Return of the Hag

Hello there, Beard here.

So.

In very predictable fashion I am going to change my mind.  I know, who knew.

I am in the process of selling off a large amount of my collection.  All of my Bayou has gone, only Reva remains of my Rezzers and I am all in on Outcasts. 

Except of course I’m not, and an old flame is calling. 

When I wasn’t on Rezzers in M2E I spent a great deal of time with a Master that was largely panned by all and sundry. Especially on the UK scene and whilst I have side eyed her I’ve only given her one game in m3e and I’m going to change that. I played her exclusively in Bayou in M2E and this time around I’m going to give her a go in Neverborn.  I am of course talking about the 13 of Masks herself, she who puts the Hag in a dep have, Big Mama Z, Malifaux fate witch: Zoraida. 

Now much like I did for Reva last year Im going to quickly touch on why I loved her in M2E.  And weirdly, there’s not that much on her card as to why.  The big thing on the front allowing me to hire Iggy (bare with me) in Bayou, equally there was an upgrade that let me hire swampfiend models in bayou which is how waldghiests (who were amazing!) and bad juju (who wasn’t!) came with me.

The back of the card is pretty familiar (although I think much improved now), Obey is the big one for which she’s known and it was still stat7 and suited but as you may note her totem summoning mechanic requires 2ap. 2 master ap! That’s truly awful! And for a long I never ever summoned the voodoo doll, I just didn’t think it was worth it. 

And then along came the Willow the Wisp. This little guy changed everything for me. For 3ss I got a model that could take Zoraida’s summon action for her and that was all he ever did and he was worth every single Soulstone I spent on him.

So there’s some subtle differences with the dolly now and how Hemmed/Curse works now, big thing is back then you had to flip to get it on someone and it was a condition so it could be removed.  So back then it was harder to summon the doll, required a high card in hand to get it on to someone and even then they could just remove it.  It’s so much better now!

Well.

I don’t know about that. As you may have spotted above, whenever the voodoo doll suffered damage, the hemmed target took damage. And this little guy had SIX WOUNDS. So if you could severe 6, the hemmed target also took 6 dmg. 

So for a long time this is what I would try to do, but it was very card intensive and didn’t always work and 6 damage will certainly make a hole but it won’t kill everything and then along came Iggy.

Iggy had a melee that just put burning on a target, and with a low tome in hand burning +2, and maybe Zoraida would obey him to do it again. So pretty reliably I would stack 4-6 burning on the voodoo doll, which stacked 4-6 burning on the hemmed target. 

And back then, burning worked like this. So come the end of the turn my voodoo doll would take 4-6 dmg (and probably die) and then the hemmed target also took 4-6 dmg, and then another 4-6 dmg from their burning. 8-12 dmg will a kill lot of things in Malifaux. It’ll kill them real good, all for only one opposed duel. 

So that’s I would do, choose a big scary thing in range and then blow it up. Every turn.  Generally this tactic meant I would 2 games each tournament and then in the final round I would face an actual good player and get my teeth kicked in, but that was a solid result I found and I was happy. Played my fair share of top table games, got my fair share of best in bayou (at least till zip hit the scene).

Of course now, none of this is possible. Models don’t do those things, the curse is now an upgrade and burning has been changed significantly but I still remember these times fondly.

But now on to what can I do with dolly in this edition. What new nonsense is there for me to play with.  I have ten games lined up with various opponents some streamed, some not. Time to see what the old girl can do now.