Challenge Kaargra vs Action Hero Stuntman, Xtreme Captain Cosmic, Termination Bunker and Xtreme Tempest in the Celestial Tribunal.
Expect this one to go fast. And let Ansel mine the whole arena for maximum WTF just happened.
Yeah, I was shocked I Minted it. The round I had resigned myself to a loss was the round Stuntman opened up a can of whoopass and saved the day. No Time to Bleed let him play a Mine, which then immediately went off (I want to say this was in the middle of Tryragon's attack, which would be hilarious if it were true). So he takes out Captain Cosmic, which destroys the Paragon of Sentience next to him, playing the top card of the environment deck: Call to Judgment. Summon Requital Captain Cosmic! And I used his power on Tempest, whose third card was a Lightning Slash, letting him take off Kaargra's last 3 HP before it was too late. :D The Mine is your friend!
Mint.
Kaarga games are usually a damage race. Not because you want to kill targets, but because that’s what gains tokens. Doing lots of AoE makes the crowd happy.
So this setup is all about Action Stuntman, because he’s the only one that can really do that quickly. Captain Cosmic needs time to build, and Xtreme Captain Cosmic is slower than the other versions at doing so, since he doesn’t get his extra card play from his base power. Bunker is another slow setup, and while starting with a grenade launcher helps, he can’t do the 2 points to 3 targets required here without some damage boost that he isn’t going to get. Tempest can pull it off if he draws Hailstorm, but he didn’t in my game.
Stuntman did almost all of this himself, and I didn’t lose anyone. He just kept pulling ridiculous strings of attacks, mostly blowing things up with mines, since he starts with 2. Sure, “I do all my own stunts” is bad for the heroes too when he’s dropping mines, but as long as he’s doing a lot more damage to the villains than the heroes, this works for Warfang. It’s great with “No Time to Bleed,” as well.
I won on round 4. Kaarga was flipped and I had 25+ crowd favor. I completely lost track of all the stuff Stuntman was doing on Kaarga’s turn to knock her down. It went something like: Stuntman takes damage, Moving Target lets him use a power, he uses All My Own Stunts to play The Usual Solution, damages Kaarga, she retaliates with 1 psychic damage to everyone due to The Mindbreaker title, which also means everyone takes +2 damage on the next attack because of the Seeker title, he shoots her due to No Time to Bleed, a mine goes off, Stuntman gains The Champion for nuking a bunch of constructs, Stuntman tries to shoot himself because of the mine and No Time to Bleed, but since it’s 5+ damage he destroys it and shoots Kaarga with his machine pistol instead, and then finishes her off with Coup Vexant.
Seriously, one way or another he did something like 20+ damage to Kaarga during her turn. The +2 damage to each attack from a couple of All My Own Stunts had a lot to do with that.
Mint.
Crazy damage flying around--hard to keep track of!
After a bit, Stuntman had Seeker (because a mine damaged a construct that had just received Stonejaw) and Indiscriminate and was blowing everything up. It was on the edge of a knife, because Kaargra had 19 favor at the end.
Captain Cosmic and Bunker helped out a teeny bit, and Tempest was Ahsclawed for almost the whole game.
At the end, Stuntman 11HP, Captain Cosmic 7HP, Bunker 8HP and Tempest 3HP.
Minty goodness but I can't tell you how.
What I can tell you is that it was, appropriately, the Stuntman Show.
Still not familiar enough with Stuntman to know the exact combinations flying out fast and furious, but going in to this one-shot I knew enough about Stuntman to know that with any damage boosts, he goes nuts. Since his variant gives him that as a base, ALL OF THE DAMAGE for my game came from Stuntman. It got even worse once he picked up the Seeker title. Sure, Captain Cosmic pew-pew'ed a couple measly lasers and Bunker tossed a couple grenades, but seriously. Tempest was just there to keep the worst gladiator's end of turn effects from happening it seemed like. CC's constructs distracted the "target lowest" gladiators, Bunker.... bunkered I guess, and Stuntman blew up the Arena several times over.
Ended with Stuntman at the lowest at 6 and everyone else around 10, favor something like 22-13
~Komori
Mint.
End Score: 30-13.
Ended up being super easy with Stuntman dealing more damage to Kaargra and the Gladiators on the villain turn, then they were dealing us.
Same deal here: Mint, 28-7, the Stuntman Show.
Round 1: Stuntman does some training and puts out a couple of cards. CC double-skips because the only other thing he could do is play a construct, and with 4 damage on the table headed to the hero with the lowest HP, that would have been a free point. Bunker plays and fires the grenade launcher. Tempest just puts down his Resilience, since he can't do damage and is scheduled to take some.
Round 2: Stuntman plays some more stuff, including smashing the Celestial for Death-Caller. CC goes ahead and plays, but that meant Bunker had to skip his attack or Tarnis would have gotten Mindbreaker. Tempest double-skips.
Round 3: Kaargra pisses Stuntman off, who murders everything and earns 5 titles. Game ends at the start of Captain Cosmic's turn, with Death-Caller bypassing Kaarga's Unbreakable.
I could have literally double-skipped with everyone but Stuntman every turn and had basically the same result. Good lord, he gets stupid.
Mint. Ended it on the Environment turn, after Stuntman bringing KW down to 2 at the start of Bunker's turn.
And, thinking back, I probably could have taken her out that turn.
Maybe.
I lost track of just what the hell happened.
I'm impressed everyone is minting this. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I looked at it last night and thought "They must have seen Action Hero Stuntman rose to the top of the hero chart and put him in a really hard one-shot to give him some more losses." I guess I was wrong.
Reading Mindwanderer’s account, I realize I really don’t pay enough attention to Kaarga’s mechanics. I didn’t think “losing a construct is a point for the other team,” I thought “that’s 4 damage my heroes won’t take.” I looked at the Celestial Executioner and thought “that’s not a threat yet,” not “Stuntman could get Death Caller if he destroyed it with The Usual Solution.” When doing damage I just try and do damage, I don’t think how that might give the target the Mindbreaker title.
I think that's why Kaarga is so hard, and why Christopher is in denial about how hard she is. There's just so dang much to keep track of. Had this been a normal game and not a one-shot, I would have used Undo and reordered the last villain turn multiple times, because Stuntman kept getting titles that altered how the rest of the turn played out. Fortunately it was easy at that point anyway because Action Hero Stuntman is absurd, but I could have done even better if I'd thought eveything out carefully.
When I see Kaarga as a one-shot, I just assume I’m going to end up with Fine because there are so many ways to lose that are unpredictable. For example you can be close to a victory and have Fickle Fans lose the game for you. Whatshername the Adept scores 3 crowd points every turn, which is a serious timer. The titles can turn assets into liabilities - having any kind of damage resistance is bad if The Seeker is still available as a title.
Kaarga’s one of those villains that practically demands control of the villain deck via Infrared Eyepiece or Extrasensory Perception, but heavily penalizes support characters because they’re not doing damage, and not doing damage means losing the crowd favor race.
So yeah, I was surprised to get Mint, and surprised at how much Action Hero Stuntman could chain together attacks and damage bonuses. I’ve been playing with Stuntman a lot recently, and I was aware of the sort of out-of-turn shenanigans he does, but getting 3 extra plays in a round was more than I usually see.
When only a hero has damage reduction and The Seeker is available:
https://tenor.com/view/hulk-the-incredible-hulk-thor-chris-hemsworth-the-avengers-gif-5446278
Mint on the first pass, much like the others.
Read the thread and was amused by the idea of Stuntman soloing it. So I did a game where only he played damaged cards. Cosmic brought out one vitality conduit, Bunker went straight to recharge and stayed there, Tempest did his damage reducers.
Result - win, 47-16, Stuntman at 2, Cosmic at 6, Bunker at 7, Tempest at 5, and Legacy watching from the Celestial sidelines at 2. I had a ridiculous amount of damage buffs on Stuntman by the end, such that his final mine did 9 to each enemy.
Mint here too. Things were looking bad, but then Stuntman decided to explode without warning and never stopped exploding. I couldn't even concentrate on what was happening like I normally do with Kaarga because of all the explosions. I think that's the fastest I ever hit 20 favor.
Mint.
Add me to the “What the heck did Stuntman just do” camp. I had the requisite favor to win, trying to figure out how to wipe out Kaargra, when S’sdari (who had 4 or 5 titles by now) shoots Stuntman, which triggers a mine, which triggered something, which KO’ s Kaargra.
Monsieur Moreau can just go crazy! But you have to be a little nuts to Do All Your Own Stunts!
Near Mint for me.
My first game I made the mistake of getting out to an early favor lead and Fickle Fans was a major setback. Kaagra got 20 favor exactly on one of her turns which was unfortunate since I likely would have won that round.
My second game was much easier as I knew to wait for Fickle Fans before taking a favor lead.
Mint, 40-10.
Stuntman went down in a blaze of glory on Kaargra's last turn. Wasn't quite enough to knock her out, but got her down to about 6 HP left. (He'd picked up Mindbreaker pretty early on, after I had CC and a construct hit him with Plays With Madness. That, plus Seeker, plus Death-Caller, plus Hidden Mine and Pistolet-Mitrailleur, made for some fun times.) I think CC might have had one construct all game that survived to his next turn.
Pretty easy mint with everyone still in the high teens. 21-10. Stuntman doing most of the heavy lifting (as well as all his own stunts!). I was winning pretty handily, but had a pretty crazy mine go off in the last round that essentially gave 3 titles to Stuntman and triggered a power usage for him, which pretty handily cleared Kaargra out.
Probably one of the more relaxing games I’ve had against Kaargra - I enjoy her fight, but I do think it’s one of the easier ones to lose, as the wrong order of a few random cards can have a big impact on you, but in this case Stuntman was just putting consistent damage across the whole area and it was her and the Gladiators who were struggling to keep up.
I just played a practice game since I don't think I've ever done Challenge Kaargra before. I discovered there are some really nasty Gladiator-Title combinations!
S'sdari with Death Caller means any constructs you play are immediately killed. But worse than that is Provocator Tarnis with Chaos Lord. Every turn he's dealt damage, you play a villain card. And he redirects the first damage dealt to a villain each turn to himself. So any turn you damage a villain, a new villain card gets played.
I got lucky with a Fickle Fans and had a chance to win if I could just finish off Kaargra, but Stuntman went a bit overboard with his stunts and his mines killed all of his teammates (except the Unbreakable Bunker!) as well as the Representative of Earth.
Same. Lost 20-17 in my first game, would have won easily if Fickle Fans hadn’t swung tokens.
I hate Fickle Fans, despite benefiting from it with my Mint. I get that villain decks usually need disastrous cards like Dawn’s Aurora and Kaarga’s Get Back In There to keep games from being a predictable climb to victory, but Fickle Fans is not just random, it punishes good play.
The counter argument for cards with potentially huge effects is deck control, but as I said before, Kaarga punishes teams that spend effort on anything other than damage.
Fickle Fans is thematic for what the deck represents and while potentially punishing I’d much prefer to see that than Get Back In There
I feel if Fickle Fans would just reduce the amount of favor the winner has without increasing the amount of favor the loser has. That way it would just slow things down and not end games out of nowhere. Heck if the card wasn't there as it currently is Kaagra would easily be my favorite fight in the game.
I think it’s fine where it stands as it fits thematically and over the course of a game ends up breaking even.
I've always found Fickle Fans to be a card limiting how far Kaargra can get ahead in the early game, and always plan for it so it'll be helpful when it inevitably hits.
“”It’s thematic” should never be a discussion point when talking about balance. That’s the sort of seat-of-the-pants game design that leads to terrible games. Repeating that “it’s thematic” doesn’t make the argument any stronger.
It’s largely irrelevant that Fickle Fans should balance out over the course of the game, what’s important is that it can turn a victory into a defeat with the turn of a single card. I can’t think of any card in any other deck that can do that. Wager Master (which is the worst villain deck by far) has some cards that invert things like “Who Are You Fighting?”, but you can see them before they take effect, unlike Fickle Fans.
(By worst, by the way, I mean random and poorly balanced, not hard. Wager Master can be ridiculously easy if he plays Losing To The Odds early).
”Assume it’s going to come out, and play accordingly” is a stronger argument. If you don’t have deck control, the idea would be that you sandbag a bit in the early game. You want to keep as close as you can to Kaarga’s score while staying behind. Though of course there’s a limit to that, you can’t keep doing that if Kaarga is close to winning on points.
This is a game highly built around being thematic. Just because you’re not a fan of the mechanic it does doesn’t make being thematic bad game design. There are plenty of other decks where a particular card can lead to a game ending if it hits the right circumstances just like Fickle Fans. An ill timed EPE or Jail Break can be the end for heroes.
I’m sure this has happened to others before, but I once won a game on Wager Master’s first turn because of Losing To The Odds.
Typical Wager Master to lose to his own rules before the heroes ever agree to playing his game.
This is a spurious argument. That theme has zero to do with balance has nothing to do with my personal tastes. It’s something that’s objectively true. By trying to make it about personal taste you’re attempting to avoid discussing the issue based on its merits.
Theme isn’t intrinsically balanced or unbalanced. Theme can enhance a player’s enjoyment of a game, but being thematic doesn’t fix balance. It’s like arguing that a bridge with engineering flaws can bear more weight because it’s a nice shade of blue. If someone points out it might collapse, “you just don’t like blue” is a meaningless counterargument.
Ignoring game balance is bad game design. I can’t count the number of designers I’ve worked with who have done exactly that, made up mechanics based on “feel” with no consideration for balance at all. Seat of the pants design can make decent games by accident, but usually it doesn’t.
I mentioned that there are lots of nasty cards in villain decks, but Fickle Fans is different because it penalizes effective play. Usually it’s the opposite - it’s much easier to deal with an EPE, for example, if you’ve cleared the board of all other threats.
Jail Break is a stronger analogy, though not exact. Jail Break, Get Back In There, and Forced Deployment undo the elimination of threats, and one way to play around them is to wound targets rather than eliminate them, because you know a “bring ‘em all back” card is coming. Those cards penalize you for eliminating rather than damaging targets, which is usually good play.
In the case of Forced Deployment, you have advance warning, unlike the other two. You can play cards to defend, like Grease Gun or Heroic Interception. If you eliminate Forced Deployment yourself, instead of waiting for the villain turn, you have an opportunity to eliminate minions before they can act.
Still, Fickle Fans is different, because bringing back minions isn’t an immediate loss, and there are things the players can do about it. That’s not true of Kaarga’s scoreboard, there are ongoing cards which reduce damage to heroes, but no ongoing cards which reduce abrupt gains in crowd favor.
I don’t see it having a balance issue much like Wager Master can win or lose based off of Conditions he plays. There are plenty of ways to work around it if needed and sometimes being the underdog on either side will help. It’s not meant to be a fair card and clearly we can see with Kaargra being flipped as a target she cheats since you can’t win as long as she remains a target.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re saying about Wager Master, so I won’t try and address it.
“Fair” is an ambiguous word in this context. Villain cards are always intended to be obstacles to the heroes, so they’re never “fair” in that sense because they’re always working against the heroes. That’s expected. From a game point of view, though, it’s a questionable card.
I do think Ario’s point is a valid one, and that intentionally keeping your score lower than Kaarga’s because of Fickle Fans is part of gaming the challenge, much like the Title cards force the player to behave in atypical ways to either gain titles or avoid awarding them to gladiators.
Still, I object to using theme as a justification without examining how it affects the game. In the same vein,”Kaarga cheats” isn’t relevant. Kaarga’s personality has no bearing on the balance or lack of it in Fickle Fans.
On an unrelated note, and I want to be clear this is unrelated, and not meant to be relevant to the nature of Fickle Fans, I’m not even clear that Kaarga is “cheating,” since the background isn’t really spelled out. I mean really, for all we know it could be a longstanding rule of her arena that she can get in there and fight if she wants. Though personally, and yeah thematically, I’d have worded the flip side of her card to say if the heroes eliminate her, they win. That she effectively recovers full health if you beat her flip side and then she plays “get back in there” again is atypical.
If you’re going to say Kaarga cheats, I’d point to the fact she arbitrarily awards herself titles when she goes in herself. That looks like cheating on her part.
As I’ve made obvious I think Fickle Fans is balanced for what the Kaargra playstyle is. I often play with random teams and it tightened things up by not letting one side run away with the game. My recent experience has been having everyone get damaged with it coming up as the first card play. It’s just an obstacle to keep in mind which you can game as Ario pointed out.
I think mechanically Kaargra is one of the most interesting fights as there are lots of elements to keep track of. It’s easy to lose in my opinion because Kaargra’s win condition is essentially a clock - if she gets to 20 she wins or if she defeats the heroes she wins.
The heroes have a slightly harder job - they must get to 20 and make sure Kaargra is off the board. This makes the game interesting as you can’t just damage race her and win - you need to control your favour so that you’re getting to 20 as you take her off the board - too many actions spent killing her before you get there are wasted (as Get back in there can come out and ruin your day) and too many actions that score points before you defeat Kaagra are also risky.
Fickle Fans helps to keep the fight balanced in my view - it acts as a limiter on how overwhelming the heroes can be and also can act as a catch up if you’re falling behind. I’ve definitely lost to it, but it’s much easier to play around than some of the other super cards villains have - some of those might not instantly win the game, but some can easily spell the start of a slow enevitable defeat easily enough. Knowing Fickle Fans exists makes it much easier to play around though and I’d argue that as long as you know it’s a possibility you can limit its impact on your game so that it isn’t hurting you (and can even help you).
I just want to say that fickle fans doesn't really turn a win into a loss or vice versa. For the game to end due to a fickle fans the winning side needs to be at 15-17+ tokens and for the loosing side to have 16-18+ tokens. Even at the far end where the villians have 15 and the heroes have 19+ there are more than just fickle fans that can end the game and unless your at 40+ tokens the game is fairly close and the game doesn't just "end out of nowhere".
Yes, Fickle Fans does turn a win into a loss. Fairly often, actually.
For example, if Kaargra is in play, the heroes can have 20+ tokens and in a position to win if they beat her down. This is usually the most common way the game goes, unless the heroes have deck control and can avoid Get Back In There entirely. If Kaargra has 15+ tokens and FIckle Fans comes out, they lose instantly. The Crowd Favor card doesn’t say Kaargra has to be ahead to win - she only has to have 20 tokens.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Kaargra game that wasn’t “fairly close” by your overly strict definition. She almost always has at least 15 tokens by game end. I’ve never, ever had 40+ tokens against her, even when things went perfectly. 30+ feels like a runaway success, actually.
Seriously, your comment makes me wonder if you’ve ever actually played her.
I consider any favour gained over 20 to be kind of a waste actually - arguably you want a little bit of a buffer (for Fickle Fans purposes), but scores of 30-40 favour don’t impress me that much as it either means you either got some really poor luck (get back in there when you’re at like 19) or you haven’t played that efficiently. Taking Kaarga’s flip side down with the action that gets you to 20 is probably the ideal goal in a Kaarga game to me. It’s not always possible, but winning with 40 favour I’d consider to have been a really tough game.
I agree that there’s little point in trying for points once you’re at 25+ (with Kaargra flipped, obviously), but I don’t agree that a high score implies inefficient play. I had 30+ favor in this one-shot, entirely because of the cascade of stuff that Stuntman set off. Those mines are area effect, which scores favor, and doing big hits scores scores favor as well. A tough game would involve plinking away at her slowly because you’re having trouble landing big hits, and that scores no favor.
Really, though, I have no idea what a 40+ token game would look like. As you said, once you’re much past 20 you focus on taking Kaargra down rather than points, which is why I found Jstnmayo’s criteria nonsensical, and thought they implied he didn’t have any experience playing against her.
I've gotten 40+ points without deliberately trying to milk it. Usually, as FearLord said, it's when she Gets Back In There when at 18-19 points, but sometimes it's because we're just doing that much damage. If 5 gladiators come out and you do a mass attack that deals 4 damage per gladiator, that's 6 favor points at least, probably more if you killed something or earned one or more titles, and yet Kaargra is only 10% dead. Legacy + Tempest with Living Weapon, for instance, makes this highly likely.
i have plenty of experince with kaaraga, as she is my favorite villian as i love the way the game changes. i've had plenty of games where i've either i or the villians have had 10 or under when the game ended. I will say my original post is off becuase i was thingking that ff was h-1 not h, but the point i was making still stands. for the game to end to fickle fans for the villians victory they need to be at favor vaule ther idesa, orrim, or in some cases perith can also end the game. ff aslo has a bigger impact on games with more heroes and those games the heroes have the advantage of being able to generate favor easier.
also as mindwander and fearlord mentioned, 40+ isn't that hard in some games without trying to milk it. the only reason i brought it up was that this one shot had me win with 40+ because hidden mine blew everything up hard.
It’s still wrong. Your definition of a “narrow victory” includes most victories against Kaargra, which is why I questioned your experience with the deck. The hero score only needs to be 16-19 if Kaargra hasn’t flipped. It’s irrelevant if she’s flipped, so the heroes can be well ahead, and in a position to take Kaargra out and lose to Fickle Fans.
I won this 27-19, and the possibility of a Fickle Fans draw actually made the last couple rounds more exciting for me because my impending win could have been undone by what was coming from the top of her deck. I think it depends on your personality, maybe. If you’re more inclined to Ameritrash, then the risk of losing due to the luck of the draw is more acceptable and part of the fun. It’s another big setback card like Citizen Dawn or Omnitron’s board clearers. You can slowplay in anticipation of it, just live with the possibility of it coming up, or you can bring deck manipulating heroes like Parse or Wraith if you really can’t stand having your carefully laid plans ruined arbitrarily. (Which is honestly me most of the time, but neutering the villain deck like that feels like cheating and is kind of unfun.)
I’m unable to see how using a hero who is explicitly about deck manipulation is cheating. For that matter, if your definition I of “fun” is a random card destroying your board, I’m not seeing that either.
Parse is one of my favorite heroes, possibly my favorite. Not because of deck manipulation per se, but because she’s a support character who fiddles with everyone else’s cards. My idea of fun is Parse, the Argent Adept, and Guise on a team pulling all sorts of shenanigans.
I’m not saying Fickle Fans is some amazing card; I do see the argument that the existence of a solitary card that’s so game wrecking that you have to work out a way to negate it is in fact bad design. It’s one of the things I don’t love about Sentinels, and other people here have pointed out that Kaargra’s deck is hardly unique in that respect. Omnitron and Dawn among others can punish you for doing too well too. And a draw of Fickle Fans literally handing the game the win might feel outrageous, but there are other situations where that can de facto happen with other villain decks even if it takes more than a turn to play out. I’ve had setups with Citizen Dawn where my heroes never had a turn with cards in hand and the game was essentially unwinnable after the initial villain turn. That didn’t feel fun either.
I don’t like getting my board wrecked either, but in my specific circumstances that possibility spiced up my end game. I really like Parse too, but when I feel like victory is assured but I still have a bunch of game to play out, I’m not really exulting in the engine I’ve built up as much as I’m just going through the motions to see the win screen. It’s not literally cheating, but I do feel like I rob myself a bit when I’m playing with the perfect setup to counter a villain. Bringing deck manipulation to Citizen Dawn so I never have to see Devastating Aurora feels like I’m bypassing the challenge her deck is designed to present. I prefer to avoid bringing GI Bunker to fight Apostate or Mr. Fixer to fight Plague Rat too. The game being in contention right up to the last round is what made it fun.