Paper People Problems. Unpacking Red Library with Banying and Minako Rei.

So thanks to the power of insomnia I thought I would try and commit to paper (SWIDT?) the unpack I have been working on for my Red Library crew.  Like many Thunders crews at the moment it is looking to utilise the new hotness of Banying and Minako Rei.  Why I like this with Red Library and specifically Linh Ly, Bibliothecary is card quality. 

Firstly the crew:

Now it is stone light, coming in with only the 3 stones and four models that could potentially want to use them but I am personally ok with this.  You could swap Thánh Gióng for a Terracotta Warrior and have a pool of 6 if you so wanted. Equally Mâp Map could slot in there for another defensive model and one that can move your Master around. Entirely up to you as not the most critical model in this engine.  Personal choice and match up dependent.  Situational is, as ever, not a dirty word.

In essence the Bookkeepers, Banying and Minako are going to concentrate on summoning Katashiro and the remainder on card quality. 

Deployment for this is going to be nothing fancy.  I'm going with a blank map mainly for simplicity at this point but largely the 8 models are divided into two teams of Banying, Minako and the Bookkeepers and then everyone else.

My hand for turn i've drawn is pretty rubbish, but I am going to keep it in an effort to showcase what this unpack and crew does and in many ways bad cards in hand isn't awful as we're going to be discarding 4 cards pretty soon. 

The first two activations are entirely the same, both will be the bookkeepers to take advantage of Book Worm to draw cards and cycle bad ones from my hand and they'll make use of Efficiency to drop scheme markers for Banying to turn into Sunless Selfs with his aura and more discarding bad cards.  In both instances I do the Efficiency action first (after walking) and make use of Well Versed to do. 

So our Positioning after the Bookkeepers have activated looks like this, I have been very careful to ensure that both of the Sunless Selfs are within 3" of Minako Rei so that she can summon from them.  You do get a bit of wiggle room with this as scheme markers are 30mm and then the Sunless Selfs summoned in by Banying are also 30mm, so there is about 60mm of base size to ensure they are placed where you want them. 

Our hand has improved a bit from what we had in the opener, unfortunately the Red Joker is in our discard now but thems the breaks.  Can't have everything.  Critically at this stage I do not have a 10 of tomes or higher in my hand and I want at least two of those, so let's see what we can do about it. 

Here The Story of Thánh Gióng, Jade Rabbit and Story of Sūn Wùkōng have all activated and importantly, in that order.  Well at least the monkey and the rabbit went after the horse. The Story of Thánh Gióng is the only one that drops a scheme marker through the interact action, as the totem uses Phases of the Mid-Autumn Moon to do this, and Story of Sūn Wùkōng uses Speed of Meteor which allows them to drop markers without the interact action so the usual 4" bubble restriction doesn't apply. 

At this point, if you have mispositioned any of your Sunless Selfs outside of Minako Rei's 3" range you can activate Banying and utilise Ninja Vanish to teleport to the out of position Sunless Self and drop another shadow marker. If they were really out of position you could now discard a card to summon another Sunless Self and again have that 60mm of base size to wiggle.

On to Linh Ly herself, and predictably I am just going to Lost Knowledge 3 times for her activation, then throw down another scheme Marker with her bonus.  Depending on crew comp this last marker could be utilised to fuel the Lost Knowledge, equally if your hand already has what you want, you don't have to Lost Knowledge 3 times.  I will here for illustrative purposes. 

After Linh's activation I still don't have the high tomes I wanted. My hand isn't a grip full of severes and it would be very easy to get a bit despondent about all of that.  However I have now seen over 40% of my deck and whilst I have only 1 truly good card in my hand (and know there are 2 severes and a Red Joker in my bin) there is also 8 weaks in my discard pile. So all Hope is not lost, I believe in the heart of the cards!* Lets do some summoning. 

Minako needs a 10 of tomes or better to summon Katashiro utilising shadowmarkers (which Sunless Selfs count as) so let's start spending stones.  Very solid start, it has cost me a stone but it hasn't cost me a card from my hand.  I will take that. On to Katashiro2.

One of the great joys of Malifaux as a game, is consequential odds.  The good cards have to be somewhere. So again it has cost me a stone but I have summoned another Katashiro.  With pesky paper people deployed I can start applying a bit of pressure to my opponent hopefully.

With Blown in the Wind Katashiro have a roughly 12" threat range and can start stacking Flicker for positive flips on both attack and damage and if you're lucky catch some scheme runners or vanguards off guard with both Blade rush and that top end of 4 damage meaning you could well put 10 damage into an opponents model tail end of turn 1.  Which will probably cause a hole

What's been interesting writing this up is that I actually think this was a terrible example.  I didn't get the cards I wanted, I've had to burn more stones than I am comfortable with and my Master is probably going to have to commit the grand high treason of walking next turn (another reason to take Mâp Map).  I could very easily just've shuffled my deck and forced a more favourable example but that doesn't really do me or you any real favours. Even with this suboptimal example I have still been able to achieve  what I wanted from my crew and my plan, I've summoned my mobile disposable beaters which will hopefully cause some mischief.  For a more long winded example have a look at my streamed game from a couple of days ago. 

The Banying/Minako combo is of course very popular at the moment.  And with good reason. Once all of this is done, you still have two excellent models who can just go about the game being excellent models from that point forward. You're not going to do this every turn I suspect but it is a solid enough use of your first turn with them, particularly if you can take out a key scheme runner or unsuspecting model.  Obviously minions and enforcers are the best targets, going after stone users would be a mistake I feel unless your goal is to drain them of stones. 

The Banying/Minako Combo has naturally found a home with Asami and with Shen Long.  Hopefully however I have made a case for Linh as an alternate home for it, thanks in no small part to large quantity of scheme markers her crew coughs out at the slightest provocation, and the number of cards that she and the Red Library can draw.

*It is important to note I am far too old to understand this reference.