If Voss has usurped OblivAeon's power, environment cards that bring you back from the dead work the regular way.
First form: Get rid of OblivAeon's shield. Once that happens, he flips to his next form. There is only one shield I don't ever want to use, because phase two automatically incaps all heroes in that zone when the shield is removed from the game, and that's one for a difficulty 2 Scion. All the others are OK. Plus, once any shield is on its second side you can hurt OblivAeon's first form. I mean granted, this is the end of the multiverse, so you really shouldn't get too attached to anyone, still . . . losing all heroes in a battle zone isn't worth drawing that shield.
Second form: beat him up.
Third form: beat him up. This form eliminates the hero with the lowest HP and the environment when the countdown as it zero.
So, who's doomed by canon besides the Ennead, Freedom Six, Nightmist, Ra Donald Blake, and Omnitron? One mission card suggests Infinitor is doomed by canon. La Commadora is probably doomed by her extremely old age.
For some reason. while they're both devout Catholic girls, I imagine Xtreme Prime Wardens Fanatic "swears like a sailor".
For all the folks who played at cons and said that they took 3 hours just to flip OblivAeon to page 2, it sure looks a lot easier now. Some shields can be eliminated in 1 round with the right setup, although some can be really tricky with particular hero and environment combinations.
I'm wondering if a playtester can chime in about why OblivAeon Shard was changed from the playtest version we saw (simply "Double all damage dealt by this hero"). I was concerned about arithmetic order of operations, and I suppose a lot of the new heroes with self-damage would hate it. It only just occurred to me how many of the new heroes do have at least some self-damage. Is it all of them, even? I can't think of an exception.
Dunno if intentional, but that’s Thor’s old comics alter ego. Ra is Blake Washington Jr.
Anubis is easy to forget for that list. Infinitor does sacrifice himself to save his brother. La Comodora winds up stuck outside time, possibly forever (for whatever that means when one is outside time), but the existence of other Singular Entities plus what clues we have on Prime War leave that as hypothetical rather than a certainty.
Akash'thrya is by a large margin my favorite hero deck ever! I love what she does why the environment, and Akash'flora can be a crazy powerup to achieve victory.
But on the other hand of the spectrum, there is The Harpy. Oh my ... I tried her twice, and did nothing. The token mechanic seems great in theory but didn't work for me all, I just played the Birds, the numerology card and played to card of decks... because I didn't see what else I could do. There is only one deck that I hate, this one.
A good surprise was Lifeline, his presentation seemed pretty 'meh', nothing to make me dream, but I changed my mind after seeing his deck.
Luminary and La Comodora are both fun, but the later needs to comprehend the rules well enough to exploit her card as best as possible.
Both 5 environment are cool and fun to play.
All in all, we got a lot of incredible environments and hero deck ... And the Harpy...
Yeah, Marvel dropped the Thor alter ego entirely for the movies. I think Anubis is missing, whereas the Ennead and Ra only leave their artifacts. But who knows, Tachyon and Unity could build a device to connect realities.
They did at least make a reference to it in the first Thor film; it was Jane’s ex boyfriend.
Anubis dies as well. The RPG setting has a new bearer of the Rod of Anubis (Blake Washington’s old assistant, Marty).
Since OblivAeon was responsible for the Shattering of the Timelines that made inter-reality and time travel possible, Unity and Tachyon (or any other “normal” character) would not be able to do so following his defeat. The way is shut until some other extremely powerful being(s) change that status quo again (this wouldn’t/shouldn’t stop you from saying otherwise at your own table, of course).
I read somewhere that all games of Sentinels of the Multiverse are considered canon, so if I want Luminary to face Baron Blade in Mordengrad, that happens. Actually, running mirror matches is going to be fun. Just like Omnitron v. Omnitron on Omnitron.
I think fighting the Scions is still valuable - OblivAeon has 2 cards in his deck that Summon an extra one, and The Scion deck has 3. Letting them build up seems like a problem. You get a reward for defeating them which varies in strength, and there’s are definitely Scions that look easier to deal with than others (although the more you flip, the more likely you are to hit Voss, who seems bad in pretty much any situation possibly to the extent that I’d argue he should maybe be difficulty 4? If there’s an opportunity to take him out earlier, it should probably be taken. Not sure about Faultless- I only play digitally so I’ll wait and see how it’s handled in the digital game, but if Faultless isn’t replaced when he flips that feels like a pretty big advantage for the heroes, when arguably his reward is pretty big as well. I’m of the view that he should be replaced when he flips, but I’ll wait and see.
I was initially a little confused by this mechanic, but I think it makes sense in terms of keeping the game tighter and more interesting to the players, and prevents something stalling the whole game. This way, you either ‘win’ a phase, or lose it - if you win it, you go through to the next one in a stronger position, if you lose it, you lose a ‘life’ (Environment deck) and take some damage. Essentially damage to heroes is much less valuable than it is to regular Villain decks, as instead of being reduced to an incap ability, you get to start again with a new hero. Your set up is gone, but you start off with access to some additional stuff from your old hero. In this way, it’s essentially just a race against the clock, so ‘losing’ a phase is a fairly major set back in my opinion…
Phase 3 is essentially the end game. If you start getting heroes and environments erased, you are about to lose. You either pull it together and win, or he finishes off the last few environments and wins. I think it’s just the Escalation that this final step calls for - you are out of time. If you did well up to this point, you have a little more time, but essentially you need to hurry up because the game is ending. Not sure whether he still removes a hero if there are none there though usually stuff is a little clearer if it works everywhere, but this uses ‘remove the hero with the lowest he from the game’ which could be referring to wherever they are, but could just be referring to the fact that all their cards are gone…
I think the idea with Voss is that it becomes more like a regular villain fight, although with 2 zones and everything else. As it doesn’t say anything other than you don’t get a new hero, I assume you get all the incaps of heroes you have lost, and get to use one of them a turn?
I think this potentially would give you an advantage, but there is a penalty to heroes dying, and a tempo loss in terms of setting up your next hero, but it’s something to consider if you are doing really well in phase 3…
I haven’t played with any of the new heroes yet, but Akash Thyia seems to work on the basis that she chokes the environment a bit - you gum it up with your cards and it’s affect is more limited. Other 2 I’m not sure about yet.
Akash'Thriya just shoves a whole load of seeds into the Environment deck and then has a whole load of ways to play/discard the top card and/or shuffle said deck, meaning once you have a few seeds in there you can arrange things so that they keep getting played instead of the actual Environment cards, and if any unpleasant cards do get played, you can usually insta-nuke them fairly easily. Takes a few turns to set up, perhaps, but eventually you have super-good control over the deck. Regarding the seeds themselves, some of them do things when they enter play (so it doesn't matter too much if they then get destroyed) and some do things when they're destroyed. I think there are a couple that do things at the start/end of your turn but I can't remember. And Akash'Flora (the tree) is just generally really good and worth keeping out for as long as possible (not generally too difficult due to its healing and the fact it has no max hp). And there is a card that searches for it, so you're not entirely reliant on hoping it shows up. Oh, and Akash'Thriya herself starting with 50hp seems amazing, but in my experience you'll lose about half of that in the first couple of turns if only thanks to bad stuff hitting the Hero target with the highest hp ;).
Four of the five seeds do something on entering play from the environment deck. All of them do something on destruction. The only one that does something during play is the one that does nothing on being played (Technically if you don't play it from the environment deck it's destroyed, but I imagine we're talking about positive effects).
You are also correct that Akash can easily lock down the environment deck once set up, especially the base version. Spirit of the Void tends to treat her seeds more as grenades.
Because doubling damage leds to ridiculous damage totals. 42 point Lightspeed Barrages? 4*2 damage to X targets, doubled, from the Mecha-Knight? A T. Rex Bot dealing 18 damage?
[quote =MindWanderer ]I was concerned about arithmetic order of operations, and I suppose a lot of the new heroes with self-damage would hate it. It only just occurred to me how many of the new heroes do have at least some self-damage. Is it all of them, even? I can't think of an exception. [/quote]
Luminary cares not for your self-damage, his damage is all directed at those who deserve it… THE WORLD!
Yeah. I regret that this shield made it through in this form. It's great for that first time feels "Wow! This guy isn't messing around" but it's really crappy gameplay wise after that.
Damn. I realised after reading this that I'd been playing that part completely wrong - I'd mistakenly thought the instruction was that Oblivaeon damaged heroes and then if nobody took any damage then he'd add tokens and replace a missing scion. I now see that the replace a missing scion part is an entirely separate clause and not dependent on whether damage was taken.
I would have to agree that this makes taking out scions seem counterproductive as the rewards for doing so aren't particularly great and, especially if you've seeded the deck like it suggests in the instructions, you're going to be getting a harder replacement.
Incidentally, am I misremembering it or did Christopher say in one of the updates that you were only likely to see a few scions per game? Unless you deliberately avoid taking out scions (which doesn't seem like it's intended as some get harder the longer they are out, like Borr) it feels like you're bound to see an absolute minimum of four of them per game.
Surely the trick is to try and set it up so that only one hero is incapacitated? The point of them all seems to be to break your rhythm a bit and make you pay a cost - this one seems like one of the easier ones to me. The black / purple one that deals each hero 2 + H damage every time they move next to OblivAeon at stage 1 and then have to discard a bunch of cards to keep the environment getting cards in play all while fighting Progeny seems pretty hard to me!
One more thought on the moving to the next phase mechanics - I do wish that defeating the first form’s 10,000 HP counting as a loss is a bit of a shame. Clearly the intention, and the easier option is almost certainly to complete the shield cards, but if someone is crazy enough to manage to chew through all that HP without losing I think they should get rewarded for it, rather than punished
Anyone got a prediction for challenge mode OblivAeon? Deal with all 5 shield cards in order (including ‘Bring forth x!’) before moving on to stage 2? If the countdown reaches zero, you don’t flip to the next page unless you’re on the last Shield, you just discard the current Shield card?
I have scheduled an OblivAeon game for a convention this November, and though I only doubled the box's maximum time to account for setup, mishaps, and rules clarifications I can guarantee will crop up the post where it took players three hours to get OblivAeon to flip to his second form made me think I should have asked for six hours instead of four.
I understand giving the feeling of urgency/playing for keeps, but I think a "ha ha, quiznak you!" effect should go on a higher level shield.
Challenge mode OblivAeon, prompt from video game "What are you, insane? I thought it was a nice multiverse, but if you insist . . . "
I think the idea behind OblivAeon destroying the environment if you wear down his 10,000 HP is that it shouldn't be possible, you shouldn't even have the time to do it. You broke the reality, which is exactly what he wants. In other words, you helped him break the multiverse.
I definitely think that’s the easiest of the Shield Cards - you should be able to set things up so that the shield breaks on his 3rd turn at worst. If your Heroes = 3 or 4 he should actually flip his Shield card before any of your heroes do anything, as he should play 3 Aeon men in Battle Zone 2, then move there and make them and your second Scion damage themselves. That means you plan to sacrifice a single hero who has had 1-2 turns of set up only on the next turn, and you can all move onto his second form without much trouble.
When compared to the others:
The Progeny one requires at least Hero number of heroes to move to where OblivAeon is, which relies on him moving first turn if you want to trigger it, and because he deals the damage does 5-7 damage to anyone triggering it, and then requires keeping 3 Environment cards in play while he destroys them, which is dependent on a number of factors and potentially discarding cards which hurts you more going forward.
The Nixious one isn’t too bad on the flip side, but requires getting Environment cards in the trash on the front which is going to depend on the environment again and generally require a few turns to set up.
The Aeon Master one has a couple of tricky conditions related to Aeon Men - Build up enough first while OblivAeon creates and destroys them, the clear them out without using powers!
The Void Soul one is also quite dependent on what mission cards you get on the front (although admittedly will give you good set up for the rest of the fight if you complete them) and then requires a pretty big attack to go through on OblivAeon. Not impossible, but more hero / card dependent.
What I quite like about the Borr one, is that it kind of solves itself pretty fast and while losing a hero is a huge cost, it’s impact on the overall fight is probably lower (especially as early as it comes) than some of these others.
Phase 1 of the Borr shield only flips if H hero targets damage themselves, not any target. Aron Men and Scions damaging themselves don’t count. I’ve played twice and had a heck of a time getting through the first side of the shield, because it has been hard to coordinate the heroes being in the same zone as OblivAeon...his cards or scions cards or destruction of Aeon Locus move OblivAeon around in ways I can’t seem to control. It sort of feels like trying to set up for Losing to the Odds with Wager Master...
