Manxfaux

You are fine putting reactivate on a model that has not yet activated. There are a few tricks that bank on it (as companion allows a model to reactivate itself).

So a standard beast bomb with Tara might include the NB, Bishop, Killjoy, DE or other big glass cannon but, in my limited experience, I have never found that they make back their points enough to be truly effective. As it's usually at the end of the turn it only takes a couple of bad cards and your prime beater is left exposed and ready to be destroyed next turn. I was wondering if anyone had gotten any mileage out of using a much cheaper 'bomb' that has damage potential but is not as much of a drain on the crew as one of the big guys? I've identified models such as the bloodwretch, Torakage and even Johan. Any other options people have used would be much appreciated. -The bloodwretch is cheap, fast and, given fast, has a really good damage track with card draw, but with only 5 wounds will fold like a cheap suit. -The torakage is a bit more expensive but has its built in focus, so still a reasonable damage track (trying to ignore the 1 weak) with some useful triggers if you're top decking it by that point. Added to this, if they fail to kill it quickly next turn you can run it off into their backfield allowing for all sorts of scheme running/bluffing, potentially forcing them to divert a strong model away from the front line to try to hunt it down. -Johan, while cheap, is slow so will require you're opponent to really fail to spot it coming (the NB is also similarly slow stat wise but incorporeal, a bigger base size and casting expert make it viable). He does hit like a truck though and will likely soak up a fair few AP the following turn while they get rid of him (at which point he still drops a scheme marker). Which leads me on the 'tank' bomb (or the distraction carnifex), designed to make your opponent spend the majority of the turn (and hopefully some of the next) killing off. Right off the bat I'm thinking the Strongarm and Lazarus, purely due to armour +2, but these are 10SS models again which makes them a big investment and any armour ignoring will hurt. At the cheaper end is Johan again, then things like abominations, void wretches and the effigy, but I'm not sure the AP and SS used to deliver the small roadblocks would actually have a net payoff. I like playing Tara partly because she is not the master to play if you want to wipe your opponents' crew, and coming from games like Warhammer where that is the point has been an interesting and refreshing experience, but I do think she is one of the best at exploiting that mentality in gamers. Lob one of your models into the middle of your opponents crew by the end of turn 1 and all but the very most disciplined will try to kill it. All the while, the rest of your crew can go off and score VP, job done. Really I'm just interested in other peoples' experiences if they have used any of these kind of models in Tara related shenanigans. I don't have the opportunity to play more than once or twice (if I'm lucky) a month so tweaking lists and trying out new things is a long and frustrating process at the moment, most of it done on paper - which always looks awesome! ps - As I'm sure many a player with an interest in Tara does, I keep an eye on Spiralingcadaver's tactica, it's a great resource and I imagine I will branch out into the more aggressive bury lists at some point (once I don't suck at the more simple stuff). I'm highly interested in your (and everyone else's for that matter) opinion on Tara's use for the emissary, but that might be better in another topic

Rusty Alice is awesome, but you'll need to buy the Levi box to get her. Hans can be useful if the board is light on blocking scenery and I will eventually get round to trying out Angel Eyes from the starter box, seems like she would be good but have yet to see her mentioned.

Jack the ghost Made gremlin toast

Damn. Knew I was missing something crucial. Even went off and checked the card to ensure it wasn't summoning the dust cloud first. Forgot reactivate was a condition and not just the result of dumping the cards. It should be decent on Karina's summons too I suppose, twice the use and no need to unbury them once they're rubbish. Means not accomplicing them straight away though, which may or may not be a problem. when I first read monkeys paw I laughed a bit at how rubbish it was, but actually getting to choose if and when you use it does actually provide a lot of flexibility. I'd probably use it most games just to mess with my opponent. Just had another thought. Not 'brutal' but might be ok. Reactivate on a waif? Allows for rapid repositioning and Levi can sacrifice it before it is forced to sacrifice itself? Actually, because Levi has such a massive hiring pool there's got to be something broken in there. Crooligan with bonnet?

I've been toying with the idea of monkeys paw on Ronin. Also, as I play a lot of Tara, companion on a model such as Hannah allows Tara to go first but still allow you do stuff before your opponent. Or on the NB as this allows you to zap its intended target/s with fast for the WP debuff as more of a precision strike. On the subject of Hannah, remember she can copy the trinket giving from the emissary so the emissary itself can be targeted. Actually, and this might just be horrible, monkeys paw on A&D?

yeh, little slip there. I did mean removed from the game not from play.

I find pretty much all summoning is OP when compared to non-summoning, but I don't think steam arachnids are undercosted or OP in themselves, it is the delivery mechanism that makes them stronger, and that is somewhat mitigated by the slow/wounded/no interaction mechanics. If you made steam arachnids insignificant you'd have to do the same with any cheap model that has the potential to be summoned or otherwise moved large distances, and there are a lot! Ramos' mechanic, while undoubtedly strong, has its flaws, from having to spend SS on a decent cache and a sacrificial construct, through having the right cards and not getting your electric creation lured across the board out of range and/or having its scrap moved/removed before it can be used. With great luck Ramos can summon 3 spiders from one scrap per turn, sure, that is pretty damn good, but I played a game at the weekend where a Nico player got lucky and, despite black jokering his first summon (which would have crippled Ramos), over the course of THREE turns summoned 4 hanged (I managed to kill 2), a necropunk, a flesh contruct and a punk zombie (I lost count of the mindless zombies). All without slow and most of the hanged given fast. That's more than an entire crew's worth of SS in three turns. He had zero issues generating corpses nor keeping Nico and Mortimer going forward as well. Brutal it was. I know anecdotes prove nothing but I can tell you I would have given a lot to see 9 arachnids being summoned across from me.

Say I have a Ronin with Monkey's Paw who I reactivate and end up sacrificing. The Monkey's paw is of course removed with the Ronin, but does that stop me from attaching a new copy to another model? Is there anything I'm missing that means they are one use only? Same goes for any of the other trinkets where the attached model is removed from play I suppose.

I found the opposite actually. I demo'd the starter and found the guild player usually won. The wretches are solid but the plus flips on the charge are less impactive when the control hand vs model count is so high, and the rage action limits them to one attack. The orderly's heals usually create a stalemate until the wretch inevitably misses and allows the orderly to eventually smack it down. we just used the empty deck boxes as walls on the centre line as our terrain, which Grimwell in particular found fine. His large movement saw him safe turn 1, popping out to tear Angel a new one turns 2&3. In the end I had to advise the NB players to remember they were the shooting crew and should stay back a bit, just to give them a fighting chance.

Nice! Hadn't spotted that. Shame he'll usually just bury. And if not it's probably because they took frame for murder. Still, anything that messes with how your opponent thought things were going to go down has to be a good thing. Lots of other nice targets that can be hard to get hold of too (looking at you wonder-weasel, waifs, pigapult). I suppose I have been playing Tara recently so oathkeeper's fast is less important and using the NB (pinged with fast of course) to pretty much charge anything on the board using StF should be a brutal kick in the unmentionables to any opponent. I will have to try it out (unfortunately there is no Malifaux community here atm so I only play a bit on Vassal).

Just 1ss.

I thought the wording was more similar to Levi's channel tbh, which works throughout his charge action. So what about a convict's trigger happy trigger? If the original shot is fired using StF can the triggered shot ignore los too?

I thought the actions caused by actions rule would mean not requiring los would only dissipate once the actions caused by rapid fire ended, ie the third shot.

As well as a free turn 1 nimble, not requiring a los to the target for an action actually sounds pretty lethal. I hope my logic is correct, but that means the potential ability to charge around corners and 'blocking' models and surprise blind rapid fires at hidden models because the charge/rapid fire is the action affected by scout the field, the attacks are a consequence. Does anyone actually use this? I never see it mentioned but seems like Rusty, convict gunslingers and a certain robot could easily make good use of this, and people like Taelor and Johan, with their huge engagement ranges but slow speed, could pull off some game changing charges. 1ss for an upgrade that breaks the game mechanics for one action? Seems pretty reasonable to me. Ps Just thought about the strongarm. He could literally charge anything in his threat bubble, talk about board control.

I'm in! My first tourney - be nice to my poor little crew

The rulebook states range is measured from base to base (pg 40) but that it is done from a top down perspective (pg 24) This leads to a few questions: 1: Can Misaki/Von Schill (and others) effectively charge up the outside of a tall building? If their target is on a Ht8 rooftop but in line of sight and range from a top down perspective and they ignore terrain while charging....... Similarly if they begin at the higher level would they effectively not suffer the fall damage as they ignore the terrain element as they charge? 2: Would placing a claim marker on said Ht8 rooftop wipe out all others within 6" from a top down perspective or would anything at ground level remain unaffected? Ditto when placing any other scheme markers which have to be 4" apart. Does the fact that one is at ground level but the other would be at height 4+ have any relevance? 3: Where non-LoS place effects occur (Such as Shadow Stride from Smoke and Shadows (10T)) does this allow them to effectively be placed on any level of a multi-floor building within the bubble? I can just about accept, from a gaming simplicity point of view, that two identical shooters can still hit each other at max range, even if one is at a higher elevation, but I'm sure there are other shenanigans that make much less sense. I have access to some nice multi-floor terrain but if all it does is block a bit of LoS between the layers it seems a bit pointless to use it Thanks

Interesting. If they are on the verge of releasing a solution that would be good. Personally I'd be happy to pay for access to a document with properly sized cards that I could print myself (although not too much, studies have shown printer ink costs more per litre than human blood). Scanning and printing from the rulebooks would be a much more viable option if they had designed the layout with this eventuality in mind, but there are far too many card faces that are too close to the spine to get a decent quality scan. My peev in all this is that "Temporarily Out of Stock" tag. If they are not being printed due to the fact that they would require a massive print run to remain commercially viable products, yet don't sell well enough to justify that investment, then just mark them as "Discontinued" and move on. Other online stockists can be notified and people can stop ordering them. People will understand. It's a business decision with a logical reason behind it. There's no reason to drag it out as a 'maybe' if in reality it's most likely a never. That's just frustrating and something GW would do because they don't give two hoots about their player base. If there is actually a possibility of another restock of the wave 1s then there must be something holding it back. I'm only guessing prices but would a smaller print run that would cost end users $16/£12 be worth it? Or would the cost be even higher? I saw a wave 1 Guild box go for £25 on eBay just the other day so there is obviously a demand.

You're probably right. It's a lot of SS spent on crew members and otherwise situational upgrades to summon something you can hire if you really want it. In my game the DE managed to knock Ototo down to about 2 or 3 wounds in 2 actions plus his aura damage, but got pulped by the return flurry (especially as he gets a bonus to ml at 6wd). 4 abombs might have taken longer to get rid of, although the fact the DE drops 2 after dying is a pretty awesome final bonus.

I've got some Guild wave 1 cards on order with Wayland games in the UK since early September. They have told me they have not been advised that they are no longer available, just that they are "temporarily out of stock with the manufacturer with no estimated restock date at present". It would be nice to know the official line from Wyrd tbh, just to put peoples' minds at rest. It was always going to happen that they would stop being manufactured, and if that time is now I can stop waiting for my order to be filled and make other arrangements. Otherwise I might as well hang on.

Aha! I knew someone would know how to get those 4 scrap on the first turn. I completely agree it was a time consuming process but getting the DE up and running by turn 1 using 2 abombs rather than 1 toolkit works better. The downsides are that it has a higher initial cost by keeping Joss in the crew....... but thinking about it, why would you? Levy, Rusty and a DE should be killy enough not to need Joss too. Using a Large arachnid would still leave space for a couple of good crew members. It's obviously not the optimum way to use Levy but with creating more abombs through the turns could be interesting. I may try it out next time

I'm pretty new to the game but I like Levy in that it would seem you can play him in so many different ways so he will never get boring. I wondered whether he would be able to match Ramos in summoning spidery things so set out building an abomination factory with the aide of Joss. In a nutshell - Turn 1 - Joss (with Oathkeeper and Tally sheet) hits a mobile toolkit creating 2 scrap and a card, Rusty places another before Levy uses 'From Ash' to turn them all into abombs, who all damage each other for an extra 3 cards. Turn 2 - Oathkeepered Joss kills the 3 abombs creating 6 scrap (and three cards) which Levy and Rusty turn into 4 abombs, 3 of whom damage each other for cards and finally creating a DE. Turn 3 - Turn the last 2 scrap into abombs. In theory this gets you 2 abominations and a Desolation engine for the price of a mobile toolkit and Oathkeeper. What's not to like???? I actually tried this out the other day with 'mixed' results. I addition to the above I took Johan, a Soulstone miner and a full SS pool, although completely forgetting to give Joss oathkeeper. The miner was great actually, netting me 3vp, but I could have brought it in a turn earlier, I was too conservative with it. I brought Johan as I felt he would go well with Joss, but he made very little impact in the end. I lost the game, but I feel more because the terrain meant most of my crew were bunched and Misaki with misdirection and disguise was able to plant herself into engagement range and stop me placing scheme markers for protect territory. Also shooting with Levy into engagement (not normally that much of an issue) was painful when I hit Johan whose free attack at misaki (yay!) was misdirected into Joss' face (not-yay!). The DE died quickly but was able to effectively cancel out Ototo (even when the black joker appearing at the wrong time). Sheer volume of cards for the first couple of turns meant I didn't have to burn too many SS for suits and had good cheat cards. Massive activation control, though because a lot of my stuff was still in/close to my deployment zone, I feel I didn't make best use of this. Essentially the plan worked but I felt it was a bit too slow. Only Rusty was able to do anything for the first couple of turns, which allowed most of his crew to freely position themselves and get an early vp lead. This was compounded as he took some traps which hemmed me in and forced Joss to waste some of his activations later on to get rid of them. Has this approach got real potential, perhaps with a different crew lineup? Or is using 2 full turns of Levy and Joss' time too expensive? On a slight aside, do people use the abombs' Vile Reclamation often? Against Misaki I needed to use it to counter her assassination trigger but often on other abombs who then became easy targets for things like thunder archers.

Hi all I started playing Malifaux about 6 months ago as a replacement to the destroyed game that was once Warhammer Fantasy, and tbh I'm gutted I didn't discover it sooner! I used to live in Birmingham (uk) where there was plenty of access to gaming clubs/products/players but moved to the Isle of Man (yes, it's a real place) about a year ago. Unfortunately the island has no FLGS and of the three 'stockists' - one shut down recently but was aimed towards radio controlled models anyway, there was a small section that had some random boxes of Dreadball teams and some Army Painter stuff; one is aimed solidly at trains; and one has the GW selection, although they obviously don't sell much and don't know about the products as they still have White Dwarfs on the shelf from April '14. I discovered and joined the only gaming group on the island (Manx Wargamers) that traditionally play a lot of WW2 and other historical period games which is new to me but makes a nice change, but have also started playing more sci-fi and zombie games to appeal to the younger club members. The group is really nice with large collections of models and scenery, but attendance is variable and because we only meet up every 2 weeks and because of my working patterns I can't always make it, which is a shame. I picked up a few bulk lots from eBay and added a few bits too so have a pretty big collection already, which is actually quite overwhelming. I would definitely advise new players to keep their initial collections quite small! My brother, who lives in London, was also recently bitten by the Malifaux bug (I think it caused poison +1) so we have been playing on Vassal for a few weeks but, work permitting, I hope to introduce the club and some other friends to this great game in the near future (probably after Christmas when I can get hold of scenery that isn't a piece of card with 'forest' written on it). Thanks for reading, and in the unlikely event that anyone on the IoM spots this, feel free to PM me

Hi Tag on the Isle of Man added.