Malifaux 2.0 Through the breach transcript highlights

[Iron Heel]

However (Molly especially) is very suit dependent needing a second crow or a mask for the majority of her spells (and the triggers in her crew).

Also, in the Aethervox interview, they noted that you can drop a stone to change suits. A useful ability for Molly and others.

Because of this, I think we may actually see Masters doing "more" stuff on the table, they just won't be doing 25 damage to a single model in the process.

I wonder how the thinking around the "right" amount of stones to keep in the pool will shift once the Beta hits.

[tadaka]

Given that i use lynch to get a new hand pritty much every game. i would be down for a ditch hand for a ss being as new rules have toned them way down.

[scuttlebut]

...they just won't be doing 25 damage to a single model in the process.

Although I should think they'll still be doing that a fair bit

(Although maybe not 25dg)

[NIGHTHATER]

As for my Page 8 post I was respectively asked to step back from that issue, so since I was becoming tired of warring over it anyway Im done with it. My words and concern are there, judge them as you see fit. Thank you all for the debate over the issue, and I will speak no more on it in this post.

As for my new card draw idea here we go...

Ausplosions: I disagree if the highest card in your hand is a 4, 5, or 6 Id do it for a S.S.

Forar: Ya I'll take your 3 and raise you to 6 bud the average is 7 0-14 card span so If you got 1..6 and the next highest is say 4, I'll bet most people would be willing to pay a S.S. to drop there whole hand and get 6 new cards. Yes its a gamble but Id do it.

Adran: Please see top paragraph.

Mike3838: HHHmm...maby the ability would be rarely used, but I'm not so sure. I think people believe the ability would be rarely used because they dont have it now. I play Malifaux alot with my best friend and there have been countless times after a draw for fun or out of anger at a bad draw we would reveal our hand and the highest card was like 5 or 6 maby 1...7 but I play alot. You are right though 2 more random card may help fix your hand, but I can't see people spending a S.S. on a random 2 more cards and thats why it feels goofy to me UNLESS see Scuttlebut below

Scuttlebut: Maby Scuttlebut although now that you can spend a S.S. to spells to get the suit and who knows what else, the suit dependent issue might not even be an issue anymore. As for the S.S. for an extra 2 card draw the only time I see it happening is when your master and henchmen are down and you have them to waste, but well see. As for your words

..."my master does everything" and more "my crew works well as a cohesive unit."...this is very accurate for the most part, although the S.S. and other changes making the crew more cohesive unit assessment...ya I feel your reaching. It becomes a matter of opinion as some people will say there whole crew is already a cohesive unit while someone else playing that same crew my say they only need the master for the most part. I think your getting at by making masters weaker the crew becomes more important, ya I agree with that.

Nighthater

Edited May 15, 2013 by NIGHTHATER

[CRC]

Mike3838: HHHmm...maby the ability would be rarely used, but I'm not so sure. I think people believe the ability would be rarely used because they dont have it now. I play Malifaux alot with my best friend and there have been countless times after a draw for fun or out of anger at a bad draw we would reveal our hand and the highest card was like 5 or 6 maybe 1...7 but I play a lot. You are right though 2 more random card may help fix your hand, but I can't see people spending a S.S. on a random 2 more cards and thats why it feels goofy to me UNLESS see Scuttlebut below

The odds of drawing a whole hand of cards 0..6, is less than 1%.

And since we're talking about a freshly shuffled deck, I can make this statement with certainty.

Oh? The discards from last turn? They're going to be low valued, so they push the odds even lower...

[Mike3838]

There's about a 1.8% chance that every card in your hand (assuming 6 cards) is lower than a 7.

It will happen around once every 54 draws. Or once every 9 games.

Bad things happen occasionally, but I'd rather have a core mechanic that I can use more regularly, in order to improve things slightly.

In that way it's more of an actual decision for me to make - something I have to think about. If it was an entire hand mulligan as you suggest, I'd use it rarely and when I did use it I wouldn't need to stop and think and weigh the options - it would be the obvious choice in 1/54 draws.

---------- Post added at 04:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:01 PM ----------

Thanks CRC - I'd forgotten to account for the discards.

[thebarbalag]

Also, in the Aethervox interview, they noted that you can drop a stone to change suits. A useful ability for Molly and others.

Because of this, I think we may actually see Masters doing "more" stuff on the table, they just won't be doing 25 damage to a single model in the process.

I wonder how the thinking around the "right" amount of stones to keep in the pool will shift once the Beta hits.

Even better than changing suits, as I recall, the wording was "add a suit." For me, a lot of the time this is worth more than flipping and adding the card for a stone. You just can't rely on a blind flip to provide a suit. I also really think we're going to see lower cc's across the board, and defenses aren't going to be as horrendous as they once were, given the change to SS usage.

---------- Post added at 10:18 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:11 AM ----------

I would never use a SS for that.

Too much risk vs little reward.

Agreed. This is a very serviceable element of replacing the flip + add of old SS use. If you factor in the ability to add a suit with a soulstone, a canny Master or Henchman can do a crazy lot. Even better, if you pull a hand like, say 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13 - not a bad hand, not an amazing hand, you have the opportunity to ditch that 3 and 5 for potentially another face card or two. This allows a crew that is less "master dependent" to run like a dream. If you regularly have a hand with 4+ cards above 10...you can get a lot done (so can your opponent, but that's life).

I see this (haven't played it yet, so I'm just speculating, of course) as a big improvement. Very often in Malifaux you will have a round or two with only one or two decent cards in hand. This is severely limiting to your crew, and can lead to NPE. You feel stifled, rather than powerful, and I honestly think a game is more fun when it legitimately feels like really skilled and powerful forces going to town on each other, rather than a stuttering, hiccuping slap-fight.

[Csonti]

So you guys just started to form a judgement and/or debate on M2E rules and even suggest changes to them WITHOUT even seeing a single line from the new rulespack? This will be an interesting beta test when it finally will be revealed...

[Lucidicide]

M2E -- not enough cowbell, will not play.

[Sway]

I think that what everyone saying "I will never spend a soulstone on that" needs to remember is that soulstones are being devalued. The designers don't want everyone to bring 8 by default. The current intention seems to be more like, "Well, there's no way to fill in those last 1-2 stones left in my hiring pool so I guess I'll take those into my cache." Soulstones won't be the game changers they used to be. So when you say you would never spend a soulstone on an ability, remember that that's based on your current conception of what a soulstone is worth. I expect that we will all have to adjust that conception pretty drastically.

[CRC]

Further, we've heard that the number of SS in a game is changing, but without substantially changing the number of models involved. That makes SS cheaper. (Right now they cost 1/4 of a witchling, in the future they may cost 1/5 or 1/6 of a witchling.)

Too many confounding variables. Nothing we've seen makes sense outside its framework.

[Uncle Caveman]

Trepidation should be expected. All I can really say is wait for the beta. Then cite things that don't fit. That's the purpose of beta testing anyway. I don't love a lot of the things I have heard. Still, I cannot gauge how they will work out due to the lack of a complete game to base them in. As Sway said above most of our impressions are based off 1.5 as is the context in which we view them. Once you have the full picture feel free to yell and complain. Break things and quit the game. At least it's honest then and not a tantrum based on the idea of change.

[Paddywhack]

*You can also now use a stone in the draw phase to draw and discard an extra 2 cards*

Ya Im not feeling this at all, it just feels goofy. Lets do this instead...NIGHTHATER

Keeping in mind we haven't seen the actual rule yet, if this statement is what the rule is, then it seems to imply you pay the SS BEFORE you draw your hand, not after. So this would allow you to draw two extra cards as you draw your hand for paying a SS. This would only be useful for a very important turn usually, but still very useful overall. Now that SS don't add another card to the total I really like they have thought of other useful/colorful ways to use our stones.

Now it might actually come out to say draw you hand and THEN decide to spend ss and draw 2 more. I personally find that a too easy decision and like the other way, but I'll roll with whats decided after BEta.

[Forar]

I think that what everyone saying "I will never spend a soulstone on that" needs to remember is that soulstones are being devalued.

I'm not sure I agree entirely. Sure, the loss of the ability to bump up a total by an entire card is being lost, but being able to just shrug and give a SS user a positive twist on offence/defense/cast is still useful. Being able to use them to gain access to a suit you need is potentially REALLY useful. And they can be used in multiples, which unless the max cache goes up, is going to get whittled through pretty quickly if you're dropping multiples at any point at all in the game. Not to mention initiative reflips, card filtering, damage prevention flips, etc, etc.

Hell, overall they might even become more valuable, given how many uses they'll have. In the end, they may even outweigh the loss of card additions and healing flips.

---------- Post added at 01:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:26 PM ----------

Forar: Ya I'll take your 3 and raise you to 6 bud the average is 7 0-14 card span so If you got 1..6 and the next highest is say 4, I'll bet most people would be willing to pay a S.S. to drop there whole hand and get 6 new cards. Yes its a gamble but Id do it.

Except you're assuming the cards are drawn in a vacuum. There will be times that some of your high cards are tied up in an Avatar summoning, or that you DO have an 11 and a 12, but the rest are aces and twos. I'd much rather spend a stone to lose a pair of low value cards than to pitch 2 perfectly good cards and hope I snag some more good ones.

If that's a gamble you could see yourself taking regularly, hey, more power to ya. I guess I just prefer a slightly lower risk/reward ratio. Small risk, potentially small gains, and usable more regularly.

Hell, your point about the average not being that low works in my favour. Statistically it's totally likely that I'll have at least a couple of good cards in hand. Why would I want to throw those away on an full hand gamble when I could just draw two more and pitch the worst two?

Taking it a step further, imagine your hand is a 12, 11, 6, 5, 4, 2. You pitch a stone and pull two aces. Under the current rule, you can discard those and BAM, you've just cleared out two terrible cards (in most cases) for whatever follows. With your 'whole hand drop' mechanic, you now have 2 aces and 4 more cards in your hand.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the less I like it.

[Mehter]

Changing suits is awesome. First I had heard of it.

[Cats Laughing]

Changing suits is awesome. First I had heard of it.

Listen to the podcast interviews if you have a chance. The summaries on these forums are incomplete and can lead to the wrong impressions. The interviews also explain some of the ideas behind the changes.

[Mehter]

I would, but the word podcast makes me think of someone casting pod people into a lake or something, while yelling "BEGONE WITH YOU!".

Thanks, mst3k.

[thebarbalag]

I'm not sure I agree entirely. Sure, the loss of the ability to bump up a total by an entire card is being lost, but being able to just shrug and give a SS user a positive twist on offence/defense/cast is still useful. Being able to use them to gain access to a suit you need is potentially REALLY useful. And they can be used in multiples, which unless the max cache goes up, is going to get whittled through pretty quickly if you're dropping multiples at any point at all in the game. Not to mention initiative reflips, card filtering, damage prevention flips, etc, etc.

Hell, overall they might even become more valuable, given how many uses they'll have. In the end, they may even outweigh the loss of card additions and healing flips.

I think there may be some confusion here between utility and value. I think sway was saying they're being devalued in the sense that model costs are going up, so when it comes to purchasing your crew, soulstones are worth less. Think inflation. However, their utility in the game, I think, is not decreasing substantially, if at all. Dependable suits for spellcasting and triggers, positive flips, negative flips to enemy damage, prevention flips, hand stabilization, these are all great. However, if every model gets a bump of say, 1-2 SS in price, taking a few extra stones in your cache becomes an easier decision, as you're sacrificing a smaller percentage of your crew-buying pool.

[Pierowmaniac]

Further, we've heard that the number of SS in a game is changing, but without substantially changing the number of models involved. That makes SS cheaper. (Right now they cost 1/4 of a witchling, in the future they may cost 1/5 or 1/6 of a witchling.)

Too many confounding variables. Nothing we've seen makes sense outside its framework.

Yep I was thinking that the other day. With games targeted at around the 50SS value, but with same crew size that means the value of each soulstone is proportionally less than in 1.5

[Sway]

The barbalag has what I was trying to say half right. I wasn't thinking about the inflation factor but I was thinking about value and utility differently.

(Everything that follows is very much only my opinion and only based on what limited information I've dug up)

I really don't think that SS in M2E will be nearly as powerful as they are now. In one of the interviews, Mack and Justin said that they wanted to encourage players to not always bring a full cache. How do you do that? Make players think that there are better ways to spend their SS.

Think of it this way, how many games have you seen a Lady J or Sonnia crew take a full cache? Most of my games are against these two Guild masters and I see full caches all the time. Guild have a variety of excellent 4ss minions. But STILL we see players constantly deciding that they would rather have an 8ss cache than an extra Witchling Stalker.

How do you stop that from happening? Make minions better for starters. But then you also need to make SS worse. I love the idea of spending a SS to discard two cards and draw two fresh ones. But if that option was added to 1.5, I agree with Nighthater; I would never use it. I want those SS to increase my duel totals. They're too good in that one place for me to want to use them anywhere else until I absolutely have to (prevention flips). But with the "flip an extra card" rule turned to a simple positive twist I'm suddenly much more open to alternative uses.

So yes, SS seem to have more uses. They seem to have much greater utility. But are they better uses? Do they have more value? We'll have to wait and see, but I think that the intention is that they won't. I think the intention is that they will decrease in value and increase in utility.

[Dracomax]

Why do you think they want you to take less than a full SS pool? Some masters need it more than others, and the cache differences make that worse, but to me, the biggest reason those models are taken with full 8 stones, is usually because they are deficient in some way--Lady J has low Df for how in the middle of combat she likes to be, and Sonnia eats soulstones with a 0 action she needs to get off some of her spells consistently.

Just saying, the worth of soulstones currently isn't just related to minion cost, and there is no indication that people won't want to take as many or more based on built in deficiencies in individual masters.

[Forar]

Except those would be counter-productive goals.

If minion costs are going up, why spend 4-5+ stones on a figure? Even with their reduced raw power, surely you don't want to run with only the base cache?

And by making them swiss army knives (not quite, but they are expanding that utility in some ways while reducing it in others), clearly there isn't an emphasis on running dry either. Why bother having the mechanic where you can (yes, emphasis on CAN) spend multiple stones at a time if few (if any) crews would be able to use it consistently, if at all?

Basically, I'm not entirely disagreeing with you, but I think you're trying to problem solve between X and Y, where one is based on the tidbits we know, and the other is current info that might well be woefully out of date. If the cache max doesn't change, and the average model's cost goes up, it's quite possible that I won't spend those 4+ stones on a Stalker, instead I'll take the full cache and spend 1-2 on upgrades to improve the figures already present.

And with all respect, I do recognize that my own conjecture isn't based on any particular info either, I just don't think I can easily reconcile all of the things that SS's are going to be able to do in the new version, with a drive to expect players to rely on them less. If I could blow 3 stones before a turn even starts (2 on cards and 1 on an init flip), AND individual stones are worth less than they were before (perhaps it takes 5 or 6 to get what was a "4 ss model" in 1.5), yeah, running 3-5 in my cache out of 45 (the "new 35", I believe it's been called) makes sense. Remember, they're worth less apiece, and we're getting more of them to play with.

[Sway]

I could be mistaken (I would have to wait until I get off work to go check) but I could swear that in one of the interviews either Mack or Justin explicitly stated that they were hoping to discourage players from always taking a full cache. From there I've just been reading that motivation into the change I've been seeing.

I totally agree that increasing the cost of minions across the board does seem counter-productive to this goal. In fact, I agree with all of Forar's points except

And with all respect, I do recognize that my own conjecture isn't based on any particular info either, I just don't think I can easily reconcile all of the things that SS's are going to be able to do in the new version, with a drive to expect players to rely on them less. If I could blow 3 stones before a turn even starts (2 on cards and 1 on an init flip), AND individual stones are worth less than they were before (perhaps it takes 5 or 6 to get what was a "4 ss model" in 1.5), yeah, running 3-5 in my cache out of 45 (the "new 35", I believe it's been called) makes sense. Remember, they're worth less apiece, and we're getting more of them to play with.

Again, it comes down to utility vs value. Sure, it looks like there are going to be dozens of situations in an average game where I'm going to want to spend a SS to improve my position in some way. There's a whole lot of utility. But the question remains will that utility outweigh the utility I would get from having another model on the board? Would I rather have a Witchling Stalker or the Witchling's weight in SS? That's the question. And if I'm remembering correctly than the intention is to make players lean towards the Witchling.

But I'll admit, I may have invented that snippet in my head in which case all of my talk is for nothing.

[Forar]

We'll have to wait 2 weeks and change to begin to really make informed calls about that kind of thing, but I think it'll depend heavily on both the rules adjustments and the masters themselves.

I mean, I generally won't run Sonnia at less than 8ss, but I rarely run Hoffman much above 4. Some masters in the current game are hungrier for stones than others (whereas some like VS may see a reduction in their demand, based on no longer being for all intents and purposes unkillable while they have them >.< ), and I'd be surprised if this didn't remain true in M2E.

It will also depend on figure and upgrade costs; for some it'll be a no brainer to dip down to 7 or 6 or fewer stones if it means getting an extra minion, upgrading that minion to a better minion, or upgrading them with actual upgrade cards, but similar to how I'll regularly pass on an extra Stalker for Sonnia in the name of a full cache, it'd take quite a bit to get me fielding her with only 4 or 5 stones on hand.

[SgtBrowncoat]

Maybe we look at the beta rules before casting judgement either way? Even then, we can provide feedback and maybe you can fix things you don't like.

Personally, I am pretty excited and look forward to 2.0 shaking things up. I don't blame anyone for having concerns, now or ever, but let's see what we have before we get too crazy or take sides.