What's up with The Matriarch?

I see The Matriatrch consistently listed as one of the hardest enemies.  Either my group is playing her wrong, or y'all are, as we've only ever lost to her once, and that was when we got cocky and left the Pillars of Hercules in play.  Most games, we overwhelm her decisively.

She has some nasty cards available in her deck, but so much of her deck (60%!) is filled with the chaff of 1-HP Fowl that (in our experience) she never works up any momentum.  [We typically read card text aloud when they come into play, but for Fowl cards, we just say: "At the start of the Villain turn, this card will already be dead."]  If she does manage to play something nasty, we almost always just focus fire on it, and it goes down in a round or two, before it can form an evil combo (this, of course, includes the Mask that she starts with).  Horrid Cacophony is unpleasant, but she only has two of them; compare against Sedative Flechettes, which is objectively worse in 95% of games, and we don't rate Omnitron as a hard villain.

I suppose if you're allowing her retaliation strikes to destroy hero cards, then she'd give you a harder time.  Don't do that!  Just take the HP damage.  You'll kill her far faster than she will kill you that way.

Any chance you are using the oversized villain card with a copy of Matty's deck from the RC/IR combo pack?

Just checking: you're chaining fowl, right? If she gets a lot of birds out very quickly (which happens often) you will end up having to kill them sooner or later, and that retaliation damage can really add up. And then she brings them all back with Darken The Skies.

I admit she's easier than the other difficulty 4 villains and she can sometimes be a walkover if she doesn't get much in the way of bird chains, but in general I don't think she's an easy villain at all.

I was wondering about that. I've heard people saying they've never lost against her, and it turns out that's exactly what they were doing.

Matriarch was the first villain I played out of Rook City. We didn't look at difficulty at all, and we were still a fairly inexperienced group of players. That ended... poorly.

It also depends on whether or not you're using a team of heroes that can cancel retaliation damage for a turn while you obliterate the birds. Tachyon's Hypersonic Assault does a good job of this if you have a Galvanize out.

OP, It sounds like you are not taking damage whenever a fowl is destroyed. As Pyro said, are you using the Oversized card with the newer print of her deck?

I believe we are, yes.  Are we missing some errata?

Use the small card next time. I won’t spoil the surprise.

(Goes downstairs to compare card text…)

Oh.

I see.

Well, that certainly seems like it would make for a different, and significantly harder game.

Originally, that line was in every fowl card, but it caused problems with some mechanics, like Hair Trigger Reflexes. For the new edition, thry took the line off the birds and put it on Matty. However, the over-sized card is from the old version. So, if 6ou used the new cards with the over-sized card, that text was lost.

Pydro solves another mystery!

Check out the PBF game at BGG: SotM PBF #21 - Matriarch (Completed) | Sentinels of the Multiverse

If it makes you feel any better, you can completely ruin her day with an H=3 group if that group involves Unity, Legacy, or three characters who have armor effects. Unity is my favorite; put out Stealth-Bot, and the Matriarch’s counterattacks will never get through. I couldn’t stop laughing the time I figure that out.

Having the Wraith Stun Bolt her would be pretty effective too, since it doesn't even matter if Muninn is out - Stun Bolt doesn't need to deal damage in orfer to nerf it :). That wouldn't help much against the Carrion Fields, admittedly, but you could Stun Bolt Lilian and one of the Fields, or something…

Well, until she gets her +2 damage buff.

True, but I kind of assumed you’d be putting everything you have into wrecking both the ravens up, which, with the kind of damage output Unity can muster, ain’t hard for her to solo.

Doesn’t work on advance.

The funny thing is that Hair trigger is in the SAME expansion.  How that issue was never considered while that expansion was being designed or during playtesting is quite surprising to me.

The same way some broken combos end up in the same set block in MtG I'd assume, just an oversight.

Also remember that the original Rook City would have had far less playtesters than the more recent expansions.

Also it wasn't until rulings well after Rook City came out that it really became a problem.

Rook City was the first Expansion. There was still some learning going on. Consider that the core game was in development for a considerable period of time before it was released (Aug, 2011), and then fans immediately wanted an expansion. The Kickstarter was launched just two months later and they had proofs back from the printer by early January. Sleulth. Checmical Explosion. 

After all the in-depth discussions we've had over the years, it's sometimes hard for me to remember that there was a time early on when some of the meaning of the text and how things worked just wasn't as pinned down. I think towards the beginning there was more general acceptance that as long as you had fun playing, it didn't really matter so much how some of the arcane interactions worked. If it comes up while playing, make a decision and move on.

I still do. Life is too short to worry about whether or not you played an obscure card interaction correctly in a co-operative game

Unfortunately I have this overwhelming (probably obsessive) desire to be right. I do make a quick "just for now" ruling but I have to find out for sure as well as I can for next time.

"Checmical Explosion" is Pike industries new line of perfumes.  Early marketing results showed that today's generation of dissafected youth craved a perfume/cologne line that was spelled incorrectly, both so that they could feel superior by pointing it out, so that they could wear it ironically, and so that the resulting viral media surge from the spelling (and the slo-mo videos of the concentrated versions being exploded) would propel it to success.  

Underestimate the Chairman's business and marketing acumen at your peril.   

Ah, those beautiful exciting checmicals.