IMO Kismet is a 'low 2', definitely less dangerous than the likes of Akash'bhutha or Plague Rat.
Agreed.
Kismet scalse really harshly with the amount of ongoing destruction you have. It is nearly impossible to beat her without any ongoing destruction, but if you have Visionary and Mental Divergence Kismet is laughable.
It took multiple games before we were finally able to defeat Kismet for the first time - I think hero numbers may have something to do with it. Conversely, we don't tend to find Miss Information or the Dreamer a massive problem - I recall the first (possibly the only) time the Dreamer beat us she got something like two Dark Heroes and an Illusory Demon out at the beginning or something, so subsequent projections wre buffed and had soak and stuff, and we just didn't manage to get set up enough to wipe them all out before they killed us. I think a Whipacorn or two was also added into the mix fairly early on, just to make things worse :P.
Kismet has nasty cards and harmless cards, and a lot will depend on which she gets. Karmic Disjunction into H jinxes is pretty nearly game over, and Lady Luck protecting Inconceivable obstruction is a serious issue (statistically speaking it should hardly ever happen, as both cards are singletons, but I've seen it twice in four games; this sort of experience is why I disbelieve in statistics). But if she consistently hits Jinxes on her end-of-turn Lucky plays, and if you keep playing hot potato with the Talisman while putting Jinxes on heroes they'll harm the least, she becomes fairly easy. A lot of heroes are like this - I named Akash'Bhuta and Plague Rat because I've walked all over them in the games I've played, but it's not that I believe they can't ever win games. They just don't do so consistently, whereas the 4- and most of the 3-difficulty villains (and La Capitan despite her supposed non-3ness) are equipped to do exactly that.
Maybe that's the problem; my group of players is just REALLY smart. We always try to take villains on the most effective way; what makes them more or less difficult for us is how much doing so effects the game.
Since Kismet is either easy or hard, depending on how you strategize, we've always just found her easy. Others, like Miss Information, don't get much easier through planning, so although she may be technically the same, we can't make her EASY, so she's way harder by comparison.
Makes sense. And it's fitting, since Kismet is a "luck" villain, so planning is her Kryptonite, while Missy is a planner herself and is always a step ahead of your own plans.
One of the reasons I think Kismet is easier with more players is that Jinxes only affect one player, so a lot of her card plays are just less effective the more Heroes there are.
Envisioner, I'm not sure where you're getting those numbers. According to the Sentinels Statistics Project (which mostly matches my own experience), you get something more like:
1 - Ambuscade and Gloomweaver
2 - Kismet
3 - Akash'bhuta, Apostate, Mad Bomber Blade, The Ennead, Spite, Baron Blade, Miss Information
4 - La Capitan, Grand Warlord Voss, Plague Rat
5 - Omnitron, Citizen Dawn
6 - The Dreamer, The Matriarch
7 - The Chairman, Iron Legacy, Cosmic Omnitron
That's probably not 100% accurate either, but it feels a lot closer to my general experiences.
Arathorn
My numbers are based on my own experience. While my sample size is admittedly small, there is no possible way normal Omnitron is a 5.
I'v been playing a Kismet exclusivly on advanced for a while now. There are a few things about her that really make her quite swingy.
1) The biggest thing to know is that if she is going to hit you and hit you hard, 9/10 times it will be with psychic damage. Legacy single handedly defangs Kismet with Next Evolution and renders her totally useless, advanced or otherwise.
2) Her front side is downright horrifying by the time 1-2 jinx cards hit the table. With the Charm on her side, her SoT AoE gets brutal and the advanced text dealing another base 2 to anyone jinxed is not to be messed with. Ample amounts of ongoing destruction obviously is the key to keeping her damage output low while she has the charm. This leads us to
3) Lady Luck. Depending on when/if you see this hit the table, you could be in trouble as it makes managing her front side very difficult and very painful since ongoing destruction turn very unfavorable in the risk/reward department
4) Any combination of Lady Luck and more than 1 Jinx in play will ultimatly force you into playing "keepaway" with her Charm to avoid her racking up +dmg modifiers. Her flip side has an innate +1 on advanced, that combined with her trading a SoT AoE for an EoT single target zap make that the much safer side to operate on. Damage to the charm needs to be tightly monitored, that last thing you want is for the environment to knock the Charm back to Kismet sending her back to her front side with a Jinxes on the field.
5) The final component to her swingy-ness is Inconcievable Obstruction (man I hope I remembered that name correctly). If Lady Luck wasn't bad enough, this card will be directing a good bit of your damage away from Kismet to the enviro. Obviously this is troubling, as the deeper into the round count you end up going, the more time she has to rack up the jinx count.
2 & 5 are where the bulk of the randomness occurs. If Kismet finds neither of those, playing keepaway long enough to drum up some ongoing destruction should not be a problem and Kismet should go down with few problems.
Edit: I agree with Envisioner, no way normal Omnitron is on par with Dawn. I call shenanigans on that one.
Yeah, and Baron Blade a 3? Unless you're counting Bomber Blade, but they really should be kept separate.
And I see that you are not. Which makes me even MORE confused. Those numbers are ALL WRONG.
Correction, an innate +(H-2). Against five heroes, she can theoretically deal the highest-HP hero 9 damage with no other modifiers.
Inconcievable Obstruction (man I hope I remembered that name correctly).
You sure did! That card plus Lady Luck are both singletons, but I have a history of finding both of them together. Didn't help that the first time was in The Final Wasteland…
Edit: I agree with Envisioner, no way normal Omnitron is on par with Dawn. I call shenanigans on that one.
At least one forumite confessed to having misplayed Omnitron as retrieving a Device rather than a Drone with his rebuilding power, leading to multiple encounters with That Bomb. It's entirely possible that this and similar play errors have been skewing the statistics. And since Omnitron is core set, and rated at a diff 1 so it'll often be picked for the first game of newbie players, it's entirely possible that there are just plain more games against him and that this affects the statistics as well (theoretically more games should produce more consistent results, but I never bet against the outliers).
Base Omnitron is capable of tossing curveballs every so often. Technological Singularity can play havoc with the equipment-based heroes. Sedative Flechettes messes with the ongoing cards, and so forth. I have also see his double-draw turns bring out both Electro-Pulse Explosives. Combine the last with an Environment that can screw up hero play (looking at you Megalopolis) and you can watch players sweat since a pile of damage is headed their way.
The other thing that the statistics don't cover is that newbie players are more prone to making "mistakes" and losing. They often learn playing against Baron Blade and Omnitron, which is another possible reason for their higher than expected winning percentages. And I think Omnitron is more capable of "surprising" players as compared to Blade. The latter's "sudden death" condition is spelled out right off and the players will be aware of it, whereas Omnitron is possibly going to do something like draw "Terraforming" with a large Environment Deck array and then roll out a wave of drones or other damaging cards at once.
That said, Devious Disruption is absolutely no fun if you're all nicely set up with a million cards out each :P.
True. And the Blade Battalion comes right out and wacks someone for 5 HP; or Slash And Burn can hurt as well. But with Devious Disruption you get to decide and calculate how much gear you are willing to give up and possibly salvage a few pieces in exchange for a bit more damage. Technological Singularity and "THAT CARD" of Dawn's just nuke you down to bedrock. Which is a capability that all of the base game villains but GW Voss have - blasting all (or most) of the hero's ongoing and equipment cards away.
One of the problems with Omni's stats is that most players that have played a long time use his Cosmic version more that his regular, and they are the ones likely to win more.
That and early EPE's tend to just end games. Man I hate that Omnitron.
We once had both EPEs come out during the same turn (either Omnitron was on his play-two-cards side or he'd used Terraforming to play more that way, I can't remember now), but fortunately Tachyon had a couple of Hypersonic Assaults in-hand so was able to nerf them both for long enough for us to destroy them before they could actually do anything to us. Phew!