Reference the Fieldguide
I thought that - as this blog has been rather silent for a while I would post a little bit about Malifaux. Yesterdays game made me a little introspective and I figured that some reflection would do me good.
General Thoughts
Stones
Schill is ok at mitigating a bad Fate Hand - both the Librarian, Freikorpsman and the Steam trunk can throw cards to get extra abilities. He can actually do quite well with low cards in his hand. I do however tend to bring a few stones to grab cards during the important turns 2,3 and 4 as this is when high cards matter the most.
Other than those three I don't tend to bring more - I need my points for models.
Strategies and Schemes
Generally speaking you want to pick ones that reward you for staying alive and killing stuff.
Turf War - Probably the best one for Schill. Here the combat takes places in the centre where he can use the Freikorps bubble to put up a tough resistance.
Reconnoiter – You’ll get it for the first few turns but after that don’t bother with it; play your schemes instead.
Reckoning - Having good ranged threat and tough Enforcers to choose from, Schill is very good at this. Kill and survive could be the motto of the Freikorps.
Squatter's Rights – pick two, take them and then form a defensive cordon around them. Defend your opponent to death after that.
Stake a Claim - don’t bother with it. Play your schemes instead.
A word on the crew...
Card hungry. Reference the field guide and the trunks healing, plus your cheating drains your hand very quickly. You find yourself relying on a larger hand – not for good cards, just for cards that you can toss. Because of this you’ll find you limit yourself to a small elite crew, resulting in being out activated almost all of the time.
Because you’ll end up with a small crew you won’t want anything killed, meaning that you’ll be bringing at least one librarian and the box. That’s a ten point investment at the least.
Schill works best with survive and kill schemes. He especially loves a few ones that need aggression or resilience like Entourage, Vendetta, Make Them Suffer or Murder Protégé.
What follows is a general list of the things I take in my games. It is by no means exhaustive and each model, no doubt, has more that it can do, but below are what I consider to be the salient points.
Von Schill
Needs to do most of the heavy lifting –
- Charges stuff and knock its armour down a notch with his trigger
- Keeps the freikorps bubble up to protect his people.
- Takes down big beaters with armour
- Uses his upgrade (clockwork arm) to throw around utility models to remove their buffs or debuffs
- Gives out oath keeper for his first turn (three actions for a free upgrade) and then tag a bunch of models with his stand and shoot attack and have the specialist, the librarian and the strongarm smash face against the ones that got hurt.
- Gives himself oath keeper (ignore all restrictions) and go smash face – he will gain a plus on all duels vs priority targets.
- Charges something, tossing it away from its crew, shooting it, hitting the mask trigger to push into base contact, tossing it again and shooting it again. You can so this a max of three times (four with oath keeper) and do somewhere in the range of 12-27 damage, burning 9 – 15 cards from your hand and deck and moving a maximum of 15 inches (depending on base size).
Henchmen
Hannah
- Armour, Freikorps Suit, Counterspell deny, or make it much harder to pull off, Ca Attacks and Nether Flux that strips Suits from the enemy’s' Characteristics. This makes hitting triggers much harder.
- 50mm base and has Ht3 so she can block LoS to friendly models
- 3" Ml reach she can lock down a large territory.
- Can steal any (1) cast action or a (0) from a friekorps model. So you can steal Zorrida’s obey or the librarian’s bag of tricks.
- Might block line of sight to the enemy so run in the back
- Big target – might benefit from schemes like frame for murder
Anna Lovelace
- board control - prevents any enemy pushing and placing in an 8" bubble. She shuts down certain models' game plans entirely (such as Lilith), drastically hampers many others (such as Jack Daw and many Gremlins)
- summons chaff
- merc tax
- very solid for Turf War and Spring the Trap.
Enforcers
Hans
- Gets rid of upgrades
- kills chaff/scheme runners
- removes utility pieces (eg; Mr Tannen)
- Gives people slow
- Ignores armour
Specialist
- slow and his Flammenwerfen has a short(ish) range but it can ignore Cover.
- Trigger gets rid of scheme markers
- Alongside the engineers his ‘you’re flammable’ will cause a max of 4 burning.
- Auto discards corpse and scraps at the end of his activation
- On an action he gets rid of slow or paralyzed
- Blows up when he dies – frame for murder target
Librarian
- Healing Energy – you will get a lot of work out of this.
- Can shoot or melee three times with a discarded card.
- Stick behind the front rank to heal stuff and blast things that come too close.
- Can draw a card or blast on a trigger – makes pitching a tome very important.
- Important model in the crew – frame for murder
Lazarus
- 10 Wd and Armour +2. Free heal.
- Can fire three times with a discarded card that can target anything.
- Can copy a constructs action as a free – abominations card draw, puppets tricks, etc.
- Slow
Strongarm Suit
- Problem solver – get this to go kill the big beaters or the far back buffing models. Better to hunt chaff as there is almost no fear of reprisal.
- Big target – frame for murder target
- Can tank – throw him into a big group with his shielding on.
Minions
Trapper
- Cheap (for the korps)
- From the Shadows – stick them on a high building and drop a scheme for protect territory.
- Automatically gets [+] Flip on his rifle – hits big things consistently - good way of draining opponents hand vs their beaters
- Choose a mode for it; 1) either it scheme runs, 2) it targets leaders/beaters to ping them for damage, 3) it hunts chaff.
Freikorpsmann
- Cheap (for the korps)
- Tanky if in the bubble or when they hit their knife trigger
- Unimpeded - perhaps it is just my meta but I find this very useful
- Good way to mitigate a bad hand – discard low rams, tomes or masks for added suits – upping the knife damage to 2,4,5 and his gun to 2,3,6 or building in an auto reposition to the gun, or +2 df with the knife trigger. If you have a high ram you can add that to a duel total for 3,5,6 on the knife and 3,4,7 on the gun. This can turn them into surprise assassins.
Freikorps Engineer
- Adds rams to fellow Freikorps. Can boost the damage of the korman to 5,6,10 with the gun and 5,8,9 with the knife – might be better with the knife.
- Cut and crush is great – drops df of target. You’ll want to support a charge with something else like the strongarm.
- Adds extra armour to stuff with armour already – this makes any and all friekorps a nightmare to shift with damage.
- Good force multiplier.
- Good gun with a possible minimum damage of 3.
Big Jake
- Don’t mind me allows him to drop scheme markers – helps with plant explosives
- Consult the ancestors’ lets you look at the top cards in the deck in any order.
- Comes back on turn 5 – brilliant for frame for murder
Johan
- Relic Hammer – can protect a model like a librarian by pushing a model away with his trigger
- Can heal himself
- Can lock down an area with his 3” melee
- Gets rid of conditions
Sue
- Built in critical strike on his pistols which also has a positive twist making his damage track 3/4/5. Flip a high ram and this becomes 4/5/6
- Auto kill totem trigger – goodbye Huggy and Banasuva.
- Hurt allows you to draw a card
- Hard to kill
- Relentless
- Can pick a model to drop a marker on death
- (0) ring of fire – burning on everyone within 3”
- (0) The man in black – negative to enemy casting to models within 3”
Building a Crew
Here are just a few examples of possible lists. I've used a lot of inspiration from places like Schemes and Stones as well as Pull My Finger added in with my own experience.
Balanced, versatile
Von Schill -- 3 Pool -- 7 models
+Oath of the Freikorps [1]
+Survivalist [1]
+The Shirt Comes Off [1]
Spends a turn passing out oath keeper before spending a turn running forward and shooting something you want to die. Then the crew dogpiles it. After that he hits things with his cracked trigger to drop their df and runs fire support for the rest of the crew – occasionally rushing a weak model.
Hannah [10]
+Ancient Tomes [2]
+I pay better [1]
Picks a model to bury each turn. This could be your bodyguard to protect it until the end of the activation or it could be an enemy beater. Then she steals a cast action from someone. Tosses cheap cards to get focus of friendlies.
Student of Conflict [4]
Makes stuff fast so it can either run schemes or shoot stuff. Pick a model to follow to keep making fast – the trapper to keep shooting stuff, the Strongarm to keep punching stuff or the korpsmann to run schemes.
Freikorps Librarian [7]
Stays in the back and heals stuff, occasionally blasting something. Needs to stay within 8” of Hannah.
Strongarm [10]
Pick something to kill each turn either with shooting or melee. Hunt riders. Works in tandem quite often with the trapper.
Freikorps Trapper [6]
Annoy leaders. Pick off chaff. Hurt beaters so the rest of the crew can finish them off.
Freikorpsmann [5]
Extra shots at a master – don’t worry about burning cards for it – you just want to worry them to discard cards – or run schemes.
Sniper squad
Von Schill -- 2 Pool
+Oath of the friekorps [1]
+Survivalist [1]
+The Shirt Comes Off [1]
Steam Trunk [3]
Put all your naff cards on it so you know what to use for heals. Mostly this will be a cheap activation and a corpse marker remover.
Freikorps Librarian [7]
Furious casting. Try to toss in a few tomes to trigger surge or resonance.
Hans [8]
Knock off upgrades. Don’t bother with damaging stuff. It’s pointless – just knock off upgrades off masters, enforcers and henchmen.
Freikorps Trapper [6]
Freikorps Trapper [6]
These guys are going to do the damage/card drain. They will target masters and do damage/force opponent to waste cards from their hands. THEN Hans hits them to discard their upgrades.
Lazarus [10]
Boom. Gatling cannon stuff, even to things in combat [you can low cheat against your own models to get the blasts off if it means you can kill something as it will do 2 damage to your models and 3 to theirs].
Korpsman [5]
Extra Activation. Hits things that need plinking. Charges things that need removing – either in combat or shooting (with Lazarus).
The Beater Brigade
Find stuff and smash it. Get close and hammer the enemy into bits.
Von Schill -- 3 Pool
+Oath of the Friekorps [1]
+Nytheria Aftermath [1]
+The Shirt Comes off [1]
First turn he puts Oath Keeper on himself and Strongarm and walks forward with the rest of the crew. Next he tags two things. Turn three he and the Strongarm kill them. Repeat.
Steam Trunk [3]
Put all your naff cards on it so you know what to use for heals. Mostly this will be a cheap activation and a corpse marker remover.
Strongarm [10]
See above.
Librarian [7]
Furious casting. Put a card on it so you know what resources you can afford. If you can’t them just double heal with both of them.
Librarian [7]
Healing energy.
Korpsman [5]
Korpsman [5]
Both do as the situation dictates – either as scheme runner or as a supporter.
Engineer [6]
Passes out extra damage with its rams and buffs the armour of your troops. You’ll be putting a korpsman on min damage 4 if you can discard a card for RtFG, get a high ram cheat and add one with the engineer.
So that's my 2 cents on the korps. I love them and even though I still lose more often than not I do enjoy playing them.
