Azahul

My own approach looks like this: Ingenious Engineering (Outcasts) Size: 50 - Pool: 5 Leader: Von Schill Totem(s): Steam Trunk Hires: Arik Schöttemer Hannah Lovelace Yannic Waller Hodgepodge Effigy Effigy of Fate Freikorps Engineer Freikorps Engineer 2 References: Grenade Belt Land Mines Rocket Launcher Rocket Boots Reinforced Assault Shield Turns 1-2 you get scheme markers by Interacting with the Engineers, the Effigy (you won't need the healing early in all likelihood given that every model in this crew bar Arik can heal), and Yannic herself. Turns 3+ you might need to start taking other actions with your Engineers to contribute to scoring or potshots at wounded enemy models, but at that point the Effigy has become the Emissary and you have another source of scheme markers. As for what you get in return, well, with two Tools for the Job models combined with Ingenuity drawing you at least 3 cards a turn in those early turns (Yannic using Shouting Orders on herself and the Engineers using their bonus actions, which will draw you another two cards too) I find that you often end up with hands of like 6-7 Severes. Which makes Hannah and Arik incredibly lethal as they are now reliably hitting their Severe damage on attacks and should be one-shotting models left, right and centre. This build works great regardless of which version of Von Schill you run too. I actually think it might be slightly better on Schill2 than 1 since you may end up with so many severes you have no cards you want to use on 1's Load Up TNs, whereas 2 is more likely to just want severes to punch with, but it really doesn't matter much. It's a crazy hand advantage that allows your Henchmen to do incredible things. I don't really find Yannic all that good anywhere else (except Amalgam, she's solid there for similar reasons, Scavengers often having spare AP to interact with and there being a good amount of Discard) but she feels absurd in Freikorps specifically.

Triggers are part of an action, so if the Guilty is treated as a friendly for the action it would still be friendly for the trigger. I have to imagine that if you want them to be enemy for one they have to be enemy for the other.

This is more of an after action report really, I forgot to put up a post before the event, but over the weekend we ran another event at Irresistible Force Tanah Merah for the Brisbane and Gold Coast Malifaux communities. It was an awesome turnout with players ranging from long time veterans to a couple on their very first ever games. As a fun twist I themed the scenario pack around the Assassinate scheme, putting it into every single round and awarding prizes for both being the player who scored the most Assassinate points, and the player who scored the most points without ever taking Assassinate. The former prize, appropriately given the name of the event, went to an Explorers player who ran Lord Cooper every single round specifically so that he could go big game hunting. Below are some of the better pictures from the event: It was an awesome day with a great turnout, and it is very exciting to see the Brisbane scene continue to grow. Looking forward to the next one.

Yep, he's on my list! Alyce and/or the Metallurgist were the other compelling OOK options I wanted to try, comboing hazardous with all that forced movement.

Bit late to the party on this one (I don't look at the Arcanist subforum a whole lot) but from a Tara1 perspective your answer to card draw crews is a combination of: a) Summon Void Wretches to gum up the works. Two Void Wretches attacking random support models becomes really taxing, since their Stutter Times are as good as any other and while you, the Tara player, aren't fussed if they hit or miss and thus don't need to spend cards on it, your opponent isn't going to be wanting to fail Glimpse the Void checks so will frequently be cheating 9+ cards in to pass whenever you sneak a hit in (which will happen even at Stat 4 just from the weight of attacks). Forcing opponents to spend good cards on trivial attacks is the main way Tara taxes an opposing hand. b) You play assuming you aren't winning the brawl and mostly play a delaying tactic game. The few times you do try to kill a model it is likely to be a cheap model with poor defences that you can bury and delete with Talos to chip away at your opponent's AP and force their big combat models to spend more time scoring than fighting to stay in the game. c) And of course there's good old Time Warp card counting.

If you can make a couple of good looking corpse markers, it can be fun to have some of them scattered on a table Definitely gives an edge to players of crews with corpse marker mechanics but hey, crews are picked after deployment, and it can be lovely and thematic.

Yeah, I've seen him paired as a Hidden Martyrs model a lot for similar reasons. 14" away and Stealthed and Disguised is pretty good for making sure he makes it to Turn 5, just need to kidnap something for him to score the end point on late game.

I've probably been vocal enough about this one that it's less a hot take and more a lukewarm one at this stage, but Parker2 is low-key one of the best Outcast Masters. Deceptively so, but he can play most pools well and his crew can take on a good variety of threats. Oh! Also! Paul Crockett is good. Any Cost 6 model capable of generating that many Min 3 attacks has to be respected. Yeah, he's Stat 5, but if he acts late in the turn is your opponent going to hold back a Severe just in case he hits? I've seen a moderate mask in the hands of a Marcus player translate into an extra three Cerberus attacks more than a few times. He's a bit erratic and unreliable but come on, he's cheap as chips. He's a gambler's model, for a fairly small buy-in the potential return is huge. And if he fails? Well, you didn't spend all that much. Can't believe this thread has been sitting here for a month before anyone thought to add to it. I'm disappointed in myself if nothing else.

Hmmmm, I don't know if there even is a working recruitment strategy for new players in the the non-GW corner of the miniatures gaming market. If there was I'm sure every company would be doing it, since new players just buy more than long term players.

Aren't new players generally better for short term profit? Onboarding as a new player means buying up a backlog of models until you're up to speed with veterans, unlike veterans only purchasing new releases for their respective crews.

Absolutely, and I look forward to them being nerfed. But if the Malifaux Burns errata hits the worst offenders then the remaining "above the curve" models will likely be limited to just 1-2 factions with any luck. The actual number of busted models in a given cycle has been historically a relatively minor percentage and the only thing keeping them evenly distributed across the factions was the fact MB hit every Keyword in the game. I think with a release like Madness of Malifaux we are much more likely to see the problem models concentrated, leaving the game outside of Arcanists (and maybe one other new Keyword if we're unlucky) on a much more level playing field. EDIT: To be clear I'm not trying to minimise the issue of unbalanced models, if we end up with one faction head and shoulders above the others that is certainly an issue for competitive play (and doubly so in Vassal where faction jumping has no price barrier), but it does have the comparative benefit of letting most of the game carry on relatively normally for the majority of games played. The problem right now with near every faction having something busted is that it means every game feels like it is played with something busted, hence the proliferation of balance conversations I think. Which might change (I hope it changes) once Malifaux Burns is brought back in line.

The thing is that as a rule, only a smaller percentage of the game is at that level of imbalance. Somewhere around one eighth to one quarter of each release cycle (and leaning more towards the eighth from what I've seen), and that's really more me counting Keywords than individual models. A game where nothing gets nerfed is one where "the game" boils down to maybe one or two Masters per faction. Malifaux Burns makes the issue seem more serious than it is, because it spread the imbalance across all the factions. Meanwhile there is every chance the only Madness of Malifaux Master who will be above the curve will be Damian, maybe one other. If the only faction with a broken Master is Arcanists after the next round of nerfs, that's still 7 in 8 factions that play with a pretty level playing field and a good diversity of options, and it is simply easier to nerf the outliers back into line than it is buff the rest of the game up to compete. Nerfing is just safer too. If you nerf a model too much you just send that model to the shelf. If you buff a model too much you send the rest of its faction to the shelf.

Honestly, the philosophical consistency of this does make it a lot more appealing to me than a select ban list (to be honest I'd be inclined to ban all Malifaux Burns content period for said consistency's sake, but I'm not dying on that hill). The more granular the bans the more it feels arbitrary and opinion-based, while also no doubt having a disproportionate impact. How do you reconcile a Keyword having to contend with the fact that they lost one or more Master options when others might have no such limitations? Or a Faction hit particularly hard by the banhammer facing the fact that half their Keywords functionally declare their Title when chosen? Throwing everything to an even footing does feel like the fairest approach and the least likely to lead to raging internet arguments over where the line between "fine" and "broken" lies.

Aw, thanks! That is a crew that requires a bit of an investment, since you need the Emissary, a good chunk of Parker's crew, and basically the entirety of Hamelin's Keyword to get it to work. Plus there's a bit more space to flex in some tech pieces OOK in some pools than Tara normally bothers with. But I'm glad you liked the thread.

For what it's worth, Tara specifically is a small Keyword with options to handle most scenarios on her own and doesn't really need anything from her faction's Versatiles or from different Keywords. If you just focus on building up her Keyword with her four boxes (core, Scion+hunters, Talos+Aionus, and the Tara2+33 box) that will contain everything you need to play Tara even into the upper echelons of competitive play. Not all Keywords can do that, but Tara's Keyword is very well designed and there aren't really any dud models, so even though it is small as Keywords go it's still got a lot of depth and strength to it. That plus its highly unique approach to the game mean you can often play it without tailoring and succeed so long as you have a clear plan for how you are going to score your points.

Just generally speaking it isn't a great idea for the health of a company to be all in on a single product, so it's better for Wyrd (so long as they aren't running up big losses on the less popular ones) to have a diversified set of products on the go. I don't really have any interest in an army game right now, but I'd rather they get the Other Side going than roll its stuff over into Malifaux. And ultimately Wyrd is the only one that knows if TOS is hurting them.

Just to drill down on the stations a little, because it took me a minute to parse this when I was first starting: Masters - Get 3 actions each turn, can use Soulstones. Henchmen - Can use Soulstones. Can also lead crews if you want, in which case they get 3 actions each turn and a free Effigy as a sort of Totem. Enforcers - The worst tier on its own merits. Get no benefits. Are usually singular named models. Minions - The benefit from being a Minion is you get an additional bonus for having a Faction upgrade. The convention is that Minions are the models you can take in multiples, though that isn't an inherent benefit from being a Minion (it is worth noting for example that some Masters come in multiples, like the Viktorias and Nexus2). But practically speaking there are very few exceptions to that rule and we currently have no Minions that can't be taken in multiples to some degree.

I would agree that Parker is a good starting point, he's not super complicated and he has good synergies with a lot of Versatiles like the Hodgepodge Emissary and the contents of the Starter set that may find use if you expand to the rest of the faction. Parker1 specifically is, I think, in strong contention for weakest Master in the faction, but he is still where I would start. Even our weakest Master is still solid. I don't feel like he's ever really recovered from losing access to the Protection Money ability, which leaves him competing against a lot of Masters who are generally better at his own niche than he is, but he's still good for learning and has some fun tricks. Parker2 is very good, a competitive Master at even the pointiest end of the competitive game, but where Parker1 can run almost anything well I tend to feel Parker2 has a very limited build (and that build will include Benny, who is a Bandit model, but who summons models from the Plague Keyword so you'll end up needing to buy basically the whole of Hamelin's Keyword too). But hey@SEV there's nothing weird about my Parker2 build! It's almost 100% Keyword models, it's definitely how Parker2 was designed to be played As for Tara, I would advise playing Tara1 rather than Tara2 to begin with. Both are exceptionally strong, Tara would be my pick for the best Master in the faction, but Tara2 specifically is really game warping and revolves around a fixating on a single specific trick to delete enemy models each turn. Tara1 will give you a more well-rounded approach to the game. One thing I will note is that both Tara and Parker lean on Soulstones to stay alive. As Maniacal_cackle says you will be tailoring your crew for the scenario (though to be honest Tara1 can usually just hire all the non-Minion models in her Keyword and summon the Minions when she needs them and have a really good list), but both Masters will generally bring a very large cache. I personally feel uncomfortable with Parker2 if I go below 7 stones in the cache. Parker1 can go a little lower because he can make stones by fighting. But for Tara even 7 stones is feeling on the low end. That "hire all the non-Minions" approach leaves you with 9 stones, and I'm usually pretty happy with that. Tara2 can go a little earlier, but I'd still hover around the 6-7 mark for both Masters as a rule of thumb.

Yeah, it's not a useful model. Personally I'd be inclined to rework it. Cut most of its existing rules and give it a rule that lets friendly soulstone users spend its health as if they were soulstones. Make it actually feel like a battery. At absolute minimum it should be the Battery spending health to have another model cheat off the top of the deck, not the much more important and expensive model.

I do think Parker2 is pretty solidily competitive with this specific build. Removing the LOS issue would be a minor buff for this way of running him (since the whole point of this build was to mitigate the LOS issue), but more importantly it would increase the viability of different builds. Honestly, odds are this crew composition would still be one of the strongest ways of running him, but it would definitely up the value of the Bandit minions with him and perhaps give some viable alternatives to players who don't want Benny in their Bandit crews.

I strongly recommend the Symbols of Authority strategy from previous Gaining Grounds for intro games. It is a very easy scheme to explain to new players (go to the opponent's symbols and take an action to destroy them to score points) and doesn't involve killing so it's good to showcase the scheming side of the game.

I just can't see the Clampetts being dual faction. We've seen nothing that looks like it might belong to their Keyword that doesn't look Bayou through and through.

Once every activation. If a scheme marker is dropped in an enemy activation in range and line of sight, Perdition happens. If a scheme marker is dropped in a friendly activation in range and line of sight, Perdition happens. The "doesn't work" problem is because Perdition is an aura and auras require line of sight. That on its own wouldn't be an issue, save for two other rules working together. The first is that the main way Bandit models drop scheme markers is via the "Drop It!" trigger on their attacks, which allows the opponent to choose where the marker gets placed. The second is that the line of sight rules say that a 30mm base can block line of sight between two other 30mm bases. This means that the opponent can choose to place the scheme marker on the opposite side of their base to Parker, denying him line of sight for his Perdition aura (unless it is Parker himself declaring the trigger, for Parker it works fine, it's all the other models in the crew that don't work with it).

For what it's worth Hamelin1 has a Vintage model that can usually be purchased during Wyrd sales that is almost identical to Hamelin2 visually.

On the Hamelin front, the rat stuff works best with Hamelin1 and feels a bit lacklustre with Hamelin2. I think you can get pretty far with Hamelin1 in the current Gaining Grounds though, and Winged Plagues getting buffed did a lot to reduce his reliance on Versatiles. I would still recommend checking out models like the Catalan Riflemen and (probably the top of the list) the Hodgepodge Emissary. These models drop scheme markers that Benny can use to turn into rats with his amazing "Loyal Rats in Tiny Hats" action, which can be pretty invaluable in guaranteeing Hamelin a stream of rats to use for his game plan. Hamelin2 I find myself often reaching for OOK models to fill in my lists, and Benny and the rat models rarely make the cut. Sadly the Piper just doesn't have much reason to want the rat models beyond the occasional incidental rat, so Nix, the Wretch, the Disease Containment Unit, and Winged Plagues are all he considers hiring from his own Keyword. On the plus side for competitive settings it means the two versions run very different crews, making it harder to tailor against them, with Hamelin1 being a swarm with some bubble tendencies and Hamelin2 being a more spread out super friends style of play.