(If this has been discused already just point me to the proper place and ignore me)
My copy of Vengance arrived just ahead of a snow storm so today I've had great opportunity to finaly see the V5 in action. I've also seen some discusion here about the idea of future additions to the V5 and ideas of using existing villains as V5 alternates. It occured to me that the Eenead might be kind of a natural fit with them from a mechanics perspective. The numbers and card counts seem to support it. If you choose a single character card from the Eennead remove the others, the shrine and the 4 cards that cause you to place new character cards into play you have the same number of cards as a V5 deck and a villain character card with roughly equal HP to the other V5 characters. Other than that it seems that it would just work normaly.
The only problems I can see are these: first, that the V5 don't scale with H; their attacks all do fixed amounts of damage and whatever else. It wouldn't be TOO hard to just put all the H values to H-2, but the other problem is that the Ennead are meant to be dealt with as a group. Their power comes from having a card play and having 3-9 auxillary effects trigger off of it, so having just 1 severely limits their ability to combo.
Yeah, this might actually be doable. They'd play a card each turn, and MAYBE do a secondary effect, based on the type of card played. V5 decks only have 20 cards, but if you remove the shrine and the 4 cards that add new Ennead members, that's done. So figuring out what H should be (H-1 or H-2 as McBehrer said) is really all it would take, and they already have incapacitated effects. On the plus side, they'd play very fast compared to other V5 members, because they have no ongoings or minions.
I actually kind of figuired the H scaling effect might be balanced out by the fact that they wouldn't have their secondary effect go off every turn like the others.
So are you proposing that each of the H ennead members you'd play in this Vengeance-style game would have their own 20-card deck? That could in theory result in like 6-10 consecutive Elemental Storms....
I don't have Vengeance yet, but I have combined a single member of The Ennead (Set and Atu, at different times) with a half-health Ambuscade. That worked great against three heroes, and I was planning to drop both of them into Vengeful Five teams down the road.
The problem is though that it results in double scaling. Playing against the V5 already scales, because you're playing against (H) V5 decks. If one of the members has damage that scales with (H), then that individual member becomes tougher or easier, in addition to having more partners. Now, if you want to make the Ennead member harder, you can fix (H) as higher (always 4, always 5), but you really don't want it to actually fluctuate with (H).