Are Gremlins Forgiving?

[Chargy]

Just as the title states the question: are gremlins a forgiving faction to play?

As in, if mistakes are made or cards go badly, can bad luck be mitigated?

What tricks and techniques do the little green buggers have to turn things around and rebound from plans gone awry?

I've recently acquired a large Som'er teeth crew and I will be making the switch from my guild to Gremlins as a result. I find guild a bit too difficult to pull back from bad turns and horrendous luck (of which i have plenty) and I figured with bayou two card and healing options, not to mention expendable, cheap, summonable minions, I may have found a faction that may compliment my usual strengths.

Thanks In advance to any Gremlins fanatics and casual Gremlin enthusiasts who can provide some insight.

[Ratty]

As with any army or crew where you have lots of models some luck will go your way others won't, as long as you accept this and aim to have redundancy you should be fine. Never rely on a chain of events to win. Rely on a Web of events where you only need one of the many paths to work to win.

[Lemonconstruct]

Would say this question is master dependent rather than faction dependent. I would Ophelia fits perfectly into your "forgiving" idea. She has decent stats everywhere. But what I've found useful with her is if you leave her out in the open she can take the hits. She'll be low on wounds, you'll have few stones or cards, but she'll be alive and you could manage to get an extra activation out of her where other masters might not. 

 

Talking about non-master models: In a gremlin crew out-activating your opponent is easy and is probably the gremlins hidden (a bit) strength. This means you can play about with when your models activate to maximize use. For example in a game of turf war last night, through out-activating my opponent, the last model i activated was Wong who used the trigger that means damaged models get pushed to push my opponents models out of the turf war area. I wouldn't have done this without out-activation. Next point AP, through both cheap models (meaning you have lots of models) and reckless you can often have a lot more AP then other factions, this a resource you want to make the most out of. It could give you an advantage or it could bring you "on-par" (thinking about "forgiving idea"). Thing you'll find is that even with a high average defense most gremlins are squishy. 

 

In answer. I think gremlins are on average no more or less "forgiving" then any other faction and in the end it depends on the situation. What i would say their "forgiving" feature is the number of models and AP allow you to still get the job down even after taking a few bad hits.

[Omenbringer]

I would agree with Lemonconstruct for the most part.

 

Ophelia tends to be the most straight forward and forgving of the Gremlin Masters (due to playing more like most other crews) however Som'er is also fairly forgiving due to both his superb support abilities and summoning upgrade. With few exceptions (namely the La Croix's) gremlins tend to require very different skills than most other factions to play well. Things like Out activation (a huge part of most gremlin play), deck shaping/ cycling (good across factions but Gremlins as a whole are the best at it), positioning (both for synergistic abilities/ actions and limiting effects of enemy actions), mitigation of in-built negatives (some models require a trigger be declared and not all of them are necessarily beneficial or out of control pigs) and quantity of actions not quality (there are few crews that can match the gremlin AP output per turn.

 

Piloting them can be difficult (especially if trying to tame the pigs) but even when things go badly you'll usually have fun playing the game.

[Brewmaster]

To throw in some Somer specific commentary:

 

Somer's actually a solid crew to work with because he's a generalist. You take Somer because he's fairly good no matter what the scheme or strategy. Obviously there are choices that are 'better', but honestly, if I only could take one Master to a game (wave 2 not being counted), Somer's the guy.

 

Somer's big strengths are the resources you have. Yes they're cheap, but they're plentiful. Since Somer tends to be more 'Gremlin keyword' heavy, the big thing that might get you is the 'Must declare triggers'. Usually these work awesomely, but I've had games where I'm CONSTANTLY shooting my guys as well because I just didn't have the trigger I needed. Fortunately, Somer has a built in response on his card

 

Somer is a crew of attrition, not a crew of one huge KO blow.