Fanatic + Defeated Tachyon = OP?

Other Games SotM Game Engine
1

First time poster here, apologies if I’m in the wrong place here :slight_smile:

So I just played a 3 hero solo game, and I came across a combo which seems a bit overpowered. I thought I’d bring it up to see if I’d messed up a rule, or if everyone already knows, or whatever.

I was playing Fanatic, Tachyon and The Visionary, and the Tombs of Anubis, against the Ennead. It had been so simple at first… I was lucky enough to almost defeat the 3 starting Villains with no more coming out… But before I could finish the job, another got pulled. And another. In a couple of turns, Tachyon and Visionary both got toasted, with Fanatic low on health. I almost gave up, but…

Fanatic has the Aegis, 2 copies. As long as you’re wearing one, you can’t die; you lose the Aegis and get a health boost instead. She also has a card (I forget the name) which does obscene damage when she’s low on health… The worse she hurts, the more it hits for. And when Tachyon is down, each turn she can either let someone pull a trashed card back into their hand, or let them draw an extra card.

This gives crazy synergy. When the Aegis drops, you play the other if you have it, and have Tachyon pull the discarded copy back in your hand. Otherwise, draw cards until you can play the damage card for 20-29 damage, then have Tachyon pull that into your hand until the next opportunity arises, playing other cards here and there where useful (especially ones that let you draw more). Presto, you’re almost invincible and dropping huge damage every few turns. Most of the remaining villains got one-shotted. Visionary kept the worst of the environment cards at bay, thankfully.

It has flaws, especially against Ennead. The constant card discarding means that, if you time things wrong, your discard pile can dissappear and take your nuke or armour with it. End Of Days usually helped when it came up due to Set… The only equipment needed is the Aegis, and that isn’t affected by EOD. The main pain was when cards came up that discarded equipment and would affect the Aegis, which is why I kept the copy in-hand as often as possible once I found it. Obviously there was still luck involved… Enough damage in a turn would be enough to get rid of Aegis and go on to finish Fanatic… But mostly it was just a matter of time once I got in this situation.

With this in mind, it actually seems viable to go for a self-destructive Tachyon with other characters there to stop Fanatic from pulling too much damage once she drops to the health levels she wants, or to help her draw more cards to power the big attack. Tachyon can do big hits herself of course, but only after cycling through most of her deck. A downed Tachyon, and enough support or luck, can let Fanatic do the same thing every turn until she needs to put on Aegis or draw more cards.

So… I’m missing something. I have to be, right? Because it seems a bit crazy that a two-character combo (based around one of them being defeated) could lead to pseudo-permanent almost-invulnerability and huge, repeating damage outputs with minor equipment needed.

2

Totally legit. Wrathful Retribution is always a great choice to fish back out of the trash. Keep in mind though that you need 3 cards to discard each time you play Retribution. Edit: just double checked, you must discard exactly 3 cards for Retribution to deal its damage.

There are tons of players (myself included) who love to burn AbZero's health as fast as possible because even when he is down, he has some straight up ballin incap powers. Tempest even had to have an incap power nerfed in the Enhanced Edition because it was just too tasety to be legal haha.

Welcome to the forums

3

Thanks for the confirmation, and the welcome :slight_smile:

And yes, I remembered the card discarding; that’s another reason Tachyon works well, when she’s not pulling from the trash she can let you draw extra anyway, which is nice. I may have to look at other heroes’ incap abilities, and see what could make this even better… I’m liking the flavour of a holy warrior urged on by the souls of her vanquished allies. :smiley:

4

Mr. Fixer's, take an equipment card from trash and put it directly in play. Allowing Fanatic to never have to spend her play phase on Aegis and Tachyon won't have to retrieve it!

5

Oh, that’s just about perfect! And when she has it on he can grab her sword instead (Absolution?) for a touch extra health, and as a fallback when she just needs that little extra damage. :smiley:

6

Haha that's very cool :D. I like when you can cycle some kind of cool card into your trash and back over and over again. I can remember one game where I was the Scholar (can't rememberwho we were fighting, or where) and I played DDA* because I like the randomness. Then I think during my Draw phase for that turn I drew my other copy of DDA. So next round, I used it to get the first copy back out of my trash again, so I got it back in-hand in my Draw phase. And repeat for the rest of the game, letting the other two heroes basically play a whole bunch of free cards (obviously not always a good idea but in this case there weren't really any "I don't really want that card to come up" cards). I think one of the other two heroes was TLT, which meant I continued to get extra draw anyway and built up a nice big hand. I intended to go into some Elemental forms if things started getting nasty, but we were never in any real danger from whomever it was we were fighting so I just chained DDA for every round except the final one, in which I think I Turned Loose on the villain or something (with my lovely big hand I'd been building all game thanks to TLT) and nuked him/her to bits. Something's telling me we may have been fighting the Ennead (I have an image of Set being the last villain standing) but I really can't remember now. It was good fun anyway :D.

 

 

 

*In case you're not too familiar with this one, being new to the game, DDA is Don't Dismiss Anything, a one-shot which lets each player choose to either put a card from their trash to the top of their deck, or put the top card of their deck into play.

7

But for incap-power cheese, it's hard to top Horus of Two Horizons Ra.  Against any villain who doesn't play extra cards, and has at least one relatively harmless card in his deck, he can guarantee that villain never gets any further into their deck after Ra drops.  Imagine The Chairman forced to constantly replay an Enforcer over and over and over again.  (You'd have to kill the Operative first, but that was probably your plan anyway; at least it would mean there could never be a prison break, which is huge enough.)  Not so great against Spite, Omnitron, or of course the Vengeance Five, but a lot of villains will just insta-lose to that incap ability.

8

I remembered another cool game I had which involved cycling a card back for Fanatic - I was playing the Adept. Fanatic had used Wrathful Retribution on her last turn so it was in her trash (her turn was after mine). I used Vernal Sonata to get it back on top of the deck, then Counterpoint Bulwark to enable it to be drawn again. Then came Fanatic's turn, BAM, second Wrathful Retribution of the game, which I think also ended up being the finishing move :D. Okay so this only works if Fanatic has a whole load of spare cards in-hand to discard for Wrathful Retribution to work, but in theory we could've done that as many times as I had copies of Vernal Sonata in-hand (so, up to four unless my deck got shuffled and they started coming up again) :D.

9

I like Legacy/Visionary/Omnitron-X for the brokenness.

Legacy plays take down.

Destroys it at the start of his turn, Visionary uses Mental Divergence to put it on top of his deck, Omnitron Timeshifts it back into play.

Villains get to cry a lot and lose horribly.

(By like I mean I actually avoid that hero order because it ruins the game)

10

Haha that's cool :D.

Had an epic game once of TLT, Adept, and Unity (in that order) in which we had an ovepowering victory. TLT let all of us draw loads of cards. I got out Alacritous Subdominant (or was it Inventive Preparation actually...one of the two anyway) within the first couple of turns and spent most of the game letting Unity put out all the bots she'd been drawing (sometimes two in a turn, I think) thanks to TLT. So she never really needed to try and put any out on her own turn (can't remember whether she did or not). I can't remember who we were fighting but they didn't last long :D.

11

Just think of these kind of steamrolly games as compensation for the times when the Chairman opens on The Muscle and The Contract and then Prison Breaks them as soon as you finally get them killed, or when Iron Legacy starts with two Galvanized in play, or when the lowly Baron Blade manages to incap a couple heroes (through lots of Slashburns and Hastens and Devious Disruptions) within three rounds and then pulls down the moon before the survivors can stop him.  Sometimes you just win, and sometimes you just lose.  You never know which until you shuffle all those cards.

Not everyone appreciates a game like that, but we're all here because we're among the ones who do.

12

I remember a game where we had the Dreamer totally locked down. We were a turn away from victory. Argent Adept played Vernal Sonata to put Grease Gun on top of Mr. Fixer's deck. Then Omnitron-X put it into play. The Environment didn't have Equipment destruction. Mr. Fixer had Dual Crowbars and Harmony and all that stuff. Nothing could go wrong...

Except a Phosphorescent Chamber/Dark Hero/Treacherous Ape combo. At the start of turn, Mr. Fixer picks up his Tool Box. He puts down his Grease Gun. He gets shot in the back and incapacitated by a Treacherous Ape. At the start of Argent Adept's turn, he gets shot in the back and incapacitated by a Treacherous Ape.

13

I just confidently took on Advanced Mad Bomber Blade in Rook City.  I wouldn't call it a steamroll, but Blade clearly thrives on being underestimated.  I knew I should probably have had AZ play defensively as I usually do, but I was in a hurry to get rid of the ever-deadlier Mad Bomber and get onto the I-thought-pretty-harmless Death Ray side, so I had AZ burn his health like Ronway usually does, dealing lots of damage with Isothermic Transducer whenever the bombs went off around him.  Meanwhile, O-X largely avoided Components and just had Elemental Plating + RPS.  Alone of the heroes, Naturalist played defensively, with Resilient Hide doing a lovely job of protecting him; Unity just wasn't having great luck.  The Environment put some DR on the Baron, then a Racketeer shot us a little, and Natch went into Gazelle so this wouldn't happen again.  Unity popped a Pylon to make Bee Bot and Platform Bot, neither of which would survive for a moment against the 7-damage Bomb that was coming - so since none of the other heroes had Enviro destruction (O-X Timeshifted out a Bio-Engineering Beam just after this), Unity ordered one of her new Bots to kill the other one, so that in dying it would take out the Twisting Back Alleys and leave the Baron fully vulnerable again.

So the Baron explodes for the third time, and after the dust settles, he himself has just 2 HP left, while Unity is at 5 and AZ at 6, with OX also in single digits and Natch at about 12.  Then the Baron plays his card for the turn - Hasten Doom, followed by Devious Disruption.  Unity goes down no matter what, and I decide that AZ with all his equipment gone and 1 HP left isn't worth much, so I kill him too (he dies in pretty much half of my games, despite my usually playing him defensively, but this is the first time I recall having allowed him to die on purpose, when it wasn't a matter of a hit going to some almost-dead hero and him being the least useful).  But OX seems like he still has a chance, so I let him keep the Plating+RPS combo, enabling him to instantly kill the Mad Bomber.  I had not read ahead to refresh my memory exactly how the promo works, not realizing that O-X was going to lose his stuff anyway, and that Advanced games are a really bad place to kill Alpha Blade in the middle of his own turn.  Blade whips out his Death Ray and immediately charges it with the souls of a fallen Blade Battalion.  A round later, Scum and Villainy into a couple of Hasten Dooms has finished off O-X and left Natch at just 2 HP (and, just to be insulting, Blade has healed the 9 damage Natch managed to deal while briefly being a Crocodile); he turtles up with a full round of Rhino action, giving him DR 3 so that he entirely shrugs off the Scum & Villainy damage, but the Death Ray charge is 7 damage and there's a Blighted Streets on top of that.

I can't really complain; I asked for it, and the game wasn't a complete shut-out...I did deal about 50 damage even through light reduction, and did decent amounts of healing and armoring.  Without those Devious Disruptions, I'd probably have won.  But I am definitely done taking the Mad Bomber for granted; I never thought a guy whose entire turn consists of "do a little damage, trash my top card, trash my top card, go" could be dangerous, yet he manages.

14

Devious Disruption is the That Card of Blade's deck, as far as I'm concerned - everyone's all nicely set up and got all their stuff out, and then BAM, everyone has to lose all their stuff or take a whole bunch of damage with a minimum of three points each even if everyone destroys everything. It's even worse for heroes like Tachyon who hardly ever have anything out so have to count on the other heroes nuking all their stuff so as to avoid massive damage. Alternatively, it's worse for heroes who have soak because they take less damage due to a card granting them soak but if they keep it out then everyone else takes more. That card is the bane of ou Baron Blade games - it's caused more losses for us than probably anything else in his deck. Grr :P.

15

I know some heroes have very strong incap powers but I never bother looking at them.  Why? well because mostly my group doesn't like to let people die and we put a strong priority on keeping people alive through the whole game.  When we win, 90% of the time that means no incapped heros.  On the other 10% heroes get incapped with only a round or two left.

This is strictly a preference of play for us, I know some heroes are really good incapped, but we don't like it thematically and hate it from a play stand point.  To be more specific I like that they game incapped players something to do rather than being out of the game, its just that everyone in my group finds it much much much less fun than having a full hero going on.

Put these two reasons together and we have a thematic and a maximize fun reason to try out best to never let anyone get incapped, even if it would actually benefit the team.  And we do pretty well at it.

16

I tend to use that approach too, but playing advanced has given me my share of games with only one or two heroes left standing at 1 or 2 Hp.

17

Yeah, I've almost never intentionally incapped a hero no matter how useful their ability would be, even though I'm playing solitaire.  My Spite game last night, I went to great effort keeping all heroes alive rather than just going for the throat; it took much longer, but I got a lot of satisfaction from keeping Expatriette from dying yet again.  I think I've only once or twice intentionally killed a hero when they were utterly hamstrung and couldn't accomplish anything with a normal turn, and only toward the end of a game.  (But of course, I've never played Horus of Two Horizons Ra....)

18

I haven't intentionally incapped a hero either, but when I was playing Unity and she got hamstrung we certainly let her die.