Bodiless

I'm tempted to bring Sue with Retribution the next time I run Dreamer against Arcanists. He's only Sh 5, but with a positive flip, and with built-in crit strike he'd be good for targeting things like Joss and spiders if he doesn't have good cards in hand. Plus his anti Ca aura will help against things like Magnetize, he has scrap marker removal, and can let you draw cards at the price of 1 wound which he can easily heal back up off Dreamer.

I would just rather jam with gupps instead of waldgeists and make sure that I had swampfiends that were not going into the jam. I think I would also bring in McTavish to hold Hexed Among You, so that I can have Eternal and Fears Given Form on Juju to maximize the disruption. The calculus is that I expect everything I throw into their zone to die in short order. How do I maximize the disruption while minimizing the cost?

The problem I see with this approach is you are basically feeding your entire crew into the meatgrinder. My guess is that what will happen is your opponent will take two turns to wipe out the waldgeists and permanently bury juju, and then run riot on you for the rest of the game. I like the idea of the first turn jam, but I think you have to regard whatever you send in as disposable. 29ss I think is too much to sacrifice.

I think the Ramos player would have to be pretty well asleep at the switch to get a Teddy to him on turn 1. This last game was Corner - that is a lot of ground to cover and it is only going to take an activation or two before it is obvious that I am trying to slingshot Teddy into him. Ample opportunity to get Joss in the way or have summoned the first batch of spiders. I'm a little worried about taking Lazarus against Arcanists due to the odds of getting Magnetized or Joss'd to death. Looking at the cards I think Mysterious Emissary might actually be more efficient at removing markers than Hooded, and it would give some extra summoning to help keep up with the swarm. I forgot to mention that Ramos also was summoning electrical creations, so I was really falling behind on the summoning game.

I had a good game with summoning Dreamer against a good Ramos player last night, and found myself in the utterly unacceptable position of being badly out-activated. Between Ramos summoning 2-3 spiders and turn and the mech rider he actually had more summoning than me, which was a problem. The bigger issue though was that killing spiders is surprisingly hard for a 4ss minion. Df 6, armor 1, access to regeneration and immune to black blood and other pulses, NB just don't seem to have an efficient way of getting rid of them. What do people use as their favored extermination service for these mechanical pests?

Just remember that you are going to move your entire crew before your opponent needs to set foot outside their deployment zone. Unless you boost Lilith up the board you are not going to be in range of anything with Tangle or Wicked. If you do boost her up the board she is going to be sitting mostly unsupported pretty close to the opposing zone. Basically, throw out any plan that has you taking an attack action against a model if that plan doesn't also involve you reaching them in their zone. I haven't tried either of these next options yet, but other people say they have had (some) success with them and I can see the theory. 1. Use Lilith to slingshot a jamming model or two into their zone. The Raticus crew (I'm sticking with that wants their beaters killing models of their choice up the field. They don't want to be spending AP in their own zone killing a gupp or a terror tot. Bonus aggravation if you can use a dead gupp to pop a Fears Given Form Bad Juju up next to something important. 2. Use Collodi and the Mysterious or Shadow Effigy buff to limit the damage the alpha strike can do. Take the first big hit, hopefully on a marionette, and then push out of range. Cheat initiative with the doppelganger next turn and let Collodi slow/control as much of their crew as possible.

As an FYI, the person who ran over me with the Raticus (Rat+Leveticus, does that work? ) list is primarily a Somer player. His reaction was definitely not that this was really no worse than his Somer list. His reaction was this list is hellabroken and needs fixing asap. His list didn't have Killjoy in it and didn't rely on a last activation delivery of KJ. His list relied on delivering A&D, Levi, and in his case a Rogue Necro but could have been any crazy 10ss beater after my entire crew had gone. Again, based on his actual play experience a top-notch Gremlin player's reaction was that the two approaches are not even close.

This seems to assume that Wyrd never puts anything into the game that later turns out to be problematic, and that the solution to any problematic model or combination of models is l2p. Except that there is quite a long list of errata'd models and combinations that says yes, in fact, things do sometimes slip through. I firmly believe at this point that this is one of those things.

It's only two 1-pt upgrades (if you go with Scout rather than Scramble) that people frequently take on those models anyway. And Levi and Ashes both have that wiggle room, since not only do you need to kill A&D in your next turn before it does much damage you need to kill off the core or dust storm. All of which comes after eating an alpha strike and your opponent presumably picking a spot to attack where you will have trouble retaliating. Or at least that is what happened to me. Have you gone up against this particular combination yourself? If so, what did you use against it and how did it come out?

Hmm. Levi + Oathkeeper + A&D + Scout/Scramble can put Levi roughly 21" up the board with 2 AP left unless I have my math wrong. Double walk for 8, bounce to the other side of A&D's base for 10"+80mm for the two bases. That's enough to charge something in the opposing deployment zone.

Because he is prepping for a tournament. No one in our group would run it in casual play at this point.

I have to say, a lot of the suggestions I have seen for dealing with this sort of fall into this category. Yes, some things might work... IF your opponent is paying absolutely no attention to what you are doing, doesn't make even the most minimal adjustment to their plans required to stop it, and is playing more or less mindlessly. Most people don't need advice on how to deal with that situation, rat engine or not. In the game that I started this thread for, the person I was playing against wins most of our games already, although they are generally close. Giving him the opportunity to watch me take my entire turn before committing anything meant that neither of us found the game interesting.

Given that I also had Nekima, Lilitu, and Doppel in my list last night I think you will be surprised. It is surprisingly hard to internalize what moving your entire crew before your opponent does anything meaningful does to a game of Malifaux. For example, last night I started out turn 1 moving my crew as I normally would, even though I knew my opponent had a rat engine and knew what it did on paper. I moved up my pair of terror tots, activated my primordial magic, etc. I was halfway through my turn before it really sank in that this was completely pointless and I might as well just go ahead and activate Lilith and Nekima now because my activation order was utterly irrelevant. Then once I had moved all of my stuff my opponent selected which of my big beaters he could most conveniently reach and erase (Nekima) and did so. And it isn't just that all of your models are now in a fixed position and your opponent can plan around that. It also means you have no opportunity to interrupt combinations. As I said above, the Rogue Necro got into position in part by getting moved forward by Lust. This completely telegraphed what was coming next, and if I had been able to respond in any way whatsoever there are a ton of ways that I could prevented it from just charging straight across the board into my lines. Likewise when A&D charged in I might have been able to take it out before Levi could use it to jump to. But since I couldn't respond in any way he was free to just string combinations together at will. Neither one of us felt like we were actually playing Malifaux.

Pretty much. Because if every faction could take it you would end up having to take it, just because it puts you at such a disadvantage if your opponent has it and you don't.

I can't think of a single one of my regular opponents where I could say "Hey, I'm going to spot you the first two rounds of scoring" and expect to take anything but a loss. Maybe against a real novice I could see getting away with that, but everyone in my usual gaming group is at least as good as I am and most of them are measurably better. Spotting my opponent last night two rounds of scoring would be tantamount to conceding.

Remember Levi also has two basically free activations built-in, so he doesn't need to get as much work out of the engine. And the threat range on A&D with Scout, Levi, and a Fast Necro or Killjoy is huge. I think Nekima was 6" out of her deployment zone in standard deployment last night and all three of them were able to reach her. I definitely think that an 8ss investment which basically allows you to watch my whole turn unfold in combination with those kinds of threat ranges is a problem.

Maybe if I had taken 3 Waldgeists and stood them shoulder to shoulder across the middle of the board? Just to give myself some room to move forward without letting him pick and choose what to kill? I think he probably still had enough movement to get around them and snipe out whatever he wanted but that might at least have made him put some thought into it. Regardless though it was not an interesting game for him either, since it didn't really feel like Malifaux. Basically the first turn did not have alternating activations in any meaningful way. I moved all of my stuff, and then he got to move all of his stuff in response.

Rogue Necro probably _isn't_ over the top in a scenario where your opposition actually gets a chance to do something to him. But in this case on turn 1 he got a push forward from Lust, burned Oathkeeper for fast because now he was being hired into Outcasts so of course Oathkeeper, and then catapulted into Nekima who was standing just outside her deployment zone. The push from Lust would, ordinarily, have been a huge neon sign saying "HERE IT COMES, GET READY" except for the fact that I had already had to activate my whole crew by then so he could just pick and choose what he was going to destroy with it.

Playing against this list reminded me, vividly and unpleasantly, of why I stopped playing 40k.

Had my first game against a full up Levi-Ashes-Rogue Necro rat engine build last night, and it was every bit as unfun as advertised. I had an 8 model Lilith crew, and literally activated every model before he had to activate anything of substance. By the time he actually did start moving things we had both gotten bored with the game. And because I had chosen to make a cautious advance towards the markers rather than simply turtle up at the back of my deployment zone, on turn 1 he was able to pick out Nekima and send all three of his big beaters after her. By turn 2 I was well on my way to being tabled and neither one of us was actually having fun so we called it. I've been turning the game over in my head since then and honestly can't think of a single thing I could have done to really alter the outcome of this game. I've heard people say you can play around the engine but honestly I don't see it. My only two choices that I can see were to get destroyed on turn 1, which is what happened, or spend all of turn 1 standing around in my deployment zone so that I could get destroyed on turn 2 instead. The combination of over-the-top beaters in the Rogue Necro and A&D, combined with an over-the-top master like Levi, combined with waiting for my entire crew to activate made this by far the most NPE I've had in Malifaux. Hopefully they will fix this in the July FAQ, if not I will probably drop out of the NOVA events I am signed up for. Anyone who is going into a competitive event there with plans to win or place is likely to be running some variant on this otherwise and that is not a game I'm interested in playing.

If Tara is triple walking first activation, how did you get the beat-stick buried? Honest question, I only played Tara once and it was against Levi so I really didn't get a chance to play with the bury mechanics.

Envy also has a 2/5/6 damage track. You really want him taking focused shots so you can get into those moderate and severe hits.

True, his attacks are casts but since you can't manipulate curses with the child that takes a lot of the luster off of copying them.

Let's see... for models Envy, Lust, Jaakuna if you have a model for her. Other CR 7 situationally depending on the scheme pool. I always take all three curses. Depending on the board I will either spread them around to maximize the disruption/damage/resource drain or use them to really cripple a key model like a master I always take Writhing Torment to get the free pushes. Free 3" push is amazing. Especially if you have models that want to shoot.

I can see where Twist and Turn is worth it in general, mostly for the (0) Obey. But with the Child needing an 11 to copy the action... even if it is the first turn, if I have an 11 I probably want to hold onto it. I've had too many lousy turn 2 draws to be casual about dumping good cards from turn 1.