Gnomezilla

I’m still wondering whether you didn’t just hand me the means of your own destruction in melee earlier in the week, even if it has much more min2 than I fancy bringing against a 7-stone cache. Have to spend some quality time with the tape measure to be certain of threat ranges. I’m sure Hayreddin is target priority #1, but then that’s nothing new.

Malifaux night was crazy busy with occasional players and new players. I played a 30-ish stone* game with a new player who had just assembled Reva, after asking him outright ‘this crew is going to debuff you with lots of conditions, if that really annoys you I’ll happily play a beater crew instead’. He agreed to it, so I took Nellie and only used her One More Question attack. I learned something important about Nellie vs. Reva: someone who attacks through corpse markers does not engage you and therefore OMQ does no damage! Nellie makes a better demo crew than I thought. Spending so many actions on interacting (making and using scheme markers) meant I couldn’t be overpowering on offense even if the deck flipped well. (Can’t wait for False Witnesses to lessen the pressure on action economy there!) We talked before we began about how to overcome the negative flip to attack field reporters, which was a way to teach the use of focus and soulstone use for a positive to a duel. Then the deck cooperated well with the demo, giving him some severe damage on a negative damage flip and terrible soulstone reduction flips to me, and he got a legitimate win while we touched on most of the game’s mechanics. It was good. *I asked him to grab a few models he wanted to try, hired the same soulstone amount myself (but had to hire in a versatile as the correct cost Journalist isn’t released yet), and then gave us both a cache of 5.

More to the point, our little testing group made sure to use underwhelming master actions like that and report back that they were both working as they were written, and underwhelming. Finger on the Trigger was verified to be shut down by engaging Perdita (with incorporeal/flying models which ignored any screen between Perdita and the action, no less) and yet the action stayed unchanged.

I lost with Leveticus against a Marcus list with two expensive scheme runners (sneaky-sneks rattlers with stealth-and-disguised mutation). I forgot to hire a second source of no-heal aura to dampen Myranda before going for the kill(s). Also, that bloody jackalope, on one wound remaining and no hand and no-heal aura, dodged: Alyce, Ashes and Dust, Pride, and possibly Marlena (don’t remember which turn tiny teddy went king-of-the-jungle on Cojo instead). Sometimes, luck does matter.

30ss games also have fewer stones available for hiring counter-tech, so some opponents hire it and rely on it—which would boost the value of mecharachnid up to a very unpleasant surprise for the opponent. This would be meta dependent or Resser dependent (ok maybe peacekeeper dependent as well, it’s Armor plus Hard to Wound that Precise can make easy to kill, and can absorb too much effort otherwise).

We have been using his web version of beta cards for testing very happily for some time.

*psst* are Dead Man’s Hand and dual masters valid?

I certainly hope so, because I have been facing her here and there and...Er...don’t think I’ve lost since open beta. It was bloody* I grant you, and always a closer deployment type, but there was still room for concern. Guild didn’t do spectacularly at Houston either. There were two Sonnias out of twelve players. See my remarks in Outcasts about that faction and closer deployment types, and why you shouldn’t toe the line. *stupid monster hunters, stupid A Por El, stupid shot-up not-even-in-a-Hoffman-crew peacekeeper...

Not a leak so much as the fact that those minions now have a rare limit higher than the number of current plastic sculpts. (I admit the riotbreaker art change was a surprise though, even under that guideline. If those end up being re-poses of the current solid model, I won’t be sad.) (And just try and tell me that new guardian doesn’t have a zapper for its electroshock trigger instead of a greatsword—fear my stun pulse! *bzzt*)

Hoffman can use a versatile construct crew, but it doesn’t really overcome the weakness of counter-tech...still, fast lands on versatile stompybots just the same as augmented ones, and fast arachnids are fun!

Again—flank deployment vs. a Servant of Dark Powers user is a risk. My Leveticus vs. a Tara just learning the crew, and Tara chose to run the beast bomb despite my thinking that Servant would probably have jumped the gap just fine on its own. (Thoughts?) I certainly jumped the gap just fine. He surprised me by using the Nothing Beast pulse and dealing a heap of damage to my clustered crew (of all the things to bury, he had gotten Leveticus—I ran the waifs back toward the action sooner than planned), so when A&D split I returned the favor with Core pulses.

One oddity of M3e, I’ve seen and heard of far more concessions than I ever did in M2e. Is that a change in acceptable Malifaux behavior across multiple metas, or due to the edition change? They are bringing the average game time far down, when neither side wants to fight on until end of game and see if they managed to defend up until the final scheme scoring timing.

I cut up my upgrade cards. They had round faction symbols on the back so I got some 30mm-ish rounds that my group could use for turf war markings as long as there was a true 30mm to place them atop. While I cut some model art out of M2e model cards with a fantasy of decorating terrain with ‘wanted’ posters, that probably won’t happen.

And you still forgot the extra damage to previous models...it just wasn’t great design, as far as game flow went, to have five different effects key off of one action. Three (from One More Question) is quite enough to track at one time. I’m curious about reports with Nellie into a marker-using leader and whether she can make them regret that.

Went to a tournament but with not nearly enough actual Outcast models. Do not recommend it. My eventual list was very subpar. (Have been hobbying with milliput since then, to work my way up to converting my little murder bears at last.) Ran the usual Leveticus list against a Perdita with pale rider and won. Twin sources of spammed stun in the monster hunters was a good idea; putting them in flank deployment against Servant of Dark Powers was a bad idea.