Azahul

I think Hamelin's lack of top tier play is mostly down to it being a complicated crew that isn't easy to run under clock pressure, so for the pools where he's strong (Cloak and Dagger and Raid the Vaults primarily in GG4) most competitive players swing for an equally strong Keyword without the time pressure. As a regular Hamelin player I think the Obedient Wretch is too cheap to ever leave at home. All she has to do is drop schemes for Benny early on and maybe hit one Bleeding Disease in the game for her to be worthwhile. And you can kill her yourself Turn 5 with Inevitable Fate for the card draw.

Just double-checking, he did hit you with a second attack, right? Cruel Disappointment means irreducible red joker from Kiya should only do 4 damage.

Yeah, pretty much. Without Benny you don't have a way to remove big clumps of markers all at once for massive burst healing, so he makes Pearl's Reformed healing a bit more impactful. Let me know how the Montresor build goes. I like the idea but I don't like going so low on stones in Bandit. I hope it pays off!

Tara2's main benefit is she unburies her models more easily, so she's better into crews that can mess with Tara1. She is more of a hit-and-run damage dealer crew I think, where Tara1 prefers to run away and score points while her summons slow down the opponent.

It's a weird one. It definitely is worth its 10 points. It can be argued that if you tally up everything on its card it might be worth more than its 10 points. But the issue is that it does many small things that individually aren't worth 10, so you need to make sure you're using multiple aspects of its kit. Bandit is the only Keyword where I consider the Emissary a must, personally. Every part of the Emissary, the healing, the marker generation, the movement boosts, all three upgrades, it offers, etc. have a home in Bandit. Other Keywords it's more optional. Freikorps, Mercenary, Infamous, and Obliteration have in Keyword healers and probably need the Emissary the least (I sometimes bring an upgraded Effigy in Freikorps if I need the scheme generation but that's about it). Plague doesn't need a healer honestly, I only bring him there for the scheme marker generation because I love rat summoning and honestly there's probably a more efficient pick. Tormented really likes the Emissary but I sometimes struggle to fit him in with all the other models I want. Bygone can be similar. Leveticus uses health as a resource so he is easy to justify in Amalgam. But it's also never a bad choice, especially if you need schemes to score.

As a summoner I would think Tara would actually be quite good at lower soulstones. Each model you summon is a much bigger swing, proportionally speaking. I don't know about a good GG3 guide. I think Rage Quit Wire did an episode on Tara a bit over a year ago but that was probably pre-GG3? It was definitely before the 33 nerf, which changed some things. But a good rule of thumb is that she has a lot of play on most of the strategies by just stalling out the opponent and going where the opponent isn't, and/or after they've activated their models, for strategies like Guard the Stash and Covert Operations. For Cursed Objects you may want to leave your summoned models buried until the turn after you summon so that they can unbury and immediately Interact to give their Curse Token to whatever enemy model they just popped out next to. Other than that her formidable ability play named model schemes (Catch and Release, Vendetta, Public Demonstration, Hidden Martyrs, etc.) because of her ability to just leave the key model buried and safe until you are able to score is a big part of what helps her win games.

He's not very fast so I would probably avoid Carve a Path and sometimes Guard the Stash (depending on deployment). Obey is a useful tool though in Guard and especially Covert Operations, and he likes just killing so he's ok at Cursed Objects but doesn't have a great plan if your opponent is good at keeping you at arm's length. You can pack in a lot of firepower though to balance that.

Mad Dog works fine with Hamelin2. I use Barbaros in Hamelin1 from time to time. I don't have much use for Hans in either, both Hamelins tend to run slower crews and Hans is hard to score with. The Midnight Stalker can sneak in from time to time though for exactly that reason.

Just to confirm, do you have Brotherhood of the Rat? It isn't so important in Hamelin2 but you will need those models at some point. I like Rusty Alyce and Scavengers with Hamelin2, and the Starter Box versatiles (particularly Yannic and the Brawler) synergise nicely with them and with the DCU.

Hey folks, I am in the midst of organising a big two day event in Brisbane, bringing in people from interstate and maybe even snaring in some Kiwis if we can. This is the early draft of the player pack. There is a timetable in place for when I expect the event to finish that I figured would be useful for folks looking at flights, particularly flights home on the 15th or something of that nature. Let me know if you are interested or have any questions. Player Pack for Queensland Grand Tournament 2023.pdf

Pretty good summary of Parker1 I think One trick I do like myself is using the Pretty Little Bonnet on Parker himself so that he can charge into melee as a tarpit and if he lands a hit then you can use Draw Their Attention to have him interact even though he's in melee, giving him an accuracy boost on future attacks. Bonus points if you land Highway Robbery in the process and go from Stat 5 to Stat 7 in one attack.

To me the issue isn't that it feels too weak, it just feels like too much accounting for the end result. I wonder if a better nerf may have been just to take Lucid Dreaming off of Daydreams and call it a day.

I haven't heard anything specific, but it isn't uncommon for popular versatile models to be out of stock for a while. It may take a couple of months but it should pop up again before too long.

Big Jake is a good hire in my experience, since he can carry a marker quite safely. Even out of keyword he feels really reasonable. In fact there was a really mean build I went with once that was Nix led crew with an upgraded Effigy, Obedient Wretch, and Big Jake with Soldier for Hire. Most crews in the format don't have great tools for scoring Vendetta with Cost 5 or less models, and none of your cheap models are easy to kill. It is a bit tricky to get your first point on the board though so maybe Soldier for Hire should really be Servant of Dark Powers on someone for an easier Turn 1 explosive drop.

Heya folks! Brisbane has its first Malifaux tournament of the year kicking off on Saturday at Irresistible Force Tanah Merah. We won't be allowing Madness of Malifaux content (mostly because I don't want to see tables with fully proxied crews), but I am planning a big day full of fun and many tacky Valentines themed gimmicks Come on down if you want to check out the fun!

And the third game I have on hand to report was a game of Guard the Stash. We had Flank Deployment with a scheme pool of Assassinate, Set the Trap, Sabotage, Catch and Release, and Public Demonstration. My crew was Parker, Dead Man Walking with Doc Mitchell, Mad Dog Brackett, Benny Wolcomb, the Hodgepodge Emissary, Pearl Musgrove, and Johann Creedy. I had an 8 stone cache. My opponent took Titania with Gorar, Aeslin, the Mysterious Emissary, the Malisaurus Rex, and two Autumn Knights with Inhuman Reflexes. He had a four stone Cache. My schemes were Set the Trap and Sabotage (the Shrine on the right-hand side of the table). The Neverborn crew had Catch and Release (one of the Autumn Knights) and Public Demonstration (both Autumn Knights, Gorar). Turn 1 I used Parker to make a scheme marker and then use it to clear the left-hand Underbrush away with Chaos in the Badlands, which is probably only the second time I've ever used that action. The rest of my crew on the left created markers for Benny, while Johann made one for Mad Dog over on the right-hand side. Unfortunately I couldn't quite clear the Underbrush marker in front of him while doing so, and ended up in severe terrain. This let the Mysterious Emissary get a bead on him and pull him through some hazardous terrain, dropping him immediately to 3 health. Mad Dog retaliated though by rushing up into the forest and hitting two moderate damage attacks on negative flips, bringing the Emissary down to 2 health. The rest of the Titania crew just ran up into position, and I think Titania went for a potshot on someone and missed because of the Red Joker. Turn 2 saw Titania win initiative and the Mysterious Emissary immediately killed Johann. I responded by having Mad Dog immediately kill the Emissary. The Malisaurus Rex rushed into the middle of my crew, putting up the Wild Hunt and pinging Benny a couple of times, leading to a good few rats hitting the table. The Emissary healed Benny back the health he had suffered. Titania Germinated to get an angle on Pearl and tried to remove her from the board, but Pearl was saved by the Red Joker (two turns in two of Titania getting messed around by that). Benny summoned a good few rats in order to heal Pearl and then landed a massive 7 damage hit on the Malisaurus, since at this stage he'd been pinged for damage quite a few times and the area was swimming in rats. (Picture taken before Benny put like six more rats on the table). Over the course of the rest of the turn I moved Pearl off towards the top-left marker to secure a strategy marker. I pinged the Malisaurus to death with a couple of Perdition pulses between Pearl and Parker. The two Autumn Knights just moved up to join the fight. Gorar turned into the Emissary and sat himself next to the bottom-right strategy marker. The one surviving rat from the previous turn became a Rat King and moved to engage the Autumn Knight. We both scored the strategy. Strictly speaking had we been paying attention both of us should also have scored a scheme this turn, but I removed the marker I needed to score Set the Trap without thinking it through and my opponent hadn't quite computed how Public Demonstration worked so should have had both Autumn Knights over near Parker rather than having one chase down Pearl who didn't qualify. Turn 3 led off with Titania murdering the Rat King and one of the Rats before they could go, healing the Autumn Knight a little in the process. Pearl healed herself with a Draw Them In, trying to stay out of imminent murder range. The brawl in the middle between Titania and her knights versus most of the Parker grew led to both Knights getting chipped down to low health while all the healing from Pearl's Reformed aura and the Hodgepodge Emissary was keeping the Parker crew on its feet. Mad Dog and Doc Mitchell on the right-flank were able to shenanigan their way out of getting locked into Hazardous terrain by the Emissary and Mad Dog fell just shy of killing the Autumn Knight in the centre. Aeslin hauled Mad Dog back into Hazardous terrain at the end of the turn though, bringing him very low in health with only a couple of Soulstones left in the cache. Parker had been challenged by an Autumn Knight and had no cards in hand, so he had to spend his turn just disengaging from Titania and throwing a lasso at the knight to free up Pearl to score. I scored the top-left and centre-left markers this turn, while Aeslin secured the centre-right marker and the Emissary the bottom-right. The score was 2-2, with no revealed schemes. Turn 4 rolled in and Titania went first (burning two good cards to win initiative). She Germinated out of the melee and killed Mad Dog through his remaining Soulstones. Doc Mitchell responded by rushing towards her with a battlecry and firing his Hidden Flintlock at point blank range. He Black Jokered the attack and Parker executed him on the spot for such a silly attempt... but the resulting Perdition pulse from the scheme marker killed the nearby Autumn Knight. So that was funny. The rest of the turn was just jostling for position. My opponent realised he didn't have the pieces to contest another centreline marker so the Emissary bee-lined it for my deployment zone marker. I had Parker spend his entire activation lassoing Benny close enough to drop the one last marker I needed for set the trap. I chipped the remaining Autumn Knight pretty low on health so that it would die easily next turn. I scored the top-left, centre-left, and centre-right markers, and had the scheme markers in place to secure Set the Trap on the Autumn Knight in the top-left, Titania, and Aeslin. My opponent did not score, putting us at 4-2 going into the final turn. Turn 5 basically just saw Titania and Aeslin kill Benny and set up to score one last strategy point. Pearl killed the last Autumn Knight. The Emissary moved to the bottom-left strat marker. Parker was able to walk twice and push a marker with Chaos in the Badlands to set up the end point of Sabotage. In the end we each had scored the Strategy three times, but I had scored each scheme once and Titania had just barely missed out on scoring either of hers at several points in the game. The final score was a 5-3 win to the Dead Man Walking.

I played Parker a second time that night with the same crew composition, up against a Ten Thunders player on the same board. Our pool this time was Carve a Path on Flank Deployment with Sabotage, Secret Meetup, Assassinate, Breakthrough, and Load 'Em Up as schemes. My opponent's crew was: Shenlong, the Teacher, with his two Aspiring Students, Sensei Yu, the Four Winds Golem, a High River Monk, a Low River Monk with the Trained Ninja upgrade, a Samurai, and a Terracotta Warrior. He had a 4 stone cache. I deployed my crew around my two markers on the far left and centre with the intention of driving them together. My opponent's markers (the two black markers up the top) seemed angled for a bit more of a split approach. For schemes I took Secret Meetup (the Golem, Mad Dog, on the building to the left of the cloud) and Breakthrough. My opponent took Secret Meetup (the Golem, Mad Dog, at the cloud, so clearly a very well coordinated meetup) and Sabotage on one of the structures near my deployment. Now, Turn 1 began with most of my crew working together to push my strategy markers together on the left. There was a point though where my opponent moved the High River Monk forward to drive his left-hand marker up the table, and I decided to try and jump him with Parker while he was outside of the Four Wind Golem's protective aura with no Terracotta Warrior nearby. Unfortunately my attacks all missed, but fortunately this burned through all the Monk's Chi and my opponent didn't move up the Golem in response since he was busy doing something with his back line (I wasn't paying attention, once I saw the Golem wasn't advancing my vision had gone red). That let me rush Mad Dog up, with a Focus he'd been given by the Scavenger, and in two shots he managed to down the High River Monk and do a bit of damage to Shenlong in the process. Turn 2 was a bit of a waiting game waiting for the other person to leave their respective bubbles. After activating basically all my support models, I ran Mad Dog up to take some potshots at the clump around the Golem but made sure to use my last AP to run back to safety near my healers rather than risk overextending and being kidnapped by the Golem. In the end the Golem came to me anyway, diving into the cloud and throwing the Emissary back towards my deployment zone in order to set up Secret Meetup for both my opponent and myself. Love it when my opponents do my schemes for me. Parker did advance a bit, sniping out one of the Aspiring Students, pinging the Samurai a bit and dragging the Samurai in towards my clump of models on the left. By the end of the turn the Samurai had just 1 hit point remaining We both scored the strategy and Secret Meetup this turn. My opponent's Low River Monk is busy pushing the strategy marker across the table on the top, but I have got both of mine and one of his largely under control on the left at this stage. This picture was also taken a couple of activations into Turn 3, after I went first, killed the Samurai by Interacting with Parker, and the Golem responded by leaping around, pushing his own marker towards my deployment, and punching Mad Dog and Doc Mitchell a bit without achieving much of note. As for the rest of Turn 3, Sensei Yu ran into my backlines and managed to drop the Emissary down to Hard to Kill. Pearl's healing auras managed to get Doc Mitchell back up on his feet and he in turn managed to heal the Emissary, with the Scavenger pitching in an getting it back to half health. The rest of my crew threw down markers to ping the Golem and Pearl hit it for a big hit to get it to the cusp of death, but Shenlong came forward and healed it. I had enough markers down at this stage for a big rat swarm though, so Benny summoned them in and hit the Golem with a single Swarm Them for 5 damage I think, killing it off. I was able to get both my markers and my opponent's on the left over the centreline. Shen is over on the left after being moved by the Golem's Demise, fighting a Rat Catcher that I made out of the rats I used to kill the Golem who is trying (and failing) to put Slow on Shenlong. Turn 4 had Sensei Yu decide that his mission in life was to kill something, so he bludgeoned poor Doc Mitchell to death. My Rat Catcher wanted to avoid the same thing happening to him so he went early and gave slow to Shenlong, but turns out that wily Teacher has the ability to remove conditions from himself so it didn't do much. A few damage pulses removed the rats and left the Rat Catcher stunned and at half health. I was able to get both my markers into Shenlong's deployment zone though with Benny, while Mad Dog ran in and killed the remaining Aspiring Student to get into position for Breakthrough. Parker shifted towards the middle in case my opponent also had Breakthrough. The Low River Monk got the marker on the far right into my deployment zone. We talked out the rest of the game from here. There was pretty much no chance that my opponent was going to get another strategy point, and he didn't have the actions to score Sabotage. There was an outside chance he might have got Secret Meetup since I kept dropping his scheme markers into that cloud, but I was planning to use Parker to turn at least one of those markers friendly so it was unlikely. With only 2 strategy points that meant the score was probably going to be 8-3 (seeing as I had plenty of AP to get down the five markers I needed for both my schemes).

I have a bit of an archive of battle reports that I write for my local meta's Discord server, but at the request of someone not on said server I'm going to copy over a couple of battle reports to this thread in the hopes it illustrates the list in action (particularly Benny, that seems to be the part people find hardest to use well). So without further ado, first report: The game was Covert Operations on Wedge Deployment with a scheme pool including In Your Face, Sabotage, Leave Your Mark, Assassinate, and Hidden Martyrs. I took Parker, Dead Man Walking with Doc Mitchell, Mad Dog Brackett, Benny Wolcomb, Pearl Musgrove, the Hodgepodge Emissary, and a Scavenger. I had an 8 stone cache. I was up against Marcus with the Jackalope, Cojo, Myranda, the Beast Within, a Sabertooth Cerberus with Inhuman Reflexes, and the Scorpius. Marcus was packing a 6 stone cache. My schemes were Leave Your Mark and In Your Face. Marcus had In Your Face and Sabotage on... I think the building that Doc Mitchell is cowering behind? Turn 1 got off to a bit of a slow start at first, with most of my crew just walking and interacting. Even Mad Dog just advanced and dropped a marker for later. Towards the end of the turn though the Beast Within, Cojo, and the Scorpius all dove into my lines. Most of their attacks missed, but Cojo did pick up a bunch of scheme markers to shut down a future Benny rat summon and the Scorpius took about half the health off the Emissary by engaging it on the right. I counter-attacked with Benny and got the Scorpius down about half health myself. Turn 2 began with the Emissary attacking and the donkey trampled the big mecha-scorpion into the ground. Which is when I remembered to take a picture. Mad Dog is tucked behind that building on the left, which is unfortunate because he proved the focus of this turn with most of Marcus's monsters throwing attacks his way. Pearl was able to heal him up a bit because of the fun way her healing works (she needs LOS to the markers, Mad Dog needs LOS to the markers, but she doesn't need LOS to Mad Dog) and keep him in the game but by the end of the turn he was at 1 hit point and engaged by the Jackalope after trying repeatedly to disengage and get to centre-left strategy marker. With him engaged I ended up having to run the Scavenger to the centre-right marker to score the strategy myself. For my part I was able to focus down the Beast Within, forcing it to shift into Vogel to heal. I chipped it down to 1 hit point and managed to get the kill by running a rat up to Cojo, shooting it with Doc Mitchell's Hidden Flintlock (keeping him hidden from Parker2 so that he wouldn't die in turn), and using Benny to turn the rat into a scheme marker to pulse damage with Perdition to kill Vogel. I revealed In Your Face at this stage. We both scored the strategy. Turn 3 began with Marcus killing Mad Dog himself, then accomplicing into the Cerberus who dove into the middle of the clump of my models to try and deal some damage to Benny but it largely couldn't land hits. I mostly just milled around with my rats while Myranda charged the Scavenger but only managed to drop him to half health, while Cojo shoved Parker out of the way to get a line on Benny but also couldn't do much to the nimble little guy. I was able to focus down Cojo in return by barraging him with Perdition pulses and I think we called the game there. With Cojo dead it would be impossible for Marcus to score the end point of In Your Face, I still had a turn to get to the middle of the board and start scoring Leave Your Mark, and with how few of Marcus's models were still standing it was going to be hard to score any more strategy points let alone Sabotage.

Personally I get pretty uncomfortable in most crews if I go below 6. Soulstones are very useful. I rarely bring more than 8, but 8 isn't uncommon. It does vary of course, there are crews where I get away with 4 or 5, but it usually skews higher the more I expect to have soulstone users on the front line taking damage. Most of my crews use stone users as their front line, so I end up wanting a big cache.

You could also bring Benny and mine rats for cards, though I never really had much luck getting that to work. These days you'd get to add Pearl to the mix for an extra card. GG0-1 Parker was the Outcast version of Molly, in my view. Flipping on a positive and the trigger being After Resolving meant I could usually get three markers down each activation. Cashing Out plus Protection Money meant I could make that become Draw 6 cards, or Draw 3 and get 3 stones. Beyond that he was just a tank, throw him and his 14 wounds into combat with the opponent's biggest threat and sit there all game. Losing Protection Money essentially removed that niche by outright halving his resource generation. Which is why he feels power crept to me, because having been booted from his niche his only recourse is to compete as a damage dealer in a faction that has had better damage dealers since 3e launched. He can't serve his old role of providing the resources to fuel any crew composition you might want.

People tell me it was a buff A buff that means Parker1 no longer sees any table time, but I guess Wanted Criminal gets used by non-Parker players occasionally? Regardless, seems to have been an unintentional nerf to Parker.

Well, we had Protection Money as an option and it didn't cause a stir. More relevantly is that Bandits drop enemy markers by attacking enemies, not being able to do it in the backline and then stirring them around with four winds punch. Most Bandits are Stat 5 without the trigger built in. It wasn't that crazy in its heydey even against players who didn't consider the Protection Money aura when placing the markers. Odds are Koji would be fine if his actions were all enemy only and the punch got fixed.

Just to clarify this suggestion, is the idea here that Koji will never get to draw cards off of his own Protection Money aura with Taker's Bane because the opponent will always be able to place the markers out of line of sight (barring Size 1 or smaller targets)? For what it's worth I think Bandits would much rather that they got the ability to place their markers rather than others join them in the clunky, combo-ruining existence that they currently endure

This keeps changing, so I may be behind the times here, but I didn't think My Loyal Servant could heal the target of the action? The "other model" in that instance disqualifies both the target and the model declaring the trigger. Do I have that wrong?

Meanwhile Bandit players are over here in the corner wondering how on earth Koji managed to swing getting to actually place the dropped markers himself... and why they lost access to Protection Money too despite not being remotely as exploitable. #unnerf Wanted Criminal.