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Cygnar players tend to blast the crap out of my cryxian friend before he can get near. He fields epic skarr with satyxis raiders, blood witches, slayer, the harpoon jack, and a couple bone jacks with a skarlock.

His usual opponent is epic kain, any advice on how to avoid getting blasted?

Without knowing what the Cygnar player is bringing to the field it is hard to offer any real suggestions. You should be able to tie his shooting with the melee units if you are playing the scenarios.

What stuff does your opponent field besides eCaine?

Caine shouldn't be too much an issue to heavies.

If it's troops that are the main issue, run up some bonejacks as sacrifices to arc node powerful spells into them.

As for dealing with all that shooting, try to get a lot of stuff up in their face at the same time, don't send just one or two things to get shot up first, just get everything up in their face, especially your cheap stuff right up front so that everything you have can hit them on the next turn.

Cryx will usually have some spells or other things that ignore shooting, or have effects that can cripple jacks. A pistol wraith is incorporeal until he shoots, and if he gets his chain attack off the enemy model becomes stationary or frozen, I can't remember which.

Also try a combo of the Reaper along with a different jack. The reaper can move forward and pull a cygnar jack out of its gun line and close enough for you to scrap it with something else.

The most important question here is: do they play any kind of scenario or just plain "casterkill"? In most of SR scenarios the mythical "cygnaran gunline" has serious problems with controlling the scoring zones. If they stand still to shoot you may simply accept losses and win on scenario conditions. If they move to intercept, they won't have too much time before getting involved in melee. And there they lose.
If your friend plays casterkill only games maybe he should change caster to someone who can deal with shooting Cygnar better - like eg. pDenny

Get the captain for the raiders and get engaged on turn 1.

eCaine is going to be tough. He's the best Cygnar assassination caster out there. Knock him down and abuse his low armor.

Run arc node to 4" of his face and have pGaspy Breathe on him FTW. .

ecaine is a nasty offensive caster and you dont want him to feat on your own caster. sometimes baiting caine with some nice targets to feat on can lure him in to waste his feat and gatecrasher out.
his arm is also paper thin so if you can get anything to knock him down and attack him it will hurt, even camping full focus he only has the arm of a normal heavy jack.
ecaine is also almost all offense, he can offer an upkeep to prevent knockdown and a +3 def vs shooting/spells buff but he rarely keeps them on himself -or anything- long if he wants to go in for the kill. stripping him of attack options and keeping your own caster about 23" from his will mess him up bad.

Why 23"? He's got a 10" charge, .5" melee range and an 8" gatecrasher or 19" threat for shooting (7" + 12" range). Are you counting Magic Bullet in that?

Anastasia/Madalyn combo?

Maybe, but you really can't count on them being in range with the mobility that Caine has. Reinholdt and the Squire sometimes have issues keeping up with him when I run him.

Magic bullet would get out to 23" but that's real focus intensive and you're relying on something being within 4" of the caster at max range.

corbau gives 3 extra inches, i guess technically I should have said 21.51" but i like a safety zone cause spotting that 1.49 inches so far away is tricky.

As already mentioned, Cygnar is really good at the casterkill scenarios, where they "camp" in their deployment zone the ENTIRE game. Hence, I would highly recommend playing a game with objectives; besides, it will be good tourney practice for the Cygnar player.

Bringing a bunch of lowly armored light jacks and infantry against Cygnar is almost bad news for the non-Cygnar player. Sorry, but two ARM17 heavies are not going to cut it... I've found bringing a Deathjack usually provides enough of a distraction to get the rest of your army into place.