Budget challenge: how cheaply could you play the faction?

[Maniacal_cackle]

Maybe you have an overzealous mother who loves to give gifts. Maybe 7 shots of tequlia led to ordering a few too many items... Regardless, imagine you suddenly find yourself owning all the core boxes for Ressers. How are you going to play/try out all of them in fifty stone games?

If you wanted to be able to play any core box within the faction, what would you consider the cheapest way to fill out your collection so that you could play everything? Would you pick up a set of versatile models like grave golem + grave diggers? Or snag models that is useful across multiple crews, even OOK?

Ignore extra models for summoners (like Kirai).

[newsun]

The cheapest way I play malifaux is by only buying one of each box for my main faction and try not to collect too many from the other two I'm not playing currently.

[CateranLlama]

Does your collection include Jack Daw?  Nicodem?

The absolute cheapest way to do it would be to fill in around what's in each master's box with the stuff from other keywords you already have.  So (for example) Reva's core box + an Onryo and two Punk Zombies.

The next step up in price would be to get the Dead Rider.  It can be purchased in a box by itself and is useful for a lot of builds.  And if you have Nico, Mortimer is actually versatile now too, if somewhat less widely loved.  That's enough points you should be able to hit 50ss with anyone.  

The problem with the Grave Golem is that it's from the Undying encounter set and that's not cheap.  Though if you went that route, you'd also get Manos, who is very good, and the Wanyudo (who has Reva's keyword, even though it's a TT model) and Mourners (even though they're sort of meh).  Archie is generally considered worth the OOK tax, but also out of stock everywhere I checked.  And the Carrion Emissary can be pretty useful to certain masters, but may only currently be available in the Carrion Fate 3E box which isn't the cheapest box out there and you can't use the two models in it at the same time.  Having a single gravedigger can be pretty useful sometimes, but I never seem to need/want both, and I don't know if $24 for one 6 ss model is worth it.  They're all options though, depending on just how low-budget you want to go.

[Maniacal_cackle]

Haha, well, my thinking is "I wonder if I can get a base set of models that makes it so I can buy any core box and start playing a new master without having to buy their sub-boxes."

For me personally, I split a gravedigger with someone else and sculpted my own grave golem, but just used that as an example. I wanted to try to phrase the question more broadly to apply to everyone.

I imagine a lot of people here would be happy playing any core box + dead rider + archie?

[marke83]

Yeah pretty much that - Archie+Dead Rider+Core Box. Carrion Fate can kinda substitute Archie, but these models have totally different roles and Emissary needs Zombies (easy to proxy). However, Carrion Emissary's 3" Aura is so good and the model is so mobile, it'll probably fit into most crews.