Hello, Mali-folks!

It’s been a minute since I did one of these, but I’m back!  Captaincon 2024 was my first big wargaming con since, well, Captaincon 2023, and tournament organizer Jesse Ellis didn’t disappoint.  The Malifaux Content Creator’s Invitational returned (possibly for the last time?) and the Booty and Plunder open was as big and spectacular as ever.  Over three days I played 8 games of Malifaux, went out for karaoke, and… ok, not much more than that, but that’s a lot of stuff.  8 games!  How did it go?  Did I learn anything about myself?  Did the nefarious Black Joker make an appearance?  What goes with sea and salt?  How many roads must a man walk down?  Read on and learn the answers to some, or possibly none, of these questions!

Some Context, As a Treat

Going into this con, I was a little less excited than is customary for me.  The biggest reason was also the smallest: this was my first con since my son was born last March.  I found that I really didn’t want to say goodbye, and while I had fun at the con, I definitely missed my boy.  When the last round wrapped I stayed just long enough to applaud the winners and got right out of town.

The second reason is, perhaps, related to the first, which is that I just haven’t been playing as much Malifaux lately.  Being a dad is a full-time job, and I also have a full-time job, a notoriously intense and demanding one.  I just haven’t had as much time to play.  Before the con, the last Malifaux games I played were in the top 32 of the Malifaux World Series, and I was pretty disappointed with my results there: a win, a loss, and a draw in the group stage, and then a loss in the first elimination round, knocking me out.  I think both of those losses could have been wins with tighter play on my part, and screwing up that badly knocked the wind out of my sails a bit.

But that’s also Vassal Malifaux, which (while fun) is just not the same as the in-person kind.  I love seeing other people’s armies and showing off my own, and I love the social aspect of the hobby.  I don’t love getting con crud, but otherwise, convention Malifaux is basically the perfect expression of the game to me.

Once again, Jesse Ellis of the Boring Conversation podcast hosted the events: the Malifaux Content Creators’ Invitational on Friday, a three-round team tournament, and the five-round Gaining Grounds 4 tournament Booty and Plunder on Saturday and Sunday.  Like last year, Jesse (a talented home brewer) included custom glassware on the prize wall, and awarded not just the traditional podium/painting/sportsmanship prizes but two special ones: the Malifaux Cartographer award, for the person who brought the best table of terrain, and the Iron Scorpius, for the best-placing player who used a different Keyword in all five rounds of Booty and Plunder.

Malifaux Content Creators’ Invitational Cinematic Universe (MCCICU)

Just like last year, I paired with Doug of Danger Planet for this event – a three-round team tournament featuring two-player teams.  I declared Bayou, as is my wont, and Doug went with Resurrectionists.  He was wavering back and forth between them and Neverborn, who are scary strong now that Angel Eyes has been rocketed into the stratosphere, but with more reps on the Redchapel Killer he decided to go with the devil he knew.

The rules for the MCCI were the same as last year: each round, the scheme pool was the same, but there were two different Strategies and deployment types for the two tables.  All four players had to declare a Master simultaneously.  Then the higher-positioned team assigned each Master to a table (and thus a Strategy and deployment zone), and then the lower-positioned team did the same.  There was thus some element of counterpick and bluff available, though sometimes the second team had to deal with the difficulty of either picking an opponent based on matchup or based on Strategy.

This year, the tournament was played with the Bans format, but not the Singles format – so you could declare a second master if you wanted!  I don’t love that, but it’s fine.  I can deal with it.

Round 1: Nerf Guild

Our first-round opponents were Nathan and Maeve of Bayou Breakdown.  They’re both good friends, even though Nathan insists on playing notorious broken faction Guild, which needs nerfs.

The pools for this round shared Let Them Bleed, Protected Territory, Espionage, Hold Up Their Forces, and Deliver a Message. Table 1’s Strategy was Raid the Vaults on Flank deployment, while Table 2’s was Plant Explosives on Standard deployment.

I had already decided I was going to be declaring Mah Tucket all three rounds of the MCCI, since she’s really good and I don’t have as much practice with her as I’d like.  If I want to up my Tricksy game, there’s no substitute for experience.  I wanted to play on the Plant Explosives table, which meant that I drew into Nathan, who had declared Elite/Mimic.  I banned Cavalier, not wanting to let him use Louisa Fusi to casually score 4 points or more, and he banned Angler, not wanting me to have access to Uncle Bogg.  Shame, since I definitely would have hired him, but I think the trade-off is fair.  I really hate Louisa.

Nathan ran Lucius2 (unsurprisingly) with a Lead-Lined Coat, the Scribe, a Watcher, Klaus Norwood, Alan Reid (also with a lead-lined coat, as I recall), a Guild Lawyer, a Guild Steward, a Changeling, and a False Witness.

I was running Mah1 (also unsurprisingly) with Twelve Cups of Coffee, the Little Lass, the Lucky Emissary, Beau Fishbocker, Alphonse LeBlanc, a Soulstone Miner, and Big Brain Brin. Ordinarily I like to hire Bushwhackers, but Lucius2 is insanely good at killing them, so it would just be free points for my opponent.

My goal was to get over the midline as fast as possible and pin him into his deployment zone.  Lucius could jump all over the place, and it would be practically impossible to stop him from dropping two bombs, but at least if he was doing that he wouldn’t be murdering my crew.  I had a secondary goal of offing the Scribe as fast as possible with the Soulstone Miner, since it cancels the little jerk’s defensive trigger.

I chose Let Them Bleed and Protected Territory and began by rocketing the Emissary forward, dropping a bomb over the Centerline.  Nathan took that as an invitation and piled Focus on Lucius with the Guild Steward, then sent Lucius after the Emissary, swiping him twice with the Big Claw.  It’s really hard for Lucius2 to two-shot the Emissary, though, because it has both Armor and Hard to Kill, and he can’t get the extra damage with Critical Strike and ignore the Hard to Kill on the same attack.  He ended up leaving it alive at 1-2 HP, which meant that there wasn’t anything deadly patrolling his middle section.  I Tossed Mah forward and used Pulling the Strings to make the Soulstone Miner bury itself, then unburied it late in the turn.  My goal was to charge the Scribe, but Nathan had been very cautious with it, and I couldn’t reach it.  I also had to be very careful about avoiding Alan Reid’s Boring Conversation aura, since the Miner has Wp 3 and the aura could drain my hand pretty easily.  Instead I charged the Watcher, but couldn’t kill it – but at least now the Miner was in position, and I had bombs in place on my opponent’s side.

Turn 2 I won initiative thanks to Pass Tokens from Mah and Ill Omens, and immediately rocketed the Emissary 12″ away from Lucius and dropped a bomb with it.  He had a choice to make: he could pursue (and certainly kill) the Emissary, but that would take Lucius entirely out of the game for another turn.  Or he could blip over to my side and start scoring.  He chose the latter, which was wise, but it meant the Emissary was effectively safe for the rest of the game.

Nathan made a similar play, escaping with his Watcher before I could kill it, so the Soulstone Miner contended itself by going after his Lawyer and serving it up into a Pit Trap with Dropped Down a Hole.  Mah was able to kill the Lawyer, then charged into the cream filling of his crew and offed the Scribe as well.  That drained my hand, so I wasn’t really able to do a lot more killing than that, and he started piling on the conditions with Klaus and Alan.

Once Mah and Alphonse got into his knot of support models, the shape of the game was basically set: Lucius picked up the Little Lass, while the Watcher flapped around dropping bombs and Scheme Markers.  I put him on Protected Territory and was able to deny it for a turn, but only a turn – he’s just too good at dropping Schemes everywhere.  Alphonse lumbered up and hammered the False Witness to paste, while Mah killed the Steward by knocking it into a Pit Trap (thus denying its Demise) and then murdered Alan as well.  Protected Territory was a cinch for me to score, since he just had so few models left, but I was beginning to regret Let Them Bleed.  I had to put both Alan and Klaus below half health and keep them there, and that was tough with the various little ping healing options he had.  Eventually I had to kill Alan just to get his awful auras out of there, but I still hadn’t scored the first half of Let Them Bleed.  This Scheme always breaks my heart: it looks a lot easier to score than it is.

Nathan, meanwhile, was able to score the first half of Deliver a Message, and picked up my bombs very expeditiously with the Changeling (a model I really should have devoted an activation to killing).  Still, in the end the sheer weight of numbers won out, since he had just Lucius and the Watcher left and I had almost everything.  I scored both halves of Protected Territory and three Strategy points, picking up the last one with a clutch Alphonse Toss into spoon murder into Interact, and I managed to score the first half of Let Them Bleed because Lucius was the only undamaged model left on his side of the board.  He also scored three Strategy points, but only one for Protected Territory, since he didn’t have friendly models near both of his Scheme Markers on my half of the table, and only one for Deliver a Message.

A 6-5 victory to the Bayou, hard-fought and coming down to the last activation.  Given that we all know that Mah needs a nerf, this just proves the fundamental brokenness of Guild.  Wyrd, you know what you must do.

Doug also won his game, so we moved on to our round two opponents: ourselves?!

Round 2 – Evil Twins

Danger Planet actually fielded two teams this time.  Well, 1.5.  Danger Planet Brandon teamed up with Jesse of Boring Conversation to form Dangerous Conversation.  I knew that Brandon was also on Seamus, and I desperately wanted the Seamus mirror to happen, since it’s incredibly stressful for the players and incredibly funny to watch.  That would leave me into Jesse, which is always a fun time, since we take games off each other pretty regularly.

The Schemes this round were Death Beds, Sweating Bullets, Protected Territory, Ensnare, and In Your Face.  Table 1’s Strategy was Stuff the Ballots on Wedge Deployment, while Table 2’s was Cloak and Dagger on Flank Deployment.

Jesse declared Linh Ly, I was on Mah again, and both Doug and Brandon were on Seamus, as predicted.  I dropped into the Cloak and Dagger board, where Mah’s Pass Tokens give her a leg up (I’m going to keep abusing it until you fix it, Wyrd) and faced Jesse, while the prophesied Seamus-off took place just offscreen.  I banned Wastrel to avoid dealing with Hucksters or second-master McCabe, while Jesse also banned Angler, because he hates fun and alligators.

Linh doesn’t eat Bushwhackers as easily as Lucius, so my list was more of my comfort zone: Mah (with her obligatory Twelve Cups), the Little Lass, two Bushwhackers, two Soulstone Miners, Big Brain Brin, Trixiebelle, and a Test Subject.  The table had lots of rocky outcrops and formations, so I planned to use Pit Traps to close off choke points.

Jesse took Linh Ly2, along with all three Stories (Thanh Giong, Raijin and Sun Wukong).  He also hired the Paper Tiger, Map Map, a Terracotta Warrior, and of course the Jade Rabbit, with the Silent Protector upgrade.

An aside here – that combo is wretched, and really needs to be changed.  For those who don’t know, Silent Protector gives the Jade Rabbit Challenge, an attack that means its target must discard a card to target anyone other than the user with an attack for the rest of the turn.  All enemies are at a permanent double-neg-flip to attack or resist the Rabbit, so it almost always hits and then your opponent is basically taxed a card unless they want to take a fruitless double-neg swing at the bunny – that’s if they can even hit it, since it can run away.  It also gives the thing Hard to Kill, which is better than it looks; typically, overcoming the double negative flips means you have to Focus and spend a Soulstone or use some other ability that gives a positive twist, which means attacks into the rabbit require a lot of investment.  Making it take two hits to kill instead of one doubles the cost of that investment.

The rabbit really shouldn’t be able to attach upgrades.

Anyways!  I picked Death Beds (on Pit Traps) and In Your Face.  And off we went!

I deployed in a knot in my deployment zone, with the Bushwhackers on the flanks and pit traps choking off throughways.  Jesse similarly clumped up in the portion of his deployment zone nearest me, except for the Paper Tiger, which was behind a rock at the far end of his deployment zone.  When I say “behind a rock,” I mean I literally couldn’t see it, which meant that I badly misplaced a Bushwhacker, but Jesse was kind enough to give me a mulligan on that deployment at the top of turn 1 (a favor I would return shortly after, when he declared an action, flipped, and cheated for it, only to realize that due to his misreading a card it would have literally no effect – we play each other enough to allow the occasional correction of obvious errors).

Turn 1, Linh Ly’s bubble of doom moved out, while the Tiger charged my Bushwhacker (though she was able to scoot away from it with Scamper after it missed).  I responded with the bury/unbury trick on a Soulstone Miner, popping it up next to the Tiger and flinging the thing into a Pit Trap.  My Bushwhacker was able to finish it off with a couple of shots, and suddenly that flank of the board was clear.  I played cautiously otherwise, moving Mah up but not into threat range, and using my Test Subject to plug up a path that would otherwise give Linh access to my crew.  Linh hit the Subject, but thanks to some pretty poor flipping on his part (and a stacked hand on mine), was not able to kill it.

Turn 2, I activated the Test Subject early before it died, and tried to be as annoying as possible.  Linh is really durable, and her aura of stripping suits on cheated attacks is extremely dangerous to a crew as trigger-hungry as mine, but she’s not invincible.  I was able to push her into a Pit Trap with a Bushwhacker, and with that one Injured on her, she was suddenly in a lot of danger: the first Injured you get makes it much more likely that you start getting more.  Jesse went all-out to save her, investing a lot of resources in pulling Linh to safety and getting Take the Hit models onto her.  I decided to go after Thanh Giong instead, and managed to spoon him to death.  Raijin engaged Brin, which scared me a bit because Sweating Bullets was in the pool, but I didn’t really have a way to get him out of there.

What followed was a game of careful pressure.  I knew I was very unlikely to kill Linh Ly (she’s a lot tankier than she looks), but I wanted to threaten her enough that Jesse would play cautiously with her.  He Challenged Mah with the Rabbit, but she used Knock Aside and a soulstone for a positive twist to overcome its defenses and kill it in one hit – the ping damage from the Pit Trap is separate from the attack damage and so gets past Hard to Kill.  I also got a spectacularly lucky Red Joker damage flip onto Sun Wukong with a Soulstone Miner, then shot him in the head with a Bushwhacker, taking him off the table and forcing him to use his once-per-game Demise ability to come back to life.

At one point, he brought Big Brain Brin down to 1 hp, then pushed him into a Pit Trap.  I wondered for a moment why he didn’t just kill him, but I realized he must have had In Your Face – and Brin was my only eligible target for it.  I activated Brin and walked him out of the pit trap, dying to the Hazardous damage but doing so after the walk resolved, and thus dying safely outside of the 3″ kill radius for In Your Face.  Now that’s what I call a big brain.

My crew scores Death Beds almost automatically, and my Bushwhackers were perfectly positioned to Protect some Territory, so all I had to worry about was Strategy points.  Cloak and Dagger is a really hard Strategy to score 4 points on, since it takes a minimum of 10 Interact actions, plus plenty of Walks to get there.  The Bushwhackers piled up as many Intel tokens as they could, and even Mah used her spare AP to pick some up, but I knew I wasn’t going above three.  Jesse was stuck at 2, though, especially once models started dropping.  He was able to score the second half of In Your Face since all of his named models cost 8 stones, so any one of them reaching my deployment zone scored the point – and it’s next to impossible to keep Monkey out of there.  He had also taken Protected Territory, though, and simply never broke through my line enough to score it.

In the end, the game came to 6-3: 3 strategy points, 2 for Death Beds and 1 for In Your Face against 2 strategy, 1 In Your Face and 0 Protected Territory.  A great game, but afterwards we talked a bit and I told him I thought Linh1 would have been a better choice.  She’s less killy, but you don’t need to be super killy to deal with Tricksy models (which tend to be squishy), and her Scheme Marker generation and ranged Interact would have made Protected Territory a lot easier.  He could have taken Ensnare, too, or maybe Sweating Bullets.  Linh1 seems so insanely strong at Cloak and Dagger, being able to steal an Intel Token from 4″ away.

With two wins under our belts, it was time for the final boss!

Round 3 – The Inevitable Occurs

I knew we’d eventually play Badfaux Haku.  It was bound to happen.  Last year we ran into them in the first round, but this time at least they had the good grace to be our final boss.  Landon and Haku are great guys, friends of Danger Planet, and scary good Malifaux players.  I’ve actually never played against Haku, which is kind of weird given how many events we’ve both been in, and that streak was to continue this weekend.  I have played against Landon, and I’d never beaten him before this weekend in an in-person game: we’d played three, and he’d taken them all, including a heartbreaker that I didn’t think I could lose.  (My online record is better).

The Scheme pool this time was Power Ritual, Take Prisoner, Information Overload, Outflank, and Espionage.  Table 1’s Strategy was Raid the Vaults on Corner Deployment, while Table 2’s was Stuff the Ballots on Standard Deployment.  I knew I wanted to Stuff, I wanted to Stuff bad, and I knew I was playing Mah.  In fact, I knew everyone’s Masters, even before the declaration: Doug was soloing Seamus, as previously mentioned, Haku was on Zoraida (exploiting the busted Zoraida/Angel Eyes combo) and Landon had decided to make Perdita work all weekend.  I think Dita gets a bit of a bad rap, but she’s still a bit weaker than average, so if I was ever going to beat Landon, it was now.

I wasn’t actually going to play Landon no matter what, but when he dropped on Stuff the Ballots, I sort of had no choice.  I banned Cavalier while he banned Angler, for much the same reasons mentioned in Game 1.

Landon took a pretty Landon-looking list: Perdita and Francisco with Lead-Lined Coats, the Enslaved Nephilim, a Guardian with No Prisoners, a Pistolero and two Guild Mages.  I took Mah1 (with Twelve Cups), three Bushwhackers, two Miners, Brin, and Beau Fishbocker.

My games with Landon tend to follow a predictable pattern: I start out strong, but start making little mistakes, which add up.  Landon does not make any mistakes, and by the end of the game my accumulated tide of errors washes over me and I drown.

This time, the first mistake came early, as I picked Outflank.  In principle, it’s sound; I will defend Outflank from the haters, especially on Stuff, since you’re pushed to the sides of the centerline anyways.  In practice, especially against Perdita, it was a mistake.  Sitting in one place is asking to get popped by a Stat 7 crit strike Peacebringer.  And with Toss, I had no grace period – he was going to be on me right away.

I also picked Espionage, which was fine.  His model count was pretty low and they were likely to be in my face early.

I deployed two Bushwhackers on the flanks, with the rest of the crew bubbled up around Mah for the Focus pulse.  He refused one flank pretty hard, committing to my left side while leaving the right basically empty.  Having seen that, I probably should not have had a Bushwhacker on that side, but meh – I wanted to kill the Pistolero early, but I wouldn’t have been able to do that anyways through Take the Hit.

The Lead-Lined Coats proved critical here, preventing me from doing my best trick (tossing his deadly models into Pit Traps).  Perdita was Tossed forwards and took a shot at a Bushwhacker, but he didn’t get Crit Strike and so couldn’t one-shot her, and I used the Scamper push to get out of Stealth range.  That Whacker was insanely dead next turn, but at least she’d have a next turn.  Franc barreled up the center, supported by two Guild Mages.  I managed to pop a Soulstone Miner out and toss a Mage into a Pit Trap, through I couldn’t finish it off that turn.  Otherwise, not a super eventful turn 1; my right-flank Bushwhacker, I already realized, was basically 100% on Espionage-scoring duty.

Turn 2 I won initiative and activated my Bushwhacker for a cheeky vote.  Franc barreled into my crew, and here I made Mistakes #2 and #3.  #2 was pretty subtle: I unburied a Soulstone Miner to attack Franc, but did so on the left side instead of the right. I had room on either side and I don’t remember what I was thinking, if anything.  The miner did a little bit of damage to Franc, but with his Grit active – and with LLC preventing me from flinging him into a pit – its utility was limited.  I pounded on Franc with a good chunk of my crew, knocking him down pretty low, but I didn’t kill him – and a guild mage stood ready to heal him, meaning I had to send Mah in to deal with it.

Mistake #2 came back to bite me when Perdita finished off the Bushwhacker and got an Onslaught trigger, using it to shoot the Miner (which was exactly in range) and cheat in the Red Joker to one-shot it.  Crap.  Here I am down an important piece, basically for free, and for no reason.

Mistake #3 came during Franc’s activation.  He went ham on Beau Fishbocker and killed him dead, because I forgot that Brin can cancel triggers, and did not cancel Critical Strike.  Thoroughly flustered now, I decided to just use Brin to make Franc Slow and Stunned, so that I could get some breathing room to not think about him.

From there, I stabilized a bit, though I was down a depressing amount of material (as the chess pros call it).  Landon sent his Pistolero forward towards my left-hand ballot, and I used a Soulstone Miner to kill it, saving the ballot marker but scoring Landon Take Prisoner as his Guardian advanced.  In the meantime, though, I was able to finish off the second Guild Mage and Franc through judicious spoon application, and I had pretty good control over the ballots.  My right-flank Bushwhacker, who had been completely ignored all game, crept forward to score Espionage and secure a second ballot marker, and Mah secured the middle one.

Here, Landon’s low model count began to show through.  Both Mages, the Pistolero, and Franc were dead, the Enslaved Nephilim was back in his deployment zone, and the Guardian was way over on the left flank.  Perdita was a live threat, but Brin managed to Slow and Stun her too, pulling her teeth a bit.  I was not going to be able to score Outflank, but Landon had only declared one scheme, and he definitely wasn’t getting the second half of Take Prisoner when my miner dug underground and popped back up on my end of the board.

Disaster almost struck when Perdita activated Turn 5 and used Target Practice on my deployment zone Scheme Marker – she Black Jokered, but it didn’t matter because she was less than 6″ away.  It’s nice to succeed with the Black Joker, isn’t it?  The only model I could get into my deployment zone was the Miner, and it can’t Interact the turn it digs up – or can it?  Brin was able to walk, drop a Scheme Marker next to the Miner, and then use Pulling the Strings to remove that marker and make the Miner Interact to re-drop the Scheme Marker in my deployment zone.  I was proud of that little sequence… but I still almost bobbled the game at the eleventh hour by not thinking about my opponent’s Schemes.  Landon had been dropping Scheme Markers all over the place with his Guild Mages, incidentally as they removed Pit Traps.  I could really easily have picked up those markers with Mah’s Mark Territory, but I just… didn’t.  And so he scored a point off of Information Overload.

But it wasn’t enough.  I had two points off of Espionage and three from the Strategy, vs. his two Strategy points and one from each Scheme.  5-4!  Finally, I put a point on the board against Landon!

That’s one in a row for me!!!

Unfortunately, Longtin beat Doug with a margin strong enough that Badfaux Haku still ended up taking the first-place slot.  But I felt vindicated.  Undefeated in the MCCI, and I finally, finally took a game off of Landon in real life.  Sure, I was playing one of the strongest Masters in the game, and he was playing a much weaker one, and it was still a one-point game that I barely managed to squeak out, but you know what… I’ll take it.

That wrapped up the MCCI, and thus our first article.  I’ll be back, though, to talk about Booty and Plunder.  Five rounds is a lot of Malifaux.  Could I keep the streak going?  Tune in next time to find out!