Newbie. Crew for M3E Arcanists

[doktor_g]

Hey folks,

I have never played Malifaux but I have chosen the Arcanists mainly based on their aesthetic. Would y'all make some suggestions on a competitive first crew for me to play? My group is competition / tourney based. I want a punishlingly brutal list to smite these fools.  

[Trample]

If you have't played before and want to be brutal, which I interpret as damage, I would probably pick Ironsides or Hoffman. Both are pretty straightforward and both give you a couple of in-your-face beaters to throw at your opponent. Ironsides has Howard Langston and The Captain while Hoffman has the Peacekeeper, Joss, and Howard. Both crews have tokens to deal with, but every arcanist crew has something complex (summoning, burning, upgrades, etc...) so you'll have to pick something! 

Ironsides is all arcanist while Hoffman is dual faction guild so I would likely default to Ironsides. The Gunsmiths are great, so it would be another thing pushing me in that direction. I think they're probably pretty competitive, although we're early in M3e. They might not be the very pinnacle of arcanists but they'll be pretty good. 

[doktor_g]

So Ironsides core box? Full crew in there?

[dannydb]

I'd stay away from purchasing ironsides for the moment as her crew box is going to completely change come the new edition. 

 

Yes she is a great model but I'd hold off until the new box arives. Essentially she is the factions premier beatstick/tank able to heal and smack around other models. Where her crew struggles is Vs shockwaves and or blasts.

 

If your wanting to buy a beaty crew I'd suggest starting with Hoffman or mei Feng to begin with unless your willing to wait for ironsides new box.

 

Hoffman is more of a support master who buffs up his robots to let them good off and beat face. The entire crew has armour 1-2 pritty much so are quite tanky although fairly slow outside of hunters and vunrable to conditins

On the other side of things mei Feng is assassin/cruise missile. Able to do some crazy dammage to vunrable back line models of you can get some scrap near them. Her crew isn't as tanky as Hoffman but she is happyer in the fight and can fairly easily have the majority of her crew in combat turn 1

 

[mythicFOX]

8 hours ago, doktor_g said:

Hey folks,

I have never played Malifaux but I have chosen the Arcanists mainly based on their aesthetic. Would y'all make some suggestions on a competitive first crew for me to play? My group is competition / tourney based. I want a punishlingly brutal list to smite these fools.  

I'd start with either Kaeris or Mei Feng.  Both are damage dealers, Mei is more in your face, Kearis is more stand off and skirmishing.  Both crews are capable of covering most objective sets.

I'd start from their crew box's and let you expand in a number of directions.   

 

[Specky]

Hoffman and Toni might struggle with some of the more mobility orientated schemes/strats. Yes you'd go around killing better than most but I don't how well that will translate to the score board.

Hoffman to me has more severe hard counters than Toni with ignores armour. You can put up tempered steel of course but that's only one guy.

I think Mei can bring a more flexible crew with the option to bring in some bigger hitters like the Emissary if you want more punch. Neil, Kang and Mei should be able to dish out a decent amount of damage. The crew is generally pretty resilient with armour and hard to kill all over the place. Anyone who can remove scrap efficiently will hurt you - but that's not overly common

[doktor_g]

I'm not sure I want a brute Force crew. Id like some tricks too. Are Arcanists not the right direction? MeiFeng sounds like a 10thunders? I'm lost. 

[Specky]

24 minutes ago, doktor_g said:

I'm not sure I want a brute Force crew. Id like some tricks too. Are Arcanists not the right direction? MeiFeng sounds like a 10thunders? I'm lost. 

She swings both ways. Arcanist or 10T. She can also hire 3 different Bayou models (Sparks, Survivors and Mechanised Porkchop).

I don't know much about the 10T but people say she's got better options in Arcanist. I'd agree as Mecharachnid, Soulstone Miner and Steam Arachnids all go great with Mei. Joss, mobile toolkit, Kandara and firestarter have some synergy/speed to keep up.

[Adran]

Aestetic is a good reason to choose a faction.

Malifaux is different to most games in that you don't normally just build 1 list and use it for everything. You want to customise your list every game to fit the Stratergy and schemes, table layout (and opponent). So whilst people may well offer you a list, its unlikely to always be competitive. I'm going to talk masters for you. You can happily play with only 1 master, but you may well find in the long term your opponents will start meta picking against you if you have a highly competitive meta. The Master will tell you what models in faction are cheaper for you to hire. You don't have to restrict yourself to just those, but I would expect most lists to largely contain modles that don't have extra tax on them.

Arcanist have 8 Masters (Plus 1 dead man hand master).

Hoffman - Robot master, playes around with boosting his constructs. Farly tanky with some decent movement tricks. Has the downsides that he is duel faction, so part of his crew is from the guild faction (He can use it but no other Aracnist master can, so possible limited use). He also heavily relies on Armour as his crews protection. People will start putting lots of Armour ignoring things in their list.

Marcus - beast Master. He mutates his crew to make them better. he is probably more a hit and run crew.  He is duel faction as well. (Has changed the most between edition I think, so I dont' have much advice). New crew box coming out, but at least his old one is full of things he is likely to hire.

Mei feng -Kungfu constructs. Mei has a crew that is quick to redeploy, as long as some one has been there, and fairly hard hitting and durable. Downsides, relies on Armour and Scrap counters, so expect a competitive meta to counter pick against her. Also Duel faction.

Ironsides - Bubble brawler. She is at her best in the middle of a fight. Her crew likes to be there as well. They generally get better as they get hit. Down side, because of the nature of the small bubble to get your best effects, its often hard for ironsides to cover a lareg section of the board. Highly mobile crews may just avoid your bubble and score points whilst running rings around you.  As Said, her current box contains models for.a different key word, so the new box will bebetter for her crew

Colette - performers are a crew that don't really want to be in a fight. They are best at reducing combats, debuffign your opponents and scoring VPS. They probably have a very steep learning curve if you play other games, because you are unlikely to do well with Colette if your aim is to kill everything. (I mean you're unlikely to do all that well in Malifaux if you focus on killing over VP scoring anyway, but Colette really takes that up a notch).

Rasputina-  Long range blaster and area denile. She makes use of her Ice Pillars to control the battle field. They can be used to extend her range and LOS and also debuff the opponents and hide your crew. She is typically not very mobile.

Kaeris - Fire witch. She largely sets things on fire. She puts out areas of hazardous terrain, and uses those to her advantages as the burning from them will boost her crew whilst hurting the enemy. 

Sandeep - Gamin summoner. He makes use of lots of interlocking circles to make things work. He also wants to use parts of other crews (Gamin, and Golems).

 

People are suggesting brute force because you said you wanted a punishingly brutal list to smite.

All the crews will have some tricks. It depends on what you want as to what to get.

[mythicFOX]

1 hour ago, doktor_g said:

I'm not sure I want a brute Force crew. Id like some tricks too. Are Arcanists not the right direction? MeiFeng sounds like a 10thunders? I'm lost. 

Really good post from Adran above.  As he says some masters play in two different factions.

Worth noting that everyone in Malifaux has tricks, the difference is what they use their tricks to do;  movement, defense, disrupting the opponent, buffing your own models, summoning new models, etc.

It would help us to know what games you've played before and if so what factions / styles of play did you like?

 

[doktor_g]

The Masters explanation was very helpful. Insomnia tonight led me to a video review of MeiFeng who sounds pretty cool. Coming to Malifaux, I kinda wanted to paint pretty lady miniatures. It's a bummer to hear performers aren't very newb friendly. No matter. MeiFeng will be a challenge for me to paint. Other TTWGs I play are Historicals (Black powder, Hail Caesar, KoW Historic, and bolt action), SciFi (40k, Battletech, one game of infinity, dropzone commander, adeptus titanicus and epic 40k eons ago). 

[Adran]

1 minute ago, doktor_g said:

The Masters explanation was very helpful. Insomnia tonight led me to a video review of MeiFeng who sounds pretty cool. Coming to Malifaux, I kinda wanted to paint pretty lady miniatures. It's a bummer to hear performers aren't very newb friendly. No matter. MeiFeng will be a challenge for me to paint. Other TTWGs I play are Historicals (Black powder, Hail Caesar, KoW Historic, and bolt action), SciFi (40k, Battletech, one game of infinity, dropzone commander, adeptus titanicus and epic 40k eons ago). 

If you want to play performers, then you should do so, just appreciate that they have a hard learning curve, and don't get to disillusioned if it takes you a while to win. Also be prepared to have to learn how to play them from scratch because they don't go around killing the enemy, they go around scoring VPs. (This may give them problems in some game set ups where you need to kill, but its not insumoutable for them). And VPs are what win Malifaux games. Its totally possible to win with nothing left on the table and to win without killing any enemy models (I've not done these in the new edition yet,  but I did in the older editions)

[Trample]

8 minutes ago, doktor_g said:

 Coming to Malifaux, I kinda wanted to paint pretty lady miniatures. 

I know we're in the Arcanist forum, but have you checked out the Viks? They have that part covered and bring the brutal component you mentioned in the OP. They're outcast as opposed to Arcanist though. 

As Adran said, paint what you like. You can learn how the crew works. 

 

[dope_danny]

+for Mei feng. Just grab the Rail Crew core box then a Metal Golem and a box of Metal Gamin and thats almost all the core stuff you will ever need and more than enough to get started.

[Gnomezilla]

10 hours ago, dannydb said:

...Hoffman is more of a support master who buffs up his robots to let them go off and beat face. The entire crew has armour 1-2 pretty much so are quite tanky although fairly slow outside of hunters and vulnerable to conditions...

How do you get ‘vulnerable to conditions’? He has the automaton in-keyword for a lower cost, has a chance (albeit low) to remove conditions on his free action, this is the faction with the condition removal effigy and that’s a stompybot too...one of Hoffman’s stompybots with a power token can negate the Distracted negative flip at will...I would say he deals out as much as he takes there, with all the pulses for potential Injured and Stunned. Incoming blasts, pulses, and shockwaves aren’t going to give you happy days, though.

 

The flip side to having an inflexible and easily circumvented defense is that, this edition, Hoffman can hire nearly any type of offense he pleases (mostly threatening Df, although he can pulse some Mv duels) so the opponent won’t know whether his defenses will be useful either. So for a new player, his purchase list is going to be more dependent on the meta than it used to be. At least the hunters from his core box are currently all-around good value, and his watcher is still a great scheme runner (I know this is the faction of schemers with leap, but a fast flying Mv7 model isn’t shabby at it either). Guardians are a matter of taste. My meta loves them (or rather, really hates getting stunned by them). Others think they are too expensive.

Unfortunately the OP expressed a desire to paint pretty girls in dresses, and I can attest that girls are in extremely short supply around a Hoffman crew. I think the only time I hav managed it this edition was one outing with a steamfitter femme, then one secondary master, neither of which worked as well as I had hoped.

[dannydb]

12 hours ago, Gnomezilla said:

How do you get ‘vulnerable to conditions’? He has the automaton in-keyword for a lower cost, has a chance (albeit low) to remove conditions on his free action, this is the faction with the condition removal effigy and that’s a stompybot too...one of Hoffman’s stompybots with a power token can negate the Distracted negative flip at will...I would say he deals out as much as he takes there, with all the pulses for potential Injured and Stunned. Incoming blasts, pulses, and shockwaves aren’t going to give you happy days, though.

 

The flip side to having an inflexible and easily circumvented defense is that, this edition, Hoffman can hire nearly any type of offense he pleases (mostly threatening Df, although he can pulse some Mv duels) so the opponent won’t know whether his defenses will be useful either. So for a new player, his purchase list is going to be more dependent on the meta than it used to be. At least the hunters from his core box are currently all-around good value, and his watcher is still a great scheme runner (I know this is the faction of schemers with leap, but a fast flying Mv7 model isn’t shabby at it either). Guardians are a matter of taste. My meta loves them (or rather, really hates getting stunned by them). Others think they are too expensive.

Unfortunately the OP expressed a desire to paint pretty girls in dresses, and I can attest that girls are in extremely short supply around a Hoffman crew. I think the only time I hav managed it this edition was one outing with a steamfitter femme, then one secondary master, neither of which worked as well as I had hoped.

With low df and wp generally you can plaster conditions all over the place and the Medi bot can only get to so many places.

 

Also the showgirl thing was posted after my post. How am I to guess the op wanted to play showgirls from the opening post I was responding to.

 

I also think showgirls are the least "brutal" crew if your going for killing power.

 

A lot of the crew survive using tricks not hitting power or tankyness

 

[doktor_g]

@Danny. I just like the minis and am tired of painting hulking robots and musclebound superhumans. 

[doktor_g]

@ thread so the consensus purchase suggestion is:

MeiFeng Core Box

Metal Golem

Metal Gaiman

 

Is that a full crew? Do I buy these plus arcanist codex, and rulebook?

[dannydb]

That's probably a really good shout for a starting point. The only other thing worth picking up if you don't have one is a fate deck

[Nikodemus]

4 hours ago, doktor_g said:

Do I buy these plus arcanist codex, and rulebook?

Faction books have lore and model stats. Rulebook has rules (and lore). Stat cards and rules will be free to download on release.

So buy the books if you like. They're far from mandatory though.

If you hire entirety of Mei box, Gamins and Golem, you'll be at 49ss. Game size is 50ss and you probably want a few upgrades and leave some ss for your cache. So yea, a full crew in that sense. You may want a few extra models to handle some schemes and strategies better though. I don't play Mei so I wouldn't know what those are.

[Adran]

3 hours ago, doktor_g said:

@ thread so the consensus purchase suggestion is:

MeiFeng Core Box

Metal Golem

Metal Gaiman

 

Is that a full crew? Do I buy these plus arcanist codex, and rulebook?

That is a legal crew that can play 50 ss games and have a small amount of customisation. Certainly enough to learn to play with.

I would suggest your minimum buy would be these, (get them with an M3 sticker and they should have the M3 cards in),

the general upgrade pack (you might want to not use them as you learn, but you will want them soon)

and a fate deck. (Any deck will do but a malifaux fate deck saves you having to remember which suit is which).

Rules will be free, but I like a printed copy. The arcanist Codex will be useful for Lore and planning future purchases, but not essential (again, all the model rules will be available free on line).

[dannydb]

As for tactics mei is manuvabilty enough to do a wide variety scheams and pritty much all the statergies.

Essentially any scheam that wants you to get somewhere (breakthrough, deliver a message, harness layline, power ritual or outflank) mei and her crew can do

[Mycellanious]

17 hours ago, doktor_g said:

@ thread so the consensus purchase suggestion is:

MeiFeng Core Box

Metal Golem

Metal Gaiman

 

Is that a full crew? Do I buy these plus arcanist codex, and rulebook?

You're also gonna need to find something to act as Scrap markers. Lots of Scrap markers. I'd also recommend either card protectors and markers so you can write conditions and tokens on the cards, or something to physically represent them

[thewrathchilde]

@doktor_g....if I am not coming to the party too late I would also recommend going with Marcus as an option. His M2E crew box is still useful and I use almost everything in it (except the Snake) in just about any game I play with Marcus. I play both Marcus and Mei and enjoy both of them; you really can't go wrong with either. 

Go check out: https://thirdfloorwars.com. Craig has some great podcast episodes on here about Arcanists masters and the episode that comes out this week is supposed to be about Marcus according to his post on the A Wyrd Place Facebook Page. You should be able to get the new episode here on Tuesday: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/uwxm8-87b4d/TABLETOP-TALK---A-Third-Floor-War's-Podcast 

The M2E crew box Claw and Fang can be purchased at a decent discount through a variety of places right now and the box plus maybe another Cerebus, a Blessed of December, and a Scorpius and you are off to the races. With any of our masters a Soulstone Miner is a good buy as well.