Yesterday I found a really cool approach to Gloomweaver that blew my mind! The team is Dark Visionary, Dark Conductor Argent Adept, Best of Times Chrono-Ranger, Omnitron X, and Rogue Agent KNYFE. Visionary, Omnitron, and KNYFE work together to push the relics directly from the deck to the trash while Anthony helps Jim get set up with bounties on Gloomy as a backup plan for in case a relic slips through that net that Jim can just apply those bounties to the relic. It’s kind of a sideways approach, but it’s lots of fun to imagine how that plays out in fiction with the trio hunting down relics while the duo are fighting cultists
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I remember using a similar team for the video game achievement to win a game without playing any cards.
Oh that’s clever!
Yep, it’s a pretty solid gimmick. If you want a tiny bit of extra oomph, replacing Chrono-Ranger with Greatest Legacy gives you an extra use of Omnitron’s power each round, while replacing him with Parse lets you use Anthony to dig for Extrasensory Awareness and then have more control over which cards you discard.
(You can use a similar trick against Wager Master; get him to play Not All He Seems and then mill through his deck at high speed to end the game.)
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I have very mixed feelings about this, because card abilities as open-ended as that are kind of like in D&D where they tell the DM to just make some **** up to cover any situation which doesn’t have rules crunch associated with it.
What I wish would happen is that we took the entirety of SOTM, designated it all as “level 1 complexity” (actually level 2 would probably make more sense, if we had like a 5-point scale), and then created a version of the game that was “level 3” (or 4) complexity. You’d need to create a new version of every card, just about, and in this added complexity, you’d add a huge number of additional details that would make a far more simulationist game, and these would be the kinds of effects you’d get. For instance, every deck would contain things like the Ennead’s three icons or the magic numbers on Nightmist’s cards, and so abilities like Timeshift and Dark Dynamics would go from just “do whatever the top card says” to something like “reveal cards from the deck until you reveal an Magic Number 3+ card, then do what that says” or “reveal the top card; if it has Ankh, discard it, while if it has Hand, put it into play”. All the cards would be flavored around making these abilities make sense in terms of how the fluff matches the crunch, just as is currently done with picking the right 2 or 3 damage types to represent an attack that isn’t quite all one thing (eg Toxic + Radiant for Zhu Long’s dragon breath, or Cold+Toxic+Energy for the Supercooled Trisolvent in Pike Industries).
That extra complexity creates the game, and where it doesn’t exist, you have to use your creativity to explain why things work they way they do. Sometimes, that’s awesome, but other times it can get really head scratching. I really tend to prefer a more complex rules system, where the designers have actually looked at all those scenarios and figured out how they “should” work, and then made sure that the text of the cards and such actually produce that effect.
Oh I like that a lot
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