James Wilson Codes

This will probably be a shorter post than normal. This is the first time I've played and talked it out after Turn 2! It was still a lot of fun. I think it was a combination of me arriving after 7pm, and just generally chatting a lot during the game. My opponent, Jon, had recently competed at the Scottish GT and was sharing some of his experiences there - and we just talked a lot about models!

My goals going in were:

• Have fun - I usually do!
• More practice on not over exposing Kastore - keep him alive
• Don't get an intelligence token from Cloak and Dagger stolen - this often happens

Jon was playing Marcus. I've played against Marcus, Alpha once at a tournament, so I was looking forward to trying the original.

I'd met some of these models before, Ceddra/Sightless Snow is very popular right now. I wasn't sure what schemes to pick. I've found Barbaros can usually get me the first point of Sweating Bullets quite easily, so went with that. We talked after the game about how hard the second point can be to score. Death Beds and In Your Face work really well with Kastore 2 being so killy, but they weren't there. In the end, I went for Espionage with the hope that, with Flank deployment, it wouldn't be too hard to get between the deployment zones and the centreline.

There were a number of strange things about this game, other than (although possibly caused by) the short length. No model was killed (a first in all my games) and I didn't use a soulstone.
The first turn was quite cagey, mainly models getting into position. The Empyrean Eagle launched an attach from behind some blocking terrain at Barbaros, but missed. I activated Kastore last. Jon had positioned himself very well. He seemed to have only left models that were, or through Marcus's upgrades, became poor targets for Kastore. They either had Disguised, so I couldn't get off the double blast from Blood Rush, or they were within the Slate Ridge Mauler's Warning Growl aura, giving me negative flips, or Myranda's Huntress aura, giving Jon positive flips to Df.

Kastore's Blood Rush the scary min 3 damage, stat 7 attack that I made with focus, had an interesting flip:

I flipped the 1 first - so if I hadn't used focus, I could have cheated. I'd have still Black Jokered the damage, but I could maybe at least have got a trigger off.

In the end, I decided to kidnap Ceddra with Visceral Rampage. I brought her back to the centre of the table, and she was fairly surrounded by models, but did not kill her that turn.

A problem was, that Jon had sent two schemers into the corner, and I'd ignored them, hoping to deal with them later. The Blessed of December and the Empyrean Eagle might not be classic schemers. (although the Blessed does have Deadly Pursuit to help set up interacts) I think If I'd sent someone up there - Barbaros was closest, but I needed him for Sweating Bullets - I could have at least put some pressure on and stopped him from scoring.

The next turn, a lot happened (perhaps why it took so long). Ceddra transformed into Sightless Snow and escaped. The Cavern Nephilim Echolocated onto her, and then use Ferocious Claws with a double negative and a 2/4/6 damage track and I flipped:

which managed to do 4 damage!

I often remark that you flip enough cards in Malifaux that:

1. Weird stuff happens
2. The good and bad flips often cancel each other out a bit.

The Leech King managed to summon a Giant Leech against Ceddra, so I was hoping that that would tie her down. I used Bloodletting to remove it's Slow condition, and spent both of its actions trying to summon another - they both failed. I think I would have been better using Body Slam instead for a slightly higher attack with no damage flip. Summoning the leech required cheating my last card, so everything else was just as flipped. Jon was keeping cards - I presumed for the Demise(Eternal) abilities on Ceddra and the Jackalope. But the Leeches meant I was not worried about Ceddra as a threat at this point.

Barbaros double missed the Jackalope, which was frustrating. The Marathine managed to Red Joker it and take it out (before it came back). It wasn't that I wanted to kill the Jackalope particularly. I wish I'd taken a photo of this scene, but the Jackalope was stopping Barbaros from getting to Myranda to engage her to score Sweating Bullets. Kastore ended up walking to Myranda (she had **Disguised** from a mutation) and trying to Visceral Rampage her into Barbaros's engagement range, and failing. Then I had an idea - I could use Visceral Rampage on Barbaros. He took 1 damage (I think I forgot to do the Black Blood on this) and then I could place him next to Myranda. So I scored one scheme point.

Gwyll managed to fail to give the Slate Ridge Mauler Injured, and it was lined up next to some Height 2 terrain, ready to hit the Leech King over it.

At this point, it was 10pm, and we had a hard cutoff of 10:30pm. We decided to talk it out, after Jon pointed out there wasn't much I could do about the schemers in the corner now.

It was actually quite a hard one to talk out - Turn 2 is very early. We were certain Jon would have got at least 6, and I could have been anything between 3 and 5. We settled on 6-5 to him, but I think that was generous to me, and also probably not very reliable due to only playing two turns.

Compared to my goals I: had fun, used Visceral Rampage and didn't get intel tokens stolen, so it was a success from that angle!

Takeaways

• Don't ignore schemers!
• You can use Visceral Rampage on your own models. Using a master activation for it might not be great, but you could ping Barbaros, pulse out Black Blood, proccing an extra 2 inch move from Kastore, then do the push and place Barbaros. I shall be thinking about this before my next game.
• Have a plan for how to score. There's a couple of times where I could have used Gwyll's Essence Transfer or the Cavern Nephilim's Sounding Board trigger to drop schemes on the centreline for Espionage, while doing something else useful. I think I need to do this more to get better.
  

I might not have many more games with Kastore before I switch to Reva Cortinas for the upcoming Escalation League at Powder Monkey Gaming. I believe there's still spaces, so sign up if you can, it's going to be great!