New types of hero character cards

All the existing hero cards have an active and incapacitated side. That’s fine, but it seems to me there are other ways to use both sides of the card for new heroes, in a fashion similar to the villains. Examples:

Dynamic Duo - Two-sided character card, with a different hero on each side and a single HP total like Omnitron. Both sides have “Tag Team Tactics - Power: Flip this card to its other side and regain 1 HP.” and the text “When this card would be reduced to zero HP and at least one other hero is not Incapacitated, discard all your Equipment and Ongoing cards from play, flip this card, and set your HP to 1 instead of being Incapacitated.” The deck would be heavy on Ongoing and/or Equipment cards with for damage options, with a few One-Shots for drawing/playing cards. Some of the cards in the deck could be set up so that they provide slightly different effects depending on which side of the character card is active - one side might do +1 damage or hit an extra target on some damage cards, while the other side might stop an extra point of damage on defensive cards or draw and extra card on draw-and-discard One-Shots. The main trick is the at-will healing power (which might need to come up to restoring 2 HP, but I doubt it) and the fact that you’ll never be incapacitated and can live through being “killed” as long as at least one ally is still active.

One-Way Transforming Hero - Like Baron Blade, both sides of the hero card have their own HP and radically different play styles. For ex, Doctor Simon Standard is a nerdy scientist on his A side, with (say) 15 HP and a support power ala Visionary or Legacy. His deck is full of Equipment Cards with limited damage potential but plenty of card destruction, ally healing, and deck control effects, plus the usual few One-Shots. When he reaches zero HP, he flips to side B, loses all of his Equipment cards in play and becomes the Bombastic Brute. The Brute has HP in the mid-twenties, text saying that he cannot play Equipment cards, a power that lets him discard X Equipment cards to do X+2 melee damage to a single target, and text saying that when he reaches zero HP he does some kind of last-gasp effect (global damage or heal, most likely - should be about 2-3 times as strong as a single incapacitated option) then leaves play. The character lacks an incapacitated state, but has slightly more HP than existing characters and a one-shot effect when he’s finally dropped instead. Play style is diverse, starting as a controller/support guy, then switching to raw damage/destruction partway through the game.

Two-Way Transforming Hero - One character that can adopt one of two modes in combat, with one HP total for both sides ala Citizen Dawn. For ex, Equinox has text granting bonuses to radiant damage on side A, and cold damage on Side B, with both sides having a power that lets them flip the hero card and do something else (small damage, maybe) and text stating that when they’re reduced to zero HP, they do a last-gasp one-shot effect ala the Brute above. Deck would be lots of One-Shot and Ongoing cards with radiant or cold (or, rarely, both) damage. Deciding which side of the character card to play on would vary depending on your hand and in-play cards, with you switching to maximize damage every so often. Again, no incapacitated state, but a stronger parting-shot ability to compensate.

You could also make either type of Transform an involuntary thing by including two or three “Play Immediately” One-Shots that flip the character when drawn. Decent way to model a lycanthrope or other character with really unstable/unpredictable powers. At the most extreme, you could do a whole expansion of cards just for a Resurrection Man/Dial H For Hero type. :slight_smile:

Obviously you could do all sorts of different character achetypes around any of the three sets of mechanics, but you get the basic idea. They all have the small disadvantage of potentially leaving a player completely out of the game before it’s completely over, but in my experience sitting there for the last few turns picking an incapacitated option isn’t all that much more interesting than being out early. An eliminated player can at least start sorting the cards for the next hand. :slight_smile:

Fun stuff.

I like it maybe those characters could have an extra card like villains that flips or has an incapacitated side to keep them in the game afterwards making their deck 42 cards instead of the normal 41.