CA19 Maelstrom Deck building, your opinion?

[chapter master 454]

So having seen reviews, one thing I am excited about personally is the new way the maelstrom of war is handled with the tactical objectives.

 

A quick overview for those that may not be aware:

You now construct an 18 card (can be more if you want but as a former card game player, you want to go with smallest possible) objective deck from your tactical objectives (one copy allowed of any objective). Each player then shuffles them up and draws a hand of cards and from that hand chooses their objectives. There are stratagems that relate to this as well along with various other elements but you get the idea.

 

They also shuffled up how deployment works again with this time the roll determining an "attacker" and "Defender". Would have to re-look up how it fully works again but it is slighty different from how 2018 missions worked.

 

In my opinion, this is actually kind of a fun and competitive way of doing maelstrom, the deck builder being particularly fun imo as it lets you get rid of half of the deck of cards and keep only the ones you want (to note, you do build the deck AFTER you see your opponent's army).

 

What are your thoughts fellow brothers?

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

It’s a big improvement .

[MARK0SIAN]

I kind of liked the random, unpredictable nature of the current maelstrom set up. This seems like it’ll be taking that away a bit, meaning people with 1 dimensional lists are less likely to fall foul of a bad draw of cards.

 

It’s impossible to say though until I’ve played it so I could be wrong, I’m just instinctively against players getting more tools to control what happens in a match before the match has even begun.

[The_Chaplain]

It's a good thing-- can remove difficult or impossible to achieve cards from the deck (i.e Master the Warp in a Tau army), and let you play to your armie's strengths.

[Prot]

I love it. I wasn’t aware they were going to make the 18 card deck permanent. I tried it when they suggested a similar system in white dwarf. But also you had a 5 card draw that you picked your activation from, removing almost any sense of negative randomness.

 

I’ve always loved Maelstrom and felt the ‘remove 6’ system helped a lot. This is basically tripling last year’s adjustment and going even less random.

 

The obvious removals were usually the first 6 choices anyway. IE: remove witch hunter vs Tau, etc. But now we will see Killy armies focus on that. We will table presence armies focus on those objectives. Slow armies will remove Hold objectives on the opponent’s table edge, etc.

 

This also makes the art of objective placement and map type even more critical.

 

I really like this direction. Hopefully we hear more about map choices and going first.

[Dark Shepherd]

I thought withdrawing 6 you didnt like took the fun out of it but will give the more selective deck a go after all its same for both sides

 

LOVE how new deployment sounds, seizing was very unfair with deploying in one go and it sounds simpler now too

[toaae]

I like the concept. I love playing Maelstrom, but recognize the problem it poses as a competitive format. Improvements to it are great, and I can't wait to play the new missions. The CA2019 were a big improvement over CA2018, which were a big improvement over the book missions. Maelstrom missions are one of the areas I think the GW studio is nailing it.

[Panzer]

Removing 6 cards only replaced our houserule to immediately discard cards you couldn't possibly do (cast a psychic power without having psykers in your list etc) so it didn't really change anything for us. Now having a deck of only 18 cards you selected yourself before the game begins but after seeing what your opponent brings? That potentially changes a lot.

[Prot]

Removing 6 cards only replaced our houserule to immediately discard cards you couldn't possibly do (cast a psychic power without having psykers in your list etc) so it didn't really change anything for us. Now having a deck of only 18 cards you selected yourself before the game begins but after seeing what your opponent brings? That potentially changes a lot.

 

That's funny... that's exactly what I did with one of my playgroups that prefers Maelstrom. It largely replaced our house rule.

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

That makes for a much more enjoyable game.

[andes]

My friends and I have been using the deck-building method for a while now and really like it. The other thing we've done is remove the random roll for VP generated by a card, replacing with flat values so a card that would score d3 VP instead returns a flat 2. D6 returns flat 4. We've found this really smooths out the bumps and makes Maelstrom games much more fun and balanced.

[Marshal Loss]

I really like it! Look forward to giving it a go.

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

Me too.

[chapter master 454]

I kind of liked the random, unpredictable nature of the current maelstrom set up. This seems like it’ll be taking that away a bit, meaning people with 1 dimensional lists are less likely to fall foul of a bad draw of cards.

 

It’s impossible to say though until I’ve played it so I could be wrong, I’m just instinctively against players getting more tools to control what happens in a match before the match has even begun.

 

The random nature also meant that top-decking and bottom-decking was rampant along with the fact high reward cards weren't always high reward for effort. A lot of lists a designed to do something, no jack of all trade list ever does well just because not focusing on something leaves you vulnerable to those that do (though it is nice when a list isn't completely single-minded...suppose tyranids lose that part ;))

 

How does it feel when you are a gun-line, defensive army when all you draw is defend objectives on the other end of the board while getting blood and guts? How did it feel being the aggressive MAIM!KILL!BURN! list and then you get secure objectives in your deployment zone along with hold the line? Cap that with various objectives that are always dead draws for some races, this was something that would be useful.

Never fun getting master the warp as tau.

 

Yes it does mean lists can do what they are designed to but it goes both ways down that street now not to mention the layers that it can come with. The mulligan rule they have (Mulligan referring to re-drawing your opening hand) is actually a unique one with only one game I knew of doing it, putting 5 objectives to the bottom of the deck is a BIG investment as it could include some good ones you might of wanted to keep but the rest wasn't workable however you may end up never getting to the last 5 cards. Use of CP can now involve trying to work objectives you want along with allowing players to create combo objectives.

Making Priority Orders Received actually a very good card now, play it alongside Kingslayer as the combo piece can be huge if you run a character hunter warlord. Then you can recycle the cards back into the deck, use the deck manipulation to hunt down the cards again and then play it again (though that is high risk reward as it does commit a minimum of 2CP and some time to pull off).

 

It now means players can have their objectives make sense in an appropriate time because it was always a bad feeling getting hold the line turn 1.

 

Certainly again, being a card game player I am biased so it may be I just find this sort of gameplay extremely exciting to me.

[Son of Sacrifice]

My local store played these rules for a few years (which makes me wonder where GW got the idea) and it's excellent. I find maelstrom super frustrating when played in the 'old' way.

[Ishagu]

I'm excited to try it for sure. New missions and ways to play are the best things about a new CA.

[Closet Skeleton]

 

A lot of lists a designed to do something, no jack of all trade list ever does well just because not focusing on something leaves you vulnerable to those that do (though it is nice when a list isn't completely single-minded...suppose tyranids lose that part )

 

How does it feel when you are a gun-line, defensive army when all you draw is defend objectives on the other end of the board while getting blood and guts? How did it feel being the aggressive MAIM!KILL!BURN! list and then you get secure objectives in your deployment zone along with hold the line? Cap that with various objectives that are always dead draws for some races, this was something that would be useful.

Never fun getting master the warp as tau.

 

 

Gun lines aren't fun to play against and pretty much every mission is written to screw them over anyway.

 

Guard brigade lists are jack of all trades lists that have won many 8th edition tournaments (even the legendary over-powered knight castellan list relied on the allied guard brigade to actually win the mission). The most powerful mono-build list is the Eldar flyers one which is powerful because its fast and before the latest FAQ could out-board control everything else by exploiting flyer bases. The only actually top tier gunline for the past year has been Tau Riptide spam that's actually very good at board control thanks to the thruster over-charge option on the riptides and hidden coldstar commanders.

 

I kind of liked the random, unpredictable nature of the current maelstrom set up. This seems like it’ll be taking that away a bit, meaning people with 1 dimensional lists are less likely to fall foul of a bad draw of cards.

 

Any list could fall fowl of a bad draw, maelstrom was much better at arbitrarily handing victories to players than in balancing 1 dimensional lists against more balanced ones.

 

Maelstrom was much better at driving away hyper competitive players in disgust than in evening the playing field between lists. Unless it was ETC where Maelstrom was a secondary bit of pointless busywork that piled on unfriendliness to people without multi-tasking skills so competitive players could pretend they were playing Maelstrom (which they weren't due to card scoring limits and added kill points making cards more of a tie-breaker on over-all rankings than something that affected individual games).

 

The obvious removals were usually the first 6 choices anyway. IE: remove witch hunter vs Tau, etc. But now we will see Killy armies focus on that. We will table presence armies focus on those objectives. Slow armies will remove Hold objectives on the opponent’s table edge, etc.

 

eg its ITC for Maelstrom, which I remember you hating. The limits of the Maestrom deck will make it harder to just take killing stuff objectives than ITC but trying to take purely board control cards with a board control army will probably run into similar problems that trying to do that in ITC does.

 

Killing a Knight Warlord with your smash captain can score you 5 odd cards with one kill, which ITC's choices deliberately don't let you do. So it will be a lot harder to get progressive scoring for kills than ITC and a lot easier to win big in one turn.

 

I'm going to Warhammer World's Maelstrom Throne of Skulls in February so I'll see how it works then, unless the ETC event I have in January adopts stuff based off the new missions.

[MegaVolt87]

I like the concept. I love playing Maelstrom, but recognize the problem it poses as a competitive format. Improvements to it are great, and I can't wait to play the new missions. The CA2019 were a big improvement over CA2018, which were a big improvement over the book missions. Maelstrom missions are one of the areas I think the GW studio is nailing it.

 

Not familiar with malestrom, saw a post here someone said you could add a modifier to the mission where invulns don't work? Is that the kind of thing you mean? Still the new system looks more appealing still to me now to look into it more. 

[toaae]

 

I like the concept. I love playing Maelstrom, but recognize the problem it poses as a competitive format. Improvements to it are great, and I can't wait to play the new missions. The CA2019 were a big improvement over CA2018, which were a big improvement over the book missions. Maelstrom missions are one of the areas I think the GW studio is nailing it.

 

Not familiar with malestrom, saw a post here someone said you could add a modifier to the mission where invulns don't work? Is that the kind of thing you mean? Still the new system looks more appealing still to me now to look into it more. 

 

 

I think it was an Eternal War mission that had the no-invulnerables thing, not a Maelstrom mission. Maelstrom missions were largely differentiated by how many cards could be drawn. There were a lot of other stuff, but that was the biggest, fundamental difference normally. One mission might have you draw 3 a turn, another might have you draw as many as equal to the battle round number, yet another might have you draw one for each objective you held, ect.

 

My favorite was one where you drew 4 a turn, but before drawing, you'd gamble on how many you'd think you would score, 1-4. If you scored the number (or more) that you gambled, you got that many bonus victory points. If you failed, your opponent got the number you gambled as bonus victory points. Was just a fun, little meta game, that also had some come-back potential built in.

 

These new missions aren't like that. They are fundamentally the same mission, with just one affect that, while not minor, isn't a major change to the mission format. This, combined with the fact that players can choose a deck of objectives their army can fulfill and they choose which cards are in play, makes it more balanced and competitive, if much more uniform game-to-game.