Weekly One-Shot #127 Slide Like An Egyptian

So this week we fight GW Voss at the Tomb of Anubis. First on the scene is Setback, Super Scientific Tachyon, The Dark Conductor Argent Adept and Parse. 

So this was silly fun and I think Setback clicked a bit for me today. Didn't manage to redirect tank but with many out of turn, power plays allowed me to abuse silver linings and High-Risk behavior to punch Voss for many lots before we add in the critical multiplier. 

Parse various mess with deck order, card play and damage buffs made dealing with the Double Gene bound guard Forced Deployment much more manageable. 

Mint with Setback in the High Teens and everyone else about 8. 

Poor, poor Voss... with this kind of deck control available, he never got to play a single Forced Deployment. The Grand Warlord pretty much spent the entire game dancing to the tune of Argent Adept and Parse, while Setback and Tachyon beat all kinds of (Egyptian) hell out of him. Comfortable mint, with everyone in mid- to high teens.

Mint. Lost Argent Adept on the last round and had everyone else around 7-8 hp.

Basically, my strategy was to use Adept's powers to discard Voss's cards and play Tachyon's. Parse used Synthetic Analysis to play Tachyon cards as well, and Adept brought it out of the trash more than once. The result was that Tachyon cycled through her deck and made it halfway through it again.

I did enjoy having Setback use Silver Linings to rebound to 18 hp. I'd never had him bounce back that high before. That was fun.

Only major screw up is that the initial layout gives a strong hint that one of the ships will come out early and I didn't prep for it. I took two rounds of damage before I could get ride of it.

The Double Gene Bound Guard Forced Deployment was scary, but I'd already had Exploit Vulnerability up and Setback had saved one of his Oops cards. So I destroyed it on Setback's turn, he punched out one of the guards, and a slew of Tachyon cards (played on her turn, Adept's turn, and Parse's turn) cleared the field.

Near Mint.

Sigh. I did it on my first run, but I got mentally lost a couple of times during Argent Adept's mega turns, and clicked the wrong hero to play a card or use a power and hit the rewind button a couple of times before I remembered that it would negate my mint. Oh, well.

Took longer than I thought, but Dark Conductor Argent Adept's power (and Setback's Fumbling Fool) trashed most of Voss' nasty cards (a forced deployment, both ships, one of the translocators, etc.)

Parse used Between the Lines several times on Argent Adept for even more musical shenanigans...I felt like the whole game was one really long AA turn.

Again, took a long time, and I probably made it harder than it needed to be, but I felt in control most of the game.

All heroes between 6-10HP at the end.

Mint with everyone in double digits and AA at max hp (yay inspiring supertonic + harp)

Deck control. All of the deck control. Managed to discard 1 Forced Deployment and put another on the bottom, discard a ship, and keep him playing one measly minion a turn for the entire game. Even kept a Dissonance and an extra instrument out in case he managed to pull the other ship out, but never got that far.

Only real danger was when the environment started picking on the lower hp heroes on top of Voss's attack, but that couldnt outdamage 3 Hypersonic Barrages to the face.

~Komori

Easy mint, thought it took a while.

Finally a setup that didn't look like a pain in the butt.  Mint, Setback at 7 because he's Setback, everyone else comfortable.  AA gave Parse extra plays and Tachyone extra powers, Parse gave Tachyon extra plays and powers, Setback gave everyone extra powers.  Tachyon experimented exclusively on herself and played through her entire deck in 4 rounds, inclcuding an extra Lightspeed Barrage that AA put back on her deck.  She dealt about 70 damage to Voss by herself, including over 40 on Parse's last turn.  Setback did a bunch, too--Parse played double Targeting Arrows and then the team conspired to give Setback a bunch of extra plays and power uses that round.  A fun game.

Voss is generally considered “not hard” because he doesn’t do ongoing or equipment destruction, and people here are saying it’s easy... but it’s completely wiping me every time.

”Deck control” sounds good until Parse dies, and then there’s no deck control.

Usual Voss strategy is to keep 1 minion out so he doesn’t flip, but the environment regularly slaughters minions. Lots of “do damage to everything” cards. 2 damage from Judgement of Anubis or the Trial of Fire boosted with Swept into the Underworld kills all the minions, flipping Voss. The Trial of Blades does 3 damage and kills all the minions.

Tachyon’s pretty useless against Voss on either side unless she plays Lightspeed Barrage, due to his damage reduction. She’s extremely problematic against the minions because she tends to hit all of them, setting up Voss to flip.

I never worry about Voss flipping.  I'd rather he hit me a couple of times than have him with a mimimum of 2 points of damage reduction, plus then at least that one minion is hitting me anyway.  In my game he only got to attack once anyway.

Wasn't the easiest Mint for me - clearly I did different Updated Intel / Fumbling Fool type stuff than most of the rest of you - but by the time we were in single digits, Tachyon was ready to do 80 damage in a round (triple 20 damage Barrage, put one back on top with Vernal Sonata, play it immediately), so I knew I was going to win. Just... probably could have done it a little earlier and perhaps the round BEFORE Urshe came out instead of the round after.

I finally got it on the 4th try for a Fine, but it didn’t feel remotely easy.

I saw the Updated Intel / Fumbling Fool combo, but fumbled it (hah) the first time I tried it. Voss plays Forced Deployment on turn 2, which means it triggers at the start of turn 3. He’s got another Forced Deployment at the bottom of the deck, so I thought I’d move that where I could use Fumbling Fool. I did this while the first Forced Deplyment was going off, which meant Voss played it immediately, before Fumbling Fool could mill it. After that I shyed away, because I didn’t understand how I’d screwed up the timing.

Eventually I beat it by smashing Voss 4 times in a row with Lightning Assault for a total of 72 points of damage. Tachyon played all 3 of them in one turn via Hud Goggles and Lightning Reflexes, and Argent Adept put one back on top of her deck with Vernal Sonata, and then used his base power to let her draw it and play it.

Against Advanced Voss, flipping him is a problem (if you can deal with the damage reduction, of course), but regular Voss absolutely should be flipped nearly all the time. The damage you take from his flipped side is about the same as the damage you'll take from the minion you leave out anyways. But without damage reduction, and with only one card play per round, Voss goes down way, way easier than trying to juggle his minions and his damage reduction on his front side.

I think I’ve played Advanced Voss too often. Yeah, I noticed around game 4 that he doesn’t play 2 cards a turn on his flip side as regular Voss.

You want him to flip because then Hypersonic Assault can hurt him more easily.

Mint. Dropped the first forces deployment, got hit by a second around the middle which put a load out, but cleared them fairly easily. Missed all the ships and worst stuff. Cleared all the Minions and kept plugging away. Took way longer than it should as I wasted Tachyon’s big hits making sure the double damage reduction didn’t stick around, but not really in any real danger.

I always flip him to avoid the damage reduction.

Near Mint :/ The first time, I messed something up and got a Forced Deployment at the worst time. No one survived.

This time, I messed up and got both warships at the same time, but somehow only Parse went down? And then Tachyon won the game that same round.

But yeah, Fumbling Fool and Dark Dynamics keeps you discarding bad stuff off Voss's deck and playing cards from Tachyon, which seems to be the best way to go, even if I did shuffle her trash into her deck once. XD

There are lots of things about Setback that I really still don’t get. Like Uncharmed Life, which is part of your opening hand here. It’s a way to step in front of damage, I guess, particularly if someone else is liable to die otherwise, but he doesn’t do damage reduction or damage immunity like Legacy so it’s not like Lead From The Front. Sure, he’s got Silver Linings, which you can do great things with in this setup because Argent Adept can give it back to him with Vernal Sonata, but the 2 tokens he has to spend to use Uncharmed Life come out of his HP if you’re counting on Silver Linings.

While it doesn’t come into play in this game, there’s also Friendly Fire. Take 2 damage to gain 2 tokens. Yeah, I know it combos with things like Fixer’s Crowbars, but I have trouble seeing it as being a good idea absent that.

Of course, is someone else can give him some DR, like a couple of Captain Cosmic’s Energy Bracers, or Argent Adept’s Bulwark, these are a bit more attractive.

He does have some opportunities to do lots of damage if he has the tokens. In one of the games I lost, Voss had a boatload of minions out from a Forced Deployment, and Setback took out 10 of them by himself with Exceeds Expectations and High Risk Behavior. It’s not hard for him to get do 4 or 5 damage to as many targets as you want with those cards.

I’d recommend looking over Donner’s strategy guide https://sentinelswiki.com/index.php?title=Setback_Strategy