The not-so-unforgiving wasteland

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?

Not yet! Sounds awesome

That's how we beat Dawn one time; they just kept eating the citizens, so she couldn't flip or anything. A commander is much less of a threat without an army to back them up.

 

Also, I JUST got done playing Ambuscade on advanced there with the Scholar, Omnitronks, Argent, and Nightmist.

 

It was a flawless victory. They ate the sonic mines and the cloaking device, and after a while we just decided to go all out. One 8-component Sabotage, 27-card turn loose, and double-4 oblivion + ring (with Alchemical redirection and expect the worst in play) and suddenly Ambuscade went from full health to -20.

Hehe, Matriarch versus Unforgiving Wasteland is one combo I've been looking forward to playing since I got hold of Shattered Timelines. But we randomly roll for our villains and environments, so it hasn't come up yet.

Impressive McBehrer!  I'm going to attempt a bit more fun with this one I think.  I'd like try to reduce Voss' deck to three forced deployments, though it might be harder to weather the damage and avoid the alternate lose condition on that one.

I'd also like to clean up the wasteland by feeding all of the monsters to themselves, leaving nothing but the library and con's bunker.  Eternal Haka might have to join in on that one for thematic reasons.  This environment is so much fun!

Get the Wasteland down to just those three cards may be pretty tricky. You'll probably need to use Argent to Syncopated Onslaught the Skunk Ape to increase it's damage and use Rhaspody of Vigor to restore its health when needed. Then use NightMist or Fixer to redirect the damage dealt to the Horrid Skunk Ape when it is the last target in the deck. Maybe have Tempest to give even more heals to the heroes while you do this?

The Mongolian Death Worm would probably be the most annoying due to its hit-and-run nature.  Driving Mantis would be my preferred way of dealing with the last Skunk Ape (and I was almost forced to do it in the above game), so maybe Tiger Claw+Pipe Wrench (or a DR buff from Argent) would be the means of coaxing the worm into swallowing itself.  On second thoughts, ensuring Fixer had highest HP would be rather difficult under most circumstances.

I imagine Voss' ships would cause even more trouble with their melee immunity and abundant hitpoints.

My group played a game against Omnitron in the Final Wasteland last weekend. We got out the library and Con's Bunker early and used them at every opportunity. Ra managed to get off an 8 point and 9 point Scorched Earth and we had a good 7 or 8 devices (and Chrono-Ranger! He got eaten by a chupacabra) stacked up under Unforgiving Wasteland before Omni finally pulled a Terraform.

I just finished my seventh Final Wasteland game, and not one of them was a loss (although this one probably would have involved some casualties if not for a play error; I've never actually lost a hero other than Bunker one time, but I don't know how often my misreading/misremembering what the cards do was a factor in that).  This one was Grand Warlord Voss, and Unforgiving wasn't a factor in it, because Wraith used two Mega Computers to render the Cryptids largely harmless.  However, there's a good chance that Baby Legacy (who I was trying for the first time) should have died, or at least should have been in enough danger of death that she needed to play Danger Sense or Fortitude instead of an important source of damage, because I was mistaken about Smoke Bombs working on the environment.  There were Jersey Devils and Amphibious Chupacabras which probably ought to have finished her off (and not left an incap, thanks to Wasteland), but I got so used to ignoring damage thanks to Alchemical Redirection and Smoke Bombs (with Scholar in double-Flesh to Iron), I forgot to keep accurate track of the details.  But once I got used to the idea that I was invincible, I aggressively started drawing cards with the Ancient Library (unfortunately I forgot to do it more than half the time, since I'm used to the standard play order and often fail to notice exceptions to it; had I paid attention, I could have gotten all the cryptids out while Scholar was still tanking for the entire party), and between that and Con's Bunker, I soon had the entire Environment deck in play.

At this point, a rules question emerges.  Now, Con's Bunker says "Either destroy this card or play the top card of the environment deck", so there's no mystery there - with the entire rest of the deck out, if Con's Bunker is ahead of the Mongolian Death Worm in sequence, you have to destroy Con's Bunker because you can't play a card.  (After that, the Death Worm dives into the now-two-card deck.  If Con's Bunker is after the Death Worm, you can choose to play the Death Worm after it bites and dives, in which case it'll reappear when you keep Con's Bunker bite again that same turn, and then Con's Bunker will be ahead of the Death Worm in next turn's queue.  So it's unavoidable to lose the Bunker every second turn, although you have a half chance of getting it back.)  That part I understand.  But here's the part I'm not sure on - when every single card of the Environment Deck is in play, can you draw cards with Ancient Library?  As far as I can tell, there's no reason why you can't; the card is written "At the start of a hero's turn, that hero may draw two cards; if they do, play the top card of the environment deck".  Thusly, playing the enviro card is contingent upon the hero successfully drawing cards, not the other way around.  If the hero chooses not to draw cards (perhaps to deny Omnitron the damage from Interpolation Beam), they aren't able to play the top Environment card even if they want to.  But I can't see any way to read this text as not allowing the heroes to just chill in the Library and draw two extra cards every single turn, with no real consequence once the entire Wasteland is in play, as long as they're safe from the Cryptids themselves and the villain can't destroy the Environment.  The game I played tonight made very heavy use of this apparent possibility (Scholar in particular appreciated the extra cards to keep his 2x Flesh to Iron in play...it would be more appropriate if Eternal Haka could do this with multiple Ta Mokos or permanent Shielding Hakas, but Scholar is a good runner-up for the entire concept).  And of course, Ra didn't mind a bit when he finally drew Scorched Earth with ten environment cards in play....

(By the way, going off on a speculation tangent...I can't believe I never noticed this before.  "Con's Bunker" = CON IS BUNKER?  Could this be true?  Perhaps CON is actually the Final Evolution of the Bunker Suit, having become sentient and being the "concordant harmony" of all its previous wearers?  It's not the best theory about who CON might be, but I couldn't resist mentioning it.  I'm probably not the first one to come up with this idea, but I've never seen anyone say it on the forum.  We may know more about whether this is possible after seeing Fright Train, since he ends up in the suit in the future...maybe he and Lt. Vance found a way they could be friends after all.)

I never thought of it, but such a blatant yet sneaky clue like Con's Bunker being interpretable as the Bunker that belongs to Con, or Con is Bunker is something I could see Christopher doing.

This is worth looking into.  It isn't like Bunker was the only word they could use for Con's location in the future.

My game group has made that game literally every time we have seen -- or, in fact, mentioned -- that card. I doubt it means anything.