So I've been playing against AOG Spite in the video game, and it just seems impossible to get enough Victim cards A. in play and B. under the Safe House to make his drug cards flip back without making Spite flip. Because of the order of operations, he always starts with one Drug card flipped and one Victim card out. Then, at best, he plays another victim card. Even if you put both of them under the Safe House that turn, he's going to flip another Drug card at the start of the turn, and since it's now equal to what's under the safe house, neither of them will flip back. Even if he plays another victim card, there's still no way to get ahead of the curve.
And once he's got three drug cards flipped face up, there's just plain no way to get any of them flipped back before he flips to his other side.
So am I missing something? Outside of forcing him to play cards, which only applies to a tiny handful of heroes and one or two environments, there doesn't seem to be any way to get ahead of the drug curve.
He starts with a victim and plays another. One of which has to be a Good Samaritan and the other has to be any of the other Victims. Over the course of the hero's turns, save the other victim, at the start of the Environment turn you save the Good Samaritan and if it plays a Good Samaritan you can save that one aswell. If another victim is played, then you now have 3 Victims under the Safehouse. At the start of his turn he'll either flip his Character Cards if (H) = 3 or he'll Flip a drug at the start face-up and then flip a face-up one back face-down at the end.
Another way to get some extra victims into play is using Super Scientific Tachyon's power on Spite as was brought to me before. I'm not sure what the odds of doing it are to get two victims into play but that is another way. Your best scenario without that is having mulitple Good Samaritans in play and possibly drawing into another when putting him under the safe house.
So basically, short of having SST in play, it's depending entirely on blind luck and if you're playing a 3-hero game, it's impossible to get any of his drug cards flipped back to face down once one flips up?
Yes, a lot of the time it will be mostly luck. In a three player game you can't get him to flip back any drugs but if you got three victims in the safehouse it means he flipped with only one drug in play. So you would need four players at minimum to keep him on his initial side and cause drugs to flip back over.
This is one of the few places where I will go ahead and say "bad game design". Devoting that much verbiage to a condition that is almost impossible to bring about is just broken. And it would be easy to fix; if instead of "more" the condition was "at least as many as", it would be plausibly achievable far more often.
Yeah, it's one thing for a difficult villain to need a kind of character (tanking, deck control, Ongoing destruction), but to need, basically, one or two specific Promo cards (to my knowledge none of the normal Heroes can make a villain play cards), the villain deck to be stacked in a very specific say, or to be in a certain environment (Rook City might help, with how much it plays Villain cards, but even then you're still depending on the luck of the draw)? It just isn't fair.
I think the main point is that you aren't meant to be able to regularly flip his drugs. If you could consistently stop him from flipping drugs Spite is not as challenging.
It just seems like such an absurdly narrow circumstance to flip his cards back.
I tend to play 5 heroes because I like using a lot of them, but the times I've tried fighting against him, I can't gain any traction because having to put back 3 ongoings every turn makes it so you have to do nothing but play ongoings and equipments just to keep up (Damaging or utility one-shots? Ain't nobody got time for that), 3 DR is really hard to get past even if it's only once a turn and and when you do manage to damage him, destroying the Victim cards still heals him.
It seems like he can only go one of two ways -- a long, torturous slog where the only variable is which of his painful drugs flips first, you get extremely lucky with the card draw, or you play an extremely specific party (one member of which is not yet part of the video game) and get lucky with the card draw to neuter him.
I find him more fun to play against then his normal version but not every villain is a favorite. I don't think he is broken you just have to know what to expect. If you don't like his drugs then I highly suggest you don't play his advanced rules.
