Malifaux Reviews: The Metal Gamin

Earth, fire, wind, water and heart, by your powers combined, we are…metal gamin!

I always liked the inclusion of metal as a classical element, but it rarely seems to get counted in western philosophies. Now Wyrd’s put out metal element gamin before many more obvious choices, but how well did the little fantasy robots come out?

Fresh off the sprue everything seems to be fine. Connection points seem to be logical, with most of them even ending up hidden by other pieces when everything’s assembled. There really aren’t any pieces that are too small except for maybe the feet on the lizard gamin. A couple of the heads probably could have been less pieces as well (slicer gamin’s head could probably have been attached to the body and the middle gamin could have been one piece instead of a head and a face), but nothing terrible. Due to the nature of the constructs, there aren’t any incredibly thin weapons that feel like they’re going to snap at any time, everything’s decently beefy.

My one gripe would be the level of detail seems to differ from piece to piece. Overall, the chains aren’t quite as sharp, and the lizard gamin seems a little bland somehow. On the other hand, the squat gamin seems to have gone in for overkill. It’s got a ton of incredibly tiny detail thrown in all over the body. Don’t put paint on it to thickly, or you’re going to lose a lot of tiny rivets and seams.

I had a lot of fun basing these guys. I went and got some model train track to use on the squat gamin’s base, which I’ve been meaning to do with the rail crew for a while. Technically came out not to scale, but it still looks pretty nice. Left over beams from chopping that up gave the lizard gamin a nice little selection of weapons to pull from (while being out of scale, the train track was still in the same size as the beam he’s wielding). For slicer, I’d finally saved up enough little bits of flash, sprue and random metal clippings off of miniatures to do the junkyard base I’d wanted to do a while. Just glue and roll the base around in a pile of the junk, prime and paint.

The metal gamin are currently being heavily reforged for the version 2.0 beta (as of writing, the 6/13/13 revision). Pretty much no ability except for it’s armor and hard to kill status has been left intact. It’s wounds dropped a little, but current rumblings seem like it’s even hardier these days, as without the positive flip to damage from charges lots of attacks against average defense models will be getting a negative flip, and high armor will reduce most minimum damage attacks to one damage. Is it still going to die to concentrated attacks? Yes, but now at 4 points out of an average 50 point game instead of 5 out of 35 they’re dirt cheap and easily affordable.

The gamin’s melee attack is still nothing to write home about, but now it has the ability to spread burning around if it’s attacking a model engaged with it’s protected buddy. It’s a nice touch that helps it fit in with it’s native crew and some of the other arcanist toys. While it lost it’s free charge trying to dive in to the fray with it’s buddy, the new charge rules might have made that a little silly. Free charge that does +flip but almost no damage? Sure. Free charge that does 2 attacks and gives up to burning +4? Not likely. Instead the gamin has magnetism to help get it around now, pushing it towards a construct in play. Got some utility on both ends, as it damages the target making it a fine offensive action almost akin to the old free charge, but works decently with your own models as well, as constructs tend to be fairly beefy to soak up the hit and you can have better placement control with your own guys.

The main event, it’s reason for existing, the protective ability? Gamin no longer sit there and directly transfer damage to themselves. Instead, they can take an action to buff up a model’s defense and prevent it from being dropped in any way. My main gripe with the ability is it’s very hard to keep it active. The model loses it if it’s ever more than 3” away from a metal gamin, so unless it stays close to stationary you’re going to have to constantly reapply it. Without any buddy simultaneous activation abilities, the client is likely to charge in, get smacked around a bit, and then the gamin can move back in and reapply the buff. They’re cheap enough you could form a little railroad of gamin along the charge lane (since it doesn’t have to be the same gamin, just next to any one) but that could get expensive fast, and it would be a headache remembering which one actually gave out the buff.

As part of the cleaning up of Malifaux, minor flavor restrictions are getting cut off the cards, so metal gamin are no longer arcanist assets. Currently this means that Leviticus can now take them (defense 6 instead of defense 2 desolation engines? Yes please.), and I imagine Hoffman will be able to take them in the future. As a foundry model, Mei Feng will still be able to take them in 10 Thunders games, so expect to see these little guys running around a lot more tables than they used to.