Early this week I played my first game with Nicodem, avatar of decay against guildmonkee's Rasputina crew.
It was a chance for me to try out the avatar and see how things work with him, how to manifest and so on. I tried a few things with the crew as well using models I've not used before: Madame Sybelle and started the game with a Flesh Construct, plus I took 3 dogs, a punk and the convict gunslinger. The strategy was shared Contain Power.
I wanted to get manifested early doors, so I went for the dog-kill-summon method. This meant I pretty much spent the first turn arsing about in my deployment zone killing dogs to Arise and fulfil one of his manifest requirements, then manifested in turn 2 to give me the most time to give him a good chance to work.
Some things I learnt:
-I need a fast way of killing dogs in the early turns. I ended up with my crew spending all their time killing dogs and nothing else. That's not too bad in Shared Contain Power but in other strategies this is more difficult. Conventional wisdom is to use Rafkin to bomb them with poison to do this quickly so I'll need to get him. I had hoped to use the Punk Zombie to pulse them to death but I didn't get the mask that spell it needed.
-The avatar got manifested turn 2 as an all action, which obviously costs Nicodem a whole turn. I thinking Nurses might help here:
- Turn 1, Nicodem uses Arise to raise at least 3 Mindless Zombies
- Turn 2, Nicodem acts as normal taking his normal actions
- Turn 2, Nurse casts Massive Dose (Speed) on Nicodem, giving him Reactivate
- Turn 2, Nicodem re-activates, uses his (all) action to manifest. As part of the mainfest steps, you end all effects on Nicodem, Avatar of Decay, which I am assuming includes Speed ensuring he doesn't get sacrificed.
I'm not 100% sure on this one, I might stick it on the forum.
-Nicodem is hard to put down with zombies around him, but blasts, pulses and auras will do it and take out his MZ. He died to Snow Storm's shatter ability as I forgot about it.
-Rigor Mortis is still awesome.
-In the starting list above, with hindsight I should have taken a 4th dog and killed that giving me 4 corpses counters. I had 3 crows in my hand turn 1, so with 4 corpses counters I could have summoned the Rogue Necromancy and made my Soulstone spend back with interest (4 dogs is 8 SS, RN is 10 SS).
-One sticky rules question that came up was around his "Restless Dead" ability. The wording says:
After a non-Mindless Zombie Corpse Counter is placed on the table within 6" of this model, this model may Place a Mindless Zombie into base contact with the Corpse Counter and then discard the Counter.
This caused us some confusion as to it's meaning, and we played it that the MZ died, dropped a corpse counter and then came back again. Looking at the forums we weren't alone in this confusion, but this is not the case.
Here's the ruling and clarification from Ratty:
After a Corpse Counter drops from a model that is not a Mindless Zombie, Place a Mindless Zombie touching the Corpse Counter and then discard the Counter.
Mindless Zombies do not cycle like Malifaux Rats. So if someone kills Bishop, you will get a Mindless Zombie, if you kill that Zombie you will not get another one, you will just have a Corpse Counter lying on the table.
So we'll know for next time.
-I forgot he was Terrifying for the whole game. My fault.
I'm looking forward to running Nicodem, Avatar of Decay in future games.
