So lets start with Von Shill........

   I have to start with the fact that I got Von Shill as an accident.  Two years ago for Christmas I told my lovely wife that I would like a new Malifaux crew for Christmas.  Now I could have sworn that I told her I wanted Som'er Teeth Jones, the Gremlin master, however when she got to my game store, The Game Room, she talked to my friend Bruce who was working there and he told her I wanted Von Shill.  When I opened it Christmas morning, I was surprised but happy and starting working on putting it together.
   Once I had everything together it sat in my bag, getting occasional play, but mostly just primed  for a while.  Once I decided I wanted to paint them, I started talking to my friends, Chris Borer and Brian Sobb.  They are both very good painters, with Chris winning something like 23 golden demon awards from GW and if you remember back a bit to a few Rotten Harvests ago he painted the Grateful Dead teddy pictured here.  His website showing all of his best work is at Full Borer Miniatures. 
   Brian has won two silver golden demons, a gold rogue demon (adepticon before it was crystal brush), and a bronze rogue demon.  Sobb has done a lot of good painting work and always has a good tip or two that helps me a bunch.  So you can understand how it can feel to be working with my skill next to some really great painter/sculpters.  So they helped me with any number of things, starting with color schemes and painting tips, on to using washes to get all the lines between everything.  Of anything I have painted I believe that Von Shill and his crew have been the best work I have done.  I also need to thank Chris for putting Von Shill's eye patch on, the librarian's book mark and other small items in the crew that I know I am forgetting.

   Now lets talk about how he and his crew play.  Not really a tactica, but just how he plays for me.  My typical 50 stone crew looks like this:

• Von Shill - The Shirt comes off, Engage at Will - Cache 3 stones.
• Steam Trunk - I use a metal mimic trunk from the old AD&D miniatures, and I call it luggage.
• Hannah - Scramble, Spoils of War - Proxied with the Librarian on a 50mm base
• Freikorps Specialist - Flamethrower
• Freikorpsmann
• Freikorpsmann
• Freikorpsmann
• Freikorps Trapper

   This is a crew that definitely needs to be together in a tight group.  With Freikorps armor you don't have to worry about blasts, so you can keep them clumped up without worrying about losing the whole crew to someone like Rasputina.  Since you are moving them in a group, the order that you move them in is important.  You need to keep as many people as possible within the 4 inches around the Steam Trunk.  Anyone within 4 inches of the trunk can use its 3 zero actions as their own.  The steam trunk's zero actions are all condition removers, so you can get rid of poison and heal, remove burning, and removing corpse/scrap markers.  This along with the blast protection protects you from crews like Sonia and McMorning that rely on handing out conditions to remove your crew from the board.  With them being set up in a 4 inch bubble around the Steam Trunk, you are going to have trouble with your objective grabbers.  You can always send out the odd Freikorpsmann out on a run to drop an objective marker or get into position out of the bubble, because of their unimpeded ability.  Since they can ignore severe terrain, they have the ability to get their full 10 inches of movement in most situations.  Nothing worse then seeing a freikorpsmann rushing through a big piece of forest terrain through to the other side, out of your range, and you can't even follow.  At 5 points they can even be lost if needed.
   You might want to keep 1 in the bubble though, since with Spoils of War upgrade you will get 2 soulstones each time your Freikorpsmann can kill a Henchman, Enforcer or Master.  It is a handy way to bump up your cache, even though he is no where near as stone intensive as he used to be.  I find the main use for soul stones is drawing those two extra cards after you look at your control hand, and the odd damage prevention flip, but with the healing flip you can get from the trunk, that is only occasionally needed.
   Now for his avatar upgrade.  This will be based off the 2/17 update for the avatars.  Von Shill turns into the avatar of conflict. During the premanifest he gives his crew a bump as he often does by increasing the change by 2 inches and melee by +1 if the crew member is charging a model that Von Shill is engaged with.  Now with his engagement range of only 1 inch, it isn't a huge advantage, but nice fluff of a soldier rushing to the aid of his commanding officer.  He also gets another way to heal with a 2/3/4 and a place effect within 8 inch.  It being a place effect rather than a push means that intervening terrain doesn't matter and you place Von Shill anywhere in base to base with the friendly model (doesn't even have to be a Freikorps model).
   Now once he manifests he get a nice bump, mostly going to his crew rather that helping himself.  He grants all his Freikorps Companion, if a Freikorps dies within 6 inch Von Shill gains reactivate, and finally he gets a pulse within 8 inches that will cause his Friekorps to pass a willpower duel and heal 1/2/3.  All handy things in the middle of the game to help the crew with any troubles they are having.  This is a good example of an avatar I wouldn't want to manifest until turn 3 or 4 when my crew is starting to get a bit hurt.  I like how Von Shill's avatar helps his crew more then himself and reenforces that bubble concept of his crew.  He already has so many attack options, that having those kind of healing options is a nice change.
   With all the teamwork and options I find that this is a great crew for a starting player, who wants to learn the rules of the game without a lot of difficult choices at to what they want to do.  It also helps that it is a hard hitting, good armored crew that will last long even against another hard hitting crew.  The Von Shill crew is a lot of fun to play and I highly recommend it as a good fall back crew for anyone to play.

   So this has gone on longer then most of my blogs, I feel like I got out everything I wanted to say...which is just about a first for me.  I hope you enjoyed reading, and in the next I think we will talk about Pandora and how I play her crew.  Thanx for spending some time....have a good one.