Jacob Lynch After Five: Part Two

Disclaimer: Any master can do any strategy/scheme if you play well. But if, like me, you want to play a multitude of Neverborn masters competitively (I aim to have all 7 masters playable in tournaments) it is important to find the strengths/weaknesses of them so you can decide when to use each one. One thing I will not be covering in these articles is things like terrain tactics or which masters are counters for which factions etc, as these are much deeper tactical questions that I am nowhere near experienced enough to answer with these masters yet. I do hope to do a longer article (or several) on my competitive neverborn bag in late 2015/early 2016 after I have had some more events with masters other than Dreamer. If you have not read part one, it can be found here.

Strategies I like him for:

Collect the Bounty: This is the strategy I really see Lynch being a great choice. He tends to take a bunch of tough minion in his crew (specifically illuminated) and his henchman can’t give up points in this strategy as long as Lynch is still on the board. That is the one downside though, Lynch is not that tough to kill and if he goes down you are in trouble as you lose 4 collect points for your master, Huggy is no longer immortal and you’ve lost a ton of your hitting power. But as long as you are careful with Lynch his crew is great at this strategy.

Guard the Stash: Lynch’s crews have a load of models that are fairly independent and can both deal quite a lot of damage and are fairly hardy (with self-healing on Huggy and the illuminated). Graves, Doppelganger, Huggy, and beckoners can also move around the opponent’s crew. Since Lynch’s crew doesn’t rely on a buffing bubble (like Collodi/Pandora) or auras it is a great killing crew for splitting into two factions

Reckoning: Lynch likes to kill stuff dead. Huggy also won’t give up Reckoning points as long as Lynch is alive. Huggy can also obey around your opponents heavy hitters. Furthermore, Illuminated are tough, killy and relatively cheap so make up the core of a good reckoning crew. Would probably leave the beckoners behind in this crew as they are an easy kill, but other than that the crew is changed very little by Reckoning compared to the crews I run with other masters.

Rebels & Rioters

While most of the Abnormalifaux gang are off to nationals in November I decided to run a small event for all of us that can't make the trip up to the biggest Malifaux there is.

As always I'll be holding it at Dark Sphere in London, it's three rounds with extra time between rounds for chat and general socialness.

The Dragon goes to Septembers Curse

Wow what a cracker of a tournament. This weekend (27/09/2015 - for all you future readers, or time travellers), I went to Septembers Curse in Bournemouth, Dorset. It has to be hands down one of the best tournaments I’ve been too. 

So this might be a long article - I guess I might split it down into a section on the tournament at the beginning, then a section on my games.

The venue was a spacious social club in Tuckton. I actually went to school round the corner (the long gone Homefield). It was a bit strange travelling from London to my home city and being an out of towner! Still the club venue was perfect. Lots of space for tables, plenty of light, modern and no strange smells (often tournaments are in some dank and funky places). The TO’s did a great job of prizes, raffles, mugs, sweetie bags, and even free water and a new fate deck for all players. 

Aren't we all just GREAT

Okay you'll know how this works by now so I'll just get straight into my ranting trousers and get going.

I'm going to start by holding my hands up and admitting that I'm as guilty of the issue in today's rant as anyone and up until now I thought I was in the right.

The malifaux community. This is a phrase you'll hear a lot on forums, twitter, Facebook and podcasts and we'll all agree it's great. A great groups of players, great events and great support. All just GREAT!

But I've started to see our little malifaux commune mirroring issues from the wider world and it isn't making me feel quite as warm and fuzzy as it used to. It feels like it's getting toxic.