Marcus Goes for a Spin

Yesterday I got my first game in with Marcus. Dan pulled out Ramos so we'd both be trying out something new. The matchup was...

Marcus
- Razorspine
- Cerebus
- 2x Waldgeist
7 Stones

Ramos
- Johan
- Joss
- Brass Arachnid
- Spider x2
6 Stones

He pulled Assassinate and I pulled Slaughter.

Being my first match with Marcus and having never seen him before, I started out the game trying to see just how fast I could make the army. I had heard that they were a speed-centric faction and I wanted to see how well that would do. So while Ramos kept popping out spiders and making swarms, I managed to get Marcus and the Razorspine near the center of the board, one of my Waldgeists along one flank near a forest, and the other Waldgeist and Cerebus along the other flank near another forest.

Turn two I made a pretty big mistake when I activated Marcus first to try to pull out an improbable strike against Joss. I failed to turn Joss into a beast with my first (0) action and instead of using my second to Companion my Razorspine and go for a kill that way, I tooled up Marcus and sent him in to fight one of the spider swarms. I did very little damage to it, and by the time I got my second activation, Joss had killed off my Razorspine and armored up. Damn!

I sent Cerebus charging over into Johan, but failed to kill the jerk and he turned around and pasted my Cerebus. My Waldgeists moved both forests closer to the center of the board, one of them getting a hit on Ramos and giving him Slow and trapping him to the forest, while the other one managed to get a hit on Johan and kill him. Unfortunately his other spider swarm got to my Waldgeist who was holding Ramos in place and paralyzed him.

The next turn, Joss killed the Waldgeist who trapped Ramos but was in turn killed by a massively-beefed up Marcus. My other Waldgeist was able to put his second spider swarm down to 2 or 3 life left, but died from that and the (0) action heals for the spider swarm had it back near full in a couple more turns.

Still, with Johan and Joss out of the way, and a clear line to Ramos, I thought I might have a shot. For two turns I was able to get +2 damage and +2 Defense (and sometimes an additional attack) against Ramos, while also giving him a (-) to all flips against me, but it just wasn't enough. I had Ramos down to 2 life left at one point, but he kept healing and reactivating and Marcus finally fell to the spider swarms.

I learned a lot about how to use my faction then. Waldgeists were awesome - just as I hoped they'd be. A solid choice for six stones. Marcus has a lot of cool tricks, but some of them are very action-intensive and he doesn't have that many actions to go with, so it's usually better to pick either control or attack for the turn and go with it. He's very, VERY fast, being able to get a WK of 8 and then a free charge if he plays right, giving him a nice 24" move if he needs it. Overall, looking forward to Marcus again. Next time I'll have a better idea of what to do.

Dan played a really solid game, mostly focusing around getting additional activations (which he managed four or five times in the game!) and on summoning spiders and spider swarms. With how brutal those swarms can be, I need to find a good way to get rid of them quickly. Devour seems like a solid plan...