Malifaux Journal: Progression

The masters have begun to trust me enough again to let me write. They did not take well to the failure of my last assigned task, for which I was punished. It has taken much to appease their wrath and many promises I hope I can keep, for I fear this is my second and

final chance. 

I have been given to a new master as the old one grew tired of my excuses. In truth I belong to many masters, yet only one at a time ever assign me a task. I think they fear my escape, as last time I came in to contact with the servants of others, from whom I learned much of the wider world of Malifaux.

Well the Cojo Dojo has long since been and gone, and I really enjoyed my first Malifaux tournament. In the end, I finished 29th out of 30, which is one place higher than I expected. It should be pointed out here that I got the same points (nil) as the people that came 28th and 30th, but what separated us were the VPs from our games. 

There were a few other new players there, so I wasn't the only one with a lack of experience which was nice to see. As much as I love Warmachine and Hordes, I couldn't imagine someone playing as few games as I had and then grasping the game well enough to tackle a tournament, with what frankly included a decent number of the big hitters on the Malifaux circuit. But what struck me was that all players so openly helped each other by sharing insights and information. I did find this at the Warmachine tournament too to be fair, but not so much as with this one. Perhaps it was simply the pressure of timed turns rather than just a timed round meant that there wasn't the time for a player to do so, but it was a nice thing to see. I have seen evidence of the Malifaux community being really friendly and helpful on twitter though, so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised. 

Despite the losses I enjoyed the games. I picked up a good deal of info both from how my opponents played, and from talking through things with them. I was a little too busy concentrating on my games to make notes, but Trust me, I had fun losing.

After a bit of an enforced gap following the tournament to focus on Warmachine, I've started playing Malifaux again and I'm beginning to get the hang of it a bit more. Despite not being too successful at Cojo Dojo, I really got a feel for Seamus, so with that in mind, I started to think on whether to keep on using him or switch to another master. Obviously my aim is to run Molly as a master, but with no known release date for the plastics, I am forced to wait for that little miss. Instead I have started looking at McMourning. Just for something a bit different I wanted to try a Guild McMourning crew, but with further thought I have kept to Resserectionists. At the very least Ressers will be my tournament faction for a year or so and so focussing on them wherever possible should be the priority. If I want to play Guild now and then, fine, but I need to focus my learning on the way I intend him to play in a competitive setting. 

In the event that I attend a tournament that isn't fixed faction, then if I have had sufficient practice beforehand I may play McMourning from both factions, but we shall see.

I've now played the Doc three times, twice against Ben, and once against Sam. Ben used two different masters: Ten Thunders Lynch in the first game and Ressers Yan Lo in the second. 

I cannot remember really how that first game went exactly, nor can I recall the schemes or the strategy, all I know is that I played poorly. We were both using our crews for the first time, though I made less of my crew than Ben did against me.

In the second game I played much better. It was still a loss, but a bloody and close game. The strategy and schemes were as follows with the expanded schemes being the ones that I opted for.

I had misunderstood the nature of expunge and had thought that kills from that attack didn't count towards Reckoning. Had I known, I may have played differently and maybe got an extra point or two. Then again, maybe not. However, it was this game that I really got my head around how the poison manipulation works with this crew, and I began to really enjoy using him. The game ended 5-2 to Ben, though it would have been higher were it not for McMourning's Evidence Tampering.

My game against Sam was a bit of an odd fish

It was a 40SS game in an attempt to make it a smaller more managable game for Sam who was a few games behind us in experience. With hindsight, 35 would have been better really. 

This was the deployment, strategy and scheme pool for the game. Again with the expanded ones being the options I chose.

Sam chose Bodyguard on Lenny, which was also the only candidate for Murder Protege and so he was effectively worth double points depending on his survivability. 

I won't go into too much detail about this game as it was more about getting Sam some games in than being the subject of the blog. However, I was much improved in my approach to getting the most of the crew and so I'm happy that I am beginning to understand the intricacies. 

I've received my GenCon order now and I'm looking forward to using the Kirai crew, though I shall leave discussion of her for another time.