The Masters

The UK Masters was this weekend, there's already a lot of great coverage of the weekend on twitter (see my last post) and on the new show from the Malifools; Fools Daily so I'm going to keep this short. Masters is at once the end of the previous year's season and the first of the new year. 

My weekend began by driving a car I'd owned for less than an hour on a 125 mile road trip to Craig 'ukrocky' Johnson's house to rest up the night before the event. I awoke on his sofa the following morning to tipple threat of; winning a signed rules manual on facebook, the forum demanding I do some moderation and a hamster trying to kill me.  Needless to say this led to some confused early responses.

Once awake and after my tournament companions had quickly undercoated some models required for the day's play, we set off. This was my third masters and as always the atmosphere was phenomenal. It was great to see a number of new faces experiencing the event for the first time. To players who've never experienced the level of play at a masters event it's hard to describe.  These were some of the toughest and most enjoyable games of Malifaux I've ever played, and judging by conversation with new players and old hands alike I was far from alone.

I made it through the group stage on Saturday before succumbing to Luke Cocksedge by a point in extra time of the quarter finals on Sunday. I was thrilled with the weekend and it only remained for me to watch Craig be crowned UK master, beating Greg Piskosz into second place.  Greg is a newcomer to the scene and a great player, and also the only other player to beat me over the weekend.

Craig's Secret Weapon

Some comment is being made of the fact all four finalists had Lynch with them, if not necessarily using him for every game. While I'll admit he is clearly very strong I think this may have been helped by the knockout quarter final game of Turf War being played with the scheme pool; Vendetta, Make them Suffer, Bodyguard, and Assassinate. This pool is a nightmare for a number of crews but works well for Lynch and this may well have contributed somewhat to the results over the weekend.

For my own part the event exposed some key weaknesses in my game I'll need to plug if I'm to remain at the top tables much longer.  I've been relying on Ramos too heavily and need to branch out more to cover those few games he's ill equipped for. I also need to broaden my crew selection before SmogCon, and want to experiment with a more aggressive version of Ramos.

I should also say a big thanks to Dave Brown for running the event, everyone who played in the open event on the Sunday, and the event sponsors;

KR Multicase, Sarissa Precision, and Counter Attack Bases

I use products from all three of these companies and have never had anything but a great experience with them.  So that's me signing off for some much needed sleep and hobby time.

League of Extraordinary Henchmen 'side event'.

Master class

A quick post to say the UK Malifaux masters is this weekend. For those who don't know the masters is a an invitational event for the top ranked players in the country.

Despite this it's usually one of the most relaxed events of the year. Everyone present has already proven themselves to the extent necessary to get and there and they tend to just want to enjoy the company of other like minded people.  That's not to say the event is without competition, there are no easy games at masters. You'll tend to find the VPD in these games are much closer than at the average event.

I can't tell you who will win the day, the event is normally too close to call. Personally I tend to treat going to the masters as a prize rather than a competition and am more relaxed about how I do at this event than most of the others. I normally bomb out in the semifinals and I'll be thrilled if I do the same again this year.

I'll be tweeting from the weekend and if I've set my blog up properly tweets with the tag #MXmasters should be embedded at the end of this post.

Tweets about "#MXmasters"

Cutting our decks

So there was a recent debate on twitter about cutting your opponents deck. Coming from many years of playing poker and Magic; the Gathering this is something that I have a firm opinion about. To be clear I believe a player must always offer the cut the their opponent, and cut their opponents deck in turn.

Two reasons are commonly given when players explain why they don't cut, and I want to answer these in turn;

1) I trust my opponent not to cheat.
I trust my neighbours, but I still lock my front door. That being said trust almost isn't the issue. If you only cut the decks of the people you don't trust then wanting to cut someone's deck becomes an accusation.  Which is how some players behave now, people almost seem to assume that the desire to cut their deck is an accusation.  If everybody cuts it becomes automatic and there's no emotion attached to the act.

What if you feel everyone is trustworthy? Well there's still a value in cutting. Just because someone isn't trying to cheat doesn't mean they're shuffling their deck properly. You'd be surprised how many players mash their discard pile into the top of their deck and call it a day. The quick cut at least lets you put the recycled discard pile full of severe cards to the bottom of their deck.

This leads on to the second common argument...

 2) If someone's good enough to mechanic their deck then cutting won't help. 

I've met people who can manipulate decks of cards to the point they can deal a poker table full of players whatever cards they want, or shake the deck and have all the aces fall out.  In practice cutting wont stop someone with that degree of skill, however such men are very rare.

The greater threat is the casual cheat, someone steering their black joker to the bottom of their deck as they shuffle. People may even do this subconsciously without even realising their doing it. This requires next to no level of skill to do but is very effectively countered by a quick cut. How can someone steer a card to the bottom of the deck if they don't know where that is?

Cutting acts as a barrier to entry for the would be cheat. Locking your front door doesn't prevent a determined burglar getting in, they can just break through a window, but I suspect that if no one ever locked their front door we'd see far more burglaries than we do today. This small barrier to entry is a big step forward in securing our game.

So I hope that counters some of the common arguments against cutting so let me make a quick case for cutting.

Why cut?
This really is about defending the game as a whole. Cutting costs nothing and even if you're never cheated as a result of failing to cut, by creating an atmosphere where every door is unlocked you increase the likely hood someone will be cheated.

The last thing any community wants is a cheating scandal for their chosen game. While we continue with almost no one cutting I firmly believe it is only a matter of time before something happens, especially as the game and our community grows in size and strength.  Imagine in a few years time when/if Malifaux is as big as Fantasy or Warmachine, will you still trust everyone in the community then?  This is something that's best started now, while it's not a major adjustment.

So please please offer and cut each others decks. Let's make it part of the ritual of the game.

UK Masters Draw

The groups have just been drawn for the UK masters taking place in a few weeks time;
 
Group 1
Joel Henry
Anthony Hoult
Rob Smith
Mike Taylor

Group 2 
James Doxey
Jakab Sennett
Matt Ledgewood
Gregory Piskosz

Group 3 
Jimmy Balderstone
Tim Brown
Martin Wodehouse
Craig Johnson

Group 4 
Luke Cocksedge
Robert Balmforth
Nathan Chenery
Maria Wieland

The first player in each group were seeded.

My 2014 Resolutions

So it's that time of the year when we make resolutions.  So I thought I'd share mine, well my gaming ones at least.

Firstly I'm aiming to qualify for Masters again next year, that is to finish in the top fifteen players in the UK or win the Masters event in January. The former being far more likely than the latter. 

I'd also want to win a twenty plus player event and end the year as the best general badge for a faction. Normally at this stage I'd say which faction but I tend to have changes in heart from time to time so I'll not commit to which right now.

So that's my lot for gaming. I'm interested to hear yours if you want to comment them below or Tweet them to me.

The UK Tournament System

So the 2013 season is over and the community is looking forward to the year ahead. I'm grabbing some much needed hobby time before we kick in again with Masters in late January.  I've finally finished re-painting my twenty Arcanists, with the new plastic Joss replacing the old one.

The new Arcanist plastics look great and many of the models are great improvements on their old metal counterparts. I must say the huge new beasts in the Marcus box have convinced me to paint that crew next rather than the ‘Tina crew I had planned. I’m gripped by the call of the wild.

               

Following some recent questions I've had from new players I thought I'd use those post to give a quick explanation of how the wider UK Tournament system works and is scored. 

Events themselves are scored following Gaining Grounds. Firstly players score three tournament points (TP) for each game they win, one TP for each draw and nothing for a loss.  So a player with two wins a draw and a loss scores (3+3+1+0) 7TP.  

Where players are tied on TP they are ranked by victory point difference (VPD), this is the difference between the victory points they scored and those scored against them.  So if a players results were; 10-5, 10-5, 4-4, 4-8 they would score (5+5+0-4) +6VPD.  In the event of further ties players are then ranked by total victory points (VP) scored during the event, so in the above example; (10+10+4+4) 28VP.  This gives us the final standings for the event.  Some events deviate from this system but that’s fairly rare.  

The results of the event are then fed into the national rankings system.  Players need to sign up to Rankings HQ in order to have their results displayed in the rankings tables.  Each event is worth up to one-hundred rankings points to a player, based on how they finished and how many players attended the event.

The maximum score of one-hundred rankings points is available at events of twenty players or more. The maximum score is reduced by one for each player short of twenty the event is. So an eighteen player event is two short of twenty and therefore ninety-eight points is the maximum score. 

The player who wins the event scores the maximum and every player below her scores a reduced proportion of this.  So in a twenty player event first place would score one-hundred rankings points, second would score ninety-five, third would score ninety and so on down to twentieth place who would score five points.

Players are then ranked based on their three best scores in a rolling twelve month period. Making the best possible score thee-hundred points, although in the years the rankings have been running only two players have ever achieved this.

Once a year an invitational event, known as the Masters is held. The winner of the previous Masters event is invited along with the fifteen highest ranked players who are able to attend.  The winner of this is crowned Malifaux Master for the year. I’ve attended several Masters and contrary to what you would expect I’ve found them to be some of the most relaxed events I’ve ever played.

This year's Masters is accompanied by an open event anyone can enter. At the time of writing there are fifteen players signed up for the event, so it promises to be a fun one if you're looking to start your gaming year with a bang.

So that's how the UK system works for those interested. I hope Santa brought you what you wanted and I wish you all a happy new year.

Wave One Meta Analysis

With the conclusion of the UK tournament season at Joel-faux, I thought now would be a good time to take a look a the picture that's forming of the UK meta. I've exported some (publicly available) data from Rankings HQ and given it a quick once over.

Before I jump into the numbers I want to really stress that we're talking about a small sample of results, eight events, in a reasonably small meta. So I'd shy away from making sweeping statements about what this really tells us about M2e wave one.

Firstly I've broken down the players by faction;

Faction	%
Resurrectionist	23.9%
Neverborn	20.4%
Arcanists	19.7%
Guild	12.0%
Outcasts	12.0%
Gremlin	7.0%
Ten Thunders	4.9%

I'm not overly surprised to see Gremlins low on the list, after all they only have models for two masters to date. I wonder the extent to which established players are returning to playing their book one masters, which would account for the relatively low number of Ten Thunders players.

I also tried to take a measure of how the factions are performing. You would expect a faction to take a proportion of the rankings points at an event equivalent to their proportion in the field as a whole. So Guild representing 12% of the field should expect to gain 12% of the rankings points, all things being equal.

Below is a table created by comparing the percentage of the faction in the field to the percentage of rankings points that faction earned. So a faction that was 10% of the field and collected 11% of the available rankings points would be getting +1% of the rankings points. In effect this should give us a view of how a faction is over/under performing;

M2e Faction	%
Resurrectionist	+1.50%
Arcanists	+1.28%
Neverborn	+0.51%
Ten Thunders	+0.03%
Gremlin	-0.58%
Outcasts	-1.21%
Guild	-1.54%

As a footnote I've corrected for impacts of individual performance by only allowing each player to appear in the data once for each faction. Where a player would appear multiple times with the same faction I've used their average result.

It's interesting to note that based on a similar sample of results from M1.5 taken for events earlier this year the results look very different;

M1.5 Faction	%
Neverborn	+1.94%
Resurrectionist	+1.78%
Ten Thunders	-0.43%
Arcanists	-0.44%
Outcasts	-0.69%
Guild	-2.14%

It's worth noting that alongside the obvious changes in position on the table that the factions performance are closer to zero.

That's really all I wanted to do with these numbers. I'd again caution against reading too much into them, they're a small sample of results. I'd also say I'm not making a judgement on what this means about faction balance in Malifaux, I think there's a lot more for us to learn before we get a real handle on how the game truly balances out.