Aramasu

I'm curious as to whether it's worth taking on McCabe, given his penchant for returning soulstones with the right triggers.

I look at our generic upgrades, then look at Imbued Energies and Oathkeeper and get incredibly sad. Expert Sleuth looks like a great movement trick against a scheme heavy crew, though. I've tried putting it on some of the slower melee brutes like the Executioner to some success.

I use him less for his +1 Willpower aura and more for the ability to filter out bad cards from your hand. If you're being cautious with your advance on turn one or want to improve your hand quality, using Defensive Stance to milk out your worst cards and then filling back up with the Scales can be very useful.

The Judge with a Brutal Effigy is excellent as well. He's already extremely difficult to take down while being flexible with no particular stand-out weaknesses. Tossing a little healing on top of that can be great. He'll speed up your beatstick of choice, hits quite hard, and can easily tie up tougher models or take them out all on his lonesome.

I think it's an interesting pocket tactic to have, but doing it more than once a game will become extremely costly. For games where you want to deny Blasts/Pulses, your totem will be fairly valuable to begin with and none of Hoffman's models are clearly expendable in comparison to the other Construct masters since he can't summon more of them. In a pinch it's nice, but I would see it more as a 'in a bad situation, need to recover quickly' strategy than anything else. Nonetheless, Joss is boss with Hoffman so it's definitely useful! Now if only I could feel like Hoffman was a top tier master again... <.<

Haha, yeah, his effectiveness as a tar pit isn't in dispute for me. It's just moreso 'is it worth the 8 points for this tarpit' and the answer is probably yes. Like I said for everything, I really do want to get more games in with both models that I'm disputing. The Lone Marshal in particular seems like a great way to pick off other scheme runners and make some lategame schemes happen.

For the Guardian: While this is true (and I do love the mini for him!) the feeling that damage isn't so much mitigated as given a higher chance for avoidance makes me worried about whether the eight stones are really worth it for the model. I'd really have to play with it some more to finish off my opinion, but he IS really nice as a tar pit that's almost impossible to disengage from without blowing a lot of useful resources. Then again, his ability to force friendlies out of melee with that trigger on his shield is pretty sweet looking so... time to give him more playtime and find out, I guess. As for the Lone Marshal, I largely agree. It felt like they wanted to make the Riders are more distinct existence but they couldn't just keep Trick Shooting on the Pale Rider so they threw it as a castoff ability onto another model, put a few useful but not incredible defensive abilities onto him, and then called it a day. The combination of high mobility -and- shooting capacity is nice, but his shooting ability isn't particularly exceptional in a faction that can field terrors like multiple Austringers. I do want to put him on the table once or twice just because his model is sweet, though. Maybe he's more useful as a flanker on earlier turns and an objective grabber on later turns than I thought? Edit: And I'm more than happy to be wrong! I primarily play Guild, so if I'm missing anything about just how good these models are then I'd love to know to improve my own play.

My problem with the Guardian stems from the fact that he doesn't necessarily make you more resilient, which he used to -- he just increases your effective chances of being more resilient. Defensive +2 certainly is a good condition, but it doesn't increase the upper ceiling of your defensive capability so much as make it easier to reach it, which makes him feel extremely lackluster for an 8 point model for me.

I think a pretty safe argument can be made for Austringers, Stalkers, Death Marshals, and Francisco as the first four anyone should have. The fifth model up is up for debate but I hear great things about Sidir. If there's a model that I think is a little overpriced for what it does right now, it's probably the Guardian though.

How well do Hunters do outside of Hoffman crews? And from what it looks like, Stalkers still sound golden for their point cost.

What are the current good general Guild models for combat? I've been playing around with a few Lady Justice lists and while Death Marshals are certainly solid objective grabbers and Pine Box is a great ability, they feel fairly lacking on the combat end of things. Are Witchling Stalkers still the most efficient choice for combat on the lower end of the spectrum as far as Soulstone costs go? Or should I be looking to leave objective grabbing to my lower point models, the Austringer does it all, and then leave combat to my higher point things?

I figured it was a really poor matchup. >: Just going to have to change up masters for it!

From what I understand, he gives it fast with Student of Conflict, keeps line of sight with Viktoria of Ashes and pulls with Sisters in Spirit, then (since I was playing further back to try and avoid it) walked to line up a Charge and three attacks later, Ryle bit dust. The thing that annoys me is that I felt like couldn't do anything about it at all -- he activated his other models first, our strategy was Squatter's Rights so he put his models clearly in position while burning through my relevant activations, and Blood went last so it became a crapshoot of whether I could win initiative for the revenge kill... and even if I succeeded, I would have burned through several good cards just to end up not-really-even with him. Still salty. >_

Yeah, I just played against them again tonight and this time took a bigger group of beefier models to have a chance of duking it out and even though I barely advanced my crew, I just had to sit there and buff up while he moved his Ronin, Taelor, and other models around to actually get in position for objectives... and Viktoria of Blood STILL jumped across the board and managed to one-activation-kill Ryle barely inches away from my deployment zone. I've never played a matchup so frustrating where I feel like I have zero chance of winning. If we keep trading models in combat, it's trading game where I already start with fewer models if I want to have a chance of fighting and it only gets worse from there. I feel like I can't do anything about the Viktorias rocket, because I can't even take a Hoffman objective based crew since I'll just get bullied around and killed or he'll take all the objectives. Is there any way to win this matchup short of them flipping all low cards and having nothing in hand? At this point I feel like if my opponent declares Outcasts, I need to just switch to Sonnia. It's frustrating to the point of making me not want to even give 2.0 a chance when the matchup feels so one-sided even if I barely move.

Nice strategy! I thought every model had a 1" Bash (0/1/3?) as a generic action, though? Or was that removed in the shift from 1.5 to 2.0? I'll be playing a rematch against the Viktorias today, so I'll give an update later tonight.