Like many people, I was very impressed with The Dreamer when I first played her. The variety of Projections was reminiscent of Dawn, but with enough changes (most notably, a villain you don't want to hurt) to keep things fresh. And when she flipped and started raining cards and damage at an absurd rate, it was just the kind of shock that good flip should be the first time you see it.
Unfortunately, for me at least, it just didn't hold up. Once you know how much harder she is on her flip side, a clear tactic emerges: just kill all but one Projection (something like Whipacorn, or especially Stone Oni), then get to work playing out some massive, monolithic setup, so that you can stand to lose a few Ongoings and Equipments and still breeze through her flip in 2-3 turns effortlessly. In a recent game I played involving The Naturalist, Setback, and Omnitron-X, this waiting game even managed to be HP-positive for most turns. Clearly, this is a pretty boring tactic for the game to be rewarding.
But there has to be some fairly simple means of breaking it, to restore The Dreamer's greatness. If you fight her "as intended," without artificially delaying the flip, she runs great! So, what works best? My first instinct is either to give her a Blade-style mechanic that ends the game once there are enough cards in the Trash, or a variant on that where the game ends outright after, say, 10-H rounds, and you add a couple to the clock when you flip her.
Even that feels a bit Bladey to me, though, so... what other ideas for ways to put the heroes on the clock do people have?
We've always just...fought her as normal. I can imagine she's much more difficult when H = >3 though, at least on her flip side (off the top of my head, I seem to recall that all the Projections deal fixed amounts of damage rather than being H-based), due to all the extra cards she plays (plus the direct damage she deals).
You could give her a Bomber Blade-esque timer on her front side, so destroyed Projections go under her and hurt you... but again, Bladey. You could always try skipping her front side and starting on the back?
That is... tricky. Aside from some sort of gentleman's agreement not to, I would recommend making it so that if she has to draw a card and cannot, the heroes lose. Think of it as the sleeping child has simply accumulated TOO MUCH psychic energy and died. The flip side would not have the restriction, since her direct mental attacks are bleeding off psychic energy.
That's innovative, Zamielvanweber, but avergates out to around a 15-turn timer when H=4, which is very merciful. It would limit the worst abuse, but hardly all of it.
I had considered starting on the flip side, but that seems (1) too harsh even for me, and (2) like it would lose the drama of racing to reach Young Vanessa... then getting there and things getting even worse. My biggest problem with Bomber Blade (and regular Blade, to be honest) was always that once you won the race on side 1, side 2 was anticlimactic, so I like the potential of The Dreamer to invert that, but sadly, as printed, they forgot to include the race.
You could try upping the flip effects. If most or all of the ongoings and equiptment get destroyed, that hurts your ability to set up, which discourages dillydallying on the first side.