Butterfingers

Recently I've not been able to get many moonstone games so I've been at a lack of ideas for articles.

However, on the Discord* recently, a discussion about Butterfingers and how useful he is has got me inspired to write again! So how useful is Butterfingers, is he an auto-drop or an auto-include and what does he do?

‘Fizzle-Pop’

The first thing to note about Butterfingers is his brilliant arcane and standard faerie evade. These help him exceed at range, making him both accurate with his arcane abilities and hard for his opponents to hit with their abilities. 'Fizzle-Pop' is a great ability with this all in mind. Despite its low damage of X, arcane 5 means it will hit very reliably and so is great for finishing off low health models. The second part of 'Fizzle-Pop' is also very useful for Butterfingers, allowing him to push back anyone hit by this ability an inch.

‘Faerie Dust’

As well as providing excellent control options to interfere with your opponents plans the push also helps counteract one of Butterfingers greatest weaknesses. Although his arcane and evade are fantastic his melee stats and wound count are dismal. Should Butterfingers get stuck in prolonged melee combat he is sure to fail. Despite this, he is not completely useless with melee. Although he will fall to a sustained attack, Butterfingers can utilise his signature to drain vast amounts of energy. This can make him brilliant against models which have been set up with lots of energy, such as a 6 energy Ribald. A few faerie dusts and any model that your opponent has been setting up their whole turn is now useless!

‘Clumsy Cluts’

“Oops… That wasn’t expensive was it?”

In addition to draining a models energy, Butterfingers has another trick for dealing with enemies. 'Clumsy cluts' grants weakling to a model of choice hampering both their ability to harvest moonstones and deal melee damage. -1 damage to melee and +1 to harvest can ruin a models activation especially if the model has been set up priorly with lots of energy. Butterfingers can take this even further though and use this twice on one model or three times if given additional energy. -3 damage can cause Fritz to lose his greatsword bonus and +3 to harvest means a goblin will have to use his entire activation to harvest only once!

‘Butterfingers’

But what about his final arcane ability, the one which shares the same name as him? With the right timing 'Butterfingers' can win a game or, similar to his other abilities, completely ruin your opponents' plans. Models about to flee the board suddenly drop their stones and instead of escaping have to spend another turn gathering stones, something especially hard if combined with 'Clumsy cluts'! The best possible use though is at the end of turn 4, causing an opponent to drop a moonstone that will win them the game or enough to win you the game.

Conclusion

In short, Butterfingers is a good reactive piece suited to countering some factions and strategies more than others. Certain Leshavult and Dominion builds which stack lots of energy on one model are great targets for Butterfingers who strips their energy and weakens their melee. Finally at the end of the game, when in the right position, he can completely swing the result of the game by dropping moonstones and causing major disruption!