One of the things that M2e has done is thrown up all sorts of new tournament possibilities especially around the scheme pool, but that's not what I wanted to talk about in this post, nope what has been occupying a small part of my brain (some folks would probably say a small part of my brain is all i have) is Master / Faction choice.
Most events that I have ever been to are either single Master (i.e you pick your master at the beginning of the event and stick with it) or single Faction. Both of these work pretty well with Faction seemingly being the preferred choice as even in M2e some masters are better in certain matchups than others - in fact the whole guild faction seems to be built around this (Perdita being anti Neverborn, Sonnia anti Arcanist etc.)
However it occurred to me that this doesn't actually match how most folks I know build their collection of models / crews. In my experience its the masters that bring people into the game and folks like building crews that work well with that master, rather than looking at factions as a whole. So in my case for instance I love McMourning but really the other Resser masters don't do anything for me. Now I can go to a tournament, declare Ressers and just use McM all the time but what about my other Masters that are in different factions? - Misaki I am looking at you.
What I am thinking about is a tournament where you declare 3 Masters who can be from completely different factions and you have free reign to play any of those masters in any game (no being forced to use all 3 or any nonsense like that) If only I was running a tournament where I could try that format out?
EDIT - After talking with Joel '300' Henry I thought I should amend the post slightly to make it clear that if you took a potential duel faction master then you would have to declare what faction they were being used as when you signed up with the master, no getting 6 factions out of 3 masters thank you very much :)
Now if I remember correctly the last Malifaux masters used a similar system (it may have been fixed list as well) and that not only posed some very interesting challenges for the players but it also seemed to go down very well with them.
So what do you think? An idea worth pursueing or trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
Mile,
ReplyDeleteThis style of format would be something that would interest me. I tend even in open faction just to play one master. But having 3 fixed lists with different master would be very cool format to try. A tournament where I could play Lady J, Nicodem, and Lynch would be incredible. However I would want to have the restriction that each list would have to be used at least once similar to the war machine format. But it requires a 6 game tournament to make that mandatory list drop work.
Kind of falls into the solving a problem that doesn't exist for me. If it was fixed faction I would pick whichever had the master I most enjoyed playing at a given time and if I had another couple of masters for that faction they would be in my box but only likely to hit the table if there was a very clear bad mismatch. Same goes for being able to pick 3 masters really, I’m simply not playing regularly enough to know a whole faction well enough to pick and choose as required.
ReplyDeleteBut it’s also because I'm not really competitive about Malifaux, sure I want to enjoy my games but every game is still very early on in the learning process and as such I'd be picking a master because I want to see what they do on table vs a range of opponents rather than picking because I think they're best vs anyone. So it's solving a non-problem for me and for a top end competitive player it's likely to offer them the ability to massively min/max their games by having the best masters for any specific strategies/schemes/opponents.
Again I think the trick here is not to get too caught up in who your opponent is and to focus on what the objective of the game is. If you've got the 3 optimum masters for all of the scenarios out there once you've honed that it will then become a case of designing a list which beats the other 'netlist' best list at that strategy. But I'm not sure that 2nd ed is quite in that place yet based off everything I've heard/read on t'internet so far but it is typically where games head towards after they are played competitively for a long enough period of time.
I certainly wouldn't have any problems playing in a tournament like that, but I'd have to echo Dave saying that it fixes a problem I don't really have. Even in fixed master type events, I don't really find any difficulty in playing a game I love using the same master 3 times. I've been in a few fixed faction tournaments and ended up using only a single master anyway.
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