Citizen Autumn targeting

Someone posting on the Handelabra forums had an interesting situation come up:

I noticed an interesting behavior, perhaps not a bug, but definitely not what I was expecting. I was playing against Citizen Dawn with Visionary on the team, and Visionary had a Decoy Projection in play. The decoy had the lowest number of hit points on the team. Citizen Autumn came into play and targeted the decoy as the lowest hitpoint hero. Fair enough. Autumn then destroyed all of the ongoing cards belonging to Visionary. That surprised me. I would have guessed that Autumn would try to strip the ongoing cards from the decoy, and since the decoy had no ongoing cards that Autumn's attack would have had no effect. Is it the correct behavior that Autumn's attack targets the decoy but actually hits Visionary?

The wording on Autumn does seem a bit ambiguous.  She goes after "the hero with the lowest HP".  The existence of The Sentinels, in particular, complicates things.

Possible interpretations that I see:

1) read the ambiguous text as "the hero with the lowest HP Hero Character Card".

2) read the ambiguous text as "the hero with the lowest HP Hero Target Card".

1 feels right to me, but it's a wacky enough circumstance that I'd like to hear other opinions.  Or is there an interpretation I'm missing?

Definition of Hero from the Sentinels of the Multiverse Rulebook.

A Hero is a character played by a player. Heroes have Character Cards, which list the macimum HP of the hero and their innate power on the front., and their incapactitated abilities on the back. Each hero has a deck of 40 hero cards.

Ninja'd. But, yeah. "hero" and "Hero target" are not the same thing. Sometimes, it matters. I do question the original case, because it doesn't make sense for the Decoy to be targeted.

The Visionary may have been the lowest HP Hero, so while the person playing it thought it was targeting the Decoy Projection, it was in truth targeting The Visionary, which lead to her Ongoings being destroyed.

That definition helps, but is not as... "definitive" as I would like, given that The Sentinels doesn't quite work with it.  The card for "The Sentinels" is missing several aspects of Character Cards, but does have incap abilities on the back.

Digressing here, but I'm kind of amazed that the rulebook that shipped with The Sentinels covers so few of the edge cases that they create.

The Sentinels is the Hero. This is why if something targets only Heroes, it would target only one of The Sentinels. However if something targeted Hero Character Cards, it would target each of them. This is why only one member of The Sentinels can be infected at any given time and why Proverbs and Axioms allows each of them to heal or use a power.

All that makes sense, and I have no problem with any of it.  I'm just baffled at why they felt they didn't have to explain those points in the rulebook.  Or, for example, whether The Sentinels increase (H) by 1 or by 4.

The Sentinels increase  by 1. they count as 1 hero with 4 different hero character cards.

I believe some of the Sentinels (the hero, not the game) questions brought up here are answered in the Vengeance rule book...

Yeah, the Vengeance rule book covers the Sentinels wierd state pretty well.

FWIW the behaviour in the app with Citizen Autumn is a bug, and will be fixed. She incorrectly goes after any hero target, not just hero characters.

I don't have the app, but the first question that comes to my mind is "Was the Visionary just coincidentally the Hero with the lowest HP too?"

I had a question about Visionary, don't know if here is the most appropriate place but here goes;

1. Visionary has her Decoy card out  
2. She plays Brain Burn.
3. There are more than 5 cards in the villain deck.

The question I had was which of the following two thing happens?

A. Visionary deals damage to the Decoy until it is destroyed. She then stops dealing damage (because the target was destroyed).

B. Visionary deals damage until the decoy is destroyed and then deals the remaining damage to herself.

Neither. The answer is C, all the damage is dealt to the decoy projection in one huge lump, the 'packet of damage' is directed to the decoy projection and then its HP is reduced, not one HP at a time but in a single hit, even if that takes it to negative HP (it is of course destroyed after the damage is done if this happens).

Yeah, stuff can go into negative hp, hence on some villains it says stuff happens when they're reduced to "zero or fewer hp". This doesn't tend to make much difference unless Fixed Point is out, in which case the target might manage to heal itself back up above zero and thus not instantly drop dead the moment Fixed Point goes away :).

The important bit is the wording on Brain Burn. She deals herself X psychic damage, where X is the number of cards. That's why it's one "packet of damage." 

There are other cards that have different wording, and work the way you expected. Take a look at Omnitron's Technological Singularity. It says Omnitron deals 2 lightning damage for each card destroyed. If 3 cards are destroyed, then it deals 2 lightning damage 3 times (and each one is modified separately).

If the Visionary has Decoy Projection out and a card like Technological Singularity attacks her, it would work like B).

It's also why villains who flip when reduced to zero specify "restore <villain> to X HP" and "not heal <villain> by X HP", because if by some fluke a hero managed to deal, say, 31 damage to a Baron Blade on 1 HP his Vengful Mad Scientist side would die instantly if it was the second.

Sorry, I phrased that a bit badly - my thinking was that Option A was the single packet of damage. Well, that makes Brain Burn noticeably more useful.

Baron Blade's text is actually phrased differently, if I remember rightly - it specifies "When Baron Blade would be destroyed...", not "When Baron Blade would be reduced to 0hp or fewer...". That's why you can't insta-kill him on his front side with stuff like Wrathful Gaze or Suckerpunch (which you could with, say, Apostate).

And causes him to not flip if fixed point is in play.

Which has cost us a game against him.  

You're going to have Christopher laughing maniacally again...

Same for Skinwalker Gloomweaver, but they can both be lost to an Unforgiving Wasteland on their front side.