I’m always a bit overmatched when I play Malifaux. I’m a known quantity now; I play Mei Feng 2. I’m going to litter the place with scrap markers. And I’m going to panic.
I’ve played Mr. Euripides many times before. He’s a teacher IRL, so he’s used to tactfully telling newbies how they fucked up. Every time I play him, I learn more about the game. And there is so much to learn.
I played Foundry, as usual. My opponent played Savage, with his namesake Euripides, Old One-Eye, as his master. He can reuse his discarded cards. He can look at my deck and discard cards that might help me. He can imprison my units in ice pillars. And he did every single one of these things – many times.
Deployment: Corner.
Strategy: Stuff the Ballots. This was a decent strategy, as my team has good mobility and can set up scrap markers to allow my units to speed around the board.
Schemes: Power Ritual and Outflank
For this battle, I put my Arcane Emissary aside and went back to Metal Golem. The Emissary is out of keyword and is unable to benefit from the Foundry keyword – no riding the rails, no free shielding from Mei Feng. I loved his ability to charge and keep charging, and being able to explode to hit everything in an area.
I did miss its ability to destroy a bunch of stuff at once. That would oddly have been useful here; being able to destroy all those ice pillars en masse would have been massive.
As in the previous few games, Mr. Euripides went after my Soulstone Miners. My goal was to have them at the opposite corners of the board, along the centerline, and to vote and drop scheme markers to nail my schemes. Mr. E. went after both of them, of course, but I scored both my schemes on turn 3, the first time I have ever made both of them.
Sadly, by the end of turn 3 it was clear he was not going to allow me to score those schemes again. I had a fighting chance of stopping him on one of his, once, but I was not going to score on ballots again. You need to keep increasing the number of boxes not entirely on your side of the board that you control. I had one at turn 2 and two on turn 3, but I was unlikely to be able to keep three. We talked through the last two moves and I agreed to take a 7-4 loss.
But… it was a good game, and Mr. E. complimented me on how much I’ve improved since I started playing last summer. I feel I am making progress, but I have to get another keyword or two so that I can be a little bit unpredictable. I have done my time with Mei Feng and she will always be important to me.
Time to move on.