LastDinosaur

Just remember that Mollys bonus only lasts while they're in range of her aura (so you'll most likely only get use of it for a single move action).

A Silent One is one of the most useful December themed models, she'd be a safe bet.

A totem would also be a good idea. While the Wendigo fits Rasputina better thematically, it is by most considered inferior to / less useful than the Essence of Power, so probably go for that one.

The Blessed is very similar to the Cerberus, which your friend has already, so I'd not suggest that one for now.

Snow Storm is.. .. Okay, I suppose.. Not nearly as essential to the crew as the Silent Ones or a totem though, in my opinion anyway..

WYR3052 - $35 - Rail Crew Box Set

The Arcanist Rail Crew Box has had a slight delay in shipping, it will be available as normal from the Online Store but won't be at the Gencon Booth until later in the weekend.

Master - Mei Feng:

Ambitious Mei Feng uses her mastery of metal and fire elemental magic to insinuate herself into the Miners and Steamfitters Union, drawing the attention of Viktor Ramos and his Arcanists.

Mei Feng is a melee caster, She excels at fighting multiple opponents, being able to dart into combat using her own constructs as stepping stones, once engaged she can move from opponent to opponent laying down damage and burning tokens. Mei Feng can combo her spells and strikes together into chains, which though card intensive allow her to pull off some impressive feats.

Below is a small cheat card I've made to help you keep track of your combos.

-Better cache than other Arcanists

-Solid Df and Cb values

-Claws are paired, more stable damage and positive damage flips against burning targets.

-Kick has higher Severe damage.

-6 spells (as seen in the diagram)

-6 triggers (one of which is not in the diagram, Vent Steam -> Superheat is an ability)

-Scalding Breath is damage (not sure on details)

-Vent Steam is like Creepy Fog (may not block LoS for certain friendly units)

-Superheat makes enemies in Vent Steam aura gain burning tokens

-Railwalker makes you jump to btb with a construct (or Tail Worker?) within 5", do this twice (or thrice with the unlisted trigger)

-Seismic Punch moves nearby models

-Iron Skin gives armor to a friendly model (only Mei herself with the trigger)

Emberling:

-Arcane Reservoir

-Can dish out burning tokens somehow

Rail Workers:

Open Spoiler

-M&SU Members

-Have a Rst: Df spell to give burning tokens

WYR3058 - $21 - Metal Gamin (3 pack)

Open Spoiler

-Nominate a model they protect

-(0)action to charge models engaged with the nominated model

-Faster, but also more expensive, than other Gamin

WYR3053 - $35 - Rail Golem (this fella stands 78mm tall!)

-M&SU Asset

-Works on burning tokens (can get from friendly models (emberling, Railworkers), absorb from engaged models and possibly generate itself)

-Can spend the tokens on various stuff.. Reactivate being one such thing.

WYR3059 - $16 - Willie the Demolitionist

Open Spoiler

Also the wallpaper. (link)

Edit:

Put excessive pictures into spoiler tags.

Edit2:

It seems as if there'll be 1 Master w/ totem and ~5 minions per faction, so we shouldn't expect anything more than what we have here for the Arcanists.

Edit3:

Added some tidbits I heard through chatting with knowledgeable people, so not first hand and might have gotten some of it wrong, take it with a grain of salt.

Okay, so I just browsed through this thread.. I'm all for gimmicky lists, but I think I'll have to agree with Q'iq'el on the reliability problems in repeatedly using transposition in this way. Either way I still have a questions/suggestion to better the list.

What exactly is the point of the second Sorrow? And why not take a totem instead of the second Sorrow? Both options are cheaper, have better Ca, don't spend all their AP to cast Allure, don't hurt Lilith to cast her spells and are arguably more survivable. By the time you manifest the 2nd sorrow isn't that important anymore anyway from what I gather, which'd otherwise be the only pro of the Sorrow as I see it..

Ah, good to know.

Is that in an errata somewhere?

Not errata, core rules, always been.

Just look up Rare # in the rulebook.

So...

I had a little chat with this rocketboots-toting dinosaur and he told me that bumping this thread might get us all that which I so dearly desire.

Can we please have a fresh fix of malidoodles?

Perhaps even some Sonnia Sundaes and/or Raspberry flavoured ones. =3

Meh, Marcus can happily run a list with no beasts in at all and it wouldn't effect him one bit.

Aside from losing out on Companion, his defensive trigger and the occasional Howl bonus.. I assumed that since those are on his card one might as well try to take advantage of them by at least picking a single beast, but hell what do I know about Marcus, nothing.

Ah a twist.. Usually what's been said on these boards throughout the life of Malifaux is:

"I’ve won, so this is certainly not a statement of “Pandora is OP/unbeatable”, rather a criticism of how her design makes me feel when she’s on the board across from me."

One of the Masters you play, food for thought, eh..

Talking about your local meta?

The Coryphée works fine with Rasputina. Ramos aswell. Can't speak of Marcus, but don't see why not, as long as you don't give up on beast minions entirely with him.

As a December player I wouldn't bother with Cassandra though, massive investment and our core is already elitist enough, really need some cheaper activations if you take the Coryphée.

Note that strategy and board matters alot when deciding a list for December, Rasputinas inherent problem is her speed, but she doesn't always need it, and certainly not always in the amounts that the Coryphée brings.

Just in case anyone else was wondering..

Sadly it turned out my memory was mostly playing tricks with me. Dug through alot of the old threads and found those two that must've somehow combined to one in my mind:

Turns out however that she got her first name from this woman (link).

Ah well..

Ah no.. It was more like an advertisement for an upcoming/ongoing show.. Probably a burlesque one, don't remember what it looked like exactly, but I'm fairly certain it said 'Colette DuBois' on it. IIRC it was was drawn.

A bit of an odd request here, but shortly after the release of Twisting Fates there was quite a few threads about the various references from which various of the characters drew inspiration, Unexplained Connection, Collodi, etc.

IIRC there was a vintage poster of a real life Colette DuBois posted in one of them.

Unfortunately my search-fu is weak and I haven't been able to find it again, nor on the forums and neither on google where the Malifesque version gets the vast majority of the attention.

Soeh.. A simple request..

Could someone who saved that picture please repost it, or someone with a better search-fu than my own dig it up?

- Thank you very much in advance.

You can hire Hoffman with Colette, yes, due to one of her abilities, your chosen Faction has to be the Arcanists however.

Edit:

So you'll have to give up on all the guild constructs. The Coryphée can carry Hoffman however, and Mannequins give him Armor+3.

So, the thing that got me thinking about this was actually a post i saw about Ramos.

People are building crews with the sole purpous of manifesting Ramos on the second turn. and that's all well and good and everything, except that means Ramos isn't really in the game until turn 3! that seems like more of a set back than anything to me. not to mention you're scraping your own stuff. i think something like 8 SS work of models are killed on turn 1 and no one leaves your deployment zone until turn two... With Marcus or Lillith i could be nearling inside your deployment zone before you had a chance to activate Avatar Ramos. with alpha strike crazyness i could maybe even kill him and be out of there before you got any sort of benefit from having the avatar...

It works for Ramos because his Avatar is one of the strongest and one of the few that can reliably be brought out early on without really sacrificing all that much - you're not required to scrap models and his crew is free to leave his deployment zone, so not sure what you're getting at there. I don't see an alpha strike assassination run working at all unless Ramos is all by himself in the open- but any model caught in that situation is prone to whatever your enemy throws at it..

I agree with you that North Wind should affect Ice Mirror, but it was ruled that Rg does not equal a listed range and therefore it sadly doesn't. You can find the thread here (Ratty chimes in on page 2).

Freeze Over is an action though, so is definetly not affected by North Wind.

North Wind unfortunately does not affect Ice Mirror, a shame, but that's how it was ruled, reason being that North Wind makes use of the Rg keyword and Ice Mirror just lists a range.. Our cries that no ability in the game actually makes use of the Rg keyword (and North Winds specific mention of abilities thus being redundant) were disregarded entirely.

Can biting chill keep triggering if you keep winning against the defender's resist duel? Obviously you can't kill a model with this spell as it says so in the text but POTENTIALLY you could bring a 6+ Wd model down to 1 Wd in one turn with it, correct?

Correct.

I use frozen heart themed models as they work well with ice mirror and the silent ones are perfect for it as they have perfect mirror reducing the cast by -1 not -3 also forget the essence of power totem its useless as all it adds is + to spell damage..... consider this wendigo also costs 2ss has frozen heart has 4 wounds not 2 has damage of 2/2/5 not 1/1/3 has cb 4 not cb 3 both have ca of 4 he also has devour, eat your fill and consume the dead so works well with the graverobber theme especially if taking snow storm, but the benefit i see is he is like a gamin in the way that you can send him in as a shock troop and cast through him without having to waste a spell to do so, essence of power only gives the + to spell damage if its linked and will only have frozen heart if within 4" of raspy without a spell

(emphasis mine)

Whoa.. I've seen some people prefer the Wendigo to the Essence for thematic reasons and what not, but I think this is the first time I've actually seen anyone on those forums claiming Wendigo to be the better choice.. Interesting.

on spell damage alot when you're relying on dealing collateral damage with blasts and saves you a bunch of high cards throughout the game, I honestly find it quite hard to go without the Essence.. Yes the Wendigo is universally better statwise, but it's still not anything close to good, aside from being a Graverobber and the occasional Ice Pillars it doesn't really add anything worthwhile to the crew at all, and you only want Graverobber when going for the avatar (which I'm not fond of at all) soeh yeah.. - those are just my opinions of course.

Also @ the OP: There's a thread like this one for Raspy almost once a week I feel, if you did a bit of a search you should be able to find some of them easily, there's also the pullmyfinger wiki, although I do not remember how elaborate Raspys article is.. Hmm..

It means you can only hire 2, and have 2 in play, during the game. So if one dies you can summon one back, but ONLY one, instead of 2 or more. No safety net for Levi!

Eh.. You never hire Waifs, one comes for free the rest has to be summoned. And you can have two of them in play at any time (four in brawls), so if one dies you are free to make another one if you so desire, although you'll only ever get two of them back when they're resummoned at the end of the turn due to their Rare 2.

1: Yes

2: Will probably be cleared up by the time the model is released. Profiles have been known to change between book and card release. Just look at Hamelin the Plagued

But he can hire M&SU Members, can't he? (pardon me if I'm wrong, I'm at the office, and away from my cards) Or does that only apply to Special Forces [M&SU Assets]?

You're thinking of Colette now.

Edit:

Ramos' rule concerning the Assets is that he doesn't need Kaeris in order to take more than two of them.

OK the way it works is this..

1. You choose your faction.
   
2. Your first Master must be from that faction.
   
3. Your Second Master in a brawl must either
   

• be from your faction (As long as your first Master does not prevent the hire, Eg If your playing Outcast and your first Master is Leveticus then you can't hire Viktoria)
  
• or a model hirable by your First Master - whose own hiring restrictions wouldn't have made it impossible to hire the first master. (Eg If your playing Outcast and your first Master is Leveticus he allows you to hire Ramos - And if you're playing Guild with your first Master being Sonnia you can't hire Leveticus as your second, despite him being a Mercenary.).
  

Fixed that for you. Otherwise almost any Master would be able to take Leveticus as their secondary Master, which I believe is not the case, right?

I don't think Brawls are that common? At least not in my area.. Especially for tournaments.. But yeah.. Leveticus messes everything up, always did, always will.

As for the Freikorps, keep in mind each model costs +1SS for being hired out of faction, as such fielding mainly Freikorps puts you at a disadvantage right from the start, even if your opponent had expected you to bring something else..

The Dolls can just use Pull Strings three times each...

That was changed, only once per turn. - It's on the Fixes page: http://malifaux.com/Fixes.php

Also Pull Strings is a move and the Marionettes cannot move further than 8" away from Collodi, so 32"+the odd base width is correct.

Please, I'm not trying to neglect your contributions to our community in any way, shape or form and I appreciate your presence among us. I merely had the same 'problem' with your initial remark as I believe the SportsComedian had, and as such answered your question on his behalf. It might simply be a matter of cultural differences, but where I'm from boasting (not a native speaker, so may not be the most fitting term) is considered both rude and arrogant, be it tongue in cheek or not.

The thing is: Other prominent members of our forum don't go bragging about how they changed the game single-handedly or what they did to improve it, help new players through in-depth tactica, discover loop-holes or whatever.

[...] you'll see how contentious it was with how it worked with the SS Miner in full (and Bette at the same time in my Levi related threads) and I got it all worked out and confirmed by the powers that be which then led to various people adopting it as the defacto way to play SS Miners. That's all I meant, and it was only in my usual graceful sarcastic way anyways - jeezus.[...]

(emphasis mine)

This again is a prime example of the 'boasting' I was just talking about.

Now, I realize that I might've been way too blunt in my previous answer, and my apologies to you for that, but I hope you can understand my 'perspective' on this matter.