Argentbadger

This weekend was the long-awaited and much-anticipated Malifaux Scottish GT 2015, a five round 50SS event with a big enough pull to attract strong players from outside the usual local scene here in Scotland. There has been much talk about it in the regional FB group and I believe that the whole group of attendees were really looking forward to this; I certainly was. Furycat and I drove over to Common Grounds Gaming in Stirling, but we were later than planned and everyone else arranged to start without us. Being paired up with Furycat in the first round of an event was not really ideal for either of us, not because I don’t enjoy playing him but because we play each other at various games pretty much every week anyway and it felt like a bit of a waste to do so yet again in an organised event with so many other potential opponents. Luckily, two chaps arrived late (with a much better excuse than we had) before we started, so after a quick switch of tables, it was on with the Malifaux. Game 1: Guild (me) vs Neverborn (Ewan Smart) Strategy: Headhunter Schemes Pool: Line in the Sand, Protect Territory, Breakthrough, Plant Evidence, Murder Protegé Guild: Protect Territory (announced), Plant Evidence (announced) Neverborn: Breakthrough(announced), Murder Protegé (announced; Papa Loco) Crews Guild: Sonnia Criid (Reincarnation, Disrupt Magic), Papa Loco (Hermanos De Armas), 2 Hunters, Witchling Stalker, Brutal Effigy, Death Marshal, Austringer Neverborn: Pandora (The Box Opens, Fears Given Form, Aetheric Connection), Candy, Kade (Depression), Teddy, Sorrow, Poltergeist, Insidious Madness Sonnia Criid can be a bit of a gamble in Headhunter as she tends to leave heads scattered around close to the enemy but my plan here was to keep the pressure on so hard that Ewan didn’t get a chance do more than fend me off. I took the fairly standard (for me) selection of support for Sonnia, notably Papa Loco and the Death Marshal. The Brutal Effigy can be wonderful with Sonnia, but I frequently either forget to activate it first or forget that I’ve used Fear Not The Sword when I’m activating her. Luckily it’s still a strong cheap scheme runner so it always earns its keep. Plant evidence felt like a more achievable option in corner deployment than Breakthrough and Protect Territory fits in with my game plan for Guild perfectly (i.e. don’t advance too much, shoot everything to death, spend turn 5 scoring points). I got mixed up with sums here and played 4SS down; there should have been a Watcher that I forgot to put out. Turn 1: Papa Loco does Hold This for Sonnia and pulls her forward with Cover Me before eventually being tucked into a Pine Box. The crews move to engage, me as rapidly as I can manage considering the massive forest that is pretty much my entire deployment zone and Ewan surprisingly cagily. In the end, Sonnia is able to get range to the Poltergeist and kills it off while spreading some damage across the Sorrow, Candy and Kade. Turn 2: Sonnia unleashes everything she’s got, killing off the Kade, Candy and the Sorrow and summoning a Witchling Stalker from the latter. Pandora floats over and makes Sonnia Flame Burst herself, getting a tasty Red Joker for damage partway through and burning off the rest of my Soulstones. I totally forget about the Disrupt Magic aura from the Witchling Stalker that could have saved me a lot of pain by putting all her attacks on negative flips. Teddy lumbers over and kills her, but is himself on his last couple of wounds. My remaining models begin a hilarious chain of failing horror duels on Teddy so we end up with a big clump around him and I’m finally able to drop the big lunk with the Austringer. I had hoped to Deliver Orders to pick up one of the many head markers lying around instead. Turn 3: Pandora comes into my group in the centre and starts hurting the Death Marshal to get at the tasty Papa Loco inside. The Austringer Black Jokers a focussed shot at the Insidious Madness (who has been off dropping markers in the right corner as Ewan forgot where he needed to be for Breakthrough). The Effigy and Hunter who are not cuddling Pandora start to drop scheme markers all around. The summoned Stalker finally picks up a head so I score on the Strategy. Turn 4: Pandora finishes off the Death Marshal, dropping Papa Loco back out of his Pine Box. She then kills him, causing him to explode, which takes out the Hunter and puts the nearby Stalker on single wound. It would be rude to leave him so unsatisfied, so Pandora pings the last wound out of the Witchling Stalker with Incite, and laughs her was toward my deployment zone. The Austringer kills the Insidious Madness at the second time of asking and the surviving Witchling Stalker picks up another of the many head hanging around. Way away from the carnage, my two other unengaged pieces continue to mine the countryside with scheme markers. I score on the Strategy again. Turn 5: Pandora picks up a head, drops a scheme marker, incites the Austringer to get a push and then puts down another scheme marker. Somewhere on the other side of the board, the Stalker picks up a third head. We both score for the Strategy this time. Guild win 9 – 7 (3 for Headhunter and both schemes for me; 1 for Headhunter and 3 both schemes for me for Ewan). That was a nice game to start off my event, and I was pleased to be able to take a wind despite not playing very cleverly. Ewan could be a quite a good player if he was able to get a bit more experience. I could have made Ewan’s life a lot more difficult simply by remembering that I had Disrupt Magic, and I have no idea why I didn’t just run away with the Death Marshal and his explosive cargo when Pandora was clearly going to be gunning for him. The crew I took does give up Murder Protegé quite easily though; the most expensive pieces are only 7SS.

Dinner has already been arranged, so you might get your cuddle pistol after all. I'm totally looking forward to this.

I bought the Malifaux Metal And Flesh box pretty much entirely for the minions included as they seem to work so well for both Sonnia Criid and Perdita Ortega. This is the first of them, the Watcher. This little chap is a straightforward scheme runner; it’s pretty unlikely to do any more than trivial damage in any attack. The Watcher’s chief advantages are high speed and low cost; this makes it perfect for sending out to Interact for whatever schemes and strategies are needed. The few defensive abilities on the card (Armour and Stubborn) are certainly not enough to stop any sort of serious attempt to down the Watcher, so the main way this minion will survive is by being low enough down the threat priority list that no-one attacks it. One interesting option on the card is a (2) action to allow the Master to use the Watcher for drawing Line of Sight. In theory, this should be really useful for Sonnia or Perdita, but in practice there has never been a time where I’ve felt that would be a better use of the Watcher’s AP compared dropping scheme markers or moving to safer locations. I thought for a while about the paint scheme for the Guild constructs but ended up deciding to paint them all as being metal. I had considered slapping some nice colours on the metalwork to make it look like the manufacturers had painted the body work but I figured in the end that this would look less nice and also didn’t really seem in character for the faction. So here it is, a simple metal framework and body with leather wings and a red eye to link it to the rest of the Guild. The miniature itself is quite frustrating, as it is extremely spindly and has a very strange effect on the wings where one is much larger than the other. I suppose that this is meant to be some kind of forced perspective but it just looks weird in 3D. Another side effect of the massive wingspan is that the Watcher is awkward to store and use on the tabletop. Lucky for it that the piece is so effective in-game.

I think that those travelling from further south than the North East are probably going by plane. You might still be able to pick up reasonable train ticket prices. Or, even better, convince a few of your other local gamers to join you on your epic road trip. We'd certainly love to have you!

Perdita Ortega completes the Family box for my Malifaux Guild collection. She’s the master and is, not surprisingly considering her miniature, focused around ranged damage output. Most seem to favour playing her in-theme (i.e. with the other Ortegas) but I don’t think that the benefits she gets from that are really worth ignoring the many other excellent options in Guild. Her main benefit from keeping her crew full of Ortegas is that she increases the options to Relocate toward at the start of her activation. There are also a couple of Perdita-specific upgrades that give various advantages to other Ortegas. I generally find her most effective as a trouble-shooter while the rest of my crew go about the business of scoring points (though of course she’s pretty handy to have if we play Reckoning or if Make Them Suffer is in the scheme pool). With her Trick Shooting upgrade Perdita is capable of dealing enough damage to kill almost any target in the game each round; indeed one of the tough parts of playing this master is choosing which of the excellent (0) actions to use each turn. Perdita has been well-loved by Wyrd and I think that this is the fourth sculpt already. I like the simplicity of this one – she’s a gunslinger and the miniature is of a lady pointing a gun at something. Painting Perdita was very enjoyable; I chose to use the standard cowboy style of leather chaps and denim trousers to go with the standard-issue red on her coat.

Moondog - thanks very much! Here is Malifaux’s Guild Henchman, Francisco Ortega. The Malifaux internet community seem to be ablaze about how good this chap is, presumably a combination of his strong melee output and quality bodyguard-style abilities. He certainly is no slouch when dishing out damage up close, with Flurry, a good attacking stat and some decent damage tracks. Francisco plays well protecting others, with an action to place into combat and push other friendly pieces away, and his well-known ‘El Mayor’ ability to increase the defensive stats of a nearby piece. Notably, he can increase Perdita to Df and Wp 9, which makes her ludicrously hard to catch with normal attacks. Despite all that I find myself leaving Francisco in the case fairly often, as he is quite fragile for his cost (even considering his named upgrade to give him Hard to Kill) and is always a big target for the other crew. Probably if I played better I could use this bullseye on Francisco to bait the other player into some mistake I could capitalise on, but more often he’s gunned down or eaten by metal spiders before I get much value out of him. I suspect that part of this is just down to the way I play Guild, where I get most effect by having a large number of roughly equally dangerous pieces to spread the other crew’s attention across rather than a more elite crew. Painting Francisco was a lot of fun. I purposefully kept the red coat as the only really brightly coloured part of the miniature to try to make more of a contrast with the browns of the rest of his clothing. His hair and mustache put me in mind mainly of classic photos of Frank Zappa. The skin tone ended up a lot pinker than I had originally intended, as though Francisco has just come out of health spa before joining battle against the horrors of Malifaux. Apart from his hilarious hat, I have to wonder at the design choice by Wyrd to give the miniature a massive cleaver of a sword considering his rules and fluff show Francisco as dextrous duellist. I would have thought that a rather thinner bladed sword would have fit the style more effectively.

Great painting throughout. Are those freehand flowers on Chiaki's dress? If so, they are amazing. I think her eyes look like they're open a little too wide, but maybe I'd be surprised if I started playing a flute and suddenly the puddle I was standing in exploded . The depth of that blue you are using is just amazing.

Nice work, especially if these are your first miniatures. I like the additional bits on the Tara and Karina's bases.

Wow that Death Marshal looks great!

Sweet painting, and welcome back to the game. Tara and her crew are lots of fun on the table top and I love the ghostly painting style you've gone for with the Nothing Beast and Void Wretches.

There is a lot of theory in this thread about 'best cases'; my experience is that things are often quite different on the table top. Malifaux almost certainly doesn't have perfect balance, therefore one faction must be ranked number 7. Maybe this 7th ranked faction is Guild. The question is: 'is this difference in power level sufficent to make a practical difference over a decent number of games?'. Speaking from my experience in the UK scene against some very strong players with all factions, I would say that the difference in power level is much less significant than the effect of player skill in determining the result of a game. @Meliondor - if you want to play Guild and have problems playing them against Gremlins, I recommend you take this to the Battle Reports forum and you may get some more specific advice from the friendly folks who frequent it. Math Mathonwy and Adran in particular give very insightful feedback on games which could help you to see options that aren't apparent during the game.

Clanger - if you're based in the Central Belt then you can get some more games in on Thursday 02 July at this event: http://wyrd-games.net/community/topic/109195-demo-evening-and-free-play-at-6s2hit-edinburgh-thursday-2nd-july/

Awesome. There'll be a big range of skill levels showing up by the sound of it, so if people need a demo game or some one to test their cool tricks against then this will be a great opportunity ahead of the GT. Or, a great opportunity to have fun pushing your dollies around!

Nice report, and well done on the victory! I found it interesting that the Dreamer player felt that his stronger play to was try and shut down Ramos' summoning with Lord Chompy Bits in melee rather than use the Dreamer's own powerful summoning game.

Apologies to AdmiralVorkraft for the out-of-context quote but I'm interested in the general view on this particular comment (it is from the Lucius thread comparing him unfavourably to Colette, which I suspect is probably accurate). My experience (which is listed in tedious detail over the battle reports forum if you care enough to check it) has been that Guild minions are superb choices. Death Marshals, Witchling Stalkers and Hunters are staples of my lists and work for offense, scheme-running and body-blocking wherever needed. Guild Hounds and Watchers are crazy fast and while I will grant that they are easy to kill, they're very cheap so I mostly don't care much if it happens. The Austringer is such a powerful minion that it is arguably cramping design space in the Guild judging by the existence of 'non-Austringer' type clauses on other pieces. I frequently play games with a huge majority of Minions in my crew, and use relatively few Enforcers or Henchmen in order to allow a bigger number of Minions.

Money down for me, Joe Taylor and Gareth Henry.

I think you told me another time that you're not into the Facebook thing, which would be the easiest way to set something up (via the Scottish Society of Malifools group). September is a bit far off to make big plans, but if you PM me nearer the time I'll put the call out in the FB group for you. If you're not averse to a bit of travelling on one of those evenings then there are communities in Edinburgh and Stirling that will act as hubs for gamers; we could make a thing of it and try to get a lot of gamers out.

I'm not in any gaming club or team. So Ewan, if you want to form a team of nomads then I'll be happy to fly your flag.

Viruk - totally agree about how strong the Nephilim can be. I don't often find that anyone bothers to drop him in an early turn (though it could easily be done by any of the snipers) but it would really feel like a shame to have to spend my models' own AP walking places instead of being Shackled around. He is good enough that I sometimes play Perdita in movement-based strategies / scheme pools just to have access to the Nephilim. Now for Santiago Ortega, another of the Guild gunslingers. Sadly, much like Sam Hopkins, I’m dreadful at using him. He’s a shooter with no simple way around cover, and has a gimmick where he gets better if you hurt him. But since I can never seem to make him a threat, no-one ever bothers to hurt Santiago. His stock does go up a bit with Perdita Ortega as the master as she has a few tricks that rely on the Family keyword; for example she can usefully Relocate to him. I’ll be happy to learn from anyone who has a lot of success using Santiago. In contrast to my opinion of Santiago on the tabletop, I love the miniature. He’s really big and has such a characterful, dynamic pose he was a joy to paint. For some reason I have always felt that those huge mutton-chops need to be ginger, despite him obviously being Mexican (or at least pseudo-Mexican) in the story. Even my metal Santiago had ginger hair.

Very good paining all round. That scratch built sumo zombie is very cool. But I think that Yan Lo is my favourite of your miniatures. That rich red and the ghostly colour on the outstretched hand and the skeleton are just so nice.

Nice painting. The Beckoners' glowing eyes are particularly sweet. I like the neckerchief on Lynch himself, it gives him quite a cowboy kind of feel.

Wow, this is going to be great. I'm loving that this event now has enough gravitational pull to attract players from the other end of the country. We locals had better up our game, especially since the best of us has returned to her original Black Joker flag!

Here is the Enslaved Nephilim, the totem for Perdita Ortega in my Malifaux Guild crews. Sadly the unlucky little chap can only be hired with Perdita, otherwise I’d probably bring it in almost every crew. It’s a cheap activation, but more importantly with the use of Shackled can spend its cheap AP moving your expensive killy pieces around to where they need to be. The limitation (that the push must be towards another friendly) is sometimes a little annoying but can be played around with a bit of forward planning. Especially in turn 1, getting my pieces where they want to do their own thing without spending their AP is huge. Later turns the best option is sometimes a push to get someone out of melee. In Malifaux, movement tricks can be priceless. As usual, the giant close-up photos have not been too kind to my paint work here, but I like the effect when taken at table top distance. The skin is white with a very faint blue wash, and I added the red colour for my Guild to the (surprisingly neat for a slave) haircut. I’m not sure if I would use this colour skin for any future Nephilim I might get… but that is a long way off.

I really like the way you painted these, they look very realistic. There's something about the 'texture' of the paint (by look, since of course I'm sure it's smooth in real life) that just adds an extra level of grittiness. I do think that Sidir looks a little out of place with his bright red and yellow clothes, but I gave up ages ago trying to make Malifaux crews look remotely cohesive. Luna and the first Wastrel are definitely my favourites.

Sweet painting. I like the way you've based the Dawn Serpent, but Croup and Vandemar Mr Graves and Mr Tannen are my favourites. The purple in particular is so rich.