La Capitan

Is there any non-hero specific way to deal with this chick? she always seems to grow way to fast for us to do anything about anything. by the time our turns roll around she has play like three cards, destroyed all our equipment/ongong stuff, delt us a lot of damage and we don't have the power to kill anything.

I say non-hero specific because i've looked around these forums and besides targeting the ship first, which we can never kill fast enough, the only thing i've found is to play certain characters and i/we feel that that kind of ruins what part of the game is about. we want to play with the characters we like and have a chance rather that have to play a certain way if you want to win. winning isn't everything, but lossing all the time just kind of makes you want to stop playing because that makes it feel like the game doesn't feel like it functions properly. sorry i went on a bit of a tangent there.

How many players are usually in your games? Which heros do you tend to play against her? If you can provide a little more specifics it would be easier to help.

Even with just 3 random heros, you should be able to destroy the ship by at least the 2nd round. The real issue is the Ship coming back from the trash haha. Ultimately, Capitain is the Queen of Swingy. Some games she will just fall over. Some she will just trounce you. Thats honestly how she goes.

But some things:

Keep low HP enviro targets out and handy.

Some crew members you can leave alone and focus on Capitain. Let the viking chew on enviro targets for instance. Trueshot is always last. The acrobat harlet can burn in the pitts of hades.

Ongoing Destruction is nessesary in case of Maria's Revenge. Hard to win while thats on the board.

You will lose cards. Heavy Setup heros are going to struggle and thats just how it is.

Heros that deal multiple instances of damage per turn are fantastic for making her flip side fast.

Kill the ship. Hell or high water, whatever you must sacrifice, it just has to die by like round 2. Gotta figure out how to make that happen.

Her early game is nasty. After about 4-5 rounds, assuming the ship is in the trash, her difficulty goes down as you deal with her crew, as hopefully she will have eaten and discarded most of her deck searching for crew members. 

I've been pummeled by La Capitan more times than I care to count, but I have managed a victory against her once.

She seems to me to be the very definition of 'luck of the draw'. Her crew can be utterly debilitating and her one shots are nasty, but if you get the right cards at the right times (with whatever hero, i only ever play random characters) she can be a fun, if frustrating challenge.

Like all villains, there are some heroes that are just terrible against her. An entire party that relies heavily on a small number of ongoings or equipment, for instance, really doesn't stand a chance against her. Having some heroes who can increase card play really helps, because you can drop some useless ongoings/equipment for her to trash.

So, ignoring hero specific strategies, you want to drop "bait" ongoings/equipment for her to steal. If you can stack her deck, it really helps. If you can move cards from the trash into her deck, that really helps. If you can tank, tank as much as you can. Leave environment targets alive if they attack the lowest. Don't bring pure melee heroes if you can help it because the acrobat kills. Area of Effect damage is your friend - save it for when there are six crew out.

I just played La Capitan for the first time two days ago, and we won, but it was really close for a while. I was running two tanks (Haka and the Scholar), and my wife was running constant damage (Chrono Ranger) and support (Tachyon). Her two died pretty fast, because she kept targetting the lowest HP units with her crew. Scholar and Haka went into super tanking mode and then we focused her down partially with Scholar's Grace Under Fire. Haka used his 3 damage to 2 targets power to hit her and either the Viking or the Samurai, and then used Rampage to finish them off. The other ones couldn't hurt Scholar faster than he could heal.

What I learned from that was, kill order is important. Kill the Acrobat first if she's out, then the guy who hits at start of turn based on ongoings, then the Ship, then the Viking, then the Last Breath, then Siegebreaker, then focus on her and let AoE kill Chip and any others.

Cappy likes to come out of the gate swinging; in order to beat her, you need to weather the initial assault and then get her stabilized long enough that you can build up for a killshot.  Avoid the likes of Mr. Fixer and Absolute Zero unless you have other heroes who can compensate for them, like Argent and Omnitron-X.  Tachyon is great since she can shut off damage for the entire crew (except Siege-Breaker) for a round without having to keep a card in play.  Unity might be fun, since nothing ever blows up Golems except with damage (beware of Battle Forged, though), and Bot-Fix can prevent equipment destruction from finding a target on the first or second turn (discuss this plan with your teammates first!).  Otherwise, in general, just figure that your job is to kill the ship, let her flip (so she stops shooting you every turn and instead does piddly healing), plink her down to 1 stolen card, then sit and build up.  If possible, control the villain deck to keep her from getting the ship back.  Once you're ready, unload on her fast; if you're Advanced, you need to plink her once at the start of a round to get rid of her last stolen card, then again for the redirection, and then let your heavy hitters take her apart in a hurry.

She's the exact opposite of Omnitron or Akash'bhuta in a lot of ways.  Both of those are slow, buildup-heavy villains with a ton of HP, whose victory is inexorable in the long run if you can't manage to do a better job of building up than they do.  La Capitan starts built up, and prevents you from building up in the short term, so she's definitely fierce, but the battle will eventually reach a turning point, after which just a handful of cards will pose any real threat.

Fixer is awesome against the Cap.  So much to redirect, and salvage yard is amazing.

As is Bunker.

Expat for extra card plays and tons of equip that Fixer can fish out of the trash.

Adept for the wickedness, he's Capitan Bane.

Visionary is also sick.  Wrest on L'Epieste is unfair, and Brain Burn/Precogniton for burying the boat.

Then heroes like Wraith/Tempest/Tachyon, they are good against anyone.

Nice analysis Edwin. That's pretty much textbook. 

I played Unity, the Naturalist, and Ra against La Capitan last night, and I can confirm that Unity makes the fight kind of hilarious as long as you can get Stealthbot out there to protect your bits. I was about to ragequit after she stole every single frigging one of the Naturalist’s forms before I could even use their powers oh my god go screw yourself lady, though.

Anyway, I’ve rarely had a particular problem with La Capitan. The general strategy is multiple instances of damage per hero turn to ping down her passive immunity when she’s flipped and to punish her while she’s active. If there are multiple targets on the board, then chances are you want something to inflict damage to multiple targets (I’ve never used Scorched Earth as much as I did last night); if you’ve finally got her alone, and you can damage her, then pick whatever will do the most damage; if she’s alone and invulnerable, pick whatever will hit her the most times, but maybe save your big guns (say, if Tachyon has a lot of burst cards in her trash, you might not want to waste Lightspeed Barrage just for the sake of getting a card out from under her).

She has a lot of effects to steal your equipment and ongoing, so put out whatever piece of crap equipment or ongoing to you can to provide a buffer for when she steals, so you’ll have something to sacrifice in order to keep the good stuff out. I take particular pleasure in doing this with cards like Pushing the Limits, which will be destroyed on my next turn anyway. Unless the team is on board with sacrificing their stuff for you, though, I wouldn’t count on being able to build up big combos; I wasn’t even able to get the Staff of Ra and Flame Barrier out at the same time last night because she kept stealing my crap. Hope that you can set up a long-term strategy, but don’t depend on it. Your plays should be about what you can do in the moment.

La Paradoja Magnifica needs to be destroyed as quickly as possible, even to the exclusion of La Capitan herself, but the card I hate most and want to see destroyed above all others is Mable. Nothing wrecks your setup like her, and she needs to go down. Similarly, don’t even bother inflicting damage on Trueshot unless you’re going to focus on her until she’s dead, because her regeneration makes it a waste to do anything to her unless you’re committed to taking her out. It’s probably worth ignoring La Capitan herself for a while to take out Siege-Breaker too, since he’s going to kill someone faster than she is.

she stole every single frigging one of the Naturalist's forms before I could even use their powers oh my god go screw yourself lady

I cannot promise that I did not just laugh maniacally in my office.

La Capitan is one of those villains that makes us go "Oh, gawd..." whenever we roll her - she tends to wipe us pretty well, though we have beaten her a few times. I think she's just harder with only three heroes. Similarly, we often have problems with Kismet, and the other day got obliterated by the Chairman (though we did get him to flip pretty early...but too many things came out after that and we couldn't stay on top of it), though that's probably not too much of a surprise ;). I think the problem we tend to have with these kinds of villains is that they can sometimes get a lot of stuff out very quickly, and then we lack the means to get rid of it all while even more stuff is coming out and damaging us, and all the while we're trying to stop ourselves dying to that, we're not attacking the main villain and thus prolonging things even more...but if we concentrated on the main villain and ignored the other stuff, we'd get killed by it all anyway. So yeah, kind of frustrating sometimes but made up for by the occasions we can totally obliterate them (have had a couple of good games against Kismet since getting the Vengeance heroes - oh dear, Doctor Medico has a Shaky Arm and his damage is reduced, oh how will we cope? ;)). And of course there are easier villains we can just gank anyway as well :).

The Chairman is unbeatable, and anyone who says otherwise is a lying liar who makes Baby Jesus cry with all their lies.

+1

My notes show I beat him at Pike on advanced with Legacy, Scholar, Tempest, and Omnitron-X. But even then, he incapitated Tempest, and it's not like those aren't easy mode heroes.

My rule for fbeating the Chairman:  be set up enough that The Chairman doesn't get to do anything between flipping and dying.

My preferred method for that is Wrathful Retribution.

Okay, in all fairness, I have beaten the Chairman exactly once. Legacy, Omnitron-X, and Haka. It would not have happened if the first round hadn’t been Legacy and Omnitron-X playing their armors and Haka playing Savage Mana, and the second round was Inspiring Presence, two Innervation Rays, and Taiaha. Even then, I’m still pretty sure I only won because I was in Megalopolis, I had flipped the Chairman but inflicted no damage on him, and two Runaway Monorails came out in a row to pound the two of them down.

However, as previously noted, by claiming I have beaten the Chairman, I am a lying liar who makes Baby Jesus cry with my lies. Look, I don’t make the rules, I just live by 'em.

The Chairman is immune to environment damage.  He's a friend to all trains, tyrannosaurs, giant squid, and Egyptian death gods.

I'm glad I wasn't the one who had to break the bad news there…

I can remember managing a victory via the Lead from the Front/Next Evolution combo. And I think another time was via a dead Tempest. But generally things don't go quite so well. We haven't beaten him (or La Capitan) for a long time now :P.

I've beaten Chairman twice, and the second time was due to my forgetting his enviro-immunity, though it's possible we'd have won that one regardless.  It was extremely close, though, so it's also possible we would not.  The other was a freak of luck where he just got steamrolled (by five heroes, that seems to be crucial) before he could do anything.

Oh. Eh. He still would have been one of the highest HP targets on the board, so the trains would have tried to ram him even if they wouldn’t have inflicted HP damage, and they would have wiped out the Operative for me. I had a copy of Omnitron-X’s Defensive Blast on the board, so with the two damage buffs Sentinel had out, I feel pretty confident I could have gone all Aliens on him and nuked the site from orbit.

All this just goes to prove my original point about how only liars say they’ve beaten the Chairman, though.

Hey villains suffer bad card draws just like us players. First time I fought Matriarch, none of her fowl damaged anyone and the resident tank, Scholar, got seven damage dealt to him before we won. Weird, right?

I've beaten the Chairman on Advanced before. I have, of course, also lost to the Chairman on Advanced. Unity is pretty amazing against the Chairman, and Nightmist is strong against Hit Mans.

I actually find the Chairman /easier/ on advanced. Sure he does more damage and takes far less, but he flips far sooner, allowing heroes to wail on him much faster without having to go through as many turns with the thugs/underbosses

I'm sorry, but the Chairman flipping sooner on advanced is not a good thing. Even on normal level, it takes several turns to go through the Underbosses, because you can't leave any of them out. Every experiment of mine in doing so has been a miserable failure. Hitting the Chairman earlier just means getting hit back, and then seeing him heal all the damage because of the Broker and his one shot.

Also, Enforcers become a crippling card lock when he flips, and Hit Man is absolutely devastating if you don't have redirection/immunity, whereas they're annoying but manageable when Chairman's on his front side.

You can if Haka is destroying and burying their mooks under Savage Mana. The Broker, the Deputy, and the Fence become completely irrelevant after you’ve stolen their cards, so you get to just beat up the Contract and the Muscle.

I admit it’s a pretty specific set of circumstances, though.

The real threat of the deck is boosted hitmen.  Other than that he is managable.

Finding a way to deal with the hitman is key.  Lead/evolution/projectile is amazing, you just win.  Superhuman will do good as well, and it is one of the few matches where shielding winds is just amazing.  Synaptic is great, since Tachyon can avoid taking 3 damage from most other sources.  Hairtrigger - Bee bot can stop him, as can reactive/ablative + 1 damage (hairtrigger or a boost)  Ra can flame barrier for 3 pretty easily and Wraith with combat also works (those two can hurt you vs. the damage one-shot if it dials your number, cause Chariman hurts)

My favorite was the most timely fixed point ever making stealth bot indestructible as the chairman played hitman and operative played contract bringing out a 2nd hitman, with damage + (H).  We were all pretty pumped about SB's -50hp.

Alternately close quarters got us killed when Legacy was up front and immune to projectile.  That really sucked.

They are called Hired Guns, not Hitmen ;).

Our main problem against the Chairman is just that we have so much trouble getting rid of all the targets - we just get outnumbered and overwhelmed by everything. And even if we manage to kill some underbosses, well, there comes a Prison Break soon afterwards. Dammit :P.

It'd be interesting to try The Sentinels vs. The Chairman (I wonder if Rook City is in the Southwest?).  On the downside, a Contract and two Hitmen would just about kill your entire team, but if you can get off a well-timed Blackout, you could wipe out the entire enemy army.  And the thought of Flinging Chairman Pike into Darkness is just spectacular.

Katsue. It was entirely my opinion. I find damage mitagation and dealing with more damage easier to handle than hordes of minions. Target Priority is a pain in my patooe, so to me, advanced chairman flipping and opening himself up sooner for the big hits (wrathful comes to mind) make the game easier for me. Your milleage may vary.

Oh wow, Blackout versus the Chairman and his army of death...gotta try that some time :D.

Better still, make Chairman Pike damage all villain targets including himself, and then he'll retaliate against himself.

Blackout is best used on a Thug of some sort, so they'll be doing 3-7 damage to everyone instead of just 2, and then the Chairman's retaliation can kill them once you're finished.  You'll likely have to eat a bunch of revenge damage from the Operative, but it'd be SO WORTH IT.

Then I suppose you'd try and get someone like the Scholar or the Naturalist be in a position to tank all the Operative's damage so you didn't actually gt hurt at all :).

You usually can't make the big hits on turn 2, though, because they require setup. Also, you have to kill the Operative as well as the Chairman, so going all-out to kill him and taking loads of hits in the process isn't very helpful, because the rest of the mob will just carry on unhindered.

Worse, if you kill the Chairman first, he might just get shuffled into the deck and played again, back on side A (as far as we know that's how you're supposed to handle it).  Personally, I pretty much always kill the Operative first.  Or rather, try to; it's less common that it actually happens.