Malifaux: Jakob Lynch's Upgrades Part I

My newly painted Jakob Lynch

Jakob Lynch is my new favourite Malifaux master.  Yes, I know I said I was going to stick with Pandora, but I've wanted to get a Lynch crew for ages and when the opportunity arose to pick up one at a good price on Twitter I went for it.  You can see him painted in the picture above.

I played quite a few games with him now and I can say this:  he is really good.  Really, really good in fact.  What I wanted to talk about in this post was his upgrades as I think they are all pretty viable choices for Lynch.  I've been playing him as Neverborn exclusively, so I'm mainly writing from that perspective.

Let's start with the first big choice you're probably going to have to make:  Rising Sun or Endless Hunger.  These are both limited upgrades so you're only going to get to take one, and unless you're doing something way off the beaten Lynch track you will want one of these.  Both of them affect the Hungering Darkness (hereafter known as Huggy).

Rising Sun
The infinite Huggy upgrade.  When Huggy is killed, he's buried and can be brought back to life again (unburied) if an enemy model with Brilliance is killed within 6" of Lynch.  I've been using this one a fair bit recently, especially since the 1st November nerf of Nexus of Power.  It goes well with schemes like Bodyguard or Entourage where you may want Huggy alive at the end of the game.  I've found combining this with Fears Given Form on Huggy and then using him as a nuisance model can also be quite effective.  Huggy is only Df3 but he is Wp6, 7 Wd and Incorporeal so it takes a bit of effort to put him down.  Throwing the resurrecting Huggy into the enemy crew and bogging down models with him can be effective.

Rising Sun is an upgrade you want to auto-take if you know you're facing masters who can ignore Incorporeal.  Heavy casting masters like Rasputina, Sonnia and Pandora will wreck Huggy, as will things like Viktoria of Blood with the Mark of Shez'uul.


Endless Hunger
This upgrade makes Huggy Terrifying (All) as opposed to just (Living) and gives him Casting Expert.  Both his attack actions are Ca actions.  This upgrade really beefs up Huggy into more of a damage dealer and more importantly gives him an extra action where he can use his attack to spread Brilliance to more models.  However, once he's gone, he's gone and you can bet your opponent is going to be putting some effort into sinking Huggy.  That additional AP does means that he's got an extra chance to hit and get his Drain trigger (built in) to heal 2 Wds.

With the recent change to Nexus of Power, Endless Hunger is less attractive to me than Rising Sun, but it has it's place.  For example, if the scheme pool has Frame for Murder in it I might take this upgrade and put my FfM on Huggy and then throw him into the enemy master.  He's got more AP to do some damage and spread Brilliance and if he dies, then I've scored some VP.

So that's our choices for Limited upgrades.  I would definitely take one of these unless for some reason you've elected not to take the Hungering Darkness.  The final upgrade I want to talk about in this post is Addict.

Addict
This upgrade must take on Lynch or Huggy and gives friendly minions within LoS a + on Attack and Damage flips against models with the Brilliance characteristic.  In wave 1, this covers Illuminated and Beckoners.  Both of these have decent Ml/Ca stats (6 generally) so don't particularly need the buff but for the Illuminated it does make them even more deadly against Brilliance'd target.  That's nice, but they're already pretty deadly against Brilliance'd targets so you may not really need this buff.  The other problem is that this takes an upgrade slot of Lynch so you're likely to put this on Huggy who may well not be around for the whole game anyway.  Not a bad choice, but there are better ones I think.  In a Lynch mirror match, I'd want this though :)

In part 2, I'll cover off the remaining 3 upgrades and talk a little about general upgrades.