Bayou Errata

[ShinChan]

8 minutes ago, zeno said:

With the change to Focus (maxed out at 2). Was the previous change to Mah's Horrible Hollerin' really necessary?

Yep, still. It was too action efficient, even capped at +2.

This also opens the possibility of improving some of her worst models.

[Thatguy]

16 minutes ago, zeno said:

With the change to Focus (maxed out at 2). Was the previous change to Mah's Horrible Hollerin' really necessary?

Probably not any more, but there was a year between the two changes, so it mattered for a year.

[Thatguy]

3 minutes ago, ShinChan said:

Yep, still. It was too action efficient, even capped at +2

I don't think so. I mean I don't think Blasphemous Ritual was massively warping the Meta and Horrible Holerin' + Creative Cussing eats Master AP and a card. 

[Cats Laughing]

Bayou will want to look at the interaction of The Jury and the new summoning tokens on Demise->Bayou Gremlins/Piglets and summoned stuffed piglets and the like...

 

It's kind of dumb and expect a few instances whet you don't even get an activation with your summoned model.

[Thatguy]

7 minutes ago, Cats Laughing said:

It's kind of dumb and expect a few instances whet you don't even get an activation with your summoned model.

Yeah, it's going to hurt, but that is sort of the point of an anti-summoning tech piece. 

I personally would have made an exception for summoned models from Demise getting the token, since they're really meant to be the same model in a different state. Or change the Demise ability to a replace. Idk how that would interact with becoming Insignificant though.

[ShinChan]

9 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

Yeah, it's going to hurt, but that is sort of the point of an anti-summoning tech piece. 

I personally would have made an exception for summoned models from Demise getting the token, since they're really meant to be the same model in a different state. Or change the Demise ability to a replace. Idk how that would interact with becoming Insignificant though.

That will also break "Smarter than I look from Som'er". At least the damage from the Jury is only 1/turn, could be worse.

[Thatguy]

Playing my first game with Somer post nerf today. 

I'll try and remember to take pics and report back.

[Thatguy]

Got my game in. It was not great. Lol

I lost 7-2 against an opponent who had never played his Master before. 

I will try and post a batrep with more details soon. But at the risk of being a bit doom and gloom, my take away was: Post-nerf Big Hat can be solidly mid-tier, if you play smart and your opponent doesn't bring any sort of counter.

 

 

 

 

[Rufess]

Were you playing GG2? Because I think Som'er would not preforming well in GG2 even before nerf.

[Math Mathonwy]

5 hours ago, Thatguy said:

Got my game in. It was not great. Lol

I lost 7-2 against an opponent who had never played his Master before. 

I will try and post a batrep with more details soon. But at the risk of being a bit doom and gloom, my take away was: Post-nerf Big Hat can be solidly mid-tier, if you play smart and your opponent doesn't bring any sort of counter.

Very interested in hearing your thoughts.

Somer had (and still has) one of the highest skill floors and ceilings in the game, I feel, and when used by an experienced player he could feel rather oppressive unless you teched against him and knew what you were doing. I'm afraid that now there's a massive skill requirement resulting in a decidedly mediocre result.

I also agree with @Rufessthat GG2 doesn't seem to favour Somer. I suppose Break the Line and Corrupted Ley Lines are possible strats for him but it seems like we have better options for both within the faction. Without the Summon nerf Somer would've been pretty legit for Break the Line.

[Scoffer]

The funny thing about Somer nerf is that he's still very good as a secondary master. He can summon two good ol boys and secure a flank or control center while the rest of the crew is doing strategy. Tried it with Mah in gg1, worked pretty well.

[Thatguy]

14 hours ago, Rufess said:

Were you playing GG2? Because I think Som'er would not preforming well in GG2 even before nerf.

Yes. It was pretty rough.

 

Quick Breakdown:

I took:

Somer
Lenny
Sammy
The Sow
Spawnmother
Cooper
I know it  probably isn't a great Big Hat list, but I wanted to go really hard on summoning, to test the new rules and GG2. I figured, even if summoning is bad currently the abiliyt to bring 5+ models onto the board a turn should get overwhelming pretty fast.

He took:
Mei Feng
Metal Golem
Metal Gamin
x2 Survivors
Tanuki
Mechanical Porkchop
I played @Touchdown. I don't mean to disparage his abilities, he's a good player. But this was his first time with the crew, so I expected some more player errors on his side. If he had any they were minor enough for me not to remember.

The Game:

Strat- Break Their Line, I picked Breakthrough and Spread them out, counting on Summons to be able to scheme, even if they couldn't do the strategy. I put the Sow on one Flank (Flank Deployment) and Spawn mother on the other, everything else went to the center.

I made a mistake committing Cooper too early, to try and remove some scrap and prevent him from getting control of the center uncontested. Mei and the Golem punched Her and her newly summoned Gamin to death for it.

By turn 2, things were going badly. I lost Cooper and Sammy, who had banished the Metal Golem and Porkchop and drawn me some cards before dying. To try and get back in the game I pulled The Sow from a flank to charge Mei, she had Injured +1(Sammy Hit her with Jynx, but she top decked a 13 to avoid beign sent to the void), down to 5 wounds and was out of stones and cards The Sow was on +flips from Grit. I managed to super whiff though, and The Sow lost it's last wound to Burning. I cheated my high card to try and get initiative and end Mei with Lenny before she could Vent Steam, only to get cheated over, loosing both initiative and my high card for Somer's summoning. Rather than Lenny splating Mei, Mei managed to killy Lenny, two skeeters and the Sow. With Somer and the Spawnmother being the only models that could interact with the stratedy, and me having failed to remove any of his models, it was pretty much game at that point.

I scored one Strategy point and one point for Spread them Out. He got everything but a point form Let Them Bleed, thanks to The Sow burning to death in a timely manner. Somer managed to summon a Spit hog, a skeeter and a single Bayou Gremlin all game, thanks to bad hands and me cheating initiative turn 2.

 

My take always:
Somer was always eating your highest card to Summon, now it's even more important with stat 5.

No Defensive Bayou Two Card hurts a lot. Bayou Gremlins used to have a pretty good chance of slowing things down before they hit your important stuff, this is less likely with defense 4-5, 2 wounds and no other defenses.  In this game a Tanuki slapped down at least one Bayou Gremlin.

Mobility still hurts. Mei Feng and crew could jump over defensive lines to hit important back field stuff. The Mechanical Porkchop's 30" threat range is rough, and it denied me Breakthrough this game. Blasts still hurt, like Mei Feng killing 4 models in an activation and completely guaranteeing activation control.

Big Hat used to have some room to play around and try new stuff. That's pretty much gone from list building. If you have to bring a tech piece like Gluttony and go OoK for a couple scheme runners to do schemes and strats that don't take place in the center, a good chunk of your list is gone. Especially since Lenny is an auto-include.

Somer being able to shoot with Pig Eating Grin is nice, but in my experience he was too busy moving into position, summoning and now scheming, to stack focus to get the most out of free attacks.

 

I will try Somer and Big Hat again in a more "traditional" style list and see how it goes.

9 hours ago, Scoffer said:

The funny thing about Somer nerf is that he's still very good as a secondary master. He can summon two good ol boys and secure a flank or control center while the rest of the crew is doing strategy. Tried it with Mah in gg1, worked pretty well.

Yeah I had a similar idea. If Big Hat nerf and GG2 hurt enough I might try and see what lists I can pull Big Hat stuff into OoK.
 

[touchdown]

The loss of defensive Bayou 2 Card is huge. Lenny goes from one of the best tar pits in the game, to relatively kill-able. I think it took me 4 master AP plus some very good work from vent steam. Although, I think Mei is particularly good at this, it's hard to justify stones for all those 1 and 2 points of damage that keep adding up, and while a min 2 on a master doesn't look great, if you're Jackhammer Kicking, and hitting, that's 4 damage per AP (or 5 if Vent Steam is up). Sammy was almost tougher thanks to Flinch haha.

I thought B2C needed to be a little worse because it felt impossible to use shockwaves against Big Hat previously, but this goes really far.

The summon stat decrease is also pretty big, a high card of 10 is rough but with +1 that's still opens up a lot of options instead of Bajonista, 2x Bayou Gremlin, or Skeeter + Bayou Gremlin. I don't know if a spit hog, crier or 2x skeeters would have made a difference but I'm sure it would have felt more fun to have the options at least.

The summoning changes were also huge but obviously not specific to Big Hat.

I didn't even notice what the other changes did.

[Bober]

Somer
Lenny
Sammy
The Sow
Spawnmother
Cooper

 

This is probably the worst Somer crew i have ever seen. Really. You should lose and it is only your fault. 

[Thatguy]

32 minutes ago, Bober said:

Somer
Lenny
Sammy
The Sow
Spawnmother
Cooper

 

This is probably the worst Somer crew i have ever seen. Really. You should lose and it is only your fault. 

kek

Mind showing me what I did wrong? Or posting your A+ list?

[Maniacal_cackle]

7 hours ago, Thatguy said:

kek

Mind showing me what I did wrong? Or posting your A+ list?

I don't know anything about Som'er, but my experience with 'hire all the summoners' is that you end up feeding all your cards/stones into summoning, rather than immediately impacting the game. So often going overboard on summoning doesn't pay off, unless there's a specific engine that you're trying to abuse. Examples of engines that work:

• (pre-nerf) Molly & Kirai: molly draws a million cards, so Kirai can summon twice, while still having gas for the rest of the crew.
• Dreamer + Zoraida + Widow Weaver: Zoraida can draw an extra 6 cards a turn, and provides a scrap for WW to summon off of, so you have a really clean engine going.

Those work because the specific synergies line up (particularly card draw), but without those sorts of shenanigans you may struggle to get cross-keyword summon engines to work.

[Edek]

10 hours ago, Thatguy said:

kek

Mind showing me what I did wrong? Or posting your A+ list?

Apart from what Maniacal_cackle said, a good number of those summoners require certain markers and suits to summon, so in addition to spending an action to summon a model you also spend actions preparing resources. And by the very nature of this roster you can start actually doing stuff probably turn 3 when you have something to fight with, assuming your opponent didn't kill your summons and effectively wasted your actions.

Another problem is that your summoners are the only models that can interact with strategy markers. 

And Lenny's aura isn't used to its full potential the less you run Big Hat models.

 

[Scoffer]

10 hours ago, Thatguy said:

kek

Mind showing me what I did wrong? Or posting your A+ list?

"Minor" summoners drain hand resources and give very little in return. With gg2 changes you can't score strategy with summoned models => all your list is working to score only 4 VP. Break The Line is very action-hungry => every action you spend on summoning takes you one action further from scoring strat points. If you don't summon and use your summoner's actions to walk/interact you waste the stones you paid for it's summoning ability.

Flooding the table with piglets, gamins and gupps can't prevent your opponent's mobile crew from scoring and can't put enough pressure. With lots of pass tokens your opponent most likely wins initiative, kills a couple of little guys in the first activation => gets the advantage of the last activation and saves 1-2 pass tokens to improve initiative on the next turn.

Most ook picks you took lose a lot of their efficiency without in-keyword synergy. Especially Sammy. 

[Adran]

17 hours ago, Thatguy said:

Yes. It was pretty rough.

 

Quick Breakdown:

I took:

Somer
Lenny
Sammy
The Sow
Spawnmother
Cooper
I know it  probably isn't a great Big Hat list, but I wanted to go really hard on summoning, to test the new rules and GG2. I figured, even if summoning is bad currently the abiliyt to bring 5+ models onto the board a turn should get overwhelming pretty fast.
 

Did you ever bring 5 models onto the table in a turn?

I would be surprised if you ever managed more than 2 or 3 a turn. All that summoning is card and suit and resource intensive with limited ways for you to bring in those resources yourself. 

As I see it you need rams for the spawn mother, as well as passing 2 simple duels, crows or actions for the Sow, Scrap for Cooper, enemy scheme markers for Sammy and Masks for Sommer. And the models have keyword interactions with keywords you aren't bringing, there are no other Kin and Wizzbang for Sammys card draw, very few big hat for Lenny and Sommer, very little poison for Cooper. 

If you were given time to build up your forces, then the summoned models could start to overwhelm in numbers, but without that time it probably costs you more to put the models on the table than it takes to remove them. 

The list would not have been scary last week against an opponent that has an idea what you are up to, and Mei is probably a good leader to give you problems in that she can be in your face on the first turn if she wants. Trying it with the errata summoned and in a gaining grounds where you can't use summoned models to score a lot of the points is just asking to be slaughtered I think.  

I'm not sure you can really judge big hats power level based on this list, because it ignores so many strengths of the keyword, to focus on 1 aspect, and I don't think it focuses on that aspect well. 

 

[Thatguy]

9 hours ago, Maniacal_cackle said:

Those work because the specific synergies line up (particularly card draw), but without those sorts of shenanigans you may struggle to get cross-keyword summon engines to work.

Sammy helps take the hand load off. Not that Som'er is usually hurting for cards thanks to Expendable models. 

The Sow is low on card hunger, needing only a 6 to summon with a corpse or scheme maker. Spawn Mother is worse wanting a 6+ ram, stone or both. Cooper is (outside of Somer) the hardest with an unsuited 8 and also some sort of scrap generation. 

Prior to the Summoning nerf, Somer+Sow+Spawn Mother was a combo I avoided taking together due to potentially being oppressively strong. Lol

 

5 hours ago, Scoffer said:

Minor" summoners drain hand resources and give very little in return. With gg2 changes you can't score strategy with summoned models => all your list is working to score only 4 VP. Break The Line is very action-hungry => every action you spend on summoning takes you one action further from scoring strat points. If you don't summon and use your summoner's actions to walk/interact you waste the stones you paid for it's summoning ability

Yeah. Like I said in the short batrep this wasn't a traditional Big Hat list. I intentionally went heavy into Summoning to try out the new Summoning rules. 

 

5 hours ago, Scoffer said:

Most ook picks you took lose a lot of their efficiency without in-keyword synergy. Especially Sammy

Really? I find Sammy doesn't lose much when being taken OoK. 

What Sammy wants is cheap low damage models to slap him for a card draw fast and glowy tokens. And healing to put him, or the other kin/wiz-bang model back up to full health. I feel like he has more Synergy in Big Hat than in Kin since stacking injured is better with more low stat attacks to utilize it. Or did prior to shifts in hot Big Hat has to play.

In this game Sammy pulled his weight drawing cars cards and Glimpse the Void-ing the Metal Golem and Porkchop and getting injured on Mei. 

[Adran]

You've got more big hat experience than me, but can I ask how did any of the changes affect you? 

How often did you find yourself 1 off the summon you wanted? Or wanting to remove the upgrade. How often did the restricted Bayou two card actually come up? After all you didn't have too many Big hat models and failed to summon more. Based on what you two say it mean that Lennie was more at risk  when attacked, which isn't too surprising if you are using several cards a turn to summon, you're not going to be able to cheat the df as easily. Did you think to save more cards for df duels, or did you still play as if you were able to B2C your df flips and not hold cards to help protect you? From my limited experience B2C on defence largely only occurs when I've got a low card on the flip, and am losing. I can often cheat in a mid card from my hand to achieve a similar result, but obviously that uses up cards from hand. If my opponent is prepared to cheat to hit, then its probably not going to make much difference. (I would generally not B2C a 6+ card if there was a reasonable chance it would put the accuracy modifier on a straight damage flip, but that might just be me).  

From what you summoned, even with old rules the best you could have summoned was a good old boy and 2 skeeters (Or 3 bayou gremlins instead of the skeeters). And I assumed you summoned the Spit hog to help heal Sammy, so that wouldn't have made much much change. 

But, like I said, the list looks like it starts the game wanting resources very badly, and if you get the time to get those resources, it can continue to feed itself through the game, but in this game, from what I read (and this may be completely wrong, but its what I'm getting from what you say) you didn't get time to get the resources and were unlucky enough to not draw them either, and because of that you died. By the end of turn 2 you had lost all but 2 of your starting models, and whilst the B2C may have helped save Lenny a little longer (I'm not sure I would have used it against Mei very often its too much of an unknown risk with her ability to gain suits), the rest doesn't look like the errata/gg change made much difference. (You played it, so you ought to know better than me). 

[Thatguy]

1 hour ago, Adran said:

You've got more big hat experience than me, but can I ask how did any of the changes affect you?

I think that the GG2 Summoning Changes,  had some big and fairly obvious impacts. 

The Nerf to Somer's stat was less impactful. Turn two in 10 cards (draw soulstone, expendable deaths) I saw a 13 but then nothing higher then a 10. So lack of Summoning was in part to some unfortunate luck but also bad planning on my part, trying for initiative with a 13 and losing. Looking back on it, Turn 1 was a more interesting impact from the nerf. I had a 12 in hand. I could have chosen to Summon a Good Ol' Boy. I opted to go for the Spit Hog to try and keep Cooper alive, if she could have made it to the next turn and gotten some heals and shielded, it could have been a very different game. Pre-nerf that would have been a Spit Hog AND a Bayou Gremlin. That would have added later card draw and another blocker  try to keep Cooper alive. 

1 hour ago, Adran said:

By the end of turn 2 you had lost all but 2 of your starting models, and whilst the B2C may have helped save Lenny a little longer (I'm not sure I would have used it against Mei very often its too much of an unknown risk with her ability to gain suits)

Bayou two Card is generally something you don't want to have to use on Lenny or Somer or any important piece. But it still adds survivability to those pieces by upping the ability of you griblies to eat AP and slow models down. Mei is mobile enough that she has less problems getting past the front line, but if you can foil a single Dragon Kick or make the opponent to use cards to hit a Gremlin it can take the wind out of an assault, at no additional cost to you 

 

Prior to the Nerf, I rarely used Make Me Proud Boys, because it was almost always better to have your opponent spend the actions to kill your stuff. Without defensive Bayou Two Card, One For The Team seems more attractive despite being more limited. 

[touchdown]

23 minutes ago, Thatguy said:

Prior to the Nerf, I rarely used Make Me Proud Boys, because it was almost always better to have your opponent spend the actions to kill your stuff. Without defensive Bayou Two Card, One For The Team seems more attractive despite being more limited. 

Maybe specifically against Foundry who can just Ride the Rail away too

[Thatguy]

4 minutes ago, touchdown said:

Maybe specifically against Foundry who can just Ride the Rail away too

I think that was definitely part of my loss. Lol

Like Scoffer said

8 hours ago, Scoffer said:

With gg2 changes you can't score strategy with summoned models => all your list is working to score only 4 VP

I was shooting for a 4-6 point game from the outset. I was counting on Summoning to get my schemes fuffiled and then score a Strat point or two and play denial.

Chalk it up to general dumbness, or not much experience with Foundry but I was pretty blindsided by how fast the Pork Chop was. 30" threat range or being able to move 24" and interact is pretty incredible. Definitely not a crew to try Breakthrough against. Lol

 

[Scoffer]

5 hours ago, Thatguy said:

Really? I find Sammy doesn't lose much when being taken OoK. 

In Kin and Wizz-bang Sammy draws 3-6 cards each turn. It's possible to achieve something close to that result ook shooting her with bayou gremlins, but it will also need a lot of healing to keep her alive. While in kin/wizz-bang that damage is spread between many different models. Also taken ook Sammy doesn't benefit from damage taken by other models during their activation - for example from hazardous Vent Steam aura.