Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all our readers! I hope you have enjoyed all the content we have put out this year and we are looking forward to providing you with much more in the new year. We will be breaking for the holidays, but expect to see some 2016 in review posts and some 2017 plans coming up in January (as well as my predictions for how Masters will go). Thank you all for continuing to support us and I hope everyone gets lots of new hobby stuff for Christmas.

Finally a word from our resident Santa Clause:

Santa says "Have a Merry Fauxmas!"

High Fauxdelity

Plenty of you will already have heard that a couple of local players along with myself and fellow Abnormalifaux Conor have started a podcast.

The idea behind the show is for it to be a debate, we each choose our best and worst within a particular category then we argue our case. The main rule is that there can be no agreement, all models have good and bad points our job is to pick these out  and weaponise them to prove our mates wrong.

Welcome (back) to Malifaux

Well after too long an absence, I've finally had a game of Malifaux. I thought I might jot down some reflections on how it felt after a 6 month break. Luckily my good friend Francois stepped in to give me a game. He ran:

Shenlong

Sensai Yu

The Shadow Emissary

The Lone Swordsman

Wandering River Monk

A peasant

A TT Brother.

The strategy was extraction.

The first thing that struck me was how rusty I was at crew selection. I went with Pandora as my go to Master. She is just so good and super fun to play. Plus people get nervous when you activate her because he actually has an impact on the game. Just the threat of know she can activate is worrying for an opponent. 

I took 

Pandora (The Box Opens, Wings of Darkness, and Fears Given Form). I like my girl to be up and hurting people.

Widow Weaver

Waldgeist

Doppleganger

Primordial Magic

Nekima

Terror Tot.

Ho Ho Ho merry fauxmas

So this weekend was my first ever story event. Down to sunny Hockley I went for (another) day at Wayland games.

I was treating the event as a bit of an end of year office party type day, so I loaded up the car with my stupid elf hat and a few Christmas crackers plus an untried or tested crew lead by young Miss Tara.

After a quick breakfast in the cafe (I strongly recommend this a fried food is the key to a long happy life) it was over to Wayland to pull my hat on and stand about talking nonsense for a while.

Game one rolled up and instead of the usual random first round draw this time you had to find someone you've never played and face them.

I ended up playing someone I regularly see at events but never get to play (mainly because we are so far apart in skill, he gets top tables while I get spoons) Mr Joe Wood who shockingly wasn't running Kirai.

The story with this game was that we we're trying to collect parts to build a present. This was

done by picking up randomly placed markers to fit our plans (handed out by TO)

Rush Goalie 3: Finale Event of Season 2

So while the vast majority of Guildball players were over at Steamcon for the weekend, I attended a small (10 person) tournament at one of my favourite venues the Tanelorn Wargaming Club. The last time I attended an event there it was for a Malifaux event which was an absolute blast, and my second ever Malifaux tournament win. Would this day be as successful? Read on to find out!

I took my usual tournament lineup bar subbing in Siren for Fangtooth (Shark, Salt, Sakana, Jac, Greyscales, Angel, Siren, Gutter). The other captains in play were Ox (3 of them!), Fillet, Smoke (2), Midas, Corsair, and Theron. So 7/10 were alchemists or butchers, my two least favourite matchups for Siren... guess she may not get her first tournament action after all...

Game 1 vs Jay (Butchers)

I took my standard lineup for facing Butchers of Shark, Salt, Sakana, Greyscales, Jac, Angel. I don't like Siren into Butchers because they are so fast and she is so easy to kill, and I don't want to get in a fight with Butchers so Gutter was out as well. Jay took Fillet, Princess, Boiler, Meathook, Rage and Tenderizer leaving Shank and Brisket on the sideboard. I think this lineup was a pretty big mistake as the two players I find frustrate me the most in Butchers are Shank (cause he is so hard to escape from with his high speed and 2" reach) and Brisket (cause she is great at keeping a hold on the ball, especially as my team is very male heavy and the two female players I have either have 1" reach, Angel, or no low tackle result, Siren). Tenderizer was a good choice though as I find him very tough to deal with and scoring on a 5+ sucks.

The Bayou's Most Wanted - Francois LaCroix

Welcome back to the Bayou y'all! Last time we stopped by, I gave a quick overview of Burt Jebson and his amazing mullet and at the end of that post I mentioned that he and Francois LaCroix often compete for the same role in Gremlin crews, that of a beatstick. Up until very recently I tended to take Francois over Burt 9 times out of 10 but this ratio has begun to shift as I've seen what Burt is fully capable of as well as realising some of the shortcomings of the tiny green Clint Eastwood look alike that is Francois.

The Gremlin With No Name.....wait.

When you take a look at Francois' card then the first shortcoming is pretty easily seen necause his Df stat is a very lowly 4. This is mitigated a bit by having the Squeel Defence Trigger on a Mask (this is very common on Gremlin models, making them hard to pin down with melee attacks) as well as the ability to use Soulstones, being a Henchman. His Wp is a very respectable 7 (the same as Burt Jebson) and he boasts a fairly healthy 10 wounds.

Francois definitely falls into the beatstick category for the Gremlins. Like Burt Jebson he has both a decent melee and ranged attack, although unlike Burt, his melee attack (a Dueling Sword) has a slightly better damage spread of 2/3/5 as opposed to 2/3/4 on his Rough Rider shooting attack. But his real damage dealing strength (and his built in self-destruct button) is the Dumb Luck trigger. This occurs on a Ram (which comes built in on his Duelling Sword melee attack) and essentially doubles the damage taken by the opponent. The down side of this is that Francois has to take damage equal to half the damage that the opposing model suffers. So what are a few ways to keep him alive to carry on poking things with the pointy end of the sword?

Competitive side

I wanted to talk about a side of the game I don't usually mention, competition. Usually my posts are either all building community focused or straight up shouting at squirrels rants so this time I'm going to try and find a balance between the two. 

Now anyone who has played me knows I'm far from competitive, I take fluffy, pretty, and sometimes stupid lists because it's fun. I like to win games when I can but I don't put too much energy into that side of things. This doesn't mean I have any problem with other people being competitive and putting their time into playing the best game they can. 

Arc 17

As I've mentioned before 2017 is the year of the Arcanists for me. As a little taster I thought I'd share what I've painted up so far. (cough, filler!)

Part of the appeal for me when I decided to switch factions was the opportunity to have a who faction painted to a decent standard as the quality on my Ressers swing quite a lot from when I started them. I'm assuming that when I look back at these in a couple of years time I'll think the same thing, but that the benefit of improving.

The Grandest Nationals

I want to start by saying a huge thank you to Mike for putting in so much time and effort, all of the people giving up their time to help out on the day, and all the people that set up tables (including the man with a city worth of terrain in his van Mr Dave Brown). Also a shout to the staff at Battlefield hobbies, it's a great venue and they worked non stop for the whole weekend.

All my opponents were amazing and everyone I chatted to was great as well.

Lastly thanks to everyone who helped out and those that pulled in enough favours so that I could finally make it to what was The Biggest Ever Malifaux Tournament. Just to let that sink in The Biggest Ever Malifaux Tournament!!!

The

Biggest

Ever

Malifaux

Tournament