SotM Event #14: Strongest 4-Hero Team

General GTG Events
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Some remarks on the villains now that the score sheet is out.

Team:  Legacy, Team Leader Tachyon, Haka, Tempest

Settled on Legacy and TLT right off since I thought they would provide support, some tanking capability, and TLT having some big hit capability in the later rounds.  Beyond that I finally settled on Haka and Tempest for steady ability to inflict damage plus their additional cards that could help with villain control (Lightning Ball, Savage Mana, Ground Pound) as well as a TLT-fueled Haka of Battle being available.  No direct villain deck manipulation capability beyond Take Down, but otherwise some pretty broad capabilities.

All games were played on Normal since it was my first exposure to the villains, and even a few of the environments, beyond seeing some of the cards as I unpacked them.

Game #1 - Deadline

Never felt the heroes were threatened that much in this game.  Catastrophe cards were generally kept in check by Tempest or TLT using cards such as Lightning Ball.  Legacy got Inspired Presence out and then played Fortitude and one-shots while using Galvanize to support the other heroes.  TLT facilitated card draw for the most part while chipping away with minor attack cards (which adds up with +2 damage dealt).  Haka used Crush, Mere, or Taiaha and simply pounded away on the villain.  Tempest played one-shots and used his base power a lot since Hail Storm wasn't drawn until late.

3 Environment cards were removed, but little threat of more.

Deadline never flipped, so his second side remains unseen.  From the mix of weapons and catastrophes I expect that he could push a weaker team who doesn't have the right cards or powers available.  I also expect that in advanced play he would prove much more obstinate as well.

 

Game #2 - Progeny

The heroes saw more pressure in this game, but things never appeared to be spiraling out of control.  The normal rules on Scions never allowed them to get out of control - and actually allowed choice in which ones to deal with as more came out.  Three of the four heroes got DR -1 early on, and thus one of the Scions had little effect.  Villain play was also slowed by Take Down being played twice by Legacy.  This allowed the heroes to get organized for pushing out damage; all with a +2 damage dealt bonus courtesy of Legacy.  Game was ended by a 14-card discard to power a Haka of Battle.

This is a villain I want to see played in advanced mode.  With the Scions staying out and building up I expect such a game to be short and frantic - sort of like playing against PlagueRat.  A race to inflict enough damage before the Scions become overwhelming.

 

Game #3 - Kaagra Warfang

A curveball style game with different winning conditions than usual.  The heroes mainly rolled out DR early to allow another gladiator or two to come out.  A round of pounding on gladiators got the heroes an early favor lead, and TLT the Death Dealer title as she finished off a gladiator using Sucker Punch.  Things actually looked fairly easy for the heroes to maintain a favor lead and win.

The tide turned as a Fickle Crowd stole most of the hero favor and gave it to the Bloodsworn.  Villain one-shots were taking on-goings and equipment (mainly DR), and Kaagra Warfang also entered the combat.  Followed quickly by more gladiators and the Bloodsworn were quickly well ahead in favor.  The heroes were inflicting damage, but facing an uphill battle. Legacy was using Motivational Charge, Legacy Ring, and Galvanize; TLT via small damage burst cards; Haka using Taiaha; and Tempest with Electrical Storm, one-shots, and Grevious Hailstorm.

The game turned with TLT neutralizing most gladiator damage for a turn with a Hypersonic Assault.  The heroes spread their other damage around to set up a big next round against a bunch of gladiators with low HP including Kaagra Warfang down to 4 HP.  The favor at that time stood 17-10 with the Bloodsworn close to winning.  Two more gladiators came into play on the villain turn, but netted no additional favor.   The environment kicked in Imbued Fraility to help with damage even more.   Legacy led off the heroes turns with setting up Galvanize again.

Team Leader Tachyon then unleased a simple Accelerated Assault.  However, with +3 damage dealt this was 4 melee damage per gladiator in addition to Death Dealer allowing her to destroy gladiators with up to 7 HP.  TLT proceeded to take out Kaagra Warfang and four other gladiators completely in addition to wounding two more for 4 HP and gaining at least 1 more colosseum title.  An impressive 14 points of favor to push the heroes to a 24-17 win.

This is another villain I expect to hit the table more often with players who have played the game a few times.  It's a very good game to go against a non-standard set of victory conditions, a combat environment that is changable, a bit fickle, but will provide entertainment.

 

Game #4 - Infinitor

A game full of targets rolling out between Infinitor and the environment (Enclave of the Endlings).   The heroes were kept hopping for a bit to deal with them, but settled down to form pretty quickly with getting DR cards out, Legacy getting the Legacy Ring - Motivational Charge - Galvanize combo going, and the rest of the team pounding away with one-shots and powers getting enhanced damge thanks to Legacy.  Finished off by TLT dropping two 10-point Lightning Barrages on Infinitor's head.

Should have played Infinitor first to get more of a rise in threat from him to Deadline to Progeny.  In any case, this villain needs some further plays in order to see if he remains interesting and how his advanced side works out.

I also want to see the Enclave of the Endlings environment more.  Only saw 4-5 cards from it, and it looked target heavy and pretty interesting in how it helped or hindered the heroes.  The one environment card that played a card from each deck did not complete a cycle because TLT's top card was an environment/on-going destruction card.  Oops.

 

Game #5 - Wager Master

I figured this game was going to be odd due to a few factors; villain art, 51 HP, and some forum discussion.  (Low villain HP generally indicate something special in terms of victory conditions of villain ability to avoid or heal from damage.)

The game started out with Conditions rolling out, including multiple Wagelings.  Heroes were putting out defense cards, building up, and being wary of how the multiple condition cards were affecting play and victory conditions.  Including desirability of flipping conditions face-down or not.  Eventually enough Condition cards built up and Wager Master flipped.

So now it was a random condition up, a set down that set X for some effects, and Wager Master putting out more cards.  With occassionally the Condition being that if Wager Master hit 0 HP the heroes would lose.  While this was going on the Omnitron-IV environment was being mildly annoying with drones and destroying a piece of equipment now and then.

However, the hero response once Wager Master flipped was pretty blase' - they simply pounded the heck out of him.  AOE attacks did enough damage to stop the drones, and there was no reason to kill Wagelings since they were simply going to be re-shuffled.  Wager Master was purposefully kept at around 15 HP when the one condition was out.  A Take Down kept any more Conditions from coming out.  And once the heroes could win simply by finishing off Wager Master they did so with Haka of Battle enhanced Crush.

I was actually a bit disappointed by this and thought there would be a little more to it.

Will have to see how he plays again to see if this was a one-off.  And also see how advanced play affects this as well.

 

Summary

An interesting set of villains to face "fresh" with a solid hero team.  Will have to get more games in with a variety of hero teams to see how I rank these set of expansion heroes as compared to the others.

 

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If I submit any more games does it have to be in advanced to count?

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No. You only have to use advance if you saw the villain before assembling your team. The idea was to go in blind, but i knew people would want to look at the cards. So, i just didn’t want you to assemble a team around them.

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For this event I figured that Legacy and Wraith were obvious choices for uberness.  I went with Rook City Wraith for the possibility of minimal environmental deck manipulation and the expectation of replacing her base power quickly anyway.  Parse for villain deck manipulation and irreducible damage, and the Scholar for being a damage sponge.  I tend to play fairly conservatively so I went with a possibly excessive capability for damage reduction and redirection.  I suspect that if I'd been playing Advanced, I'd have lacked enough firepower in a couple cases.
 
I wanted to play the villains in roughly ascending order of difficulty, so I started out with Infinitor.  It began rather painfully, but the heroes got set up (partly thanks to Slamara) and took control pretty easily.  I think it would've been significantly more difficult without Parse helping make damage irreducible a few times.  The environment targets that came out didn't do anything really bad (partly thanks to Mega Computer) and overall it felt like a nice warmup game.  
 
Wager Master was a bit trickier.  Between frequent destruction of ongoings/equipment, AOE damage, a few environment targets focusing on the lowest health hero, and absolutely nothing coming up to redirect damage to either hero capable of soaking it more effectively, Parse finished the game with 2 health (and that was probably thanks solely to the Wraith using Stun Bolt the last few rounds.)  The game felt a lot easier to deal with after Wager Master flipped, which I didn't expect.  That may have just been unfortunate card draw by the heroes.  This fight was probably the one that was the most stressful out of all of the new villains.
 
Deadline was a nice quick fight.  Buffer Overflow never got used, but Extrasensory Awareness allowed Parse to mitigate the effect of catastrophes.  The biggest health hits to the heroes were from themselves - Heroic Interception and Proverbs and Axioms both done while hero damage was boosted by Legacy.  The irreducible damage that Deadline dealt was manageable, though this might be the first game in which I've deliberately used Suture Self.  The environment deck was down to 5 cards when Deadline was killed (I wasn't drawing into ongoing destruction to get rid of Catastrophes, so he'd flip about every other round) and if Wraith and the Scholar hadn't been so buffed I'd have been worried.  After looking through the rest of his deck, I got rather lucky that some of his devices never showed up.  This was probably my favorite battle out of the new villains.  Also, I kind of want to take him to Rook City just to see that place wrecked...
 
Kaargra was a step up in difficulty, though I had a stroke of luck to start - of the two Bloodsworn Judgements that showed up, the first was on the first turn (nothing to destroy) and the other was Buffer Overflowed.  Without setups being destroyed, Wraith + Legacy = 7 projectile damage from Razor Ordnance and three instances of 5 damage from Throwing Knives, which meant 5 crowd favor a turn.  An early Flesh to Iron on the Scholar meant that the heavy hits from Kaargra weren't getting favor for 4+ damage at once, and the gladiator that dealt two hero targets 3 damage each wasn't getting the favor for 2+ damage to multiple targets.  Kaargra was still getting that, of course, but by the time I flipped her back, the favor was something like 30 for the heroes to half that for the villains.  Titles didn't get much play in this game.  Wraith got Death-caller via grappling hook, Parse got Living Weapon toward the end of the game, and Kaargra and a couple gladiators had some other titles that never seriously mattered.
 
Progeny was...weird.  I never got much set up.  If he'd lived another turn he'd have flipped, as Parse went below 10 on his last turn.  The scions and ongoings that came out looked nasty.  When one-shots came out that had cards revealed until a scion or ongoing was found, the one-shots that kept getting skipped over looked horrendous.  Despite all that...he felt underwhelming and just got beat down.  I want to play him some more because I can't help but think that I should've been in a lot more pain.  Yeah, there was some good timing on a Heroic Interception + Proverbs and Axioms + Targetting Arrow, with an Offensive Transmutation the next turn, but it still seemed unexpectedly stress-free.
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Yes, watching Deadline destroy Rook City (only 5 cards left in the deck at the end) was oddly enjoyable.  Having a Scum and Villainy help trigger part of the destruction only to get removed itself made me smile.  Falling Statuary doing 3 damage to Deadline on the last environment turn was just icing on the cake.

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So I beat Deadline and Infinitor, but both were close games. I had Progeny down to a few HP with 2 or my heros incapped, but I forgot that it had Scion of Frost in play, despite me plinking it to death. So it really had 3 hp instead of 0  when I put my cards away. I'll repay that one and the last 2 soon

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So, going over the results, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between top picked teams and the leftovers (at within the confines of this event).