Math Mathonwy

Out of Bayou, I feel that Zoraida can pull off the reactive playstyle the best and play a control-oriented game. Obeys are a natural fit but also her card manipulation, Conditions, and the scheming potential of Swampfiend keyword should fit perfectly. Title version trades off a bit on the Obey front but provides Summoning and activation control.

For how get fair against new players, my number one advice would be to do it in the crew selection part of the game as much as possible. Faux is actually pretty good for it since all the bad Minions come in sets of three so almost any Master can be handicapped absolutely massively by just fielding six mediocre Minions and leaving the best synergies home. Mei Feng with three Rail Workers and three Metal Gamin leaves you with 20 Stones to play around with and you still get a Mei Feng experience out of it but it really isn't very scary at all. Another piece of advice would be to go more for Scheming that killing. It's more annoying to lose to dying than to scheming.

Can't believe I forgot Snow Storm! As for Wind Golem - I don't think I've ever even properly looked at what he does... Now that's a terrifying thought!

Him having Middle of the Storm and Maddening Drums kinda feels a bit like stealing the thunder (hah!) from some other models as those have been very defining abilities for The Captain and Gluttony. That said, I'm not sure that re-using abilities is all that bad since it is one way of lowering the complexity of the game a bit and naturally this guy is from a different Faction than Captain or Gluttony. About the model himself, he seems like a very good tech pick for many situations. Sound of Thunder seems potentially quite frustrating for the opponent. Luckily he is a bit squishy so the opponent likely can deal with him if needed.

I can see the logic. I kinda think that it might lose a bit of accuracy in situations where a Master is super polarizing as they might not have all that much raw power but they just really fit certain situations super well. But of course traditional tier lists don't tackle that situation well, either! I can see the argument for flexibility but surely the "raw power" would differ between the two versions?

I painted Sly Cooper. Rather pleased with how sinister he ended up looking. A really difficult model to photograph, though.

Oh I don't think that they are trying to make imbalanced models to make people buy more stuff. Actually I doubt any minis company does that, really. But their current balancing style makes it kinda inevitable. Of course, power creep is weird in that you sortakinda need some to make the new stuff compelling but that's a lengthy discussion that I won't go into here. But every Gencon a new book comes out and the cycle continues so it isn't one year but rather a constant state of things under the current balancing model. Explorers were nerfed hard last errata and I expect titles to be nerfed hard in next year's errata (hope!) and then the next book will get nerfed in 2024 and so on.

A cynic might note that Wyrd's balancing style where they balance old stuff but new stuff is left alone for a year and a half means that the power creep is even more focused on new stuff than in other games I mean, the facetious title of this thread came from the observation that without the titles the game would be in a very balanced state right now. But titles weren't touched so the power spikes remain and are actually more pronounced. Because, somewhat weirdly, the old powerhouses like pre-nerf Dreamer and Von Schtook and so on would've been right at home at the upper echelons of the title power levels.

Have to say that I can't think of many systems other than WM/H that would be worse than Malifaux in that regard. Maybe Guild Ball? And I've not played Marvel Crisis Protocol or the Batman minis game so cannot comment on them. But out of the minis games I've played, Malifaux is way, way rougher in that regard than 40k, AoS, WHFB, Epic, Mordheim, Necromunda, Alkemy, Eden, Carnevale, Dark Age, Warmaster, Infinity, Moonstone, Bushido, Twisted, Blood Bowl, Arcworlde, 1650, Flames of War, Pulp City, Black Powder, Confrontation, Lion Rampant, Uncharted Seas, Dropzone Commander, and probably a dozen or so others that I forgot from the list. And aside from direct comparisons, maybe me and my meta are an exception but we really strongly feel that facing a new Master in capable hands is a massive handicap. It isn't quite an autoloss but if the skill levels of the players are approximately on the same level it can be very rough. That said, all Masters/keywords aren't created equal in this regard and there certainly are Masters who are easier to grasp on the fly, as it were.

Definitely! But I was talking about tournaments and I generally expect competitive tournament players to be familiar with their own crews in a tournament environment. Ironically, with the balance getting better, I find that the problem kinda gets worse since the power gap is smaller. In early M3e it seemed that well over half of Neverborn tournament games were against Dreamer. But now that the balance is better you can kinda run into anything and there are very few true pushovers left so facing a new Master in competitive hands is a tough deal. And, I mean, I totally support balancing efforts! But in a weird way they make the problem of Master diversity worse. Also, as mentioned, the new Titles have a lot of Masters with very weird playstyles that at least I cannot grasp until I see them in action. Finally, at least here, the metas are quite small and cross-pollination between cities is minimal outside of tournaments. So when a tournament happens, you get three or four small metas colliding and you are very likely to run into something new. My meta has, quite randomly, minimal Arcanist representation, for example, so I still haven't played a single M3e game against Sandeep or Toni or Kaeris and haven't faced any of the Arcanist titles. (I have Toni from M2e myself but the keyword shuffle meant that I don't have a crew for her...) This is fair, I think, but it does kinda suck from a competitive point of view. At least IMO. And I realize that I'm mostly criticizing here but I wish to note that I don't have answers. I don't know what Wyrd should do to keep the game alive yet accessible from a competitive perspective. I think that the conversation has been good and I really appreciate the opinions and views offered even if I (seem to) disagree with some. As noted, I still think that Malifaux is one of the better competitive minis games and on my painting desk there's currently minis for eight different skirmish minis games...

The problem is that many crews are nearly impossible to beat when you face them for the first time if you are on an even remotely same skill level with your opponent. And the titles have stretched the design space even further creating even more complexities and possible gotchas that can easily decide a game. So tournaments are likely decided by match-up experience which can be quite random with local metas. I think that it is almost impossible to reconcile. We locally lost a ton of players to DMH and the keyword adjustments when M3e was introduced. Further killing off of crews would likely be a complete deathblow if it happened. I was just talking about this with a friend of mine. He is demoing for a couple of people this week - one who played quite a bit of M2e but fell off with the edition change and one new person. The new person is a bit more competitively minded and we kinda feel that Malifaux is very tough sell for competitive people these days as the mental investment in getting good is so enormous. And, weirdly enough, we also feel that the strength of Malifaux is in the competitive side of things. We both play an absolute ton of minis games and for beer and pretzels we have a dozen or so games that fit the bill better than Malifaux. For tournament games, the list is way shorter. In fact, I would argue that most minis games really aren't very good at all for serious competitive play. But that strength of Malfauxs really difficult to realize for new players as getting "tournament ready" for a competitive player in Malifaux is an absolutely massive undertaking these days. When Guild Ball died it mentioned in its epitaph blog one of the main reasons behind the death as being the competitive players. Which was quite rightly mocked (as they were the ones keeping the game afloat and building the communities and so on) but there was a grain of truth to it as well. GB was so incredibly skill intensive that a noob would get absolutely trounced for a dozen or so games against experienced players and the very top players were absolute machines sporting records of like 95% win rates in tournaments and stuff like that. The competitive scene was almost impenetrable for newbies and I kinda feel that Malifaux is going the same way. And of course this wasn't the competitive players' fault but the game rewarding mastery to such an incredibly level. Which is probably what many people wanted but I can totally see it contributing to the game's death.

Maybe the car goes too fast and they lost their hats? There's also still the the Gator couch but he doesn't have have a hat, either. Though he does have a parasol... Also, I still think that there's a slight possibility that one will be a Master with just Jockey as Keyword.

How's that for a clickbait title So, in general I was very pleasantly surprised by how well the titles went. Doubling the amount of Masters sounded, to me, like such a recipe for a massive disaster that I was honestly blown away by how balanced and fun the result was. But that might be because because my expectations were super low. I mean, there certainly were quite a few problems. Some were even errataed. I think that there are kinda two types of problems. Since every Master needs to have a distinct playstyle I feel that some have gotten overly convoluted. Be it tracking hundreds of pips of Poison or the kidnap style of play of Tara2 or whatever I feel that there are cracks appearing here and there when the design space is stretched out. The other problem is simply power level. I've seen a couple of tier lists and S tier seems solely occupied by titles. Now, tier lists are far from objective, naturally but I really do feel that with the latest round of errata the original Masters are in a very good spot with basically no truly OP ones left. But the titles were protected from the errata (barring a couple of fixes for the most outrageous things) so it's entirely natural that their power level is still all over the place. And it isn't all titles, naturally. Most are in a good place and there are quite a few weak ones as well. It's just such a shame that I feel that we might have the most balanced iteration of Malifaux currently if we didn't have the titles. And with the titles, I feel that we're actually in one of the most unbalanced metas ever, currently. I also really dislike how titles have a lot of stuff that the original Masters pay something for. I mean, stuff like Perdita1 vs Perdita2. Perdita1 actually had to discard a card for A Por El. Perdita2 cycles a card for it so it went from a cost to a benefit. She also summons without any requirements other than a low suited card while most original Masters need Markers or some other type of hoop jumping to Summon. And similar things are all over the titles - not trying to single out Perdita2 here! I like costs to actions - I think it makes for more interesting decisions. But the new design philosophy seems to be abandoning them more and more. Anyone else have similar feelings? Am I over reacting?

So, the latest Waldo's Weekly showed us that Bayou Bash is getting an expansion: https://themostexcellentandawesomeforumever-wyrd.com/topic/158275-waldos-weekly-hog-wild/#comment-1281113 We got to see Toad Twins and a Whiskey Gamin. Additionally, on the front of the box there's a flying thing and a straight up race car (got to say that I'm not a fan of the monster truck). We've also seen these two Most of these have also been previewed as minis in Gencons a few years back. I looked for them but couldn't find them easily but I remember the Whiskey Gamin, the Gator guy and a flying rocket pack contraption of some sort which might be rocket bird from the cover art. The four Jockeys we got in the Bayou Starter were all Versatile but they also all had a second keyword. So my theory is that every Bayou Keyword is getting a Jockey. There might also be a Jockey Master. The Whiskey Gamin is obviously Tri-Chi but the rest are more difficult. The family could fit Big Hat and the flying contraption would fit as Infamous. Toad Twins might be Kin? The big Gator could also be Big Hat or he could be the Jockey Master. The monster truck could also be the Master, I suppose. Or Infamous. Finally, there's the new keyword, Angler. I suppose the family might be riding a Gibbering Hordes monster? My other guess would be Toad Twins but she was probably even further from the look of the Skulker Skin so I dunno.

@TimHman, those Geryon look grotesque! The colours also fit the winter theme super well - truly monstrous! Great work!

Let me just say how salty I am about how this approach completely invalidates their previous reasoning for Dead Man's Hand. How you need to shelf Masters because they died in the lore or otherwise the story wouldn't progress. And now we have two different versions of each Master, many of which cannot exist simultaneously, and this was the plan from the start as can be seen from the wording of the rules in the original book. The other reason for DMH was design space, which now seems even more like a cop out! They ran out of design space because of a couple of Masters but kinda found the space for doubling the Masters through the titles. And the next book, naturally, brings forth more Masters. This rant brought to you by what could've been best title: Collodi the Fancy Chair.

I'm not sure how big a fan I am of keeping track of that many points of Poison, tbh. It seems super tedious even in Vassal, let alone on a real table. I already found Brilliance and Blight a bit much but this is on a wholly other level...

That's a good question and an important framing. The way I see it, there are kinda three different cases (that often overlap): NPE. A model might not be overpowered as such but create a ton of frustration for the opponent and it needs adjustment because of that. In M2e Brewmaster was a below-average Master but when he worked he could shut down the opposing crew and the opponent would have models but when he tried activating them they would just spend their actions failing simple duels and getting more poison so they would fail more duels. This was often seen as more frustrating than, say, Viks just killing the opposing crew. Overly-specific counterplay. Touched upon in this thread but if the only way to beat a Master is to stack up on attacks that target Mv there's a problem because very few keywords can do such a thing and only in certain factions. Games shouldn't be decided at the "declare Masters" step. OP. Some models are just too good and need toning down. The most common reason for Wyrd's errata. This is the one you can solve by just toning down the numbers while the other two usually require a bit more.

I kinda agree but the problem is that if you make Focus go away at round's end, for example, that would need a massive balance pass onto existing models. Aside from Focus stacking models, there are also models who'd become way better if Focus wasn't so readily available. Heck, Armor might become busted if there was less Focus. Hazardous would require a bit less balancing but still lots of profiles. That said, once could question whether the balance of Faux is fine enough that a big change like that wouldn't just skew it another way without really affecting the amount of imbalance present in the game. And that's a fair question - I personally don't think that the balance is all that amazing, especially after the titles. And Wyrd already did adjust Focus so they aren't totally opposed to the idea of adjusting core rules. All that said, I still kinda think that these sorts of overhauls are more likely to happen when M4e comes around, whenever that may be. Or maybe M3.5 if such a thing were to happen. Finally, I think that it is still fair to talk about the problems in individual profiles and such even if one agrees that there are core rule issues.

I very much like the idea. One problem that designs like these often have is that the "best build" is found and then there isn't much choice anymore so care should be taken to make the parts in such a way that the best configuration really depends on the strat and terrain and opponent and such. I do like that you build her only after seeing the opposing crew and deployment. I could also see that she might be a bit frustrating to play against as there's bound to be situations where the opponent is surprised by an ability or lack of one on her. But yeah, definitely a fun idea! A balancing nightmare of course but definitely a unique and fun take and fits the theme. Good stuff, thanks for sharing!

I can see where you're coming from but getting two VP from Breakthrough seems like it would be difficult. With Pale Rider it would take two turns mostly dedicated to the Scheme and Riders get so juicy for combat at the end of the game that it seems like a shame to not get on that sweet sweet murdering. Coupled with Death Beds that seems like a ton of AP tied into dropping Markers. That said, I do like the Deathbeds for Coffins idea. As a bonus, it seems super thematic!

I believe that LJ2 and Perdita2 are seen as quite powerful Masters but how do they do Strats and Schemes? Especially stuff like Symbols, Break the Line and such? As their in-activation movement tricks seem to be limited and they have very limited ways of dropping extra Scheme Markers or doing extra Interacts? A friend of mine wanted to learn those two Masters and his first game is going to be Corner Leylines with Bait and Switch, Breakthrough, Death Beds, Spread them Out, and Outflank. Neither him nor me are well-versed with Guild in general and we haven't played LJ2 or Perdita2 ever and are feeling a bit stumped. Which one would you take and any idea on Scheme selection or specific model choices? The opponent is Arcanists. So all general insights as well as specific advice would be super welcome!

Obey is such a "world is your oyster" tool of insane versatility that spotting the angles with it certainly takes time and practice. But that's what I love about Zoraida - almost every loss feels like it would've been winnable with a bit of a different approach. I kinda like Juju. He has grown on me. He gets a bit of a bad rap but he isn't bad. His problem is that he is quite vulnerable to certain things (denying healing definitely being one of them!) so he can be a liability depending on what he's facing. But on the flip side, he can be very good in the right situation and I've had him survive while being stuck in the thick of things the whole game. Whiskey Golem is worth a try as a beater for Zoraida, though. I also used to use Francois every once in a while with her but the errata probably made him worse in that role. I've also considered Alphonse but haven't tried him yet.

Zoraida and Mah are my favourite two Masters so I definitely approve of the choice! Zoraida I mostly play super focused on the Strat and Schemes. First Mate and Silurids are very difficult to stop from scoring and doubly so when Zoraida can Obey them and through them. Zoraida's main function for me is to Obey the enemy out of position and my own dudes into position. Oftentimes the best way to do so is through Charges so you get some attacks as a bonus but don't go out of your way for them most of the time unless the opponent has left a very juicy target near their big beater or some such. If there are choke points on the table Obeying enemies who have already activated to create traffic jams is best in life. So yeah, be somewhat surgical in your violence and focus on scoring and she is very, very powerful. She does have a bit of a learning curve but after you get to grips with her, the opponent is going to have a way steeper learning curve against her. Her favourite strats are ones that favour spreading out or extremely elite lists (as Obeying a handful of enemy big beaters is lots of fun and she can act as a force multiplier for your own). Finally, her card manipulation is fantastic. If you can get a read on the opponent's hand you can either activate her early to get rid of a good hand while being very liberal using up your own or you can save her activation for later when she can better disrupt opponent's scoring. As for Mah, she still likes to pulse Focus but isn't all about it anymore. Don't be reckless with her as she has pretty good damage output but isn't very durable so, again, be surgical and patient in looking for the right opportunities. She can be perfectly happy just Pushing stuff around for the first two turns and doesn't need to get stuck in too early. Her crew is way more killy than Zoraida's, though, and you can build her crew in many different ways. Roosters are very fast and dangerous, Survivors and Test Subjects are super durable for their cost and one Bushwhacker is always amazing to threaten sniping an enemy Totem or whatnot on the first activation of the game. Hopefully there was something of use there. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask!

Yeah, got to agree. All Factions should have game against all Masters so if it comes to down to checking whether you have some exotic counter tech or not (attacking Mv in a meaningful way isn't exactly common) there's definitely a problem. Doubly so if the other version of the Master isn't especially susceptible to said tech.