Lamest Games

Mostly, SOTM is awesome.  Mostly.  But every once in a while, things line up in such a way as to make the game a cakewalk, a foregone conclusion, a frustrating grind, or just a pointless waste of effort.  This is obviously not optimal, and so I think we should brainstorm corrective measures.

Here are two examples from my experience of games that went to an unsatisfying place fast.

1.  My first battle against The Dreamer; I had taken five heroes, not knowing this would make her meaner, and within about four rounds all of my heroes had been completely destroyed, except for Fanatic (it might have been Aegis that saved her, I'm not sure; the game also included Haka, O-X, AZ and Tempest, so her HP was pretty much in the middle).  But turn 1 End of Days had wiped out the initial Projections, leading to the quick flip, and once there were enough new Projections out and they'd butchered Tempest, he used his incap ability to give Fanatic back End of Days.  That one card pretty much single-handedly nerfed what was otherwise an overwhelming force; under other circumstances, EoD pulling out a last-second win against overwhelming odds might be awesome, but without the need to kill an actual villain after the minions were defeated, it was just too pathetic, and I've sworn never to use Fanny against Dreamy again (unless I just get really sick of losing to her).

2.  In one particular game where I was introducing a new player to the game, I was bored with the standard "newbie" villains like Baron Blade, Omnitron and arguably Plague Rat, and tried one other who I regarded as fairly easy: Spite.  However, my friend who usually plays Fanatic was trying out Visionary that week, and he opened on 2x Twist the Ether, putting both on Spite, and that was pretty much game; once he flipped, Spite could never deal any damage at all due to the low H value, except for 1 point getting through whenever we used a Power thanks to Compound Xi.  So he just stood there while we took him apart bit by bit.  I've also seen pre-flip Spite neutered for several full turns by having one member of the party tank while immune to damage; Nightmist can do this, as can Visionary, and a Scholar with multiple Flesh to Irons could even do it while retaining the ability to play cards.  Since turning off his damage also turns off his healing, non-advanced Spite is a pushover with such a tank in the party, and even his advanced version is beatable...while under other circumstances, that advanced healing means you might as well not even try damaging him until he flips (unless your damage output is truly spectacular).  Either way, such a sense of pointlessness is something we should try to avoid in our games.

Example 2 has rather led me to the conclusion that Spite is really not a very well-designed villain deck, compared to most of the others, and tends to lead me to not want to play him very often.  The Agent of Gloom of course helps considerably by offering an alternative, but he's still saddled with a villain deck where a lot of the card plays are blank and almost none of them are highly consequential.  I find myself wondering how the general concept of "transhuman serial killer" could be better executed....the very same set that contained Spite also contained the Chairman and the Matriarch, with all of them being highly experimental designs for bringing an unorthodox battle scenario to life, and the other two worked brilliantly.  Two out of three ain't bad, I suppose, but I still feel like it'd be nice to be able to "fix" Spite, and similar adjustments could be made to other lacking villains, such as Ambuscade and Kismet.

(We could kind of overlap here with the Playtesting Nostalgia thread, if anyone here has been around for so long that they remember the process of getting Spite, Chair and Matty to their current states.  It's entirely possible that Spite was just as much of a beast as the other two at one point in his design, and I'm curious whether that changed, and if so why the others were allowed to remain as fearsome as they are, while he was nerfed so significantly.)

Anything with Spite in my experience.  I've never had a fun game against him (and it appears early on that the most recent PBF game will be no different)

Thank the all loving great spagehtti monster in the sky for Emo Spite!

I've definitely had more lame games with Spite than any other character.  Either he ends up nuke healing himself while I fail to get out any good cards, making the game last obnoxiously long, or I shut him down completely and beat him laughably fast.

Thankfully, I've had a lot more fun with Zombie Spite recently.

Other than Spite, my most lame games came from Omnitron when I was learning the game, back before I understood that he plays a card during his Play phase.  I kept thinking "Oh, he only plays cards on one side and recycles them from the trash on the other side."  I'd beat him while taking barely a scratch.

But of course, a proper fight against Omnitron is a lot of fun, even if its still on the easy side.

my problem with modifying Spite is that his flavour is really good, his mechanics are the ones lacking a bit. I'm not sure about which would qualify as lamest game for me, but from memory 2 games against Spite after he flipped where I knew Heroes would win but it would just take forever for it. Another one would be regular Gloomweaver. Games against Chairman and Matriarch have been frustrating, but not really lame.

I'm strongly inclined to suspect that >G chose Spite to get a promo because he was kinda lame…or perhaps he was intentionally made kinda lame because they intended to give him a promo later.  Same for Gloomweaver, except there he's not lame so much as just weak (although I do think Gloomy is lame in one sense…he almost never flips, and yet when he does flip, it's not that big a deal); they probably intentionally made him underwhelming at first, so that they could do the Skinweaver thing later and be more impressive.

The mechanics were what I had in mind to change.  Perhaps instead of just automatically getting a second card play each turn, all Victims ought to give him a play, so that he'd always do something relevant on his turn.  And his Advanced text on side 1 definitely needs to change.  Then on Side 2, he's a complete robot, and deals only 2-damage instances which are too easy to shut down.  I'd have him maybe reveal a card, and do one of three things depending on whether it's a Victim, a one-shot, or Collateral Damage.  Also he needs to have some way of dealing with Ongoing or Environment cards, which can shut him down too completely otherwise.

Plague Rat is another villain I'd like to see adjusted to remove his glaringly obvious weaknesses.  I love how hyper-violent he is, but very early in my time playing the game, I read a game report about him on Mars where Meteor Storm came out, and he couldn't remove it, so the heroes just ignored him while they built up to OHK him after finally removing it.  That is a lame game, though PR is generally not lame otherwise.  But if he was up against Visionary, Nightmist and Scholar, lameness could definitely occur as he's just incapable of getting any damage through and Infections don't actually do anything.  (Heck, Scholar would be able to use PR's flipside ability to bite his comrades harmlessly and regain HP.)  This is bordering on comical rather than lame, but still mostly that.

So if this OT is ok, I'll continue a bit here. Afterall variants is what I most talk about in thsese forums. Thing is, in this game mechanics are tightly related to theme. For example, Spite flipping when 5 drugs cards are out  strongly represents him flipping out, so changing that mechanic changes that part of the theme. So when doing changes I aim to the least possible. What I tried some time ago and didn't work was having him flip when H drug cards were out and then still keep revealing cards and only playing new drugs. The reasoning was that what I don't like about Spite is that the first half barely matters (can't stick damage on him, too much healing) if you can set up to beat his static second half. I feel he should feel like a race between saving victims and delaying drugs, that once he is turned into his monster side you have to finish him off fast or he'll overrun you eventually.

I think I could try this... changing his healing on his first side to: "The first time Spite deals damage..." so there's not THAT much healing on his first side (basically just H-1 from his card and not also from all the Victims and drugs) and changing his monster side to "Whenever a Villain Card would be played, instead put it under this card. Spite deals the Hero Target with the lowest HP X projectile damage, where X is the number of cards below this card". That forces you to take action early and dispatch him fast once he flipped.

About Plage Rat: every Villian has some case where they are a dud. I think it's perfect he doesn't do stuff with the Environment, he is a Rat.

Yeah they definitely could have done more with the Infection status.  A really cool idea, and I'm sure they didn't want to dive in too deep with their first expansions, but I have a feeling if they remade Plague Rat today they could make the mechanic much more intricate.

The problem I have with Plague Rat is that he almost never flips (much like Gloomy).  He really has nothing in his deck but Infection cards and pure damage (that usually get out Infection cards faster), so if you find a way to gimp his damage and have plenty of Ongoing destruction, he is laughable (and even if he manages to flip, he won't stay flipped for more than a turn).

Just last night I did a round against PR with Haka, Visionary, OmniX, and Fanatic.  Haka and Fanatic completely shut down his damage output (Oh Ground Pound, you sexy beast) while Visionary and OmniX whacked the Infection cards as soon as they came out.

Sure he does H damage when you destroy an Infection, but Visionary always had a Projection out, OmniX had his Toxic reduction plating, and Haka/Fanatic can take the damage.

I'm sure there are some team setups that have more trouble, but overall, once you know what he has in his deck, controlling him is far too easy.

Actually, Gloomweaver's initiall incarnation during Playtesting was notoriously hard. So difficult in fact, the story goes, that he kept getting chipped away with the nerf chizzle until we got what we have today. Gloomy was brought up a few times during Vengeance playtesting actually to try and avoid the same pitfalls with the V5 (and I believe we were very successfull in that regard).

Huh. My experience of Plague Rat is that he almost always flips. Killing one of his Infections is simply too painful on his front side, unless you can prevent him from dealing damage entirely.

Plague Rat usually flips for me as well, and early.  A Ravage on the first few turns pretty much cinches the deal.  We usually hold our ongoing destruction until he flips, nuke all the Infections at once while he's not dealing revenge damage, and then move on.  Ideally he's only on his filthy vermin side for one turn. Honestly I don't think his deck needs any work, except perhaps for a way to get Infections out of the trash.

Also, Envisioner, you seem to be forgetting that Spite converts the environment into pain with Mind-Phyre and Lab Raid.  The environment doesn't shut him down in the slightest, it only makes him worse.  Good ongoings can still hurt him, but only if you can keep ahead of PL531.

We fought Rat a few days ago and won with two incapped heroes (Adept and Jim) letting the Scholar heal (via direct incap ability in the case of the Adept, while I think Jim just let him use a power) so that he could plink away with the two Energy forms he had out. A Liquid form came out at some point as well, so the Scholar basically won via healing :D.

Generally we find Rat can be quite tricky due to the constant damage being dealt, especially as most of it is irreducible. We rarely destroy Infection cards - we don't really consider it worth doing so for the resultant pain on Rat's front side, and are usually pretty far through the game by the time he's flipped so we just hold on and kill the bugger. Having Jim in the party always helps - he really is an epic death machine against Rat, even with no external damage buffs. Add in someone like Legacy and it's just fantastic :D.

I think our lamest was game involving Legacy, Wraith, and Absolute Zero vs. Voss in Insula Primalis.  He had a terrible draw early (lots of AE minions and Guards, but both BCs I think).  The end result was that Wraith died, and both Legacy and AZ were at about half.  Then the volcano came out.  Legacy had out Danger Sense, and AZ, well, is AZ.  As a result, we spent the next several rounds have Legacy Galvanize and then motivationally charge whatever minion came out, and AZ did his thing with the fire damage.  We even left out one fire minion, so that Voss never flipped.  It was both awesome and incredibly lame :)  (Especially for the Wraith player who could just use her incapacitated side).

He doesn't always have those cards; he can still end up suffering major pain from something like Oppressive Smog (no healing for you!), Mongolian Death Worm (there are no other targets, so he's nearly always one of the bites, and if Nightmist is tanking with Mistform, the other bounces off her), or Atlantean Font of Power (he gets a Victim card half the time, while everybody else gets free awesome, and has nothing to shoot at but him and maybe a Kraken).  And frankly I'm always happy when Mynd-Phyre (yes they used Xtreme Kool Letterz in place of both "I's") comes out, because it usually deals no more damage than Demon's Kiss and it eliminates the distraction of the environment, ensuring that the heroes can focus fire on Spite.

We had a pretty lame game against zombie Spite tonight.  Now its the first time we played him so maybe we did it wrong.  We got him to flip right away from a lucky draw of victims so he only had two drugs face up.  The first turn after he flipped we pulled all the victims out from the safe house.  He never flips up any more drugs or goes back to his other side once he hits his second side.  As a result after we pulled all the victims out most of his attacks only hit for 1-2 points. One stun bolt a turn meant he could barely touch us on his second side.

The lamest games I've played involve Lead from the Front mixed with Evolution.  "Hey, do you just want to completely avoid one of the main mechanics of the villain while we uterly destroy them?"

Normally, I love Chairman battles (And when I say love, I mean completely hate. WAY. TOO. HARD.), I kind of don't like it how easily he is neutered by the Legacy Lead From The Front and Next Evolution combo. Once we get that combo out, it is basically game over. Of course, this is easily avoided by not using Legacy, but still.

Exactly, we have a soft "No Legacy" policy in general, but some times with new players they want to use him.  One group of fairly new players (I think it was their fourth game) asked for a hard villain so I grabbed Chairman, the new guy to the group who had never played before grabbed Legacy.  Well, about round 3 or 4 he had Lead+Evo out and we steam rolled.  The were all like "I thought that was supposed to be hard" and the new guy was especially not impressed.  I just had to tell them that Legacy screwed it up.

I had a game the other night that was just... miserable.  We were fighting Apostate with Tachyon, Rook City Wraith, Mr. Fixer and O-X.  We were also in the Pike Industrial Complex but that did basically nothing the entire game.  Things started out okay but on the second turn Apostate got Profane Summons and dropped the worst of his relics on us.  Everything had DR and then a Relic Spirit popped out and it was pretty much over.  Our Fixer and O-X might have been able to help but the Fixer player was using his deck for the first time and literally did nothing but play Tool Box every turn and the O-X player was on a good roll until the Apocalypse card dropped and no one could stop it.  The game was not fun.

Games that involve The Visionary tend to be lame if she gets set up right, because she can completely gimp the villain to a hilarious degree.  Don't get me wrong, I love the Visionary, but I tend not to play her when around new players (unless I know that person would be into deck manipulation, then it's cool to demonstrate her power).

One game, I completely shut down Apostate with Twist the Ether by feeding all his damage into Absolute Zero and changing it to cold/fire.  AZ stayed at the highest HP since he was nuke healing every villain turn while everyone else just picked away at Apostate.  You can do a similar set up with TtE and Ra if you have Flesh of the Sun God out.  Plus with her ability to scry the decks, she ensures that no surprises come up to ruin your day (we kept Apocalypse nice and buried).

Overall the Visionary is awesome and sometimes its fun to completely leg sweep the bad guys, but man she can really turn a game into a cake walk.

Given that decks are balanced internally and not externally, there is always going to be something that totally breaks a certain other thing.

And that is just the manner of the game. Randomizer for the win. 3 Heroes, random, versus random at random. 

Definitely, yes.  This is why I will basically never play Dark Visionary, at least not unless I'm against a villain who gets constant extra plays.  It's just too pathetic when the villain gets only one card play and it's the same blank card getting Suggested over and over.  And even though Omnitron plays 1.5 cards per turn, he's so slow and mechanical in his operation in general that Visionary just totally owns him every time.  It doesn't hurt that she has no Equipment for him to blow up with TechSing.

"But every once in a while, things line up in such a way as to make the game... a frustrating grind,"

In the three games we've played so far, Skinwalker.

I noted it in the general discussion thread, but... sheesh. He starts with a 25 HP relic you pretty much have to deal with. Then Skinny typically plays one card per turn and it's probably a minion (21 cards in his deck are a minion) or a card that brings out a minion. Or both. Three of those minions have 25 HPs. The Voodoo Pins have 9 HP each.

Then he plays most likely another few minions as you deal with the environment deck. And lord help us if you play Unity or even Visionary against him. (Oddly, Wagner Base with 3 targets may be the best environment choice against him. Are their E-decks with equal or less minions?)

There's a lot of damage reduction in there for Skinny and his Zombies, and even a bit for his minions in general.

And Skinny has 150 HP on top of all that.

Basically it's a shooting gallery. Pick your optimal targets, sure, but basically just shoot and shoot and shoot. And you're so busy dealing with the Pins and Relics and any other inherent minion annoyance abilities that you rarely have time to shoot Skinny.

We discovered it's an interesting distraction. Depending on the heroes, we can often ignore it and just hit him for a much damage as possible. Once he flips (50hp), the Pouch no longer matters as he's not a Zombie once he's flipped and his Zombies don't last long enough for us to care.

In fact, that's often the case. It's a fine balancing act and varies based on the heroes and how much global damage you can do, but we'll often just target Gloomy and let global damage take out everything else. Sometimes that's not viable (e.g., if a pin is really putting the hurt on someone) but often that's the case.

Having read him, but not yet had a chance to play him, I was wondering if this was a viable strategy.  Burn him down as quick as possible, and let his own AE clear the minions once he flips.  Glad to know that I'm (or at least might be) on the right track.

Meteor Storm does this to a lot of villains, actually - it's the reason I rarely play on Wagner (unless it's against someone like Advanced Blade, or Warlord Voss, who can actually make it a threat).  There are a ton of villains with literally no response to it, up to and including Iron Legacy himself, and if the villain can't remove it, they should always lose, since a villain who can destroy stuff faster than the heroes can play it when damage isn't a factor would always win anyway, since the heroes could never get an engine going while damage was happening, either.  Heck, even villains who can destroy Environment cards almost never do so every turn (yeah, yeah, except Spite), so you're almost certain to get a few free plays in.  There's nothing lamer than a game where an Environment card randomly hands the win to the heroes whenever it shows up.

Kismet is a great villain, and I always enjoy taking her on, but after my first game against her (in Advanced, with Tachyon, Legacy, Bunker, and Absolute Zero) was one of the most intense, satisfying games of Sentinels I ever played - and easily the most fun I've had losing in this game - I am always slightly let down when I face her and the team has a lot of Ongoing removal, so I am not constantly agonizing over whether it's worth it to hit my own people.  Anyone who thinks Kismet is too easy should face her with a team like that.

I am also very saddened that the Legacy mirror match doesn't have more meat.  The trope of a hero having to face down an evil version of himself (herself, in Young Legacy's case) for a reason, and I was really looking forward to an epic clash of the Legacies… but in practice, it doesn't really work.  There is every possibility that Legacy gets out Next Evolution and Lead From The Front, totally neutering what would otherwise be the most brutal villain in the game.  Sure, you only have 3-ish turns to get that combo, so it won't happen every time, but the question of whether you draw into it or not has nothing to do with player skill or planning, so I still am not a fan.  I have similar (though less serious)  issues  with Tempest against Voss - get him Hailstorm and a damage boost from any of a number of other heroes, and Voss' minions quickly cease to be any sort of persistent threat.  Advanced Voss and Genebound Guards keep this from becoming quite as absurd, but it's always sad to me when I want to fight a villain using anyone… except their Nemesis.

Ironic

Also, welcome back Ironic! Been a while since I've seen that Ironic signature of yours.

Her regular version isn't as bad since he has to play one-shots to gimp the boss and its somewhat limited that way.  I will agree with her potential though.  Anyway my group has unofficially banned Dark Visionary, Team Leader Tachyon, and all versions of Legacy for making pretty much any game too easy.  

We do nearly always go with random heros, but even randomly you get some pretty lethal combos quite often, and if any of the aforementioned heros come up we just reroll their spot.

Which heroes?

It also depends on how many heroes you have that can do global damage in any given game. Are you talking heroes that can ignore PoB's damage reduction, or just large amounts of damage?

There's also some healing minions in there somewhere, too…

All the above?

I agree - it really does depend on which heroes you have as to what approach you want to take.

If Fixer or [redacted] are in the game, we can usually find a way to get past the reduction, but heavy-hitters like Ra, Chrono, or [redacted] can often just do enough damage to hit without worrying about the reduction (and to be able to hit the distractions when needed but still hit Gloomy for significant amounts). Having folks like NightMist (Oblivions are great against him, especially with that nemesis bonus!), Tempest, Expatriette, Fixer, or [redacted] doing global damage help significantly.

Often the healing minions aren't a big deal, and wasting damage to directly deal with them might not be worth it. For example, if I only have heroes that are going to deal small packets of damage to Gloomy, then yeah, I probably want to find a way to get rid of the Pouch or I'm not going to get far. But if I have heavy hitters, ability to bypass reduction, or global damage that will both hit Gloomy and the Pouch, I won't worry about it.

Don't know that I can give you more than that without spending hours going over every conceivable scenario - which won't really be all that useful in the long run.

I found him really tough in Wagner Mars Base, actually. Meteor Storm is a bit of a losing proposition against him, because he can build up faster than you can (especially if he has that pin out that makes someone discard cards at random), and he has a ton of damage types so you can't shut him down with Next Evolution. Also, we were unlucky with the Self-Destruct Sequence, as it was mainly Maintenance Levels that got played into it face down, and we failed to draw any Environment destruction for ages.

Pervasive Red Dust also synergises pretty nicely with his hand denial.

Lamest game for me and also the first time on advanced that I beat PR (after losing three games in a row, bad losing streak and new to the game). Dark Visionary pulls out ravage and everyone becomes infected on turn two and then fanatic plays end of days. slowly beat him down after that. I was just happy I won at the moment but looking back on it it was pretty lame.

Well, with Skinwalker we've been using primarily Legacy, Haka, DW Ex-Pat, and Wraith. Wraith's Eyepiece helps keep Skinny's deck under control somewhat, and Legacy's boost helps to get past the damage reduction. Plus the game drags along long enough for Legacy to get his Leads.../Next Evolution combo out, letting him stop Skinny's melee/infernal damage. Haka's Ground Pound is a nice card, and there's a fair amount of other global in there.

It just seems like there's enough minions coming out, and they do enough obnoxious stuff, that by the time you fight your way past it to get to Skinny himself, it's kind of a slog.

So we don't think he's unbeatable, he's just kind of... boring. Maybe it's the excessive hit points. He has 150, Akashie has 200... but defeating Akashie's minions also hurts Akashie. 150 HP is a lot to go through when it all has to be done direct.

On GloomWeaver's flip side, he hits himself both at the start and end of his own turn.

Went back and reviewed the cards again. A few things…

Pouch still has that healing, which is really obnoxious. Granted, it won't do much if you draw a Zombie on the first turn or wait to hit Skinny. Still, there's seven cards that put a Zombie into play, so that's a potential 28 points of healing for all villains, including Skinny (I'm going to assume 4H for everything here).

Cursed Acolyte does a big 16 points of damage between heroes.

Vast Following potentially brings the Pouch back around for another performance.

The Profane Zealot is both more damage prevention on top of Pouch (and itself if you get both PZs out), and heals itself, which means you have to take it out first.

Strength of the Grave is more damage reduction for Zombies. Removing one Ongoing probably isn't going to be too big a deal, but bad timing and/or hero choice (we use Wrath w/Grappling Hook, but if she's dealing with environmental stuff…) can hurt.

The Voodoo Pins and other two Relics ae more annoyances, but Ophidia at the wrong time can be a major blow if you haven't dealt with the Pins.

So yeah, if you have a way to bypass damage reduction (Fixer, [REDACTED], and Bunker mk. 3), you can get around the major road block to dealing with Skinny. But there's very little spare space to maneuver otherwise. Without damage reduction, Legacy Galvanize, and/or global damage, even the zombies can pose a threat, particularly when Chosen Disciple gets out there.

Like we noted, Skinny certainly isn't unbeatable, but it's a bit of a slog if you don't have the right combination of relatively uncommon factors. And it seems like relatively few things you can ignore so that you can go after him instead. You'd better really have some heavy-hitting global stuff.

For 6 damage (again assuming 4 player), and there's not as much as you can do to speed that along as you can with Akash. You can't global-damage minions and Skinny and get the same synergy you do against Akash (where taking out the minions does more damage to Akash along with what you did on the global attack).

It can also be a bit boring watching Skinny do more damage to himself then you are.

And the Profane Zealot DR protects Skinny from his own attacks on his flip side!

Also with Skinny, his flip-side self-immolation seems to lead to two potential lame games.

1) All the other heroes go down, Nightmist hides in her cocoon, and Skinny eats himself.

2) After all the work the heroes have put in, knocking Skinny down to 6 HP on his flip side... he eats himself. (it kinda lacks the amusement/irony of Police Backup.)

From a thematic standpoint, it's not even clear what that means. So if the heroes lose, Skinny stops eating himself and goes on to conquer Earth? Are the heroes making him self-destruct somehow?

Huh? What are you talking about?  Are you putting Zombies into play when Cultists die? Cuz that effect is not on the new Gloomweaver's card.

mm, that's not quite my definition of lame.  For it to gimp a villain completely is sad, but if it hands the heroes the game without quite doing that, then it feels like the Environment sided with the heroes to defeat the villain, and there's a nice story in that.  Mostly what bugs me is just that the flavor of Meteor Storm is wrong…it sounds like it should be the name of a card that deals damage (perhaps replacing the awkwardly named Fire in the Biosphere), and the concept of "nobody can do damage" might be better represented by a card called "Isolation Lockdown" or something, where the heroes and villains are all in different domes of the marsbase with sealed bulkheads between (not that this explains why Absolute Zero can't damage himself, but still).

I am always slightly let down when I face her and the team has a lot of Ongoing removal, so I am not constantly agonizing over whether it's worth it to hit my own people.  Anyone who thinks Kismet is too easy should face her with a team like that.

Yeah, in general I feel like the Ongoing cards and removal therefor are one of the weak links of this otherwise excellent game…too many villains have none at all, making their magic bullets useless, and too many heroes lack such bullets, for when they are vitally necessary.  It makes villains that have lots of Targets feel better-designed, because damage is a mechanic that all decks have in common…it makes you have to work at removing the cards, and some take more work than others.  Ongoings lack that interesting element…if you replaced the simple number progression with some sort of puzzle, like having to match sets of icons in order to destroy them, the game would gain something in terms of depth.  Not sure whether it'd be worth it, of course, just thinking aloud.

I am also very saddened that the Legacy mirror match doesn't have more meat.

I thought of that too, when I was wondering why Legacy wasn't one of Evil Paul's nemeses…presumably Iron Legs can't quite bring himself to be quite as brutal with his own naive, younger self as with the naive, younger selves of those who would battle him in the future.  I feel that if there was a confrontation between the IL and any of the heroic Ls, it wouldn't be a battle so much as a war of words, which unfortunately doesn't tend to model well in game form.

There is every possibility that Legacy gets out Next Evolution and Lead From The Front, totally neutering what would otherwise be the most brutal villain in the game.

Not quite…Evil Paul is almost exclusively melee damage, but has a small number of projectile attacks (and a little toxic from Next Evolution).  When I tried out the (not quite legal, it turns out) Freedom Six game against him, he killed Tempest early while beating all other heroes down into single digits (Unity also died, I believe), and then dead Tempest nearly won the entire game because heroes became immune to melee…but right as the last hero was starting to stabilize, Flying Assault killed him out of the blue.  (This is one of two games where dead Tempest has nearly defeated IL…the other time, it was by recycling two copies of Scholar's Expect the Worst every round, so he was permanently immune to all damage rather than just to melee, and the only reason it would eventually end was that Scholar had to reshuffle his deck.)

I have similar (though less serious) issues with Tempest against Voss - get him Hailstorm and a damage boost from any of a number of other heroes, and Voss' minions quickly cease to be any sort of persistent threat.

Except against the Gene-Bound Guards, of course.

That's lame, yes, but I blame it on Nightmist (or Visionary) and the lack of ongoing destruction for some villains, not on any one particular such villain.  Much as I enjoy being able to become immune to damage, it sort of means you're opting out of the very game you sat down to play.

From a thematic standpoint, it's not even clear what that means. So if the heroes lose, Skinny stops eating himself and goes on to conquer Earth? Are the heroes making him self-destruct somehow?

Gloomweaver is the Rotting God; his self-damage represents his body of crumbling, necrotic flesh literally falling apart, because his energy of death and decay is destroying everything nearby including his own anchor to the material world.  In order to remain incarnate, he must kill other things in order to harvest their life essences.  ("The only way you can survive is to spread…")  If the heroes lose, Gloomy can swallow their souls and presumably gain enough energy from it to survive the trip to the nearest center of civilization, whereup on he can feed to his heart's content.  You can think of the damage they deal to him as representing a plan to lure him away from potential sources of sustenance.

He's counting the five Zombies themselves, along with two Chosen Disciples who raise zombies from the trash.  Of course, you might not have Zombies in the trash when the Disciples first come out; unlike normal Gloomy, Skinwalker doesn't search out any Zombies at the start of the game.

Sorry to triple-post, but I was interrupted when I was first trying to respond to this thread; here is what was originally going to be posted before Broccoli's and Gislef's latest comments.  And I had so many responses to Ironic that I felt like that needed a post to itself, or it'd be impossible to follow.

Just took him on for the first time last night, and it was a lot of fun.  Tempest, Scholar, and Omnitron-X in Megalopolis.  He randomly drew his other two relics in the first couple turns, and didn't get many Cultists.  Tempest got Localized Hurricane early and was constantly hitting two relics, or a relic and Gloomy, and drawing a ton of cards.  After he flipped, Tempest soon got the Gene-Bound Shackles and it was all over; the Rotting God cost himself 4 HP each turn, and only occasionally got 2 back from eating his own Zombies or a Plummeting Monorail.  Those early Relics actually managed to put the hurt on us really fierce, with Omnitron having had physical Plating at first and thus having to worry about Infernal damage.  This was the first game in which we really experienced any problems from the Grimoire of Curses (the Drum of Despair was still fairly pathetic); having to discard every turn almost from the start of the game was painful, and the fact that all of us would take damage if any of us failed to discard (Omnitron in particular had Components at stake, and Tempest was also bleeding fast) made things feel appropriately, Gloomy-ly miserable, up until we managed to destroy the Grimoire.  It's really a pity that in normal Gloomy games, we seldom even find any of the Relics, let alone all of them; in at least four games against his normal version, he's never flipped, and only the first game was a Relic Victory; the rest of the time, we just kill him (even on advance, with a party specifically chosen to avoid non-physical damage types…I forgot to rule out Mr. Fixer because of Grease Monkey Fist, and that was all it took).

Another first in this game was Tempest's Elemental Subwave Inducer…usually I've found it useless, but in this game, it was really handy after the flip, because infernal damage was happening every turn.  O-X had switched Platings by then, so only Scholar was taking all the pain, and of course that suited him well enough (though I was finally running low on HP by the end).  In one hilarious instance, Gloomy somehow caused Tempest to deal himself damage…and because of the ESI, the damage Tempest dealt was Infernal and was therefore reduced.

He starts with a 25 HP relic you pretty much have to deal with.

Well, unless you have a pair of Focused Plasma Cannons; those made a big difference in getting rid of Skinny.  We did still kill the Pouch of Bones early, but it was a bit less necessary than it might have been.  I debated telling O-X's player that a first-turn Technological Advancement should always fetch Electro-Deployment Unit, but I figured I'd let him learn his own lessons…and as it happened, FPC was perhaps a better choice anyway.

And lord help us if you play Unity or even Visionary against him.

Unity, yes, you're boned there (it kind of neatly balances how much of an edge she has against the likes of La Capitan or Miss Information, that some other villains - Iron Legacy is another one - just brutalize her completely).  For Visionary, having to live without Decoy Projection isn't much of a sacrifice, you can just discard it to Enlighten instead of playing it, no big deal.

(Oddly, Wagner Base with 3 targets may be the best environment choice against him. Are their E-decks with equal or less minions?)

Megalopolis has only one more, but all of them are 10 HP instead of 5, so they're less likely to accidentally die at an inconvenient time, and they're not improving his damage as with Villainous Weaponry.  Indeed, in our game we let Gloomy (and my tanky Scholar) get hit with a train, and that was quite beneficial.  Though of course you never want to let Traffic Jam sit in play unless you're quite certain that the Grimoire is dead and shall remain that way.  ("Klaatu Barada…Necktie!")

I'm going to guess that the first redacted is Parse…it seems fitting that a weakness-spotting archer would have a Riveting Crane-type effect.  The second one could be anyone, but most likely either KNYFE or Mainstay.  I'm thinking the last one has to be Setback, as he seems like the type to unleash general mayhem wherever he goes.  (If he doesn't always specify "nonhero", then I'd imagine matches between him and The Rotting God can get rather bloody…)

As noted, counting Chosen Disciple, who can pull Zombies out of the trash. It's certainly not a given she will succeed, but since Zombies outnumber CDs…

Not to mention that Vast Following can resurrect a Chosen Disciple, who will then resurrect a Zombie.

Actually, one of the things about the new Gloomweaver is that Vast Following is actually generally effective nowadays, because he doesn't get 3-5 in the discard pile from round 1 on.

Because two versions of the same person can't touch each other and occupy the same place at the same time. Or they melt down into a pile of goo.

Hasn't anyone seen Timecop?

So if the two Legacies touched each other, they'd both be dead and that'd be the end of the game.

Bwah!

I worked so hard to forget that movie. Now I have to go back to therapy…

Whatever you think of it, you have to admit that Ron Silver was pretty good. Few actors could convey melting into a pile of goo like he did.

[quote="Gislef"]

Whatever you think of it, you have to admit that Ron Silver was pretty good. Few actors could convey melting into a pile of goo like he did.

[/quote]

Oh?  What about Ronald Lacey and Paul Freeman?

​ [quote="Envisioner"]

Except against the Gene-Bound Guards, of course. [/quote]

Um…

Using some d20s to randomly determine heroes and villains, I ended up with Legacy, Omnitron-X, and Unity against the Ennead.

Legacy has Inspiring Presence out, and he used his innate power to buff everyone for a total of +2 damage because I just couldn’t get a copy of Motivational Charge out of my deck for nothing.

Omnitron-X had Defensive Blast and Elemental Exoskeleton out.

Unity played Hasty Augmentation. Omnitron-X activated Defensive Blast. He inflicted 20 HP to each of four different targets, as well as Anubis over there in the environment deck.

I know I should probably be crowing about how well that worked out; the only way it could have possibly been any funnier was if it had been Akash’Bhuta in the Realm of Discord with that one environment card played that turns all ongoing cards into targets. Still, my glee was tempered by a sense of shame at having just wiped out everyone and everything who wasn’t a hero. Just…holy crap, you know? It doesn’t even feel sporting to do it like that.

Had this been an Advanced game, you'd likely have found it more sporting.

D20's.  Why didn't I think of that?

I'm getting together with some buddies this weekend who are fairly into Sentinels; using a D20 would be a great way to randomize everything.  I think it'd be more exciting for everyone to roll for their hero individually instead of having everyone dibs from the Randomizer App.  I can use a D12 for the environment too.

That's what we do - I roll a d20 for the villain (there are only eighteen villains, yes, but I just reroll if I get a nineteen or a twenty) and a d12 for the enviroment (rerolling if either is something we've already had that session). Sometimes my partner will want to randomise his hero choice, in which case I roll a d20 for that too (again, rerolling on a 19 or a 20). If the hero (or, in the case now of Gloomy or Spite, villain) rolled is one who has a promo (or two), I'll roll a d2 (or d3, in the case of Wraith ;)) to see which version will be played.

For the newer folks, there are also random generators available - and some really great ones, at that. I don't have the links and won't be able to search for them for a while, but hopefully someone with a little more time available to help can provide them, in case they're useful? 

Wait… you had Defensive Blast out, and you would have preferred Legacy dealing 3 Damage to adding 1 to all Hero damage?  Huh.

Omnitron-X is absolutely nuts against the Ennead, though, no joke.  Their generally-small amounts of damage and spotty stuff destruction coupled with the bot's ability to shut down some 70% of everything they can throw with a single Plating make a pretty brutal game, and that's before getting into why O-X is one of the overall most powerful heroes in any matchup.  Well, any matchup except for O-X's nemesis, anyway.

Ironic

The Randomizers are definitely nice; they get the game rolling quickly (and the Randomizer App for my droid even let's you set the Win %)

The only problem I have with the Randomizers (though I haven't used any of the online ones, so maybe they address this) is that many times they will duplicate heroes due to promos.  "Unity, Golem Unity, Wraith, and Rook City Wraith against so and so"

The only thing you can do is turn the promo cards off, but I want to keep them on; I just don't want it to assume I have multiple decks and can play two of the same hero in a game.

BEHOLD, THE SPIFFOMATIC RANDOMINATOR 4000!

http://www.spiffworld.com/sotm/randomizer.cfm?numhero=5

The options menu lets you tick and untick the decks you own, bookmarking the page will save your preferences and it will never give you two different versions of the same heroes :D I don't randomise often, but when I do I do it the Spiff way.

Awesome!  Going to give this a shot later tonight.

I played with some friends last night, their third game after beating Omnitron (easy) and Plague Rat (go go Wraith's Infrared Tracking!). We decided to play against Citizen Dawn with a 5 person table (Mr. Fixer,Wraith, Absolute Zero Elemental Wrath, Expatriette, Ra) at Insula Primalis

Opening citizens were Truth, Blood, Sweat, and Tears.

Two rounds in, Truth still isn't dead though he's close, no one has any cards in hand, Citizens Assault and Hammer are also out, and we're all at about half hit points. Also, both T-Rexes are out and are chewing through us like crazy.

Two rounds after that, we've got the worst of the Citizens in the trash and are carefully managing the last few to keep Dawn from flipping. Mr. Fixer is out and Absolute Zero is close to gone. Then a velociraptor pack chows down on a wounded Hammer and Dawn flips.

We never had a chance. At least we weren't playing on advanced.

The Sentinels Sidekick app for iOS doesn't duplicate, unless you specifically tell it in the settings that it's okay to do so. 

I wanted hit points back. The game had opened with a string of “Okay, so the first villain card is a green hand, so after I resolve it I have to deal damage to someone and draw a card, and this card is an orange circle, so after I resolve it I have to deal damage and play a card” crap, and poor Unity couldn’t keep a golem on the board for more than a round. I am–or was–used to seeing her as the big damage dealer, putting out craptons of damage with a golem zerg rush, so I was prioritizing her over Omnitron-X.

I wouldn't be too worried about that one even; Omnitron is something of a wimp, and the ruling on Self-Sabotage means that O-X has even more of an advantage against him than just dealing 2 damage with Defensive Blast and Gaussian.  I don't think OX pwns his ancestor quite as hard as Visionary does, but it's close.  (Now Visi on the other hand would dearly like some help dealing with her nemesis, who she's not allowed to deal extra damage to, but will take extra damage from every turn after the flip plus on several cards.)

Citizen Dawn on Advanced with H=5 is a miserable experience, unless you can manage to keep her from ever flipping.  I wouldn't call it lame, though, just incredibly long and frustrating.

Had a 3-hero game against advanced Omnitron the other day that included O-X.  Omni had the nice timing of leveling O-X twice with Technological Singularity right when O-X had a stack of equipment/components going.  The second shot blew O-X off the board with something like 11 damage.

Well yes, you do have to play him a bit more conservatively in view of that risk.  Probably save the Electro-Deployment Unit into Innervation Ray chains for another day.

Yes.  Learning that one the hard way.

A newbie player choose him the other day for her second ever game.  Did pretty well with it once I showed her the play chain for pushing out components fast and effectively using the EDUs.  She also made good use of Timeshift to help someone playing Bunker to get set up.

Meh.

Or regularly nuke yourself before the villain gets the chance to, there's no reason you can't use the same tactics as "yourself"!

How'd it get to 11? It should be all bursts of 3. 3 per equipment card, because of the nemesis bonus. It's not X, it's 2 per card. That's 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, which becomes 3, 3, 3, 3, 3. You shouldn't be able to get 11.

Yeah, against villains with lots of equipment destruction I often use a Singularity or Self Sabotage every 4 rounds or so.  There's plenty enough Resets and Tech Advancements to get your setup back.  Unlike Inventory Barrage which I generally only use as a finisher or when Wraith is <3 hitpoints, Tronks actually does quite well when he uses himself as explosives.

Unless you had 11 pieces of equipment (Omni can have exactly that number) and Adept lowered the damage you would take by 2.  (or any combo of -2 damage Dealt/Taken

X also enjoys blowing up Omnitron's components.

Me mis-calculating it of course.  (2x5)+1 instead of (3x5) like it should have been.  That means the earlier (and smaller shot) would have been nastier as well.

I guess that would make Bunker, Wraith, O-X verses Omnitron a sort of collosal game of 'chicken'.  Until Wraith got an Infrared Eyepiece going and nerfed him of course.

Earlier this week I introduced my brother-in-law to the game. We played Matriarch and had Teamleader Tachyon, Unity, and Chrono in. With the 3 of us, her hits were all just 1, and all the birds were doing just 1, and Unity got Stealthbot in the first round...I think she hit us once in the one round that both the crows were out. We finished the game before she flipped and with nearly full health. It was sort of rediculous.

Then we played Iron Legacy with Argent Adept, Wraith, and Fantatic and died in like two rounds. Somehow that made us feel better about the easy win.

Then we played IronLegacy again but stacked the cards against him: Legacy, Teamleader, Haka, and Tempest. Legacy got both of his other players are immune and we pummelled him quick.

It was a weird night in the Multiverse.

Had a game against the Matriarch with a group of newbies. They wanted a challenge after taking out Baron Blade and Grand Warlord Voss, so they insisted on playing a difficulty 4. The team was The Scholar, Tachyon, Unity, and Expatriette. We played against her in the Realm of Discord.

So the first turn, the Matriarch played a Carrion Fields. Because of the Mask, she then played Darken the Skies...huh...easiest first turn ever?

The rest wasn't much harder. Between The Scholar's tanking and Tachyon's Hypersonic Assaults, any time she got out a bunch of birds, they would get wiped out immediately with no retaliation damage whatsoever. Amusingly, Unity didn't even get a single bot out (due to inexperience and incredibly bad shuffle luck), but it didn't matter. The environment was a non-factor; anything that was threatening was immediately destroyed by Tachyon's Blinding Speed.

Huginn and Muninn eventually came out, along with about half her deck in fowls, but by that point Matriarch was down to 17 hit points. Even with the DR 2, The Scholar played Know When to Cut Loose for 8 damage, and Tachyon played Lightspeed Barrage for 11 damage to end the game. We could've claimed we played her on advanced since the cohorts never got destroyed, not that they played much of a factor anyway. The only real damage we took was from two Horrid Cacophonies. The lowest hp on the heroes side was Tachyon with 21 (Positive Energy Field was played), while The Scholar still had all of his hp.

So yeah...easiest game against the Matriarch ever? 

Matriarch's games tend to be all-or-nothing; she either destroys you or wimps out completely (whether by drawing the wrong cards or by having all her bird attacks bounce off O-X's Ablative Plating or Scholar's Flesh to Iron).  This is of course completely appropriate; she's a petulant teenage girl with a godlike artifact on her face, so whether she's effective or not largely depends on whether she wakes up on the right side of the bed that afternoon.  Sometimes she'll be executing a power-trip revenge fantasy; other times she'll be goggling over some boy and cook up some ridiculous scheme to try and impress him, only to fail ignominously and end up a sobbing wreck.  She's not exactly supervillain material, personality-wise; she just happens to have some fairly serious mojo, which might work very well if she can actually manage to employ it properly.

The Matriarch isn't normally a lame game, but she is a lame villain, in strictly social-status terms.  The Vengeance Five are all laughing at her behind her back, and she knows it.  But just you wait, she'll show them!  Someday.  Somehow.  She thinks.

As amazing as this description is,  Matriarch s hould take heart - she will never be as lame as Friction.

I registered just to kvetch, and fortuitously enough, I saw that a thread already existed for just that purpose.

Tempest, Visionary, Tachyon, and Absolute Zero vs. Citizen Dawn in Megalopolis. The initial citizen draw is relatively unremarkable, but it does contain Citizen Tears. Okay, no big. Dawn hits her play phase and flips "Blinding Blast". Huh, okay, nobody's had a turn yet and we're already down to just one card in our hand. We can't finish off Tears on the first go-'round, but Tempest gets out an electrical storm and Zero gets out a cold snap, so it's just a matter of time. We flip the environment card and... Traffic Pileup. Well, that's annoying. Dawn gets her turn, which is unremarkable except for the fact that Citizen Tears takes care of the last card in everyone's hand. Our heroes all go again and can't do anything during the play or draw phases, but at least between the Start of Turn effects and Tempest's innate power, we manage to finish off Tears and start whittling down that Traffic Pileup. Then we get to the environment turn. We flip the top card and... Paparazzi on the Scene. Well crap- now we have no play phase, no power phase, no draw phase, and no way to do anything until our Start of Turn effects finally finish off that Traffic Pileup. I think to myself "wow, this has to be the lamest game imagineable". 

Then, after we get Traffic Pileup down to 1 HP, Dawn flips Devastating Aurora. No cards in our hands, no cards on the table, everyone under half health, Dawn at 70+ health and two citizens from flipping.

I would like to say that I chose the heroic path, that I played it out. I would like to say that I managed to hang around, eking out a hard-won victory or a hard-fought defeat. I would like to say that I did not simply flip the table and ragequit. I would like to say that.

Edit: Honestly, the Aurora helped us, because it saved us a turn getting rid of the Paparrazi on the scene, and toasting Cold Snap and Electrical Storm gave us more control over when she flipped. It was just the general sense of "what now". Typically Sentinels is a very fun game, but there was absolutely nothing fun for anyone involved in that one.

Wow. And I thought we had it bad when Dawn kicked our arses in a few rounds after drawing both Sweat and Tears (forcible discard of two cards each at the end of her turn) as the starting line-up which never gave us much of a chance to get going.

Hey, on the plus side, at least the chances of having that bad a game are small enough that that exact set-up isn't likely to be happening again any time soon, so you can go back and get revenge for making you look so terrible ;).

I think the Sweat/Tears combo is infinitly worse than Anvil/Truth personally. There are answers to the DR vacuum, but there is nothing you can do about discarding your hand. Seeing them on the first round is truely a table flipper.

I think that would really depend on your cast of heroes and some of their draws.

It wasn't even Dawn that was so annoying, it was the Traffic Pileup / Paparrazi draw from Megalopolis (compounded by the fact that, thanks to Dawn, nobody had any cards to discard to get rid of Paparrazi). Although Dawn is capable of pulling out the instashutdowns all by herself, too (Opening turn Sweat + Tears + Blinding Blast against, say, Zero, Tachyon, Wraith, and Legacy = congratulations, there is literally no way for you to win the game unless the environment manages to take her out all by itself).

We played her again right after (NOT in Megalopolis), and Zero started with both modules and an Aperture on his first three turns, while Visionary had TtE in her opening hand and drew a first-round Brain Burn. So we pretty much facerolled her.

Envisioner wrote:

I don't think the mask's power is to simply control birds and get them to do your bidding and terrorize the city... I think the power just presented itself in that manner because of some aspect of Lillian's personality... I think once she is able to figure it out and realize the true power if the mask will cease to be a lame emo girl and be one of the greatest villains of all. 

Or at least I hope so 'cause I hate fighting the birds...

Isn't her being a emo girl what drives her to be a villain? If she quits that, wouldn't that mean she has a very good chance of becoming a hero?

I love those fights thematically, there is always room in any comic saga where the Villain just annihilates the heroes, those cards gone at set-up probably meant you walked into a trap, and while you fought your hardest, Dawn was far too powerful with the jump she got on you.

So you surrendered instead of going last-man standing on her, no shame there.  It's time for some of their friends to infiltrate the compound and wreak a little payback.

Good hunting.

I can enjoy being on the receiving end of a well-deserved beatdown as much as the next guy. Lord knows I probably deserve a few more just to even the score (the first time I encountered Self Destruct Sequence basically went like this: 1) Read card. 2) "Kind of annoying..." 3) Look at Haka's hand. 4) Read Ground Pound. 5) Laugh maniacally.) With that said, some cards negatively impact my fun whether I'm winning or losing. On a meta level, Sentinels is all about the choices we make and the actions we prioritize in our quest to outrace the game mechanics. On a thematic level, Sentinels is all about getting an opportunity to be larger than life, wielding superhuman power. Anything that prevents us from making choices or wielding power is a nuisance. One or two nuisance cards isn't a big deal, and in fact makes for a more interesting game as we struggle to overcome our handicaps. Three or four nuisance cards, and Sentinels basically devolves into a very pretty, colorful version of the card game War. It's not that I'm losing, or even that all of my efforts are futile, it's that I'm unable to make an effort at all. I basically have to just sit around and wait for a deus ex machina.

Thankfully, games like that one are an aberration. And perhaps that will be the last time I take on a villian who can force discards in an environment like Megalopolis where nearly half the deck (7/15 cards) depends on the players having spare cards to discard.

Hmm, how would Ground Pound have any effect on the Self-Destruct Sequence? All it does is stop things dealing damage - it doesn't stop an insta-lose condition like the Self-Destruct, Terra-Lunar Impulsion Beam, or Lost in the Past...

Edit - Oh wait...if the Sequence was in play first...you mean the "skip turn to add to the countdown pile before you get to the bit where you have to destroy Ground Pound so it can stay out forever"? Okay yeah, never mind then ;).

Actually IIRC, the official meta-plot of Sentinels includes "Sunrise", in which the Citizens of the Sun attack Megalopolis.  So game events like this might well be canonical.

So I am testing an Ambuscade Promo from BGG.  The only relevant effect is that at the start of the turn it plays the top card of the environment deck and starts with all traps face up in the deck.

We are playing in Insula Primalis.

Ambuscade puts a pterodactyl in play, puts a sonic mine in play, AZ plays cold snap.

So I of course at the end of round 1 I pass on destroying the mine, in favor of the Pterodactyl, forgetting AZ had put out Cold Snap.

Environment turn:  Obsidian Field.

Start of Villain turn:  Obsidian Field.

Ambuscade then plays Armed and Dangerous, revealing three cards to find Sonic Mine.  Under the sonic mine are two traps, one of each.

So that is 5 to everyone, 11 to Haka.  Sonic Mine is played, and we play the top card of the deck which is charged attacks.

I'm all, OK, we have ongoing destruction, we'll leave the traps out and. . . OMG AZ COLD SNAP!!

Yeah.

Sonic Mine for 4 to each

Charged Attacks for 5 to each

Sonic Mine for 4 to each

Charged Attacks for 5 to each.

23 to all of us, 29 to Haka before a hero could play a card.

It didn't last long after that.

Introduced the game to some new folks.  Breezed through Ambuscade, then Apostate (lucky Environment card draws did most of the work).  These folks said they wanted a challenge so I brought out Iron Legacy.  We won in three turns.  Fanatic opened with End of Days, clearing most of Iron Legacy's start cards.  By turn three most of the heroes were down to single digit health but Fanatic drew into Wrathful Retribution, dealing 25 damage and the rest of us were able to squeeze in the last few points of damage.  I assured them that they got lucky card draws and the game can be much harder.  I think they believed me 

Fanatic and timely lucky draws trumps almost anything.

She is amazing.

Try the Chairman in Rook City - he's pretty tough even when he's not in his favourite environment :P. If you're playing with five heroes, try someone like the Dreamer or Miss Information (not too tricky when H is three, but with more heroes they are significantly tougher, I believe). If you only have three heroes, try La Capitan. Omg she beats us so often :P.

Plague Rat is also brutal with H=3, as long as there isn't a "damage? lol fail" hero in the party and you're not playing on Wagner Mars Base (which does make him even deadlier with Villainous Weaponry, but also entirely punks him with Meteor Storm).  In a five-hero game, he's unlikely to ever flip, but with just 3 he can utterly faceroll you before you have any time to get set up, particularly if you play low-HP heroes without a "meat shield" (Legacy or Scholar) in the party.

Agree (on the stuff about H=3). But having Chrono Ranger in the party helps even it out somewhat - I don't think I've ever lost again versus Rat when I was playing as Jim >:).

Chrono or Fanatic are a great way to counter the Rat, especially on Advanced.

When there was the >G day at Leisure Games in London last October, we had a game against Rat on Advanced (players were myself, my partner, PWatson, Christopher...and someone else I can't remember...possibly Matchstickman?) in which I played Chrono Ranger. I think I got Infected almost immediately and was down to 1hp by the end of round...two, I think? But I managed to survive and was dealing Rat at least 10hp damage on my turn, probably more - everyone else helped to chip away at him whilst keeping me alive (since my damage was far outstripping theirs, for obvious reasons - yay for the Compounded Bow :D) and I actually survived the following round or two in which we turned Rat into a fine paste all over the floor :D.

Omni-10 with his Ablative Coating and RPS is good against Rat too, especially if you can get out both Innervation Rays to counteract some of the damage you'll be taking. Once you're Infected, you basically get to plink Rat for free at the start of your turn even with no components out >:).

I expect Legacy with his Lead from the Front/double Next Evolution combo out would pretty much shut Rat down, apart from Infection damage. But if you had someone to destroy the Infection cards soon after they came out, that wouldn't be a problem either :D.

I had a game with Advanced Plague Rat vs Visionary, Legacy, and someone else. Legacy got out LFtF/NE early and Visionary put a Twist the Ether on Rat at about the same time. The rest of the game was just building up to smack down Plague Rat as gloriously as possible, since he was completely incapable of dealing damage and doesn't destroy ongoings or equipment.

Playing Twist on Rat when Flesh of the Sun God is out is a good one too ;).

Last night I bought the Rook City expansion pack, and we were playing it blind with four friends; that is, we didn’t have time to look at decks before playing them, so we had no idea what Spite could do until he did it. He was beating the everloving Christ out of us, because the first card he got out was the drug card that makes the players remove (H-2) ongoing and/or equipment cards from play. Since our team was Tempest, Omnitron-X, the Wraith, Mr. Fixer, and Absolute Zero, we all had to sacrifice a lot just to get Wraith and Zero playable, and he was inflicting so much damage that he was vampired back up to full HP at the end of his every turn.

The very last card in his deck is his final drug card, so he finally, finally flips. All of us are in the low teens for HP and he’s still at full health, but at least he’s not regenerating from every blow he lands. Everyone is afraid to hurt him because all their damage effects rely on powers, and he’s going to counter each power.

I’m playing Mr. Fixer and I get the grease gun card; you know, the equipment card that leaves Mr. Fixer unable to use powers or draw cards, but prevents non-heroes from doing damage and is destroyed at the beginning of his turn. I play it, and his drug cards have me returning the grease gun to my hand at the end of his turn so I can just play it again to screw him out of being able to inflict damage.

He’s still at eighty HP, but we all decide to end the game there because he’s functionally incapable of inflicting damage on us any more, and the only thing left to do is to just wait and see how long it takes us to chip him down to zero. Victory was assured, but only at a snail’s pace.

Winning badly is worse than losing well, I think.

Actually, it returns them at the BEGINNING of his turn, so he can still deal damage. Sorry bro, but you lost that one.

Well, AZ could still play Sub-Zero Atmosphere to make Spite's base damage happen before Grease Gun, and if Fixer is going first…

I'm also kinda amazed that you managed to get to the end of his deck before he flipped.  Even with Mynd-phyre out, a couple of Lab Raids is all it takes.

Played three games in a row last week, making up for the drought of non-solo IRL games I've had lately.  However the middle one was pretty pathetic - Haka, Argent, Tempest, O-X and Absolute Zero vs. Gloomweaver (advanced, not that it matters) on Wagner Mars Base.  Argent got Supertonic on turn 1, gave Omnix a power before it had been his turn, and he Timeshifted an EDU with the other one in his hand, so he chained them before his play phase.  He then proceeded to get out almost all the Components in his deck along with a Bio-Engineering Beam, letting us all but ignore the Environment, and after about six turns the rest of us had battered Gloomweaver down to like 18, letting O-X go both Self-Sabotage and Singularity (for three or four non-Component equipments).  I did my part as AZ by convincing Tempest to turn his Localized Hurricane into Fire and hit me with half of it, letting me Transduce and Coolant Blast an additional 6 damage at the cost of 3 of my HP - it was even better when I had Frost-Bound Drain or Hoarfire (got 11 damage out of the latter, not having Focused Apertures).  It was pretty much the worst landslide I've ever seen; luckily, most of the same players and a couple new ones were willing to play another game against Skinwalker Gloomy, which proved to be reasonably challenging (although damn does he self-damage a lot with H = 5).

That's pretty much standard for Spite; even without his Advanced text, it's extremely difficult to outrace his lifegain, so the game is pretty much always about waiting for him to flip so you can actually kill him.  Once he does flip, he's completely predictable forever, so it's a pretty pathetic game.  Agent of Gloom is definitely more interesting.

The very last card in his deck is his final drug card, so he finally, finally flips.

I'm somewhat sure you must have done something wrong.  Lab Raid always fetches at least one Drug, so I don't think it's possible to hit the end of his deck without having first found all the Drugs.  The only exception might be if Omnitron-X is Timeshifting Spite's deck and puts Lab Raids into the trash so they don't resolve.

Winning badly is worse than losing well, I think.

Agreed completely.

Nah, it's entirely possible for the Lab Raids to drag out the earlier drugs. It's not that likely, but it's also not hugely unlikely.

Wraith versus Spite is good when H=3, because all you need is your Utility Belt and two Stun Bolts and you can completely nerf his damage forever. Actually, I suppose you'd need Smoke Bombs as well, just to avoid the Nemesis bonus once you're the lowest hp. Even better is if you have, say, Legacy with Inspiring Presence or Mr Fixer with Bloody Knuckles - just keep letting Spite put one of those back into hand at the start of his turn and the hero can keep replaying it every time it's their turn - in the case of Legacy, this means everyone keeps getting 1hp back on his turn even without him having Motivational Charge out, while Fixer gets +2 damage dealt without the penatly of getting hit for more…at least, unless the environment is able to deal him any damage, but if Spite has Mind Phyre out then you never have to worry about there being more than one environment card out at once, and even then only the ones that act on being played or at the end of the environment turn will be able to do anything :).

Oh yeah. Whoops! I don’t know why I thought the no-damage effect would persist after the card was gone; just deluding myself into believing whatever it would take to end the game, I guess.

You say "removed," but keep in mind that the cards go back to owners' hands, not out of play.

It's not good, but it's not as bad as losing them to the trash.

Had a super, super long game against Spite earlier - Knyfe, Naturalist, and the Sentinels (in that order) in Insula Primalis. First drug was the "increase damage and put a card back to hand at start of his turn" one, followed by the "take toxic damage and discard your top five when you use a power" one in the end phase of the same turn. And then a Lab Raid a couple of turns later nuked the two environment cards that were out (volcano and a raptor pack, I think) to put out the final three drugs (the soak one, Demon's Kiss, and Mind Phyre in that order). As he'd been healing so much, the nuke damage Spite dealt himself on flipping took him down to about 68hp (may have been 69). Around this time (perhaps a round or two later), both Knyfe and the Sentinels went down all in the same turn from Spite's many plinks of damage. This left me, playing a very tanky Naturalist, basically alternating between putting out ongoings (so as not to lose my more important cards to the "return to hand" drug) and plinking him with one-shots (most of which would deal two damage but of course, one per turn means he was only taking one point due to his once-a-turn soak drug). Occasionally I would take +2hp from the Sentinels but generally would play a card off both them and Knyfe. After some time I realised "omg, if I play this other copy of (the card where you prevent single-hp attacks and heal 1hp at the start of your turn while in Rhino form), then I get back 2hp every turn because it's not Limited, why the hell didn't I notice that sooner?". I didn't want to use powers for ages because he'd deal me two damage from the toxic thing and I had about 5hp left. Plenty of turns of slow healing later and I managed to claw my way up to 27hp (the only damage I'd been taking was from a couple of T-Rexes, and from two hits a turn from Spite any time an Obsidian Field entered play, since Mind Phyre was the last drug in the line, dammit). At this point, I think I'd slowly plinked Spite down to around 50hp and decided "sod it", putting out the Crocodile Form that was in my hand. Then I spent the rest of the game munching on him and a few rounds later, on round 28(?!?!) he finally died. Ha :P.

That sounds more awesome than lame to me, though still not extremely so.

Stands to reason that the Sentinels would suffer against Spite.  I'll have to try that if/when I ever get Vengeance.

I suppose it shows their durability in the fact that despite Spite dealing out regular damage to everyone, all the Sentinels (whose starting hp ranges between 11-14 per individual) went down in exactly the same turn as Knyfe, who starts with a nice high 30hp.

I know. Still, we had Absolute Zero, Wraith, Mr. Fixer, and Omnitron-X in the party; all people who are basically impotent without equipment and/or ongoing effects in play. As Mr. Fixer, I was perhaps best off, because at least my base power allowed me to poke someone.

It's good having Mr Fixer against Spite actually, because as long as the environment doesn't hit you on its turn, you can keep playing Bloody Knuckles and punch Spite for extra damage, have him put it back into your hand before hitting you (so no +2 damage dealt to you), then play it again on your turn :D. This also means you can actually deal damage to Spite with your base power without needing to use a damaging one-shot or a damage-boosting tool or style (or Tiger Claw) to be able to deal him damage once he has his soak-damage-from-the-first-hit-every-turn card out.

Wraith does well at double-Stun-Bolting him once she gets set up with those and a Utility Belt, causing him to do sod all damage to everyone else (and none to Wraith either if she has Smoke Bombs out and the lowest hp), plus she's capable of getting set up quite nicely if she can get hold of even one copy of Impromptu Invention. Omni-10, similarly, can keep Timeshifting himself to get as many components out as he can, with the EDUs accelerating his set-up significantly. Temporal Shielding is probably the best plating to have out since Demon's Kiss deals infernal damage while Mind Phyre is psychic. The get-hit-and-discard-when-you-use-a-power is toxic, but if you're pretty well set up by then you can get away with not using any powers and still kick his arse. Having a Plasma Cannon out before the Gaussian Coil thingy means you get to burn through his soak and cause him to waste it on your irreducible damage before the non-irreducible lightning damage hits. Even if you keep using powers after the toxic damage drug comes out, with two Innervation Rays you can heal back the damage (or most of it, once Spite has the damage-boosting drug out) every turn. Also, now I think of it, Omni-10 is probably a good candidate to lose a card back to hand from the drug that does that, because he can just replay it via an EDU in his Start phase and still play something else in his Play phase :).

It is annoying, though, if Spite gets out the more annoying drugs first - we tend to find the toxic-damage-and-discard one is the worst, unless we can nerf his damage enough (which usually happens when I'm playing Wraith ;)) to make it less punishing to use powers - the discard isn't so bad unless you're trying to organise your deck a certain way to get hold of cards (like Visionary or Adept putting certain cards to the top of their decks), and Tachyon probably has an advantage in it, as long as she doesn't burn right through her deck to the reshuffle point before having a chance to do a multi-Lightspeed Barrage whammy.

The Drug in question is one of those cards that really depends on when it comes out in the drug array. If it comes out late in the game, hopefully folks like Wraith and Omni-X have got their necessary cards in play. They can then each put one back in their hand, play it on their turn, and just do what they would have anyway.

Yeah, you can't play something new to further your strategy, but at least you can keep your initial strategy(s) going.

If it comes out first, though, then you're in trouble…

Unless you're Tachyon, who laughs at Spite in that scenario.

Yes and no. Because then she has almost nothing to remove, which means she can't help anyone to keep their stuff out.

If she can get out the HUD Goggles, she's good.

If H=3 you only have to put one card back anyway, so it doesn't have to be the same person every time if that person has stuff they'd like to play other than that one card every time it's their turn. As I mentioned previously though, with something like Inspiring Presence it can be a very useful thing to have it repeatedly being played (even if Legacy is last in turn order since you'll still keep getting hp back even if you're able to benefit from the damage buff). Also, if you're a character who tends to put out multiple cards anyway (eg Tachyon, Omni-10, Jim), it probably doesn't matter so much if just one of them has to go back into your hand because you can play that and more on your own turn anyway :).

Yeah Tachyon with HUD and Pushing the limits gets 2 cards to play and draw, and can take back Limits and put it in play every turn for the drug and not ever pay for it.

that's the laughing at Spite part with Tachyon.

Actually I think we were talking about different drugs.  I meant the one that says "take damage and discard 5 when you use a power".  Tachyon LOVES to discard 5, and if the damage is an issue she can easily live without her two powers.

Once again, all decks were determined through random dice rolls. Ended up with the Sentinels, the Argent Adept, and Tachyon against Akash’Bhuta in the Tomb of Anubis. I knew going in that was going to suck, but oh my god. The synergy between Akash’Bhuta’s draws and the number of environment targets kept her drawing card after card, and I was only losing a little bit of HP every turn very slowly because I managed to get out the ongoing card that allows a Sentinel to use a power when damaged, so Mainstay could keep giving everyone more and more armor. Nevertheless, after round five, I just couldn’t inflict enough damage on her to take down even a single primeval limb, and her constant draws from the deck kept restoring them all to full HP. At somewhere around round 10, I gave up because she had every primeval limb in play and had destroyed all my ongoing and equipment cards. She still had 163 HP.

Some games are like that, I guess, but lordy-loo do I hate getting skunked.

I don't recall a card that lets the Sentinels use a power when damaged. There's Sentinels Tactics, which lets them use a power when one of them deals damage, though. Is that what you were thinking of?

Sounded  like a pretty nasty set-up anyway…oh well, you can get revenge on her some other time :D.

Oh, tsk, probably. Oh well, wouldn’t have changed the outcome much anyway.

Vengeance style in Realm of Discord.  Using the Converted Apostate from BGG, with Fright Train, Friction and Blade.

First environment turn:  Time Flies (seriously ouch, we got the worst cards from the villains)

Second Environment Turn:  Clausterphobic Delusions  (Yeah, so Apostate had a ton of relics in play, so lowest HP target was Periapt of Woe, Runes of Melediction were in play.  So the only target not immune was at -4 damage taken.)

Third environment turn was awesome:  Ghostly images, we did Adept first, and he played Vernal Sonata, letting everyone put a one-shot on top before Ghostly hit them, that was awesome.  But still too little when that one nemesis is increasing your damage taken by one, and you can't damage anything but a -4 taken relic.

We had Adept, Ra, Fixer and Bunker, so until adept got his destruction we were stuck with Clausterphobic, which lasted till round 6.

We had destroyed periapt, but Malediction and corrupted Effigy were giving us fits.  We ended up living long enough to take out Friction, but it was a terrible game.  I forgot the Apostate/Clausterphobic shenanigans, but honestly, getting a perfect storm like that isn't likely, esp. going three rounds without being able to destroy a distortion.

What does BGG stand for?

Boardgamegeek.com. You'll find more boardgaming information on there than you could ever imagine existed. Once you learn where everything is, that is. 

IF you learn where everything is... 

This is the link you want.  The Variants page is full of custom heroes and Villains, as well as fan-made alternate character cards for existing decks.

They even have files for printing out the official promo cards you don't have.

QFT. 

Boardgamegeek.com. You’ll find more boardgaming information on there than you could ever imagine existed.[/quote]
Ah, thank you. I thought it was some expansion or variant set or something I do not yet own.

Well, it has an expansion you don't own along with lots of other variants (link to variants forum).

Just had a game yesterday and it was Baron Blade VS Tempest, Bunker and Fanatic. Baron Blade almost killed Tempest (there were 2 backlash fields) and whittled bunker to single digit. On the final turn Tempest had Electrical Storm and Grievious Hailstorm deal 7 damage (with Gene-Bound Shackles), Bunker managed to use omnicannon and flak cannon to deal 11 damage (3 cards + turret mode) and Fanatic used Sacrosanct Martyr to deal 5 damage but Baron Blade managed to hold onto his final healthpoint! Only to be taken out by... police backup. 

Heh.  Not a good day for superhero PR.....

Sing it, sister.

( PS I had to look up what QFT means. I think I'll be using that.)

QFT is good, but I prefer QED.