Here comes the big one! It's OblivAeon time!
Guise, Scholar of the Infinite, Sky-Scraper, and Rogue Agent KNYFE are doing space things in space, (starting in Dok'thorath and the Block, but extending to the Time Cataclysm, the Enclave, and the Celestial Tribunal) when space starts to become not-space. Help them stop the Ceaseless Ruin, the End of All Things!
Good luck heroes. You're very much going to need it.
~A-Kat
Can't really spoil since things are so different for every play but here we go anyway.
Near Mint after a close first game that cascaded quickly out of control. First game I got a pretty sweet setup going with the Scholar redirecting all damage then Expect(ing) the Worst for two turns in a row. This let the heroes get pretty set up and ready to destroy the shield. We had 3 turns left on the card, so figured we would bunker down then destroy it on the turn it ticked down to 1. Unfortunately, one of the Scion turns played Temporal Fractures due to a Focus of Power (tick to 2), then OblivAeon (tick to 1...) played another (tick to 0). Kaboom #1. The heroes survived due to the above Redirect, but OblivAeon added destruction tokens due to no heroes getting hit by his end of turn. This added up to enough for Kaboom #2 next turn. I thought I might be able to burn him quickly enough with a OblivAeon shard + Mecha-knight KNYFE, so I did the redirect trick again. Kaboom #2 happens, and he plays Absorb Energy... He adds another 8 tokens and Kaboom #3 is incoming. I manage to survive that, but can't burn him down through his 3rd phase fast enough and Kaboom #4 explodes everything.
Second game I more or less did the same what I did the first game, just didn't use the redirect trick so the tokens wouldn't build up as fast. Sky Scraper and KNYFE fell, but Legacy and Tempest helped finish off OblivAeon and Voss this time. Legacy with Lead from the Front and Next Evolution (plus a few extra powers via incapacitated abilities) let's him selectively tank and avoid extra tokens. Also, Heroic Interception and Take Down are just fabulous. Regular Tempest's incap of heroes immune to a type of damage can really help avoid the Kaboom damage as well.
Strategy to start was to skip Infusion of Power on Guise and move to zone 2. Move the Scholar over to 2 and pick it up to flip it that turn. I skipped Form the Head on Sky and moved to 2, then KNYFE moved and picked it up. Unfortunately, Dark Mind keeps it from flipping that turn, but Nixious will flip over to 2 and you can kill him to flip to Mecha-knight. From there, Guise can help break the shield with Gimmicky Character to put cards in the environment trash and play UYITG on the Scholar to get Apex and Form powers.
~A-Kat
Near mint becuse of an accidental backup (Forgot I was playing the one shot).
Guise made it all the way to the end, though he had 3 HP at that point.
Got the shield flipped quickly, broke it a few rounds later, and then just beat on OblivAeon from there. Guise & Scholar lasted quite a while, Scholar only when down because of the Shard overwhelming his 2 Flesh to Irons.
I dunno what happened, but I just spent probably close to two minutes watching Oblivaeon blast through half the Scions in the game, after which he flipped for some reason, after which I lost.
This isn't going to be fun. :(
Lost three environments, but that was partially to our benefit; at no point were any heroes in the same zone as OA when that happened, and each time he smacked That Scion around for irreducible damage, helping us get rid of him before the game could be extended.
Lost four heroes, two of which were only right at the end. F5 Legacy tagged in for Guise and happily took over the Atlantean Conduit. Take Down shut down phase 3 OA. Tempest tagged in for Sky-Scraper and held on to the end, including a pretty epic 1v1 with Progeny while the other three dealt with OA phase 2 and 3. F6 Bunker tagged in for Rogue Agent KNYFE and flipped Chekhov's Hairdryer for Scholar, as well as taking out a couple of critical ongoings with his base power, piling on with a Legacy and El Mejor Legado-boosted Mecha-Knight, and shutting down the environments. F6 Bunker dropped right at the end to no effect.
But the star of the show was Scholar, who got Apex of Humanity, Infinity Cannon, Meager Winnings, Lucky Break, The Chronoist, Everyman, Devastating Aurora, *and* the Hairdryer. Sitting behind two Flesh to Irons and Apex of Humanity the entire game meant that he shrugged off basically everything, and slowly built up the ability to do completely bananas amounts of damage. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep Everyman alive for a super long time; fortunately, I was able to redraw him after a shuffle and keep pounding. Two consecutive rounds of damage prevention on phase 3 OA meant he didn't do a single point of damage before he got wiped off the field.
I made one critical mistake early on and decided to rewind it; I'd forgotten that the player can choose where OA ends up in the case of an environment destruction, and realized too late that I'd sent him to the wrong zone. Ah well. Rewinding that turned a certain loss into an (eventual) relatively easy win.
Encountered a fun bug on my first run: Borr the Unstable got hit by the Block Guard (preventing him from dealing damage), which was enough to destroy him. Borr then exploded, dealing damage to everything.
If I recall correctly that is not a bug, but the result of a ruling that since Borr on his flipside is not a target any "targets don't deal damage," such Block Guard or Hypersonic Assault, do not apply to him. Cards such as Ground Pound should still affect that damage though.
Near mint after some early mistakes required a rewind. I pumped Knyfe up pretty good, arranging things so she had multiple powers per turn and Cold War. I blew Oblivaeon Shard with 10 devastation tokens and burned through all of Oblivaeon's hit points and then splashed through to cut Voss in half. Knyfe didn't make it but the carnage was enough.
Encountered a fun bug on my first run: Borr the Unstable got hit by the Block Guard (preventing him from dealing damage), which was enough to destroy him. Borr then exploded, dealing damage to everything.
First attempt got roasted... after a few attempts later I finally get it... without losing any heroes and only one environment... which had shattering blow came up like a turn sooner I probably wouldn't have lost it. Honestly nearly got to the end without Voss showing up. Knife dealing 7-10 instances of damage a turn with the Oblivaeon shard and the tokens up to 17 just annihilated Obliaveon and had damage left over for Voss.
took me multiple tries too, but at some point in my third game benchmark got the shard and the mecha knight, and was doing >50 damage a shot with that power. lol.
he had the missile pod too, I burned through both forms of AE, and voss in one turn. the missile pod didnt even finish emptying. glad thats over though, I still find that mode a bit of a mess, personnally, in terms of gameplay.
Took me a ridiculous amount of attempts but eventually did it in style, hitting Oblivion for 293 in one round. Guise + infinity shard + Guise the Barbarian + the card that lets him discard at the end of hero turns to hit for 1 = lots of damage. He then cloned scholar's ongoings with a card play from a reward and started doing wild amounts of damage whenever he regained HPs (gotta love best card ever!)
Lost to a 32 hp voss first attempt. Then got crushed 3 more times before mr. Fixer slammed everything in his path with that 5 hits for 1 damage reward with crowbars, damage boost style, damage boost card for having a tool and style, legacy power and inspiring presence. (I should memorize card names). Was fun. Killed oblivosson
I hate this so much. Getting rid of this shield is impossible. No matter what I do, he just kills all the heroes before they have a chance to damage themselves.
Not only do I not see myself ever beating this, I think I'll be skipping Oblivaeon one-shots in the future.
Finally got around to trying this, and beat it on the first try; I don’t know how many people had had the chance to play against Oblivaeon (in his published form, post any playtesting) before taking on this one-shot, but my five experiences to date, the fourth of which I won, prepared me for dealing with this one. There were some annoyances, to be sure; Guise taking 6 damage from Nixious and another 12 from Dark Mind, dying after a single turn, was a definite WTF moment. And after reluctantly allowing the Refugees to die before this even needed to happen for Shield-flipping reasons, I made sure to get all the heroes in position with Blivs so The Ceaseless Ruin would hit them all for 2 and then go away, but then what does he do, he kicks us into the other battle zone. Fortunately, this wasn’t a trick he could repeat right away, and the next round he came down to our size and we had a proper fight.
Since one of the first Missions to come out was Form the Mecha-Knight, I picked the Idealist to replace poor splatted Guise, and although it wasn’t her who had the Knight, she could put a card under it. Had I noticed that the MK doesn’t destroy its cards like a normal Concept, I would have tried a lot harder to feed it, though the need to handle my initial hand’s Monster of Id meant I mostly had to feed my Fragments to that. Still, I had all but one of the Concepts from my deck in play by the end, and was getting ready to do Bored Now on the well-stocked Monster, when suddenly a FILTER Agent popped out of the Block and shot her, causing her to die to Sanction’s and/or Oblivaeon’s attacks. This left the Knight back down to the same limited functionality it would have in my IRL games, if I had ever managed to get OA played at a table, since I don’t own a physical copy of the Void Guard.
Still, the team continued to soldier on, with an extremely well set up Scholar being central to much of our success, especially once he managed to Orchestrate the Void and get the Virtuosos down. I can’t overstate how strong they are, and pairing heal-everyone-by-2 from them with heal-everyone-by-2 from Faultless soon made it even better. With KNYFE having made a suicide run on some Aeon Men with a boosted Magic of the Ennead, and not noticed that Hellion was going to do her in, and Sky-Scraper having also died at some point, Scholar was the only hero left from the beginning, but he seemed invincible, having stayed at full HP for several turns, and even gone triple Flesh to Iron at exactly the right moment to totally soak one of Blivs’s attacks at +4 before the Shield went down.
Super Science Tachyon was the replacement for Sky, and one of the first things she did was build Chekhov’s Hairdryer (this was before Knyfe died, so she supplied most of the Equipment consumed for this). And it was a good thing too, because You-Know-Who showed up with his Devastation Armor, and the Hairdryer was the only thing that could touch him. I started to become very concerned that my victory was going to be stolen, so I started actively trying to avoid killing OA until after this particular Scion was disposed of.
All game, only two Environments were destroyed; one was blown up with all the heroes in it, but an Offensive Transmutation ensured none of us took any damage. The second one was about to happen, and I was planning to deal with it by having everyone get out of Dodge, but first I tried to set things up by having Scholar in Alchemical Redirection with a single Flesh to Iron, to deal with any attacks by secondary targets. He was at full HP, and I planned on having the Virtuosos play another Transmutation on Blivs so that another Environment would vanish harmlessly around us. Instead, however, I triggered Oblivaeon’s flip, allowing him to play a card at the end of Scholar’s turn, before the Virtuosos would work. And the card he played was another Disrupt Spacetime, the same card which delayed my Shield removal before. With only Scholar able to take damage, I figured he would get moved, but could move back in time to activate an Oblivion Shard, which would let me do just 1 or two extra damage to That Scion, enabling the Hairdryer to take him out. Alas, I’d also been trying to solve the same problem another way, by clobbering Borr the Untimely (so named because Expatriette, the replacement for Idealist, had put a Hair-Trigger Reflexes bullet into him before he could even announce himself as a new Scion, and his luck just went downhill from there. Since Borr gains only one token per turn, a huge flurry of attacks on Faultless’s turn had nearly killed him, but he had a mere four tokens; alas, that meant that when Oblivaeon killed Borr at an inconvenient moment, Scholar ate 4 net damage for every hero target in play, taking him out from full HP.
So that sucked, but we were so close to being done that it didn’t matter. Thanks to Blivs moving himself to the Enclave of the Endlings, where Empyreon had been left to tussle with the locals while the heroes tried to end the game, the second Environment removal had no heroes to hit, and left Empyreon at 1 HP. With That Scion briefly reduced to a more manageable 3 or 4 armor, T-Rex Bot and the Infinity Cannon were able to bring him within range of a single Hairdryer zap. Then it was all just mopping up; I continued to delay killing OA until the last couple Scions were dealt with (the frequently nigh-invincible Empyreon flipside went down pretty easily thanks to Omni-Unity granting sentience and electrokinesis to all of Expatriette’s guns, an unspent Ammo or two, and even her Flak Jacket). My confidence was in no way punished; nothing Blivs could pull out of his pockets was able to save him from The Sentinels leading The Every Man with like a 20-card hand. The Block remained unscratched from the game’s beginning, and the last hero to show up, Fanatic, took basically no damage except from a bored Citizen Storm, who accompanied Tachy on her final Scion hunt and was left not having any enemies to attack, so he shot one of his temporary allies out of boredom instead. (I think we can all agree this is perfectly in-character.)
