Weekly One-Shot #153 Blue Steel

Omnitron-U, Benchmark, Supply and Demand, Cosmic Inventor Writhe, Dark Watch Setback, and Hunted Naturalist against The Chairman in Omnitron IV.

I recomend a practice game to get used to the team dynamic, as this one is pretty mean against The Chairman.  You can use Writhe to negate the counter attacks he brings when you hit him as well as the ones The Operative.  Also be careful, there's a prison break about 4 underbosses in.  Try to save your AoEs for that.

Either way this was a mint for me at 17/19/11/6/15.  Like the last oneshot I had, Setback did a lot of damage here, in fact I think he was doing the most damage since he had Looking Up early and eventually got High Risk Behavior.  That said everyone else put in work.  Omni and Benchy were doing plenty of damage, Writhe kept everyone from getting too beaten up by the gang, and Naturalist kept the enviorment from doing anything at all with enviormentalallies.

Mint, pretty much same as above. I had one real bit of bad luck when the Chairman flipped the turn that Prison Break hit--that was nasty. But this team is pretty high-damage and has some strong defensive capabilities too.

Mint

The Chairman flip and Prison Break was nasty, but the rest went well.

I played a practice game last night. I agree with Missingno, the practice game is very helpful in learning team’s dynamic.

I had good environment control and was able to use it sweep the villains after the Prison Break.

This was insanely easy. I think the only suggestion I can make is be sure to use the Informant to drain the villain deck of Prison Breaks; they're pretty close together, or at least they were in my game. Not sure how much the Operative's shuffling leads to disaparate gameplay.

Yeah, I had the same.  Hyperactive Senses didn’t help, either, as both Prison Breaks were on top at the same time.

But Countermeasures and the Environment made that turn suck a lot less, ad the now 2hp Hired Gun was eaten by Benchmark.

Countermeasures is quickly becoming my favorite card.

Mint with everyone around 10.

As above, Writhe's ability to negate the first damage done each turn to a hero makes the retaliation damage much more manageable. Also don't forget that forcing the Operative and Chairman to fight each other means nemesis bonus and retaliation damage :D  I also got the nasty prison break right after the flip, but by then I could have just double skipped the heroes and let the environment eat everyone and have been fine. Instead I did burn through the rest of the deck to find the second break, then tried to shuffle the deck before killing the underbosses (if the deck is shuffled, then you kill the underbosses, they are in the trash and the Operative can't pull them back out) but missed it by one card. However, by that point it was easy enough to finish the Operative and then Pike.

Omni mostly controlled the non-helpful environment, Benchmark played all the things, Setback did the damages, Naturalist went environmental allies to let the rest of the environment chew through minions, and Writhe managed the tanking, control, and forced the Organization to fight itself like good little meat puppets.

*Update: Tried again on the PC, and I don't know what I did differently, but it ended with both Prison Breaks being the last 2 cards of the deck, and thus never played. Don't think I've ever seen that before... Everyone closer to 20 this time

~Komori

Mint.

Not easy--my Prison Breaks ended up not next to each other, and were both in the second half of the deck (the second one was the second-to-last card). After the reshuffle, and getting rid of all of the Underbosses, a THIRD Prison Break happened.  The heroes were not happy.

However, Writhe is pretty sweet--so he took care of the Underbosses with a Darkly Dreaming, and helped the other heroes weather the storm of damage from the Operative.

Setback had a silly amount of tokens and used Looking Up with High Risk Behavior, Omnitron-U protected himself with Ablative Coating and tanked when Writhe's shadow magic/tech ran out--Naturalist made the robots the friends of the heroes, and once Benchmark got set up, he had a major-mega-do-everything-even-the-kitchen-sink-and-the-can-opener turn and took the Chairman and Operative from each around 15HP to 0HP by himself.

At the end, Omnitorn-U 3HP, Benchmark 10HP, Writhe 5HP, Setback 5HP and Naturalist 6HP.

Environmental Allies is your friend.

ALSO, two nasty prison breaks in a row, wait... threee (just really bad luck) sucks.

Still got myself a mint

I ended up with the prison breaks near the bottom, so easy mint. I largely ate the environment with O-U even if naturalist could've made them friends. 

Oh, chairman does shuffling.  I forgot about that.  My prison breaks were spaced out, one near the top that only saved the fence, one in the middle when the chairman flipped that gave me a sheer heart attack before I realized "hey, I have countermeasures and defense grid up" and one at the veeeeeeery bottom of the deck, like it was one of the last three cards.

This was one of the easiest Chairman games I've ever played. Sold out for damage pretty hard. I focused down Operative so fast that I only ever saw three of the Underbosses - two that she searched out (Fence, Muscle) and one that Chairman played (Deputy) after I focused her down. Then, after he flipped, I focused him down. Saw Prison Break, but it didn't matter; by then he was half-dead and Umbral Siphon was in effect, costing him plenty of HP recovery. Won on Setback's turn with a Karmic Retribution and bounced the counter damage back in his face.

Final HP 13 / 16 / 20 / 23 / 20. 

Mint, 20/17/20/19/22. There were a couple spots where I thought I could have played a little better, but it turned out that killing the underbosses right away with all the firepower I started with was fine. I took the advice of using Informant to bring out the Prison Breaks, and I was able to milk them both out of the deck on Omnitron-U’s turn with Reset and Slip Through Time, leaving me plenty of turns to drop a solitary underboss so my environmental ally Omnitron IV didn’t make me eat too much retaliation damage from the Operative at once (since Writhe can only block one attack per turn with his variant power). Once that was done, I was able to drop the Chairman and the Operative in a couple rounds, defeating the Chairman right after he played the last card in his deck.

Fairly easy mint. I never saw any Prison Breaks. Fearing the Prison Break, I tried to have Naturalist draw as much as possible to get Hyperactive Senses and Writhe used Grasping Shadow Cloth whenever he could. The first time he played it, the Power Broker came out which neutralized Informant and made that turn easy. The extra shuffle must have moved cards around enough to avoid the Prison Breaks.

Omnitron-U used cards to do damage, especially Bio-Engineering Beam. Setback was Looking Up the whole time and used whatever else he could to do damage. Benchmark gave Naturalist an extra power play so that Naturalist had all animal forms in play at once for extra power plays. Naturalist drew cards, did damage and played Environmental Allies with Nimble Gazelle in play. This let me ignore the environment and let the environment take down Operative and whatever minions were around. Writhe protected Benchmark so the Operative was not doing any real damage. Benchmark also threw out some 4 damage punches to keep it up.

Everyone ended near full, except Setback who put out High Risk Behavior near the end to help finish off the Chairman.

Pretty easy mint. As Bolnerap said, one of the easier Chairman games I’ve ever played.

It was 90% that Cosmic Inventor Writhe eliminates all that nasty Operative retaliation, so eliminating the minions wasn’t painful. He pretty much did that and little else.

Benchmark had a runaway setup so he was doing ridiculous things by the time the first Prison Break came out. He was doing things like “next damage to The Contract is irreducible and increased by 2, now the Contract takes 4 damage and dies.” Ultimately he did the majority of the damage.

The Chairman’s one of the few decks where Countermeasures is really effective, and I forgot about it. Mainly because it so rarely gets to trigger. There was a turn where it would have killed off Hired Gunman before he did any damage, and I selected “Choose For Me” because I thought order didn’t matter, and Setback took 9 damage due to High Risk Behavior. D’oh!

The Naturalist’s main contribution was Environmental Allies, but that of course is excellent in Omnitron IV. Sure, the Chairman’s immune, but the various drones and devices chew through minions really, really fast. It also made it relatively safe to leave Recylers in play so heroes often got equipment back. Particularly the Shadow Cloak.

I'd just like to point out this is my favorite description of any one shot to date.

Whether Christopher or John or otherwise, genius.

Was it a reference to something?  I felt like it was, but I didn’t know what.

Grandpa ranty rambling isn’t exactly how I imagined the Somber Inventor. Terse and menacing innuendo was more what I had pictured. But then, I don’t read anything outside of the text available in-game.

Thanks Timjobinroach =) 

For anyone who didn't get it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q

What a reference. XD

Mint. Not too bad really considering Chairman. Cosmic Inventor Writhe certainly can get a lot of work done. Only had one Prison Break when the Chairman flipped and I cleared things out again without too much effort. Writhe’s Attacks that make villains attack each other can have a pretty big impact on this one, but this is a pretty flexible team with the damage needed to control the organisation from the beginning. 

Mint, used benchmark with informant to get both prison breaks out before taking down an underboss, followed up with the super creepy card from withe to wipe the board. was easy running from there.

You’re gonna have to be a bit more specific there, Writhe has at least 5 super creepy cards.

"you're gonna have to be more specific" is literally word-for-word EXACTLY what I was going to say to that.

That being said, I assume you mean Darkly Dreaming (hit all non-hero for 2, destroy cloak, they hit themselves for 2?)

yeah, darkly dreaming, it can wipe chairman board super easy.