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Two of these have to be placed face up, i.e. At the start of your turn, you choose three of the objectives in your hand to be your “in-play” objectives. Your hand is kept hidden from other players. Unlike traditional Maelstrom missions, where all of the objectives a player held were active, the Schemes of War rules give each player a hand of 5 objectives that make up their Objective Hand. Notably you do this before deployment and objective placement – strictly you do it when choosing your army, although how this will work in practice in a tournament setting is a matter for individual TOs. You can’t include any cards with duplicate names, which rules out stacking the deck with the same objective and also, presumably, taking multiples of the “Secure Objective X” objectives.
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the 36 base ones, plus the 6 faction ones (12 if you’re Black Legion). Rather than just using or modifying the standard Maelstrom deck, you construct a custom deck of objectives by picking 18 cards from those available to your army – i.e. The Schemes of War rules in the June 2019 White Dwarf are something else altogether. The Refined Strategy rule from the Chapter Approved 2018 missions added a much-needed deck-building element, allowing you to drop up to 6 cards from the deck before a game, but that was about it. You had 36 cards, or 36 objectives numbered 11-66 if you were a crazy person rolling on the table in the rulebook, and you generated them randomly in different ways depending on the mission being played – from the simple “draw 3” of Cleanse & Capture right through to the craziness of Tactical Cascade. Under the old Maelstrom rules, your deck was pretty much the deck. What Changed Building Your Own Maelstrom Deck Those modifications have tended to be light, though – a few changes around the edges to make the missions compatible, but mostly running things by the book. With some suitable modification, they’ve served admirably to add a reactive element to the otherwise fixed Eternal War missions. Where Maelstrom rules have seen some use is as secondary mission objectives, specifically in the “ ETC style” format. Equally frustrating are the games where you draw “kill a psyker” moments after killing your opponent’s last psyker indeed, the house rule to let you discard “impossible” objectives like this is so common that many people don’t even realise it’s not an official part of the format. They are, with some justice, perceived as too random there’s nothing quite as fun as losing because your opponent draws Priority Orders Received – Defend Objective 2 when his warlord is sat on objective 2, completely insulated from any assault, to sour you on the idea. Despite several improvements to the objectives and mission set in 8th edition – including the introduction of the excellent Refined Strategy rule for the missions in Chapter Approved 2018 – many players have continued to ignore them. Maelstrom of War, or, “that thing with the cards.” Maelstrom missions, which use randomly-generated tactical objectives, first debuted in 7th edition to mixed reviews and have stuck around since, going through adjustments and iterations along the way.
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In part 2, we’ll cover the individual cards, including the faction-specific cards that come packaged in those sweet datacard boxes and on the last page of your army’s codex, how to build a good Maelstrom deck, and how to play better in Maelstrom games. In this Part 1 of our 2-part series, we’ll run through the new rules, how they work, the new stratagems, and what they mean for the future of Maelstrom as a format. The report didn’t do a very good job of showing it off, since it was narratively-focused and didn’t really talk about how the cards impacted the game, but it certainly piqued our interest here at Goonhammer as being a potentially huge improvement on the way that Maelstrom cards are generated and scored. These new rules acknowledge the shortcomings of the Maelstrom format and give players much more control over the types of objectives they can generate in a game, allowing them to tailor their decks to their army and playstyle. Keen readers of White Dwarf will have noticed some 40k rules content slipped in with this month’s battle report, in the form of a brand new approach to utilising the Maelstrom of War card deck.
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