I just recently played a game where we randomly picked a villain - we ended up against Deadline.
Once again I was reminded of why I rarely play him, I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a game against him as it just feels like he doesn’t work right; he’s never felt like much of a threat but also unlike other less threatening villains where you can have an enjoyable light game nothing ever really happens much either.
There’s very little interaction, he doesn’t feel like he’s doing much to the heroes and you’re just beating on him, and his environment destruction has never come remotely close to being a concern. So it just kinda feels like he’s mostly sitting there twiddling his thumbs as you hit him.
So, are there other decks out that you just don’t get, just don’t ever seem to work well for you, that you don’t enjoy playing as or against? I would imagine there’s different things that don’t work for different people, are there even people out there who really love playing against Deadline and can say how they can get a good game out of him?
I find that advance or challenge rules really spice up villains that may be otherwise lackluster. Challenge Deadline in a target rich environment can get tense if he pulls Pandemoniom Key early (which can often result in him permanently staying on his flipside removing an environment card each turn.)
Deadline is a good choice to play in Rook City also (an environment I often avoid,) because RC can press the damage that Deadline lacks, but Deadline's flip side will clear some of the more annoying affects.
Outside of certain environments being less fun or more frustrating (Megalopolis and Rook City primarily,) I don't think there's a deck a dislike playing as or with. Once upon a time I would have said Bunker or Expat, but playing them in the videogame gave me enough practice to appreciate them.
For Deadline to me it’s an issue of just his Ongoings should trigger end of turn instead of start of turn making him a bigger threat. What Aria suggested certainly helps or just have him start with the Pandemonium Key out while playing in a target rich environment. As to a deck which doesn’t work for me it falls to the normal Miss Information and Spite. Miss Information because the game can drag if you don’t get clues out at any reasonable pace and Diversonary Tactics can make it worse. Spite because there until he has all of his drugs out there is often no point to saving Victims.
Decks that I find that never work for me from the player side are Expatriette. I just don't seem to be able to figure out how to play her well. My partner and other friends enjoy playing her I just don't seem to 'get' her. Am happy to be told an easy way to play her.
From the Villain side of things it's the same as Powerhound, Miss Information I quite enjoy playing if its just me or 1 other person but when you start having large groups and you have to go through her deck a few times to hit enough clues it's annoying. Spite I have had a few bad games against so I think I am a tad biased but should definitely try a game or 2 just not bothering with the Victims.
Lastly in the environment Madame Mittermeier’s Fantastical Festival of Conundrums & Curiosities... just I have never won a game with that environment in play. I think this has lead to me playing it less so haven't figured out any of the niche uses but boy is that a doozy.
With Madame Mittermeier's, I think a lot of the difficulty in that deck comes down to the fact that there are no targets.
Relatively speaking, targets are easy to get rid of. There are so many ways to deal hp damage in Sentinels that it's rare not to have a game with someone capable of dealing regular, consistent AoE damage. While you might have to divert a bit of damage-dealing to deal with a target like Char or a Portal Fiend, it's not usually too big a deal. In the Festival, there's no such luck--if you don't have Environment Destruction, you're hosed. And, while it's not uncommon, it's certainly less common than hp damage. And, if you're fighting a villain that's Ongoing heavy, you're even more hosed, as Ongoing and Environment cards are so often linked, in terms of destruction effects (Blinding Speed, Consecrated Ground, Bee Bot, etc.).
With that said, I rather like the deck, but I tend to play it with lower-challenge villains like Ambuscade or normal-Gloomweaver to give them a boost in difficulty.
First, I'm going to put aside the decks that are generally agreed by the community to not be great. Mr. Fixer gets stuck a lot, Bunker's modes are not good, Spite is just a mess all around. Taking that as read. Instead, I'm going with my personal opinions:
On the hero side, Fanatic never quite gels for me, despite having played her a lot. It's not that her deck is bad - it has lots of neat cards and effects - but I usually find that half of her deck is something that's going to be useless or counterproductive at any given time, and I've only ever got one or two cards that I can reasonably play. She works objectively, I just don't have a lot of fun with her as my deck. (I mind her less in a solo game when I have four or five heroes.)
On the villain side, I see what the goal with Apostate is, but I just kind of dislike playing against him. He's way too swingy, and the amount that he heals up when he flips makes flipping him to clear relics a really terrible idea.
On the environment front, the Mobile Defense Platform. I use it as an introductory location, often, because it does very little and that makes life easy for people who are still learning the ropes, but also it does very little. A couple guys shoot at the heroes, a couple locations make tiny changes, and also sometimes you just die.
There were quite a few decks I just wasn't willing to play with, but as the videogame mad me play more and more to unlock promos I've gotten over most of those short-comings... Except for when it comes to Wager Master.
It's not that I dislike the character or anything like that, it's just the changes he forces on the book-keeping of the game.
Book keeping can certainly be an issue in general, like, Kaargra I love her mechanics and theme but the amount of tracking everything means I rarely play her outside of the app… I love playing against her in the app though.
For villains, hands down it’s Miss Information for pretty much the exact reasons already given. To me, she just is not fun to play against.
For heroes? This one is harder but I’ve got to lean towards Parse. I know she is a good hero, I just don’t enjoy playing her.
For environments, I avoid Ruins of Atlantis like the plague. I still have too many horrible memories of that environment just wrecking us. We’d honestly choose Megalopolis for an easier experience.
And careful with over generalization. I don’t know who this General Community is or what he has against Mr. Fixer, but tell him when you see him that he doesn’t speak for me.
I’ve found the blind mechanic to be an absolute wrecking ball. He was on my Team Broken(before FV variants) when I faced every villain in the game with the same group and lost maybe twice. Think that team was The only team I’ve played with who wrecked Spite before he ever flipped.
Agreed on Fixer. He has a ton of different possibilities between styles and tools, and both Grease Gun and Savage Yard can be game winning cards on their own.
I enjoy using Fixer, but I find that he only has a couple of those really good cards, and they're only really good conditionally. So you have to have both the specific card you want, and the need for that card. He gets much better with a Micro-Assembler from Sky-Scraper.
The ones I never choose are Expatriette and Setback. Expat because she's only decent with a gun, and even then only the specific gun that's best against the current array of enemies, and it's really hard to set up her gigantic Unload combo. Setback can be pretty good, but he oddly takes a lot of planning, and no small amount of luck, to get his really good cards to pay off, and even then, other heroes can be more effective with less effort.
I actually enjoy Miss Information, although some teams, especially of 5 members, can have a hard time with her. Other than certain Advanced and Challenge modes, the only villains I dread playing are Wager Master (too random) and Spite (too predictable).
For environments, the ones I avoid are Madam Mittermeier's and Magmaria. MMFFCC is a really tough environment--very dangerous and very hard to keep under control, usually more dangerous than the villain itself. Magmaria is just boring--it has mostly the helpful Magmarians, which turn the scarce magma crystals into basically mini-Rewards--and the incredibly dangerous Behemoths, which can just wreck everything singlehandedly.
Magmaria's a good candidate for an environment that isn't super-hard but still no fun. The Behemoths are terrible and can't be prevented without deck manipulation. The Magma Crystals are scarce (I usually end up with a bunch of sedentary Magmarians for most of the game and nothing to do with them) unless you get the card that deals tons of damage and destroys all your stuff. It's just not a fun experience!
See, I've encountered that argument a few times, but I just keep thinking back to a game I played about a year ago. Some friends and I were taking on Kargaara Warfang, and I picked Dark Watch Expatriette. For the entire duration of the game–save the last two rounds of the game–I could not draw a gun for the life of me.
But, the neat thing was: I was still contributing at a particularly high level. Hairtrigger reflexes meant that I dropped consistent damage onto all those targets right as they came out. Boosted by Aim, that meant that I could regularly tally at least one point of Crowd's Favor without any action on my part. RPG Launchers kept the environment in check. Flak Jackets meant that I could tank Kargaara's sizable damage with ease.
I think I may have taken the double-draw once in that entire game, and only ended up with a gun (the Tactical Shotgun) by the time that the game was well in-hand. But even without, Expatriette was a critical contributor. While I'm sure it wasn't optimal, that game proved to me that Expatriette's deck is working as intended…
Oh, sure, I've seen games in which Expat is MVP. And I've had games where normally great characters do horribly due to terrible draws, ones where normally easy villains get the god combo and win handily, and ones where normally hard villains get shut down by complete chance. But far more often, Expat just isn't very helpful. That particular game sounds unusual simply because of its length (I don't think I've ever had a game with Kaargra last more than 5 rounds; more often it's about 3).
I'm sorry, but I'm just always going to have to disagree when people say Expat isn't that great.
The Tactical Shotgun gives her the strongest single-hit power in the game that doesn't have a downside (a la Sacrosanct Martyr). Combined, Pride and Prejudice is the strongest double-tap damage outside of a Hunter and Hunted Compound Bow. The Submachine Gun and Liquid Nitrogen Rounds applies a damage debuff to all non-hero targets that don't have damage reduction on them, and with DW Expat's Aim, Shock Rounds on the Submachine Gun turns into a marginally less effective Compulsion Handle combo. With buffs and a Hairtrigger Temper, she can stop a Forced Redeployment by herself, the turn it happens.
As for the often-repeated story that Expat never starts with a Gun, I want to point out that she becomes a consistent damage dealer with just one. There are eleven Guns in her deck (3 each of Assault Rifle, Submachine Gun and Tactical Shotgun, and P&P). There are also 3 cards that search for a specific Gun (Quick Draw) and 3 that have a chance of giving you a Gun (Arsenal Access). If we do a little hypergeometric probability, we find that in a 40-card deck, with a starting hand of 4, there's only a 9% chance that none of those cards is in your starting hand. I'm not a maths genius, so I freely admit to using an online calculator. Screenshotted the results, they're attached to this post.
It's my honest belief that Expatriette is one of the most underrated heroes in the game. I understand if people find her boring; I think Tempest is boring to play, but a lot of people love him. People have different playstyles, so it's only natural. But when people say she's not useful or isn't good, I get annoyed.
Uh... sorry for the rant. I guess I've been thinking about this for a while...
For me I find Bunker and Parse to be the two deck I would want built different. Parse is a very cool deck, but it's an odd control deck and I wanted a more "traditional" Archer Hero Architype. Fortunatly I've got Sentinals of Earth Prime to look forward to, Bowman should scratch that itch.
Bunker on the otherhand.... Well, some promos do a good job changing how he works and variant hunting and weekly one shots have given me an a appreciation of how the deck works. That said I think it's a clunky deck that I would love to see get redesigned. Maybe Modes need a bit of buffing, (Recharge heals 1 hp around, Upgrade also allows one trash draw, leave Assault alone. Just spitballing off the top of my head) maybe he needs more one shots (something like do a damage draw a card) or maybe its a mini Omnicannon (the next 5 cards discarded by Bunker go under here instead of trash, P destroy this card do X damage to a target where X=# of cards under it) But for the flavor he presents (upgrading military mega suit) he just come up short.
For myself, and I think this is true for many people, there's a frustration in knowing that there are cool card combinations, but not being able to get them into play and use them. This effects nearly every hero.
The new Mr. Fixer frustrates me. And by new I mean the dual crowbars rule.
Because now he has 1 card that makes him a really strong damage dealer, and people view him through that lense. My favorite setup was usually Hoist Chain and either Mantis or Tiger Claw. Mr. Fixer was an amazingly strong (H)=3 hero, who got less strong as you added players, and his styles and tools made him very good against advanced villains. I play a lot of (H)=3 against advanced villains, so I found Fixer to be really strong as a Fixer, a person who could deal with a lot of different problems.
Also my wife loves Expatriette, who is also a very strong (H)=3 hero, and who benefits a great deal from being paired with her Rook City pal Mr. Fixer. Taking those 2 and a third, most often Fanatic, Bunker (EOW), or Tachyon we won a ton of games against advanced villains.
Those 2 and Harpy make a fantastic team. Frankly once OblivAeon arrives the New Dark Watch will get a lot of play here, because it is really a fantastic team.
Ok, started off sounding a bit like a Mr. Fixer Hipster there :). But that’s ok, you’re allowed to have liked him before he was cool.
You’ve intrigued me with the Harpy comment though. I’ve been wondering if Harpy was going to be that final piece which made the Dark Watch team feel more like a team and not just a collection of random heroes.
