MALIFAUX MUSINGS - Murder Isn’t Always The Answer
Written By: Jay Edwards
Coming hot off GUTI’s first tournament of M4E and looking at the Wyrd forum, I feel the need to point something out to the wider community - killing your opponent isn’t the best way to win. There seems to be this idea that you can spend a couple turns just duking it out in the middle of the board and then spend the last turns scoring but that hasn’t been the local experience here of M4E so far. In fact, the games with the least death ended up being the highest scoring. I’ll demonstrate what I mean by talking about my tournament experience from this weekend.
I went into the event with a full Urami crew with Fungal backup, aiming to take Envoy of the Court as much as possible so I could focus on learning her playstyle in a tournament setting. My first game was against Misaki, Oyabun with Informants as the Strategy. On the first turn, my opponent spread out across the board and I pretty much mirrored his approach, planning on getting some swings in on the next turn. For turn 2, I went ahead and picked Assassinate, choosing Yamaziko as my target for my rage and that is where I went wrong. Assassinate is a perfectly fine scheme for some crews to do in turn 2, but not really for Urami. Kuchisake-Onna, a Goryo, Ikiryo, and 2 Gaki brought Yamaziko past half but did not kill her. 1 point for me though, right? Yeah… but my opponent was able to hold more Strategy markers than me and fully complete his Scheme, so my chase for 1 point earned him 3. Rather than focus on killing him, I should have focused more on Urami’s strength - moving and positioning. Still, a close game at 5-6.
Game 2 was against Zorida, Bog Witch on Recover Evidence. Recover Evidence is pretty hard for Urami on a normal day since the ghosts usually fall over to a swift kick, so the focus should have been to run around the edge of the board and try to do things. Should. Cue my idiot self first misreading the Leave Your Mark Scheme (I thought it was within 3” of the center, not 1”) but also in taking Leave Your Mark in the first place, I committed resources to the center of the board. The part of the board that instantly got me surrounded by Giant Leeches and Bad Juju, otherwise known as things Urami has a hard time clawing through. By turn 3 I figured out my mistake, but it was way too late. One key thing that I discovered though is that Enslaved Spirits are really good at guilting people - Bad Juju made 3 charges against his own crew in that game. He kept missing, but hey, it’s the thought that counts. Losing 3-8 stung, but hey, lesson learned.
Speaking of lessons learned, Game 3 was against a similar Miskai, Oyabun list but a different player with Plant Explosives as the Strategy. Now I knew what I needed to do - stay away from the dudes and do stuff instead. Using the speed of the Shikome and the general scariness of Oskar, I was able to basically own a corner of the map on my opponent’s half while using Enslaved Spirits and Seishin to drop Chains on models and allow Kirai to fling threats into their faces. It was still a really close game, but I won 9-8.
I think in all 3 of my games, I killed maybe 5 models. Not for lack of trying or anything like that, but because my crew isn’t a freight train and can’t explosively crunch my opponents (except that one time I flipped a Red Joker with Ikiryo against a Giant Leech and dealt 7 damage). It’s a speedy, action-doing crew. Does that mean it’s a bad crew then since it can’t murder as efficiently as a Viktoria on methamphetamine? No, I think it’s just as good as any other crew in the game but it’s better at other things. Lost in the Clouds is a great piece of tech, not to mention the liberal amounts of Incorporeal on pretty much everything but that just makes them survivable, not evisceration engines. Yeah, you’ve got a couple 3 damage attacks in the crew, but most are 2 or 1, so don’t expect to be liberating organs from their fleshy prisons with that. The other huge thing to consider is the time limit. You only have 4 turns in a game now, so taking a couple turns off to try and massacre pointlessly cuts your scoring potential in half. While you’re flailing ineffectually against an old lady with a stick like I was in game 1, a Master could be on the other side of the board scheming away.
So, what am I saying here? The long and short of it is that Malifaux isn’t 40k. It isn’t AoS. It isn’t even WarMachine. Your crew might be a pair of machetes taped to the side of a Hummer, able to rip through anything it comes across, but your crew might also be a couple butter knives dangling from the handlebar of a Segway. If that’s the case, don’t try and enter into a kill-stacking competition on the open road because you won’t win, but you’ll beat the hell out of them in a sandwich-making race at the local park. And even if you only manage to make 1 sandwich before getting run over along with the crowd in a blind Hummer-fueled rage, 1 is still more than 0. Play to your strengths. You might just make a better chef than a psycho.
