For the record, I didn't give up, and I eventually got the Mint after about two more hours of play.
Spite was the real problem. As I mentioned before, my strategy didn't work out and he got away from me, flipping with all five drugs out and five victims under the safe house. At the end of his reign of destruction that round, Wraith and Santa Guise were toast and Dark Conductor was sub-5 HP, with Nightmist in the teens and Visionary at 9. But Spite didn't realize what he was dealing with against me and my girl Nightmist.
Round 1 post-flip, I got everybody out of the Safe House, had Nightmist and Visionary play out more Ongoings, and used AA's equipment/ongoings as the sacrificial lambs to Spite's "put stuff back in your hand" drug.
From then on, every round went something like this:
- Potential Sidekick helps us stay flush with cards.
- Spite whiffs on his AOE damage due to 2x Twist the Ether.
- Spite punches a Decoy Projection, killing it every other round.
- DCAA lets someone play an Ongoing to replace one that Spite forced back into hand.
- Nightmist triggers Lost Child and redirects Spite's damage back to himself. 4 + 1 + two Twist the Ethers = 7 - 3 = 4 damage to Spite. (I occasionally had to adjust this down with Twist the Ether to avoid triggering Collateral Damage from him hitting himself.)
- Nightmist either chips away at Spite or plays out more Ongoings/Equipment, depending on the situation, then heals
- Wraith lets Visionary play an Ongoing or Decoy Projection.
- Guise's incap power typically did nothing, though I occasionally used it to have Nightmist discard and draw to help cycle her deck.
- The environment plays one card and doesn't do much. Bonus if they played Unhallowed Halls, it allowed me to keep the Decoy projection out for an extra round by using TTE to make Spite's damage Radiant.
In the course of running this cycle over and over and over, Nightmist stayed at near full health while whittling Spite down. Visionary took a total of 1 damage over the course of slowly bleeding Spite down from the mid-70s to dead, and that was only because she spied a double Feast of Flesh on top of the environment deck and we couldn't prevent the environment from playing two cards that turn.
Nightmist eventually took out Spite, and Gloomweaver came out. Within one round, Visionary was down to 2, so she parked in her Demoralization / Cocoon combo and never left. Nightmist soaked the irreducible damage pin early and used its damage to help take out Profane Zealots before the environment dropped Unhallowed Halls. At that point, Nightmist went into Mist Form and I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, after lots of skipped incapacitated abilities, skipped turns, and Twist the Ether prompts, Gloomweaver finally succumbed to the onslaught of Relict Dorotya and the angry mobs.
After he flipped, it was a complete joke; he couldn't heal and was doing 16 Infernal to himself every round, on top of the environment hitting him, and Nightmist was able to do two separate rounds of "destroy Mist Form, play Heedless Lash and hit Gloomweaver twice, have Wraith's incap play another Mist Form".
