Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Students of Conflict #11A - Lonestar Fauxdown 2023: Landon (Youko Hamasaki, Unseen vs The Dreamer)
524 Plays1 year ago
This episode we talk to Landon about a game in his journey to first place in the largest Malifaux event in North America–The Lonestar Fauxdown Malifaux GT 2023! We discuss how he plays Youko 2 and how he managed to pull a victory out of nearly being tabled.
Hosts: Doug, Clay, and Nick
Primary Guest: Landon
Other Guests: Angel and Carlo
Tournament: Lonestar Fauxdown Malifaux GT - Houston, Texas - 14-15 Oct 2023
Tournament on Longshanks:https://www.longshanks.org/event/10354/
Heroic Scale Gamers tournament live streams:
- Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJpHfJAfjag
- Day 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__H-JAD80EQ
Encounter:
Round 2
Deployment: Standard
Strategy: Cursed Objects
Scheme Pool:
1: Breakthrough
3: Assassinate
5: Sabotage
6: Hidden Martyrs
10: Public Demonstration
Map: Crystals B (page 7 from https://tinyurl.com/FauxdownTables2023)
Schemes selected:
Landon: Hidden Martyrs, Assassinate
AJ: Breakthrough, Public Demonstration
Crews:
Landon’s Youko Hamasaki, Unseen (Ten Thunders)
Size: 50 - Pool: 8
Leader:
Youko Hamasaki, Unseen
Totem(s):
Chiyo Hamasaki
Hires:
Hinamatsu
Bill Algren
Fuhatsu
Kunoichi
Kunoichi 2
Terracotta Warrior
AJ’s The Dreamer (Neverborn)
Size: 50 - Pool: 10
Leader:
The Dreamer
Totem(s):
Lord Chompy Bits
Hires:
Widow Weaver
Serena Bowman
Stitched Together
Stitched Together 2
Stitched Together 3
Daydream
Daydream 2
Mentioned in the Podcast:
Lonestar Fauxdown: The date is set for the Lonestar Fauxdown Malifaux GT 2024 - taking place in Houston, TX October 11-13, 2024, mark your calendars!: https://lonestarfauxdown.com/events
Galewyn from Phoenix Foundry: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/phoenixfoundry/tabletop-terrain-3d-printable-fantasy-village-for-wargaming
Plugs from Guest:
Danger Planet: https://www.youtube.com/@DangerPlanet1337/featured
Thank-Yous:
HUGE thanks to Top Doug Design for all the terrain we play on here in Texas and for sponsoring this podcast, to Heroic Scale Gamers for streaming Lonestar Conference matches, to Wyrd Miniatures for allowing us to use their artwork from the 2nd Edition Student of Conflict, and to Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy Houston for providing such an amazing space for the community.
Top Doug Design: https://www.topdougdesign.com/
Heroic Scale Gamers: https://www.youtube.com/@HeroicScaleGamers
Wyrd Miniatures: https://www.wyrd-games.net/malifaux
Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy Houston: https://www.facebook.com/dlairhouston
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Students of Conflict Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Straight out of the heart of Texas, here come the students of conflict, helping you become a better Malifaux player and reach the top of the podium, one game at a time.
00:00:33
Speaker
Welcome to Students of Conflict. We are Clay, Nick, and Doug. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Interview with Top Players: Landon, Angel, Carlo
00:00:39
Speaker
And we are trying to become better Malifaux players, leveling up ourselves and hopefully leveling others up as well. We normally do that by interviewing top third players from the Lone Star Conference playing in tournaments across the US, though tonight we've got guests from all over.
00:00:51
Speaker
Woo-hoo! We're not trying to capture our guests' entire tournament journey. We just want to take an in-depth look at one game. What were the key decisions that these players made before the game, during the game, and now that they're looking back at the game, what were the things that they learned and that they can pass on to others? Our format is to interview guests all at once, just as soon as possible after the tournament, when it's all fresh in their minds. We can get some good cross-flow between the guests. Rather than publishing one long marathon podcast, we break it up, releasing one individual podcast per guest, helping people level up one game at a time.
00:01:33
Speaker
These guys came in first, second and third, respectively. And Carlo took home Iron Scorpius at the Lone Star Fodown Malifaux GT,
Landon's Journey to Becoming a Top Player
00:01:42
Speaker
Today we are speaking with Landon, Angel, and Carlo.
00:01:42
Speaker
held in Houston on 14 through 15 October. We're gonna be releasing our discussions with them as episodes 11A through C. And Doug, if you could take it away. All right, so yeah, I am talking today to the man, the myth, the legend.
00:01:59
Speaker
The Pope, Mr. Landon, how are you doing today? I'm doing all right. You know, it feels good to have ascended to legendary status, apparently. I guess winning the biggest tournament hosted by, you know, the most fabulous host will get you there. But you know, it was a blast to have you all down here and was kind of crazy. Just the sheer number of you crazy out of towners who showed up. It was awesome.
Social Aspects of Tournaments: Camaraderie and Challenges
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, no. I mean, when you tell players that there's going to be Malifaux and beer in the same spot, it does a really good job of getting us all together. It also sets us up so much beer. It also sets us up to make terrible, terrible decisions.
00:02:47
Speaker
And getting past the round four hangover is just part of the challenge. If you can't do that in a tournament, you're never going to play. It's part of that, you know, you're building up that, you know, toughness that helps you persevere through six rounds of Malifaux. I think Angel became the brewmaster at this tournament.
00:03:11
Speaker
You guys drank so much. It was... Honestly, you should have seen everybody at the UK Six Nations last year. That was actually too much. There were people that didn't have time to go to the hotel and went directly from the pub to the second day of the tournament.
00:03:31
Speaker
Oh my goodness. Nice. One day I'm going to get out for that event. It sounds like a lot of fun, or some event out in the UK.
Landon's Gaming History: From Magic to Tabletop
00:03:40
Speaker
I do want to go see how they play Malifond across the pond. But it's really nice. Yeah, I've heard great things about that event. So Landon, for first time guests on the show, which, hey, this is your first time coming on Students
Transition from 40K to Malifaux
00:03:57
Speaker
of Conflict, welcome.
00:03:59
Speaker
We like to ask, so what is your background in gaming and how did you get into Malifaux?
00:04:08
Speaker
So I guess if we were to go all the way back, I started by growing up with magic. When I was young, you know, dad taught me how to play magic. And then at some point in time, my brother got really into 40K. So naturally I picked up miniatures gaming through osmosis in that regard, but I didn't really like 40K. DICE made me really mad when I wanted to do things and they just don't work. Still kind of due to this day, but
00:04:36
Speaker
You know, uh, at a certain point in time, I just kind of left war games where they were. And then, uh, shortly after college finished up, my roommate, you know, was telling me, he was talking with, uh, this one guy who ran a podcast and they were playing a war game of some sort called Malifaux. And, um, you know, I, I had played 40 K before I'm like, I'm ready for another war game. I'm an adult. I have disposable income now. And that was a good choice. I really liked it.
00:05:04
Speaker
picked up Kolody as my first master. So F and chat for the puppet man. And that was, I'm assuming, so, cause Kolody was still around, that was during second edition? Yeah, that was towards wave four second net, I wanna say. Okay, wave four then. Wave four.
00:05:23
Speaker
Nobody do the math on that, by the way. But, um, yeah, I started playing wave four second edition, you know, really, really dig Calodi. It was kind of a toss up between him, Jacob Lynch, or some other master I was trying to juggle around. Cause at the time I hadn't yet fallen in love with Malifaux's aesthetics. So I was going for one of the more further along the edge crews, you know, cause puppets were their own thing. I could dig puppets and Lynch was just cool. He had the big, he had the big tadpole and, you know, for those of you who have not
00:05:53
Speaker
You know, listen to my content, tadpole huggy is objectively the best huggy and you will not convince me otherwise. That's fair. That's totally fair. Which by the way, Nick loved the extra arms you put on the tadpole sculpt. It was beautiful. Thank you.
00:06:10
Speaker
By the way, Nick, thanks for letting Landon borrow your models so he could kick our butts with them. Oh, you're absolutely welcome. I had to represent in some way, shape, or form. Nick's models won the tournament, so by proxy. Nick won. Yeah. I'm still waiting on my pride support. You weren't able to fly with the biggest
Favorite Non-Gaming Tournament Moment: Karaoke Night
00:06:29
Speaker
hit. So, you know, I guess I just have to go give that to Nick then.
00:06:33
Speaker
Exactly. I'll put it on my a case. They didn't let you fly with the hat. Are you serious? It just wouldn't fit in my luggage. I didn't take to be honest. You couldn't put it on. You didn't want to ride with it on.
00:06:49
Speaker
I think the people I'd be sitting next to on the ride back might have a few things to say about it. Just don't turn your head. They would have been awesome complimentary things to say. It's like, wow, where did you get such an awesome big hat?
00:07:07
Speaker
All right. So something else we love to ask our guests when they come here for, you know, the shenanigans of all this is we love to ask you all in icebreaker question. And so our icebreaker question for this episode is what was your favorite non-gaming moment from the Lone Star Fodown, Malifo GT? Um, that definitely would have had to been karaoke. Just like.
00:07:34
Speaker
the whole thing. But specifically, Carlos performance was really good. And I'm like, well, he's really good. But we're all drunk. What's going on? He's got a band. Thanks, man. I remember I was drinking on a corner there. And we were not paying attention with other people on the Pacific Northwest not paying attention to
00:07:59
Speaker
what was going on in the Karaoke. And suddenly, the three or four of us were like, what the fuck? What's going on now? And we look at it, and it was what I met later as Carlo. Nobody actually said it like that. No one said what's going on. They said, what's going on? For those of you not understanding what the context is in that question, that was the song I sang was What's Up by Four Non Blondes, which is something I perform regularly.
00:08:28
Speaker
Oh, but but Landon, I mean, you absolutely killed it with your rendition of do host best best one of the night by far. I appreciate you saying so.
Strategies Against Tough Opponents: Dreamer Match
00:08:40
Speaker
It's a bit of a danger planet tradition at this point in time. So if you ever come out to play with us, we usually find someplace to go drink and sing after an event. Nice. Oddly enough, that's one of the easier songs to find for me.
00:08:56
Speaker
So the Danger Planet, y'all doing the karaoke, because I know you've done it out at Captain Con, Nova Open, Gen Con, any of the events that I've been to where the Danger Planet guys were at as well. You did a karaoke night, and it was a ton of fun and a blast. And because Dragon's Lair does karaoke, I'm like, wait a minute. We can make this work. We're just going to talk to the karaoke DJs at Dragon's Lair. Big ups to both of them, by the way.
00:09:24
Speaker
Oh my gosh, they were so awesome. And they, they loved all of the Malifaux guys because we have the best community in all of gaming, in my opinion. I would agree. And I'm the one with the podcast. Therefore it is correct. It is bad.
00:09:43
Speaker
But it just seemed like a natural fit to say, hey, let's do karaoke at Dragon's Lair. That way you don't have to worry about finding a bar to go drink at. And all of your beer money goes to the place you're gaming then. So win-win for everyone. That's for sure. So it's time to talk some Malifaux. So which round out of the tournament are you going to be talking about today and why?
00:10:08
Speaker
So I could talk about pretty much any of my games and I think there would be something interesting to talk about but the one that stood out to me as the one to talk about was actually round two where I was playing against a dreamer player in Cursed Objects and right from the get-go there were some takeaways to have. Yeah that was AJ out of the Pacific Northwest. For sure and I hadn't played anyone from the Pacific Northwest meta
00:10:33
Speaker
period except for maybe age old once on vassal like three years ago i want to say so um completely unknown meta to me at that point in time so i had no idea what to expect and uh it was one of the more difficult games i've had over the course of the year where i had been
00:10:50
Speaker
almost wiped clean off the board. I had two models left at the end of turn five, might've been the closest I've been to being tabled in a long time at the end of the game. And yet despite those hardships, I was still able to pull a six three game. Um, and I didn't know it was going to be a six three game on turn five. I thought maybe it'd be a five five game or like a six five game. So the fact is it led to that.
00:11:15
Speaker
Those of you guys that are just getting into Malifaux, I think that's one of my favorite things about Malifaux is that you can get tabled and still win. For sure. And I tell that to new players a lot. You can win with no models left on the table. It's going to be close because it's going to be a tight game then, but it's still possible. Hooray. For sure. So what were some of the biggest lessons you took away from this game?
00:11:41
Speaker
So one of the biggest lessons, you know, we'll talk about it as we get into the game in a bit of detail, but you can't let jokers overly tilt you while you're playing. I flipped a lot of black jokers on a lot of important things in that game, which is not to say that things started to go more poorly for me, but
00:12:03
Speaker
I had to play the sad black joker music. I love the black joker tunes. I had to play the sad black joker music. Is that what that was? That's the sad black joker music, kids, you know. Have you or a loved one been affected by the black joker? We can help. Somebody gave Doug a tap of water. You have to let us know. I'm sitting there looking for windows on my screen going, what ad is playing in the background? I was like, I got notifications from work. I said, is somebody calling me? That's just called Doug fucking around.
00:12:32
Speaker
No, but I've been affected by the leaving your red jokers out of the deck before. Oh, oh, god. Is that the most important lesson from your game, Carlo? Put your red joker in your deck. Probably. We'll get to that, though. Or you should use a brand new deck. The other thing I'd have to say is that a big important call out as far as playing the game is that you got to make sure you play out the game. Because as much as we like to say that, you know,
00:13:02
Speaker
Malefoe lets you take out a lot of the randomness of the game. There are still certain outs you have to play to, even if you can't guarantee them. And then when you hit, you hit and that's really good and you can claw your way back in. Awesome. So going into this tournament, why did you end up choosing 10 thunders for this tournament? Because, I mean, we know you borrowed Nick's models here. So why 10 thunders?
00:13:29
Speaker
Well, if I wanted to go back to prehistoric times, I'd say it's because they got rid of the rest of Neverborn that I owned. But mainly, Ten Thunders is just the faction that I'm most comfortable with because I've played it since the start of third edition. And so I started the edition on Jacob Lynch, tried to learn Yoko when she came out. When she came out, Yoko wasn't really worth learning with.
00:13:52
Speaker
And then at a certain point, Malefoe Burns had just started grinding out a lot of Yoko2 games. And so she's probably the master I'm most comfortable with at this point in time and has guided me to a lot of tournament wins otherwise. So knowing that I'd probably be playing a lot of that, 10 Thunders was a good choice.
00:14:09
Speaker
If it was a smaller or less prestigious event than the Lone Star Fodown, perhaps I would have tried another faction just to enjoy the game a bit more, you know, learn something. But I thought to myself, it's the biggest event in the states of the year. I'm going to win it. Awesome. So now you didn't end up playing Yoko every single round, right?
00:14:32
Speaker
That's correct because when I first got here, I didn't know there was a Scorpius prize, but once the fact that the Scorpius prize was announced, I'm like, all right, we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll play Scorpius. Maybe I won't. So round one, I start off with Shen Long and round two, I hit a matchup where I'm like, you know what? I want to play Yoko. And if this, you know, screws up my Scorpius, so be it.
00:14:58
Speaker
It did, but. Fair enough. So we're originally planning to play Yoko into this round or not? So typically how I approach Scorpius, if we're going to talk about that, is that I like to just have an idea of what masters are in my bag, what masters I'm willing to play, and then just figure out vaguely when I get to the matchup phase, you know, what my opponent could be playing, what I'm playing and what the pool is, what the best choice is from what I've got left.
00:15:28
Speaker
And so in this particular instance, the answer to all of those factors happened to be Yoko.
Key Strategic Decisions and Board Positioning
00:15:34
Speaker
In other circumstances, if I wasn't playing against Neverborn, I might have dropped something else just to try and save my more comfortable masters for later round picks. As ideally, I'd be playing Yoko, Lynch, and something else I'm familiar with in the last three rounds. But you can't always control what you're dealt.
00:15:56
Speaker
Okay, and so speaking of which, what was in your crew for this round then? So what was in my crew for this round is an interesting point. I took a fairly bog-standard list for what I play for Yoko. I played Yoko Unseen, the Chiyo, Hurtotum. Inamatsu, which is a bit spicy, we'll get there. Bill Algren, Fuhatsu, two Konoichi's, and a Terracotta Warrior.
00:16:24
Speaker
And so the reason why I took Hinamatsu and the reason why this is spicy is because I was actually expecting Dreamer 2, because the East Coast meta that I'm used to traveling to go play, and I think a decent number of people on Vassal 2, at least whoever I speak to, really liked Dreamer 2 much more over, you know, Dreamer 1.
00:16:45
Speaker
And given that we were also playing into cursed objects, which historically people don't like to play summoners into, I figured Dreamer 2 was a slam dunk. And with Assassinated in the pool, I'm like, all right, I'll take Hina Matsu. I have those innate plus flips. He's just relying on serene countenance and the, what is it, bystander to keep Dreamer 2 alive? Innocent bystander.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, I've shredded Dreamer 2 countless times with Hinamatsu before. It's a pick I'm comfortable enough going into, but it doesn't work so well against Dreamer 1 because you have a bunch of things that ignore armor, and the whole reason you're bringing her, which is specifically to kill Dreamer 2, isn't there. I thought you were going to say that you wanted to hit Neverborn with their own poison. I mean, that's always fun, right?
00:17:37
Speaker
No, the whole reason is that you want to have it to kill Dreamer 2, and it did a job of killing Dreamer 1 in this game, but, you know, Min 2 against Din Capouria wasn't getting me anywhere fast. So what AJ had, we had Dreamer 1, Lord Chompy Bits, Widow Weaver, Serena Bowman, three stitched togethers, and two daydreams. So for those of you following along at home, and what was the pool for this round?
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, so the pool for this round was... I don't have the whole pool, but I do have the schemes we took. Which is most of the pool. So there's hidden martyrs, assassinate, breakthrough, public demonstration, and Doug, what's the mystery scheme? Sabotage! And it was cursed objects on standard deployment. Well, spoilers for the audience. Sabotage is the one that neither me nor my opponent picked.
00:18:34
Speaker
I'm looking at your picks here and there's a lot of times where you see players choose at least one of the same and you had no overlap between either of the schemes that you guys picked, which is unusual. Yeah, to be honest, I thought about taking public demo over martyrs and maybe it would have scored me an extra point. Maybe it wouldn't have. I don't think in the game that we played that it would have, um,
00:19:03
Speaker
I didn't score any points on martyrs, though, if I didn't make that clear. That was a bit more coincidence than anything else as far as how the game played out. But yeah, ultimately, I scored all my points from cursed objects in Assassinate. And my opponent, if I recall correctly, gets one cursed or two cursed in one public demo. Yeah, that's what happened.
00:19:29
Speaker
Okay. Which is a lot less than you'd expect from, uh, maybe this three cursed and one public zero public demo. I think it was one, two cursed, one public demo, which is a lot less than you'd expect from a tabling, but more on that to come, I guess. Okay. So now when you saw that he was bringing dreamer one instead of dreamer two,
00:19:49
Speaker
How did that end up changing what your game plan was? Because it sounded like a major part of your game plan was, okay, we're going to shred Dreamer 2, and that Dreamer didn't show up today. Yeah, so honestly, I played a pretty sloppy game as far as what I'm usually concerned with. I played a pretty regular opening for me for Yoko 2, which is to say,
00:20:16
Speaker
I used all my past tokens, found some focus for furohatsu with tools for the job on the konoichi. I don't know how much you actually want me to go through the whole unpack here. Honestly, I don't know how Yuko 2 unpacks at all because I haven't played into either Yuko in a very long time. If anyone can go through it, it's Landon because he's a master at doing this because that's like, I remember watching him do it and being like, what the hell? Like this guy's on another level, man.
00:20:43
Speaker
I actually tried to repeat exactly what Landon did to me and Nova and fucked up half of it and still wound up coming out with a win, somebody else. So it's pretty interesting how he unpacks.
00:20:58
Speaker
Yeah, so you use all your past tokens first because that's just firstly a good habit for any of the players just starting the game is to use your past tokens turn one to make sure that you aren't on uneven footing with your opponent. Yoko 2 happens to generate two past tokens for free no matter what the model counts are. So you already get to put your opponent on the back foot in that regard. So use those. They do much more good there than they do on the initiative flip typically.
00:21:25
Speaker
and after that you start to be able to play the rest of the turn. So you use the kanoichi that you've hired to shoot fuhatsu with the shurikens as they have a galvanized trigger you can bake in if you flip a mask for tools of the job or you can just flip it off the attack flips which lets you give out focus to a model that is not the kanoichi after you do their three inch move. So they get to still advance up the board for your objectives though in Cursed Objects I didn't keep them
00:21:54
Speaker
very far past my deployment zone. While still generating resources for your team, they fill up your discard pile, which Yoko too wants to happen so that she can sift through it for severes later. They didn't have the greatest luck on sifting for severes this game, but it is an important detail as you're essentially filling up five cards per shuriken to go look through later. So instead of having like, I don't know, seven cards to go look through when you decide to go through your discard pile on Yoko's turn, you have like 27.
00:22:25
Speaker
much better odds you're going to pick up a 12 or 13 in that way. And then, you know, focus fuhatsu when you have a high ram that you've sifted from your discard can usually, in most games, one shot a model off the board, like, say, six hell stitched. So those are the opening moves are you, you know, use the past tokens, you put the focus on fuhatsu,
00:22:49
Speaker
You go with the Terracotta Warrior if you have to cheat some TNs. You walk Chiyo towards the middle of the board so that you can get her over the board for past tokens. Although you play a little bit in Cagier with her and stuff like Cursed Objects, I still walked her forward but not as far forward as she could go. And then at a certain point you have Yoko, your three beaters, and your opponent might have like one model left to go with because you either won or lost initiative and you have two activations on them.
00:23:20
Speaker
So you go with Yoko, you pick up your 13s, you push around your models with Gather Intel, usually pushing Hinamatsu forward, pushing Fuhatsu forward, and then drawing some cards from your discard. You flip your bonus, but you don't ever care what your bonus does at this point in time. You just don't want to waste a card cheating that ever since most of your cards are severe.
00:23:49
Speaker
And at that point in time, your opponent kind of already is fixed in most of his positions. He might have one activation to try and fix it, but usually it's not going to change a whole lot from what you can shoot. And so I pushed Wuhatsu into the forest, or the crystal forest, since I have the bottom deployment on crystals B.
00:24:09
Speaker
so that he can see most of the map at this point in time. There's some blocking from the crystals in the middle, the little crystal walls, but not so much that it was really impacting his lines of sight from that area. And there's a juicy little stitch together
00:24:31
Speaker
right there for Fuhatu to shoot with armor and shielded so that conveniently I won't kill him on a severe with the first turn so that I can just soften him up for some objects. There was my first black joker of the game on Fuhatu making damage flips.
00:24:48
Speaker
You're like, dang it. I wanted to jump in just real quick and just for listeners, you were talking about walking through the crystal forest and that all of the maps are on, we've got a link to the maps in the show notes. And so you can check out some of Doug's terrain. They're photos of the actual maps and then that's what we play on. And so check out the terrain and the story as Landon is telling it will also make more sense if you can see the map. So thanks.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, it was some really cool terrain to play on. I'm glad you like it. But yeah, so I get Fuhatsu holed up in that crystal forest there and he whiffs his first shot. I'm a little upset by this, but I figured the next thing that I need to do is present a valid threat to my opponent so that he doesn't just walk over and beat the crap out of Fuhatsu and will power three.
00:25:39
Speaker
So what I do is I do what I've coined the Bill Hina slingshot. And so what that entails is you've already pushed Hinamatsu five inches up the board from gather intel on Yoko on scene. The next thing you do is you go with Bill and you charge Hinamatsu and you hit her with your big pointy stick because the big pointy stick has a two inch push to begin with.
00:26:06
Speaker
that's just pre-agnostic. And then you either cheat or stone the mast to get your coming with me. So you push Hinamatsu another three inches. Then you place Bill on the other side of Hinamatsu. So on this one charge, Bill's gone 10 inches plus Hinamatsu's 40 millimeter base. And at that point in time, you can use heroic intervention to get another six inches towards the opponent. Hacks. Assuming you land within six of them. That's nasty.
00:26:38
Speaker
So it's a lot of movement just in Bill's turn that really catches people off guard and also has the added bonus of moving Hinamatsu further up the board so that she can charge something with her 8-inch charge. So I throw Bill over at some sort of... I want to say it was probably a stitched or since he had so many of them. Just to soften that up a little bit before I go ahead and try and kill it next turn since Fuhatsu failed his one job.
00:27:06
Speaker
Quick side bars stitched are terrible to play against. Oh, for sure. And then at that point in time, I end up using my last activation with Hinamatsu to try and lure Dreamer out of his protected bubble of all of his models. I think I use a stone to try and get around the serene hit and then charge into Dreamer to start trying to get some damage in. So I get some really tiny bits of chips in.
00:27:33
Speaker
But the important part here is that I've isolated Dreamer from Serena, who is maybe like 10, 12 inches away at this point in time. We'll have to double walk to heal him if he wants to start doing that healing, you know, pass this height three wall so he can't even do it in a straight line. And luckily that never actually connects for him during the game. If he had at any point been able to actually heal Dreamer with Serena, I think I would have been in really big trouble.
00:28:00
Speaker
This sounds like a hard alpha strike, but because of all of the paths, so it can be able to delay and hit him with an alpha strike after he doesn't really have a chance to rebuttal it.
00:28:11
Speaker
That's exactly what the plan is here with Yoko too. And to be honest, if he had, uh, he had also just pitched some more cards for protected to make sure that the dreamer didn't get Lord out of position, that also probably would have made this game go a lot better for him. And I would have been a really tough spot, but I think he wanted to keep some high cards into the next turn for whatever reason. Didn't want to use waste those to pitch for protected. And so that gave me the opening. I needed to try and get dreamer out of position for turn one.
00:28:40
Speaker
So turn two starts. I need my cursed object point. Well, what's the first thing you want to do? I've got Fuhatsu with a focus left over from last turn. I'm going to focus, cheat my 13 of Rams and shoot that damn stitch again before he gets shielded. Black Joker number two. It's a tragedy. Absolutely.
00:29:05
Speaker
So Fuhatsu for the second turn in a row fails to kill this six point model with all of the cards he needs to do so in hand. At this point in time just shoots the stitched again in frustration and does some minor chip damage.
00:29:21
Speaker
Technically not all the cards that he needed. He needed the black joker in hand as well So that was that was savage and not a great start to my turn I don't remember much else of what happens that turn bill takes a lot of Punishment and eats through most of my soul stone count trying to deny curse points But the nice thing about armor one henchmen is that you know?
00:29:48
Speaker
They can take a lot of punishment before going down, and he didn't really have a lot of other targets to go attack. Bill being willpower six made it so that I could still cheat cards reasonably okay to keep him alive against things like, well, the Stitch we're still going to hit him by cheating the Severe's from his remove from game pile when he had them.
00:30:08
Speaker
But everyone else was, you know, equal or not great trying to beat him up. So he lives the turn with like two or three health or something so that I can deny a curse point. I pick up a curse point eventually. I can't remember from what, though. Might have been from like an alp or something that gets summoned in to try and give Dreamer a buddy. Yeah, it would make sense, because like the daydreams are insignificant and it sounds like you didn't kill off any stitched that time.
00:30:34
Speaker
Yeah, Bill might have actually just whacked a stitch twice for minfors. That could be what happened. But it's not terribly important in the macro scheme of things. He's got Chompy. He had deployed Chompy on one side of the board and brought him back over to try and fight Bill at this point in time. So he wasted some AP walking to do that. So that's one of the nice things about dictating where the fight happens is you get to make your opponent waste AP if he wants to start doing anything about it.
00:31:04
Speaker
And then he also sends some guys to go beat up my poor, you know, child as Gio has crossed the center line to say hello. This as well within my calculations as Gio is one of my two martyrs. The other is Hinamatsu, figuring that Hinamatsu is a juicy enough target for all of his armor-ignoring stuff that he'll probably kill it at some point in the game and that will hopefully be at a different point in time than Gio because I can usually control when that happens.
00:31:33
Speaker
But none of my stuff dies turn two to give him any points because I'm not giving him any options with there. I'm cheating mostly defensively and then throwing speculative attacks into Dreamer. He's pretty hard read that I've got assassinated on Dreamer at this point in time. I think I give him a second lure towards my crew to further isolate him away from Serena. Because like I mentioned, the most important thing I can do right now in order to secure my gameplay and win of, you know,
00:31:59
Speaker
scoring Hidden Martyrs assassinate is to make sure that Serena never gets a heal off on Dreamer because I'm not putting much damage through with my Hinamatsu 2-3-4s. Yeah, that feels very pelophistic when he's got stones and in Caporial. Yeah. So I get through a couple of stones that turn, but ultimately it's not looking super great. What it turns around is on turn three I finally get a Fuhatsu attack through.
00:32:25
Speaker
and end up blasting onto Dreamer for four damage. It's not actually four because he reduces it to three within Caporial or whatever. But he had, you know, when you start piling up all these summons around you to try and protect you, sometimes it can come around and do the opposite. So that ends up being a big win. So at the end of three, I can reveal assassinate. I think he gets billed down sometime during turn three so that he actually scores his first curse point.
00:32:53
Speaker
and I think at this point in time he actually fails to kill Chiyo by like one point with his summoned alp that he dropped on her which ends up being very frustrating for me as that's my martyr and then Hinamatsu gets a ton of flak this turn too so she's on like two health and I expected one of them to die this turn
00:33:15
Speaker
So I end up pulling Hinamatsu back out of the engagement this turn with the Konoichi's I've Got Your Back. So that it and this is also how I had lured Dreamer further back the previous turn as I had said okay well I lured Dreamer back once I'm going to use I've Got Your Back to get out of engagement with whatever he had summoned at the time and I'm going to lure him further back in.
00:33:36
Speaker
and so similar idea going on here but Dreamer now is on like 2 HP or whatever for having been blasted on so much so I'm getting pretty confident I'll be able to secure the kill soon at this point in time he had already known I was going for assassinate and was dropping as much stuff near Dreamer as possible to try and get out of dodge but you only got so many cards that Hinamatsu has a lot of attacks
00:33:58
Speaker
Had you sussed out his schemes at this point, or was that still kind of up in the air for you? So his schemes at this point in time, I'm 90% confident his turn three here reveals public demo and the curse point. You might have even gotten public demo on turn two, to be honest. Something you just kind of have to be aware of when you're shoving two henchmen directly into the entire enemy bubble. But I was conscious of that scheme and decided I was just going to give away those points.
00:34:28
Speaker
at least for the reveal, because after he tells me that I need to kill three stitched, that's not a hard job. I'm pretty sure Bill killed one of the three marked public demos on turn three before he went down. Then Fuhatsu would eventually, at some point during this game, kill the other one. That was the plan anyways.
Pivotal Late-Game Moments
00:34:53
Speaker
And then he's got one more, whatever. You need to have henchmen on the table at the end of the game to actually score at the end point of public demo. That would be his part of his downfall. Now, I know that the key and gong, they like it when your opponent has at least a revealed scheme, because then you're suddenly getting more pass tokens and you got your leverage going. Absolutely. And so that played a huge part in my turn three plays that I made.
00:35:20
Speaker
because I was able to use those past tokens to get the positive flips for certain things. So like the lure on Hinamatsu I no longer was needing to use a stone for, I could just pitch a past token to get around the certain countenance. And so that made it a much more credible threat to him, as far as whether or not he was going to choose to pass that attack off or not. So I think I do end up using two lures on him and getting the dreamer only on the second lure, but
00:35:47
Speaker
And now when it comes to using the pass tokens during the game, do you generally find yourself using it for the plus flips with leverage? Or I know that Yuko too, she's got that, what's that ability called? The- She's got an ability to discard pass tokens or cards to put out distracted as well. Right, and did you find, which did you find yourself using more often there? So you primarily want to use the pass tokens for passing,
00:36:13
Speaker
and plus flips when you know you have like 70 of them and you aren't going to need that many passes. Sometimes you'll rarely use the Distracted. In one of my games against Misaki, one of your locals I think, Eeyore was his name on launching. I use the Distracted more in that game.
00:36:36
Speaker
than I think I have all year, like across all of my games. So it's not an ability I use a lot, but when it's good, it's good. But if you're just learning the crew, honestly, I'd say just pretend that's blank text and try and learn the rest of the crew's fundamentals and just introduce that in later as you play, start recognizing areas when you want the distracted actively.
00:36:59
Speaker
as opposed to just doing it because you think it's the best outlet for your passes. Because the best outlet for your passes is always making sure that you control who scores points at the end of the turn. OK. When I was kind of doing my prep work for today, since I even played against Yuko in a very long while, I was seeing that the Kunoichi, they had that unexpected ferocity trigger, which I'm like, oh, hitting them harder with that, you know, based off of their distracted.
00:37:28
Speaker
I didn't know, is that a trap that I shouldn't be going for? Or is that kind of that suddenly these shitty little, you know, six cost minions are hitting at four, five, six? Hey, they're not shitty. Was the impossible trigger to get off with Konoichi? Now I know it's unexpected ferocity. Because that looks powerful, especially with tools for the job. But I mean, so you're not really gunning for that most of the time.
00:37:58
Speaker
I'm sure there's a build in which you can get that to work, but I don't know that that builds very good. And it might have come up in my game with your if my Kenoichi had lived long enough to that point, but usually by the time you're putting Distracted on the enemy in this crew, is at the point where the Kenoichi will probably be getting picked up.
00:38:20
Speaker
They're excellent backline support models, the Kenoichi, and a lot of what they do is they just throw shurikens at your guys in the opening of the game and then try and score like your midfield points and objectives for like guard the stash or carve the path or whatever the strategy is. So they don't spend a lot of AP attacking on turns three, four, five. They also keep severe's in your hand, you know, because tools for the job is really good. Yeah, so their activation is usually
00:38:48
Speaker
aren't ideally where you'll be taking melee attacks. You know, I've had, I've had games, right, where it's turn four, turn five, and I need to finish off some guy who's running away. We're all walk, charge of Kenoichi to try and pick him up.
00:39:00
Speaker
And then once in a blue moon, you actually get to use that that trigger that I'm not certain is even on their card. You know, no witnesses. You know, that's how little I get to declare that trigger. To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually declare no witnesses on literally any model. So it's a rare event, but I've had it happen. Usually when your phone is really tabled. Yeah, I did a couple of times actually once a day with Rami turn one. Rami doesn't count. He's cheating.
00:39:30
Speaker
So, but like 10 thunders are like, I feel like the faction that has like the most of those kinds of like niche triggers that like they don't always come up, but when they come up, it's great. Like when, what's the, what's the name of, is it called assassin where if you kill something, you gain fast? Yeah. Yeah. That's a ability on, I think like Torakage and some other stuff.
00:39:51
Speaker
But like, when a Torakage pulls that off and like is able to score like a breakthrough or something with that, it's like great. But like, when is the Torakage actually killing something, you know? Step five, two, three, fours. But yeah, we were we were talking about something, you know, I've come through kind of in the middle of the game there.
00:40:09
Speaker
and you were talking about leading up to the game, you mentioned that this one, you ended up getting kind of close to tables. So when did things kind of start to turn not great for you there? So things were already kind of bad at the point I've described. I've made it sound like I'm very confident in my board position at this point in time, but if I were to realistically describe what's happened, I've killed
00:40:34
Speaker
One of his I've killed two of his summon models by the end of turn three and put like five points of damage on dreamer and I think I've killed maybe a stitched together as well So I've killed six points of his crew and put five points of damage on his master And that's not where you want to be three turns into the kill strat game And what did he kill the view at that point?
00:40:57
Speaker
At that point in time, I think he had taken Bill down. So I had lost one of my important nine point henchmans. And I had moved Yoko up the board a little too far because I had a brain fart and she had eaten like three stitched attacks at this point in time. So she was sitting on like five health. So not great, not great. Turn four rolls around and that's where it really falls apart. Yoko dies to a bunch of stitched attacks.
00:41:26
Speaker
Chiyo dies to like a Daydream or something. No, it wasn't a Daydream, it was the Alpie summoned off it, because if it was the Daydream, I wouldn't have been screwed. Cause Hinamatsu also dies this turn to Chompy doing something. Oh yeah, if a Daydream killed it off because the Daydream's insignificant, it wouldn't count. Yup.
00:41:46
Speaker
Like I said, it would have actually been better if a Daydream had done it, because if you kill one of my models with an insignificant model and the other model with a significant model in the same turn with Martyrs, I still get to score Martyrs. He kills both of those models this turn with a model, so I don't get to score any Martyrs this game.
00:42:03
Speaker
AJ is well aware of that, the insignificant loophole with Hidden Martyrs. I pulled that one against him when I went out to Washington for their GT back in April, where I had the Jackalope kill off one of his Martyrs. Oh, spicy. Yeah, yeah. Well, it was a like jacked Jackalope. And he's like, oh, I got Hidden Martyrs. Like, nope, that was insignificant. He's like, what?
00:42:29
Speaker
And that was that learning moment of the, oh, insignificant model killing a martyr.
00:42:36
Speaker
Yeah, so that's that's a real nice thing, especially when you've got three daydreams running around. But yeah, so he denies my martyrs points this turn. He kills my master this turn. He kills my other important henchmen this turn, because like I said, he had a lot of stitched on the board. So by the time he's done scalpling out all of my models this turn, I've got a Kenoichi and a Fuhatsu left on the board.
00:43:00
Speaker
The small blessing for me is that since I denied him points on turn two, he scored his curse point on turn three, then he killed all of my models on turn four for the most part, which only gets you one curse point. It doesn't get you more than one for being an overachiever here. And I've done a good enough job of keeping the fighting in like the center to his half of the board, that he isn't on my half the table very much here. So the Konoichi I have left and the Fuhatsu I have left,
00:43:27
Speaker
are basically still in my deployment zone. Fuhatsu walked into that Crystal Forest and he just parked his butt there the whole game. It was shiny. Yeah. Now, Fuhatsu I think on this turn ends up picking up Lord Chompy Bits, because I remember I blasted the Severe onto Dreamer off of him. So he was sitting on two hit points. So I pick him up at some point this turn. So he doesn't have a lot of the scary models left now that Dreamer's dead and Chompy's dead, but he still has like
00:43:54
Speaker
two stitched a widow weaver and in the city is madness i think he summoned plus some other like garbage pile of summons like he's got eight to nine models on the board here to my two so i'm thinking oh i'm not feeling super great this turn i've hit cursed objects every turn since i killed his master this turn and something on the other thing so i'm i'm not falling behind on strategy but as far as the board's concerned the board's his um and so i'm just trying to figure out well what's his other scheme you know he can't score public demo
00:44:24
Speaker
because he actually killed all of my masters in henchmen which is you know a relief for me when i'm trying to tally all the points here such upside but going into this round you know i know i'm hard capped at six points and i'm feeling okay that i've gotten five of them to this point but
00:44:43
Speaker
He can also get 5 points on this last turn, and I have very little to stop him from doing so when I've got my whip 3 fuhatsu who has to survive some stitched attacks, you know, some other stuff. But the thing that really bought me into this game actually was at the end of turn 4,
00:44:58
Speaker
I had taken a speculative shot into Widowweaver with some extra API hat on Fuhatsu. And finally he hits the right Joker on his damage flip here. And ends up bringing the Widowweaver to. And so turn five rolls around. I have my past tokens at this point in time for a small bonus on initiative. I think I still lose initiative though.
00:45:24
Speaker
Because, you know, Neverborn just do that. Not that he brought ancient packs, so maybe I did. Yeah, he didn't have any ancient packs on the list I saw. Because I go with Fuhatsu and I take Widowweaver off the table who had previously moved to her position on full health, but the Joker just enabled that play entirely.
00:45:42
Speaker
And then at this point in time, I'm like, well, you know, maybe it's a 5-5 game. Maybe it's not. But at least I got my cursed point that I wasn't expecting to get. So now I've got my full six points. And so I'm feeling really confident at this point in time. It's just kind of like how many points is my opponent going to actually score. And so he doesn't end up getting a cursed point this turn because he tries to get his breakthrough point that I didn't know he had instead for his other scheme.
00:46:11
Speaker
I was a little worried about trying to kill any of the rest of his stuff with my Kenoichi since he had martyrs, or could have had martyrs. So I was just essentially passing a bunch and trying not to die, cheating all my cards to live. But the takeaways here really are that while I lost a lot of models on the board,
00:46:32
Speaker
Knowing where the points could be scored in this game being in my deployment zone or on my half the board with sabotage and breakthrough as these schemes that weren't just kill stuff, making sure the action happened on my opponent's side of the board or towards the center of the board was really important as far as where the game needs to take place. So that regardless of what happens, if he takes those schemes and he did, he doesn't score any points off of them.
00:47:02
Speaker
So using the resources you have in the game and recognizing the best place to use them is a really important thing that we can take away from this. Because even though I ended the game with two models, as Magic players love to say, life is also a resource.
00:47:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and it sounds like, well, you didn't have as many models to activate, so you had plenty of time in your head to do the math and figure it out. So if he has this, he might be able to score this way, or if he's got this, he's got to score this way. And here's what I need to do to prevent the rest.
00:47:35
Speaker
Exactly. Yoko, too, is a lot like playing a puzzle by yourself. You know, your opponent's there to show you what the pieces look like. You know, he takes it out of the box for you, but ultimately it's up to you to put it together and figure out how to score your points. And yeah, you just tend to have the resources to do so because Yoko just picks you up the cards you need to do it and... Until she's dead, but... You gotta fill in the blanks. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You can kill her.
00:48:03
Speaker
Yeah. If you'd ended up taking assassinate there, instead of being a six to three game, it would have been a six five game there. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, there are a lot of blanks that I didn't have information for. So making sure you play out the full game, just, uh, just until you know how it's going to turn out is, uh, you know, really important, giving it your best foot, no matter what's going on.
00:48:29
Speaker
no matter how many black jokers you flipped with Fuhatsu. I swear it was three damage flips that game.
00:48:37
Speaker
Okay. That's enough. He still won. So, you know, you only get so much sympathy with that. Only so much sympathy. Yeah. So after the game, something we like to ask is we kind of split our audience up into, you know, bottom third players, middle third players, and top third players.
Advice for Players to Improve
00:48:56
Speaker
And what is some advice you would give a bottom third player who is playing into your crew for the first time? Oh, geez. Um, that's tough.
00:49:08
Speaker
That's real tough. So the best advice I can give you firstly is to make sure that you're not offering up isolated models for Yoko to pick off. If I can find a model that I can go kill and know that at the start of your next turn you have no way to interact with whatever I killed it with,
00:49:28
Speaker
That's going to put you in a really bad spot to begin with because then it's essentially like, not only did I get to do all these things without you responding and then have the potential to go first, I don't even need to go first if you don't have any pressure to put on my model once I've done my play. So keeping everything a bit closer together, you want to make sure that you don't get blasted on either and that you can still score your points. Malifaux is a hard game. Yeah.
00:49:56
Speaker
But that's probably the first bit of advice as to what I would give for trying to play into a past token-oriented crew. The next thing I would say is to just pay attention to what schemes you're picking. Things like Vendetta or stuff that you can score in the middle of the turn.
00:50:14
Speaker
are much easier to score against crews that will always have last activation. Because if I always get to say what happens at the very end of a turn, if you have something like public demos, an interesting example, since my opponent did score at this game, but something like public demo, where all I have to do is go last with the Kanochi and then go use, I've got your back to get that model out of engagement and you score zero points, then you're not going to get more than one point off that scheme.
00:50:44
Speaker
That is really great advice. Yeah. Yeah. So now what are some kind of, you know, gotcha mechanics or interactions within this crew that a new player should watch out for? The Bill Hino-Matsu slingshots definitely one that a lot of players don't see coming. Um, you get a lot of distance off on that and it just puts out a ton of damage. And then you add, do you ever add the, what's, I can never remember what that Yoko ability is called that adds, what is it? Four or five inches or something?
00:51:14
Speaker
Gather Intel. Yeah, you usually gather Intel pushing Himatsu out of your deployment so that when Bill goes, Bill can charge the Himatsu rather than just hit it, right? So you don't ever use Gather Intel on Bill because Bill already gets all the movement he needs by just charging Himatsu. So effectively by pushing the Himatsu, you've pushed both of them.
00:51:35
Speaker
No, that's a maybe efficiency right there. Exactly. So long as you're stoning or cheating the mask, of course, which is usually going to be stoning, because a lot of the times the mask is actually going for tools to the job and the key, but sometimes you just draw like three or four masks. Because as you do, sometimes you win. So how many stones do you bring? This game, I brought eight stones. Wow.
00:52:02
Speaker
I mean, you're running two henchmen that are going to be primarily your beef here. And it's cursed objects. You want to make sure they don't die. Correct. I've played lists as low as four stones before. You still stone for the mask in those instances. It kind of just depends on what your opponent's bringing and what you need to have. I'm an outcast player. So even if I bring four stones, there's always those free models I get that do work called prospectors. I'm your prospector forever.
00:52:29
Speaker
Man, I love, I swear my prospectors. I love them. I don't know why they went away. So what advice would you give to say a middle third player? So someone who's got some experience under their belt, you know, looking to give you a challenging game and hoping if they play a really tight game that they might be able to knock you off there. Someone who's trying to make the climb up the standings there. What advice would you give to that kind of player?
00:52:54
Speaker
So that kind of player needs to overcome the second hurdle of this crew, which is I'm always going to have better cards than you when I have cards. So you have to try and figure out how to spend the cards you have to win. And the most common mistake I actually see here is people are afraid to cheat their cards and lose.
00:53:15
Speaker
So one of the neat things Yoko does once you've revealed a scheme, or once I have Chiyo over the center, is I have enough pass tokens that I can start using plus flips on my duels. And when you know I have two 13s in my hand, because I literally showed you that I picked them up from my discard pile, and you see me outflip you in a duel, and you know that your card doesn't beat the 13, sometimes you still have to cheat. Because otherwise, I still have the 13 for the next thing that we're going to do. You've got to burn it out of the hand. You've just been stuck in this endless cycle of,
00:53:45
Speaker
being too afraid to lose your best card to a 13. You got to burn it out of the hand. So don't be afraid to cheat even though you know you might lose. I think that's what makes Yoko so great is the fact that you'll always have more 13s than your enemy does. And you also get rid of some of their 13s. I actually had the game against Yoko when first activation turn two was Yoko and she removed the second 13 out of my deck.
00:54:15
Speaker
I was like, what the fuck? I played four turns without 13s with only two 13s in my deck. What the fuck?
00:54:25
Speaker
Yeah, I don't usually even bother cheating that trigger. So the only time it ever comes up for me is when I flip it on accident. Sometimes it's annoying and nasty, but it's not something you want to send resources on. And if you're stoning for a trigger, it better damn well be the crow trigger, because the crow trigger is just really nasty when you actually use it to set up card advantage in the same vein of what I was just talking about, where it makes your opponent flip a bad card, and then he either has to cheat in the yoko stat seven attack,
00:54:54
Speaker
while I have better cards or just continually lose duels. And the trigger you're referring to is the one that makes it remove from the game, right? So that's the trigger Angel was talking about. The crow trigger actually lets you rig the top three cards of your opponent's deck. What I was referring to is, regardless of whether or not you use the trigger, with that same ability, you can choose a suit to remove the card from the turn, essentially. Yeah. Yeah.
00:55:20
Speaker
Alright, so now we're looking for some advice for a top third player, you know? Someone who is, you know, knocking on the door of the podium there. What advice do you have for them? And honestly, what do you wish you had done differently in this game?
Approach to High-Level Games and Yoko 2 Strategies
00:55:37
Speaker
So, advice I would have for them into playing into Yoko 2 is going to be
00:55:43
Speaker
Firstly, make sure you have a plan for how you're going to score your points through past tokens. You have to score points somehow during the game, right? So taking models during the hiring phase where you know you're going to be able to get around some of the bullshit, right? Whether that's making sure I can't push you off of stash or covert markers, or taking models with rules that are going to ensure you can get your strat points, that's super important.
00:56:06
Speaker
Because one of the main ways that Yoko is going to win is she's just going to choke you out of strat points. And then even if you score full on your schemes, which is very unlikely, I'll still win on strat, right? So making sure you can identify which models in your faction will let you do that. And then additionally, if you have models in your faction, like say, Corfi Duet that can win back some activation control, that can be priceless.
00:56:29
Speaker
The last thing I would say is look for ways to pressure your opponent's hand. Gorfi Duet's actually a pretty excellent example where she has a high stat attack, she has execute, and gives you those pass tokens. So she's just a pretty annoying model for the crew to face. If you're just playing as any blue crew, you can just slot it right in. So looking for models in your faction like that where you can pressure
00:56:53
Speaker
The other thing I would say is if you can find a way to either tank through or get past the frontliners that Yoko's going to present and just dive straight into Yoko's backline. Yoko's backline isn't nothing. But if I start dropping models, then my activation control via pass token stops being as impactful because I don't have models to do anything with to score points with.
00:57:21
Speaker
And that's tough with bulletproof disguised models, you know, as my primary core and terracotta warriors and stuff like that. But, you know, if you're, what actually Eeyore did was he early in the game, got Misaki towards my back line and just started throwing lightning strikes, uh, to take out the terracotta warriors and start putting ping damage through on the Konoichi, which was really annoying. Getting AoEs into the unpack can also really help. Travis is really good about that. I will commend him.
00:57:49
Speaker
I mean, I don't know if I've ever seen him play anything other than Misaki, but he knows that crew very well. I just heard the solution to every problem is to bring one, you know? He's the coolest model in the game. I think this question kind of slots in here nicely. I've got a question from a Quicket on the Discord. What Masters do you consider to be tough matchups for Yoko?
00:58:12
Speaker
Uh, Damien, but Damien's a tough match for everybody. Cause I think he's probably one of the best masters in the game right now. Yeah, for sure. Damien one is a monster. And I don't think gaining crowns four changes that at all. It might make it worse. We'll see. Nope. Just sell. Fantastic. All right. So, uh, couple other questions we had from the discord there. What is the best tournament you've ever been to? And why is it the lone star photo from a personal glitch?
00:58:44
Speaker
uh... well i gotta say the beer really helped at the lowest our phone and if i'm if i have to uh... you know start throwing compliments your way uh...
00:58:53
Speaker
But I really enjoyed Nova last year with no disrespect to the tournament I was just at. Just because Masters of Nova last year, we had a good turnout. And the level of play there was just so high. Everybody knew what they were doing. And you could really just chew down on those games. I can still think about most of the games I played and recall in some level of detail what happened, even though those games were like a year ago at this point in time.
00:59:20
Speaker
That's called PTSD. Yeah. Well, Amy one gave me PTSD last year. That's true. By no stretch. Was that wrong? Yeah. It was Damien one with the Corfi duet. That, that was what stopped me from winning Nova last year. So. Well, yeah, but weren't you also playing Damien for a lot of Nova? I've never played Damien in my life.
00:59:41
Speaker
Oh, no, no, sorry. I'm trying to remember who all played in that. That's long 10. Do you always insult your guests like this, though? Hey, no, no. The shade. As we said at Gen-Con, we played near each other a whole bunch, but we'd never actually played into each other until Gen-Con.
01:00:00
Speaker
And I was so busy getting my ass kicked at Nova, I wasn't paying attention as much to what the top tier players were playing, except when Longton was shoving, you know, Damien down my throat. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. And then hearing about all the Damien hate back at the Lone Star, Airbnb. Yeah, it's my perspective that I don't play the best thing in the game. I make what I'm playing the best thing in the game.
01:00:27
Speaker
Nice. Same. So that actually kind of sockets into a question from Ambrose. So Tio from the Pacific Northwest, one of the guys who is part of running the Malifaux World Series. So in order to play successfully at an event like this, how important are gameplay fundamentals versus model evaluation and playing strong crews? So obviously one helps the other to a certain extent.
01:00:54
Speaker
But fundamentals are where the game begins and not where the game necessarily ends. But at the end of the day, that's why Malifold works so much more favorably towards experienced players than other games do. The fundamentals of knowing the rhythms of turns, having the ideas of how you score different schemes, and being able to identify what your opponent's doing just plays so huge of a part as to how you win games.
01:01:24
Speaker
that even if you're playing something that's perceived to be less strong than your opponent, you can win games just by knowing what the hell is going on. And so that's why I think has been a big part of why I can find success just playing Scorpius's of factions I've never played before, is that I just know the basics very strongly of how Malifaux is played, that if someone just hands me a crew, I can go, oh, this is what the plan for the crew is, or
01:01:50
Speaker
this is what I need to be doing. And just at that point in time, let my knowledge of how to play Malifaux carry me through what I'm doing in a game of Malifaux. And I think that's a lot of the reason why Yoko 2 is so much stronger, maybe in my hands than in other players hands, since I think that was another question that was asked at some point in time. Yeah, it was kind of asking why Yoko 2 had kind of been picked up in the Malifaux World Series, but a lot of other metas have really been sleeping on her.
01:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, I don't even know if people play her in VWS all that much, Vassal World Series, just because I have no idea why they don't play her there, to be honest. But I think she's a crew that really rewards understanding of Malifaux's mechanics on a basic level and playing fundamentally around those edges to try and get what needs to be done done. Because I don't think, you know, people can tell you that Hinamatsu and Bill are the strongest models in Malifaux if they want. They're not going to be right.
01:02:50
Speaker
But they are good models with solid mechanics to them, but they don't really cheat, you know, how some models kind of cheat. They have six inch leaps or they have irreducible damage or something wild and wacky that bends the rules of the game.
01:03:06
Speaker
like none of your models really bend the rules of the game all that much so you have to try and play within the box uh you know plus or minus two pass tokens yeah i was about to say they're not on paper they're not the best models in the game but when you chain activate them and your opponent cannot do anything about it then maybe they are
01:03:25
Speaker
Yes, but using past tokens, regardless of whether or not you can call it cheating because you get too extra, I would for reference. But regardless of whether or not you do, is just part of the core mechanics of Malifaux. So identifying how you're supposed to use past tokens and how you're supposed to cheat your cards and do all of that.
01:03:45
Speaker
That's what Malifaux is in its core fundamentals is assessing what resources you have and putting them in the right spot, whether that's the right spot in the board or cheating them at the right time. It's making right good decisions is what Malifaux fundamentals are. And if you can't do that, you're not going to get very far playing any crew. Awesome. Preach, Pope. Yeah.
01:04:08
Speaker
So I had one quick question that is maybe a little less directly related to the gameplay itself, but kind of actually to the environment as
Handling Live-Streamed Tournaments and Mistakes
01:04:18
Speaker
it were. During the Fodown, we had heroic scale gamers live streaming several of our games. And you ended up playing on their live stream, I believe it was three times or was it four?
01:04:32
Speaker
Three times, yes. Three times. And you obviously ended up winning each of those games. And I know that some people, when they play on the stream, they get a little bit nervous playing on livestream. They're worried that they're going to screw up. Is there anything that you do to help keep yourself centered and focused in such situations? And kind of what recommendations would you give to a player if they find themselves playing on a livestream for the first time? That's a great question.
01:05:02
Speaker
Oh, I screwed up a ton in all of my live screen games. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't. I could probably go back to those videos and find at least three or four errors in each game. But you just kind of just can't let that bother you and just play the game as you play it. Like, I know I messed up my Lynch unpack in my game with Luckett. If you want to go and challenge yourself, you can go look at the replay and, you know, see if you can spot all of the instances I'm talking about.
01:05:29
Speaker
Well, I thought the lesson we learned from that one was never gamble against a gremlin. No, never gamble with goblin is a terrible idea. You will lose every bet. Um, and Gwyneth Monks is a terrible model. Uh, so anyways, that was a good takeaway from that game. Uh, do you watch it on stream? It was a ton of fun. Yeah. I was going to say the links links to, uh, heroic scale gamer streams are in the show notes for shout out to Nathan. He was awesome at what he does. Yeah.
01:05:57
Speaker
love playing into lucket but as far as how to keep your cool really I think you just gotta like not let one play affect your mood for another like I can get real fired up when I when I flip a bad black right but you know you just you have that emotional moment you let it out and that could even just like if you're doing it in a constructive way make the game more fun for your opponent too if you're enjoying the game that you're playing
01:06:25
Speaker
But if you keep it all bottled up and just let it haunt you, you know, what's going on in the game, you're, you're not going to make as good decisions. You're going to get caught up in, you know, past errors and it's just going to weigh you down. So you just got to not let a stroke of bad luck affect you, I guess, and just make sure that you're focused on the game and what you need to do and not what has happened. Always remember the slogan of Malifaux.
01:06:52
Speaker
bad things happen. Yeah. Oh, I was gonna go with, you know, shake it off, because we were talking, you know, karaoke earlier. For our listeners that don't know, Doug is a Swifty. He thoroughly enjoys Taylor and Kelsey's relationship in the NFL. Did you go see the screening in theaters?
01:07:17
Speaker
No, while I may enjoy her music out and about, I am much more of a metalhead. I know it's surprising. It's very surprising. No way. Doug, Doug, I'll have to send you a picture, but I bought a Taylor Swift t-shirt the other day, but the Taylor Swift, it's got like a skeleton sitting on a throne and Taylor Swift is written in death metal font and it says, shake it off on the bottom. And it's like the coolest t-shirt I think. Oh my God, it sounds fucking amazing.
01:07:45
Speaker
But anyway, so I think that pretty well wraps up this section
Closing Insights and Shoutouts
01:07:51
Speaker
here. So thank you so much for joining us, Landon. Before we go, did you have any plugs or parting thoughts?
01:08:00
Speaker
Well, I have to mention Danger Planet because, you know, that is the primary pod that I speak on at this point in time with the other Doug B of Malifaux. I say the other, but aren't there like six of you guys? There's three of us. There's three of us now. There's me, Doug Brumman and Doug Bresher. So like the minions. Yeah, there's not as many of you as there are Nathans at this point in time. But seriously.
01:08:23
Speaker
But yeah, I would plug Danger Planet, give us a listen. You know, we make things called tier lists, but they aren't always exactly tier lists. You know, we do keyword tier lists, which is really just us shooting the shit and telling you what models are good and why we think they're good. That's all I got right now. Cool. And we'll have a link to the Danger Planet channel in the show notes. Fantastic. Awesome.
01:08:46
Speaker
Oh, so I have a couple of things I'd like to promote real fast. Yes. Top dog design. Top dog design. We plug that every episode. First of all, some of you listeners out there may have noticed we took a little hiatus from releasing episodes of Students of Conflict.
01:09:04
Speaker
A big factor in that was I got super busy because a small terrain studio Phoenix Foundry had reached out to me to do a bunch of printable terrain design work for a Kickstarter they were gearing up for. Well, that Kickstarter will have launched shortly before we will be releasing this episode.
01:09:23
Speaker
We'll have a link to it in the show notes. Some quick info on it. It's called Gale Wind, and it's a 3D printable fantasy village made up of seven core buildings and a sweet airship, all with fully playable interiors. They're really sweet. I personally sculpted three buildings for this project. The Sunwind Tavern, Windmere Manor, and Windward Cottage. And I'm really proud of how they all turned out, so you should check it out.
01:09:53
Speaker
of the guys from Phoenix Foundry, Judd and Peter, have been an absolute joy to work with. And we're hoping to do more cool stuff together in the future. So keep an eye on that. But yeah, you should go and check out this Kickstarter and show them some love. That's excellent. Secondly, so Lone Star Fodown, Malifo GT this year. I mean, that's what we're talking about today, but it was the largest event in North America this year.
01:10:20
Speaker
Absolutely staggered than so many players and just our second year doing it. And we have the date already scheduled for next year. We are, you know, have the calendar slot blocked out at dragons lair again. Uh, so October 11th through the 13th, uh, is going to be lone star photo, Malefoe GT number three. Let's go.
01:10:47
Speaker
We were the largest this year, you know, we're aiming to get even bigger next year. And yeah, so tickets aren't on sale yet, but I will be screaming it from the mountain tops as soon as they are. But you know, save the date. There was a big surprise and that duck made a fate deck for everybody, which is fantastic, by the way, for this year. And there might be some surprises for next year's one as well.
01:11:15
Speaker
I'm working on another Fate Deck for next year. Just got to get enough done on it to get approval from Weird, so. Nice. Excellent. But yeah, thank you so much for joining us tonight and thank you for coming on down to Texas and kicking all of our asses. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a great time and the venue was enjoyable enough that you'll be seeing me again at some point. Fantastic. Awesome. Look forward to it.
01:11:44
Speaker
Students of Conflict is brought to you by Top Dog Design. Check out topdogdesign.com for all of your Malifotrain needs. Top Dog Design, 3D printable designs to enhance your tabletop. Students of Conflict is not an official product of Rude Miniatures LLC.
01:11:59
Speaker
All intellectual property belonging to weird miniatures is used with permission. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of entities they represent. Any content provided by our guests and or hosts are their opinion and not intended to align any group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything. Whoo!
01:12:41
Speaker
So something we'll talk about again. Did we lose him again? All right. We might want to have him. No, I should be here. Yeah. We'll go just audio. Yeah. Yeah. Oh no. The Chicago connection. Right. Blown away by the wind. Yeah. It is on record that he, that I'm getting the hat, right? That's saved. Yeah, that is on record. Okay, good.