp (can't remember which one) activates and kills Seamus. The psychosied Nightmares fail to do anything and the Necropunks and Sybelle kill an Alp and damage a Stitched. Samurai kills an Alp. Next turn, Samurai kills Coppelius and dies in return. LCB kills something, Bete pops out but whiffs three times against LCB and dies next turn (didn't draw a single 10+ card that turn, but managed to Mark for Death LCB). The rest of my force runs away to perform the strategy and the scheme with one Necropunk keeping LCB occupied. I lose 4-6 and I seriously failed to see what I could've done differently. Does LCB need to test for Mark for Death even if he is buried at the end of the game, btw? If not, then I lost 4-8. Oh, and we played with only one test for multiple Alps as, even though I argued it to be multiple tests, my opponent said that it's insane and that Alps are quite broken enough with just one test. And this was with just three Alps, not a "proper" bomb, mind. By placing the Alps and Stitcheds intelligently, my opponent made it impossible for me to move them away/destroy them efficiently and it's seriously pretty easy to do unless the playing area completely lacks terrain.

There's a thread about it from September 2010 and that received no official answer. So are you absolutely sure that there was a prior thread that has somehow vanished (and that you didn't link to in the September thread) or do you just remember your own argument from that thread?

Even though the ability says "one or more Alps" each Alp has it, so it triggers for every one of them. Or that's my reading. I could only find one thread on the rules forum about and it was never answered by a Rules Marshall. Edit: Q also seems to agree with my reading.

Unfortunately, since avoiding getting slowed at least once is almost impossible, charging tends to use up too many AP. This is kinda my experience.

Aye, that is what I tried, but Stitcheds can block Luring sorta effectively (the fog area that is deep enough to block is huge when you need to see to the other side of the fog). It's also kinda hard to have enough Belles to make this really work (it would need four - two in each group - and that is stretching it a bit especially as Seamus himself is so squishy to LCB assault trying to go against paired onslaught-triggered claws with his low def).

Many of the suggestion seem to be missing the key ingredient in the problem - an intelligent Alp bomb. The Dreamer player is in charge and can mitigate the effects of AoE through clever placement. Only very few death explosions match Alp's range of 3". The same is true of many AoE pulses. Ranged AoE attacks can be handled through putting the Alp (or some other Nightmare like LCB or Stitched) into melee with the ranged model. Stitcheds can be used to wall off possible retaliation routes to the bomb and so on. This all happens in the Dreamer's terms. He gets to choose when and where he deploys the bomb. Experiences like Drake's simply highlight that the Dreamer player wasn't very smart and those sorts of stories aren't useful to me however amusing they may be. Furthermore, discussing the Alp bomb divorced from the reality that it is accompanied by Stitcheds and the LCB makes the discussion utterly useless. The psychological aspect stuff I've always considered complete crock as I'm honestly convinced that I'll lose 90% of the games going in yet my win percentage is something ridiculous and well over 90. Maybe I'm a well-functioning pessimist or something. As for the crew, let's say Seamus as he's the Master I've played the most, and the only game I've ever lost with him was against the Dreamer (so I like to think that I know what I'm doing with him).

How are you supposed to survive an intelligently deployed Alp bomb? Six Alps is only 18SS so very affordable and still leaves room for Daydreams and Stitcheds and whatnot. If you clump together, you die. You can spread out, but unless the playing field is a featureless plain and the strategy involves no fixed objectives, you need to group a bit and since Alps have silly long ranges it's pretty trivial to, in a real gaming situation, have three or four Alps on every enemy model that matters. Besides, you probably have some sort of synergy that you could take advantage of it you're a bit closer to one another, so spreading out too far makes your crew really useless. Finally, you can form small teams of two and three models. This means about three teams and Alps can still cover two of those easy. The last one can be blocked off through Stitcheds. So now you're in a situation that activating a model kills it with extremely high odds regardless of it's Wp (Zoraida is the sole exception, basically). The only one who has an OK chance of surviving activation is your Master. Now, since Chompybits is so killy, he might've already mauled your Master enough so that they die to activation. If not, you've likely used terrain and your other models to shield your Master (well done! It's extremely difficult to pull off with the ridiculous melee range of LCB), which means that your slowed Master can probably kill only one Alp. Which doesn't solve the problem and your crew is still doomed. So yeah, is there a way to consistently beat an intelligent Alp bomb?

Datsue-Ba actually seems like she might be a valid alternative that doesn't slow down the crew by quite as much. Two Canines and Datsue. First canine activates and damages the second one without killing him. Second one activates and does the same to the first one. Then, Datsue kills them both and turns them into corpse counters and Gaki/Onryo depending on cards. These fresh Gaki/Onryo can move straight away, so the slow down in minimized. Finally, Chihuahua or someone can pick up the corpse counters so the slow down to the Master is minimized as well. The end result is two corpses, two spirit minions and a pretty nice activation sequence on the first turn giving you the possibility to react to enemy movement as you are likely to out-activate them on the first turn (though there are some exceptions). I haven't tried this in practice (and my Rising Powers is loaned away currently) so this is all theory but it sounds nice enough on paper I think.

I believe that jty3's post was in response to ispep, actually (it would make more sense that way).

There's a mama rat and a papa rat who love each other very, very much, and they perform a special hug. After three weeks have passed, mama rat gives birth to a litter of tiny little rat cubs.

Which means that you calling others out for "classy" is complete crock. Sure, if you change the definition arbitrarily you might convince yourself that what you're saying is somehow valid. You also convinced me that there is zero reason for me to try to engage you.