The goal of this thread is to calculate the maximum amount of damage you can deal in the first round of play.
You can choose any five heros and stack their decks in any order. Assume the villan is Akash'buta and she played an irrelevent one shot for her opening move. The environment doesn't do anything either.
I can do 62 damage using Legacy, Argent Adept, Visionary, Omnitron X, and Absolute Zero. (Actually, I think I can get higher, but I'd need to look through OmniX's deck, which I don't have with me at the moment.) Can anybody top that?
Also, this is my first time posting, so I'm hoping that nobody's done this before.
Hmm… They have, but I don't think it was clearly resolved. Off the top of my head, I'd go Legacy, Scholar, Ra, CR, and Tempest.
Legacy plays Inspiring Presence [damage +1] and Galvanises [damage +2].
The Scholar plays Don't Dismiss Anything:
Ra puts Imbued Fire into play [+3 damage].
CR puts By Any Means into play [+4 damage].
Scholar puts DDA into play:
Ra puts The Staff of Ra into play [+1 for Ra].
CR puts Displaced Armory into play, brings out Compounded Bow, deals Akash 5 damage [5].
Tempest puts Cleansing Downpour into play.
Scholar puts Keep Moving into play to put a Mortal Form to Energy out, plays two more KMs for two more MFtE's, then puts Proverbs and Axioms into play:
Tempest plays Vicious Cyclone.
Legacy plays Back-Fist Strike, for 9 damage. [82].
The Scholar skips his power phase.
Ra plays Flame Spike for 7 damage [89], uses Pyre for 8 damage and throws his Staff for 9 [106].
CR plays Displaced Armory to bring out Jim's Hat and deal 6 damage [112], then chains four Eyes on The Prizes and finishes up with a Terrible Tech-Strike and a shot from his Compounded Bow for a total of 49 damage [161].
Tempest discards 3 cards for Vicious Cyclone, to deal 3x6 damage [179], then plays Lightning Slash for 10 damage [189], and finally uses Cleansing Downpour to heal Scholar for 2, dealing Akash 3x6 damage [207] and thus killing her.
So do we want to pretend there is a target with more HP than Akash'Bhuta? If so, I have an idea brewing in my head that may or may not work, didn't want to waste my time doing it if the Meerkat has already did the max amount of damage to her.
I'm going to disallow this one on the grounds that we can't stack the environment deck. (But really because infinite combos are boring).
I think we should go with an infinite health villian. Evan with the alternative, though, Meerkat still hasn't hit the theoretical max, because the lethal attack can send a villian into negative hit points.
High single instance of damage would be quite hard to do on the first round, as most build up slowly over the course of the game. The only one I could think of that I could achieve that with is Fanatic, but it would sacrifice the small plinky damage for just a single hit, which may or may not be worth it.
Edit: I'll post something up soon, it involves Argent Adept and Scholar, so I need to make sure I have everything exactly right.
Edit2: Actually, I am going to wait until I get my copy of Vengeance, just incase cards in K.N.Y.F.E. or The Sentinel decks have changed slightly since the playtesting proofs.
But here is the team I will be using; Legacy, Scholar, Argent, K.N.Y.F.E. and The Sentinels.
I don't have any of the cards with me at the moment, so please let me know if any of the cards don't do what I think they do.
My set up:
Legacy, Scholar, Ra, Visionary, Absolute Zero
Legacy plays Inspiring Presence [damage +1] and Galvanises [damage +2].
Scholar plays Don't Dismiss Anything:
Ra puts Imbued Fire into play [damage +3, Fire]
Visionary puts Twist the AEther on AZ [damage +/- 1 for AZ, any type]
AZ puts Null Point Calibration Unit into play
Scholar puts DDA into play :
[quote]Visionary puts Twist the Aether on AZ [damage +/- 2 for AZ, any type]
AZ puts Isothermic Transducer into play
Ra puts Staff of Ra into play [damage +1 for Ra]
Scholar puts Keep Moving into play to put a Mortal Form to Energy out, plays two more KMs for two more MFtE's, then puts Proverbs and Axioms into play:
Legacy plays Back-Fist Strike on AZ. AZ takes 8, then 14, then heals 20 [AZ at 23, taken 120]
Ra plays Fire Blast on AZ. AZ takes 10 then heals 16 [AZ at 29, taken 130]
[/quote]
Legacy plays Back-Fist Strike on AZ. AZ takes 8, then 14, then heals 20. [AZ at 27, taken 142]
[/quote]
Scholar heals himself for 1. AZ takes 5, then 11, then heals 17 x3 [AZ at 29, taken 190]
Ra plays Flame Spike on AZ. AZ takes 6, then 12, then heals 18. [AZ at 29, taken 208]
Ra uses Pyre on AZ. AZ takes 7, then takes 13, then heals 19. [AZ at 28, taken 228]
Ra throws his staff at AZ. AZ takes 8, then takes 14, then heals 20. [AZ at 26, taken 250]
Visionary plays Cerebral Hemorrhage, deals 6 damage to Akash'Bhuta (finally!), and 6 damage to AZ. AZ then takes 12, and heals 18. [AZ at 26, taken 268]
Visionary skips her power step.
AZ plays Coolant Blast, and uses its power, dealing Akash'Bhuta 274 fluffy bunny damage, for a grand total of 280 damage.
I think that's the max damage you can get out of this setup, but there's a bunch of fiddly numbers involved with keeping AZ from dying, so it's possible I missed something.
EDITED to fix my math.
EDIT2: If you switch out Legacy's Back-Fist Strikes for Flying Smashes, you get another 10 damage in, bringing the total to 290. I don't want to change all the numbers a second time, though.
jsz2, Imbued Fire only boosts fire damage, not all damage. So all of his cold-healing is only at +5, one less than what you've listed for each step. This means that he'd actually die during the self-damage step of the first Backfist Strike, so you'll have to lose some damage somewhere either for more healing or by using TtE to subtract rather than add.
Also, Scholar would need to have taken damage during the first villain turn to be able to get damage out of MFtE. The on-healing trigger won't occur if he's already at full health, since his HP won't change. It's still an impressively large amount of damage, but it's not quite as high as you've listed.
Shoot, you're right. I always forget, seeing as usually Imbued Fire covers it's tracks and makes all the damage fire. I'll redo the math sometime so we can see what the actual damage is.
I covered actualy covered the Scholar's healing. Ra shoots him with his first power use, rather than shooting AZ. Now that I think about it, I should be able to rearrange things so that Legacy's flying smash (which is better than back-fist strike) hits Scholar as well. I'll do that too, when I redo the math.
Ah, I must have missed that. It also might be easier just to have Visionary go second in the turn order and hit Akash and Scholar with Cerebral Hemorrhage, though. Since he only needs to take 3 damage, that lets Ra focus on AZ a bit more.
AZ's turn: play coolant blast, blast Akash for 283 fire damage (total 314).
So in the end we're actually dealing more damage than last time. The losses come from needing to heal more (and modify damage downwards with TtE once), and removing the Fire Blast that Ra shouldn't have had. The gains came from an extra Pyre from Ra (since he wasn't needed to shoot the Scholar, because Legacy handled that with Flying Smash), the extra damage from using Flying Smash over Back Fist Strike, and skipping the healing on the last damage so that AZ could shoot Akash in the face, and switching Ra's Staff for a Living Conflagration, which gets an extra instance of damage in, and allows me to switch up the healing step to get a bit more damage in to AZ without killing him.
It's possible that there are more tweaks to be made, but I'm over 300 damage now, so I'm happy.