Combos with the Saber

The Saber slashing the Nova Scotia in an epic 2015 game. (click for battle report)

Originally published to Miniature Trading on June 21st, 2017

174 Points

This is probably my favorite Saber combo so far, but here are the others I’ve come up with.

Setup #1
This is the only one without double actions of any kind. I don’t like paying for S board on a crew, but it lets the Saber board 3 different ways – blade strikes, S boarding, and regular ram+board. Nemo takes as many crew hostage as possible while Dumas can reroll one of the boards.

Setup #2
This one might be the most incredible actually. Somehow it has the most crew (6 total), but it fits within a 40 point limit! Therefore you could use it in a standard game if you wanted to heh. It should be pretty effective – Arathiel can sac up to two oarsmen before Nemo needs to be successful nabbing crew. Once he gets going (try to capture a canceller), Arathiel can sacrifice his “recruits” to the greater good of Imperial France.  In addition, once one of the oarsmen dies you’ll even have a cargo space open, though it probably won’t be needed. I literally added Godiva just because there was no reason not to, unless you used this combo in a fleet with a 0LR +5 crew. She can help with boarding though, since the Saber will be doing a ton of that.

Setup #3
This setup is very similar to #2, but trades SAC for EA. The reroll is better utilized for Dupuy, and you could alternately use Capitaine Gaston de St. Croix if you wanted. I like the SAC setup better because the cycle of Nemo capturing and Arathiel saccing is just evil, effective, and downright scary. It’s also very practical because normally you’d run out of crew to sac, but with Nemo you won’t run out nearly as fast. Here the double actions don’t cost points outside of the build total, but missing one could really hurt.

Setup #4
This is the evil Cursed setup. Dumas is a great French crew for their larger ships, and he’s especially good on the Saber, as evidenced by this setup and that other fleet linked above. In this one he allows Moody to come aboard, who gives the captain and crew massacre abilities. While we’re at it, why not go fully evil and get a Cursed crew to go with Moody? The legendary Fantasma provides the ship with the useful Eternal keyword, and the not-so-useful (but appropriately costed at least in this case) Fear keyword. The real fun is the SAT though, which Dumas provides a nice reroll for. Unfortunately, this setup is hanging by a thread, as I barely was able to work around the double Loyal keyword shenanigans. The helmsman is Cursed instead of French to satisfy Fantasma, while I added a Pirate oarsman just to keep Moody less moody. (luckily the oarsman takes up no space and just barely fits into the point cap space) As a result, a canceller or stinkpot shot could really take this fleet apart, but it might be the most fun setup of the 4 even if it isn’t as practical as #2.

I made this fleet based on the order the setups appeared on my written version. You can tell I was getting better and more sinister as I thought up more and more combos! Feel free to comment your favorite Saber setups. I myself am now intrigued by an American setup, so I’ll probably just edit more combos into here as I figure them out.

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