Calling down the Thunder

So my first year of Malifaux has finished. Hard to believe I’ve only been playing since Spring 2014. It has actually become quite a key part of my life.

I’ve enjoyed playing the Viktorias as my first crew, and sort of enjoyed Nicodem as my second crew. I’ve decided I want a nice melee crew that has some range and flexibility with the extra character from strange movement/casting effects. The Viks are tough, and hit hard and I’ll round them out with some Freikorp over the next year, but I’ve decided to switch to Ten Thunders as I love the theme and the mechanics of the crews seem to be a nice mix of complex and straightforward melee so they have a bit more depth and variety than the Viktoria’s.

Now Ten Thunders have some gorgeous models and I felt spoilt for choice. I will be picking up Shen Long when he arrives, but for now I’ve gone with Yan Lo.

I chose him because he can play as ressurrectionist and uses some resser models even when he is a Ten Thunder master, so I can get some mileage out of my resser collection. He has a great interaction with Toshiro and Izamu as well as finding punk zombies useful. 

I like having a master than can hit and take some punishment (which Nicodem couldn’t). Yan Lo gets a decent base cast and a good melee upgrade but if he can add his 1 and 2 ascendent upgrades he can get Impossible to Wound and Incorporeal. That is a total of 3 Chi which is pretty easy to get. The incorporeal is not going to do much to protect him as nearly everything in the game seems to ignore it or use ranged mega blast spells but it is a great ability for massively enhancing movement. Suddenly he can get where ever he needs to pretty easily. Added to that is his lightning dance trick, the dreaded Terracota Curse and feared Hung Po assault. 

There are plenty of other great models in faction. My collection at the moment looks like this

Yan Lo

Chiaki

3 Ashigari

Soul Porter

3 Ten Thunder Brothers

Toshiro

Izamu

Yin

Yamaziko

3 Thunder Archers

3 Oiran

3 Punk Zombies

The Lone Swordsman (proxied with a Samurai from the Bushido range – hey maybe I should play that game too)

That should give me a really interesting mix for crew selection. The Brothers are great, hard to shift generalists, the Archers are nasty shooters, and the Ancestors are good for buffing, delaying, and brutal beatsticking!

Roll on the games