Well, *that* was one of the more brutal smackdowns I've ever received in SotM. Setup (randomized) was Bunker, Tachyon, Haka, and Tempest vs Citizen Dawn (advanced) in Megalopolis.
As her setup, CD put out Citizen Sweat, Citizen Tears, and Citizen Truth. Her turn 1 play was Blinding Blast. So my heroes took considerably less initial HP damage than typical, but had to discard *ALL* their cards. Plus, The Tears/Sweat combo would keep making us discard 2 more cards every round (if we *had* that many), and Citizen Truth was very effectively protecting that combo. In Round 1, 3 out of my 4 heroes had nothing better to do than draw 2 cards that were doomed to be discarded, whereas Haka got to do a whopping *1* point of damage to Citizen Truth.
Things improved ever-so-slightly when a Rooftop Combat came out, allowing Haka to do 2 points a round to Truth, and Tempest to do 1. Still, it was literally round 7 before I got a chance to play *any* cards, having been forced to discard a collective *56* cards up to that point! By then my team's HP were at 4/1/2/0, and it's not like we had *good* cards to play, so it was soon over. Over the course of the whole game, CD did far more damage to *herself* (via Channel the Eclipse) than I did.
Amusingly, in the rematch (still in progress), CD had almost the oposite setup: no control cards to speak of, but tons of raw damage: Assault, Battery, Hammer, and Anvil. I'm two heroes down in that game, but we have a decent chance at least...
I generally hate playing Citizen Dawn. You usually win but the games can potentially take 3 hours.
I've had a game with the Sweat+Tears starting combo too (no Truth as H=3) with a first play of Blinding Blast. We never had a chance to get going.