How about instead of tokens you use discards, something like when you play an ammo card you can put asmany cards from your hand under it and every time you use the ammo you get rid of one card. If there are no cards under it when you use it then you destroy it.
Why not give the ammo HP that decreases after each use? That gives it a limit without adding any new counting mechanisms. Gotta use it up fast, though, or foes might damage your gun and you'll lose some of it!
Why not add
"When you would destroy this card, you may discard a card from your hand instead"
to all ammo cards?
I've played a few games with her where I tweaked Quick Draw to allow you to get any gun and put it into your hand, and limiting Arsenal Access to ammo. It actually worked out pretty well. The only game it made a significant change with was one against Plague Rat where I was able to get a Tactical Shotgun out in the first round. So far this is working really well to allow her to get the gun she needs for a particular situation without making her overpowered, and it's a pretty simple change.
Platinum, How did the ammo tokens work out? Did it break Exp? :O
Jagarciao, that actually sounds like a very good suggestion. It would add another element of choice: should I keep these cards in my hand, or do I need more uses of this ammo? Of course, I can imagine Hollow Points and Nitro Glycerin to have a crap load under them, but they would still be limited, and of course if the gun they are attached to is destroyed, bye-bye ammo... I think I'll try this out, see if it works :P As our resident "Expatriette is fine as she is" expert, Platinum, would you do us the honor of trying it out as well? :P
i point out my alternate power that people seemed to have missed - one of Expats major issues is having ammo in hand and no guns at the setart of the game.
Alternate Power: Hold Out Gun - Expatriate Deals 1 target 0 projectile damage. This counts as a gun (So you can play ammo next to her character card)
Its obviously less powerful than having a gun out, doing 0 damage, but it allows you to use those ammo cards you have in your hand that you would be stuck double drawing and at least contribute /something
Ooooh lynkfox, that's another one worth trying out. Though wouldn't become much less useful when you finally DO have a gun in hand? Unlike load which is still useful later on. And how does this power affect Unload? :O
Well it says gun, so I would imagine it could count for unload. A lot of heroes have base powers that are no longer used once they have their set up, or have cards in their deck that gives them a purely better version of their base power.
exactly, on both counts - so it would count as a gun for extra powers uses (so if you had any kind of damage boost it be worth while, or a good place to put down an ammo for later) - and like Wraith, Bunker, Argent Adept, … once you get going how often do you touch their base powers? heck once Expat gets speed loading out and a couple of good ammos to draw through i rarely touch Load,.
It might be a few days till I get to test any more Expatriette variants, as it's the end of my school's quarter, and I have a ton of grading to wrap up. Plus, I'm demoing my own game at conventions over the next two weekends.
if I get a chance, I'll whip out my SotM, but if someone else wants to take up the testing, feel free!
Had a really cool game with Expatriette once. One of the other team members was Ra, and I think the other may have been Legacy but I'm not sure. Anyway, we were against Gloomweaver. Expatriette had a damage buff from somewhere (possibly Imbued Fire, if not then something from Legacy if he was indeed in the game) and Hairtrigger Reflexes out. Whenever a Zombie was played, insta-kill. Whenever a Cultist was played, it'd get hit but not killed by the Reflexes. Then we'd let it hit Ra first and his Flame Barrier would finish it off. The resultant Zombie would, of course, then be insta-killed by Expatriette. Good game :D.
Ameena, beautiful :> That's the kind of thing you just love to see, yes? :> Though I think as a whole Gloomweaver...kinda sucks. Have you seen the *suggested* improvements to Gloomweaver? Check out Spiff's website to see it :P
Yeah, I saw them - stuff like zombies getting more damage, heroes with pins in them being the only ones who can attack their pin (ie other heroes can't hit a pin that's stuck in someone else), and so on. But I like having another "easy" villain to counter all the nasty buggers. Mind you, Gloomy did get lucky on his cards once, a few weeks ago, and beat us, which was kind of embarrassing :P. He didn't flip (he never has, for us), but I think a combination of hard-hitting cultists and (probably) horrible environment cards just whittled us down.
At least he's only beaten us once. It gets a bit frustrating against some villains who have amuch higher win rate - for us, that's probably Plague Rat (the constant irreducible damage is nasty) and the Matriarch. The latter beat us in a terrible four rounds the other day, though it took about half an hour because of the working out of who was getting hit when birds got killed. We were in the Tomb of Anubis and a combination of Akana (play an environment card when a villain target is destroyed) and Mdjai (hit every target for 1 melée damage at the end of the turn) meant that in a single turn we were all practically wiped and the entire environment deck was in play. The game ended the following round when the same thing finished us off (Lilian had played a Darken the Sky to put all the birdies back in play during her turn) :P.
Upthread, I suggested an alternate base power: Search your deck or discard pile for PRIDE or PREJUDICE. Put it into play.
There was one reply:
I don't think it would make equipment destruction meaningless, because she doesn't have many cards that do damage directly. So if her equipment were destroyed then either (a) she has a gun in hand to play and uses it or (b) she has to skip her card play to use the power, and doesn't get to make an attack on the turn after losing equipment. In the second case, all she has out is Pride or Prejudice - which just does as much damage as the base character powers which do direct damage.
So equipment destruction would slow her down for a turn or two. If the goal is to give her reliable access to guns, I don't see how it could do any more than that.
I could imagine not using this power at all in many games, if I had decent cards. It makes her more secure than her usual base power, so give her fewer hit points to compensate.
TBH, I'd rather draw the extra card and try to get to a set up faster than use Hold Out Gun with a hand full of ammo early. The only exception would be if we had to kill a thing this turn. But I don't usually take Expatriette if I feel like I'm going to need her damage on turn 1, because she's so susceptible to bad draws.
Maybe a riff on Eternal Haka's power? Draw a card. You may discard an ammo card. If you do, draw 2 cards. This'll help mitigate ammo-heavy starting draws and get to the cards you want, both guns and utility. She's sacrificing one of her big strengths of being able to get a fat setup in a turn or 2 even if her entire tableau gets wiped. I kinda feel like a lot of the promo hero cards are about sacrificing a strength to cover a weakness, and this would be in line with that.
Let's start with the claim that Expatriette is already powerful enough, so any tweak is just to make her more fun, not more powerful.
Expatriette's base power allows her to play more cards that other heros. If nothing let's you draw additional cards, you're stuck only being able to use that power 3 times before you've got an empty hand. There doesn't seem to be much incentive in skipping your turn to draw an additional card, because you loose out on the opportunity to use a power and deal damage. How do we entice her to skip turns?
I love the idea of ammo cards. I see her base power as a way to drop a ton of ammo, and then use it. What would happen if Speed Loading did not put a card on top of your deck, but instead read "Power: take all ammo cards from the trash and add them to your hand." You use up your power for that turn, but you've also got plenty of options for loading on following turns. It encourages more use of Pride and Prejudice to burn through ammo. It also encourages the use of ammo other than just Hollow Point every turn. I imagine the movie sceens where empty bullet shells pour out of the gun and cover the floor.
Agreed, thats one reason I liked the run and gun power suggested: do 1 target 1 damage and draw a card.
I think the big thing about Expatriette's power is that it makes spending a turn drawing cards less painful. When faced with opposition that's essentially immune to damage, you can draw cards, or put out a Flak Jacket and an RPG Launcher, or whatever. A lot of the time, you're going to prefer your gun to your base power anyway, but I have found that sometimes you're better off playing two cards than doing a couple of points of damage.
I jsut recently played another game with Expatriette, no modifications, against Voss. It. Was. Beautiful. While it was ultimately Fanatic who burned Voss down to nothing with Wrathful Retribution, it was Exp who was able to mow down the field of minions. She was invaluable: instead of taking multiple turns to take down 2 or three baddies, it took just one of Exp's to Assault Rifle them all to death, with some assitance from good ol' Imbued Fire. And Exp always just seemed to have an RPG, just when the environment threw something nasty at us. Point is: wow. Expatriette might just not need a fix.
....of course, I was able to draw Assault Rifle in my opening hand soooooo, you get the point.
Yeah she's great when you start with her good cards. I played recently and got Pride and Prejudice in my opening hand. She did great. I think that a lot of the talk of "fixing" her is more about the fact that she doesn't get her good cards all too often because she has no extra card draw (and possibly zero when speed loading) and her search cards pale in comparison to what we see with other heros.
As a side note on speed loading, you can't really use that card if you want any opportunity to search for other key cards like unloads or RPGs and I think that is frustrating to people. If she could somehow speed load AND see new cards it would help a lot. Thats why the idea of Run and Gun is growing on me.
I'm wondering how fun it would be to have the run and gun and be able to play an ammo next to that. Might be too good, but I would really like to see how it works out! Actually it wouldn't be much better than Haka and Scholar's 2 damage and draw power. It could be better depending on the ammo, but you would also need the right ammo and the speed loading card in play so it would take more to set up.
Even if you can't put ammo on it I like the idea of "This turn I'll choose to do less damage to get an extra card".