Rob Lo

This is one of those things that I bet most people think they're doing it the same way as the community at large but in reality some play it one way and some the other. In various battle reports I've seen in reported either way, where that 'jump' onto the ledge is kind of a free thing that just happens, and others where that little (or not so little) extra forward movement gets costed out like everything else. It also brings into question, for example B, above, how much does the base have to move forward before the model is considered "on" the ledge? If the model has less than that amount (let's say it had enough extra move to move just 1/4" of it's base onto the ledge), does the climb part of the move not happen, does the guy fall back down (taking damage depending on the height as normal), or does he stay up there sort of floating in space?

Just saw your latest blog post which led me back to this thread. Damn you.. damn you for that Sebastian pig! Apparently busting out laughing in the middle of the office is "frowned upon" and gets you the look from that one co-worker (you know the one, always giving people the look).

100% agree. My local group can come up with how we think a rule works, and so can yours. When we both show up to NoVa and find out one or maybe both of us have been playing and practicing based on 'not how the TO rules it', I'd say there will be more grumbling about that than about how big the FAQ is. And in general, Wyrd has said that just posting on the forums is enough for them to see that the question exists.

We're a very helpful bunch, and talkative too. Seriously, go ahead and ask an On Damage/On Success/Before Death trigger question! ... and I just learned all the symbols are hiding in the smiley face menu. Go me!

I've been talking about doing a list of: Nicodem w/ Corpse Bloat Canine Remains x12. I want to fit mwahaha in there as well, so maybe 11 dogs and change.

Honestly I hadn't even considered Tara in my initial statement. Until recently I'd always thought of her as the Outcast who slipped in when someone left the door open at the Resser Club meeting. But she does at least play on the fast/slow and bury mechanic as do other models in her crew and the faction. Yan to me doesn't even go that far. "Hey, are you a spirit? Here, have some armor. Now go kill things( or die, I don't care), and get me Chi!" Neither are shining examples of a well tuned symphony, however. I hear you. I've played some fun games against Hamelin, mostly because of my opponents, but nothing about him works for me. I wish I liked Kirai more than I do, I really want to. The problem I see with how Yan is put together is, he's got a lot of neat tricks, you're keeping track of chi, shuffling upgrades, zapping models around the board, but for all that, his actual attacks, the down and dirty of him, is.. meh. At no point has anyone confused Yan Lo for Levi or Lady J when talking about attack prowess. If you want your masters to have that visceral punch (and really, who doesn't?), he's unfortunately not a top choice. Not even really talking just straight damage line here, just more along the lines of it being uninspiring. I would have liked to see his main attack have a chain lightning trigger mechanic. jump to another target at -1 damage each time, or something like that.

At the end of the day, it's entirely possible to just not like a master. I have yet to find an awesome reason to bring Kirai to the table, but I know others like her and she can do great things when put in situations where the things she does are great. Don't even get me started on Marcus, because I will fall asleep. People gravitate towards masters than interest them, where they like the stories and can see their own version of the stories play out on the table. You can pull off crazy stunts that you find awesome when inspired. If that interest isn't there, no amount of awesome upgrades will put it there. I can see the number of people drawn to his story being fewer than say, Seamus or Misaki, and mechanically, I think he could have used.. something. But all things considered, he's a sound choice and decently competitive given a standard pool of models to pull from. I know when I put him on the table, people will stop and think about it for a minute, rather than "Oh look, another Nico".

I'm now imagining a model made from all the most frustrating modeling pieces in the game. I know it will have an awesome mustache and beard, and a chihuahua tail. And back on topic kinda, these sculpts are so nice, it may have solidified my choice of 2nd faction.

Yan Lo is to me, the least synergistic of all the resser masters, and that's not a bad thing. The other guys, you think of the base list you'd take with them, and all those guys have game mechanics reasons to be on the field at the same time; Belles to put things where Seamus wants them, infect and catalyst all over for McMourning, etc. Yan Lo is different, you naturally want to bring his Ancestors, and they're all very good in the situations they're good in (yes that statement makes sense to me), but the sum of them isn't a great big ball of well oiled parts. Where the other masters are the guidepost pointing the direction for what that crew will be doing, Yan Lo is the guy who shows up and says 'You all go walk your path, I'll be over here on my own.' There are of course some synergies with him. He can play well with spirits and he may want to have Ancestors on the board. But he's the master that says your crew can be anything you want it to be. This lets you bring 50 stones worth of exactly what you think will accomplish your strats and schemes, without having to dedicate 20 stones to getting the poison engine or corpse marker engine or whatever going. Bring strong models whose purpose is "put points on the board", not "set up this chain of events to make that other guy shine". If your opponent has a hint of any other resser master you may bring, they can perhaps tailor to that. You can tell them up front you're bring Yan Lo and it doesn't greatly help them. Assuming an ancestors/spirits list is great way to be run over by a crew that has none of them. It's one thing to summon a random minion and send him out to munch brains, it's a very different thing when your enemy spends AP after AP to down Izamu or Yin and then you bring him back and heal him up. It is a disheartening thing, and that alone is worth it. The only thing better for a Yan Lo player than someone who has never fought him before so you can pull off all the neat tricks and confuse them into a win, is an opponent who does know his tricks, and will go to great, great lengths to avoid being anywhere near ressurectable Yin or Izamu. You dictate the path the game walks down. His Ancestor upgrades allow you to react to the enemy crew. Sometimes you want hard to wound early, sometimes you want incorporeal. Eventually you probably want both, and against a slow moving enemy you'll probably have them both by the time it matters. Against a fast opponent or with close deployment, you need the right defense quickly and he can do that. Then there's lightning dance. Take a look at your opponents crew. Pick one guy you'd like to kill most. Now take that guy, find a good spot right where you'd rather he stand, away from the support of his crew, and place him there. While you're standing in the middle of the rest of his friends, throw a terra cotta curse on them, and wave goodbye as you jump back to that other guy and place him even further from his support and surrounded by your hand picked crew of destruction. Lightning dance is a positional game unlike anything else in Malifaux. Your opponent can almost never account for all the possibilities of how you might use it. Move the enemy offensively, move them defensively. Hell, move Yan Lo defensively. Pull him out of being surrounded by the enemy heavies and jump across to an enemy model off to the side, place it away anywhere to not have to deal with disengaging strikes, then two incorporeal walks through a forest to a nice safe anti-Assassinate corner of the board. Loads of reasons, but the truth is, you play Yan Lo because as a kid you watched hour and hours and hours of old Kung Fu movies on Saturday morning, and the ancient guy with the white beard was always the badass with style.

Your first point did make me think of Squat Markers for the Squatter's Rights strategy. Those are definitely not scheme markers, but once claimed by one side, can then be claimed by the other side for a 1 AP interact. At least for that one, maybe that's where the confusion came from? Dirial is of course correct about scheme markers though. And the climbable one is a very good example of "Always discuss terrain first!" Saves so many awkward situations later.

Almost always at least 2 upgrades on a master, and probably one or two more on other guys in my crews. I found I'd forget about them when starting a new master, and then after the game was over I'd smack myself in the head and say "Wow, that would have changed everything". Then play the master again and be sure to focus on getting that upgrade ingrained into my standard play. I've kind of gotten in the habit of looking over all my cards for the crew after a game, like when I get home that night or something. Then think about 'could I have used this part of the card instead'. That really helps me cement the idea of 'here is where you use this upgrade' in my head. I started doing all this after a couple games of putting a McMourning poison crew together and not taking Transfusion on anyone. I'd get to turn 2, look around helplessly for a second and then say 'well why am I even here?'.

I've been hoping for them for a while now like a bunch of folks, I'm sure. Almost went the route of converting a few belles or something else, but the idea of making them obviously 'Doxy' instead of just more Belles seems daunting.

If you don't use corpse markers, I wouldn't worry about it. Anyone that needs them should and almost certainly will show up with enough to be placed for a typical fight. Same thing with scrap markers, or anything else really that is part of how a particular crew/faction works. As corpse and scrap markers don't belong to either player, you won't have any problems using what your opponent provides, no matter how they're marked/painted.

Whatever you feel works well for the crews you're making, go with it. You'll be playing them on all different types of boards, so on the table they'll rarely fit in with the terrain. My goal was, eventually I'll be taking pictures of each theme-y group of miniatures, and I want those groups to look good together. In game, I'll pull models from multiple themes, so I don't worry much about having a nurse on a tile base standing next to a Student in a sewer, because they're both standing on a frozen tundra, anyway.

Okay, that bit about the necropunks being crooligans is still blowing my mind, is that from a story somewhere? As far as models to look forward to, for Ressers, if I have to pick one, Doxies. Close second is The Drowned. I don't play much else right now, but Coryphee will get me to finally paint up my Colette crew and give make my way into Arcanists.

What's this? A little ray of sunshine to brighten my day? Evil, deadly sunshine! What? No, that's not a tear in my eye. I just need a moment.

I'd definitely go with something to run schemes for you. Necropunks/crooligans are both good enough that you could just pick up one blister and do almost everything scheme-y. They both have certain ones they're better at just based on the difference of their movement tricks. If you're trying for plastic only, neither of those are out yet, so I'd sub canine remains in their place, since those you can get in plastic, and you'll probably want a few around anyway.

Kirai's an interesting one in that a lot of her tricks are great for spirits, so you want to have the models available, but many of her tricks need or work well with the non-spirits. So you want to have things like Shikome/Hanged to summon in, but maybe you want things like Flesh Constructs there from the start to summon off of. You definitely want living/undead in the starter crew to present as targets for the enemy so that Ikiryo shows up. Anything you can find that's undead & spirit, those are the best of both worlds for Kirai. I'm sure someone that knows her better will come along with specifics. Kirai is one of the masters I like in theory, but on the table I have yet to have an "Aha! This is awesome!" moment with, but I know there's a number that love her to death and back.

If you're just making up your own house rules 2v2, go with whatever feels right. I'd guess 1 flip for each team would be easiest/fastest (which I would always favor in multiplayer games). As for within one team, who activates first, alternate activations or freeform can both work, they just lead to different styles of strategy, where one choice may favor various crews more than the other. If you've really got no feel for what you'd like and just need a starting off point, you could just go with the Tag Team format rule from the newly released Alternate M2E Tournament Format:

The chihuahua is pretty hard for me to pass up. So far he has kills for Misaki and Lilith for me. I need to come up with some way to keep track of that. Maybe a nice doggie biscuit added to the base for each master killed. And the next time I try the Reactivate crew, I'll have to try some Belles. I was in my "don't always rely on Belles" phase when I ran them before.

I've used graveyard spirit in a list with 2 flesh constructs and 3 guild autopsies a couple times now. I honestly don't remember what master I used, maybe Nico?, but it doesn't really matter. Whether it works or not is completely dependent on how strict your opponent is with card management and remembering to save 2 cards instead of 1. You may catch someone off guard on like turn 2 if they're new or just not paying attention, and after that it's really just up to if they momentarily slip and forget to save cards in the heat of battle. It's not something I'd want to run a lot, but an interesting change. However, seeing Rusty Alice in the middle of an open field with 3 autopsies surrounding her on different sides, and gunned down after the reactivate kicked in, even with bulletproof, that.. that was a special moment I'll hold dear for a while.

For rezzers, I mostly have 3 types of bases. A dark cobblestone style that started with Seamus and crew, and I've used for many of the other 'standard' rezzer guys that I'll use, Molly, crooligans, hanged. I ended up picking up a painted Nico crew that isn't the same style, but close enough. When I painted McMourning his guys went on the Wyrd morgue bases, which I think work so very well with him. So now when I mix and match a crew, one or two guys will have bases that are different than the rest of the crew. Last month I moved into the spirit-y side of rezzers via Yan Lo and Kirai, and whatever I plan on using with them will get Asian garden themed bases (profile pic). So yeah, definitely a mix and match of bases while I'm playing a game. Does it look odd? Probably did at first, but you get over that real quick, I think, especially when you play them on different terrain styles. Morgue bases on a swamp board? Sure, why not. I couldn't do all one style for a whole faction; I'd get bored, I think, and I knew eventually dual faction guys would mess that up. But if you can do them all the same, it does help keep everything looking nice.

Focus and defensive are the rules you learn to love when you start thinking about the math behind the awesome card dueling mechanic of the game. On one level, it's fun to be flipping cards against your opponent for a duel. But when you know the math wants to work out to weak damage most of the time, and you'd need 4 weak shots to do as much damage as one severe, you start to think, hey, focus is a pretty great thing right now. Think of any hand you've ever dealt yourself at the beginning of a turn. Maybe there's a couple cards in there you set aside as being for specific abilities you want to make happen (a summon or whatever). After that, you've got maybe one high card, and a few low cards. Are you better served by using that one high card to cheat on an unfocused attack flip to make that attack hit for weak, or on a focused attack where you can now cheat that severe on the damage flip instead? And each of those low cards? That could be a defensive, or double defensive (still for one card!) for a guy you've got sitting somewhere holding turf war or protect territory.They weren't good enough to cheat in to protect you from an attack, but they give you the next best thing, a second random card flipped from your deck, and maybe that's the one that saves you from a rabid teddy bear. Going a little more abstract, don't forget the psychological benefits of using focus/defensive. Want to 'suggest' to your opponent to move models in a particular direction? Put a couple guys up front, defensive the one on the left but not the one on the right. Your opponent is probably going to shift to your right, opening up the left for more freedom for positioning/scheme runners. After the first one or two focused shots, your opponent will spend more time finding the right hiding spots to keep his guys alive, limiting his movement and ability to be where he wants to be. Is he guarding a marker somewhere in cover and thinking he's safe? Focus a shot in there, make him worry that one model isn't really enough to guard that marker. Maybe they overcommit a second guard, when it could have been better used elsewhere.

It's fairly common for players just starting out to think of the blast markers as an extra, second effect which therefore probably has some special handling. Better to think of it as all one big lump sum of pain, where the unlucky guys in the markers are at least lucky enough to (usually) be taking less damage than the primary target.

While I play it that my fliers and ghosts do take the damage when they 'land', I do so because for now, the issue is less than perfectly clear, and so I'm going to go with the less cheesy feeling/more fair option. This is on a friendly game level. If a TO at a competitive event said to play it the other way, I would. In my gut, I do believe that the wording of 'enters' means they get a free pass on that initial damage (only). Every model enters that hazardous terrain at the same point on the board. They only enter it once, and at the moment of that entry, they are (essentially) immune to it. I see the other way of looking at it, I just can't get behind it because looking at hazardous (and only hazardous, not adding in the impassable thing as well), the wording is too clear to me. If you then want to compare it to impassable, a lot of the discussion here basically says 'these two things don't agree, so the problem must be with hazardous". Yes, you can't physically put a model inside of a rock any more than you can end a move with a model floating halfway up a climbable really tall building, but the latest faq says that that isn't technically against the rules, just something that should be discussed beforehand. Maybe your discussion is that you can float through/over impassables as long as you end on top of them.