Post Oblivaeon Spoilers Here Only!

See above.

Spoiler

I am excited to see the physical cards.

/Spoiler

When you say post, do you mean "after"? Should I type spoilers relating to things that happen in films after OblivAeon is released here?

Yep

The game comes in a box and has lots of cards 

That box, in particular, caused a lot of complaints in the minds of certain individuals.

That’s a different box.  That box only contains one card that is the best variant.  

And scorpions…

*scorpion-handling tongs not included.

So it’s a boo-box?

Ru

Fi

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Actually, now that I am thinking about this, having everything said in one thread, questions and comments might be a bit much. I am thinking about making a thread for each deck, that you can post (and only post there) spoilers. Thoughts before I do this?

Maybe one thread for Oblivaeon content, one for the new heroes, and one for the new environments?

It’s arrived, redacted was Voss, and he pulls a Dr Doom when Oblivaeon is destroyed and carries on the fight with him wielding Oblivaeons powers.

Edit:

images

https://imageshack.com/a/img922/8750/gegKlP.jpg

https://imageshack.com/a/img923/1905/3RUW1F.jpg

Very interesting, thank you for the information. 

We need card text spoilers!

If I get around to it I’ll post some tomorrow, I have to head to work soon.

In terms of the box, its very sturdy and does have enough room for premium sleeved cards, you may have to put some decks into the oversized cards and tokens drawer however to get it all to fit.

Oooooh someone has their Oblivaeon! Yay! It's arriving! :D

Christopher gave me permission to share a joke card we got during playtesting for Luminary https://www.dropbox.com/s/n3ima2ndt54bz7b/Luminary.jpg?dl=0

I love that card. :)

Redacted was Voss! Called it! Out of interest, what’s his scion name?

Aaaaah this is so exciting, I can’t wait to see more about what’s in there. I really want to see more about Luminary :D

His scion name is his full name, Ranek Kel’Voss

Luminary's deck is filled with devices and cards that find devices and discard from the top of his deck, Devices come in two variants, normal devices that either have an effect and/or a power and Doomsday Devices that have powerful effects but can only activate if he has 15 or more cards in his trash and usually shuffle the trash into the deck.

Given that cards tend to have unique titles, what are Char, Highbrow, and Radioactivist called in Fort Adamant?

Codename: <insert name>

So, can we get a list of Missions, preferably with a general "schtick" of how to succeed them, and the respective reward for completing each?

Dang.  My money was on the All-Seeing Alzrabar, because the purple energy seemed to be a perfect match.

The best thing about OblivAeon (IMO), Luminary's flavour text. There are 3 cards in his deck that show the "story" of an idea to implementation, I love it!

So while I am not one of the fortunate people getting the actual game, I am a total spoiler sponge, so random thoughts from stuff I've seen so far:

The Void Slave card in the Nexus of the Void deck still elicits a NOOOOOO WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME reaction from me. D: D: That one should particularly interest you, PlatinumWarlock.

Everything about Luminary's deck is great. He's basically achieved peak mad scientist and I love it.

Akash'Thriya has a number of amazingly boss cards.

The Bottom of the 9th card in the Champion Studios deck is pure hilarity.

Everything about the Form the Mecha-Knight card and its flipside is the best thing ever. Now I want to know who the other person making sound effects was (since I just know Idealist had to be one).

Everything about Nixious is wicked creepy af.

Seraph is awesome. He pretty much has the paladin vibe I wish Fanatic had.

Harpy is totally badass and peak style to boot.

Highbrow is also wicked creepy.

Heartbreaker complaining how Stuntman is being annoyingly flashy in how he fights is best.

Where else are people talking about it? I’ve checked reddit and here, but I have to know more about Luminary’s deck.

I'm really impressed with it.

The box is a lot better than I thought it'd be, it's very sturdy and looks fantastic. It weighs an absolute ton when it has everything in it though, it's definitely not something you'd want to be moving around a lot.

The mission decks are incredible, really good job on them, they really give an epic feel to the battle.

The Ranek Kel’Voss appearance, and how he works, was a major surprise to me (I avoided all spoilers coming in), as were some of the cameo appearances from other heros as rewards.

I love the new hero deck mechanics, I can't even single out one as all of them have something to recommend them. I can already see that they're all going to get a lot of table time.

Kudos to Adam in particular, the artwork is sensational throughout.

The one and only disappointment to me, and it's a minor one, is that the comic book is a lot thinner than I thought it'd be.

Thumbs up to everyone involved in the making of it.

There's a spoilers channel on the Discord (appropriately named Realm of Discord).

If my memory serves me correctly, this was a clear highlight for me as well. His deck is laugh out loud kinda funny. 

Yeah, one of my personal favorite pieces of art in the expansion is Luminary trying to explain to Tachyon and Unity the merits of pulling the moon into OblivAeon, and between exhaustion/bordeom/annoyance they just don't want to hear any of it.

Curious: Any idea how much it actually weighs? I'm planning on getting a carrying strap, and want to make sure I get one that's approriately strong… 

I'd be curious for the same information, especially if the weight includes The Cauldron in its dimensions.

I’d place an estimate at about 12-15 kg, well within my lifting limit but not something I’d move long distances by hand.

EDIT: And because people want to see it https://imageshack.com/a/img922/4792/oNVpop.jpg

I won’t be posting the flip side myself, some secrets deserve to be kept.

I appreciate the front, bluedarky…but that's not how spoilers work!    Show us the rest! 

Nope, but I’ll give you one thing, he isn’t a scion on his flip side.

Any other thoughts on it? The comic is the one thing nobody's spoiled much about yet.

I'm interested in knowing the actual pagecount, for one thing. A "standard" comic is typically 22 pages of story, but winds up around 10 pages longer due to ads (now I'm imagining things like Dotitos "They're the crunchiest!" ads in there).

Idle thought I forgot to mention before: Seeing the Virtuosos of the Void art now makes me wonder why Argent is the only Virtuoso with an energy signature (green) that doesn't match his signature color (silver).

Regarding Jeysie's question about the comic book: to be honest, it's very underwhelming unfortunately, which is a shame because everything else about Oblivaeon and the collector's case have massively exceeded my expectations.

It's very, very thin: 16 pages of glossy high quality paper in total, but that count includes the front and back cover (which is just a picture of some Scions), the inside front cover (just a picture of Oblivaeon's head and summary text), 1 page that has no text / 50% just black ink and is just a picture of Oblivaeon standing over a city, and 4 of the pages are taken up by double-page splash screens which contain hardly any text. In short, there's not much in the way of actual storyline content. WalkingTarget, there's no extra content like fake adverts.

In terms of storyline, there's 1 page of Nightmist and Harpy talking about the mist gates, 4 pages covering Freedom Five interacting with Luminary which contains four panels depicting where some of the other heroes are, then 1 page showing the Aeon men attacking Fort Adamant with Void Guard showing up in the final panel. There's no information or storyline developments in it that haven't been covered in the podcast, and it's all very, very superficial. The dialogue is particularly bad, especially in the Nightmist / Harpy interaction which reads like a pastiche of bad comic book writing. The only good thing I can really say is that Adam's art is of a very high standard on most of the panels and the double page splash screens are very cool looking.

Overall it just feels rushed and something that you're going to finish reading in less than 2 minutes and put back in the box.

Spoilery question

Does anyone know why La Comodora is interested in the first human Flight? I have a huge backlog of The Letters Page to listen to (the last 20 or so episodes), is it mentioned in any of them?

It has not been explained yet Matchstickman

I havent seen it yet (fingers crossed with backer number 500 something Ill be in the first batch of collector cases in the US) that seems like a normal comic book to me. Its one of the reasons I rarely buy antyhing other than the trades - i finish standard comics in 5 mins or so, cause I read fast and while the artwork is fun, i don't pay too much attention to it the first time though. - so … seems par for the course for an actual comic book to me! 

Did anyone who received OblivAeon order Art Prints? If so what was on them?

Does the Box have a contents card count? I need to order sleeves... Lots of sleeves....

~Komori

Just wait till you see what we wrote for the video game intros!

I like Stuntman’s interactions with Ambuscde. “How can you possibly show your face, looking like that?”

Hold on, I'll do some counts.

Standard sized cards.

5 Hero decks 41 cards each - 205

5 Environments 15 cards each - 75

Oblivaeon Decks (Oblivaeon, Scion, Aeon Men and Missions) 25 cards each - 100

Shields - 5

Hero Reminder Cards - 5

Battlezone Cards - 2

Stuntman - 41

Benchmark 41

Void Guard - 164

Variants - 11(New heroes)+5(Freedom Five)+5(Xtreme Prime Wardens)+1(Ra)+1(Captain Cosmic)+1(Visionary)=24

If you got the collectors case = 1(Completionist Guise)

Complete Hero Variant Pack = 69

Total Standard Sized sleeves = 732

Without Collectors Case = 731

Without Complete Hero Variant Pack = 663

Without Case or Variant Pack = 662

Oversized Cards

Oblivaeon Booket (Not really sleevable)

Scions - 10

Inevitable Destruction Card - 1

The Scion Reserve Card - 1

Foil Oversized Villain pack - 1 Booklet + 57 cards

Total = 2 Booklets + 69 Cards

Without Foil Villains - 1 Booklet + 12 Cards

Just ONE thing about Oblivaeon :

Chekov's Airdryer, best card name ever

A couple questions about the counts:

• I don't see Sky-Scraper Extremist, Omnitron-U, or Parse Fugue State in your list. Were they not included? That would be five additional cards
• You list 69 cards in the complete hero variant pack. My expectation was that there would be 67. Which ones am I missing?

(4) Young Legacy, Rook City Wraith, Beard Ra, Redeemer Fanatic

(8) Dark Visionary, Eternal Haka, Freedom 6

(4) Dark Watch

(2) GI Legacy, GI Bunker

(1) Super Scientific Tachyon

(1) Alternate Argent Adept (not Kvothe)

(6) Prime Wardens and KNYFE Rogue Agent

(4) Termination AZ/Bunker/Unity and Santa Guise

(7) Scholar of the Infinite, Hunted Naturalist, Chrono-Ranger: Best of Times, Sentinels: Hero Project

(30) OblivAeon Kickstarter promos, including Completionist Guise

So I think the really big burning question right now is...

has anybody beaten Oblivaeon yet?

(I mean, since it came out. Obviously playtesters have...you know what I mean)

for the record, I don’t recall ever actually winning a game during play testing. 

It was at that moment that Christopher though to ask a question to the playtester.

"OK, could everyone who beat the game at least once raise their hand?"

And nobody moved.

"Hmmmm ... I guess we may have a little balance problem here ... I knew I should have asked that BEFORE the printing!"

Just in case anyone was still wondering if it all fitted in the Collectors Case, here's everything except the non-foil character cards and the foil villains.

https://imageshack.com/a/img922/6210/dXiAIN.jpg

That is a thing of beauty. Thanks for sharing! It help put my mind at ease.

That's also sleeved with Ultra Pro premium clear sleeves, unsleeved or with penny sleeves there'd be a lot more room in there.

Oh, I sleeve. The people I play with can be... unkind to cards. So my main concern was fitting them all in with Ultra Pros.

Ah! So the Collector's case does fit all the cards if they are sleeved, phew! I didn't see anyone asking that question during the kickstarter so I was a little worried...

There's a difference between knowing something theoretically and having physical proof. The latter, for example, always helps more with my anxiety problems.

I saw that question get asked a bunch of times.

i believe Matchstickman was a little sarcastic, but either way there were people towards the end who were panicking that the measurements wouldn’t fit sleeved cards.

This spoiler thread needs more spoilers! 

I am a playtester. AMA.   (I'm waiting for my box to arrive to make any major comments.)

Re: Box. Anyone without sleeves can confirm how much space the hero decks take up? Obviously it fits sleeves, but what I'm hoping for is all the heroes will fit in one of the drawers, so I can save the other one for Cauldron/Earth Prime/other custom content. Looks like it should work, but not entirely sure.

I'm super curious how the OblivAeon character booklet came out, physically speaking.  Does it stay open to the desired page without external weight?  How sturdy is it?  How is it bound?

What do I have to do to complete that one mission and get myself the sweet giant robot dinosaur?

Go to this page and purchase  https://store.greaterthangames.com/mr-chomps.html

I feel like I need to get 2 of those.

One for me and one for my nephew.

Better answer than the one I could've given.

Dammit, I just knew I was going to get a clever answer...

More broadly, if you had to narrow it down to any one villain, which villain is the Oblivaeon scenario most similar to? Given all the missions and such, I was sort of thinking it might feel a bit Kaargra-y, is that about right?

Building the King have to discard H+? equipment cards.

I had a 50/50 win rate on OA before we could use all the hero variants. Then always won but some game had to be called but to time. (was each player only pick 2 at one point)

It…

Uh… 

I…

Well…

Nope. I got nothing. 

Seriously, it's not like anything we've had to date. 

As a playtester, my only thought is that Deadline takes away pieces of the environment. If you don't manage OblivAeon appropriately, it takes away the entire environment deck in one blow. And if it does that enough, you lose. It's not really comparable. It's far worse, far larger, and far scarier. 

Missions aren't like Titles. They are far more interesting, diverse, and entertaining. Not that Titles aren't entertaining – the Missions are just even better!!! Titles are just minor modifications to a character. Missions are allies, super-powerful devices, or other insanely fun/hilarious things. 

sadly all the heroes dont fit in one draw un sleeved, but then there are a few of them now  .

but there is lots of space, as you can see left hand draw is almost empty (back 2 are the old dividers), and you can see where ive used the foam to hold the cards forward.

whoops forgot a tray, so thats a yes you can fit the foil boxes in if you dont mind losing a little space. as for the redacted item on the top i'll pull out stuff and give it a proper picture tomorrow when its not 4am lol.

It doesn't stay completely flat, especially open to the center pages, but it's not going to shut itself mid-game either - I expect once the spine gets broken in it'll be a little easier to get almost completely flat. It's two pieces of glossy paper stapled together to make an eight-page booklet (including front and back cover.) It's the same studiness as any of the rule books.

Two things that I don't think have been mentioned is that you get a foil version of it in the foil villain collection, and that there's an Oblivaeon cardboard stand-up that moves around the board to show what zone he's in. It's a nice little touch.

Something that surprises me after my first quick glance through everything is the number of Scions vs. methods of getting Scions into play.

That's a resounding "no" from me. If anyone who has gotten a win has any tips, I'd love to hear them.

I'd also be very interested to hear what sort of game lengths others are getting. I think the box said 60-90 minutes was the estimated length, but I'm a pretty quick player and I'm going massively over that.

You're not meant to see most scions in a game, this adds to the replayability.

Had my first test game today. Probably full of mistakes, I think i forgot a scion turn and a few effects. Epic.

Mr Fixer + Apex of Humanity and a bloodstone?  Cool.

Add the virtusos of the void and a jack handle for maximum epicness.

But :

Stuntman with an hairdryer ? PURE. AWESOMENESS.

I figured this was the case, I just had a different understanding of the scenario in my head. Thanks for clarifying though!

I have been involved in only a small number of OblivAeon games. I think 60-90 minutes is wildly optimistic. I think it would take a concerted effort by expert players to finish in 90 minutes. If I were planning to play, I'd schedule at least three hours.

Very exciting seeing all the filled Ultimate Collector's Cases! I'm a Cauldron fan and intend to put all of it alongside official material in this big box. This also means that I'll use the old dividers (since Cauldron uses the same format as those old dividers and for consistency). Anyone still using the old dividers? I get the feeling that the new dividers are significantly thicker. Also, anyone else intending to store Cauldron in this box?

That's my plan, and probably will finally mix/match them together, rather than using my RC/IR box to hold all of Cauldron and other custom stuff. Also planning to do the same as you and use the older dividers; not a big fan of the new divider design.

Can someone please explain Swift Summoning to me ? , I'm not sure what exactly it is saying 

It will make more sense after you read applied numerology.

Basically if you don’t have applied numerology in play:
You reveal the top card of a deck and play it. If it was a one shot you flip a [magic] token.

Just thought about something: Do the old dividers fit in the Collector Case's drawers!? I remember that, according to one of the earlier measurements in a KS update that the current dividers were a tad too big to fit in the case. Has anyone tried to fit the old dividers into the drawers?

Thanks, I had read Applied Numerology , but  misunderstood it to be saying that it increased Harpys defended you used a power

The old dividers should fit easily.

I can confirm the old dividers fit. I misplaced some of the new ones and made do for about 5 minutes.

They're much thicker. I love the new design: unlike the old ones, they have a tab at the top, so if you alternate which side you have the tab on it makes searching (particularly the much smaller Environment decks) easier as you can always see the text, unlike the old ones where sometimes they could obscure each other.

I can't say enough good things about the collector's case, it's an excellent piece of design work.

I'm planning on sticking the Cauldron in the mega-box, though I'm not sure how to split them up considering they don't have dividers...but maybe I can repurpose some of the old ones I'll have spare if I use these new ones I see mentioned for the official decks. I'll figure it out when I get there, I suppose ;).

Regarding Oblivaeon play-times...well, the first game I played it took about four hours but that was much earlier in playtesting so many tweaks and changes were made between that game and the next one I played. I think I played it twice more, both games lasting around two hours (can't remember how many players we had for any of these), and we won all of them. First game I think players were limited to just two heroes each (swapping to the second if the first was incapped) and I started as the Idealist, got wiped out in the first couple of turns, and spent the rest of the game as Haka (all heroes rolled randomly) and ended up eating the entire Aeon Men deck, which probably contributed somewhat to our success ;). The next two games I started as Omni-10 and Writhe, respectively, and in both was insta-killed in the first turn by some card of Oblivaeon's along the lines of "Destroy the hero target with the lowest hp". So I just switched to the promo version of the hero I was playing, shuffled my trash into my deck, drew a new hand, and continued :P.

Love the Mission/Reward cards - they make you feel so OP. In the game where I was Omni-10 I ended up with someone having the "buff all Hero damage" Reward (or possibly they pick a hero and only buff the damage of stuff in that hero's play area), something that made all my Equipment into targets that automatically dealt damage at the end(?) of my turn, and Chomposaurus Rex. And of course I was well set up with my own stuff. So I was dishing out an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage every turn even aside from my normal abilities :D.

New thought: Akash'Flora is going to be just hilarious on a team with Ra. Make all Hero damage Fire, make her immune to fire, let the heroes all rock out every turn while the tree just keeps growing.

(Other possibilities: Fanatic could Chastise the tree for as long as she can keep pumping out damage, with some DR in play you could make heavy use of Smoke Bombs or the Stealth Bot, or you could try to get some good Naturalist loops going with the Rhino to keep redirecting damage to him - this would require some pretty substantial card draw, but he can do that!)

So what does Akash-Flora do, exactly? I guess it has...something to do with friendly fire damage?

From what I remember, it starts at something like 5hp but has no maximum - at some point (start or end of turn, probably, I forget) it heals all hero targets for...I think 1hp, maybw two, can't remember now. But it can take damage (it's either hitting itself or Akash'Thriya is doing it) to allow a hero to use a power. Can't remember if it's an "If this takes damage this way..." situation that would prevent stuff like the aforementioned damage immunity situations, though.

Akash'Flora has 3 HP, but can go over that - it has no max HP. At the start of akash 's turn, each hero can use a power, but the tree deals itself 2 damage each time it happens.

At the end of turn, the tree heals itself for 2 HP and then heals two other targets for 1 HP each.

Akash'thrya has ways to heal the tree further.

If can protect the tree from damage, well, free power for everyone !

Just some thoughts: Flesh of the Sun God only makes hero character cards immune to damage, Chastise can’t be played on hero targets, and Smoke Bombs only redirects damage from villain cards.

Double Twist the Ether would work though, wouldn’t it?

That’s a lot of setup to nullify the damage on what can still be a fairly squishy target 

Zealous Offense would stop the Self-damage.

Whoops, I forgot that only Heroes were immunized through Flesh of the Sun God. And I did mean Zealous Offense, rather than Chastise.

Akash'Flora is a target in Akash'Thriya's deck. It starts with 3 HP, but can heal above its maximum. At the start of your turn, every hero can use a power; each time a hero does this, Akash'Flora hits itself for 2 damage. At the end of the turn, Akash'Flora and some heroes heal. 

There is so much awesome and powerful cards.

It's great for the hero decks ... a little less for the villain decks. :)

One card was the target of my attention because how ridiculously powerful and weird it seems to me.

La Comodora's Rudder in the Timestream

At the beginning of your turn, either discard a card or destroy this card.

Power: Move 1 card from a trash to the bottom of that card's deck, then move 1 card from a different trash to the bottom of that card's deck.

So basically, you can spam the villain deck with hero cards and then using shuffle or deck manipulation force the villain to play cards for heroes.

La Comodora + The SW Sentinels (For Writhe's power) + Dark Argent Adept (to fill the villain trash) could be a big problem for any villain.

La Comodora can make Rook City a good place to live ... Or she could take the Chairman's underlings to feed them in heroes deck... and that's just the beginning of my ideas for this card.

So much possibility, so much potential ... Thanks for this card, Christopher ! I need to find a way to abuse it so I can use it on OblivAeon AND the scion decks !

That card would not put hero cards into the villain deck. The cards only go to the bottom of deck it belongs to.  

Noooooooooooo ...

Why do you break my dream ?? What kind of monster are you ? OblivAeon is a good guy compared to you !!! You didn't shatter the multiverse, but you did shatter my heart.

OK ... the "that card's deck" confused me a little ... I thought it meant "the deck of the first card". Well, I guess I will have to turn on Akash'thrya to put my cards where they don't belong ...

The prints are for Akash’Flora, Impending Doom and Devastating Aurora.

The box weighs 12lbs (around 5kg) when empty. Have not filled it yet. So, yes, it is a beast of a thing.

EDIT: Filled weight is 34 lbs (15kg). And it fits everything with premium sleeves, but you have to be a bit creative about where to put some content (I placed all the OblivAeon cards and tokens in their own slot in the token drawyer.

Thanks!

Some questions about Faultless:

1. When Faultless flips is that counted as a Scion being removed from the game?

2. In Oblivaeon's first form, if/when does he replace Faultless?

3. Does Faultless allow us to remove inevitable destruction counters for it's removal from the game, if so when?

I would say that when a Scion no longer counts as a Scion, a Scion ‘has been removed from the game’, which means flipping Faultless should count as a Scion being removed for all purposes.

In playtesting the wording was brought up, there was no official rule handed down to us.

But I played as not, just like when The Operative (from the Chairman's deck) is "destroyed" by e.g. Sucker Punch, the wording on the character card overrides the general rules and she is not destroyed, she flips instead.

Surely that’s exactly why the Scion rules refer to ‘removing from play’ rather than being ‘destroyed’ though?

Right.

And did you remove any card from play, whether Scion or not? No. So no remove from play or on destruction text triggers.

And is the Scion that waas in play now in play? No. Faultless' flip side isn't a Scion so there is now 1 fewer Scion in play. If it wasn't removed, where is it?

Also, Completionist Guise has a different comic cover and flip side speech depending on whether he's Foil, regular (from the variant collection) or from Super-Ultra Mega-Rare from the box itself. Nothing else seems different between the cards.

Isn't "Removed from play" a gameplay term, and not a  colloquial usage? Like "Destroy" or "Reveal"?

In play but no longer a Scion (i.e., changed). 

Yep! 

I would be much more able to contribute to this discussion if I had actually seen any cards. As it is now, I'm just desperately waiting for the darn thing to hit store shelves and being too impatient to avoid spoilers. 

I do have a few questions for those lucky enough to have their hands on OblivAeon:

How does the Scion Deck work? Is it like Nemeses, where the cards have an extra effect depending on if certain Scions are in play?

How long from the start of the game is it before OblivAeon actually loses any significant health? 10,000 is a bucketload, and besides that, he apparently starts immune to damage. 

Are the new heroes balanced for non-OblivAeon games? I understand if they're super good to stand a chance against the end of everything, but are they able to be used against normal villains without making the fight boring?

Removed from play doesn’t seem to have its own Glossary entry, but ‘play’ does, which includes both playing a card and that card either remaining in ‘play’ or leaving play - I would definitely argue that if a Scion changes to no longer be a Scion then a Scion Card was in play and then it wasn’t in play… however, as I only play the digital version, I guess I’ll go with whatever that uses for this!

This only really affects Faultless and Voss I think, but I think this would give a pretty huge bonus for taking down Faultless in the first stage of OblivAeon- if he doesn’t get replaced then that’s a pretty big advantage!

Scions do not work like Vengeance nemeses. They work more like Vengeance vilains, higher HP and are nasty regardless, but extra damage to nemeses.

OblivAeon starts taking damage once the shield card flips. However, he doesn’t start taking significant damage until he’s on h8s sec9nd and thord ‘sides’. 10000 is a bucketload, but you don’t have to clear all of it to win.

The new heroes are similar in power to others. They may seem to do more, but in the end actually contribute similar amounts to regular heroes. That said, they may tend towards the stronger side than the weaker one.

Thanks for the explanations! I knew the Scions were Vengeance-style, though. I meant with the cards in the Scion Deck (since as far as I know they all share a deck). Is it like, "1 Scion deals each hero target 2 damage, and increase it by 2 if Dark Mind deals this damage"?

It is a shared Scion deck but there are no bonuses on the cards played if it’s a certain Scion.   Scion Panels may have something that does increase their damage dealt though.  

Thanks, all! My questions have been answered. Back to lurking!

According to the art, some cards represent acrtions by different Scions, but this has no effect in play.

As Powerhound said, they're not like the Sentinels with each card having varying effects depending on who's around. They're just horrible to and for everyone.

Super belated, but after some of us got to look at the art, I realized it's the wrong year being referenced to be the first human flight, and one of the RoD folks further dug up that she's interested in when Pike Industries first started becoming corrupt.

Aside: A bit sad there isn't prints for Orchestrate the Void or Form the Mecha-Knight, I'd go for either.

Also I think Idealist is a good contender for Flavor MVP between her deck and her OA stuff.

On the subject of Missions: I know we have several that, story-wise, really seem to focus on one character or another (Arataki for Haka, or the Hairdryer for Wraith, for example) - do we have any that are built for Legacy, Tachyon, or Luminary? The first two are a couple of my favourite characters (and I already know what we're getting for Fanatic :P ) and I'm very excited for the third, so I'd love it if there were extra story stuff around them.

Not strictly an OblivAeon spoiler but it's from the vriant pack:

Nice quintych of the X-Treme Prime Wardens

None are Luminary specific.  Tachyon has only one I recall directly involving her with the OblivAeon shard.   Legacy doesn’t have any that directly involve him but a few rewards are versions of him from another universe.  

Ooh, cool! I remember Lucky Break (or whatever Setback!legacy’s name was) but I’ll look forward to seeing the others!

Lucky Strike

Actually, it is Lucky Break for the OA Setback; Lucky Strike was the Quando? Ahora! Setback.

The other Legacy-equivalents are El Mejor Legado and maybe Everyman?

Aside: To possibly go with El Mejor Legado, there is one card in the OblivAeon deck "Unbracing Smite" which interests me because it has what looks to be more human versions of Medico and Writhe, with flavor text from "El Curador" in the "Centinelas".

In somewhat related news, I received my tracking number for Oblivaeon last night.

It's currently at the FedEx facility in Vandalia, about 10 minutes from my house, awaiting delivery on Monday.

Excitement intensifies!

(Edit--For reference, I was backer number #462.)

Can someone clarify what the final paragraph of Oblivaeon's "The Abyss Stares Back" card means for me please? I'm finding the wording choice a little odd.

If this card is ever revealed or discarded, put this card into play, then move Oblivaeon and all heroes to the other battle zone.

What's confusing me is whether the paragraph is activated if the card is played from the top of the deck under normal circumstances; this seems like it counts as being "revealed", but then the "put this card into play" part of the text seems to suggest that it doesn't. My gaming group was split on whether to move Oblivaeon and the heroes or not, so a rule clarification would be helpful. Thanks!

It sounds like a way for the card to enter play no matter what - if it gets played normally, it's fine. If it gets revealed or discarded it enters play anyway, and then everyone runs away from it. Since both "reveal" and "discard" are official game-terms then yeah, what I mean is that you only move everyone if it would've been either of those things, not if it just gets played/put into play normally.

"Revealed" has game meaning. When something says to Reveal a card from the deck and this is that card, this text triggers. Playing a card from the deck does not Reveal the card in a game context (even if it does from a  colloquially ). 

Thanks, that's perfect. I did check the glossary but I didn't see an entry for "Revealed", hence the confusion.

I want to let people know that I received a FedEx tracking number. My scheduled deliver date is 8/3. I am East Coast US who ordered basically everything included the collectors case. I was backer number 2444 for reference. 

I received mine the other day. We played today.

Akash'Thriya, Santa Guise, Temi-Nation Unity, and The Adamant Sentinels. In the third form, the first three died at once and were replaced by Tachyon, La Comodora, and Redeemer Fanatic. We beat him not long after. This was our first game, but it did take almost five hours.

We got really lucky and flipped his invulnerable card after the first round thanks to Akash'Thriya starting with Accelerate Nature's Order in hand.

The missions are great, though if you manage to complete a few, your characters can start to get a lot to do on their turn (think Omnitron-X when he has everything out. Not quite as bad as a fully set-up Argent Adept though).

We got quite lucky several times, but found OblivAeon a little easy until the third form. We had Nixious and Sanction as the starting Scions, and got out Dark Mind and Voidsoul in the second and third forms respectively.

It can be difficult to keep track of the different combat zones.

But overall it was a lot of fun. We all really enjoyed it. :)

After, I think, a little over five years of lurking on these here forums, I just had to create an account to give a solid thumbs up to the collectors box.

WHAT A PIECE OF BEAUTY!!

It looks so stylish and amazing. It is functional and sturdy (though a chore to carry around).
I'm thinking of putting it on permanent display in the living room.

oh beautiful box
your geeky content contained
within your drawers

the content is also nice...

Oh well, enough daylight for me, back to the shadows.

Has anyone who has gotten their shipments get the Villain Foil Pack?   It should have alternate art for the Scions and Team Villains.   The standalone villains would have the same art as the current Villain Oversized Pack. 

I could be very wrong here, but I'm pretty sure the Scions/OblivAeon booklet use the same art as in the expansion, just foiled up.

Vengeance villains did have new art, though.

That’s a bit disappointing if the Scions and OblivAeon booklet all have the same art.  

Glad to have you here, fuzzy_dunlop! Welcome! 

Same art as the previous oversized cards, just foiled up. OblivAeon arts are the same. This is what we were told would be the case during the Kickstarter.

I’m not finding any update that says the Scions wouldn’t have new art but regardless you’ve confirmed what I wanted to know.  

Took 3 hours, but i just got everything transferred into the new box.

… and damn, is it heavy! I’m going to have to find some really stable shelf space for this!

I recommend the floor. The case is 35 lbs when full.

It's increasingly looking like we're going to donate my wife's old stereo/boom box (which she's had since high school and currently gathers dust in our game room), and have OblivAeon take its spot.  They're about the same size, all told...

Ours is living on the floor in our spare bedroom for now, so I fully endorse this statement.

Has anyone found the Cthulhu in the art yet?

"The" Cthulhu? Void Guard and the OblivAeon decks have more tentacles than a calamari buffet.

Especially Nixious, who should ideally be nuked from orbit.

I just got done unboxing everything. Holy cow the collector case is everything I wanted it to be. Time will tell how durable the front flap will be, but it’s such a great thing to have to roundout my collection. Just need to hunt down an original Young Legacy and an original Redeemer Fanatic!

Well, Mordengrad and the Nexus both sound like they have great plot stuff going on! Also: Infinitor :,(

My gigantic OblivAeon box arrived today.  Lots of fun stuff in there.  I'm just now starting to go through it all to make sure the new accessories I'll be posting to my site match the final product.

I'm sad to say the Collector's Box is just too ridiculously big and heavy.  It's too deep to fit elegantly on any of my shelves, and when full is much too heavy to be regularly hauled from said shelf to the table.  As much as it pains me to say it, I think I'll be donating it to my FLGS to see if they can find it a good home where it will be loved it like it should be loved.  I'll be sticking with a standard white 4-column card box plus a shoebox for the printed accessories as a much more practical storage solution.

I just barely got everything unpacked & sorted yesterday, so I haven't really been able to look through much yet.

The thing I did notice is that we somehow missed the individual members of the Ennead having oversized cards. This makes me sad.

There's also a small typo in the comic book which also makes me sad.

Off to work at school registration & then do some pre-term work on getting my classroom straightened up and in order, but maybe I'll be able to look through cards tonight. Tomorrow's probably one of not-very many times that the box is going to leave my house. (Rabit, when/if you figure out your strap/carrying technique, let us know?)

Got this yesterday. No time for Oblivaeon, but we did play a normal game with the new heroes.

Luminary is -so- perfect flavor wise. It's liberating just throwing his devices out and he doesn't care if they get destroyed because it's all feeding back into THE MASTER PLAN - playing incredibly destructive Doomsday devices. Conversely, the female alt-universe Luminary wants to keep them out for her power (and luckily, they aren't hard to get back out). I love Luminary. He's not complex, but he's fun.

Also having all 3 of his blade bots (whatever they are really called, we're going to call them blade bots) out all attacking every turn can just get to silly levels of destruction. With La Commodora's +1 damage buff out, All According to Plan, and devices to spare, they're essentially swinging for 10 damage apiece... yeowch.

For the comic, one thing that would have made it a little better for me would have been having the Xtreme Prime Wardens fight with the regular Prime Wardens, before both sets join the Void Guard in the fight. Especially a little banter between the two Fanatics, e.g., PW Fanatic: "You know it's a little hard to take the other me seriously when she looks like she's dressed for the beach".

I like how three villains were "invited", while Luminary and La Commadora showed themselves in.

I am myself one original Young Legacy short of owning everything ever; managed to track everything else down. My PS printed proxy of Young Legacy is very pretty, but I KNOW it's not the real deal…

Someday…

Question for completionists.    Do you consider your collection complete if you have the Chrome character cards or do you still feel the urge to have the non-chrome reprints as well.   I have every original variant(even Young Legacy) and I got the Chrome ones,  I did not order the standard set of all of them as well but now I am hearing Completionist Guise is different in that one from the other two versions.  ARG!!!  Damn my need to be complete!!!

I also need to finally donate the $20 and get my Kvothe and Kvothe chrome card

Honestly, I'm probably gonna donate my non-foil promo pack to a fellow gamer, since the art is the same as the foil ones. I do appreciate the alt art for the variants, including the base heroes (and yes, I sometimes just break out my character cards just to look at the art…!). I didn't get the foil Kvothe neither (but I do have the non-foil one though).

I'm surprised, there's very little mechanics discussion here.  Well, I just got my game and haven't read everything yet, but I'll start.

• There doesn't seem to be any point in defeating Scions in Phase 1, and very little point in Phase 2.  In phase 1, they get replaced instantly (although the mechanics on Faultless are unclear).  In phase 2, one gets replaced every OblivAeon turn, so only if you're lucky enough to kill two in one round will you get a round with only one Scion.  Are you meant to just tank them until Phase 3?  (Other than the ones that get more dangerous over time, for whom replacing them is a good idea anyway.)
• OblivAeon "flips" (turns the page) when the Inevitable Destruction countdown reaches 0.  I don't understand this.  You can beat him either by beating him up, or by just letting the destruction happen?  Granted, beating him up is the better option, but I don't understand why you're rewarded for failure.  It seems like you could win by just flipping the shield card once to make him not immune to damage and letting the countdown run out twice, and only then attacking him.
• On the other hand, it looks like in Phase 3, if the countdown ever reaches 0, he starts erasing a hero every round!?  That seems like it's pretty much game over if that ever happens.  Whoever he erases might do a tiny bit of plink damage, but that's it unless they get crazy lucky (Action Hero Stuntman with In Medias Res, maybe).  This seems like a really frustrating, unsatisfying, and unnecessary mechanic.  Maybe it plays differently from how it reads, but it reads badly.
• Speaking of getting removed from the game, I'm unclear on Voss's mechanic.  You don't get a new hero when he kills you, but I can't tell what you do get.  You don't lose your turn, so I'm guessing you can still change zones and use an incap ability.  If I were reading this strictly, I might even infer that, since your hero doesn't get replaced, they become a normal incapped hero per the normal rules, and thus you'd get two incap abilities (one from your existing roster of dead heroes, one from the one Voss killed).  I'm assuming you don't just get removed from the game, that's counter to Christopher's design philosophy.
• Am I crazy or, if you're critically low on HP and it looks like Voss is about to usurp OblivAeon, it's a good idea to commit suicide so you get a fresh character before he can kill you off for good?
• Now for heroes.  I don't understand how Ahash'Thriya is supposed to work.  It seems like her main schtick is to put stuff in the environment deck and then making the environment play or discard a lot, but environments are, much more often than not, bad news for the heroes.  She has a bit that mitigates this, but not much.  Using her to play the whole environment deck sounds like a really, really bad idea.  And the Spirit of the Void variant doesn't look like it can make much use of her Seeds at all--without her main default power, she has a couple of ways of getting Seeds into the environment deck, but not many.  And at 3 HP, I don't see them sticking around long enough to make much use of the attack.
• La Comodora confuses me, too.  So much of her stuff requires her to discard cards to keep them active, but she doesn't get much card draw.  I haven't played her yet, obviously, but looking at her deck I don't understand how she's sustainable.
• Similarly, Lifeline has a lot of self-damage and not much to mitigate it.  I'm not sure how he's sustainable either.

That's all my questions for now.  Luminary looks surprisingly fun for a Complexity 1, and Harpy makes perfect sense (though I'm unclear on the strategy, I'll figure it out).  Champion Studios is hilarious and I really want to hear the story(ies) behind it.  Haven't gone through the rest yet.

I can answer some of your questions:

-Each scion you defeat has an immediate reward for beating it and let’s you remove a devastation token. Removing devastation tokens is really useful because that’s the primary mechanism OblivAeon uses for destroying environments and winning the game.

-If you fail to defeat OblivAeon on any page before the countdown reaches zero the game OblivAeon moves on to his next stage anyway. This speeds up the game. However, you will want to defeat OblivAeon on each side if you are able; failure puts you at a major disadvantage in the next stage.

-If the countdown reaches zero on phase 3… that’s really bad! You don’t instantly lose, but you’re going to probably lose in a round or two. If OblivAeon is low on HP, you have 1 last chance to take him out. Otherwise, it’s up to you whether you go out fighting or quit and accept the destruction of the entire multiverse.

-You can kill your hero to refresh before Voss takes over… it’s up to you whether you think it’s worth the loss of set-up. Sometimes it is but often its probably not worth it.

-Akash does accelerate the environment deck but she also adds to it and has amazing environment destruction. Over the course of the game this allows her to really change it’s tempo. She’s definitely one of the harder heroes to get the hang of but she can be really strong. Her promo is much stronger than the base version early in the game but the base version has the edge long term. I personally prefer the base version but power level wise they are probably similar overall.

-I actually think La Comodora’s card draw is really good. I find her to be an incredibly powerful and incredibly versatile hero. I find hand size to generally be less of a factor than set up speed.

-Lifeline can be played in a bunch of different ways as well. He deals himself a ton of damage but has increadible power to compensate… if you like Hunter and Hunted, you’ll love Cosmic Immolation.

If Voss has usurped OblivAeon's power, environment cards that bring you back from the dead work the regular way.

First form: Get rid of OblivAeon's shield. Once that happens, he flips to his next form. There is only one shield I don't ever want to use, because phase two automatically incaps all heroes in that zone when the shield is removed from the game, and that's one for a difficulty 2 Scion. All the others are OK. Plus, once any shield is on its second side you can hurt OblivAeon's first form. I mean granted, this is the end of the multiverse, so you really shouldn't get too attached to anyone, still . . .  losing all heroes in a battle zone isn't worth drawing that shield.

Second form: beat him up.

Third form: beat him up. This form eliminates the hero with the lowest HP and the environment when the countdown as it zero.

So, who's doomed by canon besides the Ennead, Freedom Six, Nightmist, Ra Donald Blake, and Omnitron? One mission card suggests Infinitor is doomed by canon. La Commadora is probably doomed by her extremely old age.

For some reason. while they're both devout Catholic girls, I imagine Xtreme Prime Wardens Fanatic "swears like a sailor".

For all the folks who played at cons and said that they took 3 hours just to flip OblivAeon to page 2, it sure looks a lot easier now.  Some shields can be eliminated in 1 round with the right setup, although some can be really tricky with particular hero and environment combinations.

I'm wondering if a playtester can chime in about why OblivAeon Shard was changed from the playtest version we saw (simply "Double all damage dealt by this hero").  I was concerned about arithmetic order of operations, and I suppose a lot of the new heroes with self-damage would hate it.  It only just occurred to me how many of the new heroes do have at least some self-damage.  Is it all of them, even?  I can't think of an exception.

LOL

Dunno if intentional, but that’s Thor’s old comics alter ego. Ra is Blake Washington Jr.

Anubis is easy to forget for that list. Infinitor does sacrifice himself to save his brother. La Comodora winds up stuck outside time, possibly forever (for whatever that means when one is outside time), but the existence of other Singular Entities plus what clues we have on Prime War leave that as hypothetical rather than a certainty.

This expansion has two extrem for me:

Akash'thrya is by a large margin my favorite hero deck ever! I love what she does why the environment, and Akash'flora can be a crazy powerup to achieve victory.

But on the other hand of the spectrum, there is The Harpy. Oh my ... I tried her twice, and did nothing. The token mechanic seems great in theory but didn't work for me all, I just played the Birds, the numerology card and played to card of decks... because I didn't see what else I could do. There is only one deck that I hate, this one.

A good surprise was Lifeline, his presentation seemed pretty 'meh', nothing to make me dream, but I changed my mind after seeing his deck.

Luminary and La Comodora are both fun, but the later needs to comprehend the rules well enough to exploit her card as best as possible.

Both 5 environment are cool and fun to play.

All in all, we got a lot of incredible environments and hero deck ... And the Harpy...

Yeah, Marvel dropped the Thor alter ego entirely for the movies. I think Anubis is missing, whereas the Ennead and Ra only leave their artifacts. But who knows, Tachyon and Unity could build a device to connect realities. 

They did at least make a reference to it in the first Thor film; it was Jane’s ex boyfriend.

Anubis dies as well. The RPG setting has a new bearer of the Rod of Anubis (Blake Washington’s old assistant, Marty).

Since OblivAeon was responsible for the Shattering of the Timelines that made inter-reality and time travel possible, Unity and Tachyon (or any other “normal” character) would not be able to do so following his defeat. The way is shut until some other extremely powerful being(s) change that status quo again (this wouldn’t/shouldn’t stop you from saying otherwise at your own table, of course).

I read somewhere that all games of Sentinels of the Multiverse are considered canon, so if I want Luminary to face Baron Blade in Mordengrad, that happens. Actually, running mirror matches is going to be fun. Just like Omnitron v. Omnitron on Omnitron.

• I think fighting the Scions is still valuable - OblivAeon has 2 cards in his deck that Summon an extra one, and The Scion deck has 3. Letting them build up seems like a problem. You get a reward for defeating them which varies in strength, and there’s are definitely Scions that look easier to deal with than others (although the more you flip, the more likely you are to hit Voss, who seems bad in pretty much any situation possibly to the extent that I’d argue he should maybe be difficulty 4? If there’s an opportunity to take him out earlier, it should probably be taken. Not sure about Faultless- I only play digitally so I’ll wait and see how it’s handled in the digital game, but if Faultless isn’t replaced when he flips that feels like a pretty big advantage for the heroes, when arguably his reward is pretty big as well. I’m of the view that he should be replaced when he flips, but I’ll wait and see.

• I was initially a little confused by this mechanic, but I think it makes sense in terms of keeping the game tighter and more interesting to the players, and prevents something stalling the whole game. This way, you either ‘win’ a phase, or lose it - if you win it, you go through to the next one in a stronger position, if you lose it, you lose a ‘life’ (Environment deck) and take some damage. Essentially damage to heroes is much less valuable than it is to regular Villain decks, as instead of being reduced to an incap ability, you get to start again with a new hero. Your set up is gone, but you start off with access to some additional stuff from your old hero. In this way, it’s essentially just a race against the clock, so ‘losing’ a phase is a fairly major set back in my opinion…

• Phase 3 is essentially the end game. If you start getting heroes and environments erased, you are about to lose. You either pull it together and win, or he finishes off the last few environments and wins. I think it’s just the Escalation that this final step calls for - you are out of time. If you did well up to this point, you have a little more time, but essentially you need to hurry up because the game is ending. Not sure whether he still removes a hero if there are none there though usually stuff is a little clearer if it works everywhere, but this uses ‘remove the hero with the lowest he from the game’ which could be referring to wherever they are, but could just be referring to the fact that all their cards are gone…

• I think the idea with Voss is that it becomes more like a regular villain fight, although with 2 zones and everything else. As it doesn’t say anything other than you don’t get a new hero, I assume you get all the incaps of heroes you have lost, and get to use one of them a turn?

• I think this potentially would give you an advantage, but there is a penalty to heroes dying, and a tempo loss in terms of setting up your next hero, but it’s something to consider if you are doing really well in phase 3…

• I haven’t played with any of the new heroes yet, but Akash Thyia seems to work on the basis that she chokes the environment a bit - you gum it up with your cards and it’s affect is more limited. Other 2 I’m not sure about yet.

Akash'Thriya just shoves a whole load of seeds into the Environment deck and then has a whole load of ways to play/discard the top card and/or shuffle said deck, meaning once you have a few seeds in there you can arrange things so that they keep getting played instead of the actual Environment cards, and if any unpleasant cards do get played, you can usually insta-nuke them fairly easily. Takes a few turns to set up, perhaps, but eventually you have super-good control over the deck. Regarding the seeds themselves, some of them do things when they enter play (so it doesn't matter too much if they then get destroyed) and some do things when they're destroyed. I think there are a couple that do things at the start/end of your turn but I can't remember. And Akash'Flora (the tree) is just generally really good and worth keeping out for as long as possible (not generally too difficult due to its healing and the fact it has no max hp). And there is a card that searches for it, so you're not entirely reliant on hoping it shows up. Oh, and Akash'Thriya herself starting with 50hp seems amazing, but in my experience you'll lose about half of that in the first couple of turns if only thanks to bad stuff hitting the Hero target with the highest hp ;).

Four of the five seeds do something on entering play from the environment deck. All of them do something on destruction. The only one that does something during play is the one that does nothing on being played (Technically if you don't play it from the environment deck it's destroyed, but I imagine we're talking about positive effects).

You are also correct that Akash can easily lock down the environment deck once set up, especially the base version. Spirit of the Void tends to treat her seeds more as grenades.

Because doubling damage leds to ridiculous damage totals. 42 point Lightspeed Barrages? 4*2 damage to X targets, doubled, from the Mecha-Knight? A T. Rex Bot dealing 18 damage?

 [quote =MindWanderer ]I was concerned about arithmetic order of operations, and I suppose a lot of the new heroes with self-damage would hate it.  It only just occurred to me how many of the new heroes do have at least some self-damage.  Is it all of them, even?  I can't think of an exception. [/quote]

Luminary cares not for your self-damage, his damage is all directed at those who deserve it… THE WORLD!

Yeah. I regret that this shield made it through in this form. It's great for that first time feels "Wow! This guy isn't messing around" but it's really crappy gameplay wise after that.

Damn. I realised after reading this that I'd been playing that part completely wrong - I'd mistakenly thought the instruction was that Oblivaeon damaged heroes and then if nobody took any damage then he'd add tokens and replace a missing scion. I now see that the replace a missing scion part is an entirely separate clause and not dependent on whether damage was taken.

I would have to agree that this makes taking out scions seem counterproductive as the rewards for doing so aren't particularly great and, especially if you've seeded the deck like it suggests in the instructions, you're going to be getting a harder replacement.

Incidentally, am I misremembering it or did Christopher say in one of the updates that you were only likely to see a few scions per game? Unless you deliberately avoid taking out scions (which doesn't seem like it's intended as some get harder the longer they are out, like Borr) it feels like you're bound to see an absolute minimum of four of them per game.

Surely the trick is to try and set it up so that only one hero is incapacitated? The point of them all seems to be to break your rhythm a bit and make you pay a cost - this one seems like one of the easier ones to me. The black / purple one that deals each hero 2 + H damage every time they move next to OblivAeon at stage 1 and then have to discard a bunch of cards to keep the environment getting cards in play all while fighting Progeny seems pretty hard to me!

One more thought on the moving to the next phase mechanics - I do wish that defeating the first form’s 10,000 HP counting as a loss is a bit of a shame. Clearly the intention, and the easier option is almost certainly to complete the shield cards, but if someone is crazy enough to manage to chew through all that HP without losing I think they should get rewarded for it, rather than punished

Anyone got a prediction for challenge mode OblivAeon? Deal with all 5 shield cards in order (including ‘Bring forth x!’) before moving on to stage 2? If the countdown reaches zero, you don’t flip to the next page unless you’re on the last Shield, you just discard the current Shield card?

I have scheduled an OblivAeon game for a convention this November, and though I only doubled the box's maximum time to account for setup, mishaps, and rules clarifications I can guarantee will crop up the post where it took players three hours to get OblivAeon to flip to his second form made me think I should have asked for six hours instead of four.

I understand giving the feeling of urgency/playing for keeps, but I think a "ha ha, quiznak you!" effect should go on a higher level shield.

Challenge mode OblivAeon, prompt from video game "What are you, insane? I thought it was a nice multiverse, but if you insist . . . "

I think the idea behind OblivAeon destroying the environment if you wear down his 10,000 HP is that it shouldn't be possible, you shouldn't even have the time to do it. You broke the reality, which is exactly what he wants. In other words, you helped him break the multiverse.

Oh yeah. Scholar sacrifices himself to save Guise too, for another “doomed” character.

I definitely think that’s the easiest of the Shield Cards - you should be able to set things up so that the shield breaks on his 3rd turn at worst. If your Heroes = 3 or 4 he should actually flip his Shield card before any of your heroes do anything, as he should play 3 Aeon men in Battle Zone 2, then move there and make them and your second Scion damage themselves. That means you plan to sacrifice a single hero who has had 1-2 turns of set up only on the next turn, and you can all move onto his second form without much trouble.

When compared to the others:

The Progeny one requires at least Hero number of heroes to move to where OblivAeon is, which relies on him moving first turn if you want to trigger it, and because he deals the damage does 5-7 damage to anyone triggering it, and then requires keeping 3 Environment cards in play while he destroys them, which is dependent on a number of factors and potentially discarding cards which hurts you more going forward.

The Nixious one isn’t too bad on the flip side, but requires getting Environment cards in the trash on the front which is going to depend on the environment again and generally require a few turns to set up.

The Aeon Master one has a couple of tricky conditions related to Aeon Men - Build up enough first while OblivAeon creates and destroys them, the clear them out without using powers!

The Void Soul one is also quite dependent on what mission cards you get on the front (although admittedly will give you good set up for the rest of the fight if you complete them) and then requires a pretty big attack to go through on OblivAeon. Not impossible, but more hero / card dependent. 

What I quite like about the Borr one, is that it kind of solves itself pretty fast and while losing a hero is a huge cost, it’s impact on the overall fight is probably lower (especially as early as it comes) than some of these others.

Phase 1 of the Borr shield only flips if H hero targets damage themselves, not any target. Aron Men and Scions damaging themselves don’t count. I’ve played twice and had a heck of a time getting through the first side of the shield, because it has been hard to coordinate the heroes being in the same zone as OblivAeon...his cards or scions cards or destruction of Aeon Locus move OblivAeon around in ways I can’t seem to control. It sort of feels like trying to set up for Losing to the Odds with Wager Master...

I’ve found this shield difficult for that reason.

I missed hero on that card - that does make it hard, although I would argue still a fair amount easier than some of them.

Yeah—I haven’t tried the other shields yet!

Borr’s shield gets a whole lot easier if you have The Sentinels around.

Unless I missed it somewhere, I'm disappointed that the Chrono-Expatriette/Fanatic cross wasn't used in game. Though it might be a bit confusing with beating Hellion/Evil Fanatic to gain Seraph/Apostate Fanatic.

Although I know the joke would be dated terribly fast, I'm slightly disappointed none of Lifeline's cards has the flavor text "Will you stop asking me if you can phone a friend?"

Finally received my ultimate collector's case and found everything in tip-top condition. Seeing the box firsthand confirms how much love went into designing and crafting the thing!

Unfortunately, as others have already commented, the box is far too large - it would fare better, I think, to be taller (with more drawers) instead of deeper. In an alternate universe, I envisage a case made up of three boxes vertically-stacked (like a tiffin carrier). First tier for heroes, environments, rules and tokens. Second tier for normal villains, oversized cards and their decks plus oblivaeon content. Third for team villains, oversized cards and their decks.

Wishful thinking aside: Luckily most of our SotM games are at my place! Now I just need to find a shelf...

Also, I don't sleeve my cards and you'll be surprised how much extra space you're left with when the cards are unsleeved. Logistically-impractical as it may be, this is one of the times when I wish there's a box design for sleevers and another for non-sleevers!

I dunno...I don't sleeve, and I put in all my official cards, then tried the Cauldron decks only to find it all fits perfectly, which was nice :D.

four? Seriously? by the time we lost to OblivAeon in the game we played last night, we had seen all 10 come out.

Something that we were confused on last night with the scions. I do not have them in front of me but some of them said something like: This scion does damage to each of the heroes with the highest number of rewards. Does this mean if we have a tie in rewards all of hte heroes take damage. I feel like this may be a misprint or I am reading it incorrectly and it should just be the highest and not each.

My guess would be that, like many other ways to resolve ties in Sentinels, if there is a tie the players get to pick.

Yes, but rather than "<This Scion> deals X <type> damage to the hero with the most rewards", they read "<This Scion> deals X <type> damage to each hero with the most rewards."

The wording leads me to think if two heroes are tied for the most rewards they both take the damage.

I’m not 100% sure on this one, but I believe the “each” is there do to the Sentinels having 4 hero Character Cards. I believe it indicates that all 4 Sentinels would be hit if they have the most rewards.

But then I feel like it would be each character card in a play area. That each hero feels like if there is a tie then it would have to be on everyone that falls in the tie. Would be nice to get a quick clarification from Christopher on this one

But then I feel like it would be each character card in a play area. That each hero feels like if there is a tie then it would have to be on everyone that falls in the tie. Would be nice to get a quick clarification from Christopher on this one

Does anybody know what the card art from "Maria Helena's Plot" is referencing?  The coordinates are in the midde of a lake in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and a quick internet search doesn't turn up any big bad events that occured December 17, 1923.  Any ideas?

I said four as an absolute minimum - I agree that you're likely to get far more, my point was that I thought it had been officially stated by Christopher that you were only going to see a handful in any one game and that's been far from my experience as I've never had less than six and, like you, have had all ten before. I was just wondering aloud if that had been changed during development or whether there was potentially a bit of a balance issue, as I think the game would be slightly more manageable time-wise if you were only seeing a small number of scions.

The existing way is also ridiculous. La Comodora and The Harpy can do damage an outrageous number of times per turn - I think The Harpy can damage a single target ~20 times in a single turn, so any damage bonuses are huge for her, let alone a bonus that could be +12 or more.

The other balancing act for the shard is pretty much that if a Scion or Oblivaeon is in the same zone as the shard during Oblivaeon's turn or the battlezone's villain turn, all the heroes are probably going to die horribly.

Unless the folks at the other end of the table were mis-reading the card, the one I'm remembering targeted the Hero play area (emphasis mine) with the most rewards, and then damaged everything therein. However, maybe we're talking about different cards.

On the number of scions per game. 

my very first game I saw about 6-7 scions before I even got out of the first page. This was made worse because we kept hitting scions who would die to only be immediately replaced. So I learned that scions dieing before the page turn is always gonna be bad. 

We never finished that game. But we are gonna give it a second shot here in a bit. 

I'm curious how these games are lasting so long, unless there's something I missed somewhere, the only way to move the tracker backward is: during form 1, break OblivAeon's shield, or OblivAeon destroys the environment; Phase two, you beat OblivAeon or he destroys the environment; Phase 3, you beat OblivAeon or he erases a hero from all timelines.

Perhaps I need to look at what you get for beating Scions.

New game mode, a lot more strategy to consider (should I give up a phase to swap battle zones? If so, which one? Do I deal with the current threats or go after a mission instead?) There's a lot to track on the board and remember at any time, especially the first couple of games and you're still learning all the new cards/mechanics and making sure you're catching everything.

2-3 hours is a reasonable length after playing it a lot, and I think some playtesters got there consistently after a while. But honestly, I've played games that went 2-3 hours without making any meaningful progress.

Are people still playing with old rules?  You don't give up a phase to change zones anymore, it's free at the start of your turn.  Doesn't even cost you your mission/incap step.

Looking at the shields, a lot of them look quite easy to do in a couple of rounds if everyone coordinates.  The environment-dependent ones could be tougher, but most of them look quite controllable.  I haven't played yet myself, though.

I did play a few games with some of the new heroes and environments, though.

1. Dark Watch Harpy, Fugue State Parse, Heroic Luminary, and Akash'Thriya vs. Grand Warlord Voss in the Maerynian Refuge.  Although I should probably call that Fugue State Parse and the Maerynian Army vs. Voss, with a bit of help from Harpy.  We managed to get all three Squall Guards and the Lightning Dome out (wasn't even a bad shuffle; a lot of the intervening cards were milled by Akash), and that's 9 automatic damage a round to Voss if he has no minions.  15 with Targeting Arrow, because that happened twice in the four rounds the game took.  And of course Parse prevented Forced Deployment.  So Harpy killed off the minions, and did pump out a lof of damage, but it was hardly necessary.  Luminary's Triple Cross did help with the initial rush, though.
2. La Comodora: Black Spot, Fugue State Parse (she refuses to play anyone but Parse), vanilla Luminary, and Blood Mage Lifeline vs. Challenge Kismet in Champion Studios.  Kismet is really too easy to get much of a feel for; between Parse and Lifeline, she gets shut down pretty hard.  Although Blood Mage's power is really bad against her.
3. Super Sentai Idealist, Fugue State Parse, Luminary, and Benchmark vs. Challenge Omnitron in Mordengrad.  This was notable mostly because of how it ended.  It's Parse's turn.  Omnitron is at 2 HP.  She looks over at Luminary and his robot army.  She looks over at Benchmark and his full stack (9 hardware, 9 software).  She shrugs.  "Idealist, play the bottom card of your deck."  It's Hedgy Hogs!  Omnitron escapes a barrage of lasery death by being cuddled spikily instead.

Thoughts, in no particular order:

• The Maerynian Refuge has the potential to be the most friendly environment in the game.  There's some annoying stuff, but it's mostly either neutral or benign.
• Heroic Luminary suffers from Expatriette Syndrome: She'll probably get some devices, but if she doesn't, she's pretty useless, and she doesn't have a lot of good ways of digging for them.
• At first, playing The Harpy, I tried to balance Magic and Bird so I could make use of whatever cards I drew.  But more of her deck wants to push things over to Birds, so it was hard to get Magic stuff.  And she was plenty effective without it.  Eventually I stopped bothering and went with 4-5 Birds, and just let her be a machine gun.  It worked pretty well but it felt like it was defeating the purpose.
• Akash'Thriya has a crazy long setup time!  By the end of the game she had just barely started playing seeds from the environment.  At least she isn't as vulnerable to ongoing/equipment destruction, but she takes the long game to a new level.  She doesn't have that many HP; she was only highest HP for 2 rounds.
• Luminary's Doomsday Devices are also a lot like Expat's Unload.  They look good, but the chances of one going off before the end of the game aren't great.  La Comodora was even helping him mill his deck.  He still finished with about 10 cards in his trash, both games.  (Heroic Luminary only had 3.)
• La Comodora indeed has severe upkeep problems.  Parse and Bottom of the Ninth gave me extra cards that I had to just sacrifice.  She's a lot like Scholar, only less straightforward and with less card draw.  How is it he got upgraded to a 3 complexity when she's a 2?  Makes no sense.
• Idealist, holy cow, she can be a damage engine!  I had multiple opportunities to bring out Karate Robot, and it deals a mess of damage.  I did need Super Sentai to eat the Monster of Id (which was in my starting hand), but I almost never used it, Karate Robot or Stabby Knives were always better.
• Benchmark is almost too complicated for a normal human to handle.  If Scholar, the Sentinels, and Nightmist are 3's, he's a 4.  Conceptually he's not that hard, there's just so darn much to keep track of.  The person who played him read all his cards in advance and is normally our #2 strategist after myself, but he was totally overwhelmed and I had to keep reminding him of everything he could do (and was obligated to do).

To be fair, I haven't played OblivAeon in months and it changed a lot over its development. Sorry for mispeaking!

Brilliant Inventor helps dig for Devices, Hasten Victory gets an extra play from top of deck, Technologically Stable is a draw and play, and Consider the Price of Defeat also draws a card.   She may not get as many devices but is likely to be effective still.

Luminary's Doomsday Devices are also a lot like Expat's Unload.  They look good, but the chances of one going off before the end of the game aren't great.  La Comodora was even helping him mill his deck.  He still finished with about 10 cards in his trash, both games.  (Heroic Luminary only had 3.)

Unless you’re playing a very short game I’ve regularly triggered at least one Doomsday device.

La Comodora indeed has severe upkeep problems.  Parse and Bottom of the Ninth gave me extra cards that I had to just sacrifice.  She's a lot like Scholar, only less straightforward and with less card draw.  How is it he got upgraded to a 3 complexity when she's a 2?  Makes no sense.

Between Shipshape, Concordant HELM, Timeless Treasure, Rudder in the Timestream, Take Time, and possibly Temporal Rigging she has decent card draw.  You aren’t meant to keep everything out but if you have the Plot out it can make the decision easier for stuff you didn’t want to keep.

Of those, only one does more than replace itself.  Granted, Brilliant Inventor is way better than Arsenal Access, and a card that does replace itself is better than nothing (or one that puts cards from your trash back into your deck), but still, in our very first game, our Heroic Luminary spent multiple rounds double-passing because she had nothing else she could do that was at all productive.  I think maybe I just have bad luck with these sorts of heroes.

Even our long game, enough for Benchmark to get a full 18 cards in play, wasn't enough for Luminary to fire one off.

She has some, but, again, compare to Scholar.  He has a ton of card draw, and he's still clearly intended to keep at most 3 forms in play.  He only has 3 unique forms and 3 copies of each.  Meanwhile La Comodora has substantially less card draw, and 2 copies each of 7 different cards that require the same upkeep (although Timeless Treasure pays for itself, and some of the others can mitigate their own costs).  I don't think she's unplayable, but I think she's substantially harder to manage than Scholar, at least.

I’m not sure what you had in your Luminary game but I’ve never had a game where it was worthwhile to double skip.  He’s proably been one of the more consistent heroes of the group for me.  

Again, this was Heroic Luminary.  Her hand consisted of nothing but Dangerous Vision, Technologically Stable, All According to Plan, and a doomsday device (I forget which one).  There was a gene-bound guard out, so putting down the one device so she could use her power for 1 damage was pointless, and while she could have just played Technologically Stable to cycle it, that's not a superior option to just drawing an extra card.

I can understand for that case but that’s moreso a struggle various heroes have which is sometimes they can’t immediately deal with DR.  What I might suggest though is playing the Doomsday Device and the next turn play Dangerous Vision to get All According to Plan out.   Later on if you still need the device you can get it back with Technologically Stable.  This filters a card out of your deck that you won’t draw a second copy of as well.  I realize that doesn’t get her base power past DR but it takes a card out of your deck and helps towards powering up Doomsday Devices.  It will allow your damaging Devices to get past the DR and if a Quark Drive Transolocator gets destroyed you get to trigger All According to Plan as well. 

How would All According to Plan help there?  She had it in hand already, IIRC, but it does nothing with no devices.  Playing nothing in order to just draw an extra card, given the high probability that such a card would actually be helpful, seems like the best move to me.  And it turned out to be necessary, since it took her four rounds to draw anything useful other than her starting Triple Cross.

I'm not sure I'd agree that La Comodora has substantially less card draw. Concordant Helm is +2 passive card draw every turn, and Shipshape also provides passive draw. Bear in mind that with Rudder in the Timestream you can rig the bottom of your deck to use Weigh Anchor to just reply your destroyed Equipment anyway.

I edited my post to add a bit more.   Anyways, if you had Triple Cross in your opening hand why not play that to get rid of the Guard?

Did that, but after that it became a choice of either play a card that wasn't helpful and do 1 damage, or draw a card.

Seems a worthwhile play to me especially with no DR to deal with.  Luminary when possible should play Devices.  The following turn I’d suggest playing All According To Plan from hand or through Dangerous Vision. 

So we got in our first complete game of Oblivaeon. 

Heroes win. 8 heroes had been defeated, 6/8 Scions defeated (didn’t see Voss), 1 environment removed from game. Took us about 4.5 hours with some brief mental and potty breaks. 

Some notes: 

• The Scion that you can redeem felt great and was a big help during the second Oblivaeon phase. 
• Getting the shield down early is vital.
• rewards and missions continue to be a highlight during gameplay. We each had a few by the end of the game. Once you have a couple you like I found myself using incap powers far more later in game to power through all that Oblivaeon health. 
• Akash is such a weird deck to play against Oblivaeon. It took a crazy long time to get her to a useful place. Her promo card is pretty awesome with the Cursor reward though as it gives her seeds the damage buff even when they are not in her play area
• writhe player struggled to get much of anything cool going. Could be unfamiliar deck or just a bum start hand. Unsure. I haven’t played it myself. 
• Stunman is quickly becoming a group favorite. So many cool moments for the player using the deck. We played him twice during the game. 
• Maybe it was just how the game unfolded, but the group only ever moved battle zones once all game to get next to Oblivaeon to get him to phase two (we had the shield that reduced damage to him on the second side). That was fine because we let Borr and Progeny duke it out alone against Ft Adamant. 
• Any heroes that rely on villain deck manipulation are better off messing with the scion deck we think. It’s more likely to bring out more scions than the Oblivaeon deck. But with at least two plays a round it’s hard to lock it down consistently. 

Didn't leaving a zone with more Scions than Heroes rack up the Devastation tokens too quickly?

As a person who played 20+ games of OblivAeon during testing - my group was able to get in games consistently at 2-3 hours after the first ~3 which were much longer. The first game was 6 hours. However, now that we understand how to face OblivAeon, it has become one of our favorite villains to play.

Also, I think there are a lot of key strategies for OblivAeon which have not yet been commented on in this thread and which are fun to discover. Same thing with many of the new heroes, they have odd mechanics that take some getting used to. Don't give up on La Comodora or Harpy or the others too early! Our group really enjoys all the new heroes. 

Isn’t there a hard cap on the number of turns? I.e. in all stages, OblivAeon moves the countdown towards 1, which and the countdown teaching zero ends the first two phases. If you did well in the first 2 phases, you can have a slightly longer 3rd phase (each environment you’ve saved up to that point gives you an extra turn), but essentially that’s at max 3 turns longer.

Is it just the fact that a lot is happening that adds to the run time so much?

The turns take longer than in a standard Sentinels game (there's more going on), and the total possible number of turns is fairly large.

Played my first game of OblivAeon at GenCon on Sunday in the GtG room!

With 4 players (plus the GM/teacher facilitating the villain/environment turns), we managed a full playthrough in about 2.5 hours.  A win, no less!

Our starting heroes were, in order, Tempest, Fanatic (myself), Akash'Thriya, and Luminary.  Tempest managed to get the Bloodstone early, and Fanatic pulled two Aegises within  her first two turns, which meant that I was able to stay on my feet longer than expected.  Unfortunately, the shuffle of Missions/Rewards didn't really fall to my favor, and I wasn't able to pick up much that was useful for me.  As Ra, I fared a little better, recruiting Omni-Unity and Seraph, which meant my End-of-Turn was particularly damaging.

The first hero down was Akash'Thriya, and the player there was visibly frustrated, complaining "I'm not even doing anything useful..."  ...he then proceeded to pull Lifeline, and proceeded to complain about all the self-damage.  After being eliminated, the player proceeded to say, "I think I've seen all I need to see; I think I'm done," and walked away from the table, leaving our GM/teacher to take over the Hero 3 slot.  I can't tell you much about the Luminary player's game; he was seated at the far end of the table from me and, since we were next to the door, I had trouble hearing him over the crowd noise.

Our final heroes ended up being Tachyon (with 2 hp), myself as Ra, Legacy, and Bunker, the latter of whom *just* joined the game, after La Commodora fell.  MVP of the game was the incapacitated Tempest, who made us immune to the 9999 energy damage hit and, in the following round, immune to two hits of 20 infernal damage as two environments fell in one round.  

We only saw about 5 scions throughout the game:  Voidmind, Dark Soul, Faultless, Sanction, and one other (I think it was Nixious, but can't quite remember.  I got the impression that the GM might have missed a rule or two, as I was expecting more to be showing up, but I certainly wasn't complaining.  

I had no idea what you were talking about so I re-read the rulebook. 

Holy crap you’re right. 

Holy crap that probably would have changed quite a lot. that could have added multiple more rounds to the game. We were already pushing 5 hours as it was.

What are people doing to speed speed up the battle zone phases? It seems like those take so much time in my limited experience. 

Platlock. Old buddy old pal. Tell me your secrets! 

Also, odd question, but if you are afforded extra power uses during your turn, could you choose an incap power in your play area? Or are those sequestered to the special start of turn rules with objectives?

This seems crazy to me. Iv been playing SotM since initial release and I just can’t fathom how you get a game of this in under 3 hours. Where is all that damage coming from when you have to split your party for a lot of phase 2. How don’t you see the majority of the Scion deck which brings a ton of extra scions to bear. Am I just playing more rules incorrectly? I need to know!

Wish I had a better answer for you.  I went into that game fully expecting that we were going to lose.  And, truth be told, there were a number of times where we should have, if we didn't have the right damage-immunity or some other mitigating factor.  This goes double when, effectively, we had a player contributing very little to the fight.

As tempting as the new heroes might be, I'd definitely make your first OblivAeon game start with heroes you know well.  Damage isn't quite so important during Phase 1, outside of keeping the number of Aeon Men down.  From what I'm seeing, if you can situate yourself to have about 15 hp, a few of your own cards on the table and one or two major rewards, you'll be in good shape to go through Phase 2 and into Phase 3.  You might not survive all the way through those, especially if you don't have any sort of damage mitigation, but you'll put the group in good position to take down the Big O.

I'd guess we saw an average of 6 scions per game. I  think the main things are 1) try to beat a lot of missions, as they can dramatically increase your damage output and 2) the decision tree when you first play OblivAoen is huge, there are a ton of things you can do but a lot of them aren't what you should be doing… and you learn which things aren't worth much consideration after a few games. 

Other testers were also able to get their games down around 2-3 hours.  But, it is also probably true that my group plays pretty quickly. 

Incap abilities aren't powers, so no.

Just finished our first game of obliaeon.

He took out 10 heroes and 3 environments, we were down to the last environment with 13 devastation tokens, so at the start of his next turn he would win. luminary, naturalist, la commadora, and lifeline were the last heroes standing. Naturalist did amazing damage. We did have a strange situation where we had all the heroes in one battle zone fighting Borr, and the other had Voss, progeny, faultless and oblivion punching each other. The 999 damage card was in that zone so we just let oblivaeon destroy all the scions. 

Then we we rushed in and unleashed all the damage we could, it was a fantastic finish.

would definitely not play multiple heroes when doing this again, it’s just too much to manage with all the other things.

all in all a solid experience.

Managed to squeeze in a play this weekend since my friend's copy arrived. Mine is delayed because of signing troubles apparently (grumble mumble)

We won, and won hard. First note, looking back we realised we forgot to factor in the "OblivAeon's damage is increased by H" in the first phase for a couple of plays that probably would have ended up incapping someone, but it was too hard to rewind as we were in the next Scion Phase by then. That was my bad, as we had 4 players and me "playing" OA, Scions, and Environments just to keep track of everything. But anyway.

Grandpa Legacy, F6 Tachyon, PW AA, and Tempest laid a mega smackdown on Big O. Started with the Bringer of Foes and Aeon Master, and only "stacked" the scions in that we put Voss on "top" so we never saw him. Missions were being completed left and right, sometimes on the same turn as they were gained. AA turns were taking 15-20 minutes just with the amount of shenanigans he was throwing around by the end. Heroic Interceptions and hypersonic Assaults made the Scion turns and OblivAeon damage laughable. Damage boosts on Tempest with the many, many, many additional card plays or powers meant he was wiping Battlezones and bringing OblivAeon down real quick. A Take-Down on Phase 3 meant the heroes could stand next to OA and just wail on him without fear of more card draw. Legacy gaining the Shard with 10 tokens and other rewards that dealt damage meant he brought down OblivAeon with a 60+ damage turn. Took about 4 hours.

Also my friend made up these little health spinners for the Scions/Heroes/OA. Really helped keep the tokens from being too short.

~Komori

Now some questions I had from that session:
1. Someone like Sanction says "Whenever a hero gains an Objective" - This still only counts for a hero gaining an Objective In the same battlezone, correct?

2. Voidsoul: Assuming they flip (complete an objective I think?), they do various bad things. Then at the end of their End of Turn text, it says to flip them back over. Since it is still "End of Turn", they then proceed to do the front side End of Turn text, correct? That seems like a lot of shenanigans each turn, assuming you're finishing objectives.

3. Is there a reason to not just let Scions chill in their own battlezone beyond gaining the Devastation Tokens? There were several rounds where everyone was in Zone 1 with OA and Zone 2 had 3 Scions, and I would say "Start of Turn add tokens, Scions try to do damage to nothing, play a card, they try to do damage to nothing, end of turn, more damage to nothing. Moving on!"

~Komori

Adding 3 Devastation Tokens a turn feels fairly major from my perspective (as someone who hasn’t played it) - 4 turns of just that (and it seems a number of other factors add tokens) and you lose an environment…

That is often a good strategy (and speeds up the game). Sometimes the devastation is worse than what the scions would do to you, however. 

I imagine if you get 3 scions in one zone, you might want to just let them chill there for a while.  They'll tear you apart pretty badly, and they add tokens based on how many there are, not how badly they outnumber you.  It's a huge cost either way, but sometimes there's not a lot you can do.

One of the variant battlezone rulesets I tried out in testing was that getting incapped gave you 2 devastation, defeating a scion removed 2 devastation, and scions gave you 2 devastation for each scion greater than the number of heroes in a BZ (like you said, based on how badly they outnumber you). I liked the incentives that ruleset created - splitting the heroes across BZ was often a good play, there was a greater incentive to avoid getting incapped, and a greater incentive to defeat the scions. 

@PlatinumWarlok, OblivAeon wasn't the Akash/Lifeline player's first ever game of Sentinels, was it? Given your story, it sounds like this person wasn't used to Sentinels of the Multiverse at all.

Nope.  He had played at least a few times before, if not quite often.  But yeah, he seemed quite put off at the idea that a hero deck might take some degree of set up time or gasp might even self-damage…

I'll be honest, my first game was with Setback and the fact that he does worsen things is what pulled me in. Heck yes, I want a superhero game where the heroes have flaws.

Sounds like someone who definitely should not have been playing OblivAeon yet. There's a reason I listed my convention game as 3C (code for "Lots of experience, complex rules"). For a team villain games, I'd drop it to 2B ("some rules knowledge, moderate complexity"), and most regular games would be 1A ("No experience necessary, easy rules"). Hopefully that player isn't put off playing Sentinels of the Multiverse because of his experience.

Yeah, I really don't know.  He'd obviously played before; he had no questions about basic mechanics or how the game works.  He didn't need any instruction on turn order or the like, he understood the basic structure of the game, and he didn't ask many questions.  Despite this, he seemed really put off at the idea that most of Akash'Thriya's cards involve a degree of self-damage.  And, since he wasn't focused accelerating environment plays to get the deck reshuffled, he left underwhelmed with the character overall.

Even still, I look at it like, "if you're not happy with that character, that's fine.  They're about to die anyway.  Pick one that you know you like and can play well, so you can contribute."  Nope, went right back to the well with Lifeline.  shakes head

I think I want to add a line to either my description or notes to the convention team: Must have played at least 50 games of Sentinels of the Multiverse, at least 5 against Complexity 4 villains, and at least 5 Team Villain games.

Yes, I agree, trying out a hero you haven't used before to take on OblivAeon is a bad idea. Then again, even some earlier heroes can have bad opening hands (e.g., Expatriette with nothing but Ammo cards) or be swingy (either version of Setback).

For the seven villains fighting as heroes (though I have no idea who Benchmark was), it's probably best to use them in "mirror matches" first.

Benchmark wasn't a villain at any point.  Though he's backed by RevoCorp. 

On Shipshape is there some combo I'm missing when it comes to its second half? Drawing a card when you discard was great so I was glad I got it out but what's the point of putting a card in play back on your deck then imediately playing it? The only card I saw in her deck that benefitted from this was Paradoja Figurehead, to get a second one back to your play aread. Is that it? Outside of some other effect like Realm of Discord that giving your stuff health.

I’ll quote Dandolo from another thread about it

Ah! Thank you. I was looking for a less subtle interaction but that all makes sense. Not sure why I didn't think of that, I grasped Benchmark's Overhaul Loadout immediately for that purpose but not here. Might have been that I only got 2 turns with her before OblivAeon's Guise Jelly card prematurely ended my first play as her. 

The source of foes shield, do you have to destroy 4 aeon men in one turn or in a round? Seems almost a typo for it to be 4 in a turn

They're pretty flimsy.  4 in a turn is quite doable, just not right off the bat.

If on Oblivaeon on his first phase, the countdown reaches 0, will Oblivaeon destroy the shield or will it stay?

when it hits the countdown goes to 0, do we remove the devastation tokens?

I seem to recall that's explained on Oblivaeon's character pages - from what I remember (can't be arsed to dig it out of the box right now), whenever the Countdown hits zero, that blows up an environment and flips him to his next page (unless he's already at Phase Three, of course, in which case only bad things happen :P). Not sure about the shield but it'll say on the shield card if it doesn't say on Oblivaeon's page.

General SotM rule: if it doesn’t say you don’t do something, you don’t do it. Tokens are only reset when you hit 12. The shield only goes away when you compete the task described on it.

You lost me there. How would adding more destruction tokens have made you play “multiple more rounds”? More devastation tokens equals more frequent environment destruction, which means less available rounds, especially in phase 3, not counting the 20 infernal damage AoE when Oblivaeon destroys the environment. 

It’s “turn”. Either a single hero or a Scion or the environment has to kill 4 of them in his/her/its own turn. 

Mind you that Oblivaeon plays Aeon Men in the other battle zone while destroying the ones where he is, so he may end up flipping his shield. 

I don’t know if this is intentional in this variant rule or if you just misread the standard rule, but usually you add 1 token for each Scion in the zone if you’re outnumbered, not 1 for each Scion outnumbering heroes (i.e. you add 3 tokens if you have 3 Scions and 2 heroes in a zone)

Trying out new heroes, picking one with an “odd” new mechanic, when apparently you don’t even like the idea of self-inflicted damage is always something to carefully consider and face it with an open mind; which that payer clearly did not. 

Doing so in the first Oblivaeon game of your life requires even more open-mindedness.

I’ve triggered Aegis of Resurrection countless times with Fanatic’s self inflicted damage, so I’m definitely not scared about it. Apparently that person has played a few Sentinels games but only using a couple of heroes, maybe the most straightforward ones.

Definitely not in the right mood to try new things.

Set up a game :

Akash'Thryia / Lifeline / Luminary VS Omnitron in the Nexus of the Void.

Omnitron and Luminary have interesting interactions ... Since to win against Omni NO device must be in play.

I guess Omni learn some hacking skills.

I think he meant that playing without that rule could have added multiple more rounds. 

@Tootzo, I think I may want to add a line. "This is not the time to play a hero you haven't used before. Use who you know." While I understand your opinion, I think OblivAeon games are the wrong time to learn a hero you haven't used.

I have some questions about the OblivAeon fight:

1. If Voss is not in the same zone as OblivAeon, can Voss's end of turn attack still hit OblivAeon?
2. If Voss is not in the same zone as OblivAeon, can Voss's flip side effect activate when OblivAeon would otherwise be defeated?
3. If a player has a reward character and it runs out of HP, where does it go?
4. If a player has a reward equipment, and an equipment destroying effect destroys it, where does it go?
5. Can you add an old reward card to your empty hand during the time when your last character has been incapacitated and you intend to add a new character at the end of your turn?

No.  Voss cannot reach OblivAeon to hit him.

Yes.  Winning the game is not something that happens in one zone or the other.

To that player's trash.

To that player's trash.

I'm not sure why old reward cards would go to your hand, but no.  All your reward cards immediately go under the incapacitated hero's character card.

You don’t get back up at the end of your turn after incapacitation, it’s the very end of the turn you were incapacitated on. Which I suppose it could technically happen that your hero is dead in time for the start of turn actions if you’re using the Arc of Unreality and just splatter like a fly on a windshield against it. More of a weird edge case than something likely to happen though. In the event it does occur I’d guess the answer is that no, you can’t add a reward to your hand because then you wouldn’t have a hand to add it to.

I have some answers!

1. I don't believe it specifies that it can cross zones so no it cannot hit OblivAeon.
2. Yes, because there is still a card in play with a "meta" condition that stops the game being won.
3. The card belongs to the hero so it goes to the hero's trash pile.
4. The card belongs to the hero so it goes to the hero's trash pile.
5. I don't know! I don't remember that coming up before.

EDIT: Whoops! Did not see the answer over the page, oh well.

A few OblivAeon suggestions (several already covered in this thread)

1.  Play heroes you know really well and that don't take long to build up.  The game is complex, throw down fast and hard.
2.  Try to get the mechanical rules down first.  Read the rules that are universal and try to get them working right.  they keep the game moving more than the cards that get played.
3.  Divide up responsibilities.  Have less rules savy players run environments, have one person take OblivAeon, one take the Scion pile and top of scion pile card.  This really helps keep the mechanics going without over-stressing one person's brain.  If you have to run it all yourself you are going to miss a ton of stuff and end up with a headache.
4.  A very basic priority list:
A.  Get the shield down.  We know Ewoks are cute, but the whole fleet is going to die if you don't get that shield down.
B.  If you can do something, do it.  Every point helps, and there isn't a lot of setup time, so act now.
C.  Missions are key.  If you can't do something right now look at how you can accomplish some missions, if your hand stinks, discard it for a reward, even if it isn't your reward.  Rewards last, Heroes don't.  This goes below B because a stack of rewards aren't going to save you if you are way behind.
D.  If you have a reward or two, get someone else one.  Stacking rewards on one hero seems awesome, but when that heo is lost, those rewards take time to get back, spread them out and your team is more resiliant and recovers faster.
E.  If it is your first game, don't try to plan every thing out.  There's too much going on, just do your best and focus on getting the mechanics right.

For me the biggest thing is playing simple, powerful heroes that you know well for your first OblivAeon game (or two).  If you are running the Mechanics heavy stuff, play Ra or Haka or Legacy and focus on getting the mechanics of the game right.  So much of the mechanics are there to help keep the game from getting overly long and/or boring.  The game is better with them.

The U-Con Gaming Convention in Michigan has a monthly Games Library Day, usually on the second Sunday of the month. The theme this Sunday is new games and there was a not so subtle hint that people want to see Oblivaeon. It's probably good to get a few games of it in before I run it at the convention.

So I will be running Oblivaeon this Sunday, and by running I mean playing the villains and environments while not also playing a hero. This is also how I plan to run it at the convention. I think this method will save brain power for everyone.

I just noticed that "The Effusion of Pain" and "Disintegrating Bastion" are phrased slightly differently.  One is "If (H) Hero targets are dealt damage this way" and the other is "If at least (H) Hero targets take damage this way".  I can't see any semantic difference between those, so I'm not sure why they're written differently.  Am I missing something?

Because in Oblivaeon (H) = hero play areas (we might need a clarification if this is now to apply to all instances of [H]), it makes sense. If you have a game with 3 heroes, say including Unity and she has golems out, the "if at least (H) targets" would apply if she had three golems and they took damage. Or say, Captain Cosmic has constructs out. Same thing. The "if" could cover damage immunities.

Akash'Thriya's card "As the Earth Turns" is worded unclearly (but is awesome). My wife and I were facing off against Citizen Dawn tonight, and I put out As the World Turns", and sure enough, THAT CARD came out of Citizen Dawn's deck, and we rejoiced that I had put out protection against it. Then.... we read the card and didn't know what to do.

As the Earth Turns says: Whenever a villain card would be played, Akash'Thriya may deal herself 2 psychic damage. If she takes damage this way, play the top card of the environment deck instead.

So... we didn't know whether to replace THAT CARD or to discard it, cuz it doesn't say which to do. So we discarded it. Is this correct? Is there a ruling on this?

As an epilogue, I got another Earth Turns the following turn and put it out too, and sure enough, Citizen Dawn's next turn was her other THAT CARD! It was the death knell for poor Dawn and we destroyed her. Also, Harpy sucks and Idealist is phenomenal.

My reading is: both are wrong. It doesn’t say “whenever a villain card would come into play,” it says “whenever a villain card would be played.” So you don’t flip the top card of the villain deck at all, you have to choose right when the time they would play a card comes up. And once you do reveal the card, it’s too late to change your mind.

It’s not 100% clear, though, and I’d certainly like corroboration. But that’s how I’d play it.

That’s the correct interpretation.

Well, after playing with the new heroes for a while to get to know them, we had our first OblivAeon game yesterday. It sounds like our experience was pretty typical:

First of all, yeah, the comic was underwhelming. They had such better writing and plot content for the ARG!

We played with all the rules straight out of the rule book, randomizing Scions and Shield, and we did it blind (without looking through any of the OblivAeon game decks before playing - we had no idea what the rewards were!). We started with the Primary Objective shield and Sanction in the other battle zone. Heroes were Tempest, Haka, Captain Cosmic, and KNYFE. I think we got one round before Tempest, Cosmic, and KNYFE were all incapacitated. That sure made the rest of the game seem daunting. However, with a second set of Ra, Haka, Wraith, and Sky-Scraper we managed to get the shield down, have some ground pounds, and start achieving objectives. We realized in the second form that killing Scions off would win us a Scionless villain turn, which is quite helpful. Still, we weren’t able to stop the countdown in time and OblivAeon flipped to the third form on his own. By that time, the hero composition was Ra, Young Legacy, Super Scientific Tachyon, and Mainstay. Ra had an OblivAeon shard with 6 devastation tokens in play, so we focused our start of turn incap abilities on him and took down the big bad. (It didn’t hurt that Tachyon had an outstanding game even without buffs, dealing 8 damage just in her opening turn.) Voss usurped OblivAeon’s power, but the tables were turned - Voss came into OblivAeon’s spot on Tachyon’s turn, she immediately Hypersonic Assaulted him, and he didn’t even last a full round.

Overall tally: victory. 3 environments destroyed. Saw 8 Scions (and killed 5). 7 heroes incapped. Went into Voss overtime. Took about 5 hours of play time.

Impressions:

• The play time posted on the box is laughable, even after we know the game. Sure, we’d have made some decisions differently if we didn’t do this blind, but I don’t think it’d accelerate below the 3 hour mark. I mean, I’ve had 3 hour Citizen Dawn games!

• Seems like a successful overall strategy is: Form 1, run away from OblivAeon, win objectives, and get his Shield down. Form 2, starting beating up OblivAeon and get objectives/attack Scions opportunistically. Form 3, concentrate all fire on the Super Star Destroyer.

• Holy crap, choose heroes that don’t require more than one turn of setup! Right now, I find it unfathomable to play Argent Adept, Akash’Thriya, La Comodora, Absolute Zero, Mister Fixer, Benchmark, Idealist, etc. Seems like the initial heroes chosen are just a write-off if the initial objectives don’t really align with what’s in their hands; OblivAeon touches them once and they die. We started not to get too attached to our heroes, instead figuring we’d just cycle through them a lot. It’s just disappointing that this basically rules out several of the heroes who are intended to fight OblivAeon.

• The objectives are definitely the highlight of the game. We got great use of the T-Rex Bot, Arataki, Lucky Break, and the OblivAeon shard. The missions add a whole new dimension of storytelling and flavor, and some of them are downright hilarious the way they interact with their rewards or the heroes. The art is fantastic, too.

• You have to look for the exploitative combos sometimes to protect your heroes. Like Heroic Interception + Leader of the Pack. Coming up with those strategies, though, takes time to plan.

• The rule book really could explain battle zones better. It took us a while to figure out how we were supposed to treat them, and then as specific cards came out we kept having to make table rulings. There are other somewhat basic things that don’t get an explanation, too: for example, suppose you do 80 damage to OblivAeon in his second form, and then he flips to his third form. Should he now have 120 or 100 HP tokens? The wording on his third form page (“set OblivAeon’s HP to 120”) is different from every other similar case we could find. (Since every past instance we could think of where someone actually heals up if they’re less than the max HP says “restore,” we kept him at 100 with a max of 120.)

• The beginning of the game felt like a daunting slog but by the end we were hitting our stride, dishing out massive damage constantly, and having a truly epic feel of the game. It won’t be an everyday thing just because of the entire-afternoon playtime, but I’d do it again.

The reason it says “set” rather than “restore” is because OblivAeon’s HP could be raised or lowered to that value. In any event, his starting and max HP are the same in each phase.

I ran an Oblivaeon game today and just ran villains and environments. That was a good idea. Initial setup was Team Leader Tachyon, the Scholar, Haka, and Luminary. Form 1, did not get the shield down, and I hope I didn't miss it elsewhere, but if the shield flip condition happens does it matter what battle zone triggered it?

I am definitely adding two hours to the run time of this game at the convention. Anyway, Team Leader Tachyon went down first, followed by Haka, then Luminary. TTL was replaced by Hunted Naturalist, Haka by Chrono Ranger, Luminary by Legacy. Haka Ranger's play area was incapped again, and replaced by Xtreme Prime Wardens tempest.

By the end of the game, 9 scions had come out, and the Multiverse probably would have ended if I hadn't been making several mistakes. Once Voss was out, damage was concentrated on him to prevent him from taking Oblivaeon's power. So obviously, I have to go over the rules and character booklet again. So even with all the mistakes made and fiat decisions, it took six and a half hours, granted some of that was from ridiculous amounts of card plays and power uses.

Redeemed Fautless didn't get to stick around to help for very long.

Did another one today… Ran from 4 pm to 11 pm, with a two hour break for dinner. Ugh.

The Source of Foes is a really daunting Shield in phase 2 if Aeon Master still has a lot of health. We only got it down because OblivAeon destroyed an environment through the devastation token trigger, which is on his devastation rule card at the start of his turn, and the 20 damage wiped a bunch of Aeon Men. Then we checked the shield’s start of turn trigger.

Victory. 2 environments destroyed, 8 heroes incapped, 8 Scions appeared (7 killed). I don’t know how anyone plays this game in less than three or four hours. The shuffling time alone… I think I’m gonna have to look at starting OblivAeon games in form 2.

One nasty situation: the Environment incapped a lone hero in a battle zone where we had 12+ devastation tokens and Rainek Kel’Voss along with another scion. So I had to pick a hero to immediately take ~15 damage, then 20 damage. I just pulled a character card with a useful incap ability and put it facedown on the table…

I agree that setup dependant heroes are not very good against form 1, but they are really good against 2 and 3, especially if they get/give extra plays. I warn people that your first hero is likely going to go down, and the goal is to get some missions completed so that your next hero can avenge them! 

I think you misread the question you were responding to. 

While English is not a context dependant language, I made the mistake of thinking that it would have been clear by my reply that I was only talking about Hero targets.

Don’t newly placed heros get to move to the other battle zone if they want to?

Yeah, but that has nothing to do with my question.  My question is, how is

"If (H) Hero targets are dealt damage this way "

different from

"If at least (H) Hero targets take damage this way "

Usually, within one product, the same condition or effect is phrased the same way.  Here they aren’t, and I can’t see why.

Uh…do they?

That's what the rules say, yes.  "Then, they may optionally move their hero from one battle zone to the other."

Yep, that rule was added in part to prevent chains of incaps. 

For the shield cards, I'd say the different wording is to account for hero targets that are immune to damage. Thematically it's the same, in a three player game, if three hero targets take damage the effect happens. I had that about it in a programming manner as a XOR (exclusive OR) even though it's different cards. That just doesn't hold up to either the Borr shield or the Nixious one. In Nixious case it's an "if no hero targets" or if "at least H hero targets", which I don't rhink really makes sense either now that I look at the cards side by side.

New heroes enter play at the end of the turn the previous hero was incapped on, but they don't get to move until their next turn.

No, they do. Quoting directly from the rulebook here...

"When a hero is incapacitated, immediately return all of their non-character cards (other than Mission cards) to the box. <skipping some text not relevant to this point> After the end of the current turn, that hero's player sets up another hero from the box in their play area, as if at the start of a game, including creating a hand of four cards. Then, they may optionally move their hero from one Battle Zone to the other."

So yes, the moment you get incapped, you put away that hero's deck and flip their character card, but once you're done with everything in the End phase of the turn in which they were incapped, you can move zones.

Ah. Good to get a reminder.

I think that is a fair analysis of the OblivAeon experience. My group enjoys it, because we are all hardcore fans and have now reached the point where we can play it in ~2.5 hours, so it is a fun epic game for us. But I would never play it with my wife - she enjoys taking on Baron Blade but I'm pretty confident she will never enjoy OblivAeon. 

P.S. Strategically, I think it is better to draw out phase 1 as much as possible to get more mission rewards, in spite of the crazy damage coming at the heroes. 

Just played a game with Harpy, FS Parse, Dr. Medico, and Eternal Haka vs. Advanced Chairman in Fort Adamant.  Haka, of course, was trying to Hoover up all the villains into Savage Mana, but couldn't draw it to save his life.  Drew and played all 3 Dominions, but we weren't destroying environment cards (they all either helped or were trying to damage the Chairman).  Then we got Blast Doors.  Haka happily discarded his hand to draw 21 cards.  Game was pretty much over at that point.

I tried super hard to play Harpy in Magic Mode, but couldn't do it.  Prison Break didn't come out until the end thanks to Parse, and even then it wasn't in our best interests to have Harpy do mass damage, so Haka could eat them instead.  Fortunately it's very easy for her to switch over to bird mode (way easier than switching hero to magic mode) and she just machine gunned both the Operative and the Chairman to death.  Again.

I definitely want to learn how to use her better, but unfortunately I'm going to have to wait until she's out in digital to do that.  I take too long figuring out what to do with her and my friends get annoyed.  That's what I had to do for AA and Benchmark, and it'll work again with her.

Happy birthday!

Hey, if you’re not using it, could I borrow your copy (and perhaps you, as well) over the weekend? I’ve got a similar “my birthday’s probably the only chance to play” issue, but with the added complication of my copy not having shipped yet. I’ll leave my Quark-Drive Translocator tuned to the down-charm-strange-top-top band; come on through any time that works for you! 

Just skimming through here, but I think the use of incapacitated abilities to help your other heroes survive may be a bit underrated here.  Best way to deal with 20 irreducible infernal damage?  How about using original flavor Tempest's incap ability to be immune to infernal damage for the round?

Legacy can set up to tank infernal damage for everyone without too much trouble as well, but the Tempest thing happens right away as soon as he falls.  And he has enough damage output that he's a good opening choice as well.

I've only played once and it has all the complexity and time consumption that folks say, but I find myself eager to do it again already! :-)

I thought it was either stated or confirmed that was Xu.  Not sure where though.

I asked about it for the Editor’s note simply because no mention came of it during the episodes that I recall.   I’m sure we’ve gotten confirmation it was Xu but not much about what transpired. 

Oh dang. :O

So when Anthony summons the other Virtuosos, the creepy-looking dude in the back is Vogel, right? Meaning Xu's not there.

Yup, because he destroyed her instrument.

Xu became The Undying Husk. :p.

Well, after what feels like months of avoiding large portions of the forum and not being able to listen to the Letters Page for fear of spoilers, and with the USPS deity finally finding favor in my fasting(of SotM content), I was deemed worthy of recieving my copy of OblivAeon on October 26th. I haven't gotten the chance to play a game yet, but I did get the chance to look through many of the cards. They all look fantastic, and I can't wait to get myself excited to play just to have my group of 'friends' say they're all too busy.

Everything was in good quality when it arrived thankfully, no horror stories for me to report of creased cards(though I haven't looked through EVERYTHING) or glued-in shelves of the collector's case. The OblivAeon heroes all look fantastic(I've been playing Benchmark and Stuntman for months now thanks to SotMDigital, and Voidguard just dropped there as well, so most of my interest was in the in-box heroes). I'm excited to get them in play and test out their mechanics. Luminary seems REALLY fun, especially with extra plays of his base power to get his stuff into play. The others seem a mite more complex, but I'll get them under control in time. I've leftmost of the info of the actuall villain decks be a mystery for now, want to be fully horrified once I get to play.

(Cont. later when I have the time)