My friends and I were playing a game of SotM the other night when we stumbled upon what seems to be a game-breaking (or, at least, heavily game-altering) combination. We were taking on Grand Warlord Voss in the Ruins of Atlantis, and the player using Tempest happened to be seated directly after Haka’s controller.
As the game progressed, Tempest wound up incapacitated. One of Tempest’s abilities in this state allows him to return an Ongoing card from a trash pile to play. Immediately, the Tempest player selected Haka’s trashed Ground Pound:
Ground Pound
“When this card enters play, discard 2 cards. Non-Hero cards cannot deal damage. At the start of your turn, destroy this card.”
We didn’t take a single point of damage for the rest of the game; Tempest simply recycled the Ground Pound every turn until Voss went down. From the cards themselves, I see no reason why this strategy would be illegal, but I wanted to get a few other opinions. Is this a legitimate combo? If so, it seems like Tempest is actually most valuable when incapacitated.
Note that this situation can be remedied by arranging the turn sequence in such a way that Tempest acts before Haka (since Ground Pound goes away at the start of Haka’s turn, Tempest would recur it, only to have the card destroyed again a turn or two later. Still potentially useful against things like Backlash Field, but hardly super-powerful). That being said, this is the first two-card combo I’ve seen that could force players to adopt a certain turn order in an effort to maintain competitive balance. Citizen Dawn has plenty of ways around this combo, but the other villains are pretty much helpless. Did we make any mistakes?
I suppose the limiting factor for this combo is that Ground Pound requires Haka to be able to discard two cards when it’s played, right? If he can’t do that each time, then he can’t Ground Pound, even if the card is entering play directly due to Tempest rather than being played by Haka himself. At some point, you figure Haka’s got to run out of cards and the combo won’t work anymore.
I’m not sure that the “discard 2 cards” is a limiting requirement. It doesn’t say, “You must discard 2 cards in order to play this card.” The discard effect happens after the card comes into play. As such, it seems similar to Citizen Dawn’s Blinding Blast, which forces each hero to discard two cards; if you’re only holding one card, you discard it (and the other card is “404’d,” as suggested by another poster here).
Even if you DO have to discard two cards each time it comes into play, Haka can fuel this engine simply by not playing cards or using powers. This will let him draw two cards on each of his turns, allowing the combo to continue indefinitely. Sure, Haka won’t be doing much else, but when every Hero is invulnerable…well, it’s probably worth it.
I don’t think this is a very “fun” strategy–it seems terminally boring for the Tempest and Haka players–but it could appeal to, say, a more competitive group battling an Advanced Villain. It’s not foolproof, and it does require Tempest to take a beating, but it seems awfully good in most situations.
I agree that Haka can fuel the combo by drawing two cards every turn (as long as he’s never forced to discard anything), but when a card says “this happens when the card comes into play”, I’m pretty sure that means that if that can’t happen, then the card can’t come into play. Maybe an official ruling is in order here?
This can actually be done with quite a lot of cards. Recycling Fanatic’s Aegis of Ressurrection (which is equipment, but I believe Bunker can get it for her) can make her extremely difficult to kill, even if she’s the only hero left. Recycling Take Down can prevent the villan from playing any more cards, at the cost of Legacy’s health. Recycling Ground Pound seems pretty nice too =p.
I suppose if you wanted to, you could kill Tempest off on purpose, but if you don’t attack him directly, it is very difficult to get him to be the first one down and have your other heroes in a fighting position, although I suppose if you arent taking damage, its fine if everyone is at 2 hp.
However, most villans could still counter this. Devestating Aroura, or Sedative Flechettes would end this strategy, for a round at least. The only Villan who is really shut down by it is Voss. That said, it still seems pretty good, and fully legit I believe.
My understanding is that the remaining heroes should become more of a threat to the villains when other heroes have fallen. This basically invokes the idea of the remaining heroes fighting twice as hard for their injured comrades.
And Christopher may correct me on this one, but I believe that the two-card discard is, in fact, a limiting factor.
I posted this on Haka's guide thread, but it seams to fit here...
Is it within the rules to Ground Pound and then just skip your turn for the rest of the game to keep Ground Pound in play? The card says to remove it at the start of your turn, but what if you don't take another turn?
Basically, you can skip your turn when the game says so, for example to get rid of the Meteor Storm card (Mars Base) or Volcanic Eruption (Insula Primalis).