So my friend and I set up a 3-hero game today against Wager Master. Shuffle his deck. Start revealing cards for the beginning Conditions. First Card: Wageling. Okay, easy enough to deal with. Second Condition: Another Wageling. Little annoying, but we'll deal. Third Condition: Another Freaking Wageling. Pause. Read Wageling again. Realize we immediately lose. Fun times. Set up next game against Kaagra and proceed to have fun.
That is awesome. That is officially the fastest game ever I believe.
And by awesome, I mean that is totally WM's style, and I don't play him much either.
I like that he exists. Sometimes its fun to just throw caution to the wind, and have crazy crap happen. Its like a blind double alien game of Cosmic Encounter, no idea what'll happen, but it'll be wacky. That said, I dun play him very often either. I am happy to have the option though.
(Cosmic Encounter is a fairly simple diplomacy and mild combat game where everyone gets a alien card at the start, dictating their power. In blind, noone else can see it, and in a double game, everyone gets two alien powers.)
Wager Master is all right if you don't think of him as a real villain. He's a gimmick, and as a gimmick he works just fine.
"The greatest trick Wager Master ever pulled was convincing the heroes he wasn't a villain."
- Guise, The Best Book! #3
Have Kaagra manage to get the title of Chaos Lord on turn 1?
Just had that happen recently. It doesn't technically end the game immediately, but it might as well.
Yeah, Wager did this to me too : oops wageling everywhere, the end.
But I like playing against him - lots of strategizing, and lots of crossed fingers. He can win (and lose!) anytime, it makes for a strange, always on the edge, "fight". I completely understand that he may not be liked, though. But I personnaly like the strategic and statistic puzzle he offers.
My favorite game against him, he had the condition that he would win if he fell at zero HP. The solution was to keep all conditions active, reduce him to 5 HPs, then flip him, hope the condition would stay face down and finish him before his next turn. It worked but really felt at the mercy of any random event ( bad card flipped... a bad environment card killing him before the condition was out...). Good, tense time - for me.
I honestly prefer the Wager Master to Kaagra. I always feel as though Kaagra is way to much upkeep and mangment to be worth fighting, but Wager Master is so unpredictable, that he's really fun
I find Wager Master in a similar vein to Iron Legacy, except maybe even more extreme, in that games are very quickly over one way or another. True story, the first time we played Wager Master at our group we had the instant win combo come out twice in a row before the first hero played a single turn. The third game was thankfully actually a game. I honestly can't see the deck getting much use in the future, it's cute and all but far too swingy to waste time on over pretty much any other villain.
I’ve only played one game against the Wager Master and he got the condition that would make you lose if he ran out of HP. We had to flip him multiple times to get into a situation where we could win and not die while getting there. It was one of the longer games of SOTM I’ve played.
You have to be in the right mood to face him. The game will be weird and difficult to predict. I doubt he was intend to be played as often as the villains in the normal expansion boxes.
I won against Wager Master on his first turn. He played New Deal, Wagelings, and Losing to the Odds in that order.
We just played against him for the first time last night. I'm still not sure if we played him right; he's SO DIFFERENT from everyone else we've played.
I must have missed the text on the Wagelings that cost the OP the game. Luckily, we only ever got two, and the first was face-down when the second one showed up.
I'm hoping we interpreted him right:
Wed started the game with 4 Conditions out. If I recall, we had the one that lets him win if he's dropped to 0 HP, the one that shuffles our cards into his deck, the one that changes the play order, and the one that lets us discard to flip the Condition. He got a Wageling out, which we quickly dispatched, and we discarded to flip that other one, so he flipped pretty quickly.
Flipping him flips all of his Conditions, if I read him right? So now we could kill him if we could bring him to 0 before he flips again. There were 6 Conditions out when he flipped, so we had ~6 turns to do about 40 damage... assuming we were lucky and he never flipped the "0 HP loses" card. It was pretty tense, as we reshuffled the flipped cards and chose one to flip each round. My wife was seriously tense trying to decide which face-down card to flip to avoid flipping the one that would make us lose if we "killed" him! We managed to avoid it, and we killed him with two face-down cards left.
Assuming we played him right (it took some time to wrap our heads around how he played, and how we were supposed to win if we couldn't KO him!), it was weird, fun, and tense, and difficult not because the cards were unfair, but because it became a puzzle we had to solve. Not being able to kill him by punching him to death made it really feel like a Mr. Mxyzptlk episode, wherein you can't defeat him with conventional means. We had to trick him, play his game, and have a little luck before we could finally put him down.
We had Guise, KNYFE, Setback, and the Naturalist, and it was a lot of fun! Wager Master definitely seems like a once-in-a-blue-moon villain, though. Like, whenever you go to play, choose a villain and then roll a d20, and on a roll of 1 the villain is randomly replaced with Wager Master. :)
That is exactly what I enjoy about him. A good bit of chaos, and some problem solving. It is neat to occasionally contemplate whether or not bashing a team mate with Flying Smash to even out hit points is a good idea, or how best to mill out a deck to win, etc.
He is an interesting play. I Just got to play him last night with a friend and his playstyle is so different. A lot of the villians have one or two mechicanics that you can avoid/contain/destroy with certain hero combos but Wager seems more reactionary then pre-game preparing (depending how you pick your decks of course).