Say Apostate has the Orb of Delirium out -- if you have Tempest hit all targets with Squall, does that mean that he hits the Orb of Delirium once for every Relic in play?
Yes. Individually. So Squall isn't one 5 Point attack, it's five 1 point attacks (if there were five targets in play for example).
It should also be noted that you choose a target, then redirect if needed, choose the next target, redirecting if needed. If you have 5 relics in play, with Orb at 3 HP, you could hit it first, then target two other relics, causing it to be destroyed. That will allow the other 2 relics to be hit.
Another note of importance, if a target has DR that would reduce the damage to 0, then no redirection would occur. So without damage increases or irreducible damage, targeting Condemnation will not trigger a redirection.
Man, I really wish we'd realized that a couple weeks ago (because of a really bad opening draw -- Profane Summons, which drew not only Orb of Delirium, but also Tome of the Unknowable and Ruins of Malediction -- he had almost his entire deck out on the playing field by the end of the second round and was one of only two games we've played where we got to the point of needing a villain deck reshuffle). Admittedly Ruins of Malediction's DR made it so that most of the mass damage attacks couldn't do much anyway, but still, we misinterpreted it as more like Legacy's Heroic Interception and focused mainly on attacks that would damage the Orb directly.
That was actually a really fun game -- we played mostly the mystic heroes (Nightmist, Ra, Fanatic, Argent Adept and Tempest), which meant when Apostate played Apocalypse, it did him more harm than us by wiping out his demons and leaving Nightmist, Ra, and Fanatic's relics on the table.
Just to check something…you know you never have to draw during your draw phase, right? You only ever have to if something says "draw a card" (as opposed to "you may draw a card"). So you can avoid Apostate playing extra cards via the Tome at the cost of not getting any extra cards yourself.
Yeah, we know, but it came out on the first round. Nightmist and Argent Adept both need card draw to even basically function, and nobody else had any powers in their flops that could get through the +2 damage reduction from the Runes to even start on the Orb. If we didn't draw, we couldn't do much but plink at Apostate himself, so we judged it worth letting him put more stuff out so we could actually get moving.
Hmm. No Cedistic Dissonant, then? :(
Nor an instrument to sacrifice to it.