Vengeance: mega-expansion, or micro-expansion?

We've been considering Vengeance to be a mega-expansion, in that we're getting five new heroes and five new villains, plus a new way to play the game.  However, it occurs to me that since the villains can't be played separately, we're really only getting one new villain, the Vengeful Five.  Which villains make up the Vengeful Five will change from game to game, but if your usual gaming group is four people, you're going to see four of the five villains every game.  That's sort of less replayability than we get with a usual expansion.

Discuss.

One additional thought - when we first saw the pic of Baron Blade with his cronies arrayed behind him, we all oooohed about all the villains in the background.  I specifically remember people pointing out the asian villain who we figure might be the guy who turns into the golden dragon on Mr. Fixer's "Overdrive"card.  For Vengeance, none of those background villains are in evidence.  HOWEVER, if more villain mini-decks were made available (Overdrive Guy, Granite Oni, Toy Master guy from Dreamer's deck, etc.), perhaps as one-off purchases from the site, I'd be a seriously happy camper.  At that point, the possible number of Vengeful Five combinations explodes, and Vengeance becomes in my mind a seriously Mega expansion.

The issue what to call it came up a lot in the PT forum. One of the issues was what you mentioned. The simply answer, this is a different expansion with different rules. That’s it.

I must agree that it would be ideal to have access to more than five "Vengeful Five" decks.

What is really nice about the setup is that it is inherently modular in order for it to work with lower and higher [H] values. I am not sure >G will ever add more Villains to the V5 format, but it certainly is left open as an option.

That's a great idea - more "villain groups" to be played in the same way as the V5. I'd love that!

I love pretty much everything about this thread :)

I would expect some sort of addition to the playstyle.

There have got to be all kinds of minor Villains that would be willing to team up with others to try to take down the good guys.

Would allow for much fun, and all sorts of new villain teams.

Nah, minor villains would never team up with with the big boys.

Right?

I still think that it ought to be possible to play all of the Vengeance villains (except possibly Six-Pack Blade) as a single, normal villain.  It makes sense for the Ennead to always travel in a group, since they share an origin, but the VF includes a Soviet idealist, a still semi-patriotic American mercenary, a jewel thief and a frustrated scientist; aside from each being pissed at a particular FV member (and that's weak in Proletariat's case, plus he's the one I'd most expect to be able to succeed without any help, for obvious reasons), they don't really have terribly strong reasons to want to work together.  And we've never previously seen them together except on Scum and Villainy, where Friction and Proletariat don't seem especially more chummy than Char and "Burn-Victim".  Coolant Blast and Lead From the Front just show Proletariat, and more significantly, Fright Train not only shows up alone on Flak Cannon, but is very observably present on Mars in Maintenance Level, while none of the rest of the FV appear there (Vengeance Blade has been seen in the Realm of Discord and we have the other two in Rook City, but that's all we know location-wise for now).  So if Bunker and Fright Train were duking it out on Mars, were Vengeance Blade and Ermine also there, but we never saw them?  If not, why not?  I think it makes more sense to imagine that it was just FT rampaging his way through the base, driving Bunker into hiding while (for example) Visionary and Absolute Zero monitored the situation from afar and tried to help.

tldr - I think you should be able to fight anywhere from 1 to 5 vengeance villains and have it be a workable game.

On the rest of the subject in general, I do think that there will be more than adequate replayability provided by the extra Environments and Heroes; more Villains are the least needed overall.  We're going from 216 villain/environment pairs (not counting the distinction between regular and advanced games, or promo villains) to 264, while the number of possible 3-hero teams goes from a bit under 5000 to well over 10,000.  The change is somewhat disproportionate, but those extra 48 MDP, Freedom Tower, and VF games are nothing to sneeze at.  I'd say "mega-expansion" certainly remains valid.

I'm sure someone will work out single V5 villain houserules. I'd definitely be interested in that too. 

Challenge accepted!  Unfortunately I'm not a pre-order-er(-er-ererer), so someone else might beat me to it.  And experience has taught me that I will always disparage others' houserules as being inadequate, and try unsuccessfully to come up with something more satisfactory to me, and end up just stuck with the rules as written (this is why I'm still battling ordinary Ambuscade despite knowing he sucks; Spiff's version doesn't do it for me, and I don't know what would).  Still, when I get that far, I plan to try it.

Cool, I plan to look at it myself too. It might be as easy as increasing their HP, but it's impossible to know until we can test it. 

Well... I don't think this is TOO spoilery, but since the AMOUNT of villains is modular around H, the cards themselves don't actually use the H modifier. They mostly have static numbers. So, for instance, Fright Train will play a card that makes him do 3 damage; it's always 3. Not H. Otherwise it would get EXPONENTIALLY harder with 5 of them. 5 of them hitting for 5 at a time is much worse than 3 hitting for 3 at a time.

... My point being, that you'd have to account for scaling, as well. Since they scale by adding teammates, rather than hitting harder.

I want to see a villain death match between the V4 (ditch Blade) and Iron Legacy, since they do hate him so very much.

Gonna definitely need house rules for that. They are certainly not designed to work that way. 

Well, if you go with H=4, then technically you have 5 different combinations of the V5.  If you think of those as each being 1 new villain, you're actually getting 5 new villains, though admittedly, not 5 completely unique ones.  Granted, it's only one at H=5, but it's way more at H=3.  Thus, I think that with 5 heroes, it's closer to a mega expansion than a micro, but I admit there's room for both interpretations.  I personally care way more about more heroes than more villains, so I lean towards mega.

Plus the V5 are significantly more varied and dynamic than they appear at first glance. Don't be too quick to dismiss it. Or Anything, for that matter.

Obviously not a Playtester, but from what I understand concerning the V5 mechanics, I don't see a reason (and perhaps someone who has played the game and has a reason could prove me wrong!) why a "mini-expansion" for Vengeance can't be released at some point down the line.  As others have mentioned, there are still a few mini-bosses/smalltime villains present that may not be prime-time enough to appear as a big villain, but could very well be a part of a team.

Plus, it'd be pretty safe to assume that >G didn't take all this time to add a completely new way to play the game only to never expand upon it with more options.  It'd be cool to see the next mini-expansion offer a smaller villain team or the next "normal" expansion contain 2 heroes, 2 environments, 2 villains, and a handful of "minor villains" that can create more combinations for Vengeance.

What would be really cool is if we could create mini-decks for existing Villains and plug them into the Vengeance format.

Plauge Rat for example. Annex a few Plauge cards and some oneshots, house rule up a character card, then plug and play

I think someone may have already done that in the playtester forums. I think it went untested however.

Might take a bit to get used to the level of interaction and such, but it should be doable.

Ambuscade could make a great smaller deck, and La Capitan might take interest in forming a new crew  The decks are 20 cards right?  Just cutting 5 cards might be tough to balance.  Would need to ditch (H) and swarming mechanics.  Don't know how targets work (or don't).

Would any Playtester care to wager a guess at where you would set (H) for conversion, since V5 don't use (H)?  I would assume (H)=3 would give the best balance, but I could be wrong there.

It would take some testing to get something right, but just look at what EmoSpite did with Lab Raids. There is no chasm too deep which creativity can not cross.

Ambuscade. Glad you brought him up. Now, I can't say exactly where I got this notion, but I'v had this little tingly feeling for a little bit now that Ambuscade might do something along the lines of what you are suggesting. There might be crumbs of evidence to support such a feeling, but if they even exist in the first place, I'm sure I won't be the only one to pick up on it eventually.

Nor were you the first.

As a playtester, I'd rather see full villain decks made out of one or more of the V5 villains.

Not sure if I can discuss this yet or not, but it is so close to the launch that I will go ahead and do so. If any big wigs have an issue with it, feel free to delete this.

How I converted it was having H=2, with H-2=1. However, it is completely untesting, meaning it could very well be better to have H=3. With their HP, I went with roughly a third of what their current HP is.

Personally, I kind of feel like it might be Spite, like maybe this connects to why we've seen him in a costume on the back of Freedom Six Wraith.  He certainly could stand to have a revised deck.  If we want the deck down by 5 cards, well, leaving out the Drugs would certainly work…

Yeah, definitely this.