Dual Keyword Duel

[Jesy Blue]

What's the best dual keyword model?  One that incorporates both of the synergies of both of it's crews smoothly.
What's the worse dual keyword model?  One that is either just bad in one crew it belongs to, or bad in both crews.

For my money, Fermented River Monks are so perfectly balanced.  Chi mechanics, immune to poison, spends chi for effects, spends poison for effects, triggers to gain more chi, triggers to gain more poison.  It only gets the River's Conflux ability with Ten Thunders, but will passively be getting additional poison in the Bayou. They work wonderfully in Monk & Tri-Chi equally.

Benny Wolcomb sucks as a Bandit.  He has Life of Crime to remove scheme markers to gain fast, but his bonus action is to remove scheme markers to summon rats, which is lessened by Life of Crime.  He has the Drop It! trigger in his melee attack (a melee attack that gives out Blight Tokens, but Benny nor the Rats he summons can use Blight Tokens for anything), but he will not survive in melee.  He has no other Bandit synergy... if you can call any of the above synergy.
 

[Adran]

I think Iggy is a great mix, He adds extra use of burning for Wildfire and adds extra conditions for Woe. Probably helps that he is self sufficient in most ways.

 

 

[eddy]

Best Hinamatsu also as leader

[Trample]

Necropunks. They don't do much, but they do what they do pretty well. They are about as survivable as you get for a 5 point scheme runner with armor +1 and HTW (although only 4/4). The suited leap is pretty fantastic. When breakthrough is in the pool I take a punk and he just does it. Sabotage too. In certain situations they can take out another schemer. If you have the cards in hand for onslaught you could get up to 4 attacks and, since he has entropy it's OK if you leave your unactivated opponent on 1 wound. In Von Schtook they're often cruising with focused +1, so you can get that 4 damage on one attack. But you should probably be scheming with them. 

[Axelst]

I'm gonna have to disagree about Benny. With Wanted Criminal he becomes an insane card engine and being the only Bandit who can reliably generate enemy scheme markers without enemy models means he has synergises well with Parker, Wokou Raiders and Bayou Smugglers. 

[Jesy Blue]

1 hour ago, Axelst said:

I'm gonna have to disagree about Benny. With Wanted Criminal he becomes an insane card engine and being the only Bandit who can reliably generate enemy scheme markers without enemy models means he has synergises well with Parker, Wokou Raiders and Bayou Smugglers. 

If he only works in the crew because of an upgrade, I'll begrudgingly upgrade him from no synegy to poor synergy.

[Adran]

2 hours ago, Trample said:

Necropunks. They don't do much, but they do what they do pretty well. They are about as survivable as you get for a 5 point scheme runner with armor +1 and HTW (although only 4/4). The suited leap is pretty fantastic. When breakthrough is in the pool I take a punk and he just does it. Sabotage too. In certain situations they can take out another schemer. If you have the cards in hand for onslaught you could get up to 4 attacks and, since he has entropy it's OK if you leave your unactivated opponent on 1 wound. In Von Schtook they're often cruising with focused +1, so you can get that 4 damage on one attack. But you should probably be scheming with them. 

I'm not sure how much is just Necropunks are good, rather than they are a good mix of the two keywords.

3 hours ago, Jesy Blue said:

Benny Wolcomb sucks as a Bandit.  He has Life of Crime to remove scheme markers to gain fast, but his bonus action is to remove scheme markers to summon rats, which is lessened by Life of Crime.  He has the Drop It! trigger in his melee attack (a melee attack that gives out Blight Tokens, but Benny nor the Rats he summons can use Blight Tokens for anything), but he will not survive in melee.  He has no other Bandit synergy... if you can call any of the above synergy.
 

Whilst benny and the rats can't use blight, the rats can summon a rat king which can summon  a rat catcher which can use blight. Its a convoluted way, but Benny can be used to bring in models that make use of blight. 

[Axelst]

 

2 minutes ago, Jesy Blue said:

If he only works in the crew because of an upgrade, I'll begrudgingly upgrade him from no synegy to poor synergy.

It's an upgrade you'll often want in a Parker crew anyway. Benny doesn't need to be the one to have the upgrade, and it's not the only synergy he has with the crew. Even without the upgrade he can still place enemy scheme markers without having to attack the enemy.

[RisingPhoenix]

For my faction, Necropunks are tempting, but I'm going to have to go with Gracie.  Every time I've seen Gracie hit the table she's been a monster that took way more than her 8 stones worth of pain to put down.  Armor +2, Hard to Kill, 8 wounds, two different methods of healing, Ride With Me and Reckless, and Delicious Bacon on top of that.  So in short she's a 50mm base that can't be tied down in melee, can take 3 actions, can go sit in a chokepoint forever, and is nigh-impossible to kill.  One of the absolute gold standards of 8 soulstone models.  Talos could stand spending a few years at Gracie school learning how to be a real model.

I'd love to chuck Benny into the "WTF" pile because seriously, WTF (and double WTF if you're trying to use wanted criminal and praying your new 10 soulstone, 8 wound model lives and gets in range of anything) but I won't.  Instead I'm going off the Outcasts path into Arcanists.  Ice Dancers are performers!  Did you know that?  They can, um... interact with Ice Pillars.  And make new Ice Pillars.  And do absolutely nothing for the showgirls crew at all.  I'm not saying they're great for Rasputina, but why would any Colette player ever bring them?  

Oh and by the way, do yourself a favor and don't bring Wanted Criminal.  It's one of those things that works better on paper than it does in real life.  And it doesn't work particularly well on paper.  Sue and Mad Dog often have better triggers to declare even if they hit the suit, and only Parker's Highway Robbery is a consistent source of enemy scheme marker drops.  And the range is anemic, 6" is not the bandit crew's preferred fighting distance.  It's one of the worst ugprades in the entire game.  If you really want the effect, take a Bayou Smuggler.  I'm not sure why, but hey, 4 soulstones for a Bayou Smuggler is a deal.

[Axelst]

10 minutes ago, RisingPhoenix said:

I'd love to chuck Benny into the "WTF" pile because seriously, WTF (and double WTF if you're trying to use wanted criminal and praying your new 10 soulstone, 8 wound model lives and gets in range of anything)

Benny doesn't need to get close to the enemy to be effective. He'll turn your own scheme markers into rats and then turn the rats into enemy scheme markers. For each marker turned you will discard a card to draw at least two cards (more if you run two copies of wanted criminal or use bayou smugglers), move any wokou raiders 3 inches and you will still have scheme markers left to gain fast or turn into stones or cards with Parker. 

[RisingPhoenix]

So let me get this straight.  The idea is you use actions to drop scheme markers.  Then you have your 10 stone benny go and use his action to turn those scheme markers into rats.  Then you have other models go, and use their actions to shoot and kill the rats.  That lets you turn them into cards, at the rate of 1 AP/card for the rest of the game, as long as you're within 12" of a rat.  And all it cost you was 10 stones, an incredibly fragile engine, and y'know, 1 AP/card.  And you can take a 6 stone model to turn this into a 16 stone investment, that's even more "efficient"!

Was there a new scheme introduced where you score by drawing cards?  Why didn't Wyrd let us know?  Could we get more bang for our buck by, I dunno, shooting the enemy?  

This all seems massively off topic, and a bit of a joke.

[Maniacal_cackle]

All the ancestor/retainer models really interact with their keywords well. Same for elite/mimic 😜

But more seriously, Rogue Necro has solid synergy with both crews (even if the model is generally lacking).

In Neverborn, Widow Weaver has good, different synergies with puppets and nightmare.

[Adran]

12 hours ago, RisingPhoenix said:

So let me get this straight.  The idea is you use actions to drop scheme markers.  Then you have your 10 stone benny go and use his action to turn those scheme markers into rats.  Then you have other models go, and use their actions to shoot and kill the rats.  That lets you turn them into cards, at the rate of 1 AP/card for the rest of the game, as long as you're within 12" of a rat.  And all it cost you was 10 stones, an incredibly fragile engine, and y'know, 1 AP/card.  And you can take a 6 stone model to turn this into a 16 stone investment, that's even more "efficient"!

 

The whole process doesn't look that much more inefficient than the Philip and the Nanny card draw in the last edition, which was the engine that powered several crews to success. You get to draw 2 cards and discard 1 for killing the rat. Any model could do the killing for the card draw, it just has to happen near the Benny/the model with wanted criminal. (That doesn't include the extra bonuses you could get, such as more cards from Parkers bonus action later)

The whole bandit theme seems to be you use early game actions to drop markers that you can turn into extra actions else where. Benny has to spend 1 action getting the rats, but after that it can be anyones actions to get those cards. Is it worthwhile? That's up to you, and the way you play, but card draw can be very good for some players/crew.