Unluckiest Moment

Other Games SotM Game Engine
1

I just had a game against Akash Buta yesterday with one of my friends with in order Knyfe, Horus-Ra, The Sentinels and Unity in the freedom tower. Even in advanced mode we were pretty breezing by as well there are no targets in the environnment deck. Of course this is also a team of heroes with absolute crap as far as environnment destruction goes: Beebots can only do so much. So even with 2 entry points in play we weren't feeling the pain.

That's when Akash Buta reminded me why she was the absolute queen of turnover victories. On her turn she played Primeval Eruption and the next card it played after the reveal and discard was a Primeval Eruption and this one triggered a third one that could only reveal 3 cards before reshuffling her deck for the next card play. We already felt like the storm was coming by that point but damn my shuffling skills were about Setback's level for that game. So the first card to come out after shuffling her deck was of course a Primeval Eruption and guess what was the card that followed: ANOTHER Primeval Eruption. Luckily the third one got revealed by it and discarded... Nevertherless, it when from a breeze to a simple massacre. Where no limbs were in play we ended up with all of them except one Ensnaring Brambles and one Arboreal Phalange. Even considering that a bee bot was out to destroy one entry point that turn hurt like freaking hell (we had just gotten on her flip side where she strikes too).

Where your end of days when you really need it... it took every bit of creativity and scraping the bottom of our drawers but we managed to turn this into a very narrow margin victory where knyfe was at 1hp, Mainstay and Writhe at 2 and all the rest incapacitated with only 3 extra damage on Akash Buta. One turn later and the cryo chamber would've done us in and as if that was not enough Akash could have done it herself and had an Entomb in play. It was a nasty game where imbued fire never came out, every single signature card of the sentinels was compacted by Akash Buta except the idealists one and the only card I got wich boosted Knyfe's damage was the one where the highest hp villain takes one more and well it saved our bacon.

So at wich moment in a game have you felt like you had Setback's luck?

2

We played the F5 vs. the V5 in the Freedom Tower.  The game was touch and go with the villains relentlessly wearing down the heroes, but the heroes getting their licks in too.  Ermine was killing us with her damage redirection ongoing out and there were a ton of nemeses in play.  Absolute Zero was second in the play order (after Bunker) with both modules and Focused Apertures out.  For turn after turn I was waiting for a Fueled Freeze to break the game open and finally drew it.  AZ only needed to survive one more round to play it and he was down to a scary low amount of HP (all of the heroes were).  On the environment turn, Frost's Cryo Chamber came out which killed Bunker but healed AZ to a more comfortable HP total.  On Bunker's turn, his incap ability allowed AZ to play Fueled Freeze out of turn to waste three ongoings and deal 5 cold damage to all non-hero targets.  It was a nemesis massaccre and it killed Fright Train, Proletariat, and Friction.  I don't remember how but Tachyon and Legacy both ended up dying, Wraith finished off Ermine, so only she, AZ and Baron Blade were left.  Fright Train's incap ability killed Wraith in the worst way:  She dealt herself however many toxic damage (I forgot how much), which left her at one HP, but she also had Combat Stance in play dealing 2(?) more damage to herself.  OOF! 

For two or three turns after that, Baron Blade took massive damage from a +2 damage Impale and Cold Snap and the hero's 4 incap abilities led to a somewhat epic victory.  My cousin and I (who normally play 2 heroes each) vowed to never do 5 on 5 again due to the shear mental taxation we endured, but then I found out a week later that Baron Blade is supposed to go first in the turn order, so in my eyes our win comes with an asterisk.  I let him know and now we're going to try it again the right way, though to be perfectly honest it was such a fun and epic game that I can't imagine not doing it many more times.

 

Edit:  I should have read more closely.  I posted my luckiest game, rather than unluckiest.  D'oh!

3

Hmm, does Akash'Bhuta really have five copies of Primeval Eruption in her deck? I didn't think any deck had that many copies of a card. Were you discarding each one before the card that played off it had finished resolving? Because if Eruption plays another Eruption, the first one stays in play until the second one has finished - if that plays an Eruption as well then you just have a pile of all three of them and they don't go to the trash till everything else has finished. Otherwise you could potentially chain them forever (same goes for any other card which plays cards off it - Fleet of Foot, Hasten Doom, most of Ambuscade's one-shots, etc). Still, it's certainly nasty when she chains them like that…but very fun if you can nuke a whole load of limbs at once. We got her to deal herself a total of…103 damage, I think it was, after she had a whole load of limbs out and the environment was pretty well built-up as well and things were looking dodgy…until Fanatic's turn came around ;). I was playing Jim and I'd put By Any Means on Akash'Bhuta so she was hitting herself for more each time, because naturally we decided to destroy all the limbs before that bounty when End of Days went off :D. Wasn't enough to kill her as she'd been pretty high at the time - knocked her down to about 42hp or so, though :).

That Vengeance battle sounded like a very hectic and manic game :D. The self-hitting stuff can be very annoying, yeah. I can remember one game we played at the game day back in October (when Christopher and Paul came over here to the UK to a gaming shop in north London and a bunch of us went along) which involved the Vengeance Five and Fanatic. That nemesis minion who has the "if Fanatic is active, hero targets are immune to damage from hero targets" property came out, which meant that when Fright Train went down he became utterly useless since none of us could hurt ourselves at all. It didn't even impact Fanatic too badly :).

4

Plague Rat has five Infections, Gloomy has five zombies, and Proletariat has six clones, but I don't think anybody else has more than 4 of anything.  Akash has 3 Primeval Eruptions.

I actually really like the Seer.  I've had a couple of games where it was worth it to let Ermine keep breaking our stuff just so the Seer could stop Fright Train and Blade's incapped self-damage.  Nightmist also had a field day with him.

5

Text order of primeval eruption says reveal H cards put limbs in play discard others and then in another line says play a villain card. So maybe I didn't exactly play it up to rules cause I considered that it was resolved when the other card was played because it had completed all instructions so I put the copies back in the trash as it went. My gaming group agreed with the way I played it so yeah it wasn't the exact good way it just because a nasty surprise fest wich was awesome. Even more awesome since we pulled through it at a nastier interpretation.

6

We were very worried about this happening in our Vengeful Four game last night (Wraith was the only non-Vengeance hero at the table; the only other pre-Veng deck in use was Insula Primalis, as I wanted our first encounter with that insanity to be under fairly safe circumstances - and then promptly got a tyrannosaur thrown at me by Fright Train.  Heh, one of his other cards is "Loco Motivation" - I just got that.)  Since Fright Train takes extra self-damage, it seemed logical to focus fire on him mostly to take him down; we had no idea about the incap abilities.  (Though it was generally agreed that Friction's was worse.  Next time, we kill Proletariat or maybe Ermine first instead.)

Fortunately, Ermine was kind enough to get rid of the Combat Stance before Wraith could end up hitting herself.  Though she ended up dying anyway, and later we figured out that we'd been forgetting nemesis when Ermine hit her, so she should have died even sooner.  Setback of course always gets himself killed, so it was up to the Naturalist and the Sentinels to carry that game.

I found out a week later that Baron Blade is supposed to go first in the turn order, so in my eyes our win comes with an asterisk.

Yeah, I missed that too; we had Proletariat in first.  Mostly because he was the one I was gung-ho to get a look at.  Nor was I disappointed.  Though the real treat was getting to see a non-misty Nightmist in Blade's deck; she's gorgeous.

7

My Worst Defeat

by DubTak

 

It was a battle of epic proportions, wherein Bunker, Tempest, and The Wraith were going toe-to-toe with the dastardly Omnitron.  My friend, who was playing Wraith, literally said the words "This is great!  With all this equipment, I can deal a ton of damage every turn!".  "I know," says my other friend playing Bunker, "with these cards out, we'll win in no time!"  If anyone knows where this is going or has a weak stomach, turn away now.

 

Technological Singularity.  Every single one of Wraith's and Bunker's equipment violently exploded and shattered all of our hopes and dreams.  Wraith had 7 or more equipment cards, and took an absurd amount of damage, while Bunker didn't fare much better.  I was able to avoid the blast with Tempest, but had been playing to support Wraith's damage engine, and suddenly the entire house of cards came a-tumbling down.  We were still alive though, and planning our come-from-behind victory dance, so long as nothing came along that had a lot of hitpoints or did a ton of damage.  

 

Electro-Pulse Explosive.  This card could have spelled our doom, but we were not about to let some machine get the best of us. Oh, no.  Wraith and Bunker  built their supplies back up, while I scrambled to heal the party over and over again so that we might stand a chance.  We managed to severely injure/destroy the Electro-Pulse, but somehow Omnitron healed/brought it back.  We were ready this time, though.  We worked out the numbers and could reliably take it down so long as nothing destroyed our-

 

Technological Singularity.  OK, guys.  We might be able to put this off for a turn and survive (maybe).  I, The Great and Powerful Tempest, will knock The Electro-Pulse Into the Stratosphere.  This will buy us a turn to recover and regroup.  I know that, next turn, Omnitron has two plays off of his deck.  But we can, realistically, take the Electro-Pulse down to a manageable level so that our triumph will be assured, so long as some little plinky minion shows up, instead of-

 

Electro-Pulse Explosive

Electro-Pulse Explosive

All Heroes Incapacitated

 

-DubTak

8

EPEs can never be healed or brought back by Omnitron unless he runs out of deck and shuffles them back from the trash that way and you're unlucky enough to have them come back. The repair bots only ever heal Omnitron and the shuffle-the-trash-and-bring-a-thing-back effect on his front side only works on Drones and Components (the EPE is a Device). He only has two of them in his deck so if you got both of them at once, ouch that's unlucky :(. One time we had one come out but fortunately Tachyon had two Hypersonic Assaults on hand so was able to nerf it for the two rounds it took to destroy the bloody thing. They're kind of annoying in that as soon as one comes out you basically have to drop everything and focus fire on it to avoid getting completely nuked on the next round. At least you have a chance to deal with them, though, unless they come out during the environment's turn or via an environmental effect (Pillars of Hercules, Time Flies) which lets Omnitron play a card during his Start phase. Then you're basically dead unless it's early enough in the game that everyone still has at least half of their hp left (or somehow you've managed to pre-empt the situation and have a Leading-from-the-Front Legacy make hismelf immune to lightning via Next Evolution on the preceding turn, lol).

9

The biggest lifesaver against an EPE is to have the Tachyon card that redirects the damage back on it destroying it before it damages heroes even if it's HP is full... But I feel your pain when I got the game I got three defeats in a row against Omnitron as my first three games figuring he was a difficulty 1 villain and that he should be easy.

10

That works, but Wrest The Mind is way more fun :D