Jope's battle reports

[Joachim]

Hello guys,

I'm going to give writing some battle reports a go. The main reasoning is that usually after playing a game I try and think about what plays made me lose/win the game, and what are the points I need to improve on. Therefore I'm trying to write out some battle reports and incorporate my thoughts building my list and picking schemes as well as pointing out where I made mistakes. The goal is to learn more about the game by doing this and to have some fun in the process.

I hope you enjoy reading these battle reports and all feedback is very welcome.

Greetings, Joachim (aka Jope) 

[Joachim]

Battle report: Rasputina vs. Nicodem

Scheme pool:

Extraction – claim jump, eliminate the leadership, frame for murder (december acolyte), search the ruins, quick murder (valedictorian)

 

Crews:

Rasputina (4ss) (Frozen servants, Enveloped in ice, Cold nights), Snowstorm (warding runes), Wendigo, December acolyte (ffm), Ice gamin, ice gamin, ice gamin, arcane emissary (elemental conflux)

Nicodem (7ss) (maniacal laugh, undertaker, reaper grin), Mortimer (my favorite shovel, corpse bloat), Phillip and the nanny (Haunting cries), Asura roten, Valedictorian, Necropunk

My reasoning behind the crew is that I’m currently liking 3 ice gamin with rasputina and her summoning upgrade so I can recycle the scrap markers. I’m always happy with these guys at 4 stones, they take some effort to remove and then put out some damage when they die, their +1 damage aura is amazing, bumping up their own attack to a respectable ml5 2/4/5 damage and rasputina's to a scary 3/5b/6bb. The arcane emissary also becomes very strong with a 5/5/6 attack on the charge if he is able to remain within range of the aura. I always take cold nights cause at 1ss it is just too good imo especially cause wendigo can place ice pillars. The ability to block charge lanes, los, interrupt auras is just so strong. Since eliminate the leadership was in the pool both cold nights and enveloped in ice really helps, and for ressers its easier to get some mindless zombie engaged with raspi and now she has a chance to just passively kill it. I played without shattered heart before and tbh I never really missed it. Yes it is good, but It also takes an upgrade slot and costs 3ss. Rasputina has so many good upgrade options, so with the wave 5 upgrades I’m not finding the place for it anymore.

I wanted to give the emissary a try with rasputina. In extraction I could get him in the middle, push some models out of range and also keep serving as a mirror while engaged there, ensuring I keep a mirror up. Also his (0) negation is great as it ignores hard to kill and damage reduction.

For schemes I thought a quick murder wouldn’t be too hard as I expected the very mobile valedictorian to go for the acolyte and that way expose herself. And df5 wouldn’t help a lot vs ca7/6. I like to take frame for murder on the December acolyte as it usually dies pretty quickly, especially when people have seen what it can do. And if they don’t kill him he can put down a lot of hurt on the enemy and his control hand.

 

I didn't take too many pictures and don't have any of later in the game. There wasn't a whole lot of movement, and I also didn't want to slow down the game too much. I will probably take more pictures in the future though.

The beautiful board we played on. 

Deployment: I pretty much deployed everything in a blob in the middle, ready to move up to the extraction marker. The plan is that wendigo can move a bit up on one flank should he need to deny claim jump and that the December acolyte goes on the other for the same reason, as well as applying early pressure on nicodem and trying to bait in the valedictorian. Which worked out as I deployed first and the valedictorian deployed in front of him within double walk range.

 My deployment, fltr: December acolyte, ice gamin, snow storm, rasputina, ice gamin, arcane emissary (brutal emissary proxy), ice gamin and wendigo hiding under the building.

Enemy deployment, fltr: Valedictorian, asura roten (just the base), phillip and the nanny, necropunk behind the trees, mortimer and nico.

Turn 1:

I start with snowstorm shooting into an ice gamin, getting moderate damage for 1 blast and pushing some models forward, he walks and brings up raspi next to him giving her good vision over the center and a direct firing line towards the other side, exploiting the choke points. I didn’t bring shattered heart so I wanted to give me an option to try and not use mirrors when it is not necessary.

The valedictorian then moves up into the acolyte. This was a mistake of mine, as I somehow assumed that she was 2, and I was just outside of 14”, but she has 3”, putting me in the worst possible position. It’s not too bad as he is my ffm sucker, but I would have liked to get more work out of the acolyte instead of being engaged before he even activated. Asura roten, the emissary, ice gamin and wendigo all move up. The ice gamin get into better mirror positions and score for extraction next turn. One puts up the +1 damage aura. The emissary double walks up. Asura roten walks, drops a markers and summons a mindless zombie within walk range of the acolyte. The acolyte can’t do much and puts up his ignore armor aura and tries to walk away as he can’t do much else but fails. The marker is dropped within 6” of the center, I’m assuming the opponent is doing claim jump, though search the ruins or just a distraction is also possible at this stage.

Phillip and the nanny and Mortimer do the usual and nicodem summons a student of viscera and a hanged. Rasputina sees an opportunity to shoot into the hanged via a mirror, though I only have weak and moderate cards (max 7) in my hand, making it very hard to ensure hits, even vs df 4 (since nicodem has so many cards). I doubted really hard but decided to do a double focus and hope for at least moderate damage and no black joker. Frame for murder is in the pool and I though the safest strategy early game for raspi would be to go primarily for his summons, untill I have a better idea of what the opponent is trying to do. The attack goes off, killing the hanged and putting a blast onto the student and Mortimer before the summons can activate. This was huge as it delayed models getting in range of the extraction marker and removing the hanged before it could activate. The student moves up and gets an attack off.

 

Turn 2:

Valedictorian activates and kills off the acolyte as expected, he didn’t do anything but he wasted 2 turns of ap from the valedictorian, overextended her and gave me 3vp which was the plan so I can’t complain there. We had a question here to which we did not find the answer, the valedictorian killed the acolyte but with a trigger to push, does the acolyte first die and therefore can’t be pushed, or does the acolyte get pushed and then dies at its new location. We played it that he still gets pushed, but is this the correct way to resolve this? I’m guessing we did it correctly though I wanted to check it here. The valedictorian drops a scheme marker on the centerline with her last ap. This makes it clear that he is going to do claim jump.

Snowstorm moves up to attack the valedictorian but fails and he brings in the wendigo who isn’t needed on the other flank. Wendigo copies Decembers curse to try and put out some more damage, fails, and moves on to a scheme marker that asura roten dropped last turn to block a possible claim jump.

The Emissary tries to kill the student of viscera but fails with his (0) so he needs to use an ap to put it down which means he can’t charge the valedictorian and he decides to instead move further up to threaten Mortimer next turn. As you will notice during this battle report, failing negation is somewhat of a constant.

Asura roten deals 4 damage to wendigo and summons a zombie. Nico’s crew does its card cycling and nico summons 2 hanged. I’m pretty happy with this as one is just within 12” of rasputina, so I decide to focus and shoot, not needing to cheat to do a severe damage causing 6 damage and double blasting onto Mortimer and the other hanged. This was the turning point of the game as rasputina single handedly blasted a lot of resources of the table before they had the chance to even activate. Mortimer is left on a couple of wounds after damage prevention and an emissary staring him down. That’s what you get for ripping out your spleen over and over again.

I score for the strat and move the extraction marker backwards.

4-0

Turn 2: Valedictorian is hiding behind the building on the left after killing the acolyte. Emissary killed the student and moved up. Rasputina shoots and kills two hanged.

End of turn 2: Rasputina's path of destruction. Mortimer is hiding behind the cart.

Turn 3:

I’m in a very good spot being up 4 vp. I control the entire centre of the board, am on top of his scheme markers with my chaff and Mortimer is very low. I can now focus my firepower to put down the valedictorian, if I succeed and remain on top of the extraction marker I should win the game easily.

Snowstorm shoots into wendigo to try and push him out of range of asura roten and blast onto her for a bit of damage. I decide to use his (0) to reposition the emissary in charge range of the valedictorian.

Mortimer can’t pull out more spleens, so he moves forwards and uses corpse bloat. I need scrap markers to summon an ice golem as I had the red joker in hand so I cheat down the duel to take my last point of damage, he explodes onto Mortimer, killing him in the process, perfect. Another ice gamin dies and unfortunately I misspositioned and the explosions kills wendigo who was on two wounds and didn’t get to activate. At this stage it wasn’t that big, but that was a misplay on my part.

Emissary charges past valedictorian, hits her once and pushes her back into my crew. This was also a bit greedy, cause I push her into snowstorm who is possibly the quick murder target. He again fails his negation for some extra damage.

Asura roten summons a zombie that engages rasputina. Nico summons a hanged and tries to summon a crooligan, but at this stage he is out of stones and it fails. The hanged puts some good damage onto snowstorm, and I now realise he is in a bad spot.

I can’t remember exactly what happened with raspi, she did get a free attack onto the zombie, but I’m pretty sure I needed to use more ap on it, so It might have been two zombies. I manage to kill off the zombie(s) with my (0) and a melee attack, and I summon an ice golem next to the valedictorian. With my final ap I randomize into snowstorm with the paralyze, which also paralyzes valedictorian who I pushed into base using the emissary. The ice golem puts some damage on the valedictorian, but leaves her at one wound, if only the negation had hit earlier L.

I still block claim jump, we both score extraction, but I can move the marker backwards again.

5-1

Turn 4:

Nico wins initiative, activates the hanged, who kills snowstorm for 2vp, who explodes onto the valedictorian and the ice golem (again a bit of unfortunate positioning) putting down the valedictorian for 2vp.

The emissary uses its (0) to draw 3 cards, is a bit out of position, and he has to move his measly 4” and hit the necropunk for 2 damage. I now realise that the negation is also a (0) and would have killed the punk as it negates hard to kill. Oh well.

At this stage the game is pretty much over and I don’t remember exactly what happens, but I believe the ice golem puts down asura roten and double moves backwards towards the extraction marker, so I have raspi and the golem there to score it. Raspi has to use ap again to fight off those annoying zombies, and gets a shot onto the hanged, killing it. Nico fails to do a lot, as he is out of stones.

I score extraction and move the marker back a bit yet again.

8-3

Turn 5:

Nico summons a necropunk and student of viscera. He uses muhahaha to summon 6 mindless zombies.

The arcane emissary inexplicably whiffs hard against the necropunk. Failing his negation again, and hitting one attack on double negatives, flipping 3 face cards, doing 1 damage as he is hard to kill.

Raspi summons an ice gamin who later walks up to the summons, and can do nothing with her ap but smash zombies. The ice golem plays some whack-a-zombie. The student puts down the ice gamin who explodes and fails to do much else, the punk is able to put down markers for claim jump which I can’t block anymore.

I score my final extraction point and nico scores claim jump. The game would have gone on to at least turn 6, the opponent would have probably been able to score more points from claim jump, though we diced to call it here, as it was obvious that I would win the game.

Final score: 9-4

It was a very enjoyable game with some beautiful terrain. I do think that the strat and schemes especially favored rasputina. The turning point was surely the double blast onto one hanged, killing another and hurting Mortimer badly. In total she put down 4 hanged, and a lot of wounds onto the student of viscera and Mortimer, as well summoning and ice golem and an ice gamin and paralyzing the valedictorian. That’s what I call doing work. The opponent also made quite some mistakes, forgetting to use muhahah first etc. to his own frustration.

The fact that the hanged is incorporeal, has only a couple of wounds, no hard to wound and only df4 makes it extremely easy for raspi to hit it, and by focusing once, a face cards ensure a double blast for 6/5 damage. I think that other summons would have performed better here.

I do believe that I played the points game fairly well, controlling the middle the entire game, as well as my ffm/quick murder plan working out. I’m happy with the job that the acolyte did, though I often make the mistake of overextending him too much and losing him too easily. I could have easily put him out of 15 inches, so the valedictorian couldn’t engage him turn 1. The opponent would give up control over the middle without moving up anyways. I misspositioned my models a bit, taking some unnecessary damage (rip wendigo). I also overextended snowstorm more than necessary, especially with quick murder in the pool. I had control so he didn’t need to move up to do more damage. I was able to place models onto the claim jump markers, as well as destroying one marker and 2 corpses using the emissary. I was happy with the emissary and might pick him up in the future, he had some bad flips, and he was a bit out of position late game, mainly due to the lack of targets to charge and snowstorm to pull him back, though the game was won at that point.

I hope you enjoyed this battle report.

Greetings, Joachim.

 

[James Dyson]

Bravo!  Thank you for the well done battle report (and congrats on the win!).  I appreciate how you explained your crew, upgrade and scheme choices.  Your use of pictures was also helpful in following the flow of the game.  Your turn summaries are solid and informative.  Your post-game analysis was likewise helpful to read.

As someone whose been playing a bit of Rasputina lately, I do have a few questions for you.

1.  The Arcane Emissary did not seem to really pull his weight this game.  Is this common, in your experience?  Would you consider another model (or two) in his slot?

2.  Do you often play without Silent Ones?

3.  How frequently do you find yourself summoning back ice gamin with Tina’s AP rather than golems/ blasting?

I’m looking forward to more battle reports!

[Joachim]

Hey, 

Thanks for the comment. 

1. I agree that the emissary seems to have performed poorly, though I believe he performed very well. He got the bad end of card luck and my hands weren't great. I picked him to ensure a mirror in the centre of the map. Seeing how the game went some cheaper model would probably have done a good job as well. 

 

2. Never as I don't own them. I've been playing more neverborn and now expanding into ressers. They're on the buy list for rasputina as I think they're really good and add healing which can be nice. 

3. I summoned 3 ice golems in one game cause I had really good cards. This game i summoned one. I only summoned and ice gamin once in two games though. If I can open fire on important models I usually prefer the shot. I don't think I would stone for it, but if you're holding the right cards its ok I guess. 

[Azkral]

Nice report and very easy to follow. 

I think the trigger says after damaging, so the model dies without being pushed.

[thatlatinspeakingguy]

On 10.01.2018 at 4:05 PM, Joachim said:

We had a question here to which we did not find the answer, the valedictorian killed the acolyte but with a trigger to push, does the acolyte first die and therefore can’t be pushed, or does the acolyte get pushed and then dies at its new location. We played it that he still gets pushed, but is this the correct way to resolve this? I’m guessing we did it correctly though I wanted to check it here.

"after damaging" happens before the model is removed from play.

[Argentbadger]

I couldn't agree more with Diceman87's praise for your style; it is detailed enough to be able to follow the action closely without being needlessly bogged down in minutiae.

How do you plan to use your high cards with this crew?  With the mix of summoning and straight-up damage from Rasputina, it seems like you could easily switch focus between bringing Ice Golems and killing stuff directly.

[Joachim]

1 hour ago, Argentbadger said:

I couldn't agree more with Diceman87's praise for your style; it is detailed enough to be able to follow the action closely without being needlessly bogged down in minutiae.

How do you plan to use your high cards with this crew?  With the mix of summoning and straight-up damage from Rasputina, it seems like you could easily switch focus between bringing Ice Golems and killing stuff directly.

Thanks for the nice comments. I plan on doing some more battle reports, also because writing it down its actually really easy to spot plays that won you the game or cost you points. And that is a nice learning experience.

 

I agree that that is a very important skill if you play rasputina, especially now with the summoning upgrade, what to use your high cards for and what to use your ap for. I've once used a red joker to summon an ice golem. But that red joker can cause a lot of damage.

I usually just try to look at how to score my vp. I'll usually prioritize using decembers curse with rasputina. If i'm in a good position and there are good targets you should 9 times out of 10 being using decembers curse. In this game i was up against nicodem who summons a lot on lower wounds, so that makes the choice really easy, it is more resource efficient to blast 3 summons of the table, than to block their approach using ice pillars or to summon an ice golem who can max swing twice that turn. I also wouldn't gain activation advantage.

If you go up against for example the valedictorian, with hard to wound and armor, and no models around it to blast onto, then decembers curse becomes a lot less efficient, probably gonna hit min3 damage going to 2 most of the times. In this case I like using paralyze if she is in range, as it is an easy way to free up your other 2 ap to do other stuff, and her threat is delayed for another turn. 

If there is scrap available and you have no need for your high tomes you have the chance to summon an ice golem. It is great to get it in around turn 3, enemies will be closer, hopefully an ice gamin has died and dropped a scrap in the middle of the action, then the ice golem can use its melee expert to swing twice. They come in at 6 wounds and with their crappy defense, their armor won't keep them alive, so if I get those two ap out of them, and the enemies has to deal with it and it then possibly explodes, I get a whole lot out of that 1ap, high tomes and 1ss. I have also summoned an ice golem on my half of the board. He then had 1 ap to walk cause he can't charge. That is a huge difference in what you get out of the ice golem when you summon it. 

About summoning ice gamin, I have done it once in the two games I played with this upgrade. when you really need a body somewhere to hold a position, a new mirror, an ice gamin to put up his aura, etc. it can be worth it, but it is more situational than the ice golem.

 

To summarize this a bit:

- If there are efficient targets or clumped up enemies I'll usually go for just blasting the enemy.

- If there is a good choke point that i can block with ice pillars I usually do this with wendigo to free up raspis ap, if it is crucial though, raspi can go for it.

- I prefer summoning around turn 3, maybe 4, and try and use my long range turn 1 and 2 to harass the enemy. This way you can usually summon the ice golem in a good position, so he can at least use his melee expert to swing. They're good ap sinks, cause they do have armor2 and still explode when they die. If raspi is not under threat and you can activate her late, you have a better idea if you can use your high tome on this.

[Azkral]

On 14/1/2018 at 3:46 PM, thatlatinspeakingguy said:

"after damaging" happens before the model is removed from play.

Core Book:

"When a number of points of damage is taken by a model, it reduces its current Wounds by that amount. If the model is reduced to 0 or fewer Wounds it is immediately removed from the game as killed."

So after damaging triggers dont activate, as far as I understand.

[thatlatinspeakingguy]

3 hours ago, Azkral said:

Core Book:

"When a number of points of damage is taken by a model, it reduces its current Wounds by that amount. If the model is reduced to 0 or fewer Wounds it is immediately removed from the game as killed."

So after damaging triggers dont activate, as far as I understand.

This sentence tells you nothing about triggers timing. Take a look at page 32 of big rulebook:

"After damaging: These effects happen after Step 5 and only if the target suffers 1 or more damage from the Action. These effects are resolved before the damaged model is removed if it was killed by the damage."

[Azkral]

10 minutes ago, thatlatinspeakingguy said:

This sentence tells you nothing about triggers timing. Take a look at page 32 of big rulebook:

"After damaging: These effects happen after Step 5 and only if the target suffers 1 or more damage from the Action. These effects are resolved before the damaged model is removed if it was killed by the damage."

Ok, I didn t found that before.