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 VladimirHerzog wrote:
by the end of 8th, you could thin your deck by up to 15 cards in maelstrom, so you wouldnt get these unachievable objectives

Was that a house rule?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
by the end of 8th, you could thin your deck by up to 15 cards in maelstrom, so you wouldnt get these unachievable objectives

Was that a house rule?

The 2019 CA rules had this for making your deck:

CONSTRUCTING YOUR OBJECTIVE DECK
Before playing one of the following Maelstrom of War missions, after your opponent has shared their army roster with you, you must construct an Objective deck. This deck should be made up of a minimum of 18 Tactical Objective cards, chosen from the pool available to your army. No more than one copy of each uniquely named Tactical Objective can be included in the deck.

 Nevelon wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
by the end of 8th, you could thin your deck by up to 15 cards in maelstrom, so you wouldnt get these unachievable objectives

Was that a house rule?

The 2019 CA rules had this for making your deck:

CONSTRUCTING YOUR OBJECTIVE DECK
Before playing one of the following Maelstrom of War missions, after your opponent has shared their army roster with you, you must construct an Objective deck. This deck should be made up of a minimum of 18 Tactical Objective cards, chosen from the pool available to your army. No more than one copy of each uniquely named Tactical Objective can be included in the deck.

you also had a hand of 5(?) cards from which you picked the 3(?) active ones for the turn, and strats to recycle/draw new cards.
Oh, and you could put one of your objectives face down for some mindgames

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
by the end of 8th, you could thin your deck by up to 15 cards in maelstrom, so you wouldnt get these unachievable objectives

Was that a house rule?

The 2019 CA rules had this for making your deck:

CONSTRUCTING YOUR OBJECTIVE DECK
Before playing one of the following Maelstrom of War missions, after your opponent has shared their army roster with you, you must construct an Objective deck. This deck should be made up of a minimum of 18 Tactical Objective cards, chosen from the pool available to your army. No more than one copy of each uniquely named Tactical Objective can be included in the deck.

you also had a hand of 5(?) cards from which you picked the 3(?) active ones for the turn, and strats to recycle/draw new cards.
Oh, and you could put one of your objectives face down for some mindgames

That did improve Maelstrom, but at that point we were taking so many steps to reduce randomness that it kind of made me question the usefulness of the randomness in the first place. Again, I like Maelstrom well enough. It just seems like a lot of steps to end up with semi-random objectives that are tricky to frame a narrative around.

I remember the biggest upside to Maelstrom simply being that many objectives made your opponent leave his deployment zone. 8th was pretty gunline-heavy and unfriendly to melee units. Having the enemy do something other than remove models at a distance made the game a lot less frustrating.

it was still random, you still had to position your army in a way where you could do any objectives you would draw on the next turn.

Nowadays, most of the game is made during listbuilding. you can basically plan what you're gonna do every turn before even showing up to the game because every mission is the same

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
it was still random, you still had to position your army in a way where you could do any objectives you would draw on the next turn.

Nowadays, most of the game is made during listbuilding. you can basically plan what you're gonna do every turn before even showing up to the game because every mission is the same

Fair. But like I said before, that level of randomness kind of made it hard to hang a story on the game. I'm not trying to downplay the genuine upsides of Malestrom. It's just not my favorite way to play the game.

I felt like the last incarnation of Maelstrom in 8th did too little to vary games. Essentially it had the some problem matched play/GT has now, every games was the same game with the same army, even if what you had to archive was randomized a bit.

My thoughts on the new version:
+ doesn't burden casual players with secondary selection. Set up board, deploy armies and play away - just like in older editions.
+ players place objectives and they are allowed to be placed in terrain. Restrictions on where to deploy them still force the armies to move out of their deployment zone and punishes castles.
+ no codex-specific objectives, no warping effect on list building (nachtmund data), no cherry picking. Every army needs to be able to handle all objectives.
+ twists are not as game-warping as the ones from the open war deck, but still interesting.
+ inbuild discard mechanic for unarchivable objectives, no more CP investment necessary.
+ no stratagem overhead, just one stratagem for redrawing one objective
+ two objective decks, one for each player. No more dice table nonsense.
+ proper 24" no-mans land
+ split into traditional primaries and maelstrom secondaries. Even if the great randomizer hates you, you can still try to win.
+ kept the hand/in play mechanism from last maelstrom incarnations
o close enough to matched play to not scare people used to that away. Those hardcore "train for tournament" guys will likely not even try though.
o no deckbuilding component. Keeps it simple, but I like deckbuilding
o almost all objectives are worth the same amount of VP. Time will tell if that approach works better than the previous one. At least there are no random VP.
- just six deployment maps. Open war has something like 18?
- primaries could have been a bit more varied.
- price

Anyways, I pre-ordered mine. First release worth my money this year.

 Jidmah wrote:
I felt like the last incarnation of Maelstrom in 8th did too little to vary games. Essentially it had the some problem matched play/GT has now, every games was the same game with the same army, even if what you had to archive was randomized a bit.

My thoughts on the new version:
+ doesn't burden casual players with secondary selection. Set up board, deploy armies and play away - just like in older editions.
+ players place objectives and they are allowed to be placed in terrain. Restrictions on where to deploy them still force the armies to move out of their deployment zone and punishes castles.
+ no codex-specific objectives, no warping effect on list building (nachtmund data), no cherry picking. Every army needs to be able to handle all objectives.
+ twists are not as game-warping as the ones from the open war deck, but still interesting.
+ inbuild discard mechanic for unarchivable objectives, no more CP investment necessary.
+ no stratagem overhead, just one stratagem for redrawing one objective
+ two objective decks, one for each player. No more dice table nonsense.
+ proper 24" no-mans land
+ split into traditional primaries and maelstrom secondaries. Even if the great randomizer hates you, you can still try to win.
+ kept the hand/in play mechanism from last maelstrom incarnations
o close enough to matched play to not scare people used to that away. Those hardcore "train for tournament" guys will likely not even try though.
o no deckbuilding component. Keeps it simple, but I like deckbuilding
o almost all objectives are worth the same amount of VP. Time will tell if that approach works better than the previous one. At least there are no random VP.
- just six deployment maps. Open war has something like 18?
- primaries could have been a bit more varied.
- price

Anyways, I pre-ordered mine. First release worth my money this year.

don't every GT missions have a 24" no man's land?

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

don't every GT missions have a 24" no man's land?

There is one that is 28" and one with the 9" circle when you can get stupid close.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
don't every GT missions have a 24" no man's land?

Yes, but open war maps tend to have 18" which makes for odd games, especially since my two armies are orks and DG which benefit massively from this.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

don't every GT missions have a 24" no man's land?

There is one that is 28" and one with the 9" circle when you can get stupid close.

Tempest of War has two 9" circle deployment maps, the one from GT and one where you have opposing wedges.

Are you guys using this on the tiny boards? The 9th open war deck works better on 6x4 so I'd assume the same would go for tempest.

Would you accept an opinion other than absolute agreement with yours?

My answer to your loaded question is no, and it wasn't better for open war either.

I'm sad they didn't do Combat Patrol scale as well. I guess I can just use the Incursion ones.

I don't think it'll really make much difference. Just use 2-3 objectives (or even 1) rather than 5.

From the cards I've seen, the deck doesn't work if you cut objectives. Some things are based on holding multiple objectives that are/are not in a deployment zone.

From my experience with playing combat patrol, performing actions is more likely to be a bottleneck for 500 point armies than holding objectives anyways. Raising a banner or deploying teleporter homers (both are objective cards) might not be a good thing to do when the infantry unit performing that action is a quarter of your firepower.

The problem is symmetrical though, so you could just give incursion a try (same board size) and just accept that some objectives are harder to archive.

It got lost in all the Squat madness, but WarCom has another article up about the deck.

They talk to Tyranid player fan favourite Robin Cruddace!

Yeah, I'm probably going to pick up a set of these. I've been thinking about it since the first announcement; I read the Goons review.

I feel like these will be easy to use for folks less familiar with the game. I play with a lot of folks who fit that description, so it's kind of a no-brainer.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
It got lost in all the Squat madness, but WarCom has another article up about the deck.

They talk to Tyranid player fan favourite Robin Cruddace!

.

A true Hero of our time...

OT, we were discussing the open war vs tempest pros/cons the yesterday in my local discord and our consensus is maybe a mix of the two is best. My buddy is gonna buy a deck and we are going to sit down and look at all the options from both decks and kinda pick n choose the best/worst of both to give the most diverse mission set irrespective of balance.

 Mezmorki wrote:
I hope the above post is sarcastic. Not seeing the /s.

There's this other thing called "cooperation" - and it can also take you very far in life.

Right? Also, thinking everything is a competition seems like a stressful, terrible way to go through life.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
It got lost in all the Squat madness, but WarCom has another article up about the deck.

They talk to Tyranid player fan favourite Robin Cruddace!

Oh, I thought this was the GW April Fool's post for the day. When he said "alongside the help of our playtesting teams" I was certain I'd spotted the joke, then when I saw "fair and balanced gameplay" I said to myself they aren't even trying.

EightFoldPath wrote:
Oh, I thought this was the GW April Fool's post for the day. When he said "alongside the help of our playtesting teams" I was certain I'd spotted the joke, then when I saw "fair and balanced gameplay" I said to myself they aren't even trying.

Well it is Cruddace, a man who got called out for writing a terrible Tyranid Codex, acknowledged it was no good, said he'd do better next time, and then somehow wrote an even worse book when it came time, so there's no guarantee that he knows what he's talking about.

Racerguy180 wrote:

OT, we were discussing the open war vs tempest pros/cons the yesterday in my local discord and our consensus is maybe a mix of the two is best. My buddy is gonna buy a deck and we are going to sit down and look at all the options from both decks and kinda pick n choose the best/worst of both to give the most diverse mission set irrespective of balance.

Unfortunately, I think the Goon review said the Tempest carads are bigger than the open cards, so mixing decks could be awkward,

Not sure though- seems like an obvious design flaw if true- combining decks was one of the first things I thought of too.

Not a prob, we were gonna make our own