Waldo's Weekly - What's Cooler Than Being Cool?

[Kyle]

All right, all right, all right. Now Wyrdos,

Waldo was complaining about the cold recently. To be fair, everywhere on Earth is colder than where he’s from, so there’s only so much we can do. After getting him a heated blanket, a space heater, an ugly sweater, a winter hat, socks, hocks (horn socks), and wing-warmers, he still complained about the temperature. Not everything can (or should) be set on fire, Waldo. So, to suggest things could always be worse, we’ll be talking about just how cold things can get.

Today we're going to talk about one of the new Neverborn Masters, the ice cold Euripides. 

As you can see, Euripides has a fairly typical stat line, though he makes up for it with a whole lot of Health, which is appropriate for a Master on a 50mm base.

His first Ability, The Old Ways, is actually the thematic Ability for the entirety of the Savage Crew. It allows them to flip cards from their Discard Pile instead of their Fate Deck. This is a powerful Ability, as it effectively allows a Savage model to get double use out of good cards, albeit at the cost of a bit of damage.

Euripides also possesses Hard to Kill, which is another fairly common Ability that is shared by most of his Crew. It works in the same way as its M2E counterpart by giving Euripides a bit of protection against being killed by damage.

Intuition is a nod to Euripides’ role as a shaman and seer, and it allows him to look at (and rearrange) the top three cards of his Fate Deck as soon as he Activates. This gives him a great degree of foresight in just how he should act on his Turn, especially when combined with The Old Ways, letting him play cards out of his discard pile in lieu of using cards from his deck.

Future Sight is a defensive trigger that further builds upon Euripides’ precognitive abilities. While it doesn’t do anything in particular to protect him in the present, being able to knock Crow cards out of a Resurrectionist’s hand or to deny a Guild their high Rams can certainly have an impact on their future actions.

Finally, Euripides has Entomb in Ice, a powerful Ability that allows him to transform Killed models into Ice Pillars, all while denying Markers to his opponent. In M3E, if a Marker doesn’t state what size it is, it defaults to 30mm, so our Ice Pillars are 30mm pieces of terrain that block line of sight and can’t be moved through. Their Destructible Trait means that a nearby model can use an action to destroy the Marker, which prevents them from permanently sealing away portions of the board (and thus allows us to use more of them).

On the back of Euripides’ card, we see that he’s pretty good at pummeling people with his Huge Fists, which is appropriate for a giant such as himself. His Rake the Eyes trigger gives him a bit of control over his opponent’s Fate Deck, and the Sweeping Strike trigger allows him to deal Blast damage with a wide swing of doom.

It’s worth noting that Sweeping Strike is only really effective against enemy models; in M3E, attacks made against friendly models don’t generate Blast Markers, which helps to keep models honest. No more attacking a low-defense friend to drop non-resistible damage on the enemies standing near him.

Euripides’ Tactical Actions all revolve around Ice Pillars. First and foremost is Rune-Etched Ice, which creates Ice Pillar Markers and then forces nearby enemies to either leap out of the way or suffer some damage. His Triggers give him the option of summoning additional Pillars or forcing models further away from the Pillar, making them great at clearing an area.

Glacial Shove, however, is where Euripides really comes into his own. It allows him to grab an Ice Pillar and throw it across the board like a bowling ball, damaging anyone too slow to move out of the way. Between the Ice Pillars that he’s creating with Entomb in Ice and the ones created by Rune-Etched Ice, this savage giant should have plenty of ammunition to chuck at his enemies.

The final touch on this frozen package is Reflected Visage. By catching a glimpse of Euripides’ face in an Ice Pillar, all the models around it become Distracted, which gives them a on an opposed duel. Of course, if Euripides hits his Shattering Surprise trigger, the visage they see ends up being the real thing as he bursts forth from the Ice Pillar like a frozen Kool-Aid Man. Oooh yeah!

Euripides brings a different to the Neverborn and Malifaux as a whole, and he’s already quite fun to toss onto the table (especially against Rasputina – so many Ice Pillars)!

That’s it for Waldo’s Weekly in 2018! Waldo will be back January 9^th, 2019. As it turns out, Waldo is actually a pretty big fan of the holidays, and he promises to be tame while we’re gone. Hopefully the office isn’t a pile of cinders come the new year.

 

[Gnomezilla]

Aww man. You’ve gone and made a Neverborn sound interesting. I like this style of moving, possibly meleeing ice pillars way more than Raspy’s style of ice pillars. Having trouble bending my head around the cycling of the discard pile, though...

[Mike Wallace]

I've never looked twice at most Neverborn, except maybe Lucius because he dresses so sharply, but Euripides honestly looks like a lot of fun. 

22 minutes ago, Gnomezilla said:

Aww man. You’ve gone and made a Neverborn sound interesting. I like this style of moving, possibly meleeing ice pillars way more than Raspy’s style of ice pillars. Having trouble bending my head around the cycling of the discard pile, though...

The rule states you move the used card to the bottom of the Discard pile, so I suspect you can only draw the top card with this ability, not rifle through your Discards for the card you want.

[Da Git]

7 hours ago, Mike Wallace said:

I've never looked twice at most Neverborn, except maybe Lucius because he dresses so sharply, but Euripides honestly looks like a lot of fun. 

The rule states you move the used card to the bottom of the Discard pile, so I suspect you can only draw the top card with this ability, not rifle through your Discards for the card you want.

You use the top card from your discard pile (so you know exactly what you're flipping). It then goes to the bottom of your Fate deck (not discard pile) so if you use through your entire deck, you get those cards a 3rd time (fourth if you flip them again after reshuffling). It's really powerful for a measly 1HP. If you could rifle through your discard pile every single time, then the game would take forever.

[Bakuriel]

23 minutes ago, Da Git said:

You use the top card from your discard pile (so you know exactly what you're flipping). It then goes to the bottom of your Fate deck (not discard pile) so if you use through your entire deck, you get those cards a 3rd time (fourth if you flip them again after reshuffling). It's really powerful for a measly 1HP. If you could rifle through your discard pile every single time, then the game would take forever.

It is powerful, but it's also tricky to use at times. If you flip low all you have to use is low cards. You can cheat and gain that card again potentially, so that's definitely strong. But it also says no fate modifiers, so if there are any twists at all on the duel, it's a moot point. It's one of those things that's probably stronger on paper than in practice. Not necessarily weak, but not necessarily overwhelming. 

[Kadeton]

So with Future Sight, if I name Crows (for example) and my opponent doesn't have any Crows in hand but does have the Red Joker, are they forced to discard the Joker since it has all the suits?

I feel like Rasputina's Avatar would make a really good proxy for Euripides.

[Scatterbrain]

I'd be very interested to see a game of Euripides versus Rasputina, where ice pillars might be contested, and each possibly used to either Master's advantage or detriment? 🤓

[Phinn]

Both Abilities, Intuition and The Old Ways, also make you think very carefuly about the order in which you might want to do certain Actions or even what Actions you might want to declare.
The Old Ways seems very strong, but as soon as you perform Damage Flip, Duel with Fate Modifier etc., you not only loose the opportunity to declare The Old Ways, the high card, or stack of high cards even, will probably get buried under cards that are not worth suffering 1 damage for. Also, as the game goes on and your opponent has kindly contributed with some of his very own damage, you might want to think twice what cards you want to recycle 😃

Euripides looks very fun and, most importantly, like a master that other, lesser, Factions will envy us 😃

Can't wait to see the rest of his Box Set 🙂

 

3 hours ago, Kadeton said:

So with Future Sight, if I name Crows (for example) and my opponent doesn't have any Crows in hand but does have the Red Joker, are they forced to discard the Joker since it has all the suits?

Might be different in M3E, @Kadeton, but currently the Red Joker doesn't have all the suits, it has one suit of the player's choosing 🙂

Jokers (Rules Manual, Page 12 and 13): The Red Joker has a value of 14 and a wild suit. When the Red Joker is flipped or played, the owning player must immediately announce which suit the Red Joker will be during the Action.

[Adran]

15 hours ago, Gnomezilla said:

Aww man. You’ve gone and made a Neverborn sound interesting. I like this style of moving, possibly meleeing ice pillars way more than Raspy’s style of ice pillars. Having trouble bending my head around the cycling of the discard pile, though...

Don't worry I'm sure its a lie. You can't believe the neverborn propaganda.

There looks to be so many possible tricks to try and abuse the old ways. I can see some players (well ok me) spending forever to try and get that ideal turn where you end up with a deck of only 10 cards, and just keep using the old ways to get the good cards back into the deck. (I doubt it will work often enough to be a problem, but think of the stories...)

 

[MajorUndead]

Interesting preview.
Not surprised to see he has the "savage" keyword, after last week's keyword list.
It will be fun to see how many ice pillars you can put with him & cyclops (if they still can put ice pillars).

With the old ways costing hp, I guess you might want to bring in several big guys in your crew with him.

Can't wait to see more previews after the holidays!
I want to learn more about Von Schtook!

 

[Bengt]

It becomes important which order cards are placed in the discard pile after an action with this crew. In M2E you get to chose the order when moving multiple cards, I wonder if it will be the same in M3E.

Also, I think "...placed on the bottom..." sounds weird, "...placed at the bottom..." would be better IMO.

[Angelshard]

The reveal hand trigger seems insanely good. Knowing you opponents cards is a huge advantage in itself and if he's attacked more than once in a turn you can guarantee discards. 

I guess the reveal part is to prevent cheating, but I think it's too much. 

Other than that I love his card and theme. 

[Jesy Blue]

3 hours ago, MajorUndead said:

I want to learn more about Von Schtook!

... and I want to know more about Youko Hamasaki!

[Gnomezilla]

19 minutes ago, Angelshard said:

The reveal hand trigger seems insanely good. Knowing you opponents cards is a huge advantage in itself and if he's attacked more than once in a turn you can guarantee discards. 

I guess the reveal part is to prevent cheating, but I think it's too much. 

Other than that I love his card and theme. 

Is Allison Dade in your meta and forcing hand reveal now? It is very strange, but it hasn’t been new for awhile. And I can’t remember the last time I hit the watcher’s trigger to peek at the deck, and that’s even with it shooting Nellie to give her evidence on her defense trigger.

Happy to admit a weird ability put on defense will actually fire once in awhile, though, compared to offense.

2 hours ago, Bengt said:

It becomes important which order cards are placed in the discard pile after an action with this crew. In M2E you get to chose the order when moving multiple cards, I wonder if it will be the same in M3E.

Also, I think "...placed on the bottom..." sounds weird, "...placed at the bottom..." would be better IMO.

Cards go on the top of the deck, not at the top. There isn’t as strong a bias about putting them either on, or at, the bottom of the deck. That is weird now that you point it out. Deck boxes, you can’t put something ‘on’ the bottom of the box, yet it works for the deck. Seems like the deck is one of those objects that exerts a linguistic gravitational pull of its own on its component cards...Language is weird.

[Angelshard]

I haven't faced dade or Nellie at all, the active guild players here tend to use somewhat eccwntric and niche lists. But I think there's a huge difference between an effect where you can choose to sacrifice a scheme marker to keep your hand hidden and one you can't avoid. On top of that he discards a card and if he already knows your hand he can guarantee discards. That seems very powerful. I might be overreacting. But I find that abilities that manipulate hands are among the most powerful in the game. 

[yool1981]

Ruleswise he seems original enough and does not seem to overlap with Raspy. This was not easy I guess and required a lot of creativity.

Fluffwise, I am eager to read what his place is in our faction.

In terms of pure artwork quality, I like it more than the usual M3E artworks, although the size of the head is still very small for such a massive body (which is less disturbing for him as he is, after all a monster). I like the colouring also and I think that the saturated purple of the card and the fluorescent green of the preview background do not do it justice at all

In terms of art originality though, this does not strike me as very original at all and reminds me a lot of what PP did a few years ago...

 

[ezramantis]

Getting rid of friendly models generating blast markers?  I don't like this change. Part of the charm of the game for me has always been being able to target friendly models with detrimental effects, accepting some amount of sacrifice, to gain some amount of advantage. Sure, it can be annoying while playing vs a raspy crew to have her fire willy nilly into melee knowing that she's sure to hit my models with at least a blast, but that's Malifaux. Masters willing to sacrifice their minions for victory.

And effects like that reward out of the box thinking (another thing that makes this game better than other table top skirmish games). The number of times I've squeezed out a few victory points vs a superior crew with better abilities because I've done something like attack my own model to get a push trigger and gain just a few extra inches at the cost of hit points...

I mean, to get a good blast you normally need to do moderate or severe damage right? Why are they getting rid of this? If your willing to trade more damage to your models for less damage to opponents models, what's the problem? When I see it as a strategy my opponent is using I adapt and make it either a liability to use that strategy or just minimize their opportunities to abuse it like any other aspect of the game.

For me this rule always balanced out the fact that blast attacks didn't have a scatter die style mechanic in a way. (And that they generate the wierd blast marker instead of using a pulse from the target.) If an attack has a blast (grenade like effect) and misses hitting directly shouldn't there be the possibilty of still catching a piece of the target? We don't have that in this game but we do have the ability to turn our models into a homing device at which to lauch our missiles.

[Bakuriel]

3 hours ago, ezramantis said:

Getting rid of friendly models generating blast markers?  I don't like this change. Part of the charm of the game for me has always been being able to target friendly models with detrimental effects, accepting some amount of sacrifice, to gain some amount of advantage. Sure, it can be annoying while playing vs a raspy crew to have her fire willy nilly into melee knowing that she's sure to hit my models with at least a blast, but that's Malifaux. Masters willing to sacrifice their minions for victory.

And effects like that reward out of the box thinking (another thing that makes this game better than other table top skirmish games). The number of times I've squeezed out a few victory points vs a superior crew with better abilities because I've done something like attack my own model to get a push trigger and gain just a few extra inches at the cost of hit points...

I mean, to get a good blast you normally need to do moderate or severe damage right? Why are they getting rid of this? If your willing to trade more damage to your models for less damage to opponents models, what's the problem? When I see it as a strategy my opponent is using I adapt and make it either a liability to use that strategy or just minimize their opportunities to abuse it like any other aspect of the game.

For me this rule always balanced out the fact that blast attacks didn't have a scatter die style mechanic in a way. (And that they generate the wierd blast marker instead of using a pulse from the target.) If an attack has a blast (grenade like effect) and misses hitting directly shouldn't there be the possibilty of still catching a piece of the target? We don't have that in this game but we do have the ability to turn our models into a homing device at which to lauch our missiles.

My personal take on blasts is in favor of this change. While I understand strategically sacrificing your own units, and even enjoy doing so in certain games *cough*Skaven*cough* it's usually been a negative experience in malifaux. The fact that somebody can completely bypass my defenses, allowing for large chunks of damage against models that I've positioned for the sake of their survival. If my opponent can simply ignore that by firing at a friendly unit, then I've wasted all my effort trying to keep that model safe and those defensive moves may as well not exist in the game at all at that point. 

[lusciousmccabe]

It also eats up a lot of game time on flips, especially if randomisation is involved.

Euripedes looks cool. I like how so many of his actions are simple duels with no damage flip, to help him get the most of his Olds Ways ability.

[Gnomezilla]

*pictures the moving ice pillars being chucked overhead like a caber toss*

[Flint]

On 12/21/2018 at 11:33 AM, yool1981 said:

Ruleswise he seems original enough and does not seem to overlap with Raspy. This was not easy I guess and required a lot of creativity.

Fluffwise, I am eager to read what his place is in our faction.

In terms of pure artwork quality, I like it more than the usual M3E artworks, although the size of the head is still very small for such a massive body (which is less disturbing for him as he is, after all a monster). I like the colouring also and I think that the saturated purple of the card and the fluorescent green of the preview background do not do it justice at all

In terms of art originality though, this does not strike me as very original at all and reminds me a lot of what PP did a few years ago...

 

Ahh, a real artwork, not some marvel rejects... I remember those times.

[Da Git]

Euripides looks really cool (see what I did there!). Lots of fun, tactical options there. I'd love to know more about his fluff!

Second the calls for more Von Schtook!

[Gloomy]

I don't think future sight is too powerful because its a defensive trigger, as an opponent you have control over when it happens. You just have to make decisions when to attack Euripides, if you have a good hand with suits that you need maybe hold off on attacking him until your hand is depleted or you've already used the cards that you need. Also if your not prepared to reveal your hand don't attack him when there is a tomb on top of his discard pile as you know the trigger will definitely happen

[trikk]

Also, you can choose which card to discard so its pretty hard to have that 1 high card of the suit he picks. 

[Goodtest]

On 12/20/2018 at 2:28 PM, Scatterbrain said:

I'd be very interested to see a game of Euripides versus Rasputina, where ice pillars might be contested, and each possibly used to either Master's advantage or detriment? 🤓

Yeah!  Can’t wait for Rasputina versus Europides.