Pie-in-the-sky wishes

(Somehow the forum software knew I wanted to talk about Sky-Scraper despite my not having mentioned her in the title…)

I think Sky-Scraper would be my favorite hero in the whole game, if not for the fact that her abilities are drastically limited by the need to cram everything she’s capable of into a 40-card deck. While every hero who creates things with their powers (Sky-Scraper, Captain Cosmic, Unity), along with Guise and even more open-ended characters like Bunker or Setback, could all theoretically benefit from having a deck larger than 40 cards, with various search mechanisms and such used to get them access to a wider degree of resources without being punished too much by the greater random factor of a larger deck, I bring this out-there speculation up specifically in this case, because my wish to have MOAR of whatever I want can be put in a more specific form in this case. Specifically, I think SS would be my favorite character ever if all three of her sizes (five if you want to count the Extremist variants) had a full 40-card deck. That way, her Tiny size could have the full variation of Links that I invariably end up wishing for, her Normal size could have a martial-arts kind of a thing that represents her Bloodsworn Coliseum experiences, and her Huge size could have a wider variety of open-ended One-Shots representing the things which a giant can do, such as destroying small targets simply by stepping on them, or picking up trucks and train cars to hurl them at enemies. As it stands, Sky’s deck simply feels too constrained for me to be entirely satisfied with; in the game I just finished playing, I had to intentionally sit there drawing cards with Normal size simply to try and fish out an Emergency Evac, because it was the only option she has for dealing with environment cards that aren’t targets, when in fact a size-shifting character ought to have a million solutions to the problems represented by such cards.

What other heroes do you feel are particularly constrained by the real-world limitations of the card game, thus that the character’s superheroic abilities aren’t properly represented by shuffling 40 cards and drawing 4 of them to start the game? This could also extend to heroes who really, really feel like they shouldn’t be under the same constraints of “play 1, use 1 power, draw 1” which apply to a “typical” hero (eg Luminary, who seems like he ought to frequently start the game with Devices already in play), or heroes who feel like they should be using their trash pile in a different way to represent their usage of unconventional resources (perhaps a more aggressively Cthulhu Mythos version of Nightmist could have worked this way).

To me, it doesn’t seem like “sneaky linker,” “gladiatorial martial artist,” and “big stompy giant” are complex enough to make full decks. Just my opinion though; I could be wrong.

What about doing what DE is doing with Omni, where cards have different effects based on mode? Sure, Proportionist and similar do that, but what about expanding that? So maybe link cards have effects in either Tiny or Normal mode, and some other card (techniques? Powers?) have effects based on Normal or Huge. Then the size changers stay the same.

That’s the Naturalist, though.

To answer the original question, I don’t really feel that any of the heroes are particularly over-constrained by the overall framework of the game. Sure, there are times when heroes who rely on particular mechanics get held up by a bad initial draw – who hasn’t played an Expatriette game that started with a hand full of ammo? – but that can happen to literally any hero. Even the ones who are more One-Shot heavy can run into this problem; I’ve totally had games with Tachyon that started with HUD Goggles, HUD Goggles, Lightspeed Barrage, and Pushing the Limits, or games with Tempest that start with too many Subwave Inducers and Flash Floods. But I’ve never thought the solution to that problem – if the game even needs a solution implemented beyond the existing draw-two rule – is to have more cards in their decks, more starting cards in their hands, or more deck-search cards for those characters.

For me, each hero does have their own feel in terms of which mechanics they lean into. Some may be a little more successful in thier implementation than others. I personally like Sky-Scraper’s size-changing implementation, especially her Extremist variant; part of her strategy is considering when to change size and when to stay where you are, based on both what’s going on in the game and what cards she has at her disposal. But the bottom line is, no matter your character, if you have a bad hand, you’re left with one good option: do the thing that best helps the game for the heroes. Sometimes that is setting yourself up for later, and sometimes it is just drawing two so you can get more options. I have a hard time imagining that any good fix for the occasional bad hand is to add more cards, multiple decks, or lots of hero-specific rules.

The issue isn’t one of drawing a bad hand, it’s more about how good your “a game” is if you get fully set up. For instance, the Wraith’s ideal layout for a typical damage-dealing situation is Utility Belt + Micro-Targeting Computer + Razor Ordnance + Throwing Knives, letting her hit one target for 8 and 2 others for 3. With the same four cards in hand, Bunker gets to do Turret Mode + Flak Cannon + Grenade Launcher + Gatling Gun, and deal 10 damage to one target, 3 to another, and 2 to the third. Pretty similar results, except that Bunker is discarding a card every turn and never drawing any, while Wraith pays no such cost. While I agree that it’s in flavor for Bunker to need more setup in order to be effective, since he’s an army guy and can’t do anything without several million dollars worth of military hardware, the problem is that when he does get everything he needs, he is still only about as effective as other heroes who need far less. Ex-Patriette has similar problems, and is probably weaker overall, but that’s fitting to her character, so it doesn’t bother me all that much, it just means I’m probably less likely to play her than any other character. Sky-scraper, however, is a character who I want to play, and the game seems to be holding her back from being as awesome as she ought to be, the same way it holds Bunker back from being as effective as the U.S. Military’s greatest strategic asset should.

Maybe the Definitive Edition will fix all that . . .

But is it really the fundamental game structure that’s holding Sky-Scraper back for you? Would you really solve the problem if she had a 50-card deck, or her draw phase fished for the next wherever-size-she-is card, or she swapped entire decks?

She can already be a stompy, collateral-damage-dealing distraction. She can already be a sneaky manipulator. And she can blow the whole field and reset. There are times when I play her where I might wish to be one of those things, but I only have cards in hand for the other – and that goes back to bad draws, bad initial hands, and the fact that this is a card game drawing from a random deck. Like I said before, any character has those moments.

I do feel that the Extremist Sky-Scraper variant is more fun, because it leans in to the chaos-causing potential of her size-change abilities while also giving the player some additional control over her size abilities. Bouncing between sizes multiple times a turn is the best. And maybe the Definitive Edition version of her will be further streamlined to her abilities and character, as they’re doing with Bunker and Wraith. But I still bet that those improvements can all be made within the framework of the existing game.

I’m not certain, but I think so.

For Sky, that probably wouldn’t be a good change. Chrono-Ranger would love it, not that he needs the help (he’s already about my #3 favorite).

That sounds like a great mechanic for yet another “three forms to switch between” hero, who would play differently from either Sky or the Naturalist (who is my #2 fave character and my #1 fave deck).

I don’t know for sure if that would fix anything, but the whole reason I made this thread was because I theorized that it might.

Some seem to have them a lot more frequently than others. I can’t recall a single occasion when I was playing Tempest or CR or The Sentinels and I didn’t have at least one card in my hand that I was extremely happy about playing. Some heroes just plain have too much chaff in their deck, and with the exception of The Visionary and Tachyon, they usually don’t have any good way of filtering it.

Agreed, but IMO a variant being better than the main hero, as opposed to simply different, is somewhat a design failure. Some heroes get the balance just right - Rook City Wraith is perfect as an alternative to regular Wraith, with a far more exciting ability and a bit more HP to make up for the lack of a defensive Power. But in other cases (probably the most egregious being Ex-Patriette), the promo is practically a strict upgrade, and that just makes the base hero feel incomplete.

Bunker definitely needed the help; I’m less convinced that Wraith required fixing, unless they’re trying to lean more into the Batman comparisons, which IMO would be a mistake. I think it’s one of the strengths of Sentinel Comics that their heroes are recognizable as homages on a shallow level, but quickly prove themselves to be distinctive. Legacy for example is kind of Superman + Captain America, but different enough from both of them not to feel like a total ripoff of either. Wraith = Batman is one of the most 1-to-1 comparisons in the entire game, and that’s a weakness IMO. One of the best observations C&A ever made on the podcast was to say that the SC equivalent of the “plan for everything” aspect of Batman isn’t Wraith, it’s Ex-Patriette. I think it’d be a good idea if they continued to push in that direction, and had Wraith stick to her fairly narrow slice of the Batman pie, so that she continues to feel more distinctive.

Maybe. But at this point, C&A have the resources necessary that they have the ability to go outside that framework if it’s the right decision, and they shouldn’t feel compelled to keep making all hero decks 40 cards just because all hero decks have always been 40 cards. If there’s a character whose shtick dictates that he should burn through his deck faster and reshuffle a lot, then there’s no reason why that character couldn’t have a 30-card deck; Tachyon and Haka come to mind as possibilities, and both have some distinctly weaker cards that they could stand to lose (although in Tachy’s case it would be a big problem if the maximum value of Lightspeed Barrage went down or if she was more commonly forced to reset it to 0; for Haka I would have almost no hesitation about dropping all but 1 copy of several of his weaker cards, since lowering the maximum output of his nine Haka cards is less of a problem than for Tachy’s three LBs). Conversely, a character along the lines of Omnitron-X or Captain Cosmic could absolutely have a larger deck with more search cards and the like, enabling them to be more flexible with their problem-solving, in line with the highly adaptable nature of their powers.

I would extend this principle to other decks as well. Some of the Environments feel padded with too many copies of cards that shouldn’t be as omnipresent as they are in such a setting (looking at you, Atlantis), while others ought to be far busier and more diverse than they are (Megalopolis comes to mind). And some villains quickly burn through a 25-card deck while others never need it; Progeny virtually always ends up reshuffling, while Baron Blade has only a single copy of by far the most crucial card in his deck (Consider the Price), and half the time he never arrives at it. Once again, if the game is going to have the built-in abstraction of “rounds” and “turns”, dictating that exactly one card gets randomly played whenever the environment or villain turn comes around, then there’s no reason why these decks always have to have exactly the same number of cards in them. Kaargra Warfang, IMO, should have a 25-card villain deck with a 25-card title deck, and Infinitor ought to have more different kinds of Manifestations instead of playing all of them in triplicate. And that’s without even touching how badly bungled of an early design Ambuscade is (I would also say Citizen Dawn needs tweaking, though that’s probably already been done for the DE), or how inadequate the normal version of Chokepoint is, unless that was done deliberately to represent what a minor villain she is.

If I recall correctly, modifying The Wraith was more to make it so that there are other, equally powerful ways to play her besides devolving into the Micro-Targeting Computer + Utility Belt + 2 weapons combo every game, which I think is a needed improvement.