Tachyon is BS (first night of sentinels)

So here's the situation.

My copies of 2^nd edition, infernal relics, shattered timelines and each of the (current) mini-expansions had all arrived that day. Two of my housemates and myself had played once about a week or so beforehand with a friend of a friend's deck, so we still didn't really know the game, but we were all very eager to learn.

A housemate and I had to leave for a long errand in an hour, so I set up Ambuscade at Megalopolis thinking it would be fairly quick. eh...easy but not quick. I choose Argent Adept (a.k.a. Rule 63 Sona, 300 internets to those that get the reference) and my other two friends picked Chrono-Ranger and Nightmist.

Anyways, we all pitched in and upgraded Chrono's guns and blasted Ambuscade's and we won, eventually. Chrono and I prepared to leave for our respective responsibilities. Our fourth arrived just before we left and was very sad face panda that she missed out on the games. Fortunately my other housemate promised to teach her and I headed out.

When I came back that night she had not only learned the game, but had two-manned the Baron as Wraith with Tempest, and was happily dismembering Osh-Kosh-B'Gosh (Akash'bhuta) as Fanatic.

So at the end of that game she said she was ready for a challenge, I gave them a choice between Citizen Dawn, Voss, The Ennead and Gloomweaver.

She chose Citizen Dawn. I explained her background and confirmed that the group wanted to take her on. I was afraid that Dawn would be too much to handle at this experience level, (I barely knew anything about her deck other than 'there's lots of minions!') so I chose Insula Primalis for the environment. I figured those oh-so-usefully-ravenous Raptor Packs would chow down on all her little citizen friends.

Which they did, the problem was that Dawn started with the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Citizen Anvil in play. So most of our damage was piddling to nothing; we played only one hero with irreducable damage, we're newbs okay!

Here's where Tachyon finally comes in.

My other teammates were the Scholar, the Visionary, and Omni-X..... yeah, we loathed 'devastating aurora' with a deep dark antipathy the likes of which are usually reserved for mass murderers, power hungry tyrants, Enron and banking executives, and customers who litter their cigarette butts on the floor of your workplace.

So the game was going nowhere fast, (heh) but I had a plan. Dawn had flipped back to her original state and could finally take damage again, unfortunately she had also played Citizen Truth and was immune to damage again! That thrice-cursed citizen had to be destroyed, so I played Lightspeed Barrage and blasted that wretched wretch to the trash. I didn't even calculate the damage for my teammates. I just said “I play this and he dies” and went on with my turn. They sorta knew that Tachyon's power stemmed from how many burst cards were in her trash but nothing specific, so they didn't question it and moved on.

I was kinda sad-face panda myself then 'cause I wasted a beautiful boss killing card on a minion. Then something absolutely gorgeous happened. Omni-X Time Shifted The Scholar's “Know when to hold 'em.” I asked if he had gotten “Don't dismiss anything.” He said he had...and then the Grinch had a wonderful, awful idea.

I grinned like the Cheshire cat and asked if he would be kind enough to play it on his next turn. Though a little disturbed by the very evil look on my face he agreed. I promptly set Lightspeed Barrage back to the top of my deck when his turn ended and triple checked my math.....Ehhhhhxcellent.

{I have to put this in PBF format, cause trying to type what happened next in mediocre prose just can't do it justice.}

It is Tachyon's turn.

Start: nothing

Play: Lightning Reflexes

        Lightning Reflexes

        Fleet of Foot (burst), burst cards in trash = 22

              Draw: Lightspeed barrage

        Lightspeed barrage, target: Citizen Dawn 21 DMG (22-1 Citizen Anvil) Citizen Dawn HP = 44

        Lightspeed barrage, target: Citizen Dawn 21 DMG (22-1 Citizen Anvil) Citizen Dawn HP = 23

        Lightspeed barrage, target: Citizen Dawn 21 DMG (22-1 Citizen Anvil) Citizen Dawn HP = 2

Power: Neil Patrick Harris' maniacal laugh from the third chapter of Dr. Horrible's sing-along.

End: nothing

Citizen Dawn's vision was still blurry from the impacts of whatever the hell had hit her. Struggling to focus and standing back up her recovering ears heard “---iiiiitch! I totally just ran around the world and punched you, then I ran around the world the other way and punched you again. ThenIranaroundtheworldfivemoretimesgotmypicturetakenwiththemostinterestingmanintheworldbakedacakediscoveredthecureforcancerinvented--”

Citizen Dawn gritted her teeth and shouted. “Citizens! To Me! Destroy these trait-” A loud mechanical clank drew her attention behind her. She saw two figures in front of her. A bald green and black-clad woman with a neon fuchsia aura and matching glowing eyes was extending her hand and projecting that same aura at the menacing android at her side. The android pointed a blaster gleaming bright red from its barrel at Citizen Dawn's forehead.

A digital voice coldly stated “You have been terminated.”

A blinding bright-as-the-sun flash was that last thing Citizen Dawn ever saw.

So..... how did others experience their first night?

That's gorgeous. Really enjoyed reading this.

Yeah, Tachyon is wicked.  Well written too.

Looks like a good first batch of games for you.

I think you mean "batsh!t".  (EDIT:  He originally said "bullsh!t".)

Also, putting Gloomweaver in the same difficulty category as Voss and Dawn was a definite mistake (on behalf of both you and the rulebook writers).  I can't speak to the Ennead personally, but Gloomy is fairly easy to beat...you just have to wait for the three Relics to appear, and beat them up as they show.  Together they have only 75 HP, distinctly on the low side for a villain; unless Gloomy is incredibly lucky and gets them all out before the heroes can kill one (or after, with Vast Following), he'll never flip and the game will be a cakewalk.

(IMO this is not the only place where the listed difficulties seem to be a bit off.  Matriarch also struck me as being easier than suggested, while La Capitan looked to be a lot harder; I would put both of them at 3, with Gloomy only at 2.)

Awesome write-up! Sounds like a blast. That's definitely one of the things I love about the game: Entertaining and emotional moments.

Unfortunately, I can honestly say I don't remember my first few games. I have memories of very specific games, but I'm not sure of when they were.  Lots of good - if vague - memories, though!

So… Have you noticed all the NPH references in Tachy's deck?

Well, since you ask…

My nerds were assembled and ready to throw down. Baron Blade first; they were kind of enjoying it, but also thought it was rather easy. Okay, I said with my best evil grin, let's try someone else.

The following fight against La Capitan is, to date, one of the funnest games I've ever played. I don't remember many specifics, but we won with two or three incaps. It was amazing.

First night of Sentinels we played against Baron Blade, I was Argent Adept and got a really good hand and great cards throughout.  My wife was Wraith and our friend who brought the game over played Absolute Zero.

I never thought about chaining instruments but I did roll the play two cards and use a power/play a card ones a lot.  With Wraith and AZ getting set up quick and Wraith using an extra razor ordinance each round we crushed Baron Blade handily.

Then we went up against Grand Warlord Voss.

Our friend played Nightmist, I played Legacy and my wife played Fanatic.  My dislike of Nightmist started that night as I watched him get all his cards out and do all kinds of stuff that ended with mostly cards being drawn.  I've seen better use of her since.  But Legacy was a tanking and boosting boss and Fanatic was an angel of doom and Voss just died, horribly.  Embolden on Legacy with the ring out?  It isn't even fair.  To this day I really enjoy crushing Voss.

Our third fight was Citizen Dawn, I don't even remember who we played as, but we played in Rook City and Dawn and Rook City threw down.  Anvil and Battery to start, then Truth, then Rook City played Twisting Back Alleys, so we do the thing to destroy it, Dawn played Aurora and Rook city played Blighted streets.  Then the villain deck played Assault.  When we destroyed Blighted streets I think Blinding Blast was played, and we forfeited.

I honestly was bored in the Baron game, but Adept was so much fun I wanted to play again.  Then Voss was great to fight (still love going against him) but I was bored with Legacy.  Then Dawn and Rook City crushed us, and I was hooked.

That Dawn fight was more demoralizing than Iron Legacy killing us on the second villain turn.

I love the title of this topic, just saying.

Oh yeah, noticed and love all the references on the flavor text in her deck, and in almost every deck we've played. Especially love the Firefly reference in Citizen Dawn's deck. Citizen Blood is quite fearless indeed. Y'know… since he's undead.

Yeah the rulebook rating of some of the villains seems kinda wonky to me too. Your comment about Gloomy is spot-on. However we've found a villian's dificulty is more about what your team make up is. Some are damn near impossible while others are a cakewalk. We have a tentative house rule about Legacy and Wraith on the same team, with a possible addition of Tempest and anyone else with a healing ability.

As for the BS thing, it's our group's term for a character or ability that's broken/OP.

Since we're discussing first games here, I guess I might as well brag about my early experiences.  I have been keeping track of every game I've played (18 so far, since first trying the game in July or early August, although 2/3 of these have been just me playing solo), with a fairly detailed record that doesn't go quite so far as to mention every card played or damage taken, but does periodically record the most memorable such events.  I won't bore you with the total recounting, but here are some of my memorable early (or at least premiere in some sense) games:

 * First game ever - I played Wraith, two other friends were Ra and Tachyon, and my freakishly smart friend Thorin took Absolute Zero, finding him slightly confusing at first but quickly getting the hang of it.  We faced Baron Blade in the Pike Industrial Complex (which I didn't realize was an expansion Environment, I thought it looked more "core set worthy" than the Marsbase or the Ruins of Atlantis, though I did correctly identify Megalopolis for my second game).  It proved not at all difficult to defeat the Baron, but of course the real victory was that I'd discovered such an awesome new game to become obsessed with.

 * Second game and first real challenge - Thorin's father Richard, my oldest and best friend and the host of what is quite probably Minneapolis's largest non-commercial gaming community (a weekly party at his house, which has met with few interruptions for the better part of 30 years, its rotating membership likely exceeding 100 with probably 10-20 regulars over any given stretch of time) was the owner of the game set I had played previously, and I would continue to use his set until I got my own (and still do use his expansion cards, though now I have a few expansions he doesn't have, so it's a bit more fair).  On this day in mid-August, he and I were the only players around, so I took two heroes, Haka and Tempest, and he played Ex-Patriette (having already familiarized himself with the standard heroes and seeking new challenges; he would later play the Argent Adept and The Scholar for similar reasons, although it certainly didn't hurt that he looks a lot like the latter).  Besides deftly handling the mental load of operating multiple characters (an obvious prerequisite to all the solitaire I would later do), I found this game distinctive because of what a beatstick Voss is; it proved that Tempest's status as a Nemesis was crucial, as he was the only one to survive and kill Voss with about 2 HP left.  The previous game had interested me, but we never lost any heroes; this brutal slugfest was what really convinced me that the game was no cakewalk and represented a serious challenge to be mastered.

* First liveblogged game - For a while, I used a series of "Let's Plays" to a webcomic community as an excuse to play solitaire when bored (only today have I come to the conclusion that these are not a good use of my free time, prodigious though it is while I'm between jobs).  Mostly these were fairly pathetic, but this first one sticks in my mind for how grueling it was, even more so than the Voss game above.  Dawn was already my favorite of the four original villains (and high on the list of villains overall; I haven't decided who exactly I might like better than her, but Miss Information and the Ennead are probable candidates), strictly on a flavor basis…this game is where I found out that I liked her just as much mechanically, as her army of Citizens brought much more variety to the table than Voss's minions.  Fortunately, unlike Voss, she's not invincible until her underlings are destroyed; Wraith used an Infrared Eyepiece to prevent the most crippling cards from coming out, and made the questionable decision to let two Return With the Dawns hit play in an attempt to set Ra up to use Drawn to the Flame, despite the fact that Citizen Sweat was among the ones who had come out, so in essence the Citizens were immortal and we just tried to kill Dawn as fast as possible in spite of their effects (this was possible only because Citizen Truth was prevented from entering play).  Dawn had opened on a Blinding Blast which had left all three heroes struggling with card supply, and then Citizen Tears came out with Sweat for backup; by the end of the game, the impossibility of keeping cards in hand or Ongoings in play had left Ra and Tachyon completely neutralized, and only Wraith's absurd Equipment combos were able to cut Dawn down by 8 HP a turn until she bit the dust.

* Second rematch (the first was not particularly special):  I would later fight Dawn again and find her similarly brutal; I had bought my way into a convention that turned out to be far less appealing than I'd hoped, and in an attempt to salvage the evening, I set up to play solitaire in the hopes of attracting someone to join me and try out the game, which I did.  I and the complete stranger who I sucked in actually lost that game, but didn't realize it at the time, due to us having misinterpreted Incap AZs damage bonus as applying more than once (that I shouldn't have applied it to both of Fanatic's Exorcism hits was obvious as soon as I thought about it after the game, but whether it applied to all targets of Tempest's Squall was something I was unsure of, and an overly generous guess in that case had led to me making the other error).  Based on these mistakes, prior to the simultaneous demise of all heroes due to a Blinding Blast, Dawn seemingly had either 0 or 1 HP left depending on whether I had miscounted somehow, and we called it a tie, though I later realized the truth.  But the point of the game had been to convince the other player, who had first faced one of the two absurdly easy villains and found the game boring as a result, that it was not in fact so, and in that respect it succeeded brilliantly.

* First five-player solitaire game (my second was just today):  Notable solely as me pushing my ability to pilot multiple "players" to its ultimate.  The inclusion of both Legacy and Visionary, when fighting against such a relatively weak villain as Omnitron, resulted in a very thorugh cleaning of clock; I have had something of a soft spot for poor, pathetic Omnitron ever since.

* First really serious defeat:  While I lost my third ever game (and first ever solitaire game), I could easily blame that defeat on simply having faced the wrong Villain in the wrong Environment (Matriarch + the Tomb = Kaboom).  My next two losses were just due to the villains being ridiculously tough (in Apostate's case it was a combination of luck and an ignorant assumption that made him become functionally invincible, while with The Chairman it was just…well, him being The Chairman), and the one after that was due to my trying the Advanced version of Voss when I'd only barely beaten him on Normal.  So in every case, the defeat seemed to be inevitable, and not really anyone's fault.  But when I faced La Capitan in the Time Cataclysm, the game actually felt like a defeat…we seriously tried, but Cappy just got all the luck, and we could barely even scratch her Crew while none of us could ever manage to keep a card in play.  It never seemed as though we couldn't have hoped to beat The Captain at all, not even in that Environment (though it certainly didn't help)…but as it worked out, we were just utterly screwed, and took a good long time to suffer a horrible grinding defeat by inches.  Cappy has officially been my "White Whale" ever since; the next time I face her, I plan to assemble a crack team specifically for the purpose of thwarting her strengths, and pull no punches whatsoever.

* First Play-by-Forum game:  This happened just yesterday.  It was my second outing with Chrono-Ranger, and he was almost as ridiculous this time as during my first try with him (which ended with him holding sixteen cards in hand).  Having to detail every aspect of play in a post was definitely a new experience, but did not suffice to stop me from making critical errors; I ended up having to declare two "alternate universes", one in which Kismet successfully resolved a Karmic Disjunction to put out four Jinxes at once, instead of near-missing, and the other in which an Amphibious Chupacabra all but killed Fanatic (I had missed that it was instead supposed to gnaw on The Talisman).  Since neither of these disasters actually occurred in the real timeline, the game ended with the most conclusive victory I believe I've ever seen - thanks to Wrathful Retribution, Fanatic reduced Kismet to -20 HP!

* First genuinely unsatisfying Sentinels game:  This depressing milestone came today.  Whether I won or lost, I've always enjoyed my Sentinels games before, but today I set up a solitaire "demo" game as I had done once before, set not in a convention but in my FLGS, where I had gone with a fornlorn hope of finding an expansion set for sale, so that I could own two of the last four heroes sooner than December.  I played against The Dreamer with five heroes, the fifth being Fanatic and having been included on a whim after I selected the four I actually wanted to play, just because I haven't used her much.  And I will continue to not use her much, because she pretty much single-handedly won this game, in which none of the other heroes stood a chance and only one even contributed meaningfully.  She opened with first-turn End of Days, wiping out the Dreamer's entire initial army of Projections…and then, after the Sleeper Awakened and brought forth another army to quickly slaughter all the heroes, Fanatic's Aegis of Resurrection preserved her from the otherwise-lethal damage, and Tempest's incap power let her play End of Days again, killing all the remaining projections for a very thorough and gratuitous victory.  This is the second time I've seen EoD wipe the board on turn 1, and it always feels like a lion-tamer proving his fearlessness against a beast which was shot with six tranquilizer darts just before he stepped into the cage.  While the other cards in Fanatic's deck are variously amusing, EoD is just such a huge spoiler for fully half of the villains that I'm left not wanting to play her in any game I care about, just in case she might manage to punk the villain that thoroughly.  (Visionary is the other hero who has evoked similar feelings in me; I've won every single game she played in, and usually did so by utterly dominating the villain and rendering him useless, which is rather sad; the reason this game counts as such a spiritual failure is that it consisted solely of such ignominously cheaty triumphs over an otherwise invincible foe.)

I'm just saying that's not usually what people think you mean, when you refer to something as being the excrement of a male steer.  Why exactly chiropterean guano is considered synonymous with zany insanity, I don't know…but it's better than implying that Tachyon is in any way bogus, deceitful, or otherwise akin to politicians, advertisers, PR companies, and the like, all of whom are notoriously referred to as "artists" in the medium of ox dung.

(If you're not American of course, you can't be blamed for not knowing all of these connotations.  If you are, well…maybe you just have a weird bunch of friends, or you're in some location where the normal laws of cultural reality are twisted into strange and unfamiliar shapes.  Like the Realm of Discord, or a college campus.)

Welp, as promised I put together a powerful (though not quite maximally optimized - no Legacy or Visionary) team and rematched La Capitan.  The group was Bunker, Fanatic, Unity, and Omnitron-X (I was reluctantly giving Fanatic a chance to be OP in this match, despite her not fitting with the tech theme of the other three and my being sick of her in general).  And this time, it felt like a fair fight, not the ridiculous blowout we had before.  The Block was a nice, orderly setting for the battle, instead of the chaos of the Time Cataclysm, and since I knew better than to play Ongoings or Equipment which would simply get destroyed, Cappy never got anywhere near as ridiculously buffed.

The opening was more ordinary, instead of the absurd "two consecutive Raiding Party and unkilling the Ship twice" of the previous game; the ship was still at 2 HP when All Together Now happened for the second time (the first was on turn 1 when it was just 1 damage to the toughest hero; there may not be a swingier card in the game), so it was destroyed shortly thereafter and luckily stayed dead, and the crew were not too horrific either, with fortunately no Plunders or Walk the Planks, and Maria Helena's Revenge only fired once, when the ship itself was destroyed, before being Cleansed by Fanatic.  A bit earlier than that, Fanny had played End of Days, wiping out not only the Crew produced by one Raiding Party but also the Inmates from the first-turn Prison Riot; later Char came out, but she Chastized him for two rounds, allowing him to fire off one megablast which left her at 1 HP, just before Warden Hoffle squished him.  Slightly before that, she'd used Wrathful Retribution, not as a killshot as I usually use it, but just to take 1/3 off the top of a barely-scratched Cappy; after that, the Captain Ordered herself to kick Fanny's...fanny, and she succumbed, but her "play a card" effects proved to be very useful to Omnitron-X, letting him get Components down just before his turn, so they could immediately activate.

Once the battle had simplified itself, Bunker did exactly what I tend to think he should always do, which is put down a Flak Cannon and a Grenade Launcher and then go into Turret Mode; he stayed there for the rest of the game.  Back when End of Days had wiped out everything except La Paradoja (with one extra Crew being out besides the Raiding Party and one normally played one, because Omnitron had timeshifted the villain deck shortly before End of Days could resolve), Bunker had put out an Ammo Drop, so by selecting that as the last thing to be destroyed, I drew him five cards as the Crew were wiped out (the Inmates also died, having dealt their damage just once a moment earlier).  By this time  Unity had a few Golems out (it wasn't as ridiculous as my two previous games with her; both of those ended with like five or six Golems out, while this time there were at most 4 and usually more like 2), and Omnitron was rocking a combo of the physical-damage Plating and Reactive Plating Subroutine, so every time Cappy shot him for being the highest HP, he took only 1 damage and dealt 2 in return.  After about six rounds of carnage, the heroes fell just 6 HP short of being able to finish Cappy off before she could flip thanks to a Temporal Thief, and she recovered 6 HP as a result of the delay, but she didn't manage to topdeck a Raiding Party or anything else that could turn things around, and Bunker and Unity shot off all her stolen cards (mostly with a pair of consecutive Brainstorms, one of them played through Incap Fanatic) and still chewed her down to 6 HP, enabling Omnitron to finish her off by burning his two Components, a Plating, Uni's Modular Workbench, and both parts of Bunker's arsenal and play Singularity.

Whew!  A workout and a half even with a crack team and favorable luck, but a victory nonetheless.  I still think La Capitan is a difficulty-3 villain, instead of the 2 that the book lists her at.  But she's definitely not unbeatable, and that's good to know.  Fittingly enough for someone who sails out of nowhere in a pirate ship with all cannons blasting, she tends to open the game with an absurdly deadly salvo, and in the first match, we never recovered, but this time we managed to weather the initial onslaught, and she never really managed a proper second wind.  I now find myself looking forward to my third meeting with her, instead of dreading the second as I had.

EDIT:  Reconstructing the final round in my head, having already mostly packed up the cards, I find myself uncertain that I did it right.  Originally I showed Cappy at 9 HP when she flipped, but this was because I had forgotten 3 damage from a Platform Bot; I calculated damage for Omnitron's turn on the basis of this omission, and correcting for it, I'm pretty sure Round 6 ended with Cappy at 6 HP.  Six hero cards were under her (assuming two hadn't been destroyed by End of Days earlier), due to a Temporal Thief, and so she healed 6 HP, leaving her at 12 with six "prevent this instance of damage" shields.  Then Bunker fired a Flak Cannon and a Grenade Launcher, removing two of her "shields".  Incap Fanatic gave Unity the play of Brainstorm, which removed one more "shield", and then Turret Bot shot off the fourth and Unity played another Brainstorm to remove the fifth.  But that would still leave one, so Platform Bot would not deal 3 damage but remove the final "shield".  Omni-X then activated Focused Plasma Cannon and Gaussian Coil Blaster to deal her 3 more damage, leaving her supposedly at 6, enabling the gamewinning Singularity.  Oh, I remember: there was a Hasty Augmentation in there, since Unity had Swift Bot out to let her play an extra card, so she let Bunker shoot off the last shield with a 5-damage Grenade before allowing Platform Bot to pew-pew a finally-defenseless Cappy.  Cripes, what a round that was.

Over here, "fanny" is childish slang for, um, lady parts. ;)

Fanny. Tush. Buttocks.

Hence the uncontrollable giggling encountered by American ladies who ask, "does this skirt make my fanny look big?" while in the UK.

Yeah, La Capitan is definitely a 3, and Kismet is a 2, as far as I'm concerned. She's still one of my favorite villains though.

It also makes the term "fanny pack" make sense.  I remember hearing this somewhere before (likely on a TV documentary).

Same here, though it's a rarely used word.

Fanny pack = bum bag. Means the same I guess. But yeah, "fanny pack" makes me smile a bit because I'm childish like that, it sounds like "vulva pouch" which is silly.

Yet more UK vs US weirdness…

Ah yeah, langauge differences - have you ever made fun ever-so-slightly of the Sheriff's name in Silver Gulch? ;)

Whether it's the front or the back, either way it's a hilarious nickname for Fanatic.

Bum bag? I've never heard of that one.  I just know that, here in the US, some people always ask the question "Why is it called a fanny pack, when your fanny is in the back, and the fanny pack is worn in front?"  Given the UK definition of fanny, it makes more sense.

We call that spam, on both sides of the pond

(There was a spam post between mine and TheJayMann's)

Yes, yes there was.

I believe they were originally worn at the back (especially by cyclists) but then people started wearing them at the front or side because that makes them less easy to pickpocket. So both names make total sense.

Not that I've seen anyone wearing one since about 1992…

I do. Everytime I'm asked for help from a certain friend.

I've seen people working at markets and the like wearing them. They're used like a portable cash drawer.

Oh yes, I've seen similar things. Not the traditional bag though, more like a kind of small apron with a couple of deep pockets in the front.

I've got a bum bag...I wear it if I'm just going out for lunch or something so don't need to take anything else with me besides money, so I need somewhere to keep my purse. Otherwise, I have a backpack.