Just a simple, light thread on a subject that has probably been done before, but I can't recall having seen it lately and we have five new villains to consider, so I thought I'd bring it up again. Out of all the villains in the game (counting the nemesis targets in the V5 decks, to go by what little we know about them...I suppose you could also pick Citizens or Thugs/Underbosses or whatever, though it's probably more sensible to pick the entire deck containing them, since they aren't really separate entities in a narrative sense), what are your five or so favorites? Here are mine:
1. The Ennead
I'm an Egypt buff in the first place, so working up a fully realized version of an entire exclusive mini-pantheon is a very awesome idea to me, and I really like the way they play, chaining and triggering off each other while dealing numerous 1-damage instances which can be boosted into the stratosphere. Their advanced version is perhaps a bit too tough to be entirely fair, and the fact that they have no Ongoing cards or non-character targets is mechanically annoying to a lot of characters (glares at Fanatic), but overall they're just incredible to me.
2. Proletariat
It'd be valid to pick the Vengeance Five as a whole as a single villain for this list, but it's also fine to focus in on their individual members, and of them all, far and away my favorite is the one-man Russian army corps. I could go on at some length about why the concept is cool to me, but others have pretty much said it all before; while it's possible that my ranking him as highly as I do is more due to "new shiny" than deservedness, it's also possible that several years from now, when new villains by the bucketload have offered us new experiences, I'll still consider him the second-best.
3. Kismet
I just finished an epic game against her, and it's what spurred me to create this list. It occurs to me that her design is almost perfect by my standards; she unpredictably careens back and forth between relative inactivity and frenzied destructive power, making for a highly swingy game experience which nonetheless seems to remain basically fair. With the possible exception of high-H games on Advanced, she's perhaps a little too easy, but in general I find her to be an extremely satisfying workout - not as much of a faceroll as Omnitron or Plague Rat, but not as insanely tough as the Dreamer or the Matriarch, and very active and entertaining.
4. Citizen Dawn
The coolest by far of the core set villains to me, she ranks below others only because of how aggravating the fight against her can be, on a purely mechanical basis. She didn't really need That Card, and the time it takes her B-side to unflip can be highly excessive. But she's still a great concept for a unique and memorable villain, one who's both a recognizeable homage to Magneto, and an innovative original approach to the general idea behind him. The slight veneer of quasi-Soviet flavor to the Citizens, visible on the back of every card in her deck as well as her pseudo-military costume and her eugenic attitude toward her daughter, just gives her the kick-up-a-notch she needed to count as one of the most interesting supervillains ever created, who I'd much rather read about than 90% of the Rogues' Galleries of both Marvel and DC.
5. Highbrow
I gave myself permission to mention the Nemesis targets as individual villains largely because of this obvious pastiche of The Leader (she was almost tied with Equity, whose name suggests a more corporate version of Two-Face, but his flavor text implies that he may be a more conventional contract-killer who just happens to look weird, and his facial structure is at odds with the rest of his look IMO, so he just barely loses out as my favorite of the bunch). I liked her just based on the name and picture, but her flavor text cinched it; the attitude of dripping condescension is just so perfect for a megalomaniacal lady genius, particularly one whose codename appears to indicate an aristocratic background (which in turn means that her opposition to Parse might well have an aspect of classist bigotry, and I do love rooting for the underdogs in such social struggles).
Honorable Mention: Skinwalker Gloomweaver
None of the promo villains is really a spectacular improvement on their distinctly lacking original, but I felt like I ought to give some props to the very concept of revising these wimpy intro villains (with the exception of Spite, who is certainly easy enough for new players, but who I think makes for an unsatisfying first impression, given how many things he doesn't do and how nigh-impossible it is to fight him outside of his narrow "script"). While Spite is perhaps the most improved by his alternate version, I like Gloomweaver better for the conceptual turnaround between his extradimensional "dream-sender" version, where the deck really represents his cult more than himself, and the one who walks the world in mortal flesh, eventually becoming a Physical God who kills his own followers and slowly crumbles to death himself. I feel that both his versions suffer a bit from the limitations of the game format - his deck tries to do too many different things to be very good at any of them, and the promo overcompensates for his weaknesses in a way that can be periodically unfair, while still occasionally failing to accomplish anything relevant. But despite its awkwardness, it's still a cool concept which spins the original in a neat new direction, both mechanically and flavorfully, and so I'm picking it as my favorite of the four.
So, that's my list. What's yours?