Malifaux 101: M2E Core Rules Changes

Hi everyone and welcome to the first Malifaux 101 of 2nd Edition, here I will have a brief run down of the changes to the core rules of M2E from the latest beta version of the rules, just so you can see  simply what has changed since 1.5 edition.

This is one of the biggest changes in M2E, now you flip a card to see what shared scheme you are playing, in normal games there are 5 strategies, in story encounters there are 14, schemes are also limited, you now flip 2 cards and use the suit and number to generate the available schemes giving you 4 out of the possible 19 to choose 2 from. In the games I played in the closed beta I found this change good, it meant I didn’t just stick to the schemes that I knew and also that I had to think about the game, I didn’t just have my set schemes that I preferred to use for each scenario and master, also for tournament play as there aren’t just the go to schemes like Raid for me and schemes like Power Ritual and Sabotage, balancing the playing field is not a bad thing.

You now start flipping for additional turns after turn 4 not turn 6.

There have been a few changes to Soulstones, firstly they no longer add onto totals, instead you can discard one to add a suit to the total but also to give a positive to the flip, this means that masters cannot be almost guaranteed to hit a model just by using a soulstone. The max cache has also dropped to 7, meaning you have to be a bit more careful with soulstone use. Finally you can also drop a soulstone in the draw phase to draw 2 additional cards before you discard down to your max hand size.

There has been a slight change to Action Point generation, Masters now generate 3AP per activation.

This is a new aspect in M2E, there re several (well 20 or so) upgrades per faction so far, these come from your overall soulstone pool and these give additional abilities, triggers and actions for for either the chosen model or all models of a particular type or in a particular range, for example ‘Flames of the Pit’ upgrade for Guild gives the chosen Guild Marshall Terrifying (Undead) 12, but makes all Death Marshalls in play immune to Horror duels. Upgrades tend to have restrictions to a particular type or number of models.

You can now premeasure in M2E, this does have its drawbacks in that now you can be sure you are in range before committing to an action, so there isn’t the risk of wasting an action point if your 1/2″ out.

These are a new type of marker in the game, these are used to achieve certain schemes in the game, they can also be destroyed or manipulated by certain upgrades or action, for example the upgrade for Dr Douglas McMourning ‘Evidence Tampering’ means at the end of the game enemy scheme markers within 4″ become friendly markers, in this case potentially helping your schemes and denying your opponents schemes.

 A fairly simple change here, instead of flipping an additional card for damage, the Red Joker now does Severe + Weak damage.

There have been slight changes to these conditions, in the case of Burning you take damage equal to all of the counters on the model at the end of the turn then remove the counters unless you are in range of an ability like the Emberling’s Stoke the Flames.

With Poison, regardless of how many counters you take 1 wound then reduce the number of Poison counters by one.

These are the new game levels rather than Scraps and Brawls. Shoot-outs are 10-20 soulstone games  which can only be lead by Henchmen. Dust-up’s are 21-40 soulstone games which can be lead by Masters or Henchmen finally scraps are 41 soulstone games which can only be lead by Masters, for me 45ss-50ss is the new 35ss level in M2E.

Wyrd is really excited about the changes to Malifaux Mk.2 – What about you?