Hamelin for beginners

[Da Git]

Ok, so seeings as there's this new fancy-schmancy Nightmare crew for this guy coming out, my will is beginning to crumble.  I've never had any real interest in him or played against him and one of the Outcast players I know refuses to play him as he sees Hamelin as boring.  I'm also very new to Outcasts as a whole.

So I pose some questions.

Is Hamelin & his in-theme crew fun to play with & against?

Are there any other additions that make him awesome?  Definitely would add Killjoy if he's good... I've always like that model!

A basic core crew & how it works?  What are the go-to upgrades for Hamelin?  (other than I hear The Piper is near-mandatory)

What do you find yourself mostly doing during Hamelin's Activation?

Thinking something along the lines of:

Hamelin
- The Piper - 2ss

Stolen - 2ss

Nix - 8ss
- any upgrades here worth taking?

Obedient Wrench - 4ss

So that's a very small core at 16ss, so lots of room.  How many rats do you hire or are they all summoned? What about the other VERMIN?  DO you ever find yourself hiring LOST kiddies with Sewer King?

Cheers & thanks for the advice!

[DXXXVIII]

A beater. A&D or Killjoy.
If you go killjoy, get the upgrade "infectious melodies" on nix. This way you can give reactivate to a rat with a rat catcher. then walk two times with the rat then reactivate with the Fast given out by nix, walk again 3 times and deliver Klljoy.
If you go A&D, piper & sewer king becomes interesting to get A&D even better to where he has to go and then Idustrial-Age bomb 8 times a Turn  (Optimal case)
And Hamelin loves the "survivalist" upgrade. Due to his ability to sacrifice a stolen and heal instead of going dead... having hard to kill is worth every point it costs ;P

[Mason]

I really enjoy Hamelin with a Desolation Engine. Nom nom rats.

[Ludvig]

Hire four rats and do the silly cycle where three rats waste activations and the fourth activates to form a rat king. Also hire the broken 4 ss model that can summon more rats by attacking your own rats. The rat king goes and sacrifices itself summoning some other vermin that also activates to waste things. By this point your opponwnt has ptobably activated their entire crew so now it is time for you to start doing your actual activations, probably something like Hamelin obeying a dead 'ard beater like ashes and dust up so it can do solid damage or Hamelin obeying a single enemy model to a place where you can kill it while not expoaing yourself to the enemy counter attack. If you got lucky on your rat summons you might be in a position to create another rat king and out activate even more.

Your rats will multiply over a few turns and the rat kings can do schemes as well as eat the other players scheme markers. Any condition scheme will be almost impossible against you since most of your crew are either immune to conditions, peons or can sacrifice themselves so the enemy can't score in a lot of scheme pools, especially since youcan scalpel out their good models almost anywhere on the board.

You can also utilizethe strong ahooting optionslike Sue, Alice and trappers. Whenyou completely out-activateyour opponent and can obey people to lrave cover or engagements it becomes viable to go heavy on ranged models.

I find the above extremely boring to play against, especially when the scheme pool makes it almost impossible to score any points. Being that severely out activated is also really annoying even if you don't always lose the game.

[Cedar]

I really enjoy playing Blight Hamelin, but without Benny he is not so great. I hope that new upgrades for him will provide additional source of this amazing condition  

Plague (the Tyrant, not the upgrade) works with almost any crew, however if you bring Desolation Engine and Ashes and Dust as your main beaters you will still have activation control over your enemies. Here are few tricks that I like:

1. Killjoy rat taxi - take Killjoy, standard rat engine pieces (Stolen, Wretch, 1-2 rats), put Infectous Melodies on Hamelin. Use summoned Rat Catcher to apply reactivate to one rat. walk with rat during first activation, during second- use fast from melodies, then walk additional three times. Rat dies and Killjoy unburies close to enemies, ready to charge.

2. Industrial Age spam - activate A&D, walk close to enemies to use Industrial age, then sacrifice it with Sewer King/ Desolation Engine. Obey Core three times for additional Industrial age, then use Industrial age two more times during Core activation. This is risky strategy, however certain masters (eg. Pandora. Jack Daw, Dreamer) will probably suffer few points of damage.

3. Using Emissary with Nix and Taelor- just give Regeneration to one of them and companion to other one - both these abilities are amazing on them, as they are resilient models which can deal significant amount of damage and with pseudo-lures granted by Emissary and Hamelin they usually will have something to charge.

4. Using Lazarus with Abominations- just draw some cards and heal Lazarus with his (0) action and probably moderate card from your hand. 

[Vorschlag]

I accidentally won a tournament I organized (when I was filling in as ringer) with blight hamelin.

He seems to specialize in picking apart elite crews as he only struggled against a swarm build.

I only used the hamelin box, the brotherhood box and Pandora's stolen.

Hamelin aims to summon enough to ensure one rat king every turn (I have 4) and will need pipes + obey for position control and blight/rat king charge.

Ideally kade + hamelin get things where you need them and then spam bleeding disease.

In other situations nix drops the upgrade for fast rushes forwards and blights as much as he can.

Candy I only take as an anti beater just encase.

I had previously been playing zoraida(gremlins) so giving ratkings moldy cheese for reactivate + 1pt charge made me view them as mini war pigs.

Another player in my area runs him with crooligans so when I rotate to arcanists I suppose I'll try them out and winged plague.

Can also see the denial potential of guild hounds and rat kings in a scheme marker heavy pool.

If you keep your activations short he isn't boring for you or your opponent...I checked with my opponents afterwards.

[Cedar]

I agree with @Vorschlag about Blight Hamelin. He can deal MASSIVE amount of damage to elite crews, especially since many big guys have low DF so even rats can hit them.  

Guild Hounds are nice addition to the crew, although some people find Hollow as too expensive to be viable. I really like it, not because it gives protection from blasters (although it helps against them) or that you can field other dogs, but for (1) AP charge against Blighted models, If you manage to perform two charges then it is like you would use two Oathkeepers on him. 

[Freman]

Hamelin is my favourite master. I like to take Piper and Plague on him as it allows me to put Blight onto an enemy model at range while drawing them closer, then Obey a Rat King to charge them as a 1AP action. Obey is always handy. One time I managed to get my opponent's Widow Weaver to take the last wounds off his Baby Kade.

The rat engine is easy to build, the Obedient Wretch and a Stolen can (if you have a couple of  in hand) get it going from the first turn. For some games I've tried pairing Hamelin with Rusty Alyce (Desolate Soul/From Aether) and it's possible to get a silly number of activations quite easily. That said, remember your schemes and strats. It's easy to forget and focus on the unimportant (my usual problem).

If there's a condition heavy pool, throwing in Nix, Ashes and Dust, and the new Benny Henchman, basically makes them redundant, which can be annoying to play against.

[Virtus]

Hamelin has been my OG since I started playing Malifaux, which has been about 3 years. He's gotten a lot better in GG17 strats and schemes than he was back with the rulebook strats and schemes. If there is one thing I would recommend for a new Hamelin player, it would be to pick up a beater (Killjoy is who I use if I go that route). You don't really need a beater if you can hand out blighted easily and quickly, but it can be hard to do since Malifaux Rats only have Ml 4. Sure, you can use Rat Kings to start giving blighted since they hit more consistently, but if you do that, then you already lost out on their 1 AP charges against blighted models.

Which leads me to one of my auto-include upgrades for Hamelin: The Plague, since it gives ranged blight on a Sh6 attack. My other auto-include upgrade for Hamelin is The Piper because it helps with the control aspect of his game. Sewer King is the third upgrade I like to take, but it is a more flexible slot than the other two upgrades. I usually take Nix and give him Infectious Melodies and Hollow for AP efficient charges. 

I basically have three ways I play Hamelin: Kill focused with Killjoy, scheme focused with Crooligans (via Sewer King upgrade), and my favorite, yet hardest to use way of AP efficieny focus with Freikorps Specialist and his tactical action to remove slow.

I've been playing Hamelin for years now and haven't gotten complaints over being out-activated. I've only heard two complaints in all my games with him. The first was from a friend of mine with whom I was learning Malifaux with and he complained Hamelin wasn't good (which I'll admit, rulebook schemes weren't his favorite, but I chose to play Hamelin anyway). The other was over Bleeding Disease. For those who complain about being out-activated all the time, I hope you realize it isn't that easy for us Hamelin players. We have a good chance of doing it turn 1 and 2, but from then on out, it's primarily from positioning Hamelin and our Rat Catchers well for the Voracious Rats ability to trigger. 

[Freman]

Don't forget that any enemy model, and any friendly model with Blight, that dies within 6" of Hamelin summons a rat. I keep forgetting.

[Jesy Blue]

I usually take just Iggy and about a dozen Rats after the core build.  Fire and a (0) AP WP penalty pulses for 5 points is great for the stubborn ones who have a wound or 2 left after Bleeding Disease. 

I've diversified out into more Crooligans and Hodgepodge Emissary and a whole slew of other stuff after playing that list for a while, but for a long several months, that was the list everyone hated.

[Seadhna]

I usually play a control-heavy crew with the rat engine (stolen, wretch, 2 rats), emissary, aionus and sue.

The extra Don't mind me on Aionus is super cool

[Ludvig]

@Virtus being out-activated in itself isn't the issue. It's more when the player takes a long time being hesitant while activating rats because they don't have the ranges and abilities down, that is annoying with any master but doubly so when you have 10+ rats on the board and don't activate them in a timely manner or don't show me clearly which ones have gone etc.

I've had really enjoayble games against Hamelin but you need to know what you are doing and take your actions in a timely manner planned way ahead. Since the alternating activations that is standard to this game also has most players expecting to take an activation about every three minutes it gets really unenjoyable to wait around for a twenty minute turn à la Warmahordes when you were expecting to play Malifaux and actually get to do things.

A Hamelin player that knows their stuff leads to fun games most of the time although some pools interact really poorly with nihilism and I am one of those who think scheme conditions shouldn't be denied by it just like no condition removal is allowed to affect scheme conditions. Iguess what I am trying to say is that as a beginner come very well prepared and get in the habit of doing quick activations, especially for rats.

 

[Mxbedlam]

My favorite Hamelin crew so far is pretty elite. I bring Hamelin (Pipes, Melodies), Stolen, Obedient Wretch, A$D, Deso Engine (Scout the Field), Void Wretch, and 2 Rats.  The idea is to let my opponent activate and then obey up the deso and A&D to smash faces at bottom of turn one, top of turn 2.