Barmution

I think Sparks' change is a pretty solid buff tbh. He gets to treat models as constructs with Now Yer A Robot allowing him to both Command Construct them and heal them for 2 with the wrench wo a TN. Also the Pack With Explosives trigger is going to be absolutely massive in a couple of KWs. Pigs, for instance, can effectively ping 3 times unresisted when you combine PWE w Stampede and Reckless. And as fun as the Bombs In Yer Belly upgrade was, it was a mechanic that mostly required your opponent to either be unaware or actively play along to get solid mileage out of. Now it may actually see table time in competitive environments.

Additionally the Command Construct action combines pretty well with Analyze Weakness as your enemy no longer gets an activation to get the armored piece out of the way before, say, a Whiskey Golem charges it. Being a henchman also means that you can get some mileage out of his auras without him crumpling like a gasoline doused paper tissue on fire.

4 round Vassal tourney coming up in early May for me and I can't wait to put Sparks on the table

That Hold Down is going to be massive for Levi as well (more stat6 irreducible damage attacks? Yes, please). The Brawler is also well suited to protect both Waifs and Levi himself, at least from ranged attacks, so I think I'll be using him in Amalgam a fair bit.

PM sent, thank you! And you might just be right, I play Freikorps pretty frequently.

Sorry to poke you @dzlier but this is still an issue for me. I can't reenter any active games and as such cannot delete them or mark as finished. I'm reluctant to delete and reinstall the app as I think there's reason to believe that the issue won't go away since I'd want to connect the app to my forum name on reinstall.

I understand that you're a busy man so I'm not asking for any fixes on the app itself but do you know if there's anything I can do on my side to try to get this fixed?

Cheers!

I've encountered a weird bug several times now: Sometimes the "In Progress" section just gets greyed out and I can't see any of my active games even if I start or join a new one. Sometimes it fixes itself when my opponent changes stuff or abandons the match, other times it just seems to correct itself after some time. Any idea what this can be? I'm on Android and logged in with a forum account. 

9 hours ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

I think it is ambiguous, but I would lean towards yes.

For that matter, if you killed something with cost 4 or less you could discard the card and then fail to summon anything?

Your last question is my follow up question from the original post (mine was poorly phrased), so I'm pretty curious myself

Another variant: You obey a model with Academic Zeal to kill one of your own models (of at least 5 ss value), elect discard the upgrade to summon a Transmortis Minion but there's no room for the summoned model to place so the summon fails but the upgrade is discarded. Would that be a legal sequence of effects?

28 minutes ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

It isn't a may effect, so you definitely have to summon something if you discard it (which I believe you can do).

It presumably summons it under your opponents control though.

I agree on both counts but wanted an outsiders' opinion on it. IMHO point 1 not entirely clear cut since I'm not sure that the effect text adheres to the cost/effect syntax of actions on cards and in that case his would be a case comparable to taking an attack action without a valid target, ie. you declare your use of the action but since there's no valid target (in this case Transmortis minion of low enough cost) the rest of the effect fails to resolve.

Quote

Recruitment Effort: After this model kills an enemy model, it may discard this Upgrade to Summon a Transmortis Minion with Cost less than or equal to the enemy's Cost into base contact with the enemy model. Attach an Enrollment Upgrade to the Summoned model. The enemy model does not Drop Any markers when killed.

If a model with this upgrade is obey'ed or otherwise forced into taking an action under an opposing model's control (Brin's Misdirected Rage trigger, for instance), and that action kills an opposing model (ie. one in the obeyer's crew), could the obeyer use the effect on the upgrade? Since the effect occurs within the context of the action and not after resolving the action I'm leaning towards yes. Obey (and most other control effects) specifies that you cannot take an action that summons other models but this is an incidental effect of the upgrade, not the action.

Follow up question: Can you discard the upgrade to summon nothing if the killed model is of too low cost?

17 hours ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

This doesn't work, because the Pit Trap you're dropping is not within 6" of the model, so it can't be counted as scrap at this point.

Ok, I think I've pinpointed where I read this action differently from you:

You seem to be reading the action as something that partially resolves at the time the action is declared then "pauses" and finally resumes at the start of the next turn. My reading is that for the action to completely resolve you decide its effects at the time where the action is declared, then those effects are added to the game state to be executed at the start of the next turn, a bit like the lingering effect of Vasilisa's Needle And Thread if the target doesn't discard a card in that it's an effect that's not tracked by any specific mechanic like tokens.

My interpretation is that the "When" of the Wait What?! trigger tells you when the additional marker is dropped, the type is decided at the point in time when you are declaring the trigger and at that time you are treating the Pit Trap Marker as a Scrap Marker.

I don't know if this will clarify my point of view for you but I think we differ in what we view as the scope of Scrapyard Mines' effect.

If the only time you evaluate what type of Marker the Pit Trap is at the moment that you declare the action and trigger then I agree with your interpretation.

OTOH If the Marker type keeps being affected by Scrapyard Mines throughout the entire action then you have 2 more options:

1. The Marker type will be treated as whatever type you treated it as at the moment of declaring Into Space, resulting in the trigger producing Scrap
2. At any point where the text refers to the Marker type you get to choose as per Scrapyard Mines, resulting in the trigger producing Wong's choice of either Pit Trap or Scrap

@Plaag At no point have I argued that the first marker dropped is not a Pit Trap Marker if you launch a Pit Trap Marker. My question is whether the Marker type referred to in the Wait What?! trigger is affected by the Scrapyard Mines ability.

15 minutes ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

I think his point is that the marker is both a scrap marker and a pit trap marker when you remove it.

At no point is it ONLY a scrap marker.

That's reasonable but in that case I'd argue that Wong's player has a choice of which type of marker to drop.

5 hours ago, solkan said:

The mistake you're making is trying to claim that the game somehow "forgets" what the marker was.  Treating a Pit Trap marker as a Scrap Marker and then removing it doesn't stop the Pit Trap Marker being a Pit Trap Marker.  The same way that treating a Mindless Zombie as a Corpse Marker doesn't stop the Mindless Zombie being a model.

 

Thank you for your reply. I'm open to me making a mistake here and this is not a hill I want to die on but I don't think the mistake I'm making is the one you're pointing out. I consider the marker being dropped by the action as literally the same marker that was removed. However I don't think the game somehow "forgets" that for the pupose of this action the player has elected to treat that Marker as being of the Scrap type and the type is what's being referenced in the trigger text.

Either way I'm fine with both outcomes and it's not something I'd argue in a tourney, I just wanted to be convinced about the common interpretation being right as I'm not seeing the logic of it given the card texts.

1 minute ago, Scoffer said:

I think "when dropping Marker ... drop an additional Marker of the same type" means "of the same type with the Marker you drop with this Action", not "with the removed Marker". So if you drop a Pit Trap the trigger drops another Pit Trap.

Both action and trigger refers specifically to the removed marker (and it's type) so referencing it's type would intuitively be the type that's being overridden by Scrapyard Mines IMHO.

Quote

Scrapyard Mines: (...) Friendly models may treat Scrap Markers within 6" as Pit Trap Markers (and vice-versa) for the purposes of friendly effects.

Quote

Launch Into Space: Once per Turn. Remove target Corpse Marker, Scrap Marker, or Scheme Marker. During the next Start Phase, Drop the removed Marker in this model's LoS, not touching terrain (...) 

As per this thread it's pretty clear that if you launch a Pit Trap marker, you drop a Pit Trap marker, however:

Quote

 Wait What?!: When Dropping the removed Marker, Drop an additional Marker of the same type in this model's LoS.

This trigger on Launch Into Space drops a Marker of the same type as the one that was launched, leading me to believe that the Scrapyard Mines ability will make Wait What?! drop a Scrap Marker instead of an additional Pit Trap Marker since the type is exactly what is being "overridden" by Scrapyard Mines. Or are these seperate references to the marker type, allowing the Wong to decide whether he uses the "may" part of Scrapyard Mines inside the scope of a single action?

Any thoughts?

Haven't been able to play a lot of games lately for obvious reasons but I've been toying with the idea of bringing in a Dead Outlaw and a Guilty into Freikorps for some card draw. At 13 SS they are a sizeable chunk of your crew but there's a couple of synergies here that can make it worth it:

• The upgrade on the Guilty to make the DO trigger his draw is cost free, at least SS wise
• Any tome you get on the DO's attack can drop an enemy scheme marker, triggering card draw from any model(s) with Wanted Criminal
• With the enemy scheme marker there the DO can trigger an action on the Guilty using At Gunpoint with a bonus of +1 damage on any given action (pretty good with Rocket Launcher)
• DO itself is a pretty decent model for putting a Rocket Launcher on due to Run 'n Gun and Covetous Cravings is great for giving Hannah or Arik Fast
• If you're hiring a prospector on anyone you have a semi-reliable source of enemy scheme markers to turn into more SS or card draw/cycle

This obviously doesn't mitigate the lack of card draw within the keyword but I'm going to try it out next time I play VS.

47 minutes ago, Mrbedlam said:

You are correct. Sorry I read that as you obeying your big beaters. 

Np, I agree that it reads a bit ambiguous.

25 minutes ago, Mrbedlam said:

Can't blast off friendly models, even the upgrade doesn't change that. 

Pretty sure that if you Obey an opposing model to hit your upgraded Gupps it's not considered friendly to that model since Obey doesn't change a model's allegiance.

I want to try a build in Bayou Zoraida with Sparks putting bombs onto spawned Gupps. Then you obey big beaters to hit the Gupps (using the Gupps as a node) and they get hit by both their own secondary damage from the blast marker and the damage from the upgrade. It sounds a bit janky but I think Stealth will help keep the Gupps alive compared to other Bayou disposables. Think it could be fun if nothing else.

28 minutes ago, Zebo said:

There's things that I dislike of them, of course, and I'm not gonna ignore those.

That's a message we've been receiving quite loud and clear for some time.

25 minutes ago, Zebo said:

With so much healing you mean the Steam Trunk and the Librarian? 

He probably also means the My Loyal Servant trigger on VS himself, Juggernaut on Laz which Hannah can copy, the construct specific healing from the Engineer action, the Survival Skills trigger on the Freikorpsmann and the fact that both VS and the Freikorpsmann has the Survivalist ability which boosts the healing they receive.

Not to be a dink but you seem to have decided that the M3e Freikorps is just all bad compared to M2e and your posts are just reflecting your opinion without even considering opposing viewpoints. They are in a good spot. Play them, but play them to their strengths.

Just now, Scoffer said:

When he is unburied by an enemy effect, it is placed by it's owner into deployment instead.

Yes, that basically was my question but in reverse

21 hours ago, katadder said:

yes he can be buried. place is a move, taking off the table to bury isnt

Does this imply that he cannot be unburied by the effect that buried him since that is an enemy effect and involves placing him?

9 hours ago, zavros said:

 (no one in our store wants to play against her)

Seems like you have found a way to get around the problem locally then. Just don't try to force your particular solution onto metas, players and tournaments that actively seek to play the game as the pick/counterpick and play/counterplay game that M3e is (way more than M2e).

As a Zoraida player I can tell you that the obvious counter play to Obey is concealment. Zoraida isn't really fond of having to spend 2 actions to get an Obey off (Focus to counter negative from concealment). Ideally you have models that provide an aura of concealment so that you can cover Z's own beaters too, since the TN of Obey is 14 it makes Obey w relent really risky (need to flip a 7 or better on 2 cards). In general, use the terrain to your advantage or bring your own terrain (preferably blocking), Z is not happy when she has to spend her actions walking. Also make sure to remember that you can relent attacks from your own models when they are being Obey'ed. That means that you will most likely only suffer min damage. Try to eliminate her key pieces or at least make her work to Obey them.

Then there's the specific tech pieces with abilities like "Hostile Work Environment" etc. They are pretty few and far between but well worth it against Z if they're available to your faction.

Does this change the fact that she is incredibly strong in Corrupted Idols and Plant Explosives? No. But it does provide an amount of counter play. She's definitely not invincible, even in those strategies, and I think the current 3e tournament records provide enough evidence to say that she's not broken.