Am I correct in thinking that this card has the ability to hurt heroes? If X (bursts in trash) is a greater number than the number of villain+minion+environment hit-point cards, then heroes must be targeted, correct?
You can hit heroes with it, yes, but you’re not required to. The only time I can think of that this would be advantageous is with something like playing Twist the Ether on Tachyon, converting her damage to fire and hitting Absolute Zero with it.
About hitting AZ w/ fire damage … I see how AZ can turn that fire damage in to cold damage against an opponent twice, so AZ does twice as much damage as is done to AZ, BUT … AZ still takes the fire damage, right? I haven’t seen anything that keeps AZ from being hurt by fire (expect the one card that reduces the fire by one, but that also reduces all of the subsequent cold damage by one).
AZ is definitely a high-risk, high-reward character in that manner. With fire damage, he can either nullify it by converting it to cold (still taking the damage but getting healed the same amount) or spit it back out at someone else (still taking the damage though). However, his ability to heal himself is huge, too.
Well, with enough buffs on the table, he can heal himself for more than the damage he takes (assuming he can survive the fire attack) from Isothermic Transducer, then fire it off again at an opponent on his turn with Coolant Blast, turning a “weak” attack into both a heal and strong attack.
Don’t have the cards in front of me, but if AZ has all of his cards out wouldn’t the sequence be:
Ra hits AZ with five fire, AZ reduces the fire by one to make it four fire, AZ takes four damage, then can target someone for four cold, which becomes five cold. If AZ targets himself, the end result is that AZ ganes one HP. On AZs turn, then, AZ can use a power to target someone else with five cold damage.
The end result, then, of Ra hitting AZ with fire instead of someone else is that AZ gets one HP and the target gets hit with cold instead of fire damage, PLUS AZ has now used a power that AZ can’t then use to do something else.
This seems pretty weak, so I feel like I’m missing something.
You’re not missing anything in that specific scenario. The difference is, this is a team game. So, you’ve got Absolute Zero and Ra on that team - throw in, say, Legacy and The VIsionary. Now, Legacy’s rocking his innate power, Galvanize AND Inspiring Presence. So, when Ra does his 5 fire to Absolute Zero, it’s actually 7, then reduced one by the Cryo Chamber to 6. But when Zero deals the 6 cold, it’s increased 1 by the Focused Apertures and by 2 by Legacy to 9. Throw in a Twist the Ether from The Visionary and everything goes up even more! Then! Say you’re playing on Insula Primalis, and there’s an Obsidian Field in play! Oh, now things are getting REALLY interesting…
Also, all those things are nice, but Thermal Shockwave is where Absolute Zero shines! Note: one of the targets he picks with that card can be himself. Imagine THAT with both his modules, Cryo Chamber, Focused Apertures, plus bonues from his friends…
We can mess around with it when I’m out for that weekend so you can see my Absolute Zero song and dance, if you’d like.
That’s exactly what I was talking about when I said “With enough buffs on the table.” Things go way out of hand, especially when Baron Blade decides to play Slash and Burn.
Just to clarify, because this came up tonight: Wording is “Tachyon deals X targets 3 sonic damage, where X = the number of burst cards in your trash.” It doesn’t say “up to” that many targets, inferring that Tachyon must target heroes if there are fewer non-heroes targets than X. ???
Is that correct? :-[
Rabit
So far that’s the way that my group has been playing it. It seems that the wording indicates that everything that is a target would get hit by the Vortex as it is kind of an uncontrollable tornado.