Musings from the Mortuary: Part 2

Don’t blame it on Gravesy, don’t blame it on Misty, don’t blame it on Bonesaw…. Blame it on the di-ice..

Good day gentle folk and I hope you are well! It’s your favourite Battlehamster on point and ready to share another Brain fart with you lucky nerdlings. Last night I played against a Smoke led team and let’s just say it didn’t go very well, 4-12 of not very well! But first of all lets clear up a slightly misleading title, we are not going to blame it on the dice. When you lose a game it’s easy to lament the bad dice rolls you have and claim that your opponent has better dice rolls. Largely because when you lose that’s the easy option and unless you are Straw it probably isn’t the case. Last night my dice rolling wasn’t great and it wasn’t awful. If you’re playing a dice based game you have to accept that the law of averages is not always present and this is just how it goes. Also I really believe that you just have to play better than the dice rolls and then it should work out sweet. Now I know that already this far in to the piece Straw will be pulling out the last little strands of hair he has that I am still being positive even in defeat. But to be honest more was learnt last night than in many of the better results I have had recently.

The first major point of the game that I got wrong was my team selection. The Morticians are still a very new team to me and as mentioned in my previous piece the aim is to have a core of players but preferably not rely on a crutch player. That being said there was a big cock up in team selection… Ghast! Before the game I had reasoned that he was most likely going to be shut down due to low defence vs Blind and Burning. But after the game It dawned on me that these exact reasons are why he should have made the cut (clever pun). Ghast scares people, end of! He does the same to me when I play against him. To effectively remove him takes a big investment in resource. The fact that I was worried about him getting blinded every turn was wrong. If this had of happened then actually I’m fine with that! Its cost 2 influence to do it, another player isn’t being Blinded that activation and he can still be a nuisance at tac 4. Worrying about him being further hampered by burning was just daft. To achieve this you to damage him therefore triggering rising anger (AWESOME), which then gives me 2 MP to use to clear the condition off him! So annoyed at myself for not thinking this through properly before the game. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. L

So if not selecting Ghast was an issue who would I of dropped to get him in? Unfortunately Bonesaw would be the fall guy. Now I know he is much maligned in general and I don’t want this to further add to the anti-Bonesaw campaign. But his inclusion in this game was a mistake. I thought I was being clever with his selection due to Offensive defence making him 5+ defence after activation. Yay great plan Totes, well done you’re a genius! Unfortunately not. This just led to him being completely misused by me in this game. Over the 3 or 4 turns I don’t know that he ever used a point of influence and never ended up further than about 10” from my goal. Therefore he will definitely be getting more time on the pitch to showcase what he can do.

Picking your team and getting the balance right is so important and in a previous article I have touched on the idea of influence balance in the team: those that want it, those that need it and those that bring it. When you have 2 strikers on the pitch you have 2 players that need influence, off the top of my head I don’t think there are any strikers at present that have a passive ability, I guess Sakana can counter attack for free I believe. But the point I am getting at is that strikers need influence to get work done. So along with Scapal, Silence and #playgraves2016 there wasn’t enough spare to get 2 strikers working in this setup.

The other issue with my team selection came from my game plan and the fact that unfortunately I didn’t really have one! As mentioned I thought I was being clever with my high defence line-up, but then I didn’t have a plan as to how to get points on the board. In my head I probably just figured Mist would get 3 goals, but with Compound on the board it’s just not that easy. Having said that it was a good lesson in team balance and how not to achieve it. Scapal got bits of work done here and there but to be fair nothing that significant. Graves managed a bit of damage a couple of times, but again nothing significant. Silence unfortunately was also not used optimally the only targets he had to try get his plays off on where def5+ and the one time I tried to Tuck Flask I failed on a 2! Mist unsurprisingly got my only goal, but in honesty I did make hard work of achieving that. Overall it was a game where I just never got anything going. For me personally 2 take outs and 2 goals is the target with my Morticians. They are not Brewers where 2-3 take outs a turn is common, but 2 in a game is very achievable. With this in mind the other major tactical decision I got badly wrong was the players I targeted to take out. As Hemlock and Vitriol both have def 5+ I kind of ignored them almost exclusively as I didn’t feel that I could get enough hits on them to do the damage. Also neither of them have armour so therefore nullifying Scapals Anatomical precision. This is exactly where I needed Ghast. Momentous knockdown on 2 success with tac 6 and 2” reach, boom bitch get on the floor! Then they are def 4+ with not lots of health and Graves or Scapal could probably have finished them off. Alternatively knockdown Smoke or Calculus and Scapal will be hitting on 3’s with 8 dice! Instead I had Graves up the board engaging Compound so he couldn’t counter charge my strikers and Scapal was trying to take out Smoke on her own. Which is just not ideal as Smoke is really slippery and can get out of dodge very easily.

Therefore in conclusion I honestly can’t blame the dice (although I really want to) it was my poor tactical decisions right from the start that ultimately cost me. Which I am ok with, big lessons have been learnt going forward and now I just have to press for a rematch J hopefully there where some nuggets in that brain fart that will help you to not make my mistakes!

Remember…