So, over in the "your most frustrating Hero to play" thread, I expressed smone annoyance with Absolute Zero for having an unexciting setup and poor performance as he worked on it (as well as Bunker for just never seeming to deliver all that much, and Tempest for being overpowered and boring). This is, as many may know and I should have guessed, a frequent subject of flame wars, and of course, when you deal fire damage to Absolute Zero, you only add more interactions.
So, to avoid derailing that thread, anyone who wants to address the content of my (absurdly long) wall of text can do so here!
The rant in question is thus:
To my mind, Absolute Zero VERY strongly encourages you to get both Null-Point Calibration Unit and Isothermic Transducer into play before you do anything else. You can go it with just one (being a self-sacrificial damage-dealer or a mediocre tank), but much more so than, say, KNYFE, I feel like I am being ounished for my haste/bad luck. And, of course, most of the famous examples of him dealing serious damage come from Thermal Shockwave, but as that's a card with only two copies and none of his search/recursion tech works on it, good luck with that.
As for his ineffective state without a setup: how about being a Hero who can only damage yourself? This is his literal starting state, and it is the weakest in the game.
But if you want a more detailed example, consider this: Cryo Chamber, Focused Aperatures, Glacial Structure, and Modular Realignment are, collectively, 11 cards - more than a quarter of a Hero deck! - which, among themselves and AZ's base Power, do exactly nothing to impact any aspect of the game (unless you need to tank some Fire damage, I guess). Sure, Glacial Structure lets you see more cards... by skipping your Play and Power phases. And remember that it costs you a card. You know what else nets you a two-card gain at the cost of both Play and Power? A default game mechanic that everyone has access to. I am reasonably certain that no other hero has a quarter of their deck which can see them doing nothing on the opening turns... indeed, it is totally impossible, since the only other Heroes who have potentially-useless Powers are The Argent Adept and Setback. Neither one has Discard-only tutoring, or passive cards which cannot accomplish something when combined with base Powers. The closest they get is the Adept opening to all six Intruments in a row, and that's still only half as many temporarily dead cards (none of which are as truly dead as Glacial Structure).
This is not purely a thought excercise. These cards, plus Fueled Freeze and Isothermic Transducer were all that a close friend of mine drew in her first game as Absolute Zero (and the Transducer came out after she had played the Cryo Chamber, so that was another hoop to jump through). This contributed in a meaningful way to her giving up on Sentinels entirely. I will allow that may bias me some, but that's not all there is to it.
For starters, the scenario above isn't even the only crippling draw for Absolute Zero. Combined, his Modules and Module-seeking One-Shots account for sixteen cards! Sixteen cards, which amount to either dealing a single point of damage, healing a single point of damage, or occasionally playing a Realignment (painfully, if you don't have any targets for it in your Trash) to do both. That's totally crazy. I always thought that Ra was excessive with eight copies of Staff/Summon Staff, but at least when you loop those together, you're healing 3 and dealing 4 each turn, which is a wild improvement over a setup-only AbZero. The Argent Adept is totally built around his setup, but Instruments and Conjurations of same only account for 11 cards in his deck, and you get benefits from playing more than two. Nightmist's setup is a lot more versatile and powerful without One-Shot support, and even it only comes out to twelve cards - and this on a Hero who totally revolves around card draw and discard! Nobody has as many bad draws, or is as useless when getting them, as poor Absolute Zero. And that's a crying shame.
You see, I really like Absolute Zero. I think he's a neat character, and that his gameplay does a good job of conveying it - I would say he's got the most evocative design of the original ten heroes! When I play him, and the pieces come together, it's brilliant. But much, much more often, I find that they don't. Either he's too mired in dead cards to make a workable setup, or he's getting nuked out of his setup and painfully aware that without it he can only hurt himself, or he's set up quickly but then drawing nothing but Modules and Module-seeking cards with no greater damage source in sight - the combination of two Modules AND Thermal Shockwave AND a steady flow of damaging One-Shots (there are only seven in his deck, and I'd played him twice before I saw any except Fueled Freeze) is just way too unreliable. I feel like a lot of people get that setup one game by pure random chance (or maybe Visionary/Team Leader Tachyon/some other hero more effective than Absolute Zero), and they think "oh, I didn't get this guy before, but now that I understand him, he's awesome". But while there are some counterintuitive principles to grasp, mostly, it's a counterintuitive deck messing you about.
Fortunately, I don't see this as a problem without a solution. I simply changed the numbers of a few cards in his deck (for example, down to three of each Module, and five Module Instalations, which now search both deck and discard like everyone else's setup cards - I mostly added more damaging One-Shots in the new five cards of space). And I read his power as "Absolute Zero deals himself 1 Fire or 1 Cold damage. Draw a card." Combined with a few tweaks to how other things work (Glacial Structure is both an Ongoing and an Equipment, and lets you draw whenever it gets destroyed, so it at least has value shielding the rest of your setup), his damage/taking potential is exactly the same as in the printed version, but he now gets good games often and garbage ones rarely.
