SotM Puzzle: Ultimate Akash'Bhuta

Akash'Bhuta has grown more powerful of late.  So Visionary, The Wraith, The Sentinels, The Scholar, and Guise banded together to protect humanity.  They were not afraid.  Even at her Ultimate power, Akash'Bhuta can still be stopped!

Or can she?  Our fair heros were met with a Primeval Eruption.  But this was no ordinary eruption - on and on it went.  Three times did the tangled limbs of the dread avatar emerge from the ground.  And then our heroes felt the earth grow fast around them.  They were Entombed!

But the heroes stood fast.  They had chosen the ground for this fight carefully, and they had prepared well.  Hope was not lost!

Dark Visionary, Rook City Wraith, The Adamant Sentinels, The Scholar, and Guise must face Ultimate Akash'Bhuta.  After a triple Primeval Eruption, all limbs and Entomb are in play.  You may choose which environment you use, and stack the hero and environment decks as you will.  You can stack the Villain Deck as well, because it makes planning exact sequences easier and this team has too much deck manipulation for me to stack it against you.  You may use as many rounds as you want, but unless I screwed up the math it is possible in one.  Yes, really.

Have fun!

You may choose team order.

A couple of questions.

Ultimate is using the videogame terminology to mean Advanced and Challenge mode, yes?

12 Limbs came into play so 12 cards were discarded from the Environment deck.

Is there an order that the Limbs came into play so we know who was Ensnared, or does your stack the deck condition allow stacking before the start of the game?

I know it's possible to kill regular Akash in 1 round but my usual tricks wont work here as I let the Environment do the heavy lifting with Oxygen Leak.

Yes, Ultimate is Challenge + Advanced.

Yes, you may pick the order the limbs enter play. I can’t think of any order that will ensnare anyone other than the Idealist, though.

Is nobody interested in this puzzle?  I can provide hints if people are would like them.  :D

I'm interested, but I was on vacation in Hawaii for a week and was more interested in swimming and seeing the sites.

Thanks for bumping this up.  Puzzles are fun.

I sat here thinking about it when you first posted it, but I can't figure out a 1 round win, I'm not even close!

Below are two hints, encoded in ROT13.  They are unrelated, and rather vague.  The first one in particular may not actually be helpful.  I'm not sure.  The second one is better, I think.

I am going to jot down some general ideas, so we can crowd source the solution. I'll white them out.

Well the limbs are a Red Herring  (with the exception of the Carapace and the Brambles)  because Akash is immune to Villain damage.

Rook City Wraith can get an Environment card into play.

You could clear out the Limbs with an environment card but that wouldn't help with Akash.

Scholar can get use Don't Dismiss Anything and/or Proverbs and Axioms to give power uses and cards.

Guise can make his damage irreducible and unredirectable, which might be a way to deal with the DR.

I just had a lot of fun removing all limbs and environment targets from the game via Unforgiving Wasteland.

I didn't win until round 3.

Time to have a go at speading things up.

Sorry this is a little less than polished, and I might have made an error or two, but how is this?

Truly horrifying!

Congratulations! That is not at all the solution I came up with, but it looks like it works.

That is amazing!

I would be curious to know your solution.

One of the things I like about Sentinels is that there is often multiple paths to the desired outcome.

Wow.

I especially enjoyed that you took the time to specify that Guise yelled "Woo!"

I had a seder last night, and gaming tonight, but I’ll try and post my solution tomorrow.

Here you go.  I wrote it up in story form, so you'll have to read between the lines a bit, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

It took me a while to understand what you did but I get it now… very clever!

I unfortunately cannot figure out the infinite loop part. I was following everything until it gets to that part.

Every time Guise regains 1 HP, 3 targets regain 1 HP, every time Scholar regains HP he deals 3 targets 1 damage.

As long as Guise uses every third heal on himself he can go on until he reaches max HP. As long as for each time Guise heals himself Scholar targets Guise and each time Scholar heals he damage himself neither will ever reach max HP and the loop can continue.

That said, Guise has to gain more than 1 HP, otherwise Scholar won't be doing enough damage to get through Akash'bhuta's damage reduction.  Which is why we needed Selling Out and Look What I Found rather than relying on the damage from Guise's main power.

Ok. I see now.

Nicely done.

...you can "Lemme See That" on "Hippocratic Oath?"

You can with Caspit's Playground in play.  

OK, so the Scholar plays Keep Moving three times, putting all three copies of Mortal Form to Energy in play.

What was the 4th card played?

If it was Solid to Liquid, wouldn't that be enough to increase his damage enough to break through the DR?

You could also force the environment deck to shuffle by playing all copies of Gimmicky Character so you have one less DR to worry about from Akash'Bhuta.

I avoided using any damage boosters because I didn't want to do the math to see if they would make the damage being dealt/healed spiral up uncontrollably.  If Scholar starts dealing more damage than Guise's health total, it doesn't matter if he could immediately heal it away.  Twist the Ether might make it managable, but again I didn't feel like figuring it out.

There were a number of card plays and power uses I left out, that could possibly be used to make the combo more efficient.  But someone else will have to do the math.

So then… How is the Scholar getting past Akash'Bhuta's DR 1 against Villian targets?

You don't start the infinite damage loop with the 1 damage from Guise's base power.  That's what Mission Control, Selling Out, and Look What I Found were for - so that the damage is in increments of 3.