New Player Question - How far in advance do you pick your crew in online tournaments?

[Invincible_Ink]

New player here. I started playing Malifaux about a year ago with a few friends. We started playing in person when
the pandemic situation still allowed it, moved things online a few months in, and recently I started dabbling a bit into
tournament play.

Now the way my friends and I played it, we determined a scenario and chose a leader a few days in advance, giving
us enough time and information to come up with a crew. Now I'm a bit of a tinkerer, and puzzling over my lineup till it
fits the scenario and opponent is one big appeal of the game for me.

But once I started playing people online, I found that not everybody does it like that. I had people locking in their
complete crew days in advance, while others didn't even choose their leader up until our live session started. I
I haven't encountered every master yet and don't know every model in detail so I have to admit that I struggled
with the latter.

That's why I wanted to ask the community how you are handling this. How far in advance do you set up your
games, choosing leader and crew? I wonder if there is a common best practice here, or if everyone does it differently.
What do all you think?

 

[Maniacal_cackle]

For in-person tournaments, we often play with the convention that it should take you no more than 15 minutes to create your crew and to read your opponent's crew (although I often set up base crews in advance and then adjust crew to situation).

For the vassal series, I try to setup my crew decently quickly so my opponent can read my models (and I can read theirs), but it varies quite a bit. Some people prefer to know whether they're attacker/defender before setting up their crew, in which case it can be easiest to do it on the day.

[muraki]

8 minutes ago, Invincible_Ink said:

That's why I wanted to ask the community how you are handling this. How far in advance do you set up your
games, choosing leader and crew? I wonder if there is a common best practice here, or if everyone does it differently.
What do all you think?

I think a lot depends on your group.  My usual opponent is a tinkerer, and likes to pick / counter pick to whatever I play.  I on the other hand am usually unsure about what I'll play until the moment i sit down and build a list (and Vassal just makes this worse as I dont even have to worry about pulling out models).

In the official malifaux rules, the process flow is Determine Schemes > Choose Faction > Declare Leader > Reveal Crews > Choose Schemes.  So I think knowing your opponent's faction (if you're playing a tourney / league, people usually declare that in the beginning) is a safe bet, as is knowing the strat / scheme pool (which TOs tend to send out beforehand).  That'll let you at least take a look at the different masters in a faction and see if there's any that your preferred master/masters couldn't deal with.  Sadly tho, I think that's all you can really expect to do beforehand (unless you talk to your opponent and you both decide to do the master declare step beforehand).

I agree tho, that doesn't give you a lot of time to tinker with lists (other than more general 'what would i do against Ten Thunders?!?').  I usually focus more on 'in this pool, what pieces do I need to accomplish the strats / schemes'.  If that's a fast model to get to the back and claim a marker, or someone to kill / hold up a target, I put that into my core group, and then leave a bit of flex at the end for 'oh no! stompybots, I need armor ignore stat!' models/upgrades/etc.

[SEV]

1 hour ago, Invincible_Ink said:

New player here. I started playing Malifaux about a year ago with a few friends. We started playing in person when
the pandemic situation still allowed it, moved things online a few months in, and recently I started dabbling a bit into
tournament play.

This is exactly my situation as well. As a new(ish) player I prefer to have a little bit of time to select my crew since there's a lot of master that I don't know super well. 

I'm playing in the World series event since November and most of my oponent are fine to select a master a few days in advance.

Also, people are competitive but generally super nice to beginner.

[Maniacal_cackle]

One thing that helps is to stay in communication, I think.

It is easy to forget to create and submit a crew, and with a bit of communication it can usually be easy to get opponents to create their list.

[Jesy Blue]

If the scenario is posted ahead of time, I pick the key word I want to play. Once I see the table, I have to either keep my initial choice or pick something best suited for the terrain. When opposing faction gets declared you make that choice again.

At every step there could be a variable to make you change your crew.

The good thing about the app is I can make 4-5 different builds of the same keyword based on different criteria and have them on hand.