la capitan what am I doing wrong?

So I am very new to this game (7 games under my belt) and have been enjoying the heck it if it even when I lose. On that subject, I have won 4 games this far, and lost 3. All the losses were to la capitan, haven’t beat her yet. Wtf?
I understand killing the ship is a priority, but we just get stomped by her and the crew. I understand she can roll you with a bad shuffle, but all the times? We beat omnitron handily but get murdered by this chick. What’s up?

Try playing against her with a hero or two who can stall her deck.

La Capitan is most dangerous at the start of the game when she’s pulling two cards around, and the longer that you leave her able to do so, the worse she gets, either pulling multiple crew members or stealing a ton of items. Adding some on who can manipulate the deck–Visionary is ideal–or straight-up lock it down (Nightmist or Legacy) would be a great combo.

Try a 4 man team of Visionary, Legacy, Wraith, and Ra. Ra can stay on “clean up” duty while being buffed by Legacy. Visionary can focus on deck manipulation while Wraith fills in the gaps. Add Nightmist if you need a 5th or drop Wraith if you need to go down to 3.

She can be pretty brutal. You'll want at least 1 hard-hitting damage dealer, like Ra or -- even better -- Chrono Trigger. (Whole Gang is great for crew, the hat can play multiple cards, there's reliable AoE, and No Executions is great for the boat.) Some sort of damage mitigation and/or redirection is great, since those crew members are TOUGH. Battle Forged and Final Breath will WRECK whoever has the lowest HP, and if L'Episte shows up mid-game, he can hit for double-digit damage. The Scholar is good for this, and Smoke Bombs go a LONG way too.

At first glance, Unity really struggles, but you can bait them into destroying Bee Bots to destroy her particularly obnoxious ongoings easily, and with smoke bombs you can protect the golems as well, to help her build up.

Wraith, of course, has stun bolts, infrared eyepiece, and decent multi-target damage, plus combat stance, which is great against her multitude of violent cohorts.

you may also want a healer or support character as well, to recover from the frequent board wipes and damage. Argent Adept is a no-brainer (but really, when ISN'T he?).

So maybe try a game with Chrono, Argent, Wraith, and Unity, or maybe switch Chrono or Argent out for the Scholar.

Edited for accidental spoilers.

(Ignore the part about the Sentinels, OP; they haven't been published yet and McBehrer isn't supposed to be talkinga bout them with non-playtesters.)

My advice is to kill the ship first and hope that you don't hit "All Together Now".  Possibly wait for at least one of them to go by and then kill the ship while it's in the trash.  As for your party, you want either characters who put out LOTS of Ongoings and Equipment which they don't strictly need (Wraith, Omnitron-X, the Argent Adept) or characters who can live almost entirely out of their hand (Tachyon, Ra, Haka); you don't want a mix, because if only a few O/Es are in play, they'll get Plundered.

Our last game was O-X, wraith, chrono ranger, and unity. Sounds like we should have had a decent chance. Also, does the order of the heros matter a ton? We had chrono going last which that player (though only his second game) felt hindered him.
The ship’s worst power honestly seems to be the reshuffle. The extra play is rough, but when we manage to whipe like 4 crew, but not the boat, it reshuffles and she again plays the card to get 3 crew out, its just disheartening.
Again, probably a good chunk is us not playing super well, but we rolled baron blade twice and omnitron once, but we just got a brick wall with this villain.
Thank you everyone for your advice and suggestions. @envisioner- the forbidden info is stricken from my mind.

Envisioner is correct, hitting the ship first is never a bad plan, since it cuts down her extra plays and make her more manageable. It also gets rid of her shuffling her deck each turn, so someone with deck control can do their thing. If you're having a lot of trouble with crew members, Haka with Savage Mana in play tends to help with that.

It's worth noting, that my local group found the jump between Level 1 and Level 2 villains to be the greatest increase in difficulty, at least at first. 

Derp that's right. I forget Vengeance isn't out yet, since we're done with playtesting.

But keeping the ship out of the trash is great, since she can pull it back out but not search the deck for it.

Yeah, that's probably a fairly decent group for the fight.  I used O-X recently and he was the last survivor, because his Ablative Coating shrugs off most of the damage (melee, projectile and toxic covers almost all of the crew - a few deal energy and ATN does lightning, but it was pretty close to total defense).  CR is mostly built to hit single foes, but The Whole Gang was mentioned, and Kill on Sight would also be handy.  Unity's bots are fragile and will easily die to Final Breath or Captain's Orders, and they become an active liability if Battle Forged shows up, but otherwise they can be quite strong in this match.

Also, does the order of the heros matter a ton?

In general, definitely.  "Enabler" heroes like Legacy and Visionary prefer to go first (an exception exists if Legacy is paired with self-damage heroes like Fanatic or Nightmist), while characters which need extra enabling to be most successful (Absolute Zero, Scholar, Chrono-Ranger etc) are often better last, although nearly every hero has some ability to contribute in either position.  Whether it would make a big difference against Cappy in particular I don't know.

We had chrono going last which that player (though only his second game) felt hindered him.

That probably depended on the exact situation.  If he's in positon 1, he can do more by playing By Any Means, or he can set up KOS/DOA/TWG bounties on targets which the downstream players will take out for him.  But in general, I think he'd rather have upstream players who might be able to hand him damage boosts, or else whittle down targets to just a few HP so that he can polish them off with his plinks.  In particular, damage reduction makes CR a sad panda (unless he has The Masadah), so having Fixer upstream of him to use Riveting Crane Style is definitely better than having Fixer in last place with the same card in his hand.

The ship's worst power honestly seems to be the reshuffle. The extra play is rough, but when we manage to whipe like 4 crew, but not the boat, it reshuffles and she again plays the card to get 3 crew out, its just disheartening.

Fair enough.  The game has a few "unwritten rules", and the psychological effects of certain $#%@ing cards are one definite example.

Again, probably a good chunk is us not playing super well, but we rolled baron blade twice and omnitron once, but we just got a brick wall with this villain.

Villains are rated at difficulty 1-4, and both of those are 1s (although Omnitron is probably deadlier, unless you have certain particular heroes that nerf him).  La Capitan is officially only a 2, but I think she deserves to be more like a 3.  If you think Cappy is hard, try going up against Iron Legacy or The Dreamer; Dreamy is a 3, but a "high" one, and IL is the only 4 that exists outside of the currently-oop "Rook City" expansion.

@envisioner- the forbidden info is stricken from my mind.

But not from mine!  Mwuhahahah!

Assuming you can KEEP savage mana in play, which is tricky with how much Ongoing destruction she can do (especially in Advanced, where she does it every turn on her front side).

*coughForbiddenWastelandcough*

I feel like Kismet and La Capitan got their difficulty ratings switched around. Or maybe GtG should consult with the playtesters to determine difficulty ratings. Miss Information should be a 4 if you ask me, and there's no way Kismet is harder to beat than La Capitan.

One of the >G team confirmed that Missy is only a 3; I agree she's very tough, but I don't think she's unbeatable or anything, though she does seem to actually get harder against more heroes rather than easier.  Kismet being a 3 I can believe, at least on Advanced; have you seen how much damage her Miscreant side can dish out?

Or, just try it with 5 heroes apparently.
In all seriousness, we decided to try her with Unity, Legacy, Tempest, Ra, and Bunker.
She only played the crew from trash card when there were no crew in the trash. (Sorry I don’t know the names of all the cards)
Never got the ship back after it died.
Never got the card to search the deck for crew. Moral of the story, she never played more than 3 cards in a turn and we crushed her. Like noone ending below 20 hp crushed her. It was glorious and anti-climactic at the same time.
On an unrelated note, tried scholar in another game, I’m pretty sure I played that guy totally wrong and he was still amazing.

Yeah, that one never did anything in my last game either.  But it plays an extra villain card, so it's hardly harmless - it gets her closer to whatever other horrors lurk within her deck.

On an unrelated note, tried scholar in another game, I'm pretty sure I played that guy totally wrong and he was still amazing.

Scholar is a definite powerhouse.  He's basically the Obi-Wan Kenobi of SOTM; he has Additional Powers As The Plot Demands.

well, 4 does not mean unbeatable, but Miss Information is not equivalent in difficulty to Kismet. She's more like The Chairman or The Matriarch.

I thought Kismet's official rating is only a 2. As for Miss Information, she's not as scary as The Ennead or the Dreamer, so she's no more than a 3 IMO.

That’s for all the input everyone. Up to a 6-3 record now. Having someone that van deal damage quickly (like Ra and Tempest) I think is really strong against la capitan. If all your characters need to build up to be super effective, she can easily get ahead of you, then you’re in real trouble.

I don't think she's as tough as those; she compares better to The Dreamer or Citizen Dawn I think - a "high 3".  Kismet and Warlord Voss are "low 3s"…they pose a much more significant threat than Plague Rat or Akash'Bhuta (both of which have glaringly huge weaknesses that can be exploited), but they still prove somewhat more manageable.  Personally, I would rank the difficulties from about 1 to 7.

1 - Baron Blade (intro villain)

2 - Omnitron, Ambuscade (easy villain which poses a mild threat)

3 - Akash'bhuta, Plague Rat, Gloomweaver (average villain)

4 - Kismet, Voss, La Capitan (challenging villain)

5 - Dreamer, Citizen Dawn, Miss Info (very tough villain)

6 - Matriarch, Chariman (extremely difficult villain)

7 - Iron Legacy (epic villain)

Advanced mode moves almost everyone up one rank on this ladder, but IL remains at 7 - as much damage as he dishes out, it barely matters whether it's irreducible or not.  (I can't recall what his flipside's advanced text is, so perhaps there it makes a difference, but frankly it's hard enough getting him there.)  A few advanced modes do not raise difficulty because they don't make enough of a difference - Gloomweaver for sure, probably Ambuscade, maybe even Matriarch.  Kismet is the one villain I've yet identified where I would call her advanced mode a +2 difficulty; that "+H-2" damage is insane, and extra damage to Jinxed heroes while having the Talisman is just absurd.

It's printed as 2 on the paper sheets, but corrected to 3 in the downloadable file thereof and on the Sidekick app.  >G has yet to confirm which one is official, but the Internet version can be updated in real time while the dead-tree cannot, so I'd bet on 3 being correct.  It's probably based mostly on her advanced mode.

Difficulty ratings are all based on their non-advanced mode.

She's a tough villain, but there are a few ways to make teh fight an easier one.  

I do subscribe to the idea that any villain can be beaten with any combination of heroes, though some definitely make it harder than others.  that being said, here are some of the general tips, strategies, and thought processes that I use when fighting her.

Prioritize Her Support Structure

This goes beyond the sip, in some ways, though getting rid of it will certainly make life easier.  By herself, she's not that bad.  She has a single nasty hit (on her starting side), but her strength lies in her crew.  

The main ones to get rid of ASAP are Mable and the Battle-forged.  Both enable her to get extra card plays, which will make your life hell.  the others will hurt you, but they will strip you of resources, go after the weakest, and enable La Capitan to grow stronger.

The ship is a good thing to get rid of, but if don't prioritize it over everything else.  The reason is because La Capitan has a card that can get the ship back from the trash- so if you pour everything you've got into getting rid of it (potentially ignoring crew, ongoings, or setup), theres a chance that her next card will bring it right back at full health.  Look for ways to accomplish multiple objectives or ensure some breathing room- like scouting her next few cards to see if its safe to get rid of the ship, or locking her deck, or getting the ship out of the trash. In the long term, if you can get rid of it ASAP, go for it- but be aware that unless you know otherwise it will be back, and at the worst moment.

Its Dangerous to Go Alone (Take This)

Team synergy and tactics are an absolute necessity when fighting her.  Always be on the lookout for ways to help other heroes.  You're going to be losing ongoings/equipment, so make sure that you have some sacrificial stuff ready (or at least be aware that you may lose what you have).  

Any card/power that gives you some breathing room is essential.  If you've got a specialist (like Ra or Chrono for damage or the AA for support), it helps to do everything you can to make sure that they can do their thing before getting your own cards down.  This is because generalists can adapt ot changing situations (usually) better than the more specialized heroes, but the specialists can usually crank out wondrous things once they are set up. Spend a few turns protecting them, helping them do stuff, or sacrificing your ongoings/equips for them.  They'll pay it back in spades once they start setting the world on fire, blasting crew members full of holes, or (in the case of the Argent Adept) letting everyone else go crazy.

If you've got a team of generalists, stay flexible.  Try not to obsess over the "perfect build" (something I am still learning how to do), and make the most out of the options you have.  There will be frustrating moments...but you also may find new combinations and tactics that you never considered before.  An example I learned recently (for Unity) involve using her "Scrap metal" card to take a low-hp bot back into my hand AFTER it does damage. It keeps them from being munched by the Battle-Forged.

On the topic of Hero Order, it definitely matters.  Heroes that support others through an external focus (by increasing their damage, letting them draw cards, play cards, etc) tend to do better at the start of the turn order.  Heroes that deal high damage tend to do best at the end, where they can perform clean-up duties.  In the example of fighting La Capitan, it helps to have the heavy hitters go later in the order because it gives the other team members time to scout out her deck (to see if any dead ships or crew will pop right back out), get rid of her ongoings (since she has one that makes it painful to take out her people), or generally weaken the minions and bring them into killl range.  

The projected number of turns required to get the number of projections needed to wake The Dreamer goes up as you have more heroes. Wish I can find my calculations for how I determined that …

IMO Kismet is a 'low 2', definitely less dangerous than the likes of Akash'bhutha or Plague Rat.

Agreed.

Kismet scalse really harshly with the amount of ongoing destruction you have.  It is nearly impossible to beat her without any ongoing destruction, but if you have Visionary and Mental Divergence Kismet is laughable.

It took multiple games before we were finally able to defeat Kismet for the first time - I think hero numbers may have something to do with it. Conversely, we don't tend to find Miss Information or the Dreamer a massive problem - I recall the first (possibly the only) time the Dreamer beat us she got something like two Dark Heroes and an Illusory Demon out at the beginning or something, so subsequent projections wre buffed and had soak and stuff, and we just didn't manage to get set up enough to wipe them all out before they killed us. I think a Whipacorn or two was also added into the mix fairly early on, just to make things worse :P.

Kismet has nasty cards and harmless cards, and a lot will depend on which she gets.  Karmic Disjunction into H jinxes is pretty nearly game over, and Lady Luck protecting Inconceivable obstruction is a serious issue (statistically speaking it should hardly ever happen, as both cards are singletons, but I've seen it twice in four games; this sort of experience is why I disbelieve in statistics).  But if she consistently hits Jinxes on her end-of-turn Lucky plays, and if you keep playing hot potato with the Talisman while putting Jinxes on heroes they'll harm the least, she becomes fairly easy.  A lot of heroes are like this - I named Akash'Bhuta and Plague Rat because I've walked all over them in the games I've played, but it's not that I believe they can't ever win games.  They just don't do so consistently, whereas the 4- and most of the 3-difficulty villains (and La Capitan despite her supposed non-3ness) are equipped to do exactly that.

Maybe that's the problem; my group of players is just REALLY smart. We always try to take villains on the most effective way; what makes them more or less difficult for us is how much doing so effects the game.

Since Kismet is either easy or hard, depending on how you strategize, we've always just found her easy. Others, like Miss Information, don't get much easier through planning, so although she may be technically the same, we can't make her EASY, so she's way harder by comparison.

Makes sense.  And it's fitting, since Kismet is a "luck" villain, so planning is her Kryptonite, while Missy is a planner herself and is always a step ahead of your own plans.

One of the reasons I think Kismet is easier with more players is that Jinxes only affect one player, so a lot of her card plays are just less effective the more Heroes there are.

Envisioner, I'm not sure where you're getting those numbers. According to the Sentinels Statistics Project (which mostly matches my own experience), you get something more like:

1 - Ambuscade and Gloomweaver

2 - Kismet

3 - Akash'bhuta, Apostate, Mad Bomber Blade, The Ennead, Spite, Baron Blade, Miss Information

4 - La Capitan, Grand Warlord Voss, Plague Rat

5 - Omnitron, Citizen Dawn

6 - The Dreamer, The Matriarch

7 - The Chairman, Iron Legacy, Cosmic Omnitron

That's probably not 100% accurate either, but it feels a lot closer to my general experiences.

Arathorn

My numbers are based on my own experience.  While my sample size is admittedly small, there is no possible way normal Omnitron is a 5.

I'v been playing a Kismet exclusivly on advanced for a while now. There are a few things about her that really make her quite swingy.

1) The biggest thing to know is that if she is going to hit you and hit you hard, 9/10 times it will be with psychic damage. Legacy single handedly defangs Kismet with Next Evolution and renders her totally useless, advanced or otherwise. 

2) Her front side is downright horrifying by the time 1-2 jinx cards hit the table. With the Charm on her side, her SoT AoE gets brutal and the advanced text dealing another base 2 to anyone jinxed is not to be messed with. Ample amounts of ongoing destruction obviously is the key to keeping her damage output low while she has the charm. This leads us to

3) Lady Luck. Depending on when/if you see this hit the table, you could be in trouble as it makes managing her front side very difficult and very painful since ongoing destruction turn very unfavorable in the risk/reward department

4) Any combination of Lady Luck and more than 1 Jinx in play will ultimatly force you into playing "keepaway" with her Charm to avoid her racking up +dmg modifiers. Her flip side has an innate +1 on advanced, that combined with her trading a SoT AoE for an EoT single target zap make that the much safer side to operate on. Damage to the charm needs to be tightly monitored, that last thing you want is for the environment to knock the Charm back to Kismet sending her back to her front side with a Jinxes on the field. 

5) The final component to her swingy-ness is Inconcievable Obstruction (man I hope I remembered that name correctly). If Lady Luck wasn't bad enough, this card will be directing a good bit of your damage away from Kismet to the enviro. Obviously this is troubling, as the deeper into the round count you end up going, the more time she has to rack up the jinx count.

2 & 5 are where the bulk of the randomness occurs. If Kismet finds neither of those, playing keepaway long enough to drum up some ongoing destruction should not be a problem and Kismet should go down with few problems. 

Edit: I agree with Envisioner, no way normal Omnitron is on par with Dawn. I call shenanigans on that one.

Yeah, and Baron Blade a 3? Unless you're counting Bomber Blade, but they really should be kept separate.

And I see that you are not. Which makes me even MORE confused. Those numbers are ALL WRONG.

Correction, an innate +(H-2).  Against five heroes, she can theoretically deal the highest-HP hero 9 damage with no other modifiers.

Inconcievable Obstruction (man I hope I remembered that name correctly).

You sure did!  That card plus Lady Luck are both singletons, but I have a history of finding both of them together.  Didn't help that the first time was in The Final Wasteland…

Edit: I agree with Envisioner, no way normal Omnitron is on par with Dawn. I call shenanigans on that one.

At least one forumite confessed to having misplayed Omnitron as retrieving a Device rather than a Drone with his rebuilding power, leading to multiple encounters with That Bomb.  It's entirely possible that this and similar play errors have been skewing the statistics.  And since Omnitron is core set, and rated at a diff 1 so it'll often be picked for the first game of newbie players, it's entirely possible that there are just plain more games against him and that this affects the statistics as well (theoretically more games should produce more consistent results, but I never bet against the outliers).

Base Omnitron is capable of tossing curveballs every so often.  Technological Singularity can play havoc with the equipment-based heroes.  Sedative Flechettes messes with the ongoing cards, and so forth.  I have also see his double-draw turns bring out both Electro-Pulse Explosives.  Combine the last with an Environment that can screw up hero play (looking at you Megalopolis) and you can watch players sweat since a pile of damage is headed their way.

The other thing that the statistics don't cover is that newbie players are more prone to making "mistakes" and losing.  They often learn playing against Baron Blade and Omnitron, which is another possible reason for their higher than expected winning percentages.  And I think Omnitron is more capable of "surprising" players as compared to Blade.  The latter's "sudden death" condition is spelled out right off and the players will be aware of it, whereas Omnitron is possibly going to do something like draw "Terraforming" with a large Environment Deck array and then roll out a wave of drones or other damaging cards at once. 

That said, Devious Disruption is absolutely no fun if you're all nicely set up with a million cards out each :P.

True.  And the Blade Battalion comes right out and wacks someone for 5 HP; or Slash And Burn can hurt as well.  But with Devious Disruption you get to decide and calculate how much gear you are willing to give up and possibly salvage a few pieces in exchange for a bit more damage.  Technological Singularity and "THAT CARD" of Dawn's just nuke you down to bedrock.  Which is a capability that all of the base game villains but GW Voss have - blasting all (or most) of the hero's ongoing and equipment cards away.

One of the problems with Omni's stats is that most players that have played a long time use his Cosmic version more that his regular, and they are the ones likely to win more.

That and early EPE's tend to just end games.  Man I hate that Omnitron.

We once had both EPEs come out during the same turn (either Omnitron was on his play-two-cards side or he'd used Terraforming to play more that way, I can't remember now), but fortunately Tachyon had a couple of Hypersonic Assaults in-hand so was able to nerf them both for long enough for us to destroy them before they could actually do anything to us. Phew!