4 Spring Showdown reports from Madaxeman.com

[madaxeman]

See the Arcanists struggle with the rules, the list building, the terrain, the opposition and most of all the dietary properties of the food on offer at Wayland Games industrial estate lockup in 4 reports from Spring Showdown 2015.

 

 

Mei Feng, Ramos and Marus all struggle - so an equal opportunity failure policy - in reports brimming with a big pink flying baby with a bad case of piles, hot chicks in leather with big swords, re-animating snipers in a childs playroom and a cast of thousands of mechanical spiders all of whom are creating confusion in deepest Essex

 

 

You can also join in a half-hearted and half-baked debate on the merits of pre-announced schemes and strats elsewhere on this forum...

 

enjoy! 

 

tim

[Argentbadger]

Terrific reports as usual.  I'm a huge fan of your style of writing, and the captions on each picture are great.

 

You've done a lot of self-analysis in the post already, so I'll only add one thing.  I don't think that making a crew immediately upon seeing the scheme pool is actually helpful until you see the board and know the other faction, which I think is something you felt gave your opponents an advantage.

 

Finally, you mentioned that the Viks were not obliged to take a Horror duel that after being placed in melee with Howard Langston (game 4), but Horror duels are also triggered by declaring an attack action.

[zFiend]

"I know it's on my team but having that blue knob thing behind me is making me rather uncomfortable" :D hahahahahaha, solid gold again! 

[madaxeman]

You've done a lot of self-analysis in the post already, so I'll only add one thing.  I don't think that making a crew immediately upon seeing the scheme pool is actually helpful until you see the board and know the other faction, which I think is something you felt gave your opponents an advantage.

 

Yeah... I sort of see what you are saying, but in all honesty I simply haven't played enough games (or against enough masters) yet to be in a position to do any sort of meaningful crew-tailoring to match my opponents faction... and without knowing that, even seeing the terrain was not that big a deal, as I had no idea how my opponents would play on it anyway.

 

Having time to plan a crew in advance to try and come up with a plan to achieve the scheme pool would still have been much easier for me.  I still think going forward I'll be looking at Gaining Grounds etc and coming up with a whole series of pre-planned crews who can have a sensible go at each major scheme (strat?) before I try another tourney 

[Argentbadger]

That's a good point.  I think that, despite what the popular opinion is on the game, you can actually do pretty well with a fixed list in Malifaux.  I don't mean that it would be optimal, but rather that having a dozen models that you know well is better than an arbitrary mish-mash of stuff that you vaguely feel would be right for the schemes based on reading the cards.  I play lots of Malifaux and still usually find that I forget important things on the cards, so if you have 3 masters, all the Arcanists and play comparatively infrequently I suppose that you'll get bogged down in all the rules.

 

Your suggestion to pre-plan crews for each strategy seems good.  But if you want to get better then the best possible way is going out to play games (which of course you're doing) and being on the receiving end of whatever cool tricks people can do with their crews.

[HowNot2Wargame]

Perhaps look at it this way....

Considerations such as what your opponent is playing faction wise (and by extension model wise), the terrain you are playing on, how your opponent likes to play the game... These are all things you can't control. So in all honesty, if you are fairly new - don't worry about them, you can learn as you go along. A great example of this is now using soulstone miners to hunt hollow waifs from now on.

What you can control however is:

* knowing which masters you like to take and why

* what models you like to take and why

* what the potential strategies you can face (is the book and gg15)

* what the potential scheme are

Hence what I did was create a 'cheat sheet' of models. Essentially its one page of a4 which I keep in my phones case, and when I have a spare minute on the bus I read through and refresh myslelf.

In short I went through all of the strats and schemes, looked at what I needed to do, but also what I would expect I would need to stop someone else doing it.

Let's take power ritual as an easy example.

You need to drop a scheme marker in a specific place in the board, but then you do not need to have that model about. Hence I am looking for models which are speed over staying or fire power, so to me that's watchers or guild hounds. However, I may want to include something shooty like riflemen or austringers to stop the opponent in case they decide to take the same.

Hence, when I get to a tournament, I have an idea right away what I want to take as soon as I can see the strats and schemes.

I also keep it very simple, as that is all my brain allows

The other thing I do is then randomly generate a set of schemes ( via the breach or @malifaux schemes ) and then practice while the missus is watching something awful like east enders constructing a crew.

Hence, now I have confidence I can get a crew on the table which has the right things. If only I could play better

Hope that helps?

Sorry for the need to re edit quite a bit. Long posts and tablets don't mix!