Journey to Malifaux UK Nationals 2024

I organised the next Malifaux Midlands meetup this past weekend and we had 7 players attend with varying different crews all having some friendly games. My intention was to get a game in with Iron Heart Von Schill as I hadn’t gotten a chance to use him yet. I played the person who gave me the original demo of the game a few years ago so it was nice to play him again at a proper level.

Here are the crews for the game we played at a standard 50 soulstones game, we got standard deployment in Cloak and dagger with sweating bullets and let them bleed for my schemes;

Von Schill – Iron Heart

Steam Trunk

Freikorps scout 

Freikorps Engineer

Metallurgist

Hannah Lovelace 

Arik Schottemer

Lazarus

3 soulstones

My opponents list was;

Lucius Mattheson 

The Scribe

Alan Reid

Klaus Norwood 

Cavitica

White eyes

Guild Lawyer

2 False witnesses 

7 Soulstones

Turn 1 was the standard positioning for scoring in Turn 2. The only real notable thing I found that the keyword I was playing had a lot of card and hand manipulation abilities making it a little harder to pull off the things I really wanted to do.

Turn 2 I had gotten in a good position to score the strategy and make a start on scoring the schemes I had picked. I threw Iron-Heart into the mix with reckless abandonment foolishly as all the hand manipulation quickly drained my cards. However in an unknowing good pick, Lazarus’s Grenade launcher avoided a lot of this because it is a shockwave weapon and doesn’t target models, but instead targets a spot on the board. Unfortunately my opponent had a wealth of cards to pass the tests needed to avoid damage. We traded blows here and there doing a little damage to each other’s crews. I lost my Scout to white eyes who made a Beeline for him from the very beginning of the game. 

Into Turn 3 a slight misjudgement of placement meant that Hannah was not as in the mix as I wanted, but Arik managed to move in and smoosh poor Klaus into paste with an 8 damage punch. Iron-Heart was completely tangled in a web of Boring conversation and Flexible Morality meaning getting anything off was tricky. I had a plan for Turn 4 but we’ll get to that shortly. I didn’t manage to score my strat this round as I said I was just to far out of position and Lazarus had not managed to do any significant damage again. My opponent scored a scheme and a strategy putting the score at 3-1.

Turn 4 I had a plan to hopefully get Iron-Heart into a better position with Bulldoze remove some markers do some damage and get him to where I wanted. he managed to pull it off at the cost of a few cards and chipped some damage to a couple of characters and setting up the fall of the guild lawyer among them. Sadly Lazarus fell to multiple attackers that I just couldn’t fend off. Iron-Heart was now in deep trouble surrounded by enemies on all sides and only an engineer in support. We both scored the strategy my opponent scored the another scheme but with a little help I also scored one of my schemes as well the score now sat at 5-3 in my opponents favour.

Turn 5 myself and my opponent talked it out and did a couple of key activations to see if I could score my last 2 Schemes and the same for him. Iron-heart managed to do the amount of damage needed the people around him to score both of my schemes for end game and he would also do the same and he would easily score the Strategy and the game ended at 6-8.

So in conclusion I am begining to remember to use focus, the best people to put certain upgrades on and my abilities and triggers that help me win games. I am getting there and the past few games I have played have seen me so close to victory or at least a draw. Whilst I feel the wooden spoon is most likely what I will walk away with at the nationals I can at least say I will have progressed from where I began. I am happy with my level of knowledge for the most part, but most importantly I am enjoying the game more and more.