Weekly One-Shot #43: Balance Past Due

Another week, another One-Shot! This time The Wraith’s organization is taking down Ambuscade!

How did you do?

(Did I get the first clear? Mint, btw)

Mint. First order of business is taking out the cloak, and tanking damage.  Skyscraper played Colossal left hook then discarded to play thorathian monolith.  After he flips over, it's really more annoying than it is difficult. In short order biomemetic plasma vault comes out, and between that, smoke  bombs, stun bolt, and ambuscade's advanced ability, damage is heavily reduced.  At that point it's basically just chipping away until you can get the compulsion cannisters into play.  Riveting crane would work too, if you could get dual crowbars or pipe wrench with harmony, but I never saw harmony.  The turn after the vault finally popped, I hit him with an omni-cannon for 14, then polished him off with a compulsion cannister.

Mint.  On advanced even moreso his Reactive Plating cards have got to go down first.  Had I known the Sonic Mine wasn't going to show up I would played Cold Snap earlier. 

I played it early, but it never mattered, because once I got the plating down, biomemetic came out, so he always had DR 2 until the very last turn.

I spent two turns playing Adhesive Foam Grenade with Bunker so I didn't see Biometric Vat until the last turn with him already at low health. 

Mint. 

My favorite type of game.  Everyone was getting knocked around early.  Low health all around with everything looking hopeless.  Finally get set-up and then come back to defeat the villain. 

Ended up winning with everyone in single digits.  Just had to slowly whittle him down with all the damage reduction in play.

I played Cold Snap first turn, then absent-mindedly activated Bunker's power, destroying it and discarding a card!  Still, I was able to get Mint by pausing the Environment at the right time and constantly whittling.

Mint.  An interesting game in that no one hero was MVP, and nobody was seriously lacking either.  Wraith did a ton of damage with Throwing Knives and Razor Ordanance, and almost dealt the killing blow with an Inventory Barrage, AZ whittled him down with Cold Snaps, Impales, and kept us safe using  Sub Zero Atmosphere.  Bunker held back the environment, and then unloaded fully with a Flak Cannon, Grenade Launcher, and Turret Mode (Actually, I played all three modes in the game - Recharge, Upgrade, and then Turret).  Sky-Scraper shielded us from some damage, got a few good whacks in, and made Ambuscade hit himself, and Mr. Fixer made everybody else's damage irreducible, making everything else go that much faster.  All in all, a good game.

Mint. Compulsion Canister and Jack Handle are BFFs.

Mint. It was close -- I've lost to Advanced Ambuscade in Pike Industrial before -- and Sky-Scraper went down, but that just meant Wraith was doing an extra 5-ish damage per round. Ended in single HP, but thankfully I never got more than a 3-point Vat Explosion.

I got a sonic mine relatively early. Ambuscade shuffles his deck pretty regularly, so we won't all get exactly the same game. Had I known I wouldn't see charged attacks I would have played Recharge Mode and drawn sone guns for Bunker earlier instead of saving it to fuel Engine of Destruction.

Wraith went down, everyone else in single digit hp,  but I got the mint. Used the crowbar of healing to keep AZ up in the last couple of rounds before knocking out the Frenchman with a Flak Cannon.

A few mistakes early such as playing Cold Snap forgetting that Sonic Mine could come out made the game take longer than it should have. Still got Mint with no one incaped. The highlight was probably when I started using Crowbar and Monkey Fist to deal Fire to Absolute Zero to increase the damage to Ambuscade by 2 and net Zero a hit point.

Near Mint.

First game was very, very close, but I lost due to more than one instance of Sky-Scraper messing up Wraith's carefully laid Infrared Eyepiece plans with a Neutralizing Resonator… d'oh!   I also Cold Snapped a Sonic Mine.

Second game went much better. All heroes in low single digits, but Bunker fired off a big Omni-Cannon to end it.

Mint, but that set up . . . Guh.

Worse than that, every time he played a trap, it immediately surfaced after the shuffle. What a load. 

It was very nice to be able to get a mint again. :)

Sweet gods above that was one nasty setup, and opening salvo! Got the Mint with everyone on their feet (though all in single-digit HP) and eventually managed to drop Ambuscade with a savage Inventory Barrage + Omni Cannon one-two punch for the victory.

I'll admit though, I was seriously considering just suiciding Absolute Zero to get rid of the damn environment completely, but thanks to Bunker and some very timely foam grenades the damage from Pike Chemicals was mostly contained.

Tough mint, like many of you! The opener was double Reactive Plating + Explosive Launcher + Cloak, and he played an Unavoidable Explosive that “shuffled” to the top of the Villain deck and immediately went off.

It’s funny to me because that’s yet another situation that would never happen to me on the table top game. If I shuffled the Trap to the top of the deck, I would just consider that I’m not done shuffling yet and do another riffle! While that may seem self-serving, to me it’s more in line with the intent of the Traps because then 1. they trigger in the future, and 2. I don’t know when that will happen.

Interesting Mint -- left the healing vat out for a while to get back up to double digits, Stun-bolted the hell out of Ambuscade which, with Sky-Scraper's links, kept his damage down. Fixer spent most of the time not doing much until I fished the Compulsion Canisters out of Sky-Scraper's deck, and then it was on. A rare game where I didn't use the Infra-Red specs -- reducing Ambuscade's damage was just a higher priority.

I also didn't see any traps go off except the first one, which no-doubt helped.

My first game of the Video Game, my first battle against Advanced Ambuscade (only my second battle against Ambuscade at all, my first being when I demoed the game at PAX and first decided to buy the game), and my first time using most of these heroes, so I feel my Near Mint was reasonable.  Missed Ambuscade's Advanced ability, which caused Sky-Scraper to self-destruct early on, but that just gave me environment control and let Wraith and AZ get set up faster.  Between getting his cloak up as soon as I destroyed it 3 times in a row and then AZ hitting the Sonic Mine, he lasted a lot longer than he could have, and my surviving team members weren't doing so hot by the time he finally went down.

On the plus side, I've always pooh-poohed Ambuscade based on his atrocious win rate statistics, but now that I've seen his potential, I'll be buying him after all.