Fourth Time's The Charm: Victory over OblivAeon!

I’ve previously mentioned my third game against OblivAeon using the app; my first one was a hopeless slaughter, my second a doomed struggle, and my third a very narrow loss. The trend continued, and I’ve finally achieved not only a victory, but probably one of the better ones anyone has ever gotten. Only 6 of the 10 Scions ever even came out, 3 of the initial five heroes survived to the end of the game while two others were replaced twice each, and only one Environment was ever destroyed (by the Countdown on Blivs’ second form, which I left alive at single digit HP, not remembering that he could do this; how well I’d have fared if his third form had premiered a couple turns earlier remains an open question).

Our two Environments for effectively the entire game were The Block and the Enclave of the Endlings, and the heroes durability had a lot to do with the first-round combo (enabled by the Mission which plays extra Environment cards) of Immutus and Jansa Vi Dero. I imagine Immutus finally moving after thousands of years of inactivity, grappling the immense first form of OblivAeon and managing to hold him back for a round; alas, once Immutus was gone, I was obligated to kill Bloogo since he was protecting the monsterized version of Hermetic, although in retrospect I needn’t have bothered, since the resulting Bloodstone never actually did anything but force Omnitron-X to discard every turn. I forget what exactly happened to Jansa Vi Dero, but it may have involved a Bio-Engineering Beam, or else Oblivaeon did her in along with several other Endlings who trickled by one at a time (the only one we never saw was Phrentat, although by the time Szzreem showed up it the place had been abandoned so that Blivs could blow it up without taking any of us out). Nearly all of the heroes spent nearly all of their time in the Enclave, ganging up on OA and taking advantage of their synergy; through sheer luck (much of it coming from Lucky Break, who was one of the first Objectives I managed to complete by chance while working on the shield card), the group never really suffered for their decision to clump up like this, and it allowed them to take huge advantage of the restored Faultless, who was the second Scion to come out and the only one that I took particular pains to flip (fortunately, the glitch I’ve previously encountered with off-turn powers never came up in this game, and I was able to benefit twice from eight extra powers a round thanks to him and The Sentinels working together).

The game was Haka, O-X, hero 3, Sky-Scraper, and hero 5; as the only hero I’ve re-unlocked a variant of since suffering some technical difficulties, Guise appeared once in each of the two slots which ever changed, effectively starting the game in slot 5 (this was originally held by Writhe, but he was instagibbed by Heir To Nothingness before having a turn) as Santa Guise, and being killed after 2 or 3 rounds, whereupon he respawned as normal Guise in slot 3. The original hero 3 was Luminary, and he died in the same round as Santa, who accomplished very little in his brief career; regular Guise did slightly better, blitzing his way through several punchy cards and managing to nearly take out a flipped Voidsoul (I was on The Primary Objective, so this Scion started the game in play). A large part of my heroes’ durability throughout the game was due to Lucky Break repeatedly stumbling upon Thorathian Monoliths for Sky-Scraper; the one time this partially backfired was while Guise had out Uh Yeah I’m That Giantess, and the two of them alternated taking hits for all of the heroes in play (including The Sentinels, who had replaced Santa Guise, and a number of Reward targets), with Guise succumbing right at the end of this massacre and Sky being left at 3. By the end of the game, though, she’d managed to heal up to 13, mostly by retreating for a round to the Environment which had been largely abandoned. The last hero to come into the game was Legacy, who replaced Guise and was part of the Faultless fiesta; thanks to dead Luminary, he got to play two cards a turn, with enough of them being Bolster Allies or THOKK that he never ran out, and a Heroic Interception that was luckily paired with one of those Monoliths made the heroes invincible for a full round after Faultless was taken out.

After the death of Voidsoul, mostly at the hands of his nemesis Guise (I didn’t plan the meeting between the two, but it worked out interestingly), the Block was left largely abandoned for most of OblivAeon’s second phase, which was more dangerous than I realized; the Skguise-Scraper incident happened here, and might have been prevented if I’d thought to use Writhe’s incap to add a third point of armor to her while she was taking so many 5-point-gross attacks for the rest of the team (Guise would have lacked this extra protection, but would probably also have survived if he hadn’t had to take as many hits in her place, although trading him for Legacy was probably ultimately in the group’s favor). Nixious the Chosen wandered in for a while and confabbed with Warden Hoeffle while not much actually happened; it was fun to imagine the Warden insisting that everything was under control, and Nixious somehow managing to pretend to be something vaguely normal, so that Hoeffle never actually realized anything was happening until O-X came along to Bio-Beam him to death. With the block as essentially a safe house, and all the real carnage happening in the Enclave, it was naturally there that Rainek Kel’Voss showed up; I’d put him somewhere in the middle just to be different, since I had frontloaded with the easier Scions (Faultless, Sanction, and Nixious) otherwise. Once he came out, I looked at Skyscraper’s 3 HP and became very worried about OblivAeon dying too soon, but fortunately Haka had Chekov’s Hairdryer, and O-X had recovered enough from an early Singularity to get both Plasma Torches running, so with Seraph thrown in for still more irreduceable damage, and Legacy boosting the whole thing up to three times thanks to Faultless and Writhe’s incap, Voss’s 90 HP vanished quite swiftly in spite of his totally unbreachable Devastation Armor (with the only Environment removal being Countdown-based, the Devastation count pretty much invariably went up, although the death of one Scion managed to drop it from 13 down to 7 in the nick of time to avoid losing a second Environment). The last Scion to show up was Borr, but thanks to Devastating Aurora and O-X’s Defensive Blast with a double-boost from Inspiring Presence Legacy, he didn’t survive two rounds.

All told, a great victory; maybe not the hardest fight, and certainly I made liberal use of the Undo button in order to optimize my plays (I never do this for the purpose of learning random information and then changing based on that, but feel perfectly entitled to do it when I failed to notice an interaction among visible game text which I simply hadn’t fully comprehended the effects of). I’ve got one Shield left to try out, and I doubt that the trend of ever-easier games will continue with that one, since it will involve Aeon Master and he’s a threat I’ve yet to have any serious dealings with. After that game, I’m not sure how I’ll proceed thereafter; the thought of an Advanced game remains far too daunting a prospect.

Congrats! Sounds like a hard-fought, well-earned victory! I only first attempted OblivAeon mode last November when The Ceaseless Ruin One-Shot came out. Ended up beating it the next week, after several attempts and copious use of the Undo button.

I’ve since found my favorite heroes to use, so basically any random setup game eventually devolves to Legacy, Dr. Medico, and Action Hero Stuntman coming out, along with whoever else I feel like at the time. Regular Tempest is usually the sacrificial lamb, to get immunity from infernal damage when an environment is about to go down.

Good luck with the Source of Foes (Aeon Master shield). I find that one the most annoying since I hate not being able to use powers. Maybe you’ll get lucky and he’ll get shifted to a zone without the shield in it, then you can just wipe him out in a turn or two to clear the board of Aeon Men, then go back to beating on the big guy.

And I don’t know how in the blazes I pulled off the Advanced and Ultimate achievements. All I can say is may the odds be ever in your favor!