I’m a supporter of Fixer, I don’t think he is weak by any means, however I am always interested in possible alternate cards. Someone made an interesting suggestion earlier about making his base power the ability to discard a card to search his deck or trash for a non-equipment card and put it into your hand. I thought this was a very interesting idea so this last week I tried to put it into action. Sorry this is quite lengthy but I wanted to make a fairly detailed report. I made two changes to Fixer and his deck:
1) His base power was “discard a card, if you do search your deck or trash for Meditation or Charge and put it into your hand.
2) I modified Overdrive to read “You may play two cards now”. I felt this fit with original flavor of the card.
Overview:
I found this setup to have a lot of interesting nuance to it. Ultimately you can change to any stance you want within one turn, but you need to be thinking ahead because it will take a turn to change and you cannot attack that turn. In addition, playing equipment, or harmony means you cannot attack for a turn. Fixer’s basic attack now being charge gives him essentially +1 damage compared to strike. I didn’t realize before that in his original setup Charging and then Striking ends up being better than an Overdrive play. Anyway, on to more nuances, there were some really nice plays made against Spite in the game I played that I will go into more detail with later, but I did find some interesting general things including:
Searching all your Meditations, Charges, and stances (through meditation) early in the game will really thin your deck getting you to other cards quite quickly and reliably. Of course this isn’t always the right move as you will not be attacking on several turns doing this.
Hand size needs to be a consideration. Playing overdrive, two charges, and then using your power results in removing four cards from your hand (though a charge or meditation is replaced) and gives you a very limited hand to work with. In fact you can double charge twice in a game unless you have gained extra cards in some way. I didn’t notice this in the game because of how ours went but I saw that it could potentially be something to consider. There were some interesting interactions with equipment. Playing a new equipment bounces the old one to your hand so your hand size will increase that turn. Choosing an equipment to discard for your base power and later playing Salvage Yard is a nice way to keep hand size up as well. My brother suggested playing Overdrive, followed by Tool Box, followed by Charge noting that would let me attack and get my hand size up one (once it come back to hand) but most importantly cycle two cards. I’m not sure that it is worth the Overdrive usage but it does let you attack and cycle the deck if you are looking for something specific. Overdrive can be used to play a style or tool and still be able to attack that turn. I also had a nice use of Overdrive purely for setup as detailed below.
Spite:
So we played Spite. Now my groups generally have trouble burning him on the front side with all his Hp regen so our strategy was to sit and rescue victims until he flipped. That leads to an interesting start that is nonstandard so keep that in mind. Anyway I used the deck thinning strategy listed above at the start of the game. I hit a Tool Box a few turns in so I could draw 3 cards and search one to thin the deck each turn. I was also able to use the Tool Box as a card to bounce for Spite once he had that drug in play. By the time Spite flipped I had a bunch of cards in hand including two Charges, Harmony, a Driving Mantis, a Grease Monkey Fist, an Overdrive and a Salvage yard. I also had a Pipe Wrench in play. First turn after Spite Flips I played Overdrive and put out Grease Monkey and Harmony. I didn’t use a power. Next turn I played Salvage Yard which put my Overdrive from last turn into play (and got me a few equipment cards) letting me Charge twice at 5 damage each (the first being reduced to 3 by Spite’s armor). I didn’t use a power. Next turn I put Mantis into play, I used my power to get a Charge back and redirected Spite’s attack back at him. I pretty much repeated this every turn (minus the Harmony which I bounced at some point) until he went down. I was doing a total of 5 damage on each of my turns (charging for 4 reduced to 2, Spite attacking for 3 Pipe Wrenched down to 2 redirected via Mantis as 3 back to him) as well as redirecting damage on Spite’s turn.
What about Bloody Knuckes?:
One of the knocks on this idea was that it makes certain cards worthless. Two that were mentioned were Overdrive and Bloody Knuckles. I made the change to Overdrive as mentioned and just left BK the same. If nothing else it is a good discard candidate for your base power, but here are some other ideas I had:
1) Do nothing (I think my second favorite option), you can always just discard it and its only one card. Plus it still works if you Overdrive, then BK, then Charge, so it is actually not worthless with the Overdrive change, just not as good as double Charge. This is something I didn’t consider in the game I played.
2) Change the timing on it so that it lasts through your next turn or next attack (like Haka of battle) allowing you to get one turn of bonus damage but still suffering a turn of extra damage taken.
3) Change it so that the bonus damage part to “When this card comes into play deal one target 2 damage”, the rest remains the same. This makes it a crappy alternative to Charge but still useful if you don’t have a Charge on a given turn (ie you just played both via Overdrive).
4) (This is my favorite) Add one line: You may play a card now. This way, if you follow it with a Charge, it effectively does the same thing that it does now. This could lead to big turn if you BK and then Overdrive and Charge twice with say a dual crow bars in play, but that would take a fair amount of work to pull off, it would potentially empty your hand (4 cards total), and it’s no bigger than a turn of two Hypersonic Barrages or Fully setup Unload.
5) Change its text to say “When this card comes into play deal one target 2 damage, You may destroy an Ongoing or Environment Card, Increase Damage to Fixer by 2, at the Start of your turn destroy this card”. This really changes the purpose of the card which is why it’s not my favorite idea but it gives Fixer some board destruction.
Conclusion:
I really enjoyed this game. The original poster of the power called it Anticipation because you need to always be thinking of what you want to do on the next turn. The title also works because even on turns where I wasn’t attacking I had a good sense of anticipating the next turn. “Oh man, I’m set up for a big turn next round!” This and the some nice card interaction were fun and also kept the game interesting. Deciding to attack or play a tool, style, or something else made for interesting and meaningful decisions during game play. This was only one game, and maybe not a very standard one, but I enjoyed it immensely and will probably try to talk my regular play group into trying this a couple more times with other villains, maybe with the Bloody Knuckles option number 4 added in, and see how it goes.