3/11/17 Montag's Malifaux Tournament!

So as promised I'll be catching up with updating the blog for my recent tournaments. This post will be on my Malifaux tournament here in Houston!

This first game was against Travis, Malifaux Extraordinaire. Lately I'd been successfully winning in practice games against him and have gotten a very good grasp on his crew mechanics. Turns out it didn't count when it mattered...

It was Flank Deployment, the strategy was Headhunter. The schemes were Claim Jump, Frame For Murder, Leave Your Mark, Undercover Entourage, and Search the Ruins. I chose Claim Jump and Frame for Murder, he ended up choosing Leave Your Mark and Undercover Entourage.

I ended up taking Viktorias due to being able to handle his Yasunori charge better than Leve could, I knew I'd be engaged very fast because of it and had to provide a deterrent with Blood.

My deployment, the Winged Plagues were far out on the flank

The beginning was standard fare, positioning for a prime assault for both sides. I moved the Winged Plagues on my left in anticipation of Claim Jump, but he answered by moving Asami and summoned some Yokai to counter it. I realized I should have split them up after that, too late.

He also summoned Obsidian Oni to clog up charge lanes to Asami.

My positioning at the end of turn 1

The Winged Plagues, realizing they may have made a bad move...

With the way we were set up and the experience we've had playing each other, we both said this game comes down to who wins initiative for turn 2. If I won then I'd be able to wipe out his critical models including Yasunori and his Henchman. If I did this then there'd be almost no retaliation capable of killing Blood or my other models. If he won then he'd be able to stop my crew from advancing and feed Blood one model at a time, slowly picking away at my crew while achieving his schemes and denying mine.

Guess who won? Well, of course I didn't...

It was a blood bath...

Yeah... So I lost initiative, of course, even after spending a stone.

There isn't much to say after that, things happened and I took less pictures because I was losing models left and right. Yasunori killed Hannah, the Henchman, Graves and Yokai ended up clogging my right side so I had to choose between targets and the Yasunori lived. There were corpse and Head markers absolutely everywhere. I felt bad for the Malifaux clean up crew that was responsible for clearing dead bodies afterward.

Because of this I was unable to perform any of my schemes since I was on the defensive the whole time. I ended up getting 2 VP for Frame For Murder on turn 3, and by that time I had hardly anything left. He scored his full 10 VP for the game. On the last turn I managed to pick up one Headhunter marker, ending in a loss of 10-3.

My second game was against Brian, a newer player. He declared Nicodem, a master I have only had one game against and it was brutal as it was Travis' most successful list to date with his favorite Rezzer master. He admitted to not having a large model pool for his crew, which is scary as he has a pretty good understanding of the game and will only get better once he gets the right models.

During lunch we talked before we played and I ended up explaining to him how the Viktorias worked since he'd never faced them. It made this game interesting since he knew how my crew in particular worked right before the game, with both Mike and myself explaining how you can counter it.

It was Standard deployment with Stake a Claim as the strategy. I really hate this strategy as Outcasts don't have solutions like a Necropunk to move and do 2AP interact actions. The Schemes were Claim Jump, Dig Their Graves, Accusation, Hunting Party and Mark For Death. I decided on Viks as I could stop the sheer amount of summons every turn by killing them and hopefully distract him into committing to my main crew more and letting my scheme runners run more free, and Hunting Party seemed to be an easy score for me with two henchman and easy summons to kill.

I ended up taking Hunting Party and Claim Jump. He took Claim Jump and Hunting Party as well.

On turn 1 I moved my Vik block up while keeping the Winged Plagues on opposite table edges (I learned!) with the Freikorpsman in the middle just in case. He moved his Carrion Emissary, Mortimer, Rotten Belle, Nicodem and Valedictorian (can't remember if this was summoned or not) up the middle, with the Necropunk going toward my right.

He couldn't really Lure anything since Hannah blocked LOS, and he used his Emissary's ability to block LOS and eventually summon Mindless Zombies into that charge lane. He also summoned a Punk Zombie to get into my clump.

In the end, though, Blood got them all lol.

Notice a lot of models disappeared!

So I ended up winning that crucial turn 2 initiative. I charged Blood into the clump and killed pretty much everything there. The rest of my block moved forward and things were looking good.

Although I was able to gain the upper hand on the table Brian ended up doing a very good job at denying my score and catching up in VP. I found myself unable to deny his Stake a Claim with the Necropunk without sacrificing my VP for Claim Jump and Stake a Claim. He summoned models to deny my Claim Jump and Stake a Claim as well.

On the left he shifted Mortimer, who escaped the range of Whirlwind, to deny that side as well.

In the end I got the win 6-5, which was much tougher than I anticipated on turn 2.

In game 3 I played Parker, who was using Ramos. I didn't take many pictures during this game because I was pretty engaged the whole time.

It was Corner Deployment with Squatter's Rights as the strategy. Claim Jump, Frame For Murder, Leave Your Mark, Mark for Death and Tail 'Em were in the scheme pool. I ended up taking Leveticus as he tended to be a good counter to Parker's lists. I took Leave Your Mark and Claim Jump, he took Frame For Murder and Mark For Death.

He was running a very elite list and had a shocking 5 models in his list. Granted, he had a lot of summoning power between Ramos and the Mechanical Rider, and the rest had some hitting power with Joss, Howard Langston and the Arcane Emissary.

He ended up hitting me very strongly with Howard, the Emissary and the Mech Rider. I managed to live through most of the attack, as I was using a pure Outcast Leve list that was untested but seemed to work fine. The Strongarm took the brunt of the Emissary's insane attacks, and Sue lived through assaults from the others. Because Sue had his aura of burning up he ended up giving burning 3 to all of these guys, lived with Hard to Kill, and got an insane amount of free attacks due to the Return Fire upgrade - I was just throwing out low Crow cards just to get it! On top of that the Librarian and Hannah were healing these guys up slowly. The Winged Plagues were running schemes unchallenged as well.

In the end I got the win 8-5!

That's all for now, next time I'll update you on last week's tournament in Austin!

Blood Bowl Commission

Holy crap, two months?!

What the heck, man...

So why the long absence? Well, firstly I got a promotion at work and with that came lots of training and more responsibilities, so this obviously came into conflict with extracurricular stuff like hobbies. Also, because I was working on the commission, I stopped any projects that were personal to ensure it got done, so it became a standstill for my own work.

Although once I got done with that stuff I was out of the groove in terms of upkeep for the blog. Now that I've gathered my wits I'll make sure to get this back up and running regularly.

So with that I present the completed commission:

(So it turned out really grainy and looked much better on my phone/computer, but in the future I'd be using a camcorder and not a phone!)

This video was slapped together haphazardly, so it's not really a reflection of what I'd want to eventually do with the hobby in regards to making videos. I just thought it would be cool to try out, and I did so immediately after getting the painting done so I was extremely tired. Anyway, thought you'd enjoy it!

So what about pics?

Here's the Ork team in all its completed glory. As stated earlier I was tired, it was around 1AM on a worknight, and I couldn't find my usual camera to take photos of the job. I had to use my phone, which doesn't have a white balance option and doesn't take macro photos, so bear with me with the yellow pics.

Like I said, they're really yellow...

Initially these guys were a lot more vibrant, but due to the matte varnish it knocked the oranges down a lot and made them more muted. It did a great job blending the decals into the paint job though, and it's crucial when working with decals to have a painted-on look.

Although this guy was my test model for the Orks it shows a bit more on its vibrancy, although I had others that looked better.

The team on the field...

Now for the humans, the Reikland Reavers!

These guys turned out way better than I anticipated, and turned out to be one of my favorite paint jobs! It was a breath of fresh air painting these guys after the Orks, they have more unanimous shapes for the armor plating and the blue turned out spectacular. I had also finally worked out an effective assembly line schedule for painting and got them done much faster than I had with the Orks.

I have a ton of WIP photos for both teams, but figured it's not a crucial item to display.

I learned a ton from this commission! I finally figured out how to paint black in a way I'm satisfied with, as it's a color I struggled with much like brown a few years back. I couldn't figure out how to highlight the color without making it look too much like the highlight being the main color, for this instance grey. I also learned how to do a very vibrant blue. And although I've done green skin numerous times this is my first foray into blending it smoother, and I learned to love the new GW Glaze line they offer (it's amazing for glazing!). The most important thing I learned though was organization and learning how to effectively paint in an assembly line, since I hadn't done that since around 2007. I really prefer painting one model at a time, though, as I tend to sacrifice a tiny bit of quality for quantity.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any questions on paint recipes I'll be happy to share them! For the next update I'll post on my last two Malifaux tournaments along with a few items I've learned from them, as well as progress regarding Parker Barrows in my recent experiments!