Tuesday, February 26, 2019

The Spy Who Stabbed Me: Why Margaret Belle is the Best Commander in The Other Side

Come at me, nerds.



           It’s been a while since I put together a blatant click-bait post, so let’s give it a whirl. As I’ve had a whole 3 games worth of The Other Side experience, I feel qualified to make a definitive statement about who the best commander in the game is. Sure, Adeodatos is a pretty good force projector, if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy. Alright, the Storm Siren can lure enemy forces out of position. Big whoop. And yeah, whatever, your Lords of Steel make all the stratagems cheaper. La. De. Da. You can keep all of them. I’ll stick with the unsung hero of the British Empire, a lady who embodies all the virtues (gleeful homicide) and talents (shadow magic) that we prize in a young lady of these modern times (1907). I’m speaking of course of the pride of the Intelligence Service, Miss Margaret Belle.

            From the first number on her stat card (ok, the second. I obviously don’t mean the +25scrip thing) Margaret Belle outshines the competition. Look at that. 8” of movement. That’s just silly all by itself, but then you remember the part where she places 16” away at the start of her activation and, if that isn’t enough movement, you can give her the generic Earthside asset Marching Boots and push her up to speed 10. That’s 36” of movement on a rush action. At that rate, in a tournament she’s going to be running around on your board for round 2 while you’re still mopping up your game in rd. 1. Df and WP of 7 are both excellent. Armor 8 is the equivalent of the Royal Rifle Corps. Her Poisoned Knife attack has an AV of 7 with an (admittedly nothing to write home about) St of 3. However, when she stabs an enemy champion, it’s instead St 4 and Accurate. And for that juicy target that really, really needs to die, she has a morale action which is an 8 vs. WP (Read: it’s going to succeed most of the time) that locks a target out of cheating fate until the end of her turn and (on a trigger) hands them a shaken token. All of this combines to make for a potentially devastating assassin that can be almost anywhere and stab almost anything she wants in a given turn. And that’s just on the front of her card!

            In Glory, Margaret jumps to Sp 9 and WP 8. Her Knife attack increases to AV8(T) and gains a built-in trigger to flip the target out of glory, as well as another trigger to give her attack Piercing. Her morale action gains a trigger to immediately take a melee attack action against the target (hurray for free attacks!) and, if she’s got nothing to stab (likely because she’s killed her target or, more likely, because she’s busy supporting our boys on the frontlines by placing Objective Markers) she can spend a morale action to Draw two cards. Cards are at a premium in The Other Side, and if the King’s Empire has a failing (laughable concept, I know) it’s not having as much card draw as many of the other Allegiances. Of course, while deployed far behind enemy lines, she runs the risk of reprisal from the cowardly enemies she’s fearlessly facing down on her own. To counter this risk, her signature asset of Rapier Wit allows her to discard tactics tokens to force any action sent her way to target a Fireteam with which she is engaged (not "a fireteam she is engaged with", we don’t end sentences with prepositions in the proper King's English.) This can include the Fireteam that attacked her, so she’s probably safe most of the time so long as you end her activations engaged with someone with whom to pass attacks. And just for a bit of gravy, she gets another Morale action to force an enemy Fireteam to discard all tokens from their unit and then move them slightly out of position. Not the most powerful thing on her card, but a decent action to have in her toolbox (particularly to knock those Shaken tokens off of Burning Man loonies.)

            While I think she’s probably the KE’s best choice for most games, she truly shines in objective based scenarios like Scavenge or Set Traps. Placing Objective Markers is a Morale action, after all, which means as a Commander she gets a free one. I personally enjoy placing Margaret 16” away from the Fireteam with which she was engaged, issuing the Rush order, placing an Objective Marker, and then moving right back in to engage the same enemy unit. I’ve enjoyed using her with the Marching Boots, but I think they’re possibly overkill in most games. Rapier Wit comes stapled to her card in my opinion. Beyond that, it never hurts to have Toughness in case she gets caught with some Ranged Attacks when she’s unengaged/when you can't afford to burn a tactics token. For one commander games I’m starting to like Medal of Honor to avoid being completely starved of tactics tokens all game (plus that’s another attack she can hand off to the enemy). You can flavor to taste, but I think that it’s no contest that Margaret is the best commander in the Allegiance, and well worth including in any game.

Rule Britannia! 

Sunday, January 27, 2019

M3E: Now it can be told...


On today’s blog offering, a discussion of crews that excite me in M3E (and why it took so bloody long for me to post about them). But first, some…

Mini-Musings


-Going to Adepticon? Malifaux Musings is too! I have no illusions about being competitive in…anything, so if you want to hit me or Phiasco up for a game in person outside the tournaments, we would be delighted to oblige. We’ve got Malifaux crews. We’ve got The Other Side companies. So, come throw down with us!


-In Through the Breach news, our Roll20 character sheet (pictured above) is in beta testing! We don’t have it uploaded into Roll20’s system yet, so you have to install it through the custom script. The good news is, we want playtesters to try it out, and we’re happy to provide the code to you if you let us know you’re interested (and pinky swear to give us feedback.)

- Also, we’ve started recording an actual play podcast! I mentioned previously that I was running my crew through a Malifaux adaptation of Wizards of the Coast’s module Dragon Heist, and last month I started recording them. Learning how to edit has been a process, and we want to get lots of them banked up before we start releasing to the public, but I’m excited for this new way of generating content for Malifaux Musings.

***


            A couple of weeks ago, the NDA was lifted from M3E content, and an open beta began on Wyrd’s website. A rush of content has begun as the previously dormant podcasts and youtube channels have found new life (and you should go listen to all of them, including Flippin’ Wyrds, Max Value, Schemes and Stones, etc.). When this era started, I felt a call to start writing about the new edition as well. Malifaux Musings had lain fallow for almost a month at that point, as my readership numbers had let me know loud and clear that very few people seem interested in Through the Breach or The Other Side content, or at least nowhere near as many as would follow Malifaux news. This wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was hard to get motivated to crank out a batrep to essentially broadcast it to no one. But now that should be changing. M3E was out there, and we could start breaking down new masters, new schemes, and new rulesets to try and inject life back into my favorite game.

            And for some reason, I just didn’t feel like writing.

            It’s not like I had no ideas. Discussing how the new masters play on the tabletop. Looking for the best way to tackle the new strategies. Hell, just a celebratory “M3E is here! Let’s all start dancing in the streets” post would have been appropriate, but for whatever reason I just couldn’t find the spark to sit down and write it. Maybe part of this stemmed from the fact that M3E wasn’t new to me. I was drafted into the alpha effort, which was where most of my contributions during playtesting went on. I stuck with reading the updates and occasionally getting a game in during later phases, but the playtest group I tried to assemble never really got off the ground, due in large part to the fact that we all live hours away from each other and have to play on Vassal, which takes roughly 1.5x as long as a real game. Plus, it’s a pain printing out the stat cards every week for a crew, etc etc there are a number of reasons. SO, long story short, I stayed in the beta and kept reading the changes, but my interest waned over time. M3E coming out is therefore less a matter of “Oooo look at all the new shinies” and more “huh, well, at least it’ll be new people playing it” for me.

            Then there were some changes at the end of the beta that really blew the wind out of my sails. The NDA is lifted so I could technically go into details, but I’m gonna chose not to, as it would just come off as griping. And then, of course, Mason left Wyrd, which frankly sucks. I was lucky enough to meet him at Gencon a couple of years ago and hang out. I’ve enjoyed collaborating with him during the Through the Breach playtesting group, and he’ll always have my respect for the excellent job he did heading up the rewrite of the RPG’s rules to fix some of the (very) bumpy parts of TTB1e. I’m sure Wyrd’s remaining design staff are excellent and the properties are in good hands, but I have a hard time believing that they’re not worse off for his departure.

            And weirdly, the game I didn’t think I would be that interested in (The Other Side) has actually grabbed a lot of my attention and gaming time recently. One undeniable fact about Malifaux is that, at the end of a game, I’m tired. It takes a lot of mental energy to keep all the possible combinations and moves in mind as the game goes on, and things can swing on one activation. My King’s Empire doesn’t feel that way. Maybe that’s because most of the models I have are some variation of “move into position and shoot the other guys” for their activation. But, somehow, the increased model count and the more abstract nature of the rules (the only elevations are “low” or “high” terrain, for one example) have resulted in a game that is smoother and easier to play. *shrug* Maybe that’s not true for the other Allegiances (I certainly know that Phiasco’s Abyssinia seems to have more things to keep track of than mine) and maybe it’ll change as I expand the models available from the Allegiance, but for now I’m enjoying the game quite a bit, which makes changing gears back to Malifaux even more complicated. Also, the games I’ve played so far have left me with the impression that it’s hard to get completely wiped out in a game of TOS, as the reinforce rules make keeping a fireteam knocked off the board pretty difficult. After almost an edition’s worth of playing the glass-cannon Neverborn, it’s nice not being afraid that one miss-step would end with half my crew getting knocked off the board.

So, yeah, that’s why I haven’t come blazing out of the gate with M3E content. Let me be clear: M3E is a good game that answers a lot of the problems that had accrued in Malifaux  2nd edition. I’m going to play it. Malifaux Musings will keep writing about it. But I’m gonna keep talking about the RPG and TOS as well. This is a continuation of what the blog has always been about, a celebration of all the parts of the Malifaux (and by extension Wyrd) world that I love. I hope readers will stick along with me.

***


So who/what do I like about M3E? Well, most of the testing I did focused on the Ten Thunders and Guild, so that’s what I’ll be most familiar with initially. Long-term readers will know I was leaning heavily towards Ten Thunders going into the edition, and that hasn’t changed. I really like the card manipulation that Lynch’s crew uses. Stack the Deck looks like it would mostly be useful as a card manipulation/cycling tactic, but it goes deeper than that. Get tired of failing simple duels to activate your free actions? Put the card you need on top of the deck and the problem is solved without having to reduce your handsize by cheating. Know you’re going to be doing a double walk or a walk-interact (IE you won’t need to perform a duel during your activation)? Hide a high card on there and know you’ll be in good shape for defense duels. There’s a lot of there there, if you take my meaning. The summoning is nice, but I didn’t get as much mileage out of it in my games as I had hoped (disclosure, I played Lynch in the alpha and early beta, so it could have changed.) One of his abilities also used to be called “Blackjack and Hookers.” I’m sad that is no longer the case.

McCabe is interesting. I like that the crew is more built around swapping the upgrades than previous versions. I’m hoping the Ruffians prove to be quality enough to be used in most games, as I like the models (and the bald guy with the chains is one of the few Malifaux people I can cosplay, these days.) Plus I kind of fell in love with McCabe at the end of M2E, so I’m definitely feeling the Wastrels going forward. For those worried about his Nightmare Edition boxed set no longer being viable (since he can’t hire mounted guards anymore, after his termination by the Guild), rest assured that you only have to be patient. This will be resolved shortly. Misaki is a lot more interesting and involved than previous versions, as you have the tension of being penalized for the longer you let her sit buried versus the advantage of not having your master in a predictable place. I’m not sure I “like” it as a crew I would want to play all the time, but it’s certainly more unique and tactical. I’ll go into more of a discussion of the Qi and Gong crew in the future, but the games I played with them I enjoyed. Their success or failure doesn’t wrap around their master, as their damage dealers and scheme runners are in the greater crew, but they can tie you up into some serious knots with all of the conditions they can stick you with. They leave the opponent in a position where they have to make hard choices which you can exploit. I worry about how that will work competitively, as one of my hard rules is “don’t rely on your opponent making choices, as they will always choose the one that is worst for you”, but I’m intrigued. If nothing else, their addition ensures the Ten Thunders’ have the most hookers per capita of any faction in Malifaux, which is amusing. 

Oh yeah, and the Shadow Emissary can crush some serious face, which I like for reasons entirely unrelated to being in love with the paint job I did on mine.


For the Guild, the new guys from the Frontier have definitely drawn my attention. They’re likely to be the subject of another blog post, but I’ve always been drawn to crews that can define the terrain of the battlefield, and these guys do a lot of that while also being ranged combat oriented. There’s a reason M2E McTavish was so popular in Lillith crews, after all. They expand the deployment zone, which seems broken as hell the first time you see it. That actually happens a lot in M3E, and The Flippin’ Wyrds pointed out that this is a feature, not a bug. When you get the models on the table you’ll realize most of it isn’t as bad as you think. I’m still a little worried about the combination of melee masters with it, though. Is Lady Justice being that close to the opponent on Turn 1 worth 16 points? I’m not sure, but I’ll keep testing it until I know for sure. Austringers that die release Malifaux Raptors, which is cool and reminds me of Roland’s coming of age in The Dark Tower, which is what drew me to Malifaux in the first place. Plus, Cornellius has a trigger where a sandworm pops out of the ground and attacks an enemy model. I don’t know this for sure, but I’m pretty positive Malifaux didn’t have sandworms prior to the Penny Dreadful one-shot I wrote for Wyrd Chronicles, so I’ve pretty much gotta play Basse. 

Somehow playing KE in The Other Side (and all of the Guild lore from the setting) has me wanting to play Dashel. I’ve never really played a summoner before, which is kind of mind boggling when I think how long I’ve been playing Malifaux, so I’ll have to give them a go at some point. I stocked up on the Lucius box set and some other things that go with Dash during the Easter sale. If nothing else, the Captain deserves some respect for going from a nobody in Malifaux to a master in his own right over the course of two editions. I guess it’s good to have the secretary-general on your side. The Ortegas feel like the Ortegas, so they’ll always be there as an “I don’t want to think anymore, I just want to shoot shit” crew. I do like that Francisco won’t be the Guild’s version of Wolverine anymore (IE: somehow he’s a guest star in every single crew, much like Logan was somehow an X-Man, Avenger, had two of his own comic book, and was guest starring in half of the other series). The out of keyword tax wouldn’t have been enough to get that done with M2E Franc, so they scaled him back a little to get the job done. Also Santiago isn’t hot garbage anymore, so putting him (or his sister Santana) on the board won’t be as embarrassing.

So yeah, like I said. I don’t hate M3E (despite how the first part sounded.) I quite like it. The rubber-band dynamic of the scoring is interesting, and I want to see how it plays out in tournaments. There are a lot of crews I want to get on the table (even if it’s just virtual.) In the future I’ll likely do individual crew break-downs, unless people have their own stuff they would rather see first. Let me know in the comments if you have a crew you want first, or if there is a different topic you’d like to see covered.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

First King's Empire Acquisitions



I've officially joined the Empire, as of last night. A fellow was looking to off-load his Kickstarter purchase and I happened to notice when he commented about that fact, so after a quick chat on messenger I have some forces heading my way. What it looks like I'll be receiving:

Rulebook- (Important. Knowing how to play the game is useful.)


Allegiance Box- (Also important. Contains Charles Edmonton, 2 Units of Riflemen and one unit of infiltrators. The riflemen seem very shooty, and embody the WWI army visual I wanted these guys for. The infiltrators are interesting. Being able to create hazardous terrain seems useful, but they have to live long enough and kill something to get to glory. They can act as screening units. They can screw with the opponents' tokens. They seem pretty useful. And Edmonton is a sniper who shoots things. Maybe too much of a good thing? IDK, we'll see.)




2x Margaret Belle- (strange, but I'll need a second commander and I can sell the other to defray part of the costs. Belle's crazy fast and very murdery. I wonder if she knows someone from Malifaux named Bette, because she certainly reminds me of her. My time playing 40k taught me how important a counter-punch can be for gunline armies, so I'm kind of leaning her way as far as commanders go. But we'll see. )



1x Samantha Thrace- (Guild envoy. Melee beater. Gives you a tactics token for 3 stones, which are invaluable in this game. Also, see previous comment regarding counter-charge.)



2x Motor Scout- (Whee! Funny guys on bikes! But with machine guns! I was a little dubious at first, but they're dirt cheap, silly fast, and if you gave them Toughness probably more trouble to get rid of than they're worth. When they flip to glory they can summon another one, so I guess it's a good thing I have two, although I'm told they include a cardboard template for things that are summoned in game, which is very considerate and cool of Wyrd. Also, they were a real thing. Totally didn't know that.)


Sharpshooter- (shoots things, but better. And counts as two people when he dies, so that's useful.)


Some extra token sets (how many do you need in most games? Maybe can trade some of them as well...)


The King's Hand- (Big stompy bot. Can't go wrong with that, and if I go to Adepticon I'll need a Titan.)


So, basically a commander level pledge with some motorized scouts tossed in. That's probably a good thing, in terms of learning how to play the game from the ground up. I have some idea of other things that would be good to add on, but we'll get there.

In other news, I've got Chicago on my mind (and I don't mean the band.) In the first week of December, I'm traveling there for work to a conference, and I'm hoping to meet up with the locals for some Wyrd times. Sounds like there will be some The Other Side to be played, or that's the plan anyways. And then, in March, Adepticon is coming. I'm hopeful this will be the first time I'm able to attend. We'll see.

Anyway, Wyrdos, I've put my money where my mouth is. Hopefully I'll have some models to show next time. Speaking of, I'm planning on doing a painted minis roundup of ToS models at some point in the future. I think people liked those. Keep a look out for it.