Agent of Gloom Spite Musings

After playing against GloomSpite several times, I've discovered some interesting things but also have some questions.

Victims seem to be a trap, oddly enough.  Unless he plays victims and only victims, it's not really worth it to even attempt to flip him.  Each time he plays a non-victim card, it gets harder and harder to flip him before he's got his full loadout.  But once he DOES have a full loadout, flipping him only makes him hit harder.  Collateral Damage is the worst because it doesn't play a new victim like On the Prowl does, plus he's likely to kill a second victim with his end-of-turn attack.  Deck Manipulation is key for this route, and since he only ever plays one card a turn deck manipulation is quite easy.  Otherwise, it's best just to leave the victims to their fates.

That said, his backside is so horrible that I find it simpler to just fight him on his frontside.  He deals substantially less damage, he hits the highest target instead of the lowest, and when he kills a victim all he does is heal himself.  One Collateral Damage chain on his backside is all it takes to turn the tables against the heroes.  It seems best to eject everyone but Thiago from the safehouse as soon as possible to get his damage under control.  Not only does this prevent chaining Collateral Damage, you get extra card plays that can really help against PL531.  We only put Innocent Bystanders into the safehouse on his backside, and only so we can immediately eject them again.

Another thing that's interesting is how differently he plays with different numbers of heroes.  Unless H=5, it's not normally possible to actually turn any of his drugs facedown.  Even if H=5, you need at least one Good Samaritan (or Omnitron-X's Timeshift), and EVERY card Spite plays must be a victim.  Otherwise he'll flip before he turns anything facedown.  The only way to turn drugs facedown with H=4 is if Spite plays a victim on the first villain turn, Timeshift plays a victim on O-X's first turn, and you can save all three of them before the second villain turn.  If you can miraculously get ahead of the drugs, Spite becomes a total pushover (at least until Forced Entry).  You'll be fighting his weak frontside with all the benefits of fewer drugs.  With H=3, though, it's much much easier to flip him before he gets all his drugs out, and when you do flip him, the first turn is a lot less terrible since he'll have at most a +4 damage boost.

Because of all these reasons, we generally don't even bother saving victims at all unless we start with two victims, or we start with a Good Samaritan and have deck manipulation in hand.  We just let Spite get his drugs out one at a time, and we burn him down as fast as we can without flipping him.  Since he doesn't heal himself except when he kills a victim, he goes down MUCH faster than regular Spite.  Keeping everyone outside has the added bonus of making Thiago stick around a lot longer than with normal Spite.  GloomSpite only plays one card a turn, so it's usually a lot easier to reliably keep him alive.  He's often spent the first half of the game hanging out in the victim entourage and the second half alone in the safehouse.

I do have some questions.  Are we the players supposed to know which of the facedown drugs are which at the start of the game?  The setup instructions don't say anything about mixing or randomizing the drugs.  Do you prefer to pick a particular drug order, or do you shuffle them and let fate decide?

Additionally, there seem to be some potential quandaries regarding the victims.  Unlike normal Spite, there's often little mechanical reason to actually save the victims.  In many cases, saving a victim will make it much more difficult to actually defeat GloomSpite.  Does this bother anyone from a moral or design standpoint?  With regular Spite our group often agonizes over whether to save a particular victim and whether we can actually keep them safe from Forced Entry.  With GloomSpite we only save them if there's a clear benefit to be gained.  We'll often even personally eject them from the safehouse onto the streets for our own benefit.  Does this make US villains as well?

This is a really neat analysis. And heroes who play radically different games based on the hero count are my favorites.  This list includes Citizen Dawn, Miss Information, The Dreamer, The Ennead, Plague Rat, Iron Legacy, and arguably Apostate, Kismet, and Advanced Baron Blade, off the top of my head.  The first four are all among my six most beloved villains...of the ones that don't scale radically with H, the only one that I have a really strong fondness for (unless you count my love-to-hate grudge against Omnitron) is Akash'bhuta, who plays more or less the same regardless of player count, but who I just think is cool.

And I also await the official verdict on whether the players choose an order for the drugs, or if they're essentially shuffled as a separate deck, or just put out in the order they happened to be in the pre-shuffled deck (the latter would make their order unchosen, but known, so the heroes couldn't put the least harmful drugs first, but they could plan around the knowledge of what's coming).  All three options probably have merit; for my first game, I intentionally chose the relatively weak ordering (Mind-Phyre to turn off the Environment, then Demon's Kiss, then Compound Xi, then Upsilon, and only then the godawful Omicron), and he still made for a credible threat.  I'll probably try it other ways as well, to see which I consider best.

As to your shameful mistreatment of the safehouse victims...just think of it as the heroes baiting a trap for Spite, or recruiting the people they've saved as agents in their dragnet (Alec Baldwin style).  That's if you're ejecting them to play a card...if you just don't bother trying to save them in the first place, you can simply assume that the heroes didn't know they were in danger.  After all, they weren't really expecting Spite to rise from his grave.

My group honestly never feels the Victim cards are worth it.  Forced Entry undermines our efforts too much for us to care.  It doesn't matter if you have three, four, or five heroes.  You could have as few as none to every single Victim in the Safe House.  Completely irrelevant.  All of them are vulnerable and one of them is going to be destroyed.  And it's even more insulting when a Good Samaritan you're attempting to save flips a Forced Entry, which has happend to my group more times than we can remember.

I get that some people really love Spite, but he really isn't a villain for me or my players.  This talk of "this version really encourages you to save the Victims" or "you actually want to save them this time" is quite baffling to me.  As far as I'm concerned, unless you have enough deck manipulation to prevent Forced Entry from making all of your efforts meaningless, saving the Victims is in fact the least safe thing to do.

Especially for the Victims.

Spite, in my experience, is one of those villains where he either goes down fast or just hangs on while widdling your team down to nothing.  One round with Ex-Pat, DW Fixer, Legacy, and Chrono Ranger, I absolutely demolished him in a matter of 4, maybe 5 turns.  Other times, I've certainly spent 45 minutes trying to chip away at him, only to get an unlucky, early Drug combo that just won't let me catch up.  This has given me a bit of reluctance when choosing Spite as a villain; I know it's either going to be easy or aggravating, but rarely "fun".

Personally, I've taken much more liking to AoG Spite because I feel the match is a little more balanced out.  As you've stated, Victims actually feel like they matter and saving them is more essential than just biding your time until he flips.  I've still only run a few rounds against AoG Spite, but so far I'd say it's a much needed improvement to an otherwise "yawn" enducing boss battle.

Yes, this is why I have pretty much identified him as the overall least satisfying villain in the game, as noted on the Lamest Games thread and elsewhere.  Other villains can go awry time to time, but he strikes me as generally the most likely to provide a poor experience.

I can't really say anything about gloom spite 'cause I haven't played him yet, still trying out the basic villains before I start getting into the promos, I got the IR/RC set recently and haven't had time to play all the villains but spite was one I did play and he seemed more of a 3 than a 2, but I did get PL531 compound upsilon almost right away soo....