Dust Up 25

[LordZombie]

So my community meets every Monday night. We game from around 6pm to around 10pm. Most of them don't really do weekend events, so I do what I can with the time we have. I try to run events everyone month, so my community can gain mystery boxes and guilders. Because of the time limit, we can only do Henchmen Hardcore and Enforcer Brawls. So one of the things I wanted to do it come up with a new format. Something more open than Henchmen Hardcore but with more structure than just 30 ss. So I came up with Dust Up 25. I have posted up the rules for my community to give feedback on, but I figured I would see what the Malifaux Forum community thinks. So look it over and let me know what you think. Would you use this format? 

 

25 soulstones.

Master lead.

Soulstone pool of Master's cache +1 only. Any extra is discarded.

4 turns only, no flips for extras.

Scoring allowed on first turn.

May summon, but can never have more models in the crew than the crew started with.

Crew creation as normal.

Time limit in events is 40 minutes. 
 

[Ludvig]

I get why summoning should be limited but the limit looks harsh.

With the shorter timeframe and scoring from turn one you could probably allow summoning to go over the model limit since the idea of summoners is to have a significantly higher model count by the end of turn two. Maybe net gain of one model per turn or something like X amount of soulstones allowed to be summoned per turn.

I'm not sure why the limit on soulstones is in effect, seems like the master will dominate the hell out of this format and support masters will be gimped either way.

 

If you want to cut back on time I would do fixed lists or list selection in advance with knowledge of the schemes for each match. 

[Seadhna]

As @Ludvig mentioned: fixed list is the way to go when starved for time. 

Also, a good way to speed up games is to prepare tables and deployment zones already set up beforehand. 

[LordZombie]

The soulstone limit is mainly there to match up with some of the other formats. Also encourages list building. The summoning part was brought up by one of the other players also, but he plays Kirai, so that was the reason for his comment. I was thinking of doing a summons +conditions type rule, but it seemed clunky at first. 

As for pre event info and fixed list, this does not work with my community. They are all very causal, almost to the point of not caring as long as they play causal. There is only one player in the community that would use that info, and he is the best player we have and does not need that info to help him. We do always use fixed list, but that is standard for Henchmen Hardcore anyway. 

Thanks for the feedback. 

[Math Mathonwy]

I wonder if the format would work better with the Masters simply not getting the extra AP (so they would have 2 like everyone else)? I wonder how it would affect the power balance of the various Masters but the small game size already throws that out of whack so I doubt it would "break" anything any worse than the format already would.