Nomadda The Cost

Hello there! Another blog post, and another new contributor. I’ll go by Tayne, as I once called a character that in an MMO and it’s just been useful as a handle since.

Anyhoo! Brief intro. I played fairly heavily in M2E, moved away, came back last year. Had some fun with a variety of masters (notably Maxine, Kaeris, Parker, and Rasputina), but didn’t really fancy playing any of them for GG4 and then got quite distracted by the return of some square basing. This meant that I’ve only played six or so games of GG4 since launch.

Now I’ll bet there’s some questions about the above paragraph. Probably something like “Raspy is great in GG4, are you nuts?”. Well, sure she is, but that doesn’t make me want to play her. I habitually avoid whatever is ‘The Choice’ and look to see what can be done with other things.

I also play keywords without hiring outside of the keyword. Versatile options are fine, but bringing in anything else is something I just don’t do. Does this hamper my gameplay? Yeah, probably. Am I enjoying these toy soldiers anyway? You betcha.

Which brings me to now. I want to play more Malifaux, and wanted a new keyword at the same time as a few of us have started the Ten Game Challenge set by Beard, so I thought I’d hop on board the bandwagon and ultimately chose to pick up Tiri and her Bygone keyword.

So, if you’re interested enough to keep reading, this blog will be my journey into discovering the keyword. And messing up GG4.

First, I made a list. You’ll note that this list was made before any strats or schemes and that was intentional. For the first game with a keyword, the actual scoring part of the game is secondary for me, my primary objective is to shove models around and start to learn how the keyword operates.

With that in mind, my first list was:

Tiri 1

Oro Boro

Parson

Ancient Construct with Flush with Cash

Kett

The First Light

Aua Warrior.

The Iron Matron

I got a game with a friend, said game being Plant Explosives (Ensnare, Espionage, In Your Face, Let Them Bleed and Deliver a Message) into:

Toni 1

Mouse

Arun Rajput

Gunsmith with Magical Training

Soulstone Miner

Mechanical Rider

Amina Naidu

 

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow, mostly because I didn’t take notes and it would invariably fail fairly quickly, but I will give some thoughts on the keyword that I picked up in this game.

 

The Unpack

Aka, how to Durdle on turn 1. Pretty good here, as The First Light sorts out a hand for you, Kett starts shifting your whole crew up the board, Parson and Tiri set up The Ooh Matron with fast, shielded and focus and all the while, Tiri is drawing you a load of cards thanks to Let Bygones Be Bygones. This leads to…

The Ooh Matron

She hits like a truck! Toni did her best to corral The Ooh Matron into place with Caught in the Ring, but the Pass Through trigger whisked me out of that, pushing through Toni, Arun and the Gunsmith and letting me easily kill said Gunsmith with a couple of Greatsword whacks. And this was despite Amina’s attempts to spoil fun with her Reach of the Union.

Now I did expect The Ooh Matron to die, and she duly did (which denied me the second point for In Your Face, which is absolutely my bad), but she did serious work before kicking the bucket and took a lot of attention away from the rest of my crew.

Boom Boom Boom Boom

No, not a poem by Baldrick but a comment on how many blasts the crew throws out. Tiri’s earthquake is not a projectile, letting her freely lob it into combat and cackle. The Aua Warrior’s frisbee was surprisingly good….

Dammit. I now realise that Tiri sets up the warrior, as her attack staggers anyone damaged and the Warrior’s Discus Grenade targets move. Awesome! Can’t wait to make people sad with that.

Where was I? Oh yes, the booms. Well, on top of these blasts, we also have shockwaves. In fact, they’re so useful I’ll give them their own section

Shockwaves

See! Promised I would. Right, there’s two here I want to talk about. The first is from The First Light and her Light The Way trigger. This was able to yank my models around quite easily (only one per turn), getting Kett out of triggering Ensnare and moving Oro Boro ready to drop a bomb.

You gotta love a significant, armour 2 totem, right?

The second is on Kett. Not just that he moves large chunks of the crew around thanks to Safe Passage, but the Distortion Wave trigger was clutch. Once more, I was able to prevent an Ensnare on a model by passing a simple duel with the right trigger and moving the markers far enough away.

You’ll notice that neither of these actions let the enemy do anything to stop them. The shockwave itself is incidental, if they do affect any enemy models or draw out some cards, brilliant, but I’ve already gotten the value I wanted out of the action before that, and this makes me a happy camper.

 

All in all, I managed to pull out a 5-5 draw, which genuinely shocked me. I think the keyword is great and I sincerely look forwards to exploring it in the next 9 games. And I might even switch to Embrace Technology at least once in one of those games.

Maybe.