The Guild Got Gutted (or GGG)

Hey guys, Huron here again with a post event report.  So this weekend saw me and 7 others of my regular crew from Huzzah Hobbies, my local LGS head a hour north to play in a 35ss Malifaux Tournament in Waynesboro, PA. 

There were 8 of us and 4 of them.  I chose to play Guild and use the Henchman Lucius as my master.  My Crew consisted of :

• Lucius (Henchman)
• Drill Sergeant Totem (3ss)
• 2 Guild Guard Captains (7ss each, Rare 2)
• 3 Guild Guard (4ss each)
• Ryle (8ss)

Some of you may notice that my full crew comes out to 37ss in a 35ss tournament.  Well one of the nice things that separates Henchman from Masters is that the Henchman's starting Cache of stones is added to the starting soul stone pool which you take them as a Master, allowing you to actually spend more ss then the game would normally allow.

The general tactic of this crew is the advance towards the enemy, stop 8-10 inches away from them, and start blasting the enemy at ranged with all sorts of bonus flipped attack and damage ranged attack flips.  Then when the enemy gets tired of getting shot up and engages you beat them down with Crit Striking melee love.  Fun.  Or at least that is what it looks like on paper.  In actuality you either do lots of damage to your enemy killing them outright or not enough (usually not enough) and are forced to engage them on their terms which is all bad.

Game 1
My first game put me up against a Kurai Ressurrectionist list.  Now Kurai and her whole crew are spirits for the most part, or can take on the ability of spirits.  Spirits can move through terrain, don't block line of sight, and halve all non-magical damage they take.  Since my crew tends to either to really high damage or 1 or 2 points of damage at a time, that pretty much nullifies my low damage and severely reduces my high damage.  Add in a LOS blocking terrain piece in the middle of the table which Kurai never moved out from behind, and Jack Daw running around on the table and that was it for me.  LOSS 3vp - 0vp

Game 2
My second game was against a Pandora Neverborn Player who had also taken Jack Daw.  In an average game I would have had a decent shot against her, but we played on a board that had a special effect of every model only has a LOS of 3" unless it had the Hunter special rule, then that models LOS was 6".  Long story short, no shooting for the Guild, which crippled me; Jack Daw moved over to my objective and put up an aura every turn then stopped me from cheating fate or using soul stones within 6" of him... and Since my LOS was 3", yeah... you get the picture; and Ryle got nerfed by Pandora so I ended up running Lucius into combat to see what he could do, getting him killed, and then forfeiting the game.  LOSS 8vp - 0vp

Game 3
My third game was against a happy go lucky guy playing Rasputina the ice witch Arcanist Master.  Our game was pretty fun, us going back and for joking, make noise as our models moved and did actions and having a fun game.  Then last turn was called.  I was sitting at 6vp and he had 4.  I finished activating my last model with him having 2 more to go.  He looked at me and said "What do I need to do to win and have you get Zero?"  We looked at it and then he proceed to do what he need to have me get another zero.
LOSS 4vp - 0vp

So at the end of the day I ended up with zero total points, coming in dead last of 12 players.  Thankfully the guys I went with ended up taking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place and everyone else placed in the upper end of the spectrum.

Additionally, before the tournament started me and 3 other of the guys I went with placed a side bet which had the loser, me, buying the first round after the tournament. The tournament was set so that you could not use the same schemes in any of your games.  So the bet was to come out at the end of the event with the most schemes completed, but you had to choose and lock in your schemes that you were going to use each game before the first game began.  Bill managed to get 6 of his over the 3 games, with John and Chris both getting more then half of theirs. (nice job guys)


What does this mean for me...  Do I work on my game, buy more models, paint more stuff, and go for not having to buy the beer next time?  Or do I call it quits, hang up the Hat, and ebay my crews and move onto greener pastures (They don't exist!).  Well for now at least, I have already paid money to play in 2 tournament for Malifaux, one at Adepticon (Sunday 35ss Scrap) in April and one at the Nova Open (Friday 30ss Scrap) in August so I will at least be continuing my growing love/hate relationship with Malifaux until then.  Will I continue after that?  Only time will tell.

Thanks for letting me ramble, see you next time.