This comes across like you’ve seen and played DE Operative. I’m not sure with what is public how you can make that conclusion already.
I think it would’ve been helped by being a side deck, as introduced in DE for RCR, since it would’ve allowed her to have a full deck and not have ten cards taken up by that.
Or the various different decks in Oblivaeon…
But… I think a “bounty” deck would be too limit. But… a Con deck? Some kind of limit assist, which has both bounties and CR’s weapons?
I’m more okay with OblivAeon, not because what they did was ideal, but because the goal they were shooting for was so much loftier that I’m more forgiving that they didn’t fully attain it. The only things I would really say failed about Blivs were the Aeon Man deck, which had only four different cards in it and thus didn’t really need to be a separate deck of mostly identical cards, and debatably the fact that Oblivaeon was a booklet with three different modes, when they could have gotten him down to two modes so he could be a standard two-sided villain. If he was to be this booklet instead, then he should probably have had at least four distinct phases, and even that could have been handled with two double-sided character cards that flip independently. But as I say, this and other complaints I have about Blivs are all just wishing that I was given the world on a shinier and more silvery platter; what we got was more than reasonably satisfactory.
My issue with Kaargra is just that she feels like she should have been second only to OblivAeon in being a completely separate game mode, and instead she feels only slightly different from a standard villain, about at the level of Dreamer and Miss Info for how atypically she plays. As to Operative, no I haven’t played her, haven’t played DE at all in fact; I’m going off the previews we all saw. But I think the Orders thing for her, along with Loaded for Expat, is just kind of a hacky and ugly approach to handling the writing of rules. It makes me think of a government document saying “refer to paragraph 77 subsection D”, instead of just telling you what to do in plain English.
I really think you ought to give it a try before dismissing it. Omnitron was actually the first to use a mechanic like this, in the core set, and I think it’s implemented really well in that deck. It’s also essentially what Argent Adept has always done.
Really not sure what your comparison about government documents is supposed to be, because everything you’ll be doing will be written down right in front of you, as in DE the only card text you need to worry about is that which is in play.
I wish we had a pinned editable post or wiki page for consolidated “confirmed” expansion info.
I think we have half the heroes for Disparation. I could take a stab at assigning the 7 cards, but I’m coming up with some heroes that don’t fit the “theme” of the set. This includes Darkstrife & Painstake in my mind - as jazzed as everyone is, I don’t see how they belong to Disparation.
Okay, ranked choice:
Justify the Means
Systems Iteration
Take Out the Trash
Forget What You Saw
Reprioritize
This one’s tough, being so vague. If I’m trying not to double up on first picks…
Optimized Efficiency
Man, very mechanical again. Too many options…
Enthrall
Now, watch as they throw something completely from left field at us and it all makes sense then. We’ve probably still got ~4 months before kickoff as I don’t think they’ll begin another Kickstarter campaign until RCR is at least mostly distributed.
I wonder if Forget What You Saw will be the new Buffer Overflow. It always bugged me that Parse plays more like a control deck than Visi.
In the case of The Organization, this is largely intended. It’s an Organization, after all, and having this hierarchy of Chairman->Operative->Underboss->Thug is kind of the point. We went through many iterations to make it as smooth and un-fiddly as possible.
Expat, too, went through a lot of iterations to get the gun/ammo relationship working the way we wanted. It reads more gimmicky than it is. Jerry Holkins tried Expat in the streamed game vs. Apex, and he got how it worked instantly. The same thing could have been accomplished with more words and more reading, so I’m pretty happy with it the way it is.
I hope that gets VOD’d soon. Livestreams aren’t usually my thing, and I would love to see that game.
oh nice! I saw christopher retweet this and brain-farted on what “PA” might mean XD
Thank you! I couldn’t find it. My google-fu is weak, this week.
The whole seven hero decks thing is really kind of strange to me. Having extra cards to replace in a deck for a variant would be pretty clunky. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to have two decks to represent different aspects of a character (Visionary/Dark Visionary or Darkstrike/Painstake) when DE has been productively using and developing ways to achieve the same effect with a single deck (like Suddenly! cards in Alpha’s deck). And why have a separate deck for Bounties or whatnot when we already have all the Summon, Discover, etc. mechanisms? A separate deck might save a little shuffling, but they clearly haven’t shied away from driving a lot of shuffling with those keywords in the core set, as some single cards already force that multiple times.
Here are my suggestions:
I have made this happen in custom content for EE, it’s totally possible. 
I think the reason for this would be that it makes them only accessible through certain avenues, as opposed to being able to randomly pick them up. And it allows for more of them, without the possibility of cluttering the deck.
I’d be interested in seeing these examples. Multi-hero decks such as The Sentinels, Law/Order, or the Nightlore Trio version of Starlight are a recurring passion of mine; seeing the reverse, a multi-deck hero, strikes me as the kind of thing that’s right up my alley (currently the closest thing we have is probably Drift, whose cards all have two versions depending on where your tracker is).
What about if one of the decks was like a ‘sidekick’ deck?
This would require a rules addition, with Sidekicks being optional. Sidekicks would be Heroes with their own character card, but would be associated with a main Hero, and all their cards would play in the hero’s play area. Sidekicks wouldn’t have a power, however. Instead, they would have a ‘Support’ keyword (similar to The Operative’s ‘Command’ keyword). Then the main Hero would need to use their ‘& Sidekick’ variant, whose power would be to use the ‘Support’ effect of their Sidekick. This ‘Support’ effect would be to play the top card of the Sidekick side deck, or something similar.
Sidekicks are useful, often times providing a helping hand at a critical moment, or foiling the main villains plan in the background while the Hero is going toe to toe with them in the foreground. But sidekicks also get into trouble, often requiring the Hero to take time and effort to rescue them. The Sidekick deck could have useful one shots as well as ongoing cards that help the Hero out, but also some that cause complications for the hero. The tradeoff is giving up the Power of the Hero (which usually helps them build their engine) in exchange for the Support of the Sidekick, which could be more powerful or possibly a hindrance.
In addition, if the Sidekick counts as a Character card, it can also be Incapacitated. All the cards from the deck would go away, but it would still have a Support effect on it’s incapacitated side that would be something smaller, but still helpful, much like with Heroes.
This could also work with a dual Hero situation, where one is the main Hero, but can call on their companion as their ‘Power’, who has their own separate deck with its own effects. However, with the Sidekick mechanic, multiple characters could have a ‘Sidekick Variant’ allowing them to play with any Sidekick.
Also, not a Disperation guess, but literally less than three minutes ago, it occurred to me we might get a “restored” Mr Fixer variant in the Oblivæon set at the end.
It’s not impossible, but I can’t think of any character in the lore that it would match, and I’ll be surprised if we get a hero deck that we’ve never actually heard of. Sentinel Comics is shockingly low on sidekicks as a concept; the closest you usually get are folks like Unity or the Idealist, who are still full heroes in their own rights.
They discussed it in the D-List Heroes episode. I sent in a letter about my love of sidekicks and kid/teen heroes, and they mentioned they thought the concept was a little too fraught with unfortunate implications nowadays outside of specific scenarios, which is why they don’t write about them much here.
A good example of why people should stop overanalyzing the supposed implications of things, and just enjoy stuff that’s fun at face value.