The new year

Hi folks,

At the end of 2016 I was 73^rd in the UK rankings, had 1 best painted trophy, and 4 or 5 best sports trophies (almost all “joint best sports”), and frankly it was a very enjoyable year for me returning to Malifaux after a year and a half away. Here’s kind of a “plans for the new year” post, though fair warning: I don’t do resolutions. I still have no intention to run any kind of “netlists” or whatever, I’ll continue to do my own thing to make sure I’m having fun and see what I can get to work.

You may have noticed I’ve been tinkering with some Neverborn recently, and not just snazzy beasts for Marcus. After much contemplating of new masters to diversify into, I came to the conclusion that none of the “other” Arcanist masters particularly float my boat, so I’ve decided to branch out into Neverborn, so that I can use Lilith. She’s another generalist master, good at most things, with crews which are generally fairly fast, with notably high defence (if few wounds).

In the absence of any paint on Lilith, the base coating of Angel Eyes is going to have to pass as a vague leader model.

The initial plan was to do a one man “Tale of X gamers”, by slowly growing my Neverborn as I play more tournaments. However, that plan somewhat fell apart along the way, when I had a massive prize haul at Pigs in Blankets, which included a few voucher prizes for various different stores. This meant I could pick up a few extra bits, and therefore fill out the model pool a bit.

I’ve ended up with:

Lilith

Malifaux Cherub

Barbaros

Angel Eyes

Doppelganger

Scion of Black Blood

2 Bloodwretches

3 Terror tots

3 Silurids

3 Waldgeists

In the natural theme, my young Satyr Terror Tots (mid painting)

That’s quite a big model pool for having never played a game with any of them. Though my casual gaming has crashed down to near enough nothing at the moment, I have a few tournaments coming up (including the 2 UK Masters side events), and so I think I’ll use them to try to learn the Neverborn. One critical thing I find while trying to learn new crews/models, is to use a relatively small model pool, and get the hang of a few models at a time. As I’ll be jumping in at the deep end with two tournaments, I will most probably use multiples of a few models (Terror tots, Bloodwretches etc) with a scattering of other things, so that I can learn them relatively quickly, and therefore build up an idea of what models can achieve what.

Bloodwretches look to be very good cheap-middle minions, plus lovely models.

I do now notice that my model pool includes pretty much no models which can actually deal out damage (reliably/consistently/easily), so hurdle number 1 will be how do I kill things in game (I’m pretty sure I have scheme running sorted out).

Muscles and shotguns. In the absence of any ability to hurt things, the Scion of Black blood may well be my “heavy hitter” for a while.

Anyway, I hope you aren’t put off by the non-Marcus-centric shift (chances are I will still use him a fair bit), and let’s see where 2017 gets me (guesses on the back of a postcard).

Until next time

Dave/sssk