Box 4/5/6 Predictions

We were getting off topic in another thread, so I figured I’d pop the discussion over here. We “know” there are three more DE boxes after Disperation releases. And based on the EE content still to be released, we can categorize the box themes as “Team Up Villains”, “Space!”, and “Oblivæon, no really”.

If they continue to release 5 previous hero decks + “surprise, here’s a new one” as they have the first two expansions, then here is my predictions on who we are getting when.

“Team Up Villains”, aka Box 4:
Southwest Sentinels, a team all on their own
Naturalist + Akash’Thyria, who were palling around together
Guise + Scholar, who were mentoring around together
Mystery Guest #1, who I’m predicting for Young Legacy, but could also be Rambler

“Space!”, aka Box 5:
Void Guard
Sky-Scraper
Mystery Guest #2, who will be Fashion, there is no one else who fits

“Oblivæon, no really”, aka Box 6:
Benchmark, aka the last hero before Oblivæon
La Comodora, bad guy turned good
Lifeline, bad guy turned good
Luminary, bad guy turned good
Stuntman, bad guy turned good
Mystery Guest #3, who I’m predicting for Rambler, simply because he fits that “not really seen as a hero” vibe for the rest of the box, but could be Young Legacy, for that “about to carry the torch into the future” vibe.

Anyhow, discuss!

Pretty much! I do think it’ll be Rambler for 4 and Newest Legacy for 6, personally.

I can see Greazer or Fashion for the Space box. I lean more towards Greazer as they have more history in the multiverse era to pull from. They also seem to be a more of a fan favorite and interact with more characters. Add on that my impression from when they talk about Fashion is that she’s really getting back into being a major hero for the RPG and not the multiverse era.

Yeah, currently my prediction is a new space hero that we haven’t heard about before showing up in the podcast in the next couple years. I have been wrong before, and I’m probably wrong this time, but I’m like 25/75 on Fashion being significant enough to earn a deck.

To be clear, I really like Fashion and hope I’m wrong about this.

Cross-posting from the other thread:

The team box could be titled Vengeance Returned/Revisited/etc. but my personal guess is Exordium. Heroes: Scholar, Guise, Naturalist, Akash’Thriya, Southwest Sentinels, Rambler. Environments: The Court of Blood, Madame Mittermeyer’s, Mobile Defense Platform, probably Maerynian Refuge, ??? (I do have a guess here, but it’s based on Disparation content that hasn’t been revealed yet). Villains: Honestly not sure, because the format could be just about anything. 15 team villains of 20 card decks is already 300 cards (9 standard villains is 225), and that’s already a lot, even without adding new content.

Cosmic Tales is possible for the space box, but a little bland, and they seem to be avoiding titles with Tome/Tales/Comics in the names. So my guess there is Cosmic Concurrence. Heroes: Void Guard, Skyscraper, Fashion. Environments: Celestial Tribunal, Dok’Thorath, Enclave of the Endlings, probably Omnitron-IV, ??? (My guess: The Roulette). Villains: All the remaining standard villains from EE, plus a Fashion nemesis (probably Pristine) and new nemeses for heroes who don’t yet have one; Crisis Man and Schema are at the top of my guess list, but it’s a long list.

If they’re not willing to reuse the name OblivAeon, the logical alternative for that box is Scion Strike, especially if the focus is on normal-sized games instead of one megagame. Heroes: Luminary, Lifeline, La Comodora, Benchmark, Stuntman, Young Legacy. Environments: Champion Studios, Fort Adamant, Nexus of the Void, Mordengrad, ??? (my only guess, and it’s a bad one, is Mosaic). Villains: Again, I don’t know the format, so who knows, but I’m expecting Scions using a format more similar to the other two formats.

I expect Rambler in the team box over Young Legacy because she’s huge in the OblivAeon conflict and he’s not, plus he seems to be peripherally involved with a lot of minor villains. I think Fashion has been planned for a while, with Greazer becoming a fan favorite too late to make the cut (plus he’s really not heroic except by accident).

Guise is a hero by accident as well during most of the multiverse era.

And about as selfish as Greazer, too.

I feel like La Commodora would be earlier, just because of how important she turned out to be, but I can also see her not showing up until last because that’s where she had the most (non-Chrono Ranger and Disparation) impact.

Stuntman, Luminary, and such are definitely in the last box, because timing and all. Hopefully Rambler, too, but that’s just because I’m not that enthusiastic about him.

I agree that we probably won’t get Fashion as a hero deck (boo), but I also don’t think Greezer will be a hero deck. Popular though he is, they were clear from the beginning that he could have been a hero deck, but they decided to keep him a… friendly adversary, I guess is the best way to describe him. I could totally see the Roulette as an environment, though. Some of the descriptions in the latest venture there sounded like stuff from a deck.

I wonder if they’ll try again to separate Kargra and the Colosseum. The "Ruler of Aeternus’ villain deck and “Aeternus” environment in Disparation feel like a proof of concept, there.

I’m really curious about how the team villains will look. Will they be full decks, like EE, or character cards and side decks like the Operative or with Visionary? They’ve been playing around with mechanics, so I doubt it’ll just be the same thing. I’d like to see Fright Train get a full deck, but that’s just because I have a soft spot for the guy.

Here’s something I want to toss out to folks; Do you think we’ll see any content that would have originally been in Tactics? Like Young Legacy having a Beacon variant? Akash’Darsha and Omni-Reaper critical events? Just a thought. Or more RPG stuff like a villain deck for The Vandals?

Okay, one more thing. This is more on my "wouldn’t it be cool’ list rather than anything likely to happen.

What if box 4 or 5 has Luminary… Ivana Ramonat, that is. Then the OblivAeon Ivan is the variant, instead.

Again, not going to happen, but would be fun. Mostly because I love Ivana’s power, especially against bad guys like Ambuscade with lots of wonderful toys.

I think we might get post-OblivAeon content after the 6 boxes are done, but it’ll depend on the market, sales, whether C&A are ready to tell those stories yet, and whether they’re willing to tell them in card game form instead of saving them for the RPG or another minis product. Fortunately, they don’t need to make that decision for, like, the rest of this decade.

My predictions:

Team Villain Box (tentative name – Exordium; alternate name – Vengeance: Returned)

• Heroes: Southwest Sentinels, Naturalist, Akash’Thriya, Scholar, Guise, New Hero
• Villains: All Team Villains
• Environments: Court of Blood, MMFFCC, MDP, Omnitron-IV, The Roulette

Space Box (tentative name – Deepest Space; alternate name – Hero in the Arena)

• Heroes: Sky-Scraper, Void Guard, Fashion
• Villains: Remaining Standard Villains, plus Schema, Crisis Man, and Pristine
• Environments: Dok’Thorath Capital, Enclave of the Endlings, Celestial Tribunal, Fort Adamant, Mosaic

DE OblivAeon (tentative name – Scion Strike; alternate name – Burying the Blade)

• Heroes: Luminary, Stuntman, La Comodora, [New Hero or Benchmark], Lifeline, [Benchmark or New Hero], [Possible Extra New Hero]
• Villains: OblivAeon, Scions
• Environments: Mordengrad, Nexus of the Void, Maerynian Refuge, Champion Studios, New Environment
• Bonus: Whatever form the Time Cataclysm takes in DE, it’ll be here

Reasoning:

Given that EE OblivAeon had one villain-turned-hero from each of the five major expansions, I expect that DE will follow the same pattern, especially since they’ve conveniently moved Matriarch and Akash’Bhuta to the base set while moving Harpy’s and Akash’Thriya’s heroic debuts up to well before OA, as well as putting Ambuscade in RCR. This mainly means that in addition to Luminary, Stuntman, La Comodora, and Lifeline being in DEOA, I suspect that one of the remaining two heroes will be a heroic version of a team villain, to complete the pattern. I have three main theories:

• Option 1: The new hero in the Team box is Rambler, the new hero in DEOA is Young Legacy, and the team box will have Revocorp-controlled Benchmark as a new team villain.
• Option 2: The new hero in the Team box is Young Legacy, the new hero in DEOA is Rambler, and the team villain box will have Gloom Agent Rambler as a new team villain.
• Option 3: The new hero in the Team box is Rambler, and DEOA has 7 heroes: Luminary, Stuntman, La Comodora, Lifeline, Benchmark, Young Legacy, and Greazer.

Bonus extra off-the-wall speculation: DEOA will expand the format to include other large crossover-type events such as SpiteWeaver; this may potentially include some format for Cosmic Contest. My reasoning is that way back in the Minions and Henchlings episode in 2019, when going through the villains in the order they would be released in DE, C&A made a point of including Jansa vi Dero between the space villains and OblivAeon, and notably did not do the same for other environmental characters such as Zhu Long or Blood Countess.

Ah, sorry forgot to mention: my reasoning for Fashion being the new space hero and not Greazer is almost entirely due to Pristine: he’s a Fashion nemesis who C&A knew about since before the DE core set launched, and they made a point of waiting until the Fashion Foes episode before explaining his deal rather than doing so during the Wayward Sun episode, which seems like an odd thing to do if he’s going to show up as someone else’s nemesis other than Fashion.

Greazer gets his own title in their metaverse in October of 1989 that lasts until 1996. We have other major heroes who never get their own title to themselves. He also seems to be a regular in Cosmic Tales along with that based off what they’ve said. Then there is just the way they talk about Greazer versus Fashion also just has me thinking Greazer. Fashion could be the one for the Space box but she’s more limited in what can be referenced.

Every instance of a single character getting both a hero and a villain deck either has one version in the base set (Baron Blade, Matriarch, Omnitron, Akash’Bhuta, Legacy), one version (probably) in OA (Luminary, Stuntman, La Comodora, Lifeline), or both versions in the same set (Visionary and Dreamer); this seems to fit with C&A’s stated goal of making the expansions relatively self-contained. I do think there’s a chance Greazer will get a hero deck; I just think that if he does, it’ll be in OblivAeon, not the space box, especially with him apparently sort-of joining La Comodora’s crew late in the Multiverse.

That example doesn’t quite work entirely in EE or in DE. In EE, Legacy had his villain version show up in Shattered Timelines and similarly Omnitron had the hero version come up Shattered Timelines. In DE we have Matriarch showing up in core and then Harpy in RCR. In this case I’d expect a Greazer deck in the team up box which is next and then a hero deck in a Space box. If he doesn’t get a hero deck then I’d still expect the team villain deck to show up in the next set.

How does it not work? In both EE and DE Legacy and Omnitron were both in the base set, and Matriarch is in the DE base set – I said that hero-villain pairs where both were the same character tended to have one version either in the base set or in OA, or both versions in the same set as each other.

To clarify – my understanding was that each expansion being “relatively self-contained” meant that you could easily buy only the base set and any one expansion without missing much, with the likely exception of OblivAeon. Iron Legacy and Omnitron-X being in an expansion fits with this since their other versions are in the core set. Additionally, I was basing my predictions on the fact that EE OblivAeon specifically had one villain-turned-hero from each prior set, and Greazer getting a hero deck in OA would fit that pattern better than him getting one in the space box.

You do bring up a good point about Greazer’s solo book, which I hadn’t considered – having double checked the wiki, there doesn’t seem to be a single instance of a non-hero Sentinel Comics character getting a self-titled ongoing (as opposed to a limited series). With that in mind, it does seem a lot more likely that he’ll get a heroic version in DE.

I’d say the only guarantee with buying base and any expansion except OblivAeon is that the you’ll get variants related to those hero decks in that box and for the core box. Like I don’t expect the Space box to have variants for Parse or Expat but one for any of the core box heroes is likely.

I’m rather late to this discussion (I also just created an account), but I’m predicting that whatever box has Maerynian Refuge will also contain a Tempest variant that has the Maerynian keyword, because that’s something that is missing right now and it’s weirdly disparate from DE’s newfound enjoyment of Hero Character keywords.
Any predictions on other Hero Variants in future boxes? This is pure copium, but those of y’all who are in the Realm of Discord server know that I am riding hard on an Earth Spirit Man-Grove Akash’Thriya Variant.

Today’s Letter Page Episode #282 question section seems to throw a lot of cold water on the idea of a Greazer hero deck. Oh well.

I’m going to have to re-listen to it, I missed whatever it was. Got almost done and realized I’d zoned out completely partway through. Been happening a lot lately, there’s so little RPG content and my interest in the pre-RPG canon is waning steadily.

Maaaybe.

The exact question was whether, knowing what they know now, C&A would have given Greazer a hero deck in Enhanced Edition.

The answer is:

None of that rules out Greazer as getting both a villain deck and a hero deck, provided that the villain deck comes first.

I’m actually wondering if, rather than getting “the team set” and “the space set”, we’re going to have Boxes #4 and #5 each include some team villains and some solo villains. I don’t know if they’d go that route, but it might be interesting…

It doesn’t completely rule it out but certainly lowers my expectations it happens.

They could change their minds, but originally they said all the team villains would be in one box. Plus, all the remaining solo villains are conspicuously space/cosmos-themed.

And in the minions and henchlings episode, C&A listed all the team villains between the Disparation villains and the “Space Box” villains, specifically referring to the latter group as the “last set”.