Best Villain Opening / Most Brutal Loss

i just hit the strongest villian opening I've ever seen, which unsurprisingly led to one of the most brutal losses I've had in SotM.

Setup: Infinitor vs Captain Cosmic, SkyScraper, & Tempest in Dok'Thorath (XPWCC unlock experiment)

Infinitor begins with Twisted Miscreation and Lambent Reaper in play

Round #1 

Infinitor plays Insanity:

     Insanity plays: Twisted Micreation #2, Recalescent Hellion, Lambent Reaper #2, Ocular Swarm, Lambent Reaper #3, Ocular Swarm #2, then Machinations of a Madman

     Machinations plays: Recalescent Hellion #2, then another Insanity

     Insanity #2 plays: Twisted Micreation #3, Crushing Cage (on CC), Ocular Swarm #3, Whispers of Oblivion

     Whispers of Oblivion plays: Crushing Cage #2 (on CC), then does 1 damage to each hero (2 to CC)

          That's 13 of Infinitor's 15 manifestations in play as his opening turn (17 of his 25 cards)

     Heroes then took a lot of damage from the manfiestations, knocking out almost half of the total hero hp.

     There's really not much that the heroes can do against this, but I play it out to see what happens.

CC: Crushing Cages stop him from playing a card, his power puts a wounding buffer into play (on SkyS).

Sky: Plays Left Hook to punch Infinitor for 2 (no useful 2nd card) , then uses Concussive Clap to deal 1 damage to each villain target

Tempest plays a Lightning Slash to hit Infinitor for 4, his power does no damage due to Infinitor's DR

Environment plays Rebel Headquarters (Really? I was totally expecting the Freedom Fighters, Ravagers, or Thorathian military to pile on here)

Round #2

Infinitor flips and plays Recalescent Hellion #3 (naturally), then destroys an Ocular Swarm

    Ocular Storms do more damage and bring out Crushing Cage #3 (last manifestation in the deck)

    Manifestations dole out another round of damage, knocking out Tempest and CC, but they leave Sky with 1hp so the heroes get a surprise 2nd turn.

Incap CC: Reduce all damage by 1 (new plan: just see if I can survive another round)

SkyS: Plays Thorathian Monolith, then uses power to take out a couple of damaged manifestations while Monolith and CC soak up damage

Incap Tempest: SkyS uses Concussive Clap again to take out more manifestations (Ocular Swarms do nothing due to no cards in Infinitor's deck)

Environment plays Defiant Looters (Infinitor reshuffles)

Round #3

Infinitor plays Crazed Artifice, bringing a Crushing Cage into play on SkyS (because how could things be worse, right?)

     Manifestations do NO DAMAGE due to CC and the Monolith and SkyScraper survives another villain turn!

Incap CC: Reduce all damage by 1

SkyS: Monolith goes away, but Sky survives the Cage due to CC's DR. She can't play a card, but uses her power to destroy all of the remaining manifestations except for 1 Hellion and the Cage that's on her.

Incap Tempest: Makes Sky immune to the upcoming projectile damage from Infinitor

Environment: Plays Thorathian Military (There they are), who knock out Sky 

Heroes Lose without making it through Round 3. Ooof.

Probably not the quickest loss I've seen (what with Wager Master and weird stuff like that), but probably the fastest loss I've had that was due to straight up damage taking out all of the heroes.

Ultimate Cosmic Omnitron on a 5 person team in Rook City.

This was a random batlle. 

Died on second turn. No hope. 

Never play Cosmic Omnitron on a 5 person team.

Yeah, Infinitor is horrifically good at the whole "Oops I just played my entire deck" deal, and it's usually pretty hard to recover from the resulting solar storm of damage.

Challenge Ambuscade can easily steamroll you from the word go, but that's no surprise.

Dawn.  Megalopolis.  Dawn takes all our cards with Sweat, Tears and Blinding blast.  But we've survived that, base powers take out sweat.  Megalopolis plays pileup, dawn plays blast #2.  Get pile up to 3 hp and then environment plays paparazzi and Dawn plays return, bringing back sweat.

No powers, no cards.  Absolute lock down.

Good point about Ultimate Cosmitron -- clearly the craziest damage dealer in SotM. However, as the Challange/Ultimate modes are knowingly unbalanced, I don't really count that as a regular game.  But yeah, now that you remind me of when I went through and beat each Villain on Ultimate mode, there were a bunch of games against Ultimate Cosmi in which the heroes didn't survive round 2.

Only Ultimate mode I CAN'T beat is Akash'bhuta. I don't ahve the right team/environment match to make it work. 

Ultimate Akash pretty much requires just deck control and damage, though DR and/or healing doesn't hurt either. I find her more lengthy than difficult on average.

My "favorite" loss was losing to Advanced Plague Rat in Time Cataclysm in round 2. I had a team of 4 heroes including Chrono-Ranger.

Round 1: Plague Rat does his usual thing. I start unloading on him. Time Cataclysm plays Tendrils of Madness, which hits Plague Rat and boosts his damage.

Round 2: Plague Rat plays Shadowy Ambush. End of turn damage hits Chrono-Ranger for 1 (base) + 1 (advanced) + 1 (Plague Locus) + 1 (Tendrils) + 1 (nemesis) = 5. Which plays a card. Which is, of course, Ravage. Which plays three more cards... etc. He played out his entire deck and I lost on his second turn.

One of my favorite things about SotM is that with the "right" cards, any villain should be able to beat any team of heroes and any team of heroes should be able to beat any villain. Some combinations are ovbiously going to be harder than others (like that awful Weekly One-Shot of Chairman vs Expat, Mr Fixer, & Nightmist), but game should be winnable or loseable if the cards swing hard enough.

Which tells me that I'd love to see the digital game have a Wizard-Mode that let me stack decks to my hearts content to force insteresting or unusual scenarios.  Maybe someday in a future update after Oblivaeon.

I’ve beaten Ultimate Cosmitron with a team of Legacy, Parse, Hunted Naturalist, ChronoRanger, and KNYFE. They have little hope of surviving pay the stay off round three, but with a little bit of luck they are perfectly capable of dealing 100+ damage in 2 rounds.

For beating Ultimate  Akash'bhuta , I used Legacy (boosts, blocks and occassional damage),  Ra (another boost and tons of damage),  TLT (cards for everyone and Hypersonic Assaults while building up Lightspeed Barrages), and Wraith (dual infrared goggles for deck control and more damage).   If you can start a game with Legacy playing Inspiring Presence and Ra playing Imbued Fire, everything else becomes a lot easier - but this team should be able to smoke her, honestly this team can smoke just about anything and was my go to for most Ultimate challenges.

Also important is to pick a good environment for fighting  Akash'bhuta . I like the Freedom Tower - zero targets, nothing too bad (even the Entry Points aren't much of an issue once Wraith gets her deck control going), and a couple cards that let you hunt for  Inspiring Presence and Imbued Fire faster.   Let the Env cards build up and then unleash Ra's Scorched Earth to mighty effect.

Ultimate Miss Information is the only one I haven’t beaten in the video game.

Original Omnitron starting with double EPEs.  Not really much you can do to stop him, depending on your team of heroes.

Similarly, Voss starting out with both ships.

Dawn starting out with Blood, Sweat, Tears, and Truth. (That’s ROUGH.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/sentinelsmultiverse/comments/682ow5/crossed_ultimate_miss_information_off_my_list/

This is what I used (before Fuge State Parse was made available).

Temple of Zhu Long is the one environment I use for Ultimates (especially if they are hard). I get tons of plays, draws, and damage is minimal at best. 

Progeny starting with Time of Tribulation, Scion of Storm, Scion of Flame.

And then playing Hour of Reckoning on his second turn.

The Heroes did not get a third turn.

One of my favorite absurdities was Advanced Baron Blade VS the standard Freedom Five. 

On Turn 1, he played Hasten Doom, Hasten Doom, and Consider the Price of Victory. This, combined with his Advanced mode, put 13 cards right into the trash. 

It was not a good start.

I killed his Mobile Defense Platform, which pushed him to 14 cards in the trash, and then on his second turn he played another one. I was not able to kill it and also flip him by the end of Turn 2, so I lost the game. 

To Baron Blade.

In two rounds. 

So a devastating start against Challenge or Ultimate Chokepoint in a five hero game.  She plays Newfound Power which reveals Newfound Power.  Once that resolves Newfound Power reveals another Newfound Power.   When that resolves the last Newfound Power reveals Material Upheavel.   Assuming at least two one-shots in each player's hand each hero is dealt 20 energy damage.  If they each had three one-shots everyone is dealt 30 energy damage.  Add on four damage from Material Upheaval.  So at best best each hero was dealt 24 damage and worst 34 damage resulting in only PW Haka being the only available hero who would be still up at this point.  

Wager Master, 3 Wagelings, 3 Heroes who need at least 2 turns to deal enough damage. 

Nuff said