In what’s becoming a bit of a recurring theme on Malifaux
Musings, I thought I’d write about how not to play a new crew, in this case
Summoning Pandora. And, as obvious as the name may be, I think we’ll call these
articles Faux Pas from this point forward. Go ahead and groan, that’s the
title.
Deal with it.
But first, mini-musings.
***
-There’s a new issue of Chronicles on DriveThru RPG. It has
a tactics article by me, as well as some discussion from Rathnard regarding starting
Outcasts on a budget and a lighter Through the Breach module where the Fated
help a bride put her wedding together after their wedding planner gets arrested
for being an Arcanist sympathizer. You know, that old chestnut ;).
-The February newsletter announced that there’s another
Through the Breach worldwide event coming soon. There aren’t a ton of details,
yet, but these are always pretty exciting. Previously, we helped release
Titania from Nythera and travelled back in time to old Malifaux in the time of
the first Breach. Let’s see what’s coming soon.
-There hasn’t been an official preview yet, but Game Trader
magazine had a picture of the other story box coming for Malifaux. It’s called
Backdraft, and seems to feature a fight between Arcanists and Gremlin
moonshiners. Sounds…flammable?
***
So I took summoning Dora out for a spin and, per usual,
played it terribly and got crushed. There are probably people out there that
put their models on the board and are successful the first time out of the
gate, but I am not that person. Hopefully, my failure can be educational for
others, at least.
Pandora, specifically a Pandora crew oriented around her
book 5 summoning upgrade Woe is Me, is sort of a topic du jour in the Malifaux
community right now. Several weeks ago, Travis did an episode of Max Value with
a tournament report featuring a version of the crew. Over the course of the
last week, Alex posted about it on his Youtube channel and Arcane Reservoir did
an episode with Luke Cocksedge detailing the crew, since he’s been having a lot
of success with it. Also, some blog started writing about her too. It’s a heavy
synergy crew that relies on spreading conditions and a swarm of Willpower duels
to start spreading misery (literally) through the enemy. I built a version for
myself and gave it a test drive, and promptly got pummeled.
They say we learn the most from our failures. If that’s the
case, I should be the smartest person alive.
So, here’s a quick list of things I learned not to do when
playing this crew. Hopefully it’s useful.
1)
Don’t spread out. We were playing Ours and my
opponent Rich had deployed models on both flanks and in the middle. I tried to
fan my own crew out to contest him. This was a big mistake. As I said, this is
a crew oriented around synergy. They support each other, as none of them are
particularly tough or damaging in and of themselves. The whole idea behind the
crew is that the enemy can easily pass some of the Willpower tests you’re
throwing at them, but by combining them together the combined threat paired
with Misery auras overwhelms the enemy and drains their resources. Iggy out on
a flank by himself is going to get killed by most things the enemy throws at it
(in this case, a Bone Pile and Chiaki.) Iggy in with the rest of your crew is
able to put Burning for Pandora to use for summoning, Incite to help control
the enemy’s activations, and can hide among bigger, scarier threats.
2)
Speaking of Ours, it’s a slightly tougher
strategy than some of the others for this crew. Since they want to stay
together in support, it’s harder to fan out and cover multiple quarters. It’s
not that she CAN’T handle this, but you definitely can’t do it the way I did,
by putting the focus of the assault in the middle. I think a much better plan
would have been to choose a flank and roll up it in force, knocking out one
side of the enemy’s crew and then making them come to us to try and dislodge us
from the enemy quarter.
3)
The best strategies for summoning Dora are Ply
and Public Execution, because you can theoretically summon off of the enemy’s
strategy conditions. There’s nothing like that in Ours. I was playing against a
Yan Lo crew, with the old man hiding in the backfield to build up his Chi and
refusing to engage until turn 3, when he was effectively unkillable and was
going to wreck my whole board. There were no other conditions in the enemy crew
to use for summoning. I had brought along the Emissary with Dora’s conflux to
copy Misery and put another aura into the board. Thing is, that’s 10 points
that can’t generate conditions. I brought Lilitu for Luring, but she also doesn’t
put out conditions. And I brought Baby Kade, who also doesn’t put out
conditions. As such, when we called it on turn 3 I had no Sorrows in play, and
no obvious way to get one out there. Gotta get more conditions in the crew,
because I can’t count on the enemy to provide some. I blame playing so many
games against the Ten Thunders for this one.
4)
In a similar vein, Pandora does most of the
heavy lifting for this crew, but she can’t do all the lifting on her own. When
I was grumbling about card flips, my opponent pointed out that I killed Izamu
twice in that game. That was cool and all, but here’s the thing: that was all I
got done all game. The crew needs the Poltergeist to do what it does, and I couldn’t
get the damned thing into play because of the dearth of misery auras and the
fact that I had to have Dora kill Izamu personally. That’s a lot of AP to get
him down, and it feels pretty bad when Yan Lo just resummons him the next turn
to make me do it all over again. I got him down, but by the time I did the game
was basically lost. I think the crew would do better focusing on bringing down
softer targets earlier to get its summons on the board and get the ball
rolling, then shift to bringing down the heavies. Also, have to keep in mind
that this version of Dora isn’t The Box Opens Pandora. She is more effective
with the team, not rocketing up the board on her own. The summons are a lot
trickier when she has to do it all by herself.
So, in retrospect, I needed to
keep the team together, bring more conditions for summoning, and roll up a
flank first then try to turn it to chew through the army from the side. I’ll
try and reload, recalibrate, and give it another go next game. Here’s hoping it
works out better.
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