#ToMB Claw & Fang Vol.13

A Long Delayed End

Where we left off.

For those who don't even remember what #ToMB is/was it stands for Tale of Malifaux Bloggers.

Like the Tale of Gamers articles on so many sites and in magazines we were given a budget each month of $25 ($50 in the first) to start a new master and start collecting.

Dollars were used and the Wyrd web-store prices were the standard so everyone would be on the same page.

I started with Marcus and proceeded to buy, build, paint, play games and record my thoughts on this process.

An issue I had early was the amount of models I didn't want to buy in metal, this caused for some delayed purchases and ultimately one of the reasons for the huge gap in continuing Marcus tale.

It's October now and I believe that #ToMB should have already ended.

With Gencon a lot of the models I wanted were released and it gave me a chance to get some of those tools I knew Marcus would enjoy.

On top of this, I will be taking Marcus to a fixed master tournament, @leebattrick's Malifolk 3.

Now seemed as good a time as any to talk about the games I've had between now and volume 12 as well as end thoughts and eventually one final volume discussing my tournament experience with the Beastmaster.

Dollar Dollar

For those that are interested my dollar spending for up to month 4 was as follows:

• Claw and Fang - $50
• Metal Gamin - $21
• Dawn Serpent - $15
• Rogue Necromancy - $15
• Night Terrors - $15
• Total Spent - $116
• Money remaining - $19

With two months remaining another $50 added to the $19 would give me $69 to play with.

• Molemen £11.90 (£14)
• Silurids £13.60 (£16)
• Hoarcats £9.35 (£11)

Above were my Marcus related purchases from Gencon, I cannot remember the dollar amounts, but the first price is the Element Games Prices and second is the RRP.

£41 is roughly $66 meaning that I was way within budget.

I will highlight the reasons for purchasing each of those boxes as well as cover what I have done with them painting wise but before that...

What else would I buy?

My one regret was not purchasing Waldgeists from Gencon, this Neverborn minions are also Beasts.

For 6 stones you get a tough bugger with 7 wounds and Armour +2, add this to Perfect Camouflage (negatives to shoot or from charges if they haven't activated), Unimpeded and a way for them to make their own terrain, these guys are hard to crack easily and are fairly annoying.

Wk4 is a let down, but with Germinate they are almost always able to take advantages of their tree like ways gaining a 4" melee range.

Perfect area denial, fantastic for things such as Squatter's Rights.

Canine Remains will also be a good future purchase, almost as fast as the Night Terrors but with the ability to interact. These dead dogs are quite versatile at the measly 4 stones they cost and they can also make things become Beasts allowing Marcus to do a few more tricks. 

December Acolytes are on my list of things I own I want to paint.

From the Shadows is almost reason alone for taking them, I have even considered Wild Boars due to this.

However for the 1 stone cost extra Acolytes offer a lot more controlling and reliable piece.

The 12" range on the Harpoon can cause early irritation especially considering it dishes out slow (with Sh6 no less) add this to either forcing a discard on your opponent or better, dragging their models out of position the Acolyte can do a lot of work.

They may not be Beasts but they are worth having in Marcus' arsenal and hey, if you need some anti Armour or Hard to Wound they do that too.

Shikome are a nice fast attacking unit that is worth a look in.

Blessed of December is a nice alternative to the Cerberus versus certain opponents and The Spawnmother has a lot of potential being a chunky Swampfiend which can occasionally charge for free and enhance the crew, especially the ones that Leap.

Lastly I could talk about Mechanical Rider or even Soulstone Miners, but I would suggest checking some of the other blog posts I have made concerning them.

These are simply some of the best things Arcanists can field and it doesn't have to be all about Beasts.

Moley Moley Moley

Gaming

Molemen were always something I wanted to add into Marcus' crew quite early. The issues was metals and I wasn't too fond of the models.

For 4 soulstones, these guys can prove fairly tough and can cover some similar roles to the Metal Gamin.
Df4 isn't particularly high but Armour +2 is great and combined with the Burrow trigger of being able to reduce damage to 0 a lot of weak damage will do quite literally nothing to a Moleman.

If simply holding ground the Molemen can boost up to Df5, however discarding a card is a tough price considering unlike the Metal Gamin they can't use actions without cards to go Defensive.
Wp5 is an improvement over the Metal Gamin and the obvious adage that they're Beasts means these are definitely not strictly worse.

However, if I consider them possibly worse why bother?
Well it's (0) action Tunneling that makes the Molemen great, placing in contact with friendly scheme markers 8" away (that's 2 walks for the Mole) can be extra strong. More on how a little later.

Painting

Trying to keep within the video game theme I had a few ideas.

Resetti from Animal Crossing would be a good laugh, but painting dungarees onto a model seemed a little too odd.

My mind as always went to Pokemon, being there are so many unsurprisingly there are many moles.
Drillbur and Excadrill (the latter being a monster I like to use) seemed like a good choice at first.
Especially to me as in head Moles (the animals) are grey.

However, the digging Moleman made me think of a lot simpler direction.
Diglett.

Unfortunately however these turned out OK, I think the scheme is too simple to indicate any impersonation.
Luckily though this did speed up things I wanted to get done for #Malifolk3

One thing, well a person really, did save me from not showing the obvious theme.
@dudewaaagh the man behind the fantastic Dreamario/Nightmario crew had used something very classic to Mario on bases for his Shy guy Alps.
Green Pipes.

Very kindly of him, he sent me the materials he used, so mostly done for me bar resizing, gluing and painting.
The third Moleman would emerge from a pipe and although I'm not sure what he's doing with his arms now, I still love it.

Bouncy Bouncy Bouncy

Gaming

Leap it's pretty good isn't it?

Silurids were one of the top things I wanted to add to Marcus' crew and again due to metals I avoided them.

Boy am I glad I did as I love the new miniatures even more than the quite decent metals.

As I was saying Leap is good, well it's excellent. Arcanists do have the Sabertooth Cerberus and now the Blessed of December both however are a little expensive to be in a crew for just scheme running and this where Leap comes into it's own.

Hopping 7" then walking another 5" for a foot total and still being able to interact makes good for placing markers, flipping Squat markers and a Leap of 7" also helps for Stake a Claim.

It's all pretty obvious that an extra (0) move will help here, but until you play with it and start jumping over terrain you don't realise quite how ridiculously powerful it really feels.

Scott Porter tore me apart with Necropunks and Leap in Stake a Claim at my first tournament.

They felt, unfair. How would I catch them? They can place markers in the turn they move? This is nuts.

Well Silurids, my word.

They're better for this.

They do lose the defensive abilities of Hard to Wound and Hard to Kill like the Necropunks (and don't forget Reattach) and cost two stones more, but 7" is perfect for Stake a Claim and needing simply just any five or greater to succeed in doing the action is just great.

My first few games with them made me open my eyes, I knew they were great, but this felt almost like cheating.

Going back to the Moleman's Tunneling you can now maybe see a little combo I like.

7" Leap from the moleman, place a marker and move allows the Moleman to instantly catch up.

Allowing those early scheme marker drops on the enemies half of the table or even again Squatters Rights to be sorted.

Add this to the fact that actually they can beat some (smaller) things up, 1/3/4 is no a fantastic damage spread but the Ram trigger Blood Frenzy gives the Silurid's Talons the potential to pretend to be a Cerberus.

The Mask trigger Bite also does some work. Another thing to hand out poison which I know Shikome will love.

Lastly, Silurids do not have the same resilience as Necropunks but Silent and Perfect Camouflage do a lot of working of avoiding shooting death, also the encouragement to activate last is also handy.

Painting

Video game fish, what is there? 

James Pond?

Nah!

Fishy Pokemon?

I've done too many Pokemon themed things.

What fish men are there?

Well my mind went to Final Fantasy and Sahagin.

Sahagin are fishmen, aquatic monsters that walk on the ground.

In VII they are actually portrayed as turtle-like creatures with tridents which doesn't work for Silurids, but through most the others they look kind of similar.

This opened up barrels of colour scheme choices as typically with JRPGs you get repeat monster classes with different palettes.

The reoccurring colours were green, yellow and blue for the bulk of the monster.

Green would be too similar to the box, the yellow ones didn't look appealing at all so that left me with Blue.

Perfect for Arcanists.

Now at one stage I was going to just go simply, blue with red thins, this may've had looked better, it would be striking for sure.

The white underbelly was also an idea and one I am still tempted to go back and do, or just do my third like it.

In the end I went for a rainbow thin, not so scary but the art had me impressed.

Now my replication isn't that great but in the end I was happy with what I had done.

Basing wise, still needed snow to tie into the rest of the crew but something to show that they were Neverborn and fit any potential crews in the future (though I imagine I might just buy more as they're very nice).

Swampfiend was the word that made life easy and I went for some disgusting shiny green ooze.

Meow Meow Meow

Gaming

Hoarcats had awful metal miniatures this made me barely ever consider them though I had a short history of using them on Vassal

Meowlifaux was comedy list where I took all Hoarcats against Jan's Gremlins as "Devour is so broken".

Well it is decent, however it turns out so are Hoarcat prides.

Five soulstones gets you a surprisingly offensive little beast. Fangs and Claws may only be Ml5 but 2/3/4 is pretty solid. The power though comes from having +1 damage if the model is at three or more wounds.

I love how this thematically reflects the same idea as Three-headed, but again let's look at that 3/4/5 on a 5 stone model? Bring it on.

With the added Ram trigger to get double positive damage these little kittens can sometimes be as scary as the bigger cats in the right situation.

Eat Your Fill is also perfect, something the Sabertooth doesn't have on it's own is to get Three-headed going again where as if a Hoarcat goes down to one or two wounds it still has potential to power up.

Pass Through is surprisingly useful, especially to get into the right position in combat and avoid the troubles having a larger base sometimes causes.

Finally, defensively the Hoarcat is ace, Manipulative 12 is a pain in the back side and Small Target means that shooting the kitty dead early is a difficult task. I've found that against gun lines this model can simply dive right at it and be alright, especially considering it's one of if not the cheapest model in the crew.

It's not all about Devour.

Painting

Pokemon came to mind and I may be painting some up as Meowth.

However there was only one real choice.

Red XIII's kittens.

Now I have been "that guy" but I think that the single Hoarcat on a base looks fine.

Yes it's meant to be a Swarm a Pride by name but three is far too full and busy and two, is that a pride or a Swarm really? That's a pair, a tag team, a couple.

So far the two I have done have some tattoos like Red XII.

The face marking, though a single stripe not two and numbers.

VII and I so far. I want the third to be V to add up to their daddies amount.

One more Volume!

Volume 13 is the end of this #ToMB experience.

Also he will be revisited as I have already started to paint (and finish some) additions to his crew outside of my #ToMB allowance.

It's been a long time to get around to finishing this.

I hope this has been entertaining as well as somewhat educational.

Thank you for reading.

-Ben (@Psientologist)