Weekly One-Shot #145: Nine Lives

Ennead on the Mobile Defense Platform vs. Parse, Freedom Five Wraith and Freedom Five Legacy.

Mint.

Kind of a walk in the park? Given the title and description, I expected a flood of Ennead to enter the game...but they didn’t. Only Atum joined the fray. Legacy starts with 2 Take Downs, and Parse and Wraith have ridiculous amounts of deck control....so....have fun!

My favorite moment was when Wraith’s Combat Stance took out both Atum and Isis on the same turn. Your Kung Fu is weak, Egyptians.

Wraith finished it by taking out Geb with an Inventory Barrage.

Parse 14HP, Wraith 10HP and Legacy 14HP.

Mint, got legacy with fortitude, lead from the front, and next evolution, villians did no damge after that.  This is a good exmple on how enead is much easier with 3 heores.

Easy mint. Smoke bombs, fortitude and Parse controlling the deck meant nothing happened. Parse and Wraith on 23, Legacy on 25.

Easy, simple, fun Mint. I made a bunch of mistakes -- mostly clicking the wrong target for damage -- but it did not matter. Two rounds of Take Down, especially when you can play Fortitude the same turn, mean toothless Ennead. Most of the game was spent with Wraith giving Legacy extra cards to play on his turn. The others just didn't have much to do outside their turns.

Easy mint. Everyone in their twenties. I dug out Infrared Eyepiece as quickly as I could, which gave me deck control once the Takedowns were done. That ensured I never had another Enead come up, nor their cards that destroy equipment.

...so Shu doesn’t come out?  Would that make the game unwinnable?

I checked, and none of the heroes could deal damage to Shu and the enviornment only hits heroes. So yes you are correct, but I didn’t see Shu at all in my game.

Mint with everyone high teens.

I also thought that a flood of Ennead were incoming, but there were more environment targets that came out than Ennead. 2 Take-Downs to start and two of the best deck manipulators in game meant a whole lotta nothing happened for most of the game. Worst was a Desert's Wrath with 4 environment cards out, but even that was minimized by smoke bombs, Fortitude, and particular order choosing.

Otherwise I would plink away and build up cards until parse got a Targeting Arrow, hit one of them, and then everyone piled on damage and would take them out in a round.

~Komori

PSA for people here, Parse discarding from the deck with Extrasensory Awareness will trigger effects from active Enead members.  Just something to watch out for.

Edit: Mint with every hero at 24 HP amusingly enough.  They went down like a sack of potatoes.

Yes, surprisingly easy mint. Everyone in their 20’s.

I didn't even notice that this was the Shu=You Lose hero team.  Without it being on Advanced, and with two Take Downs in Legacy's hand and Infrared Eyepiece easily accessible, you shouldn't be seeing a 4th villain.  Kept digging for Buffer Overflow just in case, never got it, never needed it.  Legacy was down to his low 20's, mostly from Take Down; the others hardly took anything at all.

I dug decently far down into the enemy deck myself and only saw one instance of something that would bring in more members.  Heck you’re more at risk of losing Wraith’s equipment than bringing in more members in this game!

That's odd, I used Infrared Eyepiece in round 2 and immediately used it to put Rise to Power on the bottom.

I made an account just to mention that I'm one of the people who did, in fact, get stuck in an unwinnable situation, with Shu coming out.

What order did he come out in? Curious how long you have before the game becomes unwinnable.

Welcome to the forums!

Joining for much the same reason as the above, at least in my case, Shu was 5th out.

Played too risky on not constantly checking the deck since they wern't dealing enough damage i felt that I needed to control it comapred to rushing them down. That was my bad, lesson learned.

Welcome to the forums!

Mint, 21/24/24. I'm amused by TakeWalker's comment that in his game, Wraith was giving Legacy a bunch of extra cards to play, since in mine, Legacy spent most of the game giving Wraith extra plays.

I'm not sure she really needed them, since by her third turn she had an IR Eyepiece, a Throwing Knives, and a Utility Belt and those were the powers she used for most of the rest of the game, but it was a bit satisfying to end with a 10-card Inventory Barrage.

Ridiculously easy mint. Though it seems I played slightly differently than anyone else.

My primary concern was preventing any further faux Egyptian gods from showing up. From the title I expected all 9 to arrive. First two turns I did what TakeWalker mentioned - Fortitude + Take Down to delay while I looked for deck control cards.

Parse is probably my favorite hero by far, and she has a wealth of deck control. Wraith’s IR Eyepiece is nice, but Parse has Guage, Extrasensory Perception, and Buffer Overflow, all of which could block additional gods, equipment or ongoing destruction. Thus I used Wraith’s Clandestine Funding to give Parse card draws until she got Extrasensory Perception, and tended to alternate between Parse and Legacy for card draws afterward. Legacy mainly for Lead from the Front and Next Evolution.

Parse, predictably, was MVP. She rapidly dug through her deck until she had 3 Critical Multipliers in play, along with Snap Decision. Wraith helped her look for cards and Legacy helped her play them. With 3x Critical Multiplier, Recomplie reads “one hero does +9 damage.” It wasn’t too difficult to get at least one of those a turn, and often two. On the last turn, Wraith did 15 points to Geb, and Legacy did 25 points to whatshername.

With so much deck control between Extrasensory Perception, IR Eyepiece (which shows up early) and eventually Guage, the Ennead was limited to 1 and 2 point plinks. No additional gods showed up, no equipment destroyed, no ongoings destroyed. The one AoE attack got Throat Jabbed.

It’s true that Extrasensory Perception gives the Ennead plays - but it felt worth it, initially, to get rid of a really threatening card. Guage and IR Eyepiece only delay bad cards, they don’t eliminate them. In truth, though, it was over before that could have been a problem.

I think most other people go straight for the Eyepiece, whereas I go straight for “what can I pair with Micro-Targeting Computer?” I did zero deck manipulation in that game and came out just fine.

Same, but I didn’t think about the possibility of Shu coming out and making it unwinnable. I probably would have gone for Eye Piece a bit quicker if I’d have considered that, but Legacy can set up defensively quickly in this fight and also start piling on the damage pretty quick, and by the end I had Wraith dealing 4 to 3 targets and another 4 from her stun bolt as well as some big punches from Legacy and whatever arrows Parse had lying around. I completely ignored the environment and takedown stalled the villain deck quite a bit so we just powered through really with only Atum coming in…

I got this on the first try also. I was shocked when I had already pulled deck manipulation cards for both Parse and Wraith by the time my Take Downs had run out. I figured for sure the twist was going to be that all those cards were buried in their decks, making this a pure damage race before Shu came out. And then for a while I kept expecting all the extra god cards to be clumped up to make pulls unavoidable either way, but I buried the only one I saw.

The equipment blow up on top would have at least been a nasty surprise for Wraith at the end of the Take Downs, but I avoided it. And the environment deck got to attack for all of one turn before I ended the game. I finished with everybody in the high teens, despite ignoring all of Legacy’s defense cards to focus on the race. So this was a romp for me pretty early on, but I still enjoyed it.