It was rumoured, it was leaked, it was retracted and then it was…well, launched. Wyrd has officially announced that Malifaux Third Edition will be coming. They plan to have 2 crews ready for Gencon 2018 with some of the new cards and rules in place. Their email said that Rasputina and Marcus will be ducking it out for folks to play with this year.
And that got me thinking why they would do 2 Arcanist Masters to fight with. But then they dropped the bomb – Marcus is now Dual-faction with Neverborn. WHAAATTT?
And he’s not the only one switching up things it seems. McMourning has lost his Guild faction (nothing new here since he was caught controlling zombies by Lady J), Misaki has handed in her merc card and become Ten Thunders solely (again this was story-driven and as head of the Katanaka clan she needs to lead the Ten Thunders), Lynch has stepped away from the Neverborn connections and Brewie has thrown in his lot with the Gremlins. McCabe got out while he could and cashed in his lot with the Thunders. Let’s hope I can still bring some Guild forces when I play McCabe! Jack Daw has now appeared in the Ressers which switches tings up a touch.
To replace these lost dual factions we have some new ones – Zipp has become Outcast Dual-faction (well, he is a pirate!) and Hoffman may be showing some Arcanist sympathy as he becomes Dual faction with them.
Some players might be a little riled up by this but by far the most anger has come from some lost masters. Within the fluff of Malifaux we have seen Nicodem taken out, Lilith has been locked in the Red Cage by Zoraida (for her own good) and what’s left of Ramos has been shipped Earth-side to Vienna. This means that now in M3E tournaments these masters will be useable at the TO’s discretion.
With some masters now gone we have new masters stepping in to take their place. First (and rightfully so) Nekima has taken her place as Queen of the Nephilim, Euripdes has come down from the mountain to serve Titania, Von Schtook has taken his university on a field trip and now is a master in the Ressers and Dashel has been given a promotion within the Guild.
From what information has been released it seems that M3E will streamline a lot of what has become seen as bloated in M2E, namely all the tracking of conditions. There will now be 11 main conditions in the game. Masters and models that previously used conditions will now use tokens for tracking quantities. I don’t really see a difference here but let’s see where they go with it. Deployment zones have now been changed to increase threat ranges and I guess action from turn 1 will become the norm.
To achieve this there is a closed beta that will be working til release next year. By far the most interesting part of M3E is that unlike M2E which had a staggered release for models using a wave system, M3E will be fully ready to go when it is released. With a lot more models introduced from M1.5 to the end of M3E this is a massive undertaking but hopefully we will be in for a treat!
D.
