Fanatic Guide

Overivew

 

Fanatic is one of my favorite heroes both in terms of theme and game play.   She's really quite a powerhouse of a hero, but like all heroes, she has her quirks.   Her deck can be strange to play and seems to be a mix of straightforwardness and... not.  With that said, Fanatic excels in both combat and support roles, but you must be aware of the state of the game to extract maximum benefit.  

 

Fanatic Basics

 

Here are some things you absolutely must fully comprehend in order to get good use out of Fanatic.  Fanatic is all about gaining maxiumum use out of buffs and debuffs.  Keep track of your bonuses,  always know if you are doing net increase in damage, net decrease in damage, or are breaking even.  

 

Suppose you have a +1 damage bonus,   what is better:  using it once or using it 5 times?   The answer is obvious,  but you must keep this in mind always.   Many Fanatic cards and abilities hit for small amounts of damage,   this makes any +1 damage boost very effective for her.    To be clear,  Fanatic can often make better use of +1 damage than can, say,  a hero like Legacy.     Now granted that Legacy isn't known for being a combat powerhouse, but bear with me so I can illustate this point.   If Legacy has +1 damage,  he might use it twice on his turn,  one from a one-shot, and once from motivational charge.   This is being pretty generous, as Legacy only occasionally plays damaging once shots, and often does not have motivational charge out (or will choose to use another power instead).  In Fanatics case, she essentially always "uses" +1 damage at least twice because of Exorcism.  She has some buffs in her deck that she will play (Absolution) , but you can almost count on her playing a damaging one-shot every single turn,   he deck is just full of them.   So she will pretty much use +1 damage at least 3 times, and sometimes a whole lot more.

 

By the same token -1 damage (or +1 enemy armor) hurts you more than it might hurt your counterpart heroes.  Knowing what to do when your attacks arent as effective is just as important as knowing what to do when they are.  Try to do something better than just doing damage,   this is a great time to buff yourself.  You could lay down Absolution, Undaunted, or Aegis of Ressurection.   Absolution is a card that very well might already be out,  so if its not and you have it,  play it.   Absolution can definitely help because it can change your power phase from the 1+1 damage mode to a 3 damage power,   which is preferable when enemies have armor.   Practically no enemies except Matriarch's birds and some environment cards deal 1 damage.   For this reason I usually do not play Undaunted unless on Pike Industrial or against Matriarch.  It also has some applications on Atlantis because of the 5+ damage thing, but I tend to feel Undaunted is Fanatics worst card, and is very very situational.  Aegis is a good play, but you typically want to play it just before you die, in case something comes up that kills your stuff.   However, if not playing against a villain with equipment destruction, this can be a nice play when at -1 damage.   Prayer of Desperation is also quite good in these situations if you have 4 or less cards when you play it (this makes it better than just drawing 2 cards for skipping play and power phase).  

 

In the one-shot area,  Divine Sacrifice can be used to get in irriduceable damage if you play using the Enhanced Edition.   Just be careful who you use it against.   Final Dive is another good card, often able to take down enemies that are providing Damage Reduction (like Gene-bound guards) opening the door for Excorcism and/or helping other heroes.

 

Negative damage is not always a liability that you must play around though.   Namely, you can play Chastise and take less damage.  Chastise is a very good card that can pull the teeth right out of some of the most threatening cards in the game.    Embolden also benefits from heroes doing less damage.  

 

Offense

 

Exorcism and Absolution are pretty straightforward, but Fanatic has a lot of offensive tricks.   Smite the Transgressor is a very good play when doing +damage,  2 damage from the card, 1+1 from exorcism and 3 from Absolution means that you have just used your +damage buff 4 times.  While I'm talking about powers, I should mention;   I do not like Sacrosanct Martyr.  I feel it is simply too self-destructive to be useful.   1-for-1 ratios of damage dealt per damage taken are not something you want to be doing too often.   I will on occasion play this card anyway if something absolutely needs to die right now and there is no other way to do it.   I feel Sacrosant Martyr should be reserved for desperation attacks though, and definitely not something you plan to do every turn.   

 

Getting back to one-shots though,  Brutal Censure and Sanctifying Strike should be your bread and butter.   Fanatic needs to draw cards.   She needs to draw a lot of cards.   If you are at +damage or nueteral damage, you should pretty much always play one of these cards unless you have something that is much better.    

 

Why do you need to draw cards?  Well because you're looking for Wrathful Retribution, aren't you?   The more cards you draw, the better your odds of pulling it.  Usually play this as a finishing move on the villain,  but has other applications like getting rid of Voss' dreadnaughts or Electro-pulse explosives.   Sucks to lose it though,  but if you have a hero that lets you get it out of your trash...  good times.    

 

However,  there is another, better reason you need to draw cards; Divine Focus.    You  are twice as likely to get this card as you are to get Wrathful Retribution, so you can't dismiss it.    Divine Focus is your other "nuke" card and to be quite honest, it is my favorite of the two.  Strangely, this card is better if you have more heroes because you can use it more before having to pay the price,  but it is a nice card no matter how many players.   The key is that you can discard a card at the start of every turn for 2 damage.   In a 4 player game, there are 6 turns per round, so you can deal 12 damage.    This is very respectable, but you really should wait until you are at +damage, and as you stack on more +damage the card gets stupidly more effective.   Each +1 damage essentially gets used 6 times by Divine Focus alone.  So if you are at +1 damage you can deal 18,  if you manage to drop this when you are at +2 damage, you can deal a whopping 24....  enough to rival all but the best Wrathful Retributions.   I once had a game where even though I didn't have many cards in hand, I dropped Divine Focus turn 1 against plague rat with Fanatic infected and did a rediculous amount of damage thanks to Legacy having Inspirational Presence in his opening draw.  4 cards, but with each card dealing 6 damage, it was an easy 24,  add on 10 more from an Excorcism and Plague Rat was 1/3 of the way dead just because of Fanatics first turn.   I would say it is definitely "worth it" to play Divine Focus at +1 damage, but if you think you can hold out for +2 or higher,  than go for it.   This card can be highly efficient with damage buffs.     If you can take the damage and happen to have enough cards or Prayer of Desperation in your hand... you can repeat the fun all over again on your next turn.

 

 

Support

 

While her primary role is combat,  Fanatic has many good support cards.  Chastise, Embolden, and Consecrated Ground are all pretty straightforward and nice to have.  Zealous Offense can be quite good but it is tricky to use.   It can be very difficult for Fanatic to deal at least 3 damage on her turn without her one-shot play for the turn (which your card play will be taken up by Zealous Offense).  It also doesnt take effect until the round after you play it.   So the best way to do this is to play the card out-of-turn,  but with the exception of incapacitated powers and Argent Adept, this is quite difficult to do.  So you may have to rely on having a +damage buff to get it out,  or being neuteral on +/- damage and have Absolution.   You can also use Sacrosanct Martyr to get the card out,  but again, this is probably only if you're desperate, and if you're desperate, you probably cant wait a turn for Zealous Offense to take effect.

 

So we've come to End of Days...  what a good card, and a very situational card.   Although it can really own Akash-Bhuta from the Infernal Relics expansion,  usually you dont want to destroy your stuff.    Sometimes, you have to though, and End of Days can be a lifesaver against Forced Deployment or Electropulse explosive.    It would be kind of funny to take Fanatic, Ra, and Nightmist as your team, because they are the characters with Relics,  you could play End of Days and have only a minimal setback from the card.   Unfortunately, Nightmist and Ra have plenty of ongoings they might want to keep around too, so it might not be worth it.  The primary benefit of not destroying Relics is that you get to keep Absolution and Aegis of Ressurection.  

 

"Redeemer" Fanatic

 

The Fanatic Promo card is quite interesting,  I've not had a lot of time to play with it.  It lets you draw a ton of cards and helps keep you healthy, but at the expense of Exorcism, which is a pretty hefty price.   It helps Fanatic be good in situations where she might not otherwise excel,  like against Voss or Omnitron where -damage is very common.  You can build your hand easily towards Wrathful Retribution or Divine Foucs.  Redeemer Fanatic seems to fill primarily a support role until you just explode onto the scene with your incredible hand.  Would be pretty interesting to go around and Chastise everything or use Embolden on yourself, keeping your HP from dropping too fast with Redeem and maybe dropping an Aegis if your health got too low.

 

Particularly Rediculous combos

 

For some reason,  a lot of Fanatics cards seem to be really abuseable if you have the right teams.   Here are some good ones.

 

Fanatic+Legacy:  Okay,   who didn't anticipate this being first?  How many times have I talked about how good Fanatic is with bonus damage?  A lot.  Its almost trivial to give Fanatic +2 damage boost with Galvanize and Inspirational Presence.  So good for her entire deck, particularly Divine Focus though.

 

Fanatic+Unity:    Bee Bot + End of Days.   You can destroy what you want with End of Days, then kill off Bee Bot with EoD, and use its power to destroy EoD, leaving all the rest of your equipment and ongoings intact.   The other combo is Chastise + Stealth Bot.   You are now immune to practically all damage until something destroys ongoing cards.   Fanatic must still take the self-inflicted damage from Chastise to keep the card in play,  but it's a small price to pay for ignoring all other damage to all heroes.

 

Fanatic + Ra:   This really seems like a match made in heaven/s.   In addition to Imbue Fire really benefiting Fanatic, Embolden really benefits Ra, who can make excellent use of a second power per turn.

 

Fanatic+Visionary  (thanks to Phantaskippy!) :   They have a lot of synergy going on.   Of course Fanatic loves to draw cards to fuel Divine Focus or maybe get a chance of picking up Wrathful Retribution, so Enlighten is great.   But Twisting the Ether is another beast entirely.  Fanatic benefits greatly from a twisting the ether because she can use the +1 damage buff a lot.  However, turning her damage into Radiant damage can be great too, if you've got Sacrosacnt Martyr.   If you manage to turn the damage from Divine focus or Chastise (or both!) into Radiant, suddenly the Sacrosanct Martyr power looks a lot more attractive.   If you had Divine Focus up, you could attack yourself for only 1 radiant damage, and still be able to belt out 6 damage with Sacrosanct Martyr.

 

 

Wrapping Up

Hope you have enjoyed my guide, let me know if there is anything that needs mentioning.   I find Fanatic an extremely fun and powerful character to play,  I hope these insights will lead you to feel the same way.

 

 

 

Well done.  You got pretty much everything I can think of.  Any advice for a situation where buffs aren't coming?  (No Legacy, Ra, AA, or Visionary, and the environment is, say, Rook City?)

Ah, Fanatic and Unity.  Proof that God likes little robots too.

Yeah that can be tough.   Same principles apply though,  you want to be as effective as possible, so drop Divine Focus while at neuteral damage, or don't play it at all.  12 damage to the villain is still quite good if you have the hand to back it up.     Redeemer Fanatic might be a good choice if you have her just because it helps you get your best stuff.   With a little luck, you can pull Absolution quickly and have a nice 3-damage power.    Its not uncommon for Redeemer Fanatic to draw 3 cards per turn,  1 for a Sanctifying Strike or Brutal Censure, 1 for Redeem, and 1 for end of turn, so you can peel through your deck reasonably fast.   

 

Situations like this one might be perfect for spamming Chastise or Embolden, allowing these cards to function at maxiumum efficiency.

 

If you wanted to go into the danger zone, you could try tanking with Fanatic.   Use Divine Sacrifice to deal irreduceable damage and take the hits from enemies, healing yourself with Redeem, Sanctifying Strike and Aegis.   Even with Redeem though, Fanatic's self healing isnt nearly as good as the healing by Haka, Absolute Zero, or Nightmist, so you have to be pretty careful to not just die.   Your teammates will appreciate it though.

We used Chastise/Stealth Bot in a game tonight. It's stupidly powerful. We were playing against Voss and ended up _also_ using End of Days/Bee Bot after a Forced Deployment brought out nine minions, though only in order to speed the game to its obvious conclusion.

Another great combo that actually came up the other day is Embolden + Thermal Shockwave + Coolant Blast.

Undaunted rises in usefulness in 3-hero games. H-2 is a fairly common damage, IIRC.

Naturally if Zero is in his "Ultimate" mode than slapping another power on him is pretty good, and he can heal enough HP fairly easily to absorb the damage from Embolden.

 

Embolden is also pretty good if you have a way of mitigating/ignoring its damage.   Visionary our prime candidate here and I really should have put her in the "particularly abusive combos" section.    If you can sucessfully Twist the Ether and shift Embolden's Radiant damage into something that is non-threatening (Fire damage with Flesh of the Sun God,   Cold damage with Null Point Calibration unit)  then you're in such good shape its rediculous.    

 

That's basically a 3-team member combo though, which is tough to pull off.   It's much easier to Twist the Ether on Fanatic herself.   Naturally Fanatic loves the +1 damage for her multitude of small attacks, but she can get good use of the negative damage from the card by using Embolden or Chastise, particularly in combination with Undaunted you could potentially reduce the damage from these cards to zero.

 

H-2 damage is indeed farily common.   I've mentioned Undaunted a lot, there are situations where it is very good to have, and H-2 with 3 heroes would definitely be one of them.    Still,  compared to the rest of the stuff shes got in her arsenal, its not great.   I'd rather use my card play to hit things.    Undaunted CAN be very good against the Ennead with their tendency to do many instances of 1 damage to everybody (pre-Ennead in Force or else Undaunted wont help you),   however I always seem to have the bad luck of playing it just before they play Ancient Magics.

Thanks for this one!  Fanatic is a fun character to use for sure.  There have been games where the card draw did not work out too well but generally she comes up well against most bad guys in the game.  I had not seen the combo between Unity and Fanatic cleaning house as we just got Unity the other day and have only had a few chances to see her in action but I can't wait to see it in action!

 

 

I don't quite get how the Bee Bot/End of Days combo would work.  Doesn't End of Days essentially destroy all targeted cards simultaneously?  If so, then it wouldn't matter if Bee Bot destroyed it when it was destroyed as everything else got taken out at the same time as Bee Bot.

Any effects that "happen all at once" or target multiple things are resolved individually. Even if you use Tempest's base power to hit all non-hero targets, you get to choose the order you hit them in. This can matter in the case of his Gene-Bound Shackles, which could potentially allow you to get +2 damage to everything if the target with the highest HP keeps changing. It also matters in the case of End Of Days.

 

Each target is hit in an order chosen by the players, not all at once. End of Days destroys all the cards in whatever order the players choose.

The only possible scenario where that would be relevant is vs. Ennead, right? Maybe Omnitron if he's taking a pounding and an EPG shows up or Voss and one of his ships?

Or The Chairman, if the The Chairman and/or The Operative happen to be fairly low, or Baron Blade if he's fairly low on either side, or Dawn if she happens to be low and there's a T-Rex and a few Citizens out, or The Matriarch with both Carrion Fields in Play, … AND there's a playtest villain who … well, you'll see.

 I'm afraid that those combos are not anymore within the boundaries of the designer's mind, cf. the document drafted by spiff on page 33 (http://www.spiffworld.com/sotm/files/sotm_rules_and_clarifications.pdf):

"take/deal some damage or destroy this card"

some cards like tachyon’s “pushing the limits”, ra’s “solar flare”, or fanatic’s  “embolden” say that as part of the card’s effects, some amount of damage must  be dealt or the card will be destroyed (for example, “Solar flare” says “at the  end of your turn, either ra deals himself 4 psychic damage or this card is  destroyed”). If this damage is modified, reduced, prevented, or redirected, will it  still satisfy the conditions on the card, or must the card be destroyed?

The target stated on the card must have their hp reduced by at least one point  for the card to remain in play. this means that completely preventing, 
redirecting, or reducing the damage to zero will cause the card to be destroyed, but the damage may be reduced as long as at least one point is 
still taken by the target. the type of damage isn’t relevant, just the amount.

This is further discussed on the referred post:

https://greaterthangames.com/comment/33371#comment-33371

Following the same logic, Chastice and Divine Focus will also require that at least 1 hp is deal to the correpsonding target to avoid the destruction of the card.
 
 
 

 

 

Yeah, this guide is old enough to be before those rulings, and the change to Chastise.

One thing people don't seem to get is how good Fanatic can be when she burns herself down to take out a villain.

I have a player who goes all in with Sacrosanct Martyr, divine focus and her other damage self cards, you die a lot, but you also do a ridiculous amount of damage before you go.

Teaming her with Visionary for TtE really improves this strategy, as you can reduce or increase self-damage to set up for retribution, change Divine focus' self damage to radiant so it works with Sacrosanct Martyr, and increases your 1 damage hits.

Also Mental Divergence can allow you to keep putting Aegis on top of your deck to keep the fun going a bit longer.

Embolden on Visionary let's you put Aegis on top, then draw it, so you can play it every turn if need be.

Undaunted gets a bad rap, but the reduction is good, although not with Sacrosanct Martyr.

Also Sacrosanct Martyr and Aegis with fixed point in play is just awesome, kill yourself to heal, and don't lose Aegis.

Retribution is an amazing card.  If you have retribution go ahead and burn yourself down, if not that whole strategy loses a lot of damage.  It hurts that there is only one of Retribution in her deck, that's really the main reason you shouldn't burn yourself down, if you don't have it already, you can't rely on numbers to get it for you.

The big strength of Fanatic's deck for me is the sheer volume of good cards she has.

Zealous offense is amazing, you get to shut down two non-character cards without playing a card or using a power, you just have to deal three damage, which is not hard considering you can deal damage to yourself if you have to.  It also teams up so very well with Divine Sacrifice, as that three irreducible meets the criteria and you can make two of those targets unable to deal damage anyway.  Also Divine Focus works well to keep Zealous offense out, even if you can't do anything else.

Outside of Zealous offense Sacrifice is good for finishing off low health mobs and if you have Undaunted, Stealth bot tanking an enemy who deals everyone one damage, or suiciding yourself to low health to beat IL with a follow up Retribution.  (One of my favorite wins ever)

Her weaker cards to me are Sanctifying strike and brutal Censure, the card draw is nice, and the damage can help, but if you aren't boosted, not so hot.

The real problem with her deck is Wrathful Retribution is only one card, and if you don't get it one whole side of her damage is just dumb to use.  If you get Embolden/Sacrosanct Martyr/Wrathful Retribution/Aegis ealry, burn yourself down and take the bad guys with you.  It's really fun, and crazy.

Mental Divergence only works on ongoings, where Aegis of Resurrection is an Equipment card.

isn't mental divergence for ongoings only? I have never used it for anything other than Ongoing destruction.

Dolt, I got ahead of myself there.  Sorry.  We did that with Fixer and Visionary, not just Visionary.  My bad.

Incap Fixer can do that, since he puts equipment directly into play from the trash. I once had a game where Dawn crushed us and only Fanatic was left with Aegis. Don't remember which was the third hero (2nd was Fixer, of course) but inmortal Fanatic took her down with just 1 turn left before Dawn played Devastating Aurora.

Yes, I was aware of the change, but I hadn't edited the guide.   I will go ahead and do that now though, thanks for bringing it up..

 

I still personally feel self-sacrifice when it is not an emergency situation is just not the way to go.   For example, if you have Twisting the Ether on Fanantic, as Phantaskippy suggested, and you have Sacrosanct Martyr in play;  you can trade 4 of your HP to deal 6 damage.    Or you could deal 4 damage with Exorcism and not lose any HP at all.   For a measly 2 points of damage difference, I'd rather have my health.

 

As I said in the guide, Undaunted is just not used often enough to be considered good in my eyes.   It's a decent play if you're at -damage,  or you have nothing else to play.   Otherwise, pretty much always play a damaging one-shot instead of this.

 

Again, as I mentioned in the guide, half the reason to play Brutal Censure and Sanctifying Strike is to draw cards, thereby increasing your chances of getting Wrathful Retribution or Divine Focus.   These aren't her worst cards,  they're some of her best cards.

 

If you were lucky enough to pull Wrathful Retribution in your first draw,  you can change up your strategy a little.   You *could* try to burn your HP down and use it as soon as possible via Sacrosanct Martyr,  but I tend to find that losing HP isn't a hard thing to do.   You're going to get to use your Wrathful Retribution anyway, so I see no reason why you need to play it as early as possible.    If you already have Wrathful Retribution, your goals become as follows:

 

1.  Avoid discarding Wrathful Retribution to villain discard effects, or dying before you get a chance to play it.

2.  Have enough cards in hand to fuel the power.

3.  Get more cards so you can use divine focus too.

 

In other words,  draw cards.   Which means that Brutal Censure and Sanctifying Strike are still your best bets most of the time.  The only time this changes is if you have a way to get Wrathful Retribution out of your trash.  Maybe Reclaim from the Deep or Vernal Sonota.   If you know one of your teammates has that card,  your priorities shift to:

 

1.  Play Wrathful Retribution

2.  Have enough cards in hand to play it again.

 

Undaunted is under appreciated I think. My mind instantly goes to Elemental Storms from the Ennead, Infections from the Rat, Supercooled Vats from Pike. It for sure has some great applications.

But Undaunted is a microcosm of Fanatics entire deck. Undaunted, while extreamly usefull in limited situations, is just that. Situational. Just about every card in her deck, save for her bread+butter Sanctifying Strike and Brutal Censcor (spelling is wrong there), is very situational.