The Fencer

Coming in at a whopping 6 melee, the Fencer immediately secures her place as the highest melee stat model in the game.

This is also supplemented by a fantastic arcane 5 and a superb evade of -2. As for her other stats, the Fencer has the traditional faeries melee range of 1", 6 wounds, and an incredible 5 energy. As great as these numbers are, it's from the Fencer's horde of passive abilities that we see how this faerie designed for melee will operate.

The Fencer’s card.

‘Weakling’ and damage reduction

She has the standard 'Weakling' as is common with most faeries. As normal this can be removed by Wasp's 'Rage' ability, but weakling isn't usually an issue for this faeries as we'll see when we look at her signature later. Unusually for a faerie, the Fencer has some damage reduction, specifically an excellent -2 against all piercing damage received. Although this seems oddly specific it is very useful in tangent with her signature. On the damage-dealing front, the Fencer has a nice +1 to all her piercing damage which, as you may have guessed by now, is very useful for her signature.

‘Needlepoint’ and ‘Volta’

A reminder of Thrust.

So what does her signature do? Well, in combination with these passives, it allows her to deal solid, irreducible damage to a single target without taking much damage in return. On damage suffered for playing a thrust, we can see the main worries are other thrusts and sweeping cuts. Thanks to 'Volta' though we are reducing piercing damage by -2. So, assuming your opponent only had 1 thrust in hand, you will only be taking 1 damage from thrusts (before modifiers and crits). To this end, sweeping cuts aren't greatly useful either. This is because the follow-ups granted to the opponent for playing them have very few options for actually dealing decent damage.

As for damage dealt, 'Needlepoint' has no nil or 0 damage options with the lowest printed number being 1. So as well as suffering very little damage, the Fencer will also be outputting some very reliable damage. This is further helped by her earlier mentioned 'Needle' giving it +1 piercing damage. I also mentioned earlier that 'Weakling' isn't much of an issue for her because of this signature. This is as damage from 'Needlepoint' can't be reduced by passive abilities. As 'Weakling' is a passive ability that reduces damage it is completely ignored when resolving 'Needlepoint'. Perhaps even better though, it ignores enemy passives, rendering armour such as Fancyhats 'Plate Armour' useless!

In fact, with 3 such cards, the Fencer can sometimes kill the Baron in one hit with an amazing 7 irreducible damage! Whilst this is not likely to happen (With a draw of 3 thrusts from 8 cards at roughly 7%), she will relatively reliably draw at least 2 thrusts (at 41%), and will pretty much always draw at least 1 thrust (85%). All of this so far has been assuming that the Fencer is within 1", is initiating the attack and the opponent doesn't have any damage bonus'. Is it therefore all over as soon as the Fencer is caught in an unfavourable position?

“Allow me to introduce you to Needle!”

‘Swift’ and ‘Enfeeble’

Not at all! Whilst she does favour combat from a favourable position, she has some abilities to ensure she is always in such a position. 'Swift' first off means she can always dash into an opponent's melee zone if they try and outrange her or away if she isn't ready to fight yet. Meanwhile, for enemy models which have a high damage bonus, she can 'Enfeeble' to often completely negate the damage bonus. This then doubles up with 'Spiteful' which alongside her signature will always heal the Fencer up, mitigating even more damage. 

Beyond these abilities, timing can also be a huge factor in getting the most out of the Fencer. Activating her early can often result in a long-reach melee model attacking her outside her melee zone after exhausting all her energy. She's therefore often best left to last where she can activate without fear of reprisal and cause massive wounds to a single enemy. After an 'Enfeeble', they will struggle to cause any damage to her whilst she repeatedly 'Needlepoint's them for large and irreducible damage whilst she spitefully heals too!