SotM Weekend - Villain Beatdown!

General GTG Events
21

That was exactly my contention.  On turn 1, you definitely don't have an O/E in play.  On subsequent turns, you probably avoid playing them so as not to get them destroyed, and in the process you utterly neuter Plunder, which is otherwise one of her nastier cards.  Or, if you do play O/Es, everyone puts one out, and only one is destroyed each round, speeding her toward flipping to her less dangerous side.  I would give her a +1 on Advanced, no more.

On her flip side, its the first instance of damage that would be dealt each round. So it happens the first time you try to deal her damage regardless of whether she has cards still under her or not.

That is the exact opposite of the last ruling I heard on the subject.  Her Advanced text is at the bottom of the card, so by RAW, it happens last, after the damage has been prevented by removing a card.  I think this is lame, and if it's been changed I'm glad of it.  But it's still only one attack per round - annoying if you have a powers-based heavy hitter like Haka in position 1, certainly, but otherwise fairly manageable.  (If it were the first damage every turn, as per her misprinted oversized card, that would be entirely a different story.  I would buy that version being worth at least 4 victory points, no question.)

22

Villains might not be twice as hard on advanced, but they are at least twice as awesome.

23

shrug - welp then, I guess mark me down as having contributed 4 points instead of 2 when I mopped the floor with Ambuscade.  I didn't find it especially awesome (actually I forgot it even was an advanced game at first), but who am I to quibble with the designers.

Maybe the OP could edit the spreadsheet to have an "advanced?" column next to each villain which doubles the value, so we wouldn't have to enter our names twice?

24

Christopher didn't say they're "twice as hard".  He said they're worth "double points."  That's not the same thing. 

And if you haven't played La Capitan on advanced yet, you're in for a real treat--be ready for a beating!

25

I got a beating the first time I faced her, and that was on regular.  I've since come to conclude that it wasn't Cappy herself that was hard there, so much as the Time Cataclysm where I was fighting her…that one seems to be second only to Rook City in how much difficulty it adds to a fight.  It particularly combines nastily with her deck, since it was giving her an extra villain card play each round when she already had three.  It was my first time with either of them, so I didn't know how hazardous the pairing was, and we had allowed it to happen in the hopes of getting extra cards.

26

Sincen it is double the points, the easiest way it to put down your name twice.

27

Yeah, Time Cataclysm can be rough. I ran two demo games there in Essen, and in one of them it was really awful. Fortunately, it was with a bunch of guys who really wanted a challenge, so it was perfect :)

28

Speaking of a challenge, my third game against Iron Legacy turned out not much better than my first two.  The first game was four heroes and we got completely destroyed, and the second was the turns-out-not-quite-legal Freedom Six battle, in which a dead Tempest almost completely ended IL with his "everybody's immune to one damage type" incap ability, but IL got a card that deals non-melee damage before the two surviving heroes had regained any of their demolished HP.

This time, I again had Tempest, along with Fanatic and the Scholar.  Fanatic died first, as she usually does in my games (6 out of 9 times I myself have played her, with 5 of them being game losses; she's really not my character), and then Tempest went down, at which point it again actually looked like he was going to single-handedly neutralize his killer - this time, it was by letting Scholar constantly re-loop his two copies of Expect the Worst, negating all incoming damage and healing 2 HP each turn.  Unlike in the previous games, this version of IL had not started on 2x Armored Fortitude, and so with a little better luck on the opening hands, the heroes might have been able to take him down in a couple rounds…unfortunately, he got the time he needed to stabilize, eventually getting those Fortitudes, and earlier than that a Final Evolution that turned off most of the heroes' ability to damage him.  So it eventually came down to a standoff between IL and Scholar, each one invincible to each other (and to both of the Block's warring factions), and eventually I gave up because Scholar has no Ongoing destruction and thus could never actually hurt IL, whereas IL could conceivably kill Scholar after he reshuffled his deck, and no longer had an EtW in his trash for Tempest to return to his hand.

So unfortunately, I wasn't able to add any points to this challenge.  But I did get to enjoy an amusing mental image:  the uptight iron-clad enforcer of "Justice" and the chillaxing Dude in a bathrobe who's mystically impossible to touch, just staring at each other forever in seething disapproval of their respective lifestyles and aggravating invincibility, while the entire Block erupts into chaos behind them without their noticing.  They are just perfect exact opposites, aren't they?  The irresponsible hero who takes nothing seriously, and the guy who went around the bend because the only thing he cared about was destroyed, one trying to impose a psychotically twisted ideal of Justice on the world at any cost, and the other just trying to keep the peace and protect innocent people.  It's almost mythic, apart from the Scholar's costume.  :wink:

29

Lets play a mini game. I call it "Fishing for Tumbleweeds". 60% of the time it works every time. 

30

I decided to make it a bit mroe interesting and fun.

Points needed for a...

Minor Beatdown: 100

Major Beatdown: 200

Mega Beatdown: 300

31

I can't wait to get on this.  Since it is basically a beat down contest I will be using that as an excuse to run the most overpowered teams I can against their unwitting villianous victims.

It is open season on Evildoers, if only my son would fall asleep. . .

32

Alas I'm 0 in 2 tonight...my second face-off with Advanced Warlord Voss went even worse than my first.  Though it wasn't really him that defeated me, it was Pike Industrial.  Turn 1 Irradiated Vat, turns 2 and 3 Trisolvent Vents, and the latter finished us off.  Pity; these were all my best friends against The Ennead....

33

And my third attempt at a contribution today has also failed, even though it would only be a measly two points according to the listed difficulties (which I think are extremely wrong in her case).  It was La Capitan, but I wasn't even on Advanced (and I'm not sure I'll ever dare to be).  She is beatable; I know this from games in Silver Gulch and The Block...but any Environment which grants card plays seems to exponentially increase her difficulty.   The three heroes managed to sink the ship and kill most of the crew once, but within a round, the ship came back and even more crew came out, and the heroes went down one by one.

Again, Atlantis rather than the Villain gets the credit...it's historically been one of my favorite environments, because extra card plays are awesome for the heroes and usually not unbearable for the villain.  But not only does Cappy get triple mileage out of extra plays, with nearly all her cards doing several different things...it's not even funny how hard Atlantis was determined to screw me this game.  Round 1 Hallway Collapse was negated by her healing so it only hurt the heroes, round 2 Font of Power was somewhat helpful to both sides, but round 3 Pillars of Hercules absolutely sent Cappy into overdrive, and round 4 Leaking Room was just insult atop injury.  It ended up with Omnitron-X and a huge pile of cards in play (most of them NOT components, since I was holding Self-Sabotage rather than Singularity - the two cards are not precisely balanced with each other) standing alone against a shipload of about four crew, shrugging off much of the damage with Ablative Coating but still being whittled down gradually with hard hits and non-physical damages, and Maria Helena's Revenge hurting him for the few targets he did manage to kill, until he managed to get Battle Forged low enough in one round that a pair of Krakens could kill them both at once, thanks to the MHR psychic damage when BF died.

So, my second utterly ignominious defeat against Cappy, who always seems to explode out the gate very strong, possibly stall in the midgame, and then snowball again into utter unbeatability with a single Raiding Party or All Together Now.  You need to be able to press for the win when you're at the "sweet spot", with Ship and Crew largely wiped out, and a single card at the wrong time utterly dooms you by bringing an overwhelming force out of nowhere.

34

Game 1:

Visionary, Legacy, Tempest, Fanatic vs. Iron Legacy Advanced in Insula Primalis.

Iron Legacy falls on round three, Fanatic and Tempest nuked the crap out of him in round three, he didn't get to flip.

Game 2:

Visionary, Mr. Fixer, Expat, Argent Adept vs. Akash'Bhuta Advanced in Final Wasteland.

Longest game ever.  Removed eight of Akash's targets from the game, all her damage was gone, but the destruction cards got to be annoying pretty quick.  War of atrition went to the heroes as Adept could outheal Akash's damage.  I shouldn't have removed the targets, just killed them normally and we probably win faster, but with higher chance of losing the game.

Favorite moment was Fixer playing Bloody Knuckles and whacking 9 targets with Jack Handle/Crane, then Adept using Alacritous and inventive to let Fixer play Overdrive, and then Salvage yard.  Hitting 5 times with Jackhandle/Knuckles in one round, clearing the board of limbs and env. cards while recovering a ton of cards from the trash. . . Epic.

Game 3&4 The Chairman advanced refuses to do anything but crush me.  I seriously have a history of stomping the Chairman, looks like I was due to regress to the mean.

Game 5:

Visionary, Fanatic, Haka, Adept vs. Dreamer Advanced in Wagner Mars Base.

First round End of Days and Adept with Sonata.  Wagner played Meteor Storm first round, it was still out when the game ended at the start of round 4.  It was not even funny, exactly four hero cards were played, 2 powers used, and the entire game had 5 damage dealt (all first villain turn).

35

Well, the three musketeers of Omnitronks, Mr. Fixer and F6 Tempest were turned over twice in succession by advanced Cosmic Omnitron, in Wagner Mars Base then Insula Primalis - not very helpful to the quest I know, but I do like a challenge! In both games we had Cosmitron on the ropes before it pulled out a terrible chain of cards that hammered us flat like jelly tent pegs (with a particularly impressive chain of drones in the second game that nearly overwhelmed us, only to then launch both bombs to render our resistance laughable).

I'm up for some more pain so will have another bash this weekend - this time I'll crank it up to Rook CIty or Pike Industrial because why not?

36

This challenge doesn't adjust point values for tough Environments, so if you want to contribute to the cause (yeah, I'm one to talk, I know), there's no real advantage to suffering through Rook City.  Pike Industries might well help you; in my experience it makes all games shorter and more violent, so it's greatly to the heroes' advantage against lower-HP and less-aggressive villains; my only defeat there was by Grand Warlord Voss on Advanced, since he's extremely tough and his minions dish out a lot of pain, which the Vats amplify while not affecting him much.

37

I played one of my favorite scenarios twice. Legacy, Visonary, Ra, Argent Adept, Expatriette, in Insula Primas vs (Advance) Voss.

1) Find Hair-Triggered Reflexes.

2) Pump it up as much as possible, which every hero deck and the environment can do.

38

Are there official difficulties for Bomber Blade and Cosmitron? They're both significantly harder than their standard versions.

39

The Sentinels Sidekick app (which is officially licenced by Greater Than Games) has them both listed as lvl.3 Difficulty. 

40

The Sidekick App is telling the truth. Whenever the Handelabra guys have a question about something like that, they always check. Anything on the Sidekick app is official (unless we miss something, which is always possible but not likely :) )