Happy Monday fellow Wyrdos!

Your Monday Model for Neverborn is Serena Bowman, once known as The Trickster in the Divergent Paths event (her story can be found here), in M3E she is a versatile Enforcer of The Dreamer’s Nightmare keyword, and as such she has a suitably horrific bag of tricks to pull from.

Serena is 8ss no matter which Neverborn crew hires her, and while she will have a few more uses in a Nightmare crew, she offers plenty to the rest of the Neverborn. 8 Health to match her cost, Mv 5, Df 6, and Wp 5 makes for a decent defensive foundation, and three of her four Abilities shore it up nicely. Feed on Fear allows her to heal 1 when an enemy model she’s engaging fails a Wp duel–she doesn’t always cause many Wp duels herself, but this is Neverborn we’re talking about, most crews will have a good amount of them to throw at the opponent’s models. Disguised keeps enemies from attacking her off a Charge, which both help keep her alive longer, and Demise (Eternal) means that once per turn if she does die, you can discard to have her heal 4 instead. So, if your opponent wants to kill her and keep her that way, they’ll have to commit some pretty significant resources in a relatively short amount of time to do it.

Her last Ability is Horrific Reality, which allows her to reduce her melee attack stat from a 6 to a 5 to attack through a friendly Nightmare within 8″. This will mostly be useful in a Dreamer crew as you would expect, but she could also bring along another Nightmare into another crew for the +1ss cost to have as an option, or she could buddy up with Baby Kade’s Teddy in a Pandora crew, since Kade can bring a Teddy as if it were versatile. As an important note, the attack draws line of sight from the friendly Nightmare, but the Nightmare itself does not need to be in line of sight of Serena, it just needs to be within 8″.

So, she’s survivable and can sometimes strike from unexpected vectors, but what can she actually do, you ask? Her melee attack, Tendrils, is a 2″ engagement range, so when she’s not using it to strike out from her Nightmare friends, she can deny interacts on important scheme and strategy markers. It attacks Df with a 2/4/6 damage track, and if she flips or cheats a tome she adds a single blast to the attack. So, with a little help from Focus, Serena can hit surprisingly hard. Her other attack is an 8″ projectile common within the Nightmare crew: Twist Reality. With stat 5 with the choice of targeting Df or Wp for 2/3/4 damage, ignoring Friendly Fire, Armor, and Incorporeal, it makes her a great pick if you’re expecting either of those defenses, a crew with varied defensive stats, or if you know you’ll be mixing it up in melee with most of the rest of your crew. On top of all that, she has a few fun triggers here as well. On a tome if the target’s an enemy she can place them within 6″ of where she targeted it initially, while on a crow, the target discards a card and then she may draw then discard. If she has an enemy in her engagement range but they are not engaging her, targeting their Wp with this attack will allow her her one independent way to heal a wound with Feed on Fear if they fail.

Her one tactical action is also her bonus action, allowing her to heal a friendly model within 3″ 1/2/3, with the option of ending a condition on the target as well. On a mask the Swift Action trigger allows her to take the action again. Oh, and didn’t I mention? It only needs a 4 to hit the target number!

To put it succinctly, Serena is a nigh-immortal toolbox model of scheme and strategy denial with her 2″ engagement, while also being able to ignore a significant number of defensive measures at range, and do unexpected damage with Focus and a decent hand. She’s definitely going to see play in the vast majority of Nightmare crew, and, I suspect (and recommend) a good number of other keywords.

Neverborn may not all be quite as alpha-strike-or-die squishy as they were in M2E, but Serena is often worth coming into any crew for her healing and condition removal alone. With several other Nightmare models having Twist Reality as their ranged attack as well, Serena and they will be an excellent counter pick against Arcanists and Guild, as well as some Outcasts and Thunders who appreciate their armor, and any crew with incorporeal. Allowing the attack to choose between Df & Wp no only allows you to pick their weaker stat, it also allows you an avenue to avoid any nasty Resistance triggers that are either only allowed for one defensive stat, or are only built in for one in particular, forcing your opponent to either spend a Soulstone for the trigger or cheat in the right suit the might need for something else. Even if you’re not playing the Nightmare keyword, this makes Serena great insurance in case your opponent brings in a tough to crack target, like Gracie or a Peacekeeper.

The tome trigger on False Reality to place the target 6″ away is, quite frankly, amazing. You’ll be cheating a high tome in for it to win games, displacing a model trying to score Claim Jump, or Hold Up Their Forces, Breakthrough, or Outflank, or even placing them into her engagement so she scores for Hold Up or Take Prisoner. For killing, placing a Hard to Kill target in hazardous terrain after the attack brings them to their last wound will be a horrible surprise for your opponent.

Upgrade-wise, all of the Neverborn options give Serena something she appreciates. Eldritch Magic is the least helpful in most cases, as it gives her another action for condition removal with a higher target number, though it does have a longer 6″ range and is an attack action that targets Wp, so using it on an enemy in her engagement will have her Feed on Fear to heal 1 if they fail. She also appreciates The Final Veil ability from this upgrade, allowing her to heal 1 when any other model in a 6″ aura dies.

The Ancient Pact upgrade is also decent on her, allowing her to ignore the Black Joker and flip a new card, as well as adding +1 to all her crew’s initiative flips. Personally I’d put it on a minion to get the extra card draw, but if you find she attracts the Black Joker in a few of your games, this helps.

Inhuman Reflex is my highest recommendation on what upgrade to give her. Blade Rush adds even more surprise damage to her charges, especially since with her 2″ engagement range, she can charge through models she’s already engaging if they aren’t also engaging her back. Butterfly Jump is the primary reason I find this to be the best choice for her though, since she can get extra movement after being attacked, which can allow her to move to engage the target or another model without them engaging her, or to escape entirely to go focus on something that will get you points. Especially useful when combined with her natural Disguised.

Outside of a Nightmare crew, Serena will often find acceptance with Pandora’s Woes as backup for Kade’s Teddy (or Carver, if you take him) both with an extra boost of damage when she attacks his target through him from a safe distance, and when she heals him, Kade, or anyone else when they have need.

Zoraida’s Swampfiends also make extra good use of Serena, as Zoraida can Obey Serena to Twist Reality at a key moment to make the best use of the 6″ place trigger or have her move that extra walk to protect a critical marker. There’s also some interesting ideas I’ve had to bring in Vasilisa to summon Stitched Together from Zoraida’s dead Voodoo Dolls, as the Stitched are also Nightmares, though I’ve not tried this out yet at this point. Collodi would also appreciate this synergy with the Stitched as well, of course.

As a quick aside, mentioning Collodi, who is a Dead Man’s Hand master currently, I just wanted to express that while as of the final Beta rules DMH masters are by default not tournament legal, this is left up to Tournament Organizers to decide. By all appearances this seems to be set up this way because the DMH masters are currently not active in the fluff for one reason or another, not because they are either over-powered or ineffective. At the very least, I would suggest to TOs to allow them in their events for the first few months of M3E to see if anything broken about them emerges, or if they should continue to be allowed to ensure Malifaux is welcoming the most growth possible to the community as the new edition gets rolling. It would be a shame to leave potential players disinterested because a master that catches their eye isn’t allowed to be played competitively just because at the moment they are not doing interesting things in the stories. Also, for any who missed the change during the Open Beta, DMH is no longer a separate faction. The DMH masters are a part of their original faction, and the DMH tag just clarifies which masters are not active/allowed in competitive play by default.

Back to Serena, the rest of Neverborn will appreciate her about the same, as a great utility model that can be tricky for the opponent to deal with and can assist their crews both offensively and defensively.

What do you think of the Trickster, Serena Bowman? What’s a versatile model you’d like to hear more about? Next Monday I’ll be continuing on through the factions to the Outcasts, and we’ll be looking into how digging holes and mining for soulstones can help the wide mix of themes found there!