James Wilson Codes

I did not realise it at the time of booking, but this was probably my last event of Malifaux Third Edition! I’ve not been playing as long as other folk, but it definitely feels like the changing of an era. Fourth was definitely a topic of conversation from the very point of entering the shop - and suffice it to say there were many quips of a "I’ll stone to reduce damage - because that’s still a thing" nature, which I’ll leave out of this write-up.

My goals going in were to win one game, hopefully two, play 25 turns, and have fun.

Round 1 - Matt Lewins

I have not played Matt before, and, as is customary in Round 1 when matched against a much better player, I was expecting not to win! This turned out to be prescient… With In Your Face and Let Them Bleed in the pool, I decided to take a Killy list, pairing Kastore, Fervent with the Dead Rider. My hope was to use Soulfire from the Dead Rider’s Revel in Death action to ping models and score the last point. Matt declared Harold Tull, Dead Silent, and while I’ve faced the Artillerist before, this one was new to me.

Needless to say, when facing Guild, there were two models with Lead-Lined Coat and with the King’s Wall as well, this made it difficult for Kastore to do his blast damage and kidnap that he loves so well. I did manage to do a cheeky move through a forest and charge at Tull, hoping to Blast onto John Watson - and flipped the Black Joker for damage! I cannot wait for both faction upgrades Lead-Lined Coat is such a pain and damage flips to go. Interestingly, I feel like The Whisper is totally fine. It’s not just me favouring Resurrectionists - I think that the upgrades shouldn’t be things that affect your opponent they should just buff you. In any case, I think the game will be more fun without them. However, because of where I’d charged Kastore to, I actually ended up kidnapping Tull, into an Urnbearer’s aura - so things were looking good!

Unfortunately, I either had to, or unwittingly placed him where the King’s Wall could see him - and he just I’ve Got Your Backed him back! I had forgotten that action. Perhaps things would have gone better if I could have whaled on Tull cut off from the rest of his crew - although with Behind Enemy Lines he had another way of escaping, anyway.

Another problem is that I had forgotten that Kastore, Fervent has Terrifying(12) until part way into Turn 2, when he was nearly dead. He then died. I was outclassed in this game and was destined to lose, but it’s annoying that I made such a basic mistake. The Dead Rider was sadly easily countered with Stunning Strike, but did manage to survive, mainly due to Tull continually missing him with his gun. I also made another massive mistake which was moving the Dead Rider. out of the enemy Deployment Zone in order to try and score Let Them Bleed with Soulfire, and ended up scoring neither. I managed to scrape a point of strategy and left the first round with a distressing 8-1 loss.


Round 2 - Tom Kapel

Now it was time to face the only other Resurrectionist in the event! I’d played Tom before, in my first ranked tournament and he was very helpful to a newbie, for which I was grateful. Now it was Reva 2 vs Seamus 1 - a match-up I have played before.

The plan here was to send a Corpse Candle, Shieldbearer and Lampad on each flank, while Reva and the other Shieldbearer could be in the middle, with Bête Noire doing scheming wherever. It could have worked. I had, however, never faced Manos before. I knew his reputation as an OOK pick, but here the Lantern of Souls really messed with my Lampads, stopping them from coming back after dying. Tom managed to take out a Shieldbearer Turn 1, which was a little unsettling and a Lampad turn 2.

However, with doing a lot of Fan The Flames, I managed to keep Manos away from me, and very much on fire. He had Burning +15 by the end, when Reva finally used Immolate to turn him into a new Lampad. However, by the end, Tom had just moved the Strategy markers more than me, and I didn’t get a chance to catch up, so it ended 6-3 to him.

Round 3 - Jamie Astbury

I always get a little giddy by the third game in a day, and who better to play giddy Malifaux with than the Green Jokers Podcast Host himself - Mr Jamie Astbury! Check out their episode touching on this very game, from his perspective.

Jamie is a very experienced Kastore 2 player, so I thought I’d lure him in by declaring Kastore - but pick Kastore, Awakened! Also, I thought it was good based on the pool. It turned out to be a super good match-up for me, Jamie had declared The Clampetts and with generally low Mov, Kastore’s Devour Attack which targets that stat, and has a built in double positive to damage was quite brutal. Kastore also has a Stat 7 Willpower attack which hands out Staggered and Stunned and can pseudo-Obey on a trigger. Poor Sir Vantes was defending on a Stat 1 against being Devoured - after having been made to run into a spiky Hazardous cactus and the Urnbearer’s Hazardous Pools of Blood aura.

Kastore, Awakened is not often thought of as ‘the killy one’ but he went to town in this game. While I sadly lost a Cavern Nephilim early on, There as a big scrum near the middle of the board and nearly none of Jamie’s models survived there.

However, Bayou are very sneaky, and the Clampetts can do a lot of shenanigans, and it ended up being a draw. I totally didn’t spot the potential for Jamie to Ensnare me with both points and had I managed to do something, I could have won.

I did not care though, this was one of the most fun games I’d had in ages, and what better send off for Scrawny Kastore than romping round a desert Devouring gremlins?

Round 4 - Jack Zissell

On to day two, and another opportunity to play a fellow Joker! There was a bit of a scrum for the spoon for our team, but this turned out to be another fun game. Jack declared Ulix 2, and with In Your Face in the pool, I decided it was time for Kastore, Fervent to hit the table again!

Kastore inched forwards with out of activation movement from Feast on the Faithful and Faith in the Flesh and every time he did, Jack emulated the Jaws theme ‘DUHHHH-DUH’. Eventually I charged him into Ulix, and was very worried about having overexposed him, especially when what could be described as ‘a whole bunch of Bayou bullshit’ came his way - but somehow he managed to survive. Next turn, I then used Visceral Rampage to kidnap Ulix - which I should have done at the end of Turn 1, in retrospect, and there ended up with lots of silliness. Ulix turned Gracie into a Swine-Cursed, meaning I could no longer score In Your Face, as it was cost 7. At one point Barbaros, used Bring It on Kastore, forcing him to attack him for minimum 3 damage, tanked some of it on armour, then bled on him to heal him, then hit him to heal him further and declared Shove Aside to move away.


We sadly only played 3 turns, after quite a bit of killing, I think I would have had more AP available to me than Jack and would have been able to scrape a win, but at the end of Turn 3 he clinched it. It didn’t seem like we were playing slowly, but we had a few rules queries and a lot of complicated interactions. Again, lots of fun!

Round 5 - MR Dub

Finally, I was matched against Mark. I played him the year before in the Inaugural Yorkshire Rumble - before I started blogging but I played Kastore into Hoffman. This time, I’d decided that I wanted to play both titles of Reva and Kastore, so it was time for Reva Cortinas, the original Sidesaddle-Riding Corpse-Scything lady.

I really like Reva 1, and I have the conceit that I might have done well with her on the UK tournament scene, purely because I don’t know if anybody else has declared her! I don’t think I can tell from my free Longshanks account, or from Bag-o-Tools sadly, but if anybody knows, please let me know.

I was up against Leveticus - a master I’d heard about but never faced, so I was quite pleased that my last game of Third Edition, I’d get the chance to take him on - especially as he is being ‘moved on’ for the next edition.

Mark asked me after we’d hired “you’re not coming at me with Manos out of keyword are you?” - I didn’t think much about it, other than that Manos is a generally powerful model. It became clear later that Manos would have stopped Leveticus coming back, and I'd have had a much easier time. However, I don't own the model...

In the initial round, Leviticus was suddenly in my Deployment zone and attacked Ezekiel, who shunted it onto a friendly Zombie. It didn’t seem too scary, Reva managed to dispatch him with Ethereal Reaping, and all seemed fine. It was a bit annoying that he went and got an extra life by killing a child, but I was expecting it. She healed her damage with her bonus action. Then, the next turn, she moved up and managed to kill another model, and all was good, and then all of a sudden, he hits her for SEVEN IRREDUCIBLE damage (he’d been hoarding the Red Joker) and leaves her on 1 Health going into Round 1. Looking back, knowing what I now know, I should have used a Soulstone to put that flip onto a negative, and she might be still with us. As it was, he flipped a 13 for initiative and took her out in the first activation. If I’d thought to stone for cards (my highest was a 13, which I thought was fine but he had a pass token left) then I would have picked up the Red Joker, and again, maybe things could have been different.

However, the rest of the game continued, I used the Lampad/Shieldbearer combination again and managed to score Outflank and Protected Territory - as well as somehow manage to get 3 points of Plant Explosives. (I couldn’t get the last point as Reva was carrying bombs when she fell...)

It was looking to be a draw, we had quite a bit of chat about Ensnare. Ezekiel healed the HodgePodge Emissary forcing it to pick up some of the Schemes that it had dropped with A Weary Road - I knew he had Ensnare at this point, and it looked like it was going to happen on Ezekiel, until, reading the scheme text carefully I realised that to score ensnare, the Scheme Markers had to be both within 3 inches and LOS… and I still had a Mindless Zombie left to activate, who, being Insignificant, could not pick up the Scheme, but because of the positioning of the models, could block LOS - and I managed to just about clinch a win by a point. Please feel free to respond with a ‘Technically Correct/Best kind of Correct’ meme if you feel inclined.

This was a super fun game - and it was nice to be on the other side of a kill the master, lose the game, as it almost always happens the other way round for me!

Mark was a fab opponent and didn’t mind the last minute Scheme denial. We had a nice chat after, and the tournament was done!

I came 15th out of 18 players, and would have got Best in Faction if I’d beaten Jamie instead of drawing, but as always, it was about having fun, rather than rankings, and it was a lovely send off for Third Edition!

In terms of my goals - I did not play 25 turns, I only won one game, but I did have fun, so I consider it a success overall.

Huge thanks to Yan for organising, Ed for hosting, and all my lovely opponents!



I think all of my Malifaux posts for now will be Fourth Edition Open Beta posts - so expect a lot of emotions and even more mistakes in my strategy/tactics than normal!