Weekly One-Shot #366: A Motley Crew

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Yuck. That was my sentiment on the first attempt after just one round. I threw in the towel right then. Came back the next day to give it another shot, complete with the unlimited cheese that is the undo button. Don’t be fooled by the ending HP. Both Legacy and Haka got down to 1 at some point. Savage Mana is probably the only thing that kept me from being swarmed with crew members. With 3 Dominions out and judicious use of incap powers, I was able to cycle Ground Pound enough to avoid a total party wipe. Legacy was especially motivational, and played the part of field medic rather well to take the remaining two back into the comfort zone. Good luck!

Omfg! This was painful af. Utterly stomped without the Undo button, and probably won’t be easy even with it. At the end Legacy was racing to try and bring Cappy down before the endless Crew overwhelmed him; cheesing Next Evo had kept him up for a while, but he kept having to use some of these on Toxic in case the Biohazard Vat came out, and then it never did. He could resist Siege-Breaker’s fire, Cappy’s projectile, and even the psychic from Helena’s Revenge, but eventually there was just too much diversity and inclusion for old Greatest Generation to handle, and down he went.

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And I still made some big mistakes here, but playing defensively seemed to be the key. Keep Legacy immune to toxic damage until you get board wiped or something lol

I believe the way the app works, every individual shuffle turns out the same, so if you keep track of absolutely everything, you can still deterministically solve the game, it’s just harder. It’s not like the Randomized Start games, where you have different starting points every time. If her second turn sees her playing A Motley Crew to bring back random dead crew, then if the trash is exactly the same, then it will shuffle into the same order and move the same crew back into play. So as long as you don’t miss a single detail, even otherwise irrelevant ones, you can still plan for everything.

I guess I’ve never seen the La Capitan loss screen! I’ve probably just ditched the game early as soon as it seemed unwinnable.

I just double-checked to be sure, and this is not quite right on Steam; I’m not sure if the mobile game runs it differently.

Deck shuffles are based on a theoretically-randomly generated number. If every step leading to that number is the same, the shuffle will have the same result (so in this case, La Capitan always has the same starting crew and always opens with Maria Helena’s Revenge and All Together Now), but what she draws on subsequent turns will change based on what cards you play and powers you use. As a result, while it’s theoretically possible to plan for everything, changing your strategy in response to what cards you know are coming changes what cards are coming.

In my first game, she dropped a Plunder on me on the main phase of her second turn, which incidentally killed Haka because I’d used a Heroic Interception and then told Haka to cover Legacy so that everyone would be immune to damage. The result was that Haka took a lot of hits and died. I still somehow managed to etch out a Mint, but it was a mint with only two heroes still alive (Legacy and KNYFE) and both of them dangerously close to out.

In the second game I just tested, I did different plays in the first turn and La Capitan dropped Chip instead, which would have been a lot friendlier!

Yeah, my first game, I threw Fueled Freeze out the moment Maria Helena’s Revenge showed up and later regretted it because she got two more ongoings into play at once and that really bogged me down.

This time, she never had more than one in play at a time, so the strategy I had planned on never came to fruition! (Though Lead from the Front/Next Evolution is also a great counter to her Revenge!)

Anyone come up with a way to ditch the Vat Explosion? I believe it goes

That messes up the immunity to Toxic. I guess a perfectly timed Heroic Interception can avoid a party wipe from the Explosion, but I can’t think of a way to mill cards with this team apart from K.N.Y.F.E.'s punch to take one off the top of the villain, not environment.

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Well, it wasn’t pretty. But a win is a win.

Ground Pound always works.

Of course, I was also mad at myself for playing it because I kinda needed the explosion to take out multiple crew for me. XD

Oh, true. I’m sure I had one by that point if I hadn’t already used it. But yeah, gotta keep the crew count low or any setup will be devastated whenever she plays Plunder.

Oof. Not significantly better this time, because although I knew vaguely what was coming, I kept screwing up the details, leaving crew alive to be killed by rats or exploding vats which wouldn’t actually happen until much later. I stopped logging cards about the time two five-crew Plunders were played in one turn; amazingly that wasn’t completely the end, as Legacy managed to survive for a couple more rounds, and might have lasted longer if I had undone him punching himself because I forgot the redirect on Cappy’s flipside.

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Amusingly the captain’s HP total is left at about the same as in my previous attempt. I have to say, this seems to be one of the better Ultimate modes, since it really changes how she plays. In regular games Cappy will often not have too many Crew, but the challenge mode ensures they never stop coming, which in turn accelerates the rest of her deck; it’s very different from other advanced modes that just pile on more damage or add armor to the villain or something.

† I have no idea how I got my phone to type this character. I was mashing Asterisk a bunch, and to the left is a button which switches to a whole other keyboard of special symbols, but there isn’t a cross or dagger symbol on that one, nor on the normal one. Not even the Wraith can solve this mystery, I fear…

EDIT: And somehow, my third attempt fared the worst of all, even with extensive future knowledge. I kept the Crew numbers down much more effectively than ever before, but the double Plunder turn still devastated me, and right as I was starting to stabilize, the vats blew up. So I had less time to pound on Cappy, after her crew was wiped out, than I had in previous attempts where only Legacy was left alive!

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EDIT 2: Whew ! Managed to Fine this one at last. Doing Heroic Interception and Take Down on round 1 rather than round 2 turned out to be the key; it let me use Fueled Freeze with double Violent Shivers and suffer no boosted damage as a result, allowing me to wipe out all the crew before Plunder could happen. Then I focused fire on Cappy, trusting the Environment to kill crew instead of doing it myself; by the time she flipped and unflipped, with Legacy having made the team immune to villain damage for so long, and with the ability to build up cards in hand, I was eventually able to win the damage race before she could rebound again. I did lose AZ by being stupid about Violent Shivers when the Vats were dealing 6 damage a round; that and several other mistakes made this a less than stellar victory, but I’ll take it.

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