My experience with the Malifaux World series: A journey (Part2- Round 1: FIGHT!)

 

Even though I started writing part 1 of this journey (found here https://beardfaux.blogspot.com/2025/01/my-experience-with-malifaux-world.html ) 2 hours before pairings were up, by the time I finished, edited and uploaded it, I was ready for my lunch break. It was when I came off lunch that I saw the pairings were up and ready to go.

My opponent’s online handle is Nikotopola and he is (according to longshanks) in Poland, where it was currently (checks clock) 4:15am.

All that waiting, all that buildup and now I was just as wired as before except now instead of waiting breathlessly for the MWS committee to hit the “go” button, I was waiting for my opponent to awaken, perform morning ablutions and respond to my DM. To make matters worse, my friend Phil had already started his game, and I was seething with jealousy.

Waiting indeed

You’ll notice that most of what I’ve written thus far has been written in the past tense despite the fact that I’m writing this in real time. This is because I’m planning on writing what I can now before playing the game and writing the conclusion in the same post and I thought it would be more cohesive if the entire affair was written as a retrospective.

I have never engaged in conversation online with my opponent before, so naturally my social anxiety was through the roof. I didn’t recognise his name by reputation either which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because not having heard his name meant that at least he wasn’t so far out of my league that he was spoken of reverently in the circles I move in, but also a curse because this person was an utter mystery to me. I had no idea what to expect.

Speaking of blessings and curses, we were playing a faction mirror match which in all fairness is probably inevitable when 13 out of (now) 73 players had declared Ten Thunders as their faction. The blessing was that there was very little in ten thunders that I needed a primer on to understand how it played and what to expect, but the curse was that the reason so many players declared Thunders is because Thunders are very very good this GG.

My three number one concerns were if he declared Asami, Shenlong or Linh Ly, because as we already discussed in my preamble, I had already figured out a list for the pool.

The list I had in mind was… Wait! It’s time to discuss the pool!

Good Anya Mate round 1 was a flank deployment on Stuff the Ballots. Schemes were Power Ritual, In Your Face, Outflank, Hold Up Their Forces and Sweating Bullets.

The list Liam and I had hammered out was

Ah, Misaki. Queen of My heart    

The reason we settled on this list is the pool really encourages wide play. There are 2 ballots right in the very corners, there is power ritual and outflank that both score by being in corners whilst the existence of sweating bullets in the pool also disincentivised anchor models like henchmen or masters from being anywhere near the centre of the board.

Speaking of anchor pieces; both Yasunori and Zheng are fast and resilient enough to anchor a flank, whilst also threatening a minimum of 3x min 3 attacks making them ideal to pick off enforcers or minions, and supported by Sensei Yu’s card draw I hoped that their high stats and defensive tech would allow them to survive long enough to be relevant. Also in a pool with In your face, it sure is nice to have multiple models tied for highest point cost for scoring that end point, especially when those models require significant investment to remove with minimal investment to keep.

Now let’s hearken back for a moment to my concerns re: potential master drops.

First of all, Asami. Well this dumb keyword is such a meta bogeyman at the moment, and rightfully so. That said, despite the crews speed, I don’t think it has the resilience required to hold down both flanks; ideally it just wants to pick a spot and lock down the opponent and grind them into dust, which makes me think Asami may very well not be the best pick into this pool. If he does bring Asami, my biggest hitters are size 3 making fighting Suzaku a fair fight and sensei Yu has laugh off meaning the only viable targets for the usual cheese grater nonsense are Jin, Banying, Shang and Misaki, of which Shang is realistically the only one in danger.

Then there’s Shenlong. I’m probably more scared of Shen than the other thunders boogeymen, just because his stat 8 attacks still comfortably hit def7 Yasunori or Mv7 Zheng. That said if Shenlong is coming, once again he can only be on one flank and he’ll be relying on wind golem to score another flank. Both Yas and Zheng can get 2 attacks against the wind golem even through butterfly jump so I am confident the wind golem will not be the effective combat powerhouse it usually is.

Linh Ly is similar to Asami in that she’s at her most effective in a bubble, however unlike Asami her fast schemers are exceptionally good at staying alive and interacting efficiently. In a vacuum I think Linh is the most likely choice for my opponent of the three I’m worried about and after I declare Misaki I think declaring Linh2 is the obvious choice for negating all my crit strikes (although if my opponent goes for Linh1 to draw cards off my shadow markers, I will be over the moon).

When my opponent was available to make contact I was disappointed to learn that in the entire 7 day period, he only had 2x windows with which to play. After 6pm Wednesday (my 3am Thursday) and after 5pm Sunday (my 2am Monday)

All my fears about making multi-time zone games work were being realised, plus I was aching to actually get in and play the first round. If I wanted to get practice games for round 2 before round 2 actually started, I needed to play sooner rather than later, so I opted for the Thursday morning game, and we hammered out a slightly later start time so my game was happening at 5am. I also was lucky enough to have an annual leave day owing me after all the extra hours and responsibilities I had to take on over the Christmas period, so I took that Thursday off. Worth noting there is no way I could continue taking a day off every week if timezones continued to be a problem. I guess we’ll see how the rest of the rounds play out.

I asked if he wanted to put the game in the app, and he asked what corner I was choosing as I was the attacker. He was of course correct, the appropriate order of activation for a competitive Malifaux game is that each player will know where they are being deployed even before faction and master declaration so sheepishly I rushed to the computer, pulled up the map and hastily chose top right.

Corpse token put there to show which deployment I chose   

Having done so I watched my app like a hawk praying that he would declare a master I felt comfortable playing my list into.

He declared Shenlong. The guy I was most worried about playing into.

 Despite my practice games, my previous confidence was entirely gone. Everything that could have gone wrong so far had gone wrong and we were holding off on list declaration until closer to the game, adding more to my anxiety with 2 more nights sleep before I got the opportunity to put it to bed one way or another.

Now thanks to the magic of time-travel the game has been played. I’m very bad at remember precise details about the game so I’ll spare the blow-by-blow and try to hit the high points, especially when compared to what I thought would be my biggest concerns.

His list was

posted with my opponents permission of course

I looked at this list when I woke up this morning and was pleasantly surprised to not see Fuhatsu as I was worried he would get pushed into the centre and just bait me into the centre for my opponent to score sweating bullets and discard cards to get models to interact out of activation. The minions were surprising as I’m used to my opponents just not bringing minions versus Misaki to play around Jin. Thanh was also a surprise but I wasn’t too worried as with one good hand, Misaki can kill him in one activation and with all the card draw I was bringing that one good hand was likely (spoiler alert, I never got that one good hand). I also realised that charm warders were a threat to my sunless selves which is a neat interaction (not that it came up except for one time I thought it did and my opponent corrected me that it was on a different attack).

Looking at the lists, despite my beefy boys my opponent absolutely had the attrition advantage and I spent the game trying to play around it. Big surprise was the charm warder not only living through the entire game, but also singlehandedly dropping Zheng from full health to 0 from turn 2-4. As discussed earlier I expected Shen on one flank and the golem on the other. I was surprised to see them both take the flank where Yasunori was. Yasunori scored me 2 points turn 2 (1x power ritual, 1x strat) before meeting his demise after tanking an entire Shenlong activation and then being finished off by the wind golem’s wind blast attack. It would have been very nice to have gotten one extra activation out of him (and had him chew up one more action from Shenlong) but ultimately Shenlong being in one far corner by himself with no targets was still okay by me which essentially rendered Shen mostly irrelevant for turn 3. This did score In your face for Shen though.

Speaking of irrelevant masters I made a model placement mistake in my deployment which hampered my unpack. In order to remedy this I had to use Misaki’s activation turn 2 pushing models forward which lead me to overcompensate turn 3. This is where I made my biggest mistake. Whilst Shen and the golem were off playing silly boys on a far flank, My opponents Yu and Thanh were in the middle of the board. Stupidly, I went in on Yu with Misaki. Because Yu and Thanh were bait. I couldn’t kill Yu in one activation because hard to kill stones and I certainly couldn’t kill Thanh because of my garbage hand. This not only failed to score my reveal point but also gave my opponent the reveal for Sweating bullets. Had I seen the trap for what it was, and applied Misaki to something else (such as the charm warder that was continuously harrassing me) it would have been a much tighter game.

Game continued and my models dwindled, whilst my opponent just healed everything that was slightly injured back to full. He lost 1 model all game and that was to a speculative attack from Jin that accidentally flipped a severe against a wandering river monk.The next thing that mattered was my opponent made the mistake of attacking Banying round 5 without an appropriately high card in hand. I had a high mask and Chi so this mistake gave me 2 points, I was able to score my second strat point and made it so my opponent could not stop me scoring end point of power ritual. I was able to deny my opponents last strat point and deny end point of sweating bulllets.

Game ended on a 4/6 loss and that could easily have been a tie had a few speculative flips gone my way instead of his (turn 3 and 4 we were both playing with no cards for a lot of the turn) and if I’d not taken the bait. But as we know, Lance Smash.

So I’ve walked away from the game feeling pretty good about my performance. My opponent was inarguably a better player and whilst at no point was he sweating and worried about loss, the margin of victory speaks to how tight a game it was and I know I could have at least managed a tie if I'd made one or two slightly better decisions.

And the biggest benefit is of course that now that I’ve lost first round I am considerably less likely to run into some of the true sharks of the MWS.

No, on to practice round 2 with much excitement!

Lance out.