Herald of Obliteration: Nightmare Edition

Heralding in the the new edition is a new master. Making her a Nightmare Edition for Gen Con 2013 is a very good move. This box of pretties cost 80 USD. I only hope when the normal edition comes out, the models will not be as awesome.

Tara is the proxy for the tyrant Obliteration in Malifaux. Among her crew are few models of Nothing. The huge The Nothing Beast and babies Void Wretch. This bring the first unique challenge I faced. How to render nothing. The first thing that came to my mind is to paint is black and highlight to light grey. Then wash it down with black. This will possibly make the model very boring though. In the end, I decided to do something adventurous and try out colors I've never done before.

The Nothing Beast
I used a deep purple and highlight it up to green. The tones are still muted. Adding a counterpoint to the colors, I used orange-red for the tentacles. The Nothing Beast turned out quite nicely.

Void Wretch
I tried the same colors to tie them together with The Nothing Beast. The areas are too small and the models turned out to be over-highlighted by light purple. I had to wash them down with black. Therefore their colors are darker. On hindsight, washing them down with a purple wash would have been better.

Tara
Tara was done on a weekday evening. Most of her was done using the standard method I used for leather. Her right hand has the same same color scheme as The Nothing Beast. Her sword was painted in green. I wanted to make it soulstone like since it is a soulstone sword but the effects did not turn out very crystal like. A skill I need to improve greatly on.

Karina
Getting seriously lazy here. Wanted to give her dress a purple tint and highlight up to white. Tried a couple of times and did not get what I like. In the end, here dress is done purely by washing purple and black over Spacewolf Gray. Not sure if her lighter purple tie her into the crew. But hey, the crew is done in a week. Definitely a record for me.

Lady Justice & Her Crew

This is the very first sculpt of Lady Justice box set. They are very nice models to work with. Among the nicest miniatures in the first wave of Malifaux models. I like the livid orange I used for her hair. The leather and denim make very good contrasting tones to her hair.

The Judge is quite interesting too. I painted him white and red with yellow hair to make him stand out from the browns of the rest of the Death Marshals. Overall the Death Marshals are in muted tones that somehow my painting tend to gravitate towards. The little bit of green does make one of the model stand out.

There is a lot of flesh on The Executioner and I sucked at painting flesh. I tried to give him some belly hair and speckled him with blood. Turned out okay I guess.

Since then, two more metal sculpts were done for Lady Justice. The Alternate Sculpt which was quite nice too. And the relatively horrible Gen Con 2011 exclusive Dead Justice box. I have not even open the shrink wrap for that.

In Malifaux 2E, the new plastic sculpts for this crew is so awesome that I am very tempted to get it. Need to get rid of my old crew first.

Malifaux 2E

Malifaux 2E is very promising after playing one game and giving a full length demo. Read a lot of rant about the rule changes by Malifaux Classic players but so far I like all the changes I've seen.

Firstly, the cards have been resized and the rules streamlined.

Abilities of the models are passive (and always on) and placed at the front. All the actions requiring AP are listed on the back of the card. Actions are further broken down into two types. Regardless of whether it is a spell or attack, as long as the duel is opposed by targeted model, it is considered an Attack Action. Tactical Actions are simple duels requiring the acting model to meet a certain TN. This classification makes it simple to determine if something is considered an attack. 

Triggers for abilities are also build into the listing of the action making it easy to see what triggers are available for that particular action. 

Of course with lesser space, there are lesser actions cramped into one card. Masters and more "unique" models tend to have a wall of text in the past. To increase the number of abilities a model can have, those with certain station (Master, Henchman and Enforcer) can buy upgrades. Upgrade costs soulstones and allows certain amount of customization for models. Some upgrades are faction wide, some have restriction for certain models only.

The use of soulstone has also been nerfed. 

(1) It cannot be used to do a healing flip anymore.

(2) When used to enhance duel, it only give a +1 Positive Flip or to add a particular suit. This prevent a overpowering attack or defence with 2 cards vs 1 card.

The number of strategies and schemes for competitive play has also been reduced. Players share the same strategy that can be scored for VP every turn up to 4 VP per player. Five schemes are generated using two fate cards. Of which each player chooses two to use. We will no longer see auto-include schemes (think Bodyguard, Stake a Claim) this way. Non-revealed schemes can score up to 2VP and revealed ones 3VP. The smaller disparity encourages hidden schemes. Also most schemes use scheme markers now, which are placed using an (1)Interact action.

Hopefully with more games and when the rest of the models are updated to M2E, it will still remain as fun.