Islington

Actually I think its rather obvious that a paired flip is superior to +1 cb. If it was +2 cb you might have a point. Ive found that the most important thing in any duel is winning the intial flip and forcing your opponent to cheat first. This forces your opponent to either decide hes not going to win this duel and not cheat, cheat the highest card in his hand in an effort to win no matter what you have, or take a chance on you not having a high enough card to beat him. Every single one of these choices is good for whoever cheats last. If he doesnt cheat you can freely manipulate the total to gain a suit for a trigger or put the duel totals into range for an even damage flip. If he cheats a card you cant beat then you havent wasted a card of your own which he would have beat and youve gotten that card out of his hand. If he cheats a card that you can beat then youve traded him card for card but still gotten damage out of it. Malifaux is as much about resource management as it is about positioning and combos So in short paired is better than +1cb because while the +1cb gives you a higher possible duel total the paired flip saves you resources and gives you options. Also while I too have yet to do the math I think that if you do you will almost certainly find that a paired flip will provide you a better average duel total than +1cb. Ahh one last thing to remeber about poison is that it very neatly gets around hard to kill. If you "kill" a hard to kill model with lelu and it then heals to 1 wound you have still effectively killed it in one activation and possibly 1ap since the model dies as soon as it activates. As far as I know poison is the only thing that can do this.

This is good to hear. Its something that really did need fixing. Also comparing the combat effectivness of lelu with a young neph is rediculous. Lelu has paired claws, poison 2, 2in reach and a 0 action spell that does pretty high damage. They both have flay and the same damage line for their main weapons. The only thing the young neph has better than lelu for combat is cb 6 instead of cb 5 which paired more than makes up for. Luck being equal Lelu will allways do at minimum 3 points more damage to the target than the young neph would. For pure damage output they are not equal. Lelu is far far better. He does in fact have the highest potential damage output of any nephelim model. A single serious damage claw strike with flay does 10 damage. Granted the model you hit will get at least 1 activation before it recieves the last point of damage from poison on its 2nd activation. This is still the most damage from any model we have in a single strike. Also dont underestimate (0)drink blood. This spell can almost be thought of as another claw strike. You loose paired, poison, flay, and it requires a raven but its damage line is slightly better it heals lelu and it targets wp. Targeting wp is huge in a combat force that pretty much targets nothing but defense. So should lelu allways be taken over a young neph. Of course not. The young is far faster and can mature. There are plenty of reasons to take the young neph over a lelu but not one of them is that he has the same combat potential as a lelu.

Im not sure people are realising just how insanely powerful lure is. It has so so many more uses than just pulling an enemy model closer to you which is good enough just by itself. Take into account schemes that require you to be in a particular area or near a piece of terrain, the ability to pull your own models out of combat or move them up the field or back towards your deployment area, and finaly think about what happens when you lure a model off the top of a building. Yah falling damage hurts. Oh and there are only 13 cards in your entire deck that wont succesfuly cast the spell. Combine a Liltu with nekima for the xtra mask on the casting value and you can pretty much guarentee that the tartgeted model will be in base contact with Liltu for 1ap. Double take triggers wether or not your opponent resists the spell or not. So you just flip cards till you run into a 3, 2, or 1 which you cheat. The only thing that will stop you is the black joker in which case you just cast the spell again with your 1 remaining ap. You can pull your opponents master 18in across the board on turn 2 and then anhilate him fairly easy. Personaly the only thing that keeps this from desprately needing errata is that nekima, lelu, and liltu cost 27 points together. If your playing in a large size game this is just completely broken.

From the models listed you should be able to get 8 blood counters in one turn. Each killed merc can generate 1 blood from blood sense, 1 blood from drain blood, and drops 1 corpse token which can be turned into blood via the shamans spell trigger. Add in the 2 blood from blood offering via nekima and the shaman and you get a total of 8 blood. Unfortunately the order that you have to do this in means that you wont be able to heal the shaman. Nekima has to activate before the shaman so that she can add the mask to the cast for the shamans trigger. The two mercs have to be killed before the shaman activates so that he has corpses to turn into blood. When the mercs die they heal nekima since the shaman hasnt used blood offering yet. So when the shaman finaly activates he can use blood offering and inject blood on whatever to turn the corpses into blood, but he cant target himself with inject blood. Inject blood is a melee attack spell and you cant target yourself with a melee attack. So you cant heal your shaman back up if you blood offering with him unless you forgoe turning the corpse counters into blood because you have to use the mercs to heal him. So you can have 7 blood and fully healthy models or 8 blood and a shaman with 4 wounds left all on turn one. Alternatively you can wait till the top of turn 2 to turn the two corpses into blood and get 9 blood and a healthy shaman. The order of activation would be something like this: 1) Activate Nekima use blood offering and the +mask to casting values (1 blood) 2) Activate the Shaman use blood offering and inject blood with trigger to heal nekima and keep your bloods. (2 blood) 3) Lilith activates Kills a merc and uses drain blood. Blood sense from nekima or shaman generates a blood. Mercs death heals shaman. (4 blood, 1 corpse) 4) Activate a tot standing next to the remaining merc and grow. The now Young tot attacks twice and kills remaining merc easily then uses drain blood. Blood sense triggers and the mercs death finishes healing the shaman. (5 blood, 2 corpse, 1 young) 5) Tot activates grows then matures. (2 blood, 2 corpse, 1 young, 1 mature) 6)Last tot activates and grows. (1 blood, 2 corpse, 2 young, 1 mature) 7) end of turn 8)Nekima activates uses blood offering and adds +mask to casting. (2 blood, 2 corpse, 2 young, 1 mature) 9)Shaman activates uses corpses to cast inject blood twice with trigger healing nekima and turning two corpse counters into 2 bloods. (4 blood, 2 young, 1 mature) 10) Young activates and matures (2 blood, 1 young, 2 mature) At this point we have the tots all up sized as much as possible and enough blood to mature the young once one of the matures dies. Of course this does eat up a good bit of your 2nd turn. So depending on the schemes this is not the way to go. This is however the optimal usage of the two mercs if you only consider blood generation tot growth and model health. When other considerations like grabbing a treasure come into play your probably better off trying to do as best you can in 1 turn. Afterall we do have 2 xtra blood at the end of this that we have no imediate use for.

There is no reason to ever use whirling death against 2 models. If you whirling death with 2 models in range then you get 2 attacks but it costs you 2 ap and a card to do it. Where as you can just spend 2 ap and make 2 attacks and save yourself the card.