If someone draws Thread Explosion the whole site could come down.
Quick, where are the Adhesive Grenades?
Earlier on, I honestly thought about parsing these out into their own threads. However, I have neither the time nor the interest, with how it's grown. I wouldn't have a problem if some other obsessive-compulsive out there wants to do it, though.
Honestly I've always considered this thread to be purely entertainment rather than actually helping anyone... like rules trivia almost. Some of the questions Envisioner posits are blatantly manufactured to keep heads spinning.
I'm all for the most imaginative scenarios we can even think of, but I find it less appealing to actually attempt answering. Especially given his obvious respect for our time. "Distribution of annoyance." That made me crack a smile.
To everyone who replied after Ameena, I apologize. My intentions were honorable, but as it's clear that you are pretty much unanimous in disagreeing with my logic, I will make an attempt to respect your wishes.
That is not what I meant. Already I feel that I start up most games (unless the villain is difficulty 4 or maybe a high 3, or I'm on Advanced with a 3 or a tough 2) knowing I'm likely to win; the issue is rather how much I am frustrated in the process by an inability for my heroes (or for that matter the villain and environment) to come together. I don't derive my entertainment from the question of whether I win or lose, but rather from seeing exactly what ends up happening, often largely on a flavor basis ("Haka punches the God of Death", "the Velociraptors slip and fall on the oilslick from Fixer's Grease Gun", etc.). Consistency is just about avoiding moments in game that make you feel lame and helpless; you should have something useful to do every turn, and the villain should do something threatening every turn.
You could have the same set of heroes against the same villain in the same environment and play several games, and have none of them turn out like any of the others.
"Could", perhaps, but it's not likely. I'd prefer a game where those outcomes were completely fixed, rather than being only 90% likely to turn out a certain way. If the variance was more like 50-60%, it'd be worth the effort of shuffling all those decks, but I don't tend to believe that this is the case. Legacy and Visionary and any three other heroes versus Omnitron in an Environment that never plays a villain card will virtually always win, and I would just as soon get rid of that "virtually", cross that match off the "to play" list, and move on to the other 599 quadrillion-and-change games that someone calculated as possible, and see how those different combinations play out.
You can't really play Wraith against Citizen Dawn, for example, and go "omg this hero is crap, all her stuff got destroyed" just because in that one game, Dawn pulled a Devastating Aurora and nuked all her (and everyone else's) stuff
Actually the one time I played Wraith against Dawn, there was no Devatating Aurora, but Citizens Sweat and Tears rendered Ra and Tachyon completely unable of accomplishing anything (except Ra could Pyre for 2), leaving Wraith's Micro-Targeting Utility Throwing Ordinance as the only way of getting Dawn's HP down while her Citizens were kept immortal by 2x Return with the Dawn (which Wraith had deliberately allowed out in the hopes of turning on Ra's Drawn to the Flame, not knowing that Citizen Tears was coming).
But my point is, you say this game has a lot of variety, but in my experience, decks turn out almost the same every time, and again it's the "almost" I object to…why would you roll a six-sided die if all but one of the numbers were the same? I've played Fanatic six or seven times, and in at least four of those games, she played End of Days on turn 1 versus a villain that starts the game with minions in play. It varied exactly how much that set the villain in question back, but it always was a huge swing, and she draws it almost without fail, too early in the game for it to have any drawback for her own team as it otherwise might. Likewise, in about ten games of seeing her played by myself or others, there's at least a 50% chance that she ends the game with Wrathful Retribution on the main villain for 25+ damage. It's practically clockwork already, so I say you might as well make it literally so, and reduce the possibility that you can get screwed out of the chance to do your "shtick" just because you got a bad shuffle.
just as it would be unfair to say to Unity "omg she is overpowered" because you used her against someone who only really tends to hit the hero with the highest hp (Apostate tends to do this, I think) and thus none of your bots got destroyed.
I haven't seen Unity against Apostate, so I'll check that out…I'm inclined to suspect it's not an auto-win, just because Apostate really litters the board with extra targets and just plain dishes out a psychotic amount of damage, while being impossible to directly kill, so I suspect everyone else would die and then Unity and him would fight a war of attrition whose outcome I'm not sure of. (Given that Unity's Jewish, there's something appropriate in her single-handedly defying an anti-Christian villain. I'll probably include Fanatic in that game just in the hopes that Appy will kill her.) But Omnitron is another one who (with the exception of Sedative Flechettes) never targets the weaklings, and Unity does mop the floor with him, no question. Even an early Technological Singularity which destroyed her Modular Workbench only slowed her down a little; the game was on Advanced and was still absurdly easy. I see little reason to ever try that match again, particularly with Visionary and a dead Tachyon helping to enable Devra's maximum borkenness. That match made me feel so sorry for Omnitron that I've essentially been trying to lose to him ever since (and eventually managed it, but only through an accidental blunder).
You need to play those heroes against those villains a whole load of times to get multiple game variations and see what everyone is capable of. And of course you need to do this for every hero, every villain, and every environment. Yeah, it's gonna take you a few hundred games. Have fun ;).
Planning on it. I just figure it's never too soon to start drawing conclusions. Sometimes further experience will bear them out, other times they get overturned, and that's fun in and of itself.
I'd prefer a game where those outcomes were completely fixed, rather than being only 90% likely to turn out a certain way. If the variance was more like 50-60%, it'd be worth the effort of shuffling all those decks, but I don't tend to believe that this is the case.
I think you lose a lot of us here. A game that's completely fixed would be SO much more boring than one having even the smallest increment of variability. A game that is fixed isn't even a game. What you're looking for is a comic book/film/novel or other type of linear media to scratch this particular itch.
The villians vary in difficulty in order to provide players with a learning curve, or a sense of accomplishment, from completing each battle. You've clearly figured out Omnitron's mechanics... so don't play him anymore... or exclude the heroes you think result in certain victory. What I'm saying is that you alone control the variance of win loss percentage by the very decks you choose to play with, so you can't harp on the game for having winning-heavy scenarios which were a lot of fun to discover in the first place.
As the person who has probably still played the most games of Sentinels of the Multiverse of anyone, I can very safely say that your sample size is very limited. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just that you can really believe you have a definitive set of information on how things will behave, let alone "always" behave. Just keep playing, keep having fun, and be open minded to letting new things happen.
In demos I play at conventions in which the game is pretty much "set", I still experience new and unexpected out comes. And that is after literally THOUSANDS of games. So, as I often say, keep on saving the Multiverse.
On Apostate - we've played him plenty of times (three-player game) and he's beaten us the grand total of once. I just checked the piece of paper (well, the first piece of paper - it ran out of space a few weeks ago so we're on our second now) on which I note down the game stats (for uploading onto the Google Docs thingy) and found that one game. It was Tachyon, the Adept, and Bunker (in that order) in the Pike Industrial Complex. I can't remember how he beat us but I think he just managed to get on top of us with damage and stuff (vats probably had something to do with it as well, whether exploded or otherwise). The game took an hour and fifteen minutes over fifteen rounds so it was clearly pretty long and dragged-out. Compared to all our other games against him, it's like he got lucky, since that's the only time he's beaten us. He's also never flipped in any game we've had against him. Maybe he's easier with three people, that's a possibility. Or maybe we've got lucky every time we've fought him ;).
If you're finding Omnitron so easy, maybe you should, as Brother Dusk suggests, try varying your games against him a bit. Maybe try playing him with only three characters, and have those characters be someone like Bunker, Expatriette, and the Adept (two who are equipment-heavy and one who tends to have a fair bit of set-up time), or something like that. Or take characters with no ongoing/environment destruction - that's one way to screw yourself over in a lot of games because sooner or later something horrible will come out and you won't have any way of getting rid of it.
Like Christopher says, keep on playing, enlarge your sample size in the process, and really find out what characters can do :). Also, in the case of heroes you think you've completely figured out, play in a game where someone else controls that hero and see if there's anything else about them that you've missed or otherwise never realised, hadn't considered, or thought wouldn't work :).
One, I didn't say I wanted nothing to ever vary, I just said I wanted all experiences to be equivalent in value. The cards should do different things, but all of those things should be equally powerful, at least in context. For instance, it's potentially acceptible that Fixer's Charge < Haka's Elbow Smash, since Fixer has Jack Handle and Dual Crowbars and such…but he doesn't always draw those cards, so sometimes Charge is just a terrible card (especially if you instead compare it to Legacy's Back-Fist Strike, which is still more damage and can get a Surge of Strength boost on top of it). Thusly, I want all characters to be interchangeable, so that one can choose on a pure flavor basis what one wants to play, without affecting win percentage at all.
And two, games are experiential, so even a 100% fixed game is not the same as a piece of static media, because you don't just read it, you play through it. If I have one actual criticism of SOTM (as opposed to just nitpicking or wishing aloud for perfection), it's that the game sometimes seems to play itself…you don't always have much of a diversity of options, and I can see how that would be a turn-off for some players (leading me to kind of apologize for that fact to some of the newbies I introduce to it). But I am not one of those players…to me, even if the game were 100% automated, I'd still enjoy playing through the randomized sequence of "this happens, then that, then that", at least for the first several dozen times until I'd seen all of the variety the game contains. Having now played at least once against every villain, three times in every environment (except the Time Cataclysm and Pike Industrial, I've only hit those twice), and 5-7 times with every hero in various combinations, I still feel there's plenty for me to discover, and so I'll keep playing, even if I'm starting to feel that some subsets of the game's options are "solved".
I'm not saying I don't like SOTM exactly the way it is. I'm just saying, it could be better IMO.
You've clearly figured out Omnitron's mechanics… so don't play him anymore… or exclude the heroes you think result in certain victory.
Indeed, that's precisely what I've been doing. I will never use Visionary against him again, unless I'm burned out from a miserable loss and want to play an easy game just for the sake of my mood. Probably not Unity either. And my next meeting with him will be in one of the Environments that really make him shine, like Ruins of Atlantis (though I will in turn try to pick heroes who have a fighting chance in such cases, such as Expatriette with her Flak Jacket or Nightmist with her Amulet).
What I'm saying is that you alone control the variance of win loss percentage by the very decks you choose to play with, so you can't harp on the game for having winning-heavy scenarios which were a lot of fun to discover in the first place.
…This is true as far as it goes.
By saying variance should exist in a game I mean variance in outcome. That's what separates a game from linear narrative. A game I know with 100% certainty that I am going to win is utterly boring no matter the permutations of what happens in the middle, and frankly I have better things to do with my time than move cards around on a table if I know what is going to happen in the end.
If that's the experience I'm looking for (knowing a hero character will triumph, as they often do), I'd never ask a card game to do that for me over a book or what have you. Maybe you conflate the two because SotM tries so hard/pretends to be like a static medium in theme.
Does anyone else understand what he is actually saying here? You want to be able to magic any character's strongest card into your hand because you drew Charge and the guy before you could play a better card, Back Fist Strike? Whatever your point, I do not think comparing the absolute worst draw you could ever get in one deck to the best setup in another is productive at all. That's just the nature of random card draw, and you'll have to go farther than these forums to fix elements of randomness in games.
I think you are talking about balance between characters. Balance isn't about making every character interchangeable. Well… I take that back, a game designed with identical decks for all players would be especially easy to balance. But again, that's boring. SotM takes a different tack by having characters that excell at certain things better than others. Put together on a team, you hope to find some synergy that carries you to victory, and each person has fun doing their own part. Does the game do it perfectly? Nope. Someone will always end up standing out as exceptionally helpful.
So who has the best deck? Depends on how you define best. Best for producing irreducible damage with consistency? Mr. Fixer. Best at stacking the villian deck? Visionary. Characters who vary only in flavor sounds like you should be playing checkers. We're trying to play chess over here.
Any and all variances in outcome are only a more sophisticated variation on flipping a coin to decide whether you win or lose. It's not that I don't care at all, but I don't consider it to be the important part of the game. I want to have fun, whether I win or lose - and I have no interest whatsoever in there being a variance of whether I have fun or not.
You want to be able to magic any character's strongest card into your hand
No, I want all of their cards to be tied for the title of strongest card.
Whatever your point, I do not think comparing the absolute worst draw you could ever get in one deck to the best setup in another is productive at all. That's just the nature of random card draw
Which is precisely the heart of the problem. Randomness is a way to make outcomes different every time (at least in theory). They do NOT need to be different in degree of usefulness, however, only in the exact details of how they're used. It'd be perfectly valid to have a game in which every card contained the same total balance of various disparate values - to use Magic: the Gathering as an example, you could say that one mana was always worth 3 damage, whether dealing it or preventing it, or +3 attack or +3 defense, and as long as the players always had the same amount of mana and the same degree of tempo and card advantage, all those options would be balanced, and you could just decide which one you liked personally, felt most like playing at that moment, and it would be just as effective in any case. (That's not actually how Magic works - Lightning Bolt is a better card than Healing Salve because you can play a land on your first turn and hit the opponent, and he hasn't yet played a land that would let him prevent the hit. But it would be possible to create a version of the game in which all players gain mana, cards, and other resources at the exact same rate, so that the choice of whether to focus on attack or defense would be entirely aesthetic.)
Characters who vary only in flavor sounds like you should be playing checkers. We're trying to play chess over here.
Both chess and checkers are utterly boring to me. There's no flavor at all in checkers and only a faint trace of it in chess. On the other hand, I've been very into a couple of games about dragons lately - the actual gameplay has nothing to do with dragons, but just the fact that the cards have pictures of dragons on them makes me enjoy playing the game more than if they were just playing cards. What can I say, I'm fairly easily amused.
If every hero was as good as any other, there'd be no point in having so many heroes, because they'd all be the same apart from the pictures (which sounds like what you'e saying you want). It's like you're saying you don't want randomness in a card game. Well, umm…it's kind of the point of a card game that most of it is random, hence the term "luck of the draw" - you don't know what cards are going to come out, or in what order…well, you might know the cards (if you've learned the deck well enough to know their names and quantities, as I expect some of us have with at least a few of the decks), but not the order. If all the cards were basically the same (which they'd have to be to all "be tied for the title of strongest card", otherwise some would be stronger than others under certain cisrumstances, like they are right now), then the game would just be the same every time, because you'd know what was gonna happen before you even started playing. After a few games, it would get so boring because of this predictability. As it is, many of us have played hundreds of games (at least) and we're still not bored :).
I think the point Envisioner is trying to make has to do with homogenization of any given hand, rather than of the cards themselves.
In research, to get a good sample, you have to randomize, and the hallmark of a good randomization is that every sample is more or less the same. The individuals are of course still different from each other, but taking any random group of these individuals together, you get the same summary characteristics. I think this is what Envisioner wants: he wants every hand/game/whatever to have the same amount of fun or effectivity for any random sampling of cards drawn, such that every card is considered or equal awesomeness.
This, of course, is patently impossible: this is a card game, and there will always be variations. Moreover, this isn't research; the added risk is part of what makes all this so fun. Having everyone have the same win percentage/effectivity/power would make the game boring, since whatever combo of heroes, villain, and environment I choose, it will all just come down to the same thing, just different names and pictures. Having an equivalent card in every deck would defeat the purpose of having different decks in the first place. Changes in win-loss percentages are thus inherently a part of such variation 
Also, you seem to have completely missed the point here. I'm not even sure if you're kidding or not. Regardless, allow me to add to this analogy.
What you want this game to be is checkers, where one piece is just as good as the next, and the only difference of each of the pieces is shape and color. What we have here is an incredibly complex game of chess, where (if you will notice) each and every piece is of differing "effectivity", and yet they all come together to save the Multiverse! (I may have lost the analogy somewhere there)
I wasn't sure before, but after his last post I'm pretty sure he's trolling. Which is why I'm not putting much effort into this. His hypothetical ideal game doesn't make any sense, because what makes a game fun is having meaningful choice. Every card being functionally equal makes the game play itself - you could pick any random card out of your hand and not be in any better or worse position. So what you have is five to seven decks just playing a card from the top, resolving, and finishing the turn, then moving on to the next ( behavior we've come to associate with villian decks). There might be a minimal choice remaining in which targets you want to hit, but that isn't significant compared to the (now absent) variety of picking which card to play. What he really wants, and I've said this before, is a novel or a comic book that's written on cards which he can play one by one. It would make a horrible, boring game for babies, but that's the ideal game I guess.
Anyway, this thread has inevitably devolved into what every thread on these boards has come to be lately: Envisioner somehow holding yet another impossible position, and everyone else taking their turn at blowing holes the size of Kansas in it. I'm not in a place to complain really, because he also creates about 70% of the activity here, so whatever, but just know that is what you are participating in at this point.
I'm just here for the lulz at this point.
I am going to recomend to stop posting here then please. Let this thread die.
Nope. Not trying to hurt anyone else's feelings, just discussing my own. I might be an oblivious, self-important twit or some similar insult, but I'm not a troll.
His hypothetical ideal game doesn't make any sense, because what makes a game fun is having meaningful choice.
I don't agree. What makes a game fun is variety, even if the variety is just that you flip up a top card to find out which color moves this turn, or roll dice to see how far you advance along a track (the latter describes Chutes and Latters, which IIRC offers the players absolutely no choices beyond which color of pawn is theirs). Those aren't terribly deep games, mostly they only work for small children, but they are games, and they can be fun if you're in the mood for extremely light entertainment. Subjecting yourself to a challenge compares to that much the way masochism compares to conventional sexual desires - it's a more intense form of stimulation, for those who have become (or always were) too jaded to appreciate the lighter pleasures.
What's the point in every city having its own football team? The multiple heroes allows you to pick one that's "yours". They don't need to differ more than aesthetically. If you like simplicity, play Ra; if you like constant activity, play Tachyon; if you like to build up to incredible power, play O-X; if you like to durdle your way through an incredibly long turn to largely incremental benefit, play AA.
It's like you're saying you don't want randomness in a card game. Well, umm…it's kind of the point of a card game that most of it is random, hence the term "luck of the draw"
I want randomness to determine WHICH outcomes occur, but none of them being better or worse than the other ones that might have occurred. I don't want to be lucky sometimes and unlucky others; I just want different varieties of exactly the same total amount of luck.
Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. When I'm playing Fanatic, I virtually always would rather draw Smite the Transgressor than Brutal Censure. The latter is 2 damage and draw a card, which is a pretty negligible effect; it might be handy if I have nothing else to do with my card play that turn, but against any sort of reduction, I'll just take 2 cards for my turn. But Smite the Transgressor, even if I can't use it now, will be an amazing card later once I get out Absolution or Sacrosanct Martyr. (It does deal a less useful damage type, so in theory they might be balanced for that reason, but in practice I don't find them so.) This inevitably makes me unhappy every time I draw Brutal Censure, because there are very few circumstances under which it's an especially useful card, and I wish I had Smite the Transgressor instead.
For others, perhaps. I just find it to be a waste of my invested time and effort. I usually win the game anyway (granted I'm not playing on Advanced in most cases), but often I felt helpless, frustrated, or otherwise bad about my exact position several times during the game, and that makes me a sad panda. I would rather have had consistent awesomeness all the way through the game…I recognize that this is impractical to achieve, just as very few movies have every scene be equally cool. I'm just saying, that would be ideal to me.
Also, you seem to have completely missed the point here. I'm not even sure if you're kidding or not.
In general I am virtually never kidding, unless I include a smiley or otherwise make it extremely obvious that I didn't seriously mean it. (I also tend to be very afraid of insulting my friends whenever I speak; the fact that I often succeed in insulting online strangers is due to my not knowing them as people, and thus being unable to guess how they'll take things that I say.)
Regardless, allow me to add to this analogy.What you want this game to be is checkers, where one piece is just as good as the next, and the only difference of each of the pieces is shape and color.
And, most importantly, where on the board they are placed at any given moment. That alone gives them variation.
What we have here is an incredibly complex game of chess
Yes, but it's more as if you put the pieces on the board at random, so sometimes your king is in your front row with your opponent's queen pointed right at it, and you lose immediately. That's what I want to avoid! Chess is a strategy game with NO randomness at all (unless you roll a die to decide who plays white), and I'm fine with some pieces being pawns and some being queens in that case. But Sentinels uses too much randomness to be a pure strategy game, and I find that including luck in a strategy game spoils the strategic element of it. To varying degrees; Sentinels does much better in this regard than a lot of games, but I'm always pushing for perfection.
Just by adjusting the numbers on some cards, adding "draw a card" or "gain 1 HP" clauses to cards that are currently weak, adding drawback clauses to cards that are currently strong, and otherwise tweaking the details, you could eventually achieve a perfect balance, where there are no bad draws in the abstract. There would still be situationally bad draws, like Legacy getting four melee One-shots when Voss has his Starship in play. But there would never be an absolutely bad draw, like Argent Adept getting three Instruments and a Vernal Sonata in his opening hand. Nor would there be absurdly good draws, like Arcane Cadence into Arcane Cadence. The latter means AA has a disproportionately good game, and the former a disproportionately good one. I'd rather that he always got Arcane Cadence somewhere in the middle of the game, or maybe that he always got it on his first hand (he does seem to need the extra help in order to be any good), but only once. Just as Vernal Sonata can't keep looping itself, I don't think Cadence ought to be able to chain into itself, as it's far too swingy. And I don't like how some of AA's songs are almost useless (Cedistic Dissonant when you don't have a spare Instrument, Rhapsody of Vigor when everyone's at full HP but the villain is close to an alt-win, Rhythms in general), while others are godly (Harmonies in general, especially Supertonic, and also Sarabande of Destruction in some games). The non-song cards are similarly questionable - Vernal Sonata is wasted if there's nothing in the trash yet, Polyphoric flare is only good if you have Instruments out, and Silver Shadow only if you have a song with a good Accompany (Counterpoint Bulwark and Syncopated Onslaught do NOT have good Accompanies, Cedistic Dissonant's is only good if you have cards to spare, and Alacritous Subdominant's destroys it; Supertonic is usually good, though not if you're at full HP, and that leaves Inventive Preparation, a card whose Perform is quite weak and thus one which is generally less worth playing in the early game, as having the only really good Accompany).
Obviously, Argent Adept is one of the heroes with the most capacity to frustrate me. Unity is another one, which is how we got on this whole tangent in the first place. All I've been saying is that I would like those characters better if they were more consistent, with power levels that were a steady 45-degree climb throughout the game (barring a mass-destruction card), rather than some games having them explode out the gate and steamroll the opposition in three turns, while other games they sit there drawing two cards turn after turn until they finally become relevant.
MtG needs to be balanced on a card level, because people can pick whatever cards they want. However, SotM has a fixed deck. This means it needs to be balanced in a deck level, not a card level.
Foe example, let’s say you have a 5 card deck, where each card deals damage. There are a couple of w ays to do this:
- 2-2-2-2-2
- 6-1-1-1-1
- 5-2-1-1-1
- 4-2-2-1-1
Etc.
These decks are all balanced, but they offer different variety, situations, and gameplay.
You are saying you prefer #1. That’s fine, but I don’t think SotM is built that way.
Bolded for emphasis. Great way to visually explain that Pydro.
I can see Envisioner's point in trying to seek the perfectly balanced game, and I think that game would function like this:
Let's define perfect balance as the ability to have every possible hand represent the same usefulness "value" and let's define every hand as a selection of any 4 cards hand out of the 40 card deck (that's already a simplification since hand size can vary, but let's go with this assumption). In essence, for any 4 card combination to have the same overall value, every card would have to have the same individual value, otherwise you run the risk of having all the higher valued cards come up in a single draw and give you an overpowered hand.
Now, if we assign each possible effect of a card a discreet usefulness value, it is then still possible to achieve the same overall value with a variety of cards by assigning different combinations to each. For instance, let's say dealing damage is 1 point of value per damage dealt, and healing is 1 point per HP healed, and playing an extra card is 2 points of value, etc. So you could have one card deal 2 damage and allow you to draw 1 card while having another card heal 1 HP and allow you to play an extra card and they would have the same value.
If you assign every possible effect a discreet value, which could then be modified by things like damage types for extra variety, then theoretically, you could create an infinite combination of cards that all have the same value but are flavored differently... so, theoretically, any combination of heroes with any combination of hands would have the same chance of winning a game against any given fight scenario (whether you win or lose would still be determined by villain and environment draw and how you played your cards).
This might work in theory, but I think in reality it would be impossible to assign all the different effects a real discreet usefulness values for two main reasons 1) there are so many effects in the game that assigning them an absolute value that stays constant in all situations would be impossible, would healing everyone be given a fixed usefulness value of 2? What if there were only three Heroes? What if there are five? 2) most effects are dependent on what else has been played, what the villain/environment are doing, what else is in your hands, and what the game state is. For example, healing has more value later in the game since it prevents you from dying... and even more value if you are the last person left since it prevents you from losing.
I think to make this system be truly balanced you would have to limit the effects available, and you would have to limit their interaction, otherwise perfect balance would be unachievable. And what you would end up in the end, I believe, would be a game where you have essentially the same 5 heroes represented in 20 different decks except for different art and different flavor (in the sense of damage types or back story, etc.)
I like Sentinels because it is not that game. It is not a perfect strategy game, it is a game filled with characters that, I feel, come alive in the game. Each hero is unique... and while some are more useful than others in some situations and some are very frustrating at times, I do have a choice in which ones I will play when. I don't have to love all of them all the time... and I never ever have to play regular Bunker ever again. And I'm OK with that, because when my friend plays Bunker... he is a beast. It's got something for everyone, which is more important than having everything for me.
(OK, that's not entirely true, my girlfriend hates the game... it's got too many words for her taste... but you get my point)
EDIT: tons of typos fixed... but probably not all of them.
@ Jagarciao - You are now my favorite person on the entire forum. Thank you.