Weekly One-Shot #15 : Countdown

Legacy, Fanatic, Bunker, Ra (Horus), and Absolute Zero vs. Advanced Baron Blade (Terralunar Impulsion Beam) at Wagner Mars Base.

This was a fairly easy Mint for me.  None of the heroes are really neutered by their initial card draws and there's several routes to victory it seems.  I did lose Fanatic due to a risky Divine Sacrifice that had her redirect all damage from a Hasten Doom to herself, leaving her with 1HP (so dying next turn) but the others were still all very high at the end.

Do focus early on taking out the Mobile Platform then get Baron Blade to flip before he amasses the 15 discarded cards to win by his alternate win method.  You can relax a bit and take down Blade with the massive damage you should be able to amass.  The Environment will throw you an early Self-Destruct Sequence, but just have one hero each round skip their turn to avoid it killing you.

Mint as well.  Flipped the Baron when he was at 12 cards in the trash.  Absolute Zero ended up being the one holding back the Wagner Countdown.

Soooo did Jeremy design these last two One Shots?  The Deal All the Damage Right Now maneouvre works very well in this and last week's :)

It sounds like we worked similarly.  I also flipped him with 12 cards and had A.Z. skip most of the time, although Fanatic started skipping her incapacitated turn to hold back the base's destruction when that happened.  I just wish I had used Impale in A.Z.'s first turn so that it could go off before he skipped the remainder of his turn too...

Me, three. Flip on 12 cards. Let AZ hold off the self-destruct. Combined Heroic Interception and Divine Sacrifice to tank a bunch of damage from Blade and a turret.

Mint for me too.  Nothing exciting.  I spread the Self-destruct around a bit, mostly skipping AZ but also using Legacy once.  Flipped him with 12 cards in the trash, beat him down the same round.

EDIT:  Replaying, it becomes obvious that I misremembered and actually flipped him when he had 15 cards in his trash.  That said, on the replay I was able to do what I claimed, and flip him with 12 cards and then beat him down in the same round.  In the replay, I never skipped a turn for the countdown - just beat him before it finished.

Flipped on 12 in the trash too. AZ played Impale first turn, and was the main skipee. However, skipped Bunker before playing both Scorched Earth's. The first allowed me to take out Elemental Redistributor in one shot. The game ended when Ra threw his staff at Baron Blade who ducked, with the staff hitting AZ instead who fired it back at the Baron while in mid gloat.

"Hey Bangles fanboy. You..."

Also flipped at 12 cards in trash. Because I realised the main threat was the countdown, I adopted a “deal all the damage now” strategy which is not how I typically play. For me, Fanatic was the one to sacrifice her turns to Self Destruct Sequence. Another fun one-shot!

Am I the only one who End of Days'd the Countdown? I only had one or two other cards out at the time, I figured it was better than waiting for a Consecrated Ground to show up.

Mint.

Same story for me as many others here, except I had 13 in Blade's trash when he flipped.

I think it was because I Final Dived (Final Dove?) both the Battalion and the Turret prior to the flip.

I'm a bit addicted to Final Dive.

Mint.

Played Impale turn one and had AZ skip for Countdown until Fanatic could draw Consecrated Grounds, which she never did. I ended up losing her because I used Divine Sacrifice in order to pile more damage onto Blade to flip him. Environment plays Villanous Weaponry and Blade plays 3 Hasten Dooms and the -1 force field. So the flip side was actually really rough.  

I did the same, but I made sure to do it after flipping Baron. Bunker's grenade launcher, AZ's isothermic transducer and Ra's living conflagration were worth popping the countdown, villainous weaponry and elemental redirecting device.

I used Legacy to suspend the countdown, but I had him play Heroic Interception first.  I would have liked to get down an Inspiring Presence first, but the damage lost from not having Galvanize didn't really matter, still took down Blade rather easily.  Never even saw a Devious Disruption.

My strategy was to hit him down as fast as possible, then play Heroic Interception and let Legacy keep skipping his turn via Self-Destruct to keep it out.

This is my 11th consecutive Mint (12th if you include the Advanced Voss misprint). I was contemplating using End of Days to destroy the Self-Destruct Sequence, but it seemed easier just to skip Absolute Zero's turn each round. After all, End of Days would go off after the Self-Destruct Sequence would tick down, so you would have to skip some turn in order to not have it blow up--that is, unless you're destroying it immediately, which I didn't do because I was more focused on flipping Baron Blade before his trash got too full.

If I were smarter, I'd have played Impale on the first round and not searched for and played Isothermic Transducer. Getting a module out is almost always my priority with Zero, but Impale would have done the same amount of damage to Baron Blade by the start of Absolute Zero's second turn (due to Galvanize), without having him take any damage. In addition, Impale still gets to go off before Absolute Zero decides to skip his turn, making his turn not a total waste.

If anyone's interested, my fastest victory in this One-Shot is Absolute Zero's third turn. In general I'm interested in figuring out the fastest (in terms of round/turn number) possible victory for each fixed One-Shot. So far I have solutions for the Miss Information and Iron Legacy One-Shots, in addition to this one. If anyone wants to help with brainstorming optimal plays with me for other One-Shots, that would be cool.

It's possible to take him out on Bunker's third turn.

First round:
Lead from the Front (use to protect AZ, ignore everyone else) / Galvanize
<Nothing> / Exorcism
Grenade Launcher / use Grenade Launcher (hit the Battalion with the third ping, rather than the second)
Living Conflagration (this should kill the MDP) / Sunrise
search for Isothermic Transducer and play it / Thermodynamics

Second round:
Bolster Allies / Galvanize
Final Dive / Exorcism
Omni-Cannon / Grenade Launcher
Imbued Fire / Living Conflagration
Frost-bound Drain / Thermodynamics

Third Round:
Flying Smash (first damage to AZ, bounce it once to flip Baron, then hit Baron), Galvanize
Final Dive / Exorcism
Turret Mode / Omni-Cannon / Grenade Launcher (bounce the second shot off of AZ, and that should kill the Baron)

I think this is what I did.  If not, it was pretty close.  
 

Impressed by finishing Blade off in three rounds. I tend to think more defensively than that and to not remember that w/ Imbued Fire people can bounce damage off of AZ.

Nice! I didn't think about using Sunrise, for some reason. Getting Imbued Fire ready for Ra's second turn definitely helps.

I got a mint, but it felt kind of cheap Legacy was Heroically Intercepting all the attacks while disabling the countdown. I admit that without Galvanize I got concerned when the Elemental Redistributor came out the same round that Ra Imbued all our attacks with Fire, but it didn’t turn out to be a problem. I definitely could have done it much quicker if Legacy would have allowed Absolute Zero to get burned a couple times though.
Dividing attention between the double countdowns nearly took the team down, but Blade finally armored up with 17 cards in the trash. Legacy switched to Galvanize, letting AZ take care of the timer so that Bunker could bounce a grenade off of him and the Baron went down in flames. Everyone had full health except Legs who was at 13.
There are definitely several ways to take this one on, and I look forward to trying the End of Days route as well as the Isothermic Grenade Launcher combo. I might even try full-skipping round 1 and see what happens. Fun fun!

Mint.

Saved End of Days until after the flip, and used it when Blade dropped the Backlash field on me. 

Until then, varied who skipped their turn each round to deal with the self-destruct. 

Finished it off with a Surge of Strength enhanced Motivational Charge.

12 mint, 1 NM, 2 fine.

This one had the potential to be nasty. When I saw the setup, I was guessing at least one of Bunker, Zero, or Ra would have no means of dealing damage in their opening hand, or that Blade's first play would be Hasten doom, Hasten doom, Consider the price of victory, which would put 10 cards in his discard pile before you have a chance to act.

Interesting!   Only a Near Mint (had to rewind to fix a few mistakes), but I'd never played Advanced Blade before.   The "do as much damage as you can, damn the torpedoes" nature of his Advanced side really changes things.  I played the challenge out via random game a few more times, and in quite a few situations he was nigh-unbeatable:  In one play, for example, he pulled *two* mobile defense platforms on the first turn, and then the card that allows him to redirect fire/cold/lighting damage.  Suffice to say that a team with Ra and AZ didn't fare too well in that matchup....

Mint. End of days took care of the countdown in the first turn. Then Flipped Blade encountered a galvanized Omnicanon and Legacy's fist - multiple times.

Easy, but I am quite pleased, as I used cards I rarely use ( namely embolden and omnicanon ).

Mint, despite making a couple dumb mistakes (Forgot that I never got around to actually playing the OmniCannon, so I accidentally had Bunker skip his turn to deal with the countdown when I thought I was loading the gun; also, turns out Sacrosanct Martyr is extra useless when all your damage is turned into fire. Oops!)

Though this was the first time I really took advantage of the whole "everyone wail on AZ" strategy, and I didn't realize just how much it let you ramp up the damage.

Sadly, I won’t be able to stream this tonight - bad headache for several days, and the computer screen makes it worse.

It only really works well if you have several damage boosting effects, or Coolant Blast.  But it's a lot of fun, and some of the highest damage scores in the game can be achieved that way.

Finally got around to doing this one. It was a lot of fun - granted, I knew the self destruct countdown was coming, so I made sure to Impale on AZ’s first turn so I could deal some damage with him while having him hold off the countdown.

I was tempted to End of Days it but didn’t want to toss more cards into the Baron’s trash.

I almost played Imbued Fire the turn I got it, but I didn’t trust the Baron - and sure enough, he played Elemental Redistributor on his next turn. Blew that up quickly and then played it.

Ended up finishing him off with a Fire Blast and Living Conflagration’s power. Never even saw the Backlash Field or Living Force Field.