Gnomezilla

I have had two weeks in a row of standard deployment Plant Explosives. Out went the prospector and child, in went a pair of necropunks (one bomb per punk, one each to Alyce, Ashes, and Leveticus himself—this last a new idea for me). Both games, for different reasons, I ended up splitting my forces onto the flanks to try and blunt the enemy master’s killiness. First game was against Sonnia, some expensive witch hunter hires including the handler, and the pale rider. We spent turn one circling around a large obstacle in the center of the board, as he sent his thrall (my Vendetta target) in the direction most of my crew wasn’t, and after Sonnia spent the first pale rider turn being ferried to where my crew was, I walked around the back to the other flank. Turn two, the thrall rushed and demolished Alyce (that handler Mv buff ain’t no joke), then Ashes beat it enough for Marlena to step in and tag-you’re-it-no-tag-backs for Vendetta, leaving Leveticus to finish it. An increasingly irate Sonnia returned to her start point and tried to blast Marlena, only succeeding in pushing her out of range and closer to the necropunk which had already done its job. Meanwhile on the abandoned flank Ashes and a necropunk were ignoring a forest and leading the sanctioned spellcaster and second thrall a merry chase. Turn three, the pale rider caught up with that flank (again) and the handler finally crossed the centerline, while Sonnia flipped a lucky red joker on damage to kill Marlena before she could scurry out of LoS for the rest of the game yet leaving actions enough to score points, flipping a potential win for me over to a loss. Leveticus was not much use on that flank once Ashes cleared the area: I’d hoped to have him put some more passive healing on Marlena, but that would have required Sonnia to target Unmade users (especially dead Alyce) more often than she did. Second game was against Nekima (yes, that list) and the pool was sufficiently schemey that I went for escape and evasion early, even stripping Servant off of Leveticus to give it to the necropunks. Hayreddin did indeed catch up to a necropunk after it dropped its bomb but thank goodness, negative flipped into minimum damage so it lived despite blade rush. Alyce marched up the center and a mature met her, the waifs and A&D made the other flank enticing and Nekima went that way but didn’t quite finish A&D. (Here he stopped the game to tutor me a bit about having expected me to try and shoot the mature engaging A&D at one wound left, thus black blood splitting it and reforming it at the turn’s end for the heal, thus the engagement of Alyce and blocking of Leveticus.) Turn two, Nekima looked at the trio of targets and elected to finish the Core and score the first point of Dig...which let the surviving necropunk escape and Storm jump to Hayreddin’s side of the board. Alyce disengaged from her mature and put two lucky shots (red joker and moderate, both on negatives) into the other to finish it, but on the flip side Leveticus couldn’t finish the shaman before it advanced and grew. Turn three Nekima, alone and disgusted by it, scored points instead of hunting down the breakthrough punk, which was good as Storm stole the bomb Hayreddin dropped and sprinted back across the line. I dropped a bomb, accomplished the Leveticus teleport for the first time (felt great!) and promptly whiffed on Hayreddin (felt bad) just like Pride had. Marlena charged the new mature and found the red joker herself to also kill one in one activation. We called it when it was apparent we were heading for a draw, a very rare event. I had cheated myself out of Hold Up Their Forces by various Disengage actions and push triggers, but slaying the matures certainly helped thwart him scoring also, so.

The only conference which dares to give y’all the raspberry. (I may have already been workshopping designs on the theme. 🙃 )

If you were one of the Yan Los, I’d love details. For all that he has been played around me, I rarely get to spectate those games (and then I’m usually cooing over a stunning paint job by the 10T Yan Lo) so I know less than I should about it on the table.

Welcome to my world... I dunno, might rate Brewmaster more highly because he doesn’t need to flip a resist to get his debuffs rolling and brings a lot of 2” melee ranges, both good tools for coping with any flavor of butterfly jumping 2” melee range models. Also because of said jumping beans, I’m not sanguine about the potential of any gun line. Gunfighter is quite useless when you’re being stiff-armed by a long reach, and as noted you will get exactly one (1) activation of clear shots before being engaged. Gracie makes me outright jealous though—Armor 2 and full wounds for her cost and Ride with Me?! Full disclosure, armor only slows down the beatdown: if the Nephilim cards are good enough they can tear through Augmented like armor isn’t even there, let alone a partially armored crew. Other people want to try it though and I’m happy to see them add to that data pool.

Usually after a tournament reports that a fixed list soloed it to win, the peanut gallery of commentators who weren’t there reacts with ‘that’s broken, plz fix’; this time it was never that but instead ‘learn to play’, and I know all these guys play way better than to deserve that label. I get my l2p-level butt [gently] kicked by them in round one on a regular basis.

Until such time as the actual attendees show up, feast your attention here: Also tagging @Guslado the esteemed TO to please share the table photos. I haven’t got any photos on this phone that I can positively ID as Houstonian tables.

Third Floor Wars has the final standings, and there’s boards photos on A Wyrd Place. The TO is going to assemble a final report later, which will probably cover most of the top tables since they all regularly attend his home tournaments. (They also ended up playing against one another a lot after the initial rounds, so there was less mixing of metas than you nigh expect from raw results.) My hot take is: the chatter from the masses is a lot less ‘that’s a busted list’ than ‘y’all (you say ‘y’all’, right) got outplayed’, which speaking as someone who also attends aforementioned tournaments at the other end of the rankings, is disrespectful to some very skilled players; that’s the best showing for female US players I’ve seen in some time, which is both glorious and a sign that we [read: me] need to step it up some; and it’s something of a comfort that people other than me can’t beat that particular list either even though I’ve lost to it far, far more often.

*laughs in Lonestar Conference* There’s maybe two metas in this state that close to one another? I wouldn’t even give good odds on ‘outside Houston, but in different directions’ metas making that cutoff.

The only blanket party I know of is the one where a bunch of grownups hold the edges of a blanket up off the ground and make a sort of trampoline out of it and a kid gets on the blanket and gets tossed in the air wheeeeee! and that doesn’t sound like the un-fun idea you are talking about.

If Inhuman Physiology had been better split into Combat Finesse defensive anti-cheating and some sort of offensive anti-cheating, and then Agent 46 got the offensive version, I wouldn’t mind that...but the mind games of cheating second suit a Lucius mindset, and making that a targeted ability/action opens up the possibility of reining in Pride whose aura gets oppressive quickly, so I like your idea.

Nothing else changed which was relevant to that meat grinder. It was the old Resser style pioneered in M2e of ‘use emissary to block all paths but the chokepoint’, except now the chokepoint had one or more corpse candles/regular corpses turning the region into instantaneous death for anything 6 or 8 (don’t remember how many pyres I had, mostly corpses) wounds or less. With the change to hazardous only pinging once per terrain type per action, the hazardous-corpse aura plus pyres would have still been deleterious, but survivable by models with six wounds or more. Reva’s current fast action appears to be a response to her crew setting itself on fire and people not liking that. I don’t understand. Between this lack of use of hazardous and Ressers not rating belles this edition, it’s as if an entire faction forgot its positioning tricks, and in a Gaining Grounds with plenty (perhaps too much) emphasis on model positioning.

Funny you should mention Lynch—my mind jumped to Kitty Dumont as the only model that might look remotely like these. Maybe an older Coppelius model, but these are human and that is not.

Why am I seeing the phrases ‘dropped the peacekeeper in a single activation’ and ‘bodyguard for the peacekeeper’? Why does our faction tank, not do so?!?!

*cough* How soon we forget... 😢

Ok, that was clever, but as a long-standing and long surviving Guildie I am leery of clicking on anything a Guild lawyer had any hand in creating.

Miss KORE is supposed to be a perfect transfer of the soul to a ‘stone to a construct—but then, so was Lazarus, at first. The puppets are generally animated by dreams, not souls (the Widow Weaver and her creations, and it could be said a voodoo doll is partly animated by hope and railing-against-fate) so they sidestep the need for a soulstone. Undead mismatch the spirit to the flesh except for instances of Tyrant-level meddling, and the mismatch causes the rage against the living. This wouldn’t work for what you want I think. (Also it makes me wonder if constructs don’t start with murderous rage by default, because it isn’t someone else’s shell they occupy, but a blank and empty machine.)

I totally farted around at today’s tournament. Please do not take the following lists seriously. Plant Explosives I grabbed Hoffman because why not, gave Phiona and Joss their lead-lined coats, then filled in with cheaper runners: steamfitter, upgraded effigy, watcher, toolkit. I played against a kid-and-grownup duo where the kid picked minis he liked more or less, then played with only mild coaching. It was something like a 50ss first demo game for a new player, in intensity. The kid did legitimately kick my behind at one point as his lawyer (Neverborn Lucius) obeyed my Hoffball to turn on itself, using up Phiona’s focus and forcing me to discard a 10 and 11 Phiona was also planning to use, leading directly to her whiffing the retaliatory attacks. However I did also shortly learn a lesson about not using Phiona to reel in a lawyer with Bring It if it will be in range to slow me. I was in a mood to run multi-master malarkey for Reckoning, and eventually issued coats to Nellie and Hoffman (not sure what I was thinking there, maybe Analyze Weakness into Arcanists? don’t own Perdita), and hired a steward. Here I made a mistake and declared Nellie leader: it should have been Dashel for uncapped summons. Also this would have worked much better if I hadn’t had to split up, but if Outflank is there it must be dealt with. What followed was a game of keep-away, specifically from Ironsides herself, as our bubble crews dealt with a need to scatter all over the map and a lot of Laugh Off to ensure it stayed that way.

If you’re a classic Guildie who wants to play the ‘master plus supporting cast’ game, Lady Justice is the only choice. Neither Sonnia nor Perdita work that way any more, and the others that remain to us never did. (If Nellie gets her RAW to match her play style as intended, she might become another. Basse has potential to solo things but very few support actions in-keyword other than plain heals.) You can play a mini-game like that by cherishing and buffing the pale rider instead.

@Meliondor so far the Guildies who have placed well in tournaments have used Hoffman, Nellie, Lucius, Lady Justice, and very recently Sonnia, in roughly that order of frequency. (Basse and Hoffman have had more play in their other factions.) Sonnia’s unique element this edition (she drops blasts but not quite so many so far) is the summon-upon-death. The few masters who do that disrupt the odds of their game very quickly with one strong summon. She also suppresses the ranges of ranged and bubble crews but I haven’t heard as much about that, or about counterplay in general (which is a shame as Guild, Lady J in particular, is built to counterplay).

7+tome, undercover, destroying a scheme marker anywhere on the map. Depending on my Hoffman build, I am sometimes crazy greedy for crows for electroshock stun/otherneatstuff pulse.

Io Saturnalia! 🤣

I’ll take any game with any master at this point—I’ve been odd flip out for three weeks running now. Which has been a boon to terrain making, I admit. The armatures are turning into better trees than I expected (eyelash yarn makes a decent facsimile of trailing weeping willow branches, even to the snagging of nearby minis such that I may have to rule the bases impassable just for practicality) but I miss playing.

I haven’t had luck keeping the emissary alive long enough to stomp things (though to be fair, my opponent did warn me ‘I know this list is probably going to hit your stompybots hard, but I don’t know how hard’—it was ‘experimental’ in every sense of the word). We’re in a weird place, Arcanists. Most factions, the effigy is the sturdiest and most survivable cheapest unit we can hire, just for staking out an isolated area and scoring points...but we have steam arachnids, almost as sturdy yet cheaper. Other factions, I will use the effigy in turf war to claim a marker and then flee that quadrant before it’s caught and killed; in Arcanists I’ll prefer the spider. Still, if you’re new the 1ss difference will matter less, and HtK is always a very good thing. The secret ingredient to making a reach 2”, frenzied charge model a true unholy terror is careful positioning of it just outside of 1” of most models (so they can’t stop it charging) and somewhere it has room to move its 50mm base. Colette can move the emissary cheaply (low card) and easily with False Reality, or if the enemy position is advantageous can both ruin the enemy and move the emissary with Presto-Chango (that’s harder to get everything set up just right, but triply effective once you get the hang of it). I’m usually playing Hoffman so instead I just make the emissary fast and delegate other stompybots to do the pushes for its positioning.

Also our place and mass-push choices open up once engaged with I’ve Got Your Back and Heroic Intervention—again not useful for the initial movement you requested, but nearly as good as leap once we’re in the midst of melee. While Take the Hit should technically qualify also, I’ve had much less success using it for repositioning even though I have more reps with that than I’ve Got Your Back, probably due to the relative ranges of each.

From the Shadows and Home on the Range are supposed to mitigate this a bit. I don’t feel it mitigates that half Guild’s movement tech is either on a totem or master, both of which are banned as secondaries in large swaths of the meta.