Nicodem woes.

[NecroMeat]

Hey man. Figure I may as well throw my two cents in to see if I can be useful to any extent. So I run Nico exclusively. I just like necromancers and he is pretty much "THE" necromancer. None of the above ways of running him are bad, mind you. I run him with almost nothing but summoning in mind. I use Nico to summon, give things that I just summmoned fast and draw cards from the things that died to summon. Most of the time he doesn't even leave my deployment zone unless its a strategy that involves an objective in the center of the board, in which case I will use a rotten bell to lure him instead of wasting one of his action points. This way I cna get a little bit more out of his 6 inch bubble of undead boosting awesomeness.

The core models of my crew are always the same. Nico w/ Maniacal laugh and Undertaker, Mortimer w/ Corpse bloat, the Vulture and Bete Noire. Generally I will take 2 Crooligans and a Belle as well but I have been thinking of messing around with that soon. After these models it is a choice of either the Carrion Emissary, Izamu, Toshiro or Yin. Some are 9 points and some are 10. If I take one of the 9 point guys I will also grab the love thy master upgrade for Nico. This will give me 6 soul stones in my cache.

With that You have a pretty solid base to start summoning things. Every turn, Mortimer rips his spleen out and finds a bone for two corpses, then Nico Muhahahas to turn them into mindless zombies and then you summon through them and draw a card for each one that is within 6 of him from the Undertaker upgrade. Just remember that he has almost the whole faction at his finger tips so summon what you need at the time to get a specific job done. I feel people starting with Nico just summon whatever seems most powerful with the cards they have in their hand instead of what they need (I sure as hell did). If I have a 13 of crows I could summon a hanged, but if I need to get a model into the enemy deployment zone to score, I am summoning a shikome in and giving her fast so she can fly 18 inches (or 21 if using carrion emissary) to drop a scheme marker. Using the vulture to ferry around corpse tokens can be very powerful as well. Keep in mind it can ferry mindless zombies as well. Waiting for your opponent to run out of activation's and then dropping a corpse next to a powerful model to turn into a punk zombie that you give the fast condition to is an easy and vicious way to score 4 attacks on it using flurry and an additional attack. 

I won't go too much into Bete. Some claim she is invaluable and others will say she just isn't effective enough for her points. That is something you will have to decide for yourself. You can always message me about that. In short, I use her to disrupt the enemy crew  on turn 1 or 2 by popping out of a crooligan "stupidly deployed too close" to the enemy. Late game she just pops out and will try to get a paralyze on a master or other big model. She has other uses but that is my common use for her. I use her in every game. She has never been useless to me personally. Just make sure you have that 10 in your hand.