I enjoy playing against Ambuscade. I've gone into several games with him thinking it would be a cakewalk, and he would proceed to get string after string of his "play a card, shuffle, play another card" turns, or get the ongoing that punishes you when you kill devices, or stay hidden for extended periods. It made for surprisingly tense games.
Personally I regard excess shuffling as an annoyance (this being just about the only thing I don't like about playing Omnitron-X).
or get the ongoing that punishes you when you kill devices
Which also damages him. When he gets that card out, I tend to think of him as Ted Sprague, and try to make him self-destruct in the most spectacular way possible. Admittedly I did almost kill all my heroes by doing this one game, and that was I believe the only time he's actually managed to incap one hero (which would be game over with Spiff's version). Still, with his low HP, anything that makes it easier to kill him is probably in the heroes' favor, as he's not terribly good at hurting them enough that they couldn't afford to "play chicken" with him.
or stay hidden for extended periods.
Another mechanic I find more of a nuisance than anything - his cloak has only 9 HP, so I usually get it destroyed on like the second hero turn, and then have to sit around twiddling my thumbs for the rest of the round because there's nothing to attack.
No he doesn't have many single cards that are terrifying. But thats not the point really. What the Advanced Mode does is drag out the game, thats the point of the DR. Combine that with one or two Reactive Platings, and both he and his stuff becomes very hard to kill in a timely manner.
Trap cards are not "free rounds" for the heros in advanced mode. With the game pushing into more rounds, that provides the time needed to start filling the deck with face up traps, which will eventually all find their way to the top and probably toward the end of the game.
And irreducible damage is always matters. With the game going longer and Ambuscade having more time to deal you damage, for him to get around all of your damage mitigation is a huge deal.
But of course thats all just my opinion. The fact is though, that his deck works with itself and doesn't fight against itself. Gloomweaver feels like his deck works against him in many ways. I would not lump Ambuscade in with Gloomweaver.
I agree with a lot of what Pydro said about Gloomweaver. However I find that we almost always still win by killing him directly. This is because you can usually do it well before the last relic hits play. I think we do prioritize killing relics over killing Gloomy, but even so he is at 0 Hp before that third relic dies.
I think to really make the relics a priority you have to accelerate how often they come out. I've noticed that most variants do this. Either by increasing his card draw, having a trigger to search them, or some other method.
I like a few ideas that people have discussed where you lose automatically within a few turns of his flipping, very thematic. However these usually still include relic acceleration because people have reported that they have never seen him flip (including myself except for variant versions.)
Promo Gloomweaver? YES PLEASE
One wrinkle to the idea of attacking Gloomy directly is that when he flips, he regains Hx10 HP. So if he does manage to get relics into play, you probably want to kill them, rather than beat on him and risk the other Relics coming out.
Vast Following is the most frightening card in his deck, but not incredibly effective...it's too easy for the villain trash to contain enough cards, particularly in an H=3 game, that the trash contains Relics and Cultists but none are actually brought back. I feel like he has too many distractions for a standard 25-card deck - he should have lost either the Cultists, the Zombies, the Relics and Familiar, or the Voodoo Pins, and he'd still have rather a lot going on with just three categories of stuff. I was also puzzled by how big of a deal the Voodoo Pins are on his second side. He just pulls in too many directions, trying to be this giant sweeping conspiracy of dark magic, but still only getting one card play per turn, so he's just not effective at it at all.
Mind you, I have had games where he dished out a respectable amount of damage, and incapped heroes or came close to doing so; he's not a complete pushover, but he's definitely a severe waste of potential.
I definitely have to say this game fit the topic of this thread. I swear I did shuffle the decks legitimately, but they somehow turned out absolutely perfect…the Matriarch played only six birds the whole game, two of them on her final turn, and two of the ones she did play were lost to Unforgiving Wasteland, along with one Cohort. This level of luck is pretty much the only way I ever beat Matriarch, but the last time I had five heroes, so it didn't seem quite as unfair for them to utterly crush her with barely any effort, as her HP doesn't scale with the number of heroes working to deplete it. Having just three heroes, including her Lightspeed-Barraging sister and a "Damn the Torpedoes" edition of Ra (he paid the HP tax to hang onto Solar Flare twice, though it turned out he needn't have bothered the second time, Lilian was down to 20-some HP by then, and it had been clear she was doomed for quite a while already, with a Barrage for 14 sealing the deal). It was kind of sad to see a normally-tough villain so utterly obliterated, but then she's a teenage brat with a godly artifact on her face, so it makes sense that all her games would either be overwhelming victories or completely crushing defeats.
Note - Tachyon is Lilian's cousin, not her sister ;).
Probably our most satisfying battle against her was soon after getting Shattered Timelines, when we deliberately decided to fight her in the Final Wasteland in the hopes that it'd eat all her stuff. First environment card - Horrid Skunk Ape. Second - Unforgiving Wasteland. Third and fourth were the Library and the Bunker (can't remember which way round), just to make things even nicer on us :). Lilian ended up with just one target in her entire deck, a Carrion Field we'd destroyed at some point so it had missed being nommed by the environment.
Ah, well that would explain the last names.
Lilian ended up with just one target in her entire deck, a Carrion Field we'd destroyed at some point so it had missed being nommed by the environment.
Right, so Darken the Sky, Horrid Cacophony, Darken the Sky, Horrid Cacophony, Darken the Sky, reshuffle and flip, Loop. I hope you plinked her to death for the next 70 turns just to maximize the experience.
Hehe...well, the only thing causing us any damage after all the targets were gone was the sonic damage in Horrid Cacophany. I don't think those had much time to come out by the time all the birds had been removed because we'd been working on Lilian throughout the game anyway - having those particular first two cards come out from the environment was just epic. It meant that Lilian would play Fowl cards on her turn, then after our turns the environment would act and the Ape would kill every single bird, resulting in zero damage to us (since they're removed from the game instead of being destroyed). We made sure that we damaged the Mask, Huginn, Muninn, and that one Carrion Field enough that the environment would be the thing to finish them off. The latter part of the game basically consisted in us giving Lilian the finger as we battered her to death with whatever attacks we had (I can't remember which heroes were in the game) while she did absolutely nothing to stop us.
Having fought Matriarch twice this week, I find myself wondering if there was a stage in playtest where Horrid Cacophony dealt 1 damage for each Fowl in play. It seems like that would be more flavorfully fitting, even if it would be less functional in game terms (hideously crushing in games where you were already losing, but useless in the situation you described).
That would be incredibly horrible - if there were a lot of Fowl out, you'd first take a lot of damage from them, then a load more from Cacophony. And if you tried to get rid of the birds, you'd take damage from Lilian. I suppose if you nerfed her damage you could take birds out freely and not have to worry about Cacophony (apart from the ongoing desctruction part) or a penalty for nuking birdies.
Since there is a lot of Gloomweaver gloom in this topic, I thought I'd add another "cheating" (and hilariously underwhelming) scenario I've had against him. It basically involved an incredibly lucky draw with Argent Adept, getting 2 Instrumental Conjurations and his Cedinistic Dissonant song.
I basically did not deal a single point of damage to Gloomy or his relics (I'd attack zombies/cultists though). Any time a relic would make an appearance, I'd sacrifice an instrument and zap it. I basically laughed in his face, daring him to bring out his spooky relics only for them to be smited from his boney hands the second he held them.
I had another game last night that felt almost cheating, but definitely wasn't. It just happened to end within 10 minutes. I decided to do a Rook City theme with the new promo cards, trying out DW Mr. Fixer and DW Ex-Patriette against Spite (non-promo) in Pike Industrial Complex. Well, as it turns out, DW Mr. Fixer works reeeeally well with DW Ex-Pat considering she has so many ways to play extra cards and can get out less useful ammo cards (shock rounds) for Fixer to use as fuel for his Bitter Strike. In addition, Wraith joined the team to complete the Rook City feel as well as Chrono Ranger because every game is better with Chrono Ranger.
CR got out the Ultimate Target bounty right away as well as his compound bow, so Spite was filled with arrows (or whatever his bow shoots) during his End of Turn phase, usually completely negating his healing. Combined with some helpful chemicals from the environments, we basically flat out destroyed him with pure damage after only 5 turns. Not exactly "cheating" but it just felt like we steam rolled him. No trickery or deck manipulation; just pure straight up attack power.
Omnitron-X is probably my favorite character in the game. A base power that allows you to manipulate ANY DECK IN THE GAME is playing on a different level than everyone else.
Except that he has the second lowest base HP, and all of his toys breaks if you take 5 damage in a turn. (It doesn't even have to be in one hit; 5 1-point hits will do the trick.) Coupled with his awesome, but limited shields, and if you're going against someone like Apostate, Dawn, Spite, La Capitan, Miss Information (God forbid), or the Matriarch, who have a tendency to throw out multiple types of damage -- sometimes irreducible -- you can have a hard time setting up.
Not at all saying he's bad; he's among my favorites as well, but he's not OP. He has his weaknesses, like any other hero.
Another weakness is that a lot of his toys don't do anything until the start of the next turn (unless played DURING start-of-turn by an EDU), and so a very vicious villain can put the team under such pressure that no time can be spared. Plus the ability to "manipulate" the villain or environment decks with Timeshift is pretty limited...if he could put the card back, he'd be OP, but as it is, any nasty card he vetoes might just be replaced by an equally nasty one that was beneath it. Honestly, I mostly only use Timeshift on hero decks...as with Visionary's Enlighten, I have to fight the temptation to always use it on myself, and sometimes share with the rest of the team. Occasionally it can hack villain mechanics, such as fishing for Clues against Miss Information or for Victims against GloomSpite. Which is neat; it's like he's hopping through time and playing detective.
I tend to Timeshift myself to help speed up my set up, but one time I did randomly Timeshift Gloomy once during a game to see if I could get his last Relic out and dump it straight into the trash…and it worked :D.
Any ability that lets you look at the top (or top two) card(s) of a deck isn't infallible, since you might always turn up horrible cards. Like Turmoil or an Infra-Red Eyepiece might turn up both copies of That Sodding Card in Citizen Dawn's deck, or EPEs in Omnitron's (though admittedly the latter can be dealt with if you have enough damage or something like Hypersonic Assault to nullify it while you work on destroying it). If no-one else after you has any means of manipulating the top card(s) of the deck, you're probably gonna be stuck knowing exactly what's about to come out and being unable to do anything about it.
So it doesn't matter which deck-checking ability you're using, you always have the risk that horrible cards will come out…unless they've already been, I suppose.
True, but if you Timeshift Dawn's deck, you are no more likely to turn up That Card than to remove the top card from a deck in which That Card was second. And the odds of both That Cards being right next to each other are slim, though of course enough decks are being shuffled out there that improbably things happen now and again.
Even if you can't stop what's about to happen, knowing it can make a huge difference; players who know they're about to get wiped can choose to not play more cards, or skip and fill their hands so they have more hope of rebuilding.
Knowing an Aurora is about to come out won't help at all if you've all got all your stuff out and no way to quickly get it back again before you get your arsse kicked :P.