Sonova

Paralyze wont keep her in the box. The DM still activates and the box duel takes place at the start of its activation before the paralyze effect. This was covered in beta when we tried to permabox stuff using nurses and marshals.

TL;DR version - Use the Austringers to deprive her of cards. Problem solved. The longer version: The typical Rasputina crew is chocked full of models which have abysmal DF scores which means they are pretty vulnerable to attacks with triggers. Her workhorse Gamins for example have Df 4 and Wp 4. If you can find some way to capitalize on these weaknesses you will generally win. Its important to remember that while Raspy has insane range, she can not see you through obstacles and obscuring terrain if her models cant see you. This makes it very easy to set up ambushes since most of your models are unimpeded and can walk through rough terrain like nobody's business. The key weakness of Rasputina is that she is horribly dependent on her cards for both offensive spell casting and to defend her crappy minions. In this key area activating your austringers early and taking pot shots at her spellcasting nodes with the aim to use the distract trigger can be game breaking. The closer her spell casting nodes get the more cards you deprive her of. Rasputina with no cards means that her spell casting nodes get popped while she stands in the corner raging impotently. You also dont really have to worry about the gamins once she's low on cards because its unlikely that they will be able to do much in the way of damage without some solid cards in hand and their pretty weak low end damage scales. The addition of Wave 2 models has remedied this problem somewhat with the inclusion of actual combat worthy spell casting nodes, but has also added the additional strain of greater card demand by those better models to maintain that combat effectiveness so card deprivation is still a pretty strong strategy. Also realign your expectations. Its nigh impossible to actually kill a well played Rasputina because of her ability to hide in a well fortified area and hand out paralyze when you do go for her. And lets not even talk about the nonsense that is Ice Pillars ..... The best you can do most of the time is neuter her ability to respond and go for points.

If you need to box the Lady before her activation then the poop has well and truly hit the fan so having a 2nd back up marshal near by is probably a wise choice anyway. What you will find though is that most players will not go near the Lady before she has activated for fear of you holding high cards, so most of the time 1 marshal is sufficient.

Ummm. You if you pine box the marshal that has Justice in the box, Justice immediately pops out and gets her activation. This is why you bring multiple Marshals. If you do it properly theres no way you can lose Justice's activation. The buried model is the attacker. IF you bury something of your opponents you need to beat his total.

Its not possible to lose an activation of the Lady. She gets her activation regardless. Even if she flips a black joker, since she's the 'attacking' model in that duel you can always opt to tie/relent and attackers win all ties.

The troll factor is kind of worth the 1 AP investment on the DM. Plus you get to position her in the most advantageous way possible.

I was pointing this out in beta back when scrubs were QQing about her being squishy Lady Justice doesnt need Df greater than 5 because she effectively has Df INFINITY if theres even one death marshal left on the table.

I used freikorps mostly because of the random collection of models thing. I often use out of theme and out of faction models myself. I was just commenting on the whole Santiago vs Gunslinger thing. Yes there are advantages to using a gunslinger, but the synergies you gain from Santiago far outweigh the minor benefits from the gunslinger. You also downplay the ability of the family to actually move other family members outside of their activation, which actually makes your melee point partly moot since its trivial the extricate Santiago from situations where you dont want him to be. The only real argument you have for the inclusion of the gunslinger is the ability to dump crows for slows. Admittedly that can be good but if you needed to hand out slows there are better models for it.

The thing is that the Family synergy is the primary reason to run the Ortegas. Without it you might as well run the Freikorps.

You should always pick Santiago in a Ortegas crew. If you have never shot into combat without randomisation you don't know what you are missing. I'd bring 1 Austringer to drain cards from certain masters but 2 is overkill these days. Plus with Pistoleros a full family crew is now legit as hell.

If you are unfamiliar with the mechanics a Freikorps specialist is one of the easier ways to spread Burning, but I'd proxy rather than buy unless you want a Von Schill crew. If you are playing with avatar rules, Fire Gamin are also pretty solid. Witchling Handlers can also help your Jawas get around quicker as well as make your non witch hunter models pass out burning. Pistoleros are also solid buddy models for your Witchlings and will probably see use in other crews too.

oops

Its not that Hans is better than Frankie. Its that Hans has a wider tool set. Back in wave one he was pretty much your only real option to deal with stuff like Pandora's Sorrow spam and Huggy in guild crews other than Sonnia and incorporeal in general. He also forces your opponents to play conservatively with stuff like necropunks, vultures and baby nephilem as scheme runners because he can shoot them off the table in 1 activation from anywhere on the table as long as he can draw LOS. This helps a lot in a crew that is typically going to be outnumbered and was slow as. In wave 1, I played Justice and McMourning a lot and in those crews, Frankie was typically just another body with a nice trick (+2/+2) because of his weak synergies with those masters and crew. He added no real value other than just another sword (albeit a very good one) and pistol into crews that are already bursting at the seams with swords and pistols. I also found that his Df5 was sucking up all my stones so that wasn't an acceptable situation. So I dumped him for Hans who helped me in dealing with fast scheme minions, ghosts and shooting into melee in general. Now that the guild has access to a wider array of abilities and faster minions in general I am able to 'downgrade' Hans to Nino.

Death Marshals are quality. No other minion has an attack that can completely remove a threat from the table until you are good and ready to deal with it. Pine box is the bane of WP 5-6 henchmen/masters. Plus you can use that same attack to keep lady justice safe. You probably wont want more than 3 though.

Buy ALL the boxes. Problem solved.