Stargazer's Painting/Malifaux Corner - McMourning Tactica

So new post time you lucky people! This is something I've been meaning to post for quite a while this is the next installment of my Malifaux tactica and this time round I’ll be addressing the Dr Douglas McMourning, head of the Guild morgue and Ressurectionist master.

So down to business. For a basic overview McMourning is a glass cannon. Fact. He’s a melee monster and has the ability to walk through most non-master models in the game and some masters as well.. With a average at best defense of 4 he is quite squishy although this isn’t necessarily an issue due to some of his other abilities which I’ll go into later ;) As far as positioning in your crew, he is kinda a one man army who needs little support it’s always a good idea though to keep him out of line of sight of scary guns and offer target saturation for the enemy so he doesn’t get focused on too much. In the activation order try to save McMourning until last unless absolutely necessary so he can gain back any wounds he loses. His cache is 6 as standard and he doesn’t really need any more unless you have spare soulstones left over.

Abilities

Body Parts – You can exchange soulstones for body part counters. I personally never use this as I don’t find it particularly difficult to gain body parts in game and the soulstones are more useful in my opinion. However it also allows you to exchange a corpse counter at any point in your activation with 2 body part counters. Basically anytime you kill something you will gain 2 body part counters.

Hard to Wound 1 – Pretty standard, nice to have but nothing amazing.

Organ Donor – This is the most important ability that McMourning has. When McMourning inflicts wounds with a melee weapon he gains that amount of wounds back. Remember melee spells are also included in this. This is also the reason why you should always activate last because if he loses wounds during the turn simply walk into an enemy and start hacking away.

Precise – ignores Armour and Hard to Wound very useful against pretty much everything basically just makes him more lethal.

Actions

(+1) Passion for his Work – Allows you to throw away a body part counter and gain fast, very useful gives you another action per turn and body part counters never seem to be in short supply when the Dr is about.

( 0) Master Surgeon – target enemy or friendly model within 6” makes a healing flip and either gains or loses that number of wounds. Quite situational but can be useful, remember no resist on this so is there a pesky model on a couple of wounds with a high defense? No problem with this action. Also remember McMourning can use this on himself if you are really desperate to regain wounds but with Organ Donor you should be fine.

(0) Scalpel Slingin’ – The most useful ability McMourning has, use this as much as possible, it allows you to make a 6” melee strike and if you wound the target (use soulstones if necessary to hit) you get to push into base to base. This basically removes the need for walking giving you more actions to use on spells or attacks.

Triggers

Scalpel Magic – Very useful! Try to get it off as much as possible if there are high masks in your hand and soulstone if necessary, this combined with scalpel slingin’ you have the potential of 7 attacks on an enemy model in a turn!

A Piece for Me – This is an automatic trigger on McMournings melee weapon and gives you a body part after damaging a defender. If you are getting stuck into melee then there will never be a shortage of body part counters down to this.

Spells

(0) Monstrous Creation – This is McMournings summoning spell, although it requires a 10 crow to get off it is more often than not worth spending a soulstone to make sure that you can get it to work when you need it to. Don’t bother summoning Canine remains with it but definitely summon Flesh Constructs and Rogue Necromancys to provide hitting power when needed.

(1) Dissection – This is a rather nasty spell with a damage arc of 1/5/10 although if you inflict severe damage your activation ends. This is good to use as your last action, use soulstones to get a high total allowing you to cheat the damage, this will enable you to kill almost anything in the game in one hit! If you cant get the severe aim for moderate and try to get off the scalpel magic trigger as mentioned earlier.

(1) Rancid Transplant – This is probably my favourite spell of McMournings. Whenever I have a relatively high mask in my hand I will use this spell in conjunction with scalpel magic. It gives the target Easy to Wound 2 for the rest of the game, which means you get a double plus on any damage flip subsequent to this spell. This turns a resilient model such as Teddy into a model which is far less scary allowing you to actually deal with it. The only thing to remember is that this spell requires you to discard a body part counter however if you can get off scalpel magic you can normally gain that body part back without too much trouble.

(1) Wracked With Pain – I’m not the biggest fan of this spell although it definitely has its uses. It causes 2 wounds and prevents the target from taking (0) actions for the rest of the turn. The reason why I don’t normally find this so useful is that I normally activate McMourning last anyway so most if not all of my opponents models will have already gone. The good thing about this spell however is that unlike the rest of McMournings spells it targets Wp instead of defense which can be useful against some crews/models which have defensive triggers.

Crew

Sebastian - This guy is McMournings right hand man and the model is just too nice not to take! He has a good synergy with the dogs that McMourning normally takes and is able to deal quite a large amount of damage if he gets stuck in in melee.

Canine Remains – These are the staple of the crew fast and good objective grabbers can ambush unsuspecting models on their own and cheap bodies to generate more body part counters. Their (0) action, which allows them to pass corpse counters to McMourning, is invaluable keeping the good Dr stocked up on the much needed Body Part counters.

Nurses – I personally don’t use these that often however they can be useful to turn the dogs into “Cruise Missiles” as they normally die whenever they end up in melee anyway. Can be hard to manoeuvre into position and keep there..

Zombie Chihuahua – Not that great.. good for cheap body part counters I guess but that’s about it..

Ok I think that’s about it for this post.. any questions as always feel free to ask

Until next time

Stargazer out.