Good Morning!
One aspect of Malifaux that can be tricky to get down (and seems to happen randomly for me), is identifying the important models in your opponent’s crew. Part of this obviously goes hand in hand with their scheme selection, but sometimes you can make decent guesses by knowing the basic idea of their models.
For example, if your opponents list looks like this:
Pandora
Candy
Doppelgänger
Hooded Rider
Stitched Together
Silurid
Will-O-Wisp
You can see that they really only have one scheme runner (that they want to be scheme running). The silurid, should they choose to accept, with its leap is able to do claim jump on its own. It’s important to keep in mind that often times big beaters are just that – beaters – and can have zero affect on scoring points. Unless you can deny with them.
Killing the Silurid in the above list now puts the player in a tough spot where they have to go out of their way, and spend AP they weren’t planning on spending, on schemes.
I played against this list and was able to kill the Silurid on turn one. My opponent was then forced to use his Doppleganger and Stitched Together to do claim jump. In the later turns this actually prevented the Stitched from killing anything, because it couldn’t leave where it was and still get claim jump points.
Moral of the morning post: Pay attention during crew reveal. Think of the schemes. Think if the strat. Should you get baited into a wet noodle fight between beaters? Or should you focus on the smaller more insignificant seeming models.
Tactifaux 
From the NB side of this list. Losing the Silurid did slow me down quite a bit. I should have had a backup to this. I took the Rider as a hard counter to the Mech Rider (what Arcanist doesn’t use the Rider, I said to myself. grrr.) So rather than another silurid, the puke worm and maybe a wisp I was stuck with an overcosted model. That goes towards list building, maybe a discussion for another post?
Now, as far as the Stitched is concerned, once we got far enough into the game it wasn’t really important for me to kill anything with it. Pandora locked down one side of the board with Voices so I didn’t feel the need to kill anything, it wouldn’t have made a difference in the game if I did. So I was perfectly fine using it as a scheme runner at that point. Just a thought.
Looking forward to more posts.
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Yeah that will absolutely be another post, thanks for replying to this by the way! I really appreciate the chance to have the discussion and get all sides here.
As far as the Mech Rider goes, I have one now – so maybe next time that Hooded Rider will counter her haha!
Yeah the Stitched absolutely didn’t need to kill anything, and Pandora locked down so hard. The Stitched did what you needed it to do at that time and it got you points and points win games! Can’t fault anyone for that.
I was approaching this post (and really I used our game as an example for the recency bias), from more of a macro stand point and before cards are flipped. Thinking about what may have happened had that Silurid been alive. The Silurid living allows it to do claim jump on its own, opening up the Stitched and maybe even the Rider to play more aggressive and take that quarter of the board quicker and potentially denying Interference points on my lone Silent One. I don’t want the chase the rabbit too far on this though haha.
I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on our match and will probably post about it from my point of view and what I should have done differently.
Thanks! Looking forward to continuing the conversations here and hopefully growing and becoming a considerable resource for players.
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