In a weird way, I prefer Aurora sometimes to Truth. I tend to leave Anvil alone and Truth can be a nightmare for the wrong team.
I want to like Wager Master, but my second game against him was just horrible. A waste of setup time. He came out with "even hp wins" on the table, and flopped reducing him to 0 loses the game on turn two. So I gave up, set up for a turn 3 even hp win, and walked away feeling like I'd wasted my time playing today.
Interesting. That was basically my last game against Wager Master as well (those two conditions, I mean) but it went over really well with the group I played him with (first time they saw him). For us it was actually something we had to plan out how to achieve that. We had Captain Cosmic with damage reduction, Tempest with damage increase, the Sentinels (damage reduction on Mainstay, Idealist was nearly incapped by turn 2), and two standard heroes. We were going to plan on getting him low enough to use Fling Into Darkness to destroy him without reducing him to 0 hp, but we rather enjoyed the challenge of getting 10 different targets to even values of HP (but less than max, since that's also part of the condition) given the different damage modifiers and limited health range of constructs & the Sentinels team. And yes, I enjoyed hitting my friends to help drop them into beneficial HP values
I had also warned them ahead of time that he would not play like a standard villain, and it was the last game of the night so we didn't mind a quick wrap-up, so I'm sure those both helped.
We (as in my group... not the royal "We") HATE HATE want to burn the deck HATE Wager MAster...
What a pain in the ass to play against and to play.
I might have felt differently about that game if hitting the win condition hadn't been a joke. He also had damage me on even hp out, and two wagelings. So the win was literally kill both wagelings in round 1, so that one could hit me on round 2 and make all my odd heroes even. The only tricky part was handling Insula Primalis, which had a velociraptor pack out and who knows what coming. So I put out bee bot to take the hit and destroy the 2nd environment card.
Wager Master failed to flop anything that took me off even hit points on round 3's play, so the game was over.
Wager Master could probably have been tweaked a bit to prevent quick games, but I wouldn’t know how without sitting down to study him more. Basically, I wish his conditions werent so immediate. At least Voss checks at the start of his turns to see if the heroes lose.
How did you make Bee Bot be the thing with the second-highest hp (to get hit by the T-Rex) if all the players were at even numbers and therefore had at least 2hp?
By mistyping velociraptor :) Their damage wasn't really the problem, bee bot was out as a hedge to destroy any other card that could come out and mess up my hit points. I think whatever flopped wasn't going to take me to odd anyhow (I think it was river of lava), but I was worried about something like obsidian field.
Edit: corrected my above post.
WM's quick games are by design, I specifically asked about that idea during playtesting and was told he was designed to be "Gimicky"... which is fine if you know what he is going into the fight.
I don’t know were all this Spite hate is coming from when Miss Information exists. What an awful experience. Not only can you not damage her for half the battle, but you can’t even set up! No wonder she came with the Final Wasteland, since that and Enclave are the only places even almost remotely fun to play against!
Spite, Miss Information, and the Organization. At least with Iron Legacy if things go badly it’s over quick…
Voss doesn’t bother me. Because of him and Ambuscade not having much hero ongoing/item destruction (pre-DE, that is), I used them to teach new players the game or test out new combos in digital.
I always liked Chairman. And yeah, why are people annoyed by Voss?
I can see points of frustration, mostly with the different immunities the minions have, and the varied damage types nerfing some counters (Legacy or Omni-X), and there’s enough multi-target or all hero target things to make minion maker heroes like Captain Cosmic and Unity (or Southwest Sentinels, in a way) annoying. Not to mention the “If X minions in play” alternate loss condition.
But, conversely, I actually used Voss’ relative (and brutal) simplicity to explain the game style to some friends. They had played WoW back in the day, and we had some overlap in play during the Wrath expansion. So I said “think of it like Patchwerk’s DPS check.”
If a part of the hate for some villains is DE, I won’t get it. I only have EE.