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.
