Part of the reason why I decided to buy the video game a month or two ago was the prospect of finally getting to play OblivAeon; I bought it physically years ago, and got substantial use out of the heroes and environments, but was never able to talk the gaming group I had at the time into trying out something as elaborate as the actual OblivAeon battle. I finally tried it out a couple of weeks ago, and was absolutely destroyed; roughly a week later I played again, and did slightly better, but still got absolutely nowhere near winning. After that I took a look at some of the physical cards (since the app doesn’t make it convenient to read every card as it’s played so that I can be absolutely sure what happened; I just kind of get used to things happening which I don’t quite understand), and found myself really doubting that it’s even loosely possible to win the game.
But last night I decided I’d try it one more time, and this time the cards were more cooperative; I not only got him to phase 3 for the first time, but was able to beat him down for about 40 more damage besides that. Given how much power I had on the board this game, I think ultimately the only reason why I wasn’t able to end up winning was the fact that my phone, the app, or some combination of both are glitched, such that it’s usually impossible to get a power on anyone else’s turn. Given that two of the Scions reward you for defeating them by giving every hero a power, and I was playing five heroes with a lot of high-powered cards (eg the Infinity Cannon), ten-plus extra powers could easily have gotten me enough extra damage that I might have managed to finish OblivAeon off.
But more important than whether I could win the game was whether it made a good story, and in this case it was an amazing one. The initial two Environments were Mobile Defense Platform and the Temple of Zhu Long, and after a couple of bloody rounds, all five heroes were in the Temple, fighting OblivAeon and a couple Scions. LifeLine had an Oblivion Shard active, along with a ton of his cards in play, but we hadn’t gotten anywhere on removing the Oblivion Shield. Then, at the end of the second or third round, the MDP played Propulsion Systems, and then one of OblivAeon’s cards moved him to that environment, where he dealt 8 damage to all targets, and then went up to 17 devastation tokens. Young Legacy, who was by now down to single digits HP and not long for this world anyway, moved to the other environment and destroyed the Propulsion Systems, which caused the Platform to crash to the ground and explode, triggering Oblivaeon to remove that environment and kill YL, except that Arataki Wakarewarewa died in her place. The new environment was Magmaria, and on Oblivaeon’s turn, he wiped out that Environment as well, with YL as the only hero onsite and only a single Environment card having been played. Meanwhile, with his +17 to damage, Lifeline unleashed a string of attacks which killed a total of 5 scions in the course of a single incredibly long turn, removing 5 devastation tokens and leaving him with exactly 12 to blow up Magmaria. Unfortunately I then lapsed in the several turns of Heroic Interception and other such protective cards which had enabled Lifeline to survive with his +17 to damage dealt and taken, so a Master of the Temple took him down.
So, from a flavor perspective, this battle was clearly about how Luminary (who never appeared onstage, exactly the way a mad scientist prefers to operate) managed to secure an OblivAeon shard, storing it aboard his MDP and parking it in the air over Zhu Long’s Temple, where Oblivaeon showed up to retrieve it. Lifeline took the Shard, since he was the only hero strong enough to handle it, and escaped to the Temple with it while Legacy sabotaged the MDP, with OblivAeon briefly trapped on board it, so that it could plow straight through the earth’s crust into Magmaria and explode, heavily damaging OblivAeon and killing Young Legacy in a heroic sacrifice. OblivAeon then traveled to the Temple, where he got into an epic confrontation with The True Form of Zhu Long after he had briefly allied with the heroes, betraying them in the sense of killing Lifeline in order to steal the Shard from him, and then using its power to attack OblivAeon before being destroyed by him. The battle later ended with the badly battered OblivAeon finally wiping out the Temple, which otherwise survived throughout the entire fight, and one of the last heroes who joined the battle before the end was the original Legacy.
Sadly, while classic Legacy played Inspiring Presence and usually used Galvanize, OblivAeon had a habit of throwing the heroes from one battle zone to another, so only about half of the team was ever able to benefit from his +2 bonus to damage at a time. But with just one more round before the fourth environment was destroyed, we would pretty definitely have won. There were a lot of other little awesome and story-rich moments in this game; I wish I had somehow been recording it all, and especially wish I could have rewound it to several key turning points where I had to make a choice that turned out to be super consequential - for instance, when the third Environment blew up, I had a choice between destroying the Environment with three Heroes in it, including the fully set up Lifeline, or the newly played Freedom Tower with just two heroes. I picked the Tower to die, partly out of a desire to save Lifeline, but he ended up dying anyway, and the two heroes who were blown up instead included a Setback with 13 unluck tokens and a Silver Lining, so I would really have liked to see how the game would have turned out if I’d kept him instead.
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