State of the Blog: August 2013

I started this blog a month ago today, largely as a personal motivation tool in an effort to push myself to take my hobby a little more seriously.  I honestly had no expectations about readership, I was primarily interested in keeping to a schedule and logging my thoughts on the new rules as Malifaux 2nd Edition rolled out. Imagine my surprise when, after only a scant few weeks, I was up to over a thousand individual page views!

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by and had a read, especially to those of you who keep coming back.  Whether you got here through Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest or the Wyrd Forums, I appreciate you taking the time to visit. I'm always looking for feedback and advice, whether its for painting, blogging, playing, whatever.  Please drop me an email or a comment on an article you read and I'll write you back.

Project Guild - Progress Report

One of the commitments I have made is to finish painting all of Malifaux's Guild Faction by August of next year. Between launching this site, a family vacation and a road trip to Gen Con, I haven't gotten much painting done this month (most of the work that does show in the progress report was the result of finishing mostly-done models).

Completed This Month: Nurse Enslaved Nephilim Guild Rifleman Lady Justice (v1) The Judge (v1) Scales of Justice (v1) 3 Death Marshals (v1) Purifying Flame Pale Rider / Lone Marshal

Currently in Progress: Lucas McCabe (foot) Lucas McCabe (mounted) Sidir Alchibal Brutal Effigy Avatar of Revelation Acquired: Lady Justice M2E Box Avatar of Amalgamation

One of the challenges that I face with this project is when to call it complete.  Is Project: Guild done when I have every discrete playable model?  Every version of every model?  All models that can participate in a Guild Crew, such as Nurses or Sebastian? What about limited and nightmare editions?  These are questions I need to answer over the next eleven months.  Please let me know what you think. 

Better Know Your Malifaux

Coinciding with the early release of the second edition rulebook this month I launched my first article series Better Know Your Malifaux.  The goal is to document my thoughts on each model, one by one, as I work on Project: Guild.  The tone and content of the articles is meant to be one man's opinion and overview of each model's capabilities, not to be a comprehensive strategy guide - for that I highly recommend the Pull My Finger wiki. 

So far I have completed four articles, covering Perdita, Francisco, Enslaved Nephilim and Santiago.  As long as I can keep painting and photographing miniatures at a decent rate, my goal is to do two articles a week until I finish all of the book one Guild models.  At that point I'll reassess, but if the momentum is there this might become a much larger project. 

Playing Some Malifaux

Last week I ran my first series of demo games at X Planet in Mississauga, my FLGS.  Over the course of five hours we got three games in and I need to say that I love the new speed of the game!  I only had my Guild and Resurrectionist cards with me so Jacob Lynch had to remain in the box, but Perdita, Sonnia, McMourning and Justice all got some table time.  The new players had a good time, and I was surprised at how quickly those who had never even played 1.5 picked it up. 

As always, tabletop play is the best way to discover new interactions and learn new things about your models.  I learned, in the same interaction, both how very vulnerable Papa Loco is to Wp duels and how effective the Death Marshals' Pine Box is.  Papa Loco spent a high card to escape the coffin at the start of the Death Marshal's activation only to face two back-to-back attempts by that same Marshal to shove him back in.  Now that the ability has a built in suit it costs very little for the Death Marshal to hold on to his victims once he has them. 

X Planet will be launching a Malifaux 2nd Edition League on September 16th where the focus will be learning the new system and hopefully growing the player base.  If you're in the GTA, come on out and play.  We just had it announced yesterday that the second wave of the open beta will be launching on October 7th, so we will likely not see much of the new Masters until after that, but they will be welcome once their rule are out.

It's been a great first month, thanks for everything!