What makes Teeth competitive?

[dboeren]

Gamebreaking or not, it sounds to me like the sort of thing that's quite likely to get errataed. Even if it's not broken today, infinite combos are tricky things and all it might take is one new model to suddenly turn it into an "I win" button. It would be best to correct it now before a problem happens.

[orius]

if you can do an infinate loop action it breaks the game

if you can draw a significant portion of your deck with 2 little 2 pt models with no negative draw back it breaks the game, and this lets you draw the whol dang thing...

I understand you found something cool, but if you seriously think this is as intended...well i dont know what to say, but im sorry but it isnt.

Grelins can draw tons of cards i mean if you have somer and multiple pig whispers in range you draw two for each model in range, which is already a ton of cards. You can cycle throught hem even by turning them into pigs! i am preatty sure that counts to get cards as well...

anyways, I am glad you spoke with your friends and didnt blind side them with this tactic, that is in good sportsmanlike conduct and thats all that matters is having fun, all together.

[sprue]

Try it out. See how many cards you can draw before your opponent kills one of the mosquitos. With bete noire your opponent will be able to summon only one mosquito. With other factions, any master will be able to use a soul stone to spray the landscape with mozzie guts. It seems woefully overpowered when you think about it but when you get down to it it's not hard for a good player to handle. A lot of people have already come up with a contingency plan to handle this.

[cain]

Try it out. See how many cards you can draw before your opponent kills one of the mosquitos.

All cards. Just spawn circle the insects around until your opponent runs out of activations.

Block the LOS with gremlins, but who will reach your deploymentzone in the first turn anyway? Even vs Bete Noir you can have 4 mosquitos at the start, so loosing one by her is nothing to care about.

Before starting the spawn to the opponents master. After the master is transformed into a new mosquito, continue the spawn walking until you find another target. Because you never run out of new mosquitoes and you always have one left and one new. Opponent will loose most of his figures until you run out of cards. Or he can block one attack by his first card hand if hes lucky. Just avoid slow to die models.

But would you run out of cards anyway? You need a red joker or the crow 13 to success. But because you always activate mosquitoes you still have gremlins left to activate (and to kill them).

Man i get to draw 2 cards. Again. Look its the red joker and the crow 13 i just used. What surprise because all other cards are in my hand.

So thats not a fair game and there have to be an errata somehow.

Edited September 24, 2009 by cain

[gru6y]

Its a sick combo and congrats, Sprue, for thinking of it.

Nevertheless, I would never want to play against a crew utilizing it. I would also not play it myself either.

Its a CCG style combo. One of a 'ok, now that I have my combo on the table, you can watch, and I will win' kind which would maybe make sense in proffessional play, but would instantly mess up any friendly game.

I can't see it not being erratad.

[Haight]

All cards. Just spawn circle the insects around until your opponent runs out of activations.

Block the LOS with gremlins, but who will reach your deploymentzone in the first turn anyway? Even vs Bete Noir you can have 4 mosquitos at the start, so loosing one by her is nothing to care about.

But, see that's the whole point - a game is not balanced if i MUST take something to shut down a combo you MAY bring. See the distinction ? If this lets your resource pool in a resource oriented game go infinite (or as infinite as possible in the parameters of the game), that's a bad thing for game balance.

Despite that there may be one or two counters that shut it down, the fact remains that there is a question if an infinite mill trick is something that was intended against "Lists not containing Bete Noire or possibly Killjoy".

The more i think about this the more i think the answer may be errata'ing (all actions) to state that a model must have more than one action to perform them, or to errata slow to state that slow models cannot perform (all actions).

It's intuitive, it's clean, and it doesn't go changing anything on any cards (a + in my book). I couldn't necessarily see any downsides - could anyone else ?

I'll say this Sprue, you've got an eye for finding cute chinks in the armor of balance. Even if your trick gets errata'd you can take comfort in the fact that you spotted something that will eventually contribute to making the game better.... and if it doesn't get errata'd... well, color me buying S'omer Teef.

[sprue]

Cain if you try to use parasitic infection on a master it's going to fail. The best result a mosquito can muster is 18 (ca2 + 14 from joker + 2 from reckless abandon) most likely it will be a 16 as the mosquito won't be in range of the reckless abandon aura. A master's average df is around 4 + they can cheat fate so lets say 10 + use soulstones. So the mosquito will probably fail and that ends the infinite activation. Additionally, there are lots of models with a df of 6 or 7 so they will have an easy time beating a 16 as well. Guild players can use Perdita as well. I seriously spent over an hour the other night typing up a list of tactics each faction can use to kill the mosquitos and I eventually got fed up with it because after an hour I'd only finished with the Guild, Res, and Arcanists. Every faction has plenty of tricks.

I'd like to see what your thoughts are after you've tried playing against a gremlin army that uses this tactic. Play a few games and see how it goes. Real games are going to be much more telling than a hypothetical scenario.

[n0signal]

The more i think about this the more i think the answer may be... to errata slow to state that slow models cannot perform (all actions).

It's intuitive, it's clean, and it doesn't go changing anything on any cards (a + in my book). I couldn't necessarily see any downsides - could anyone else ?

This gets my vote!! +1

[cain]

I'd like to see what your thoughts are after you've tried playing against a gremlin army that uses this tactic.

I would not play against someone with this.

The possibility alone to get an infinite play turn shows the problem. Technically your opponent can play the spawn larva game until you ran out of activations. This is already dumb.

If he want he can play it 1 hour. Or 2. There is no end. You are just standing there and have to wait until he is done with his turn. May sound dumb but nevertheless you had to. Technically. Normally you would kick him into somewhere after some spawns.

So it doesnt work. There is no I can handle that. Or You can counter it easily. Or the master is safe. There are masters without soulstones remember. Or low def. Or bad hand cards. Or you just kill the rest of the crew. Doesnt matter.

Its just a way to break a fun game.

So dont bother with, just wait for an errata.

[sprue]

Cain, I'm not trying to be rude, but I can't understand why you'd throw in the towel or refuse to even attempt to try and beat this list. What would your opinion of Rocky be if he refused to train and fight Apollo? What would have happened if Frodo never left the Shire or George Washington said "I've lost too many battles, I don't want to be a general any more"

Please try for the sake of trying, and do your best.

[WombatCowboy]

As outcasts we can take the you didn't get your objective so we get some vp's. Than i take an infinitely long turn until time in the event runs out...Pretty lame.

It's broken, I admire the rocky analogy and the feverishness your defending your broken combo but it's not conducive to making people want to play you.

I'm hopeful the fix this sooner than later.

[sprue]

I'm sure most tournament organisers will have a problem with stalling. If you're going to put time limits on things then there has to be a rule for that as you can stall without infinite activations since time limits aren't part of the rules in the first place. That's just bad form.

I've never been to any tournament or friendly gathering and had someone say they don't want to play me. If you look at the opposite side of the coin, people who are willing to accept a defeatist's mentality are not rising to a challenge and their not bettering themselves. You can't increase your skill to the point where you can beat a skilled opponent if you're not willing to play that opponent in the first place.

I'm not pointing any fingers I'm just trying to put forth the idea. It's always better to challenge yourself, to see if you can get out of a difficult situation. You may loose a few times but we all do when we're learning. If don't try, you can't learn.

If I had never mentioned the mosquito tactic in the forum, we'd never have the opportunity to try to figure out how to beat it.

[Werecat]

But what's more important? Bettering yourself, or having fun? I choose having fun, and infinite card combos do not foster fun. I'm still strongly seated in the opinion that it needs to be changed.

[sprue]

Start making terrain with multi level surfaces. Buildings, train platforms, ravines, large hills, bridges, etc. This will give you safe zones that will make it impossible for mosquitos to get everywhere on a battlefield with summoning.

Then of course you have Hamelin the rat catcher. He's mosquito proof and can cast obey

[Werecat]

Lol...

That's the key everyone! The best way to beat the infinite mosquito combo is to build more complicated terrain! Genious!

I'm sorry man, but you're living in denial. Just let it go. It's not fair, and it's not going to stay.

[Dv8guy]

I have a question about thi infinite mosquito/draw your whole deck concept. If you have no card in your deck you cannot make an initial flip to cheat in a card so won't all of your actions automaticly fail?

[goblyn13]

I have a question about thi infinite mosquito/draw your whole deck concept. If you have no card in your deck you cannot make an initial flip to cheat in a card so won't all of your actions automaticly fail?

Nope, rules say when you run out of cards during your turn, but before the end phase you pick up your discard pile and shuffle and that's your new deck (just don't draw new control cards) (Malifaux book Pg 34)

Edited September 25, 2009 by goblyn13

[WombatCowboy]

I have a question about thi infinite mosquito/draw your whole deck concept. If you have no card in your deck you cannot make an initial flip to cheat in a card so won't all of your actions automaticly fail?

Your right in that he'd have to try and cast something to get at least one card into the discard pile before he drew the rest out.

[sprue]

Well, you wouldn't make an initial flip because you can't, you'd have to go straight to the cheating fate part.

I don't mind your sass werecat but it doesn't do you any favours. I think I've said my piece and I'll leave it at that. You're either willing to take on a challenge or you want to bring the game down to a level you're comfortable with. People say that I won't have opponents who will want to play me, but on the other hand, I enjoy challenges so if someone doesn't want to provide that, then I won't enjoy the game much either. Maybe I won't want to play them because they lack the willingness to find solutions in what's meant to be a strategic game.

Having fun is all about your attitude. You can have fun if you want to.

[Sobek]

Well, you wouldn't make an initial flip because you can't, you'd have to go straight to the cheating fate part.

I don't mind your sass werecat but it doesn't do you any favours. I think I've said my piece and I'll leave it at that. You're either willing to take on a challenge or you want to bring the game down to a level you're comfortable with. People say that I won't have opponents who will want to play me, but on the other hand, I enjoy challenges so if someone doesn't want to provide that, then I won't enjoy the game much either. Maybe I won't want to play them because they lack the willingness to find solutions in what's meant to be a strategic game.

Having fun is all about your attitude. You can have fun if you want to.

Actually, unless I'm mistaken, you couldn't even cheat fate. Cheating Fate replaces the card in play. If your deck is empty, and you couldn't flip any card, there'd be no card for you to replace.

As for this 'tactic', I wouldn't want to play against it. It's taking advantage of an obvious exploit of a loophole in the rules. That much should be obvious to everyone. The rules may allow for it, but infinite combos like this always go against the 'spirit of the rules' in any game I've ever played.

I'm all for tactical challenges, but dealing with this isn't a tactical challenge. It's a 10+ minute waste of time for you while your opponent basically plays solitaire with his fate deck. I personally don't find that very fun. If you really want to play this 'tactic', that's fine. Just don't be upset when people pick up their models and go start a game with someone who will actually play the game against them, not play through their own cards while you're standing there twiddling your thumbs.

Having fun is about your attitude, yes. But you have to think about whether it's fun for your opponent. What's more important: Winning? Or a game were both players have fun?

[Haight]

Hyperbole about fun vs. competitive, and invoking real life and fictional military figures aside, the problem with an infinite mill trick in a card game is one of unilateral access.

If everyone has access to an infinite mill, fine, no problem, as its a unilateral resource on an equal basis. The problem with this is that there are at least two mechanical tiers of unequal unilateral access.

The first is that to even hire more than 1 mosquito, a crew must hire S'omer. This means that unless you are playing S'omer outcasts, or a brawl with S'omer in a master slot, you cannot pull this trick. More definitively, if you are not playing S'omer, you cannot pull this resource trick in a scrap. That's the big one. Lack of unilateral resource generation / mill on an infinite scale, in a severely limited scope of access, is a problem.

Look at magic the gathering. While i no longer play (haven't for a while), there are many infinite mill tricks - some good, some bad. A player, when sitting down to play a game of magic has the same unilateral access to cards to put into his deck that his opponent does. It's not as if he puts a single "red" card into his deck, and this then immediately closes him off from the infinite generation trick. It may make it harder if he puts "red" (and i'm plucking that out of thin air, i'm years behind the times in magic, it may be easy or hard for red to do mill, i have no clue - substitute peuce, white, chartreuse, or tartan if you like), but it's still possible because of the rule of unilateral access.

In this instance, the moment you take a master other than S'omer, you close yourself off from this trick. That right there violates the law of infinite generation = unilateral access. In a resource game that has a sliding scale of worth in a positive and negative fashion, with a finite amount of resources, infinite draw power of that resource for one of 15 masters currently is not balanced.

2) This trick can be pulled while you hang out behind terrain, and barring few exceptions (lilith being the main one i can think of with nephilim and Waldgeists), there is very little most crews can do about this before you get going, land a joker in your hand (along with tons of 10+ cards), and are in a position to probably auto-fail duel someone, and then hit them up with severe effects. Particularly given Jones' Boomer double damage that can solitaire the vast majority of models in the game (those with 10 wounds lacking armor or hard to kill), this presents a pretty big dilemma in terms of balance.

So against many masters this one now has unequal access to resource generation (which is finite, unlike magic, to continue that analogy of game design, though magic has a mill lose condition and mana burn damage condition built in). He now is in a position where against many masters there is nothing you can do on the first turn to really prevent you from getting the optimal hand of cards.

The big problem here is one of threat ranges and terrain. If you have a piece of terrain on your side of the board, towards your deployment, you can hide there, and pull the trick, with most models being arguable out of threat range to you turn one (and threat ranges that don't pull first turn "before you go" kills are good in an alt activation game). Again, Lilith might be an exception due to fast moving models and transposition, but that's really entering into the board position and deployment more than mechanical strength or weakness.

3) Finally, I have a hard time believing that the core game design in a finite but regenerative resource management based game, that it is an inborn design intent to have any one master be able to mill-draw a perfect hand nearly without fail as long as you turtle a bit turn one, leaving you with a disgusting draw hand to pull the rest of the master's already impressive list of tricks.

BUT ... i may be wrong. I think only nathan and ericJ and some others know the answer. I'll say this - game design wise, it's unfathomable to me to let this stand, as it would compromise too many core game design elements of a resource management game like this. The rules are pretty clean and intuitive and Wyrd has shown a pattern so far of stopping upwardly scaling shenanigans so far, so i'll be surprised if it stands.

I probably wouldn't quit if someone wants to pull this until (if) it changes, but if it weren't a tournament, i'd very nicely ask them not to play it twice in a row. If they refused, i'd probably say "good game, nice combo" and then try to find another opponent, and do my best over the following week to think up a counter-combo that could potentially shut it down.

To quote a fellow gamer buddy of mine that i respect highly: The goal is to win, the objective is to have fun. While killer combos don't rob your opponent of fun (because honestly, who of us wants to win all the time?), there is a difference between a killer combo and a clear and present unintentional rules interaction that places the very bedrock fabric of the game's (finite but repeating chance driven resource management) balance into a precariously questionable position.

I'm not, but if i were, a developer of Wyrd, i'd be investigating ways of looking to keep mosquitos doing what i meant them to do, while also putting a stop to this trick with as much emphasis on "path of least resistance" as possible.

But that's just me, and i'm not a wyrd designer - i have no idea what the future picture of their game looks like. Is it possible that this is just the first of a series of Teh Uber Combo's ? Maybe - i find it doubtful, but it is possible.

At this point, i'm going to ruminate on how to stop it if i see it, and wait for word from wyrd.

Edited September 25, 2009 by Haight

[nilus]

People say that I won't have opponents who will want to play me, but on the other hand, I enjoy challenges

Good because its gonna be a challenge to find anyone willing to watch you draw 54 cards every turn on a clearly broken combo.

I think a better challenge would just to be assume that this is already fixed(either make larvae a (2) action or just assume Mosquitos aren't Gremlins(but Sommer teeth can still hire them) and just play that way. You are likely to find more people willing to play that way as well.

[Sobek]

To quote a fellow gamer buddy of mine that i respect highly: The goal is to win, the objective is to have fun.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

[Sushicaddy]

Well, you wouldn't make an initial flip because you can't, you'd have to go straight to the cheating fate part.

I don't mind your sass werecat but it doesn't do you any favours. I think I've said my piece and I'll leave it at that. You're either willing to take on a challenge or you want to bring the game down to a level you're comfortable with. People say that I won't have opponents who will want to play me, but on the other hand, I enjoy challenges so if someone doesn't want to provide that, then I won't enjoy the game much either. Maybe I won't want to play them because they lack the willingness to find solutions in what's meant to be a strategic game.

Having fun is all about your attitude. You can have fun if you want to.

I think calling the ability to create a (logically) infinite number of models and stacking a perfect hand "strategic" is kind of like putting a string of pearls on a pig and calling her your wife. Sure, you can punch anyone in the mouth who says differently, but it still doesn't change the fact that she's a pig.

Edited September 25, 2009 by Sushicaddy

[sprue]

Quick update. Played some games with the mosquitos to see how the tactic faired against my friend's Guild.

It was a 20 ss match. He drew treasure hunt and I drew assassinate.

His list:

Sonia

Executioner

Samael

witchling stalker

my list:

Jones

2 mosquitos

3 bayou gremlins

hog whisperer

The first turn was very uneventful. I was able to draw my hand but couldn't kill anything due to distance and I couldn't harm anyone with the mosquito because they stayed within range of sonia's ability to counter spells.

The second turn was more interesting, I launched a gremlin turned pig at him and he cam forward with the stalker. This time he decided to see what I could do with the mosquitos so his crew left the safety of Sonia's aura. The mosquitos made quick work of Samael and the Executioner but couldn't kill the stalker because of the low casting score they have. It was just bad luck he didn't get fend off the first two attacks. 16 isn't hard to beat.

Turn three I got the mosquitos wiped out. Since they all have to stay in close proximity to each other for their trick to work Sonia blasted them away with liberal use of cheating fate plus soulstones. There was no way I could have fended her off even with the joker and all four of the 13's in my hand. She then started pounding away at my gremlins with her remaining spells.

Turn four we exchanged blows and I was left with one gremlin, jones, and the hog whisperer, all severely damaged.

By turn 5 he had the treasure and was making his way back to his deployment zone, but on turn 6 I finally won the initiative and was able to shoot her dead before he could create a wall of flame and make his escape.

My final conclusion is that mosquitos are no where near as deadly as everyone fears. If my opponent had not made the error of leaving sonia's protective aura then he would have made it to my crew in tact and would have started killing my gremlins off. Where I once believed Sonia was the weakest of all the Guild masters I was surprised to see her effectively destroy most of the gremlin crew on her own. The game came down to who won the initiative on the last turn and if I had lost then I would probably have lost the game as well.

If I had not gone after the Guild crew with the mosquitos they'd still be alive and able to help put severe damage on his crew but severe damage for a Gremlin or a pig is only 3 and I'd have to deal with an samael and the executioner, one of which would most likely survive and kill them. I'll play another larger game soon and see how it goes then. We had a good time and it was a very close game.

I'd like to see some reports from other games involving mosquitos.

Edited October 1, 2009 by sprue