Showing posts with label Theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theory. Show all posts

Friday, January 20, 2017

4.5 Tips to Prepare for a Malifaux Tournament

Mini-Muses


Not a lot of news briefs this week, but The Other Side kickstarter has just a few hours left. If you want to get in on the game from the groundfloor, this is your last chance. The deal has never been better!

Tournament Preparation


With the arrival of the Gaining Grounds 2017 document, and the fact that I'm currently preparing for a tournament coming up next week, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about some ideas for how to prepare oneself for a tournament, particularly if you haven't been to one previously.


1) Figure out what you're playing! - This probably goes without saying, but before you head to a tournament, make sure that you know what you're going to play! This can take a lot of forms, of course. Obviously, you'll want to know what kind of tournament you're entering and which models you'll need to bring along. The standard Gaining Grounds tournament is fixed faction, meaning you name your faction at the beginning of the tournament and that is what you play every round. You are, however, allowed to build a new crew every round after seeing the strategy and scheme pools you'll be facing, as well as knowing your opponents' faction. Other tournaments may be fixed list (same crew every round), fixed master, more or less soulstones, hiring pool, or other more bizarre formats. Now, if you have a favorite faction or one crew you've been playing regularly, this can be pretty easy. If, like me, you suffer from chronic magpie syndrome, sometimes this choice can be a bit tougher. For the upcoming event, I literally asked my wife to name the first suit that came into her head from a deck of cards. She named hearts, so I'm playing Guild (because everybody loves the Guild.)

1b) Pack the models you'll need- Your choice of faction may, in fact, be a choice of master or crew that happens to be holding your interest right now or with whom you think you have a level of familiarity that can lead to success. If so, you can probably put together a small list of models, pack a small bag, and you're good to go. However, the advantage to the fixed faction format is flexibility. Depending on what you may be facing each round, you may be best off building your whole crew, master and all, each round of the tourney. I think it's at least worth your time to include models that are good for killing, good for surviving, and good for moving to go score objectives. If you have that ready, you can probably build a decent crew that can handle most situations the game can throw at you.


2) Know your models- Time limits during tournament games of Malifaux can creep up on you. When one is just learning to play or just having a fun, casual game with friends, its not unusual for games to take 2 1/2 to 3 hours or longer. You don't have that much time in a tournament. The GG2017 document stipulates two hour rounds. It is not uncommon, therefore, for many tournament games to not progress past turn 4 or even turn 3. A good way to help keep this from happening is to make sure you are as familiar as possible with the models you'll be using. If you have to look down at your stat cards every time you activate one of your abilities, that's time you lose. If, on the other hand, you know your models well enough that you remember that, say, Mccabe's Take This! requires a 4 and has a range of 10 and pushes the target 4", you don't need to check it and can just do what you need to do when you need to do it. You don't need an eidetic memory or need to sit and study like you're cramming for a final, though. I've yet to play anyone who could run their whole crew off the top of their head. Just make sure you're as familiar as possible. If nothing else, you'll have a much better idea of what your crew is capable of doing in real situations on the table (as opposed to in your head, where many of us unfortunately end up making our value judgements on the quality of models.)



3) Look up the strategies- Gaining Grounds documents list which strategies you're going to play every round of the tournaments, with a rotation that changes as the months move along. Right now, the strategies are Headhunter, Squatter's Rights, and Stake a Claim. When you know what's coming, you can start planning ahead of time what crews you're going to use every round. Conversely, if you have a fixed list that you're locked in to every round, you limit your ability to adapt to the scenario and can put yourself  at a disadvantage every round. Now, it's not foolproof, because the scheme pools are generated at the individual events (wouldn't want people to be TOO prepared, after all) so you need to be flexible. My Stake a Claim and/or Squatter's Rights Mccabe crews use dogs (as many do) as scheme runners to score the strategy. If, however, I see Hunting Party in the scheme pool for these rounds, then I might want to think about using something else to get the job done, as this would put easily killable models out for the enemy to use to score.


4) Think of pitfalls- While the stated design goals for M2E were to have every master capable of completing every strategy, there are situations where one master is going to struggle more than others. It is useful to sit down and think about what these pitfalls are for the masters/crews you're thinking of using and come up with contingency plans to counter them. One of these for McCabe is the Neutralize the Leadership scheme. It only comes up on a number flip, so I may not see it at all in the tournament. If I do, however, running McCabe essentially grants a free 1 point to my opponent, as I'm going to be reduced to half wounds at least once during the game due to McCabe's "split into two piles" wounds rules. If I see this scheme, then, I might think about running one of my other Guild crews to block those points (and potentially score them myself, of course.) Perdita and Sonnia tend to like standing back out of the fray and blasting things to pieces, so they're strong contenders to think about using in this situation.

5) Make some sample lists- There are two benefits to writing up a few sample crews before the tournament starts. First, you can save yourself a bit of time during your games if one of your sample crews fits the strat/board/scheme pool combination you're facing. The other benefit is physically sitting down and getting an idea of what you can cram into a 50SS limit. Fancy the Peacekeeper but want to use the Pale Rider to swing the glowing saber as well? You'll need to have an idea beforehand of just how much you can still fit after you chew up 20+ stones with two models, and maybe come up with something else that can do similar jobs for cheaper. For instance, if you like the Peacekeeper for his harpoon gun primarily, maybe look at a Hunter instead (which work great with McCabe anyways, since they're minions that he can Black Flash.) If it's durability you're after, Guardians (another minion, and one that got a bump in the most recent Gaining Grounds document) may be an effective substitute. Flip some points around and see what you can really do with your crews. Some things may occur to you that you hadn't previously considered.

These bits of advice aren't going to guarantee you a top 3 finish every tournament, of course, but if you keep some of these ideas in mind, you may set yourself up to do well and have a good time, as nobody likes feeling unprepared and/or getting stomped because they weren't sufficiently prepared.



Do you have any tournament preparation tips? If so, I'd love for people to comment with them below.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Bad Blood

Pictured: What we're talking about today, more or less.

Episode 69 of Before We Begin featured a Malifaux Addict named Michael who was presenting two lists for the Neverborn faction, one of which approached crew building in a way I hadn’t really seen before. The list he put forward looked like this:

Lilith -- 4ss
 +Beckon Malifaux - 1ss
 +Summon The Blood - 1ss
Primordial Magic - 2ss
Black Blood Shaman - 7ss
Doppleganger - 7ss
 +Retribution's Eye - 1ss
Lelu - 7ss
Lilitu - 7ss
 +The Mimic's Blessing - 1ss
Mr. Graves - 8ss
 +The Mimic's Blessing - 1ss
Silurid - 7ss

Briefly, the central idea behind the crew was to exploit the Black Blood ability to punish melee oriented crews and spread AoE damage. The Black Blood Shaman could supposedly give the Black Blood condition to both of the twins with one swing of his ritual knife, effectively giving them Black Blood +2. Of course, the next episode they pointed out a specific call-out in the rulebook that neutralized this combo (if a condition and an ability grant the same thing, they count as having 1 version of the ability, not two.Stupid rules, spoiling all of our fun...) Still, it got me thinking about Black Blood and its role in Malifaux.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I like to minimize as many of the random elements from my crews as I can, so there’s some appeal to the fact that Black Blood just does what it does (splash everything within an inch of the model with 1 damage every time the BB model is damaged). In the past, however, I’ve sort of overlooked it as a damage source, treating it more like icing on the cake than something to build around. I considered it a bonus rather than something built into the soulstone cost of the models. The game designers might think the same way, however, as a lot of models that have Black Blood are pretty good in and of themselves. Graves is a very solid beater that also brings some good movement tricks to a crew. Lilitu has some very strong abilities, particularly Lure and her large melee range, that make her worth including in many crews regardless of their content. Young Nephilim are one of the best models for their point value you can buy. And, of course, there’s always Nekima. I think most of us know what she can do when she puts her mind to it, and she even has abilities to intentionally trigger her Black Blood to deal damage over a wide area (50mm bases are big, y’all.) Plus, I remembered how devastating an encounter with Nephilim was in the third chapter of Nythera in Through the Breach. This was one of the only combats in the whole Penny Dreadful that put the players in honest danger of death when I ran it, and it was mainly due to the Nephilim splashing that acid blood all over the place. Of course, the difference between TTB characters and Malifaux characters is that the former does a lot less damage per attack typically, which plays right into Black Blood, but it still made an impression.

So I decided to give this a try. It happened that roving reporter Jon was in town a couple of weeks ago before heading to a tournament, so we set up my Mats by Mars and Terraclips terrain and threw down.

As a side note, this is the blog post where I come out of the closet as an anthropomorphic cat. Meow.

I ran essentially the same crew as above, with the substitution of a Young Nephilim for the Silurid (I didn’t have a scheme where the frog-man would come in handy.) Jon likes combo-y lists and was trying out a TT McCabe where he turned an Austringer’s bird into a ranged napalm strike with a combination of buffs, so I didn’t get a ton of chances to splash them with the Blood. But, a situation did present itself where I swapped Mr. Graves in front of a Guard the Stash marker, facing off with three Guild Hounds who were trying to score it, where I saw the potential in action. Jon looked at one point and said “I could try and hit you, but I’d probably end up doing as much damage to myself as I would to you.” The big bald man put his fence post to work, cleared the dogs off of the post (no marking your territory! Bad doggies!) and that set the stage for the Neverborn to win the game.

I was intrigued and decided to keep things going. A Wyrd Place runs a Vassal League through Facebook, so I signed up for that and entered as Neverborn. I decided to swap the twins out for Nekima and learned another lesson in the first game, namely that Black Blood doesn’t do you any good when your opponent doesn’t have to close with you. I was playing against Wong, I momentarily forgot that this isn’t M1E and an opponent can see all the way through terrain as long as they place a toe inside of it, and I proceeded to get my crew blasted off the board in large part by misplacing Illusionary Forests on turn 1. So, lesson 2 learned: if you’re going to utilize BB, you have to draw the opponent into you or put them in a situation where they have no choice but to walk into it. Screen your crew by putting the terrain in front of you and then making them come close, rather than trying to slow them down with it at range. Lure, Show Ya The Door, and Tangled Shadows are one way of doing this, but it’s better when you can set your opponent up so they have to do the work for you.

And that brought me to Game 2 of the Wyrd Place League. It was Extraction and it was going to be played on this map:



Seeing the restricted access the top of the map had to get to the Extraction Marker, and knowing that my opponent was not playing Resurrectionists (meaning they would likely have limited access to Incorporeal) I decided to take what I had learned from Black Blood and combine it with the terrain control crew I had written about previously. So, I fielded this:

Lillith-Beckon Malifaux, 5ss
Mysterious Emissary-Conflux of Blood
Nekima
Doppelganger-Mimic’s Blessing
Mr. Graves
Primordial Magic
Tuco

I won the deployment flip and took the bottom of the map, as planned, and completely jammed the opposing crew up in the top-middle doorway with two hungry land markers for the entirety of the game. Lillith’s long range for summoning Illusionary Forest made it less necessary to have the Waldgeists for controlling the side doors (Hungering Darkness came through the left, making the trees useless there, but Yin tried to run around the right side later in the game, and I managed to flip the trees across the board to block it without having to get out of position. Again, the Black Blood wasn’t a deciding factor in the game, but it helped a couple of times. Nekima splashed it on Hungering Darkness to soften it up, and at certain points I set up situations where the Hungry Land markers could trigger black blood and splash it onto opponents (which is great, until Lillith does it and the opponent flips the Red Joker. Hurray randomness!) It helped that my opponent had built to counter Pandora rather than Lillith and hadn’t foreseen the terrain jamming as a tactic, but I have to think that would be a rather common occurrence in this situation. Pandora was my first thought when I saw the board as well, as her 6” death bubble shtick would be pretty effective in the Turf War-esque strategies (we were playing Extraction.) Plus, I'm well aware that most boards aren't as closed off as this Vassal map, but still, I feel like there's potential here. 

So, conclusions from what I’ve seen so far. Black Blood can be crippling for an opponent’s crew, but only in very particular situations. High minimum damage crews avoid it by not having to trigger it frequently. Ranged crews get around it by…being ranged. And high wound models might not even notice it’s happening. So, it's most effective against models like scheme runners who have a low pool of wounds to begin with and have to come to you, and can be pretty useful as a kind of poor-man’s blast damage. Everyone who has softened up a 9 DF Perdita by blasting into her from the friendly model standing near her knows how effective that can be. Also, it's most effective when the opponent has to come into close contact with you. Engineering the battlefield can help create these situations, so I think there are some real possibilities to be found in combining the Black Blood and summoning Hungry Land, Illusionary Forests, and/or Waldgeist Trees. And, as a side lesson, perhaps the Mysterious Emmisary’s sub-optimal reputation is a bit exaggerated, or is one of those things that looks to be true in Theory-faux but doesn’t prove to be true on the board. Admittedly, this is one game, but considering that it basically won me that game single-handedly, I think the model at least has potential in some specific scenarios.Part of the negative reaction, I think, is that Neverborn are typically all about moving rather than playing standing defense, so the ME is a very different tool in their arsenal. I'm curious to try it on A) more open maps and B) strategies where the opponent doesn't have to come to a central point to see if it can be effective there as well. More testing is required.


Soooo…looks like I need to start building some 50mm markers with trees on them. I’m looking at you Hanging Tree boxed set. Talk to you next time!

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Potpourri


I had a few different topics I wanted to wander through that didn’t necessarily have the weight of a full-length post behind them, so I decided to lump some things together. The first subject comes from the Adepticon tournament having completed the previous weekend. The winner of the tournament put together a massive post (linked here) that explains his run-up to the victory and his general strategy in the tournament. He also puts out a call-to-action that Wyrd needs to take a look at the strategy he employed in his crew and do something about it, or this will be a problem for them in tournaments going forward.
Now, what does this crew do that is so powerful? It’s really just about using the ability to take the actions of Malifaux rats individually, then combine them into a rat king, then break down the rat king into a rat catcher and a rat. This chews up basically all of the actions of the opponent’s crews, letting you see what they’re doing and setting up the next phase, wherein Nix gives that remaining rat Haunting Memories to give it reactivate and then sacrifice it at the end of activation two, at which point Killjoy will be summoned. Typically, the result of this is that you have KJ in your deployment zone or attacking your critical models unopposed (because you’re in all likelihood activated out at this point, remember) while the rest of the Outcast crew moves to support him, typically in the form of some other critical alpha strike. The player in question would either slingshot the Victorias across the board, a move which has always been around but was very risky in the early turns because it typically left them exposed and vulnerable to counterattack, or used Leviticus and Ashes and Dust to cross quickly and cause disruptions. I think the cleanest example of this going the way it should comes from his battle report in the first round against Dan Johnsons of Before We Begin, where Nicodem starts the turn doing Nicodem things, and then gets killed at the end of turn 1. The phrase “I then killed the rest of his crew” coming in turns 2-3 against Resurrectionists isn’t something you see very often, and underscores the potential power of this setup.
Now, does this need to be shut down? Probably, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. I’m like you. The first time I heard about this I was thinking it was too strong and needed to be nerfed for competitive balance reasons, and maybe that’s true. If you go talk to Joel Henry (as I briefly did on Twitter) he’ll inform you that a ranged caster like a Sonnia or Rasputina can mess up the rat engine and that Pandora simply wrecks this crew. Ok, I don’t know enough to say whether that’s true, but even the person running the crew pointed out that an opposing Outcast crew built to deny charges can cause him trouble as well, so the combination of models is not unbeatable (as we all know nine belles and Leviticus is.) But why then do I think it needs to be nerfed?
The first is that this isn’t the game working as intended. Stalling through the first parts of the game to avoid the back-and-forth nature of the activations followed by a burst combo that knocks your opponent out and leaves them unable to respond are very anti-Malifaux. It’s not fun to play, and it’s really not fun to play against. Also, if the combo falls apart early and the crew gets overextended, you can find yourself in the opposite situation where now the matchup is slanted hard in the other direction and will likely be not a particularly fun game for either player. Is a boring crew enough to warrant an errata? Well, if you were around for M1E and were conscious of tournaments after the second book came out, you can probably recall not seeing Hamelin very often. Hamelin could do this sort of activation control every turn of the game (rather than just early) and was widely considered to be a negative play experience for this reason and was (rightly) shunned by the majority of the Malifaux world. Combine that with not being able to play even close to the whole game in a timed environment against an opponent that was running a Hamelin list, and it was a terrible option for a tournament that was largely ignored. This example doesn’t apply exactly to this situation, as running over time could often be as costly for the person playing the crew as their opponent, but it gets the point across that NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY AGAINST THIS, and often people don’t even want to use it either.
The other problem allows me to hearken back to one of the first gaming “this is unbalanced, we need to do something” situations I can remember: the Black Summer.

Settle in close, kids. Grandpa’s going to tell you a story.

Way back in the late 1900’s, there was a Magic: The Gathering deck that used a card called Necropotence to trade your life for card advantage. This combination wasn’t game breaking like the rats are being argued to be, but what it did do was let you vastly outdraw your opponent and speed them down in an early phase of the game when there weren’t practical ways to stop it with a normal deck. Decks could beat Necropotence, but they had to be specific decks like Turbo Stasis that could lock them down and keep them under control (which, ironically, is more like the rats, but I digress.) And that created the situation in the 1995 Magic: The Gathering known as The Black Summer, a period where to compete you had to either have the Necropotence deck or its counter, and nothing else could realistically win at the highest competitive levels.
Now, this isn’t quite that situation, but it has the potential to turn into that. I will be the first to admit that the Outcasts are one of the factions I know the least about, so I can’t comment from a position of authority whether this rat list is really The BestTM way to play them, but let’s say for the sake of argument that it is (the field at Adepticon appeared to think so, as most if not all of the top end players were running a form of it.) Now, let’s say the trend continues and competent Outcast players are all going to be running this because its objectively better than what else they could bring, AND you know that you have to tailor your list to beat it or it will just wreck you while leaving you no way to respond. You’ve brought, say, Hoffman because you like that list, but you know that a Victoria crew that gets to launch itself into you at the end of the first and can ignore the armor of your constructs will essentially leave you no chance to win. Are you now forced to change you crew around completely to give yourself a chance, say by switching to Sonnia to blast the rats and screw up the activations on the first turn? And if so, is that a good thing? To a degree, you do this every game when your opponent declares their faction (oh, they’re running Ressers? Better bring stuff with high minimum damage and willpower) so this isn’t a complete change. But, the difference is that bringing your standard crew rather than changing the list to react to your opponent against those Ressers means that you might have a somewhat tougher game and may have to work your way uphill to win the game. If you are unprepared for these rats, it appears you are most likely going to lose and be unable to stop it. That’s the difference here, and that’s where there’s reason for concern.
Again, this is not an unbeatable “win button.” Things can stop it, and not knowing what you’re doing while running it will still cause you to lose. However, the original poster made no bones about the fact that he doesn’t consider himself to be that good of a player, but the combination is too strong and needs to be addressed. I think something should probably be done, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. In any case, if your opponent is playing Outcasts, be aware that this exists and be ready. And, also, feel free to contribute to the discussion.

***

Second, I’m still thinking about things to do with the Wrath of Nature crew. Some models from outside the theme will be pretty helpful to include, I’m thinking, so I may have to loosen things up a bit. I think Mr. Graves could be pretty helpful in both phases of the game, largely due to his movement tricks. He could help with moving some models that aren’t that quick upfield early and then throw enemy models into the hazardous terrain later. It should be good times. And he’s a Nephilim, so why not work for Lillith? Also, Tuco might be useful to hold parts of the board away from the terrain ball, deploying with From The Shadows. Also, this would provide some ranged combat to a crew that effectively has none.
Here’s a picture or two of progress so far on painting and assembly.



***


Finally, there’s an announcement to make. My old buddy and Malifaux partner Jon has written a guest post for the blog to discuss his experience playing at Adepticon. I’ll be posting it soon. This opened up an idea for me to let others write for the blog from time to time as well. So, if you have something you’d like to get off your chest about Malifaux, can put a sentence together ledgibly, and want to see it published to literally dozens of readers, drop a line to malifauxmusings@gmail.com and let me know. I’m happy to have you! 

Oh, and I finally put my order in to get my henchman "welcome package." It has a mystery box in it to give away if I can ever put a tournament together (ha ha.) But, the foil card they included for me was pretty nice...
It's like they packed it for me personally.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Wrath of Nature: Musings on the Mysterious Emmisary

                Because of [reasons] I’ve been struggling to get some Malifaux in recently, and have temporarily sidelined my drive to play each of the Guild masters a certain number of times to master the faction. That’s the reality of kids, family, work, and all that other stuff. Truly, there is no Tyrant who poses a greater threat to the good folk of Malifaux than the home life. I have received a Miss Step from my buddy Jon that I’ve assembled and will look to use with Hoffman at some point in the future, but I’ll post that when it gets some paint on it.
                In the meantime, we had a night recently when we sat down as a family and all painted minis. My wife had an m1e Miranda that she’s going to use as a TTB character. My kids had their own models. And, mostly because A) I have a few m1e avatar models which I can theoretically use as Emissaries and B) I’ve been playing a lot of Arkham Knight on the ps4 and Poison Ivy gave me a bit of inspiration for the Neverborn’s walking angry plant creature, I decided to dust off the Avatar Zoraida I built long ago and get it in ship shape. As such, I whipped together my new proxy Emissary, and it looks a little something like this.

You know you can't resist her

I like it, though the old GW brown wash made the tree way shinier than I had initially intended and, of course, a black crow with a gray beak isn’t exactly distinctive. It’s missing some basing that I think will be pretty cool (I saw someone who had used pistachios to essentially create the piranha plants from Mario to simulate “hungry land” that I just have to steal.) But, this is the general idea, and I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. Now time to drop it off the table the first time I go to use it and break the thing, I suppose.

Of course, as soon as I decided “Cool, I’ll paint up this Emissary in a theme that I like and get it on the board,” I realized a couple of days later that it is widely considered to be the worst of the lot (explained by UK no. 1 Greg Piskosz in this podcast http://arcanereservoir.podbean.com/e/arcane-reservoir-10-conflux-of-discussion-part-2/) The tl:dr version is that Neverborn’s main advantage is maneuverability and speed, whereas the Emissary summons hazardous terrain that project an aura around them that restricts movement. Also, they have a short range summon spell and a desire to sit on top of said hazardous terrain, meaning that the Changelings have a very limited safe space where they won’t get eaten when they appear. Greg refers to it as being essentially “anti-synergy,” which is a bummer. But I painted the thing, so I’m by-god gonna get it on the tabletop. Period.

So how to make use of this possibly clunky thing? Their suggestion is to go with one of the two masters that grant strong conflux upgrades to the ME (I’ll use that abbreviation from here forward.) Pandora’s conflux is kind of crazy, as it lets the Emissary copy abilities from other models within a certain range of the model. For those not aware of what “abilities” means, flip to the front of your stat cards. The stuff written under the stats are the abilities. So, you can borrow things like regeneration, terrifying, armor, the Hooded Rider’s triggers or ability to add masks, etc etc etc. There’s got to be something in there that’s broken, and it’s one of those abilities that will only get better the more models come out in the future. The other one is Collodi, because picking up buffs in response to summoning the Effigies works out pretty well and can help the whole crew. However, I’m the kind of nerd that is bothered by crews that aren’t at least pseudo-thematic, and my plant lady ME doesn’t quite fit with those two dazzling-urbanites. So, let’s broaden our thought process a bit, shall we?
This, plus some news I’ll share as we get closer to Gencon, inspired me to shift focus to a new theme: Wrath of Nature. The Neverborn have a lot of models that involve channeling plants and the land itself to destroy the human invaders, and I wanted to combine this idea with the ME. Waldgeists are sort of the marquis minions of embodying this idea, as they’re essentially animated trees which can summon severe terrain and lash out over a massive area with their vines. The masters which play most closely into the theme are Zoraida and Lillith, IMO, where Z likes her Swampfiends and Lillith can summon an additional tree and see through the bushes to the enemy. Neither have particularly impressive Emissary upgrades, so I imagine I’ll be using the generic one that buffs minions (like, say, Waldgeists.)

I mean, I guess you could say Lillith has some thematic synergy with nature...
Lillith I think is a very interesting combination with this crew, as she gives you increased maneuverability and manipulation of the terrain that I think combines interestingly with the summoning of forests she can do along with her minions (I’m aware that the Waldgeist’s markers don’t block LoS, but go with me for a moment.) She can see through them and use Tangled Shadows to shift models into/around/out of them. This can also solve another ME problem, namely its not being particularly mobile. Walk 6 isn’t bad, per say, but we’re the Neverborn and we can do better. A walk 6 model is in danger of getting left behind, and dropping the ME forward on the board to start projecting its dangerous terrain into the enemy’s face might help improve its efficacy (assuming, of course, it doesn’t just get killed. I’m realistic.) So, here’s my first stab at a list using this concept.

For some reason the pictures I took of my Lillith are very pixellated. Its not an amazing paint job, but it isn't this bad...

Wrath of Malifaux Core Crew
Lillith-Beckon Malifaux, On Wings of Darkness
Doppleganger-Mimic’s Blessing (because why wouldn’t you)
Mysterious Emmisary- Mysterious Conflux
Cherub- (I figure if we’re going with the theme, might as well go all out)
Waldgeist x2

This puts us at 35/50 soulstones. I think you fill in the rest of the crew with either Sillurids for scheme running scenarios or something that can hit hard (Nekima? Illuminatedx2?) for more killy stuff. Illuminated getting + just for being within aura 4 of the emissary seems good (of course, that also likely puts them close to the severe terrain. Ugh.)

Will it work on the board? I don’t know. I think it would be better at scenarios like Turf War where you’re going to pile into the center of the board and you can just castle up and hold points, but I could be wrong. Likely am, if this blog’s history is any indication.


Let me know what you think in the comments. 

Friday, August 21, 2015

Theoryfaux: Are The Jokers Good for Malifaux?

Some Jokers just want to make the world burn.

I was playing a game that I wrote about recently, and started thinking about the Jokers in Malifaux. I asked myself if I thought that the jokers have an overall positive or negative effect on the game. Their rules in 2nd edition were adjusted to make them mirror images of each other when they flip out of the deck. The red counts as a fourteen of any suit and prevents the opponent from cheating when it comes out in a duel, and on a damage flip does severe + minimum damage and can a override minus flip’s “Choose the low card” rule. The black joker, by contrast, counts as a zero with no suit, stops you from cheating, and on a damage flip results in your doing no damage. So, heavy swings come to the game when you flip them out onto the battlefield. My question is, is this a good thing?
Now don’t get me wrong, the stories of a joker flip swinging a game are always entertaining, and there’s not much better than having the double negative defense flip on a model you were already writing off catch the RJ and live, to your opponents’ frustration. The trouble comes when the luck all swings in one direction, a probability whose likelihood is difficult to gauge without extensive statistics. In the previously mentioned battle report, I ended up flipping or cheating the Red Joker to about 5 duels during the game. My opponent did get three of them in return, but it can’t be denied that the Jokers decided that match for my side, and it made it rather difficult to gauge whether the strategy I’d put together was actually good or if I just got lucky. My opponent was detailing how his Amo No Zako and Hannah should have mauled their way through Francisco, denying me three points for bodyguard, and my Peacekeeper within the first couple of turns after our engagement. The trouble, really, comes from the ripple effect that the Jokers had on the rest of the match. If the Peacekeeper diedearlier, then Hannah would have been free to come get me. However, I would have moved Perdita to counter her directly, Abuela Ortega may have had more of an effect on the game, etc. etc. etc. Everything would have been different, and predicting how it would have turned out will just leave you running in circles. So, the ripple carries through the rest of the match and throws the game result into question.
The Black Joker effect can be equally devastating. You’ve crafted an amazing battle-plan. Your opponent’s fallen into your trap and you spring it, only to have Seamus’ focused flintlock shot do zero because of an untimely dose of bad luck. This is Malifaux, and as we all know, bad things happen, but do people enjoy seeing plans thrown out this easily by chance? I know I don’t, and not just when it happens to me. I hate when its obvious that one player’s deck is hosing them and I’m just going to roll to a win. Really poor black joker timing can exacerbate this even more. And, frankly, the worst thing that can ever happen is having both jokers come out on your flip, as it will typically result in A) Your action failing and B) You losing the red joker for that turn.
In terms of the actual mechanic of the game, what the Jokers do is introduce a level of chaos and unpredictability that might otherwise be lacking. By using decks instead of dice, the amount of randomness that comes into any particular action resolution is lowered. Counting cards is a thing in Malifaux. You don’t have to do it, but there is a certain benefit one can accrue by knowing that they’ve seen nine of their face cards flipped out, so it is fairly likely that they’re not going to like what comes out next time they make an attack. There is still randomness, but not as much as a d6 game has, particularly in games like Blood Bowl where you literally have a 1 in 6 chance (more or less) of failing every roll no matter how skilled you are at a particular action.  Add in the jokers, however, and the randomness level spikes. They’re still only two cards out of the 52, but in the major combat turns of the game (typically somewhere in the 2-4 range) you’re very likely to cycle through the whole deck and will thus, statistically, see them at some point. And when you do, their effect is greater than any other card in the fate deck.
How you feel about this probably says a lot about your personality and the attitude you bring to the game. If you’re fairly easy going, playing primarily for fun, or just flexible enough to adapt to the big swings on the fly, you probably are happy with the Jokers as they are. They come out like bombs, have a huge effect on the game, and can lead to amazing and fun outcomes. If you’re a planner like me, however, they can be extremely frustrating. We’re the ones that grab that black joker the first time we see it and hold it until turn 4, eating up a slot in our control hand simply to remove that statistical eff-you that’s lurking in the deck. The more control you can exert on the game, the more reliable your crew is and, ultimately, the happier you’re likely to be at the end of the game.

But then the Joker shows up, and your plan blows up anyways, and you’re just left cursing. 
Ultimately, the fact is that the Jokers are a part of Malifaux. I haven’t spoken to Justin in a while, but I doubt he’s going to errata them out of the game. So how can we control the chaos? The answer, I feel, is pretty well embodied by another article I posted previously discussing schemes that avoid interacting with the opponent. If you could execute a perfect strategy that neutralized your opponent and obtained your victory points, you would win and the jokers couldn’t do anything about it. This isn’t realistic, of course, but the more you can push your crews and strategies in this direction, the more consistent and independent of chance they will become. Ten Thunders is the first faction that comes to mind as having a lot of ways to do this, between Ten Thunders Bros., Low River Monks, and other cards that have abilities that can have huge effects on the game with very easily accomplished flips (Low-Rivers removing conditions and becoming very difficult to kill) or even without flipping a card at all (Ten Thunders Brothers blocking you from removing their scheme markers and then stretching their attack range to interact out to 4 inches on any card with the right suit). Scan your faction for examples of how to do this. All of them (well, maybe not as much the Gremlins) have something. In my current project, the Guild, my first thought is Hoffman’s stacking of constructs around himself to spike his cast up and make his spells (and any other constructs that can borrow his CA with power loop) essentially automatic. Finding all the ways to remove the influence of randomness from your crews’ outcomes is a short trip to it being consistent and, more often than not, victorious.


Until next time.


Friday, April 17, 2015

Conniving and Scheming: How to score points without involving your opponent

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. This is due in large part to the Terror Tot that seems to have invaded my home. She’s cute, but don’t let her fool you. Behind those Disney Princess eyes beats the heart of a Neverborn creature, hell-bent on never letting me sleep a whole night or do anything Malifaux related. She has finally grown to the point that she’s busy learning how to flip masks for sprint on her own, and I’ve managed to tear myself away for a moment to write about some strategy musings I’ve had recently.

 
Truly, the face of pure evil.

One thing that has occurred to me as I’ve been playing more M2E comes from an old lesson from another miniatures game: Blood Bowl. In Blood Bowl, unlike Malifaux, interactions between models are resolved with a d6 roll. A 1 always fails. A 6 always succeeds. As such, no matter how much you stack the odds in your favor on a particular roll, there is still always a small chance with each roll that it will come up a one, and this chance is the same every time you roll the dice (despite what the gambler’s fallacy might tell you.) This can critically ruin whatever you’re trying to do in the game, as a botched roll almost always ends your turn and lets your opponent start moving their team, often while your formation is left wide-open and vulnerable to counter-attack. You will never find a more superstitious and frightened creature than the average blood bowl player, many of whom are convinced that Nuffle (god of Blood Bowl) is somehow out to get their team personally. My friend Jon and I both firmly believe that the goal line of many Blood Bowl pitches has an invisible string stretched across at ankle height, because everybody knows that if you try and sprint for that extra square of movement you need to get into the end zone and score, more often than not you’re going to roll a one and your player’s going to fall down and pitch the ball into the crowd, with hilarity ensuing.

As a result, one of the first lessons any new player has to learn is to do the actions that involve no dice rolls first on your turn, and then subsequently weigh probability of failure versus importance of the action to decide who goes after that. This way, when (not if) you botch a roll later on in the turn, while your action is now over, you’ve covered yourself by moving other players into position under the assumption that you were going to have a turnover at some point. The second lesson, tied to the first, is that any time you can find a way to get the job done with fewer dice rolls, so much the better.
What does this have to do with Malifaux? Well the analogy isn’t perfect, as this is a game where you have much greater control of probability through cheating fate and having a larger range of outcomes from the deck than a six sided die. But there’s a reason one of the catch phrases for Malifaux is Bad Things Happen. We’ve all seen the games where the deck is just against you and there’s nothing you can do about it. You look at the board, the ace-through-five straight you’ve drawn in your control hand, and you realize that most of your crew is about to get their skulls caved in. In these situations your only hope is to scrape enough VPs with the survivors to eke out a win. But how can you do that? The answer lies in one of the criteria you should be considering when you look at your scheme pool for a given game: which of these schemes can I accomplish without the fate deck’s help? Assume you have two opponents in each game: the mook on the other side of the table and the fate deck. If it all goes wrong, which of these schemes can I achieve despite the misfortune? Towards this end, I’ve broken down all the possible schemes into three groups:

Fate Independent Schemes
Distract, Protect Territory, Breakthrough, Plant Evidence, Deliver a Message, Take Prisoner, Power Ritual

This group of schemes represents those which require little to no card flipping to accomplish, typically because they require little to no duels with your opponent. Protect Territory, Power Ritual, Breakthrough, and Plant Evidence can literally be done without touching the deck, as they just involve dropping scheme markers in certain points on the board which, if you’ve built your crew correctly to accomplish them, should be relatively simple. Deliver a Message and Take Prisoner do involve your crew moving in on the opponents, but both are then completed either with an interact action or simply keeping them engaged to the end of the game. You shouldn’t be trying Deliver if you don’t have someone with an extra movement trick or AP to let you get in close and accomplish it in one activation, so it again requires very little card-help to achieve, and Take Prisoner can literally be finished by ignoring the target model until the last turn and then sprinting something next to it. Distract could be considered on the border between this group and the next, but the key point is that neither you nor your opponent flip any cards to either give the Distract Condition or eliminate it. If you commit to this scheme from the outset, it should be doable without your Black Joker having anything to say.

Fate Influenced Schemes
Cursed Object, Outflank, A Line in the Sand, Entourage, Plant Explosives, Spring the Trap, Frame for Murder,

To be honest, the distinction between these and the Fate Independent schemes may be somewhat gray and could vary based on your experience level, your opponent’s experience, and both crews’ makeup. These are relatively independent of the fate deck as well, but they do have a possibility for chance to intervene on one side’s behalf. Cursed Object is kind of a counterpart to the just-discussed distract, but the key difference is that the condition comes off with a Walk duel by the opponent rather than an interact. If their cards are being kind they can get rid of it pretty easily and prevent you from scoring. Outflank, LitS, and Entourage don’t so much require deck flips to set-up, but they do need you to keep models alive in potentially vulnerable positions to accomplish them. The right builds can do them pretty readily, and frankly Breakthrough or Protect Territory could just as easily fall into this group with these three, but I split them up just because of what I perceive as the relative danger to the models involved. Your stuff is going to be on the center line for LitS and Outflank where the majority of the action tends to happen, and depending on your master you may have to play them a bit cagier than usual if you want them to survive to the end of the game in a position to break for the opponents deployment zone. Plant Explosives and its bastard cousin Spring the Trap both require very little card flipping to accomplish as written, but you again have to keep an eye out for the possibility of deck hosing, either with your scheme droppers getting popped early/en route to the enemy or paradoxically by an errant damage flip on the enemy master killing them off before you have a chance to score it. I very nearly had a perfectly executed Spring the Trap ruined by my opponent killing one of my models to release Killjoy, who then attempted to Chain-Hook the enemy master out of the blast zone.

Fate Dependent Schemes
Bodyguard, Assassinate, Vendetta, Make them Suffer, Murder Protégé,
To no great surprise, the schemes that involve killing enemy models or keeping your own models alive are the most fate dependent in the game. Of this list, Vendetta is probably the least subject to the deck’s whim, as you can at least set yourself up to get one point by having the correct model attack the target. The others are completely up to the deck and your opponents’ read of which schemes you’ve taken. The minute you ask to see your opponent’s cards or, worse, ask which is the most expensive, they’re going to suspect you’re on Murder Protégé and will likely take steps to stop you. Make them Suffer is almost infamous for the silliness people do to avoid it by taking one cheap minion who then hides in the backfield. Masters are some of the hardest models to take down in the game (on average), so Assassinate is always tricky, especially for an opponent cagey enough to keep you off of it by not committing their master to combat. Bodyguard technically can be accomplished with no card flips by keeping the henchman/enforcer hidden all game, but that isn’t usually practical given the expense of these models. As such, you most likely will need to at least put them at some kind of risk during the game. One of the trickier ways people use to accomplish this scheme involves models that bury instead of dying and can come back later, IE Bad Juju, Hungering Darkness, and Big Jake from the current playtest documents. These are good choices for the scheme, but the first two can be countered by the opponent not killing the correct models to spring the bodyguard target onto the board. Sometimes this is easier said than done and there is always the option for you to kill your own model to get them back, but that level of fiddliness is enough to make me uncomfortable. In tournaments there’s an even worse disadvantage to bodyguard: its reliant on your opponents’ pace of play. Bodyguard doesn’t score until turn 4, and you can’t get full points unless the game goes to conclusion.

Now, that isn’t to say you should never take these schemes. Sometimes the strategy or you and your opponent’s crews will dictate that Assassinate or Murder Protégé are the right choice. If you have tricks like a long-distance Lure from a Rotten Belle, you can get at least partial points by simply targeting the appropriate model from across the board with something relatively innocuous. And, quite frankly, the easiest way to ensure that you’re going to accomplish your schemes and strats is for the opponent’s models not to be on the board anymore, so there’s something to be said for scoring scheme points on the way to tabling your opponent, particularly given the shorter 5 turn time-frame in the M2E game. But still, there’s something to be said for just leaving your opponent and your fate deck out of scoring for the game. There’s a reason people loved Collette in first edition: in most scenarios she could accomplish a full set of scheme points by the second to third turns of the game without ever performing an attack flip. If you can go into the turn 3 break with your scheme points locked up without your opponent having a say in it, you’re well on your way to a win. 

Now, I've got to get back to the Terror Tot, before she starts sprouting any Obsidian Talons.