New release approach.

[Regelridderen]

Nice to see that Witness is coming out now.

And unlike the Malifaux Burns expansion, I really appreciate that we aren’t getting any rules unveiled far beyond release, and won’t go through a year of proxies - or just waiting for our new toys to come out.

So bravo.

[TimH]

I mean that's going to depend on the faction. Madness of Malifaux comes out in October at which point everyone will have the rules for all the new models, and while Damian looks set to have his full line up by the end of November there will still be 5 remaining masters to release. If you conservatively put these at say 2 months of releases per master then one of the keywords is going to be waiting about a year to have their toys and so will likely be being proxied in any tournament settings (especially if all the new masters are about the same sort of strength as Damian is proving to be).

This doesnt even account for the fact that tOS is slated for a big release at somepoint in the year, alongside probable starter boxes for 10T and potentially one or two other factions.

[Mindbadger]

Yeah, as TimH said, unless they are releasing all of the keywords at once, which I doubt they'll do, some of the crews will have to be proxied and all their stats and rules will be known ahead of time. Not a huge amount different from last time. 

I'm actually in the opposite camp, I love seeing the information early and being able to plan and theory craft with it. I'm ravenous for more spoilers!

[Adran]

I guess it's a slightly new release approach, in that they have delayed the release of the book for a couple of months, and because of the widespread use of the app the cards are widely available for the prerelease models, but on the whole I don't think it's going to make much difference over all, wyrd is going to spread its releases over the year, and the bulk of those releases are likely to be in the book released so someone will be waiting most of the year for models I expect. 

[TimH]

Unfortunately there just isn't a way to do it that will keep everyone happy. Wyrd could have not released Damian or the book, have a year of no releases for faux but starter boxes and then dropped everything at the end of the year in one mega release but that would have people complaining about a drought of new models for Faux. They could release all the master boxes up front but none of the ancillary models or dual boxes for the new crews and have every faction have something but everyone would need to proxy. They can do what they are doing which appears to be 1 keyword at a time which will mean the released keywords wont have to wait too long for their full lineups but the ones later in the year will have to proxy an entire keyword for the better part of a year if they want to play with the new toys...

Knowing an arcanist player though I can attest to the fact that frontloading the faction that didn't most of it's Title boxes until the very end of the release list has been well recieved.