My latest game featured The Scholar, Expatriette and Mr. Fixer venturing into The Final Wasteland to take on The Matriarch (standard difficulty)
It was my first time playing in the waseland and I hadn't really looked through the cards. I was under the impression it was wholly targets.
The first few rounds were reasonably easy, with The Scholar's Flesh to Iron negating all damage from the two Abominable Snowmen as well as The Martiarch's retaliation damage. The Ancient Library came out very early and I took advantage of the extra draws, spawning a good number of monsters in the process. I was having trouble shifting the mask but no biggie, hairtrigger reflexes/submachine gun was dealing with fowl so all was well in the wasteland.
Then things fell apart quite rapidly. First a carrion fields came out, shortly followed by the cohorts. The Scholar remedied their damage reduction by discarding his hand to eliminate Muninn but this was answered by a cacophony destroying his tanking ability. All element cards were now in the trash. The villain flipped. Our Rook City heroes took a lot of retaliation damage before Darken the Skies reanimated a bunch of fowl cards and brought the mask back (immediately after I destroyed it!). The appearance of the other carrion fields somewhere along the line had not been a welcome sight either and there were a fair number of monsters in play. I very nearly conceded.
A grease gun from Fixer bought some extra time, though at this point the odds seemed insurmountable. I didn't have the firepower to eliminate all sources of damage nor the hitpoints to weather it. I vowed to go down amongst the biggest mess I could make, so each hero drew extra cards to bring out more of The Wasteland's wildlife. Amongst two monsters, out came Unforgiving Wasteland too.
It was glorious.
The Chupacabra munched some jackdaws, the New Jersey Devils toasted some crows and the Skunk Ape ate the other fowl. The Rat Beasts and Snowmen tore apart the carrion fields and suddenly things didn't look too bad. 13 targets were removed from play on one turn (prompting no damage from the Ruler of the Flock) and Expatriette and Fixer begun a tentative game of pest-control, keeping their pet Skunk Ape alive while aiming to reduce all other targets to 1HP. Sadly, Expatriette didn't quite survive the siege to kill The Matriarch; falling to a cacophony three rounds before game end. The final blow was a 16-card Know When to Turn Loose from The Scholar to take The Matriarch to 71/70 damage. He never managed to get another element into play. Fixer survived with just one hitpoint remaining. ALL villain targets (and 6 environment ones) had been removed from the game, thereby reducing her deck to five one-shots.
None of the heroes had a bad game but the game winner was definitely Unforgiving Wasteland. I wondered if anyone else had had a similar experiences with it?