Weekly One-Shot #278: Free For All

Fright Train, Ermine, Bugbear, Biomancer, and Plague Rat vs. Nightmist, Naturalist, Dark Watch Setback, Akash’Thriya, and Dark Watch Harpy in Nexus of the Void. Standard Difficulty.

This was a super fun match! I got Mint, but just barely. I love the ways Harpy supports Nightmist, and the ways Akash’Thriya and Nexus of the Void interact.

Good luck y’all!

Mint, but it was an absolute disaster of a game. I made a huge mistake early on by trying to focus-fire Bugbear instead of playing defensively and whittling down Ermine, which meant piling Crocodile on the Naturalist and going for damage instead of Rhino and going for tanking. Stacked damage reduction and redirection could have kept my team around long enough for Nightmist and Harpy to really get going, and Ermine alone wouldn’t have given Bugbear enough of a boost.

Instead, Harpy got killed right before I finally took Bugbear out, and then so did Setback, and then Nightmist and Fright Train dropped just about together, and then Akash’Thriya went down at almost the same time as Ermine, leaving the Naturalist to face down Biomancer and Plague Rat alone from behind stacked defenses.

In the end, I managed to win by keeping Naturalist just below Biomancer and waiting for Magma’s Rage to torch the rogue fleshcrafter, then shifted into Crocodile to finish him, then shifted back into rhino to avoid counter-murder by Plague Rat, then healed up a bit before shifting back to Crocodile to nova Plague Rat to death. It was tight. There were multiple times that Naturalist was at 4-8 HP.

Near mint after a first game similar to Yeti. I focused Bugbear first due to his extremely scary passive damage, but it took too long to bring him down. I was doing alright and got down Ermine and Fright Train, but then Biomancer got a Rebirth that brought out ~6 minions. That hurt.

Second game I just beat Ermine down, followed by Plague Rat. I more focused on keeping Bugbear from doing tons of damage than actually hitting him, and managed to set up a lot of repeating damage and took out Biomancer. From there, Fright Train dropped because +1 damage taken will do that, and then it was just wail on Bugbear before he ate someone.

~A-Kat

I think I had a really sloppy game but Minted anyway without losing anyone. I don’t remember any particulars, it’s been a while. c.c;

Finally finished it last night, Mint with Setback the lowest at 5 HP. He still had his Silver Lining backup plan, though.
I think my takedown order was Ermine, Plague Rat, Bugbear, Fright Train, then Biomancer. Had an Eternal Timbre out for several rounds thanks to Akash, so that helped with setup. Ermine ended up milling the Mass Rebirths off Biomancer’s deck, so I never had to deal with fleshchildren returning.
Ditto to the fun game sentiment. That team played well off each other, even if they were 3/5 Dark Watch, who are probably my least favorite.

Was utterly destroyed when I tried going back to this old game; came here hoping for a walkthrough that would let me beat it, but apparently nobody has specifics of how this is done. I did share Friv’s experience of trying to focus on Bugbear and not succeeding; it’s insanely hard to kill him when he’s lifetapping from attacks boosted by others being dead, so killing him first seems non-optional, but my first attempt sure didn’t go well.

Been a while, but from what I and others put I think I went with tanky rhino Naturalist and just tried to prevent/mitigate Bugbear damage. If you can get Akash set up to cycle Strangling Roots, you can nearly shut him down. Shuffling her seeds in let Eternal Timbre stay out several rounds, so that’s -1 the heroes and Akash’Flora are taking, along with healing on environment turn. That basically makes Plague Rat no threat. Couple people said take out Ermine first, and I agree as she’s easy pickings. I guess I had gotten Plague Rat low enough to knock him off after, then it was dump on Bugbear before he gets a chance to do damage. Fright Train usually goes for the strongest target, so you can survive him. And Biomancer is just annoying, but if you can avoid the Mass Rebirths he doesn’t get out of control.

Finally went back again and beat it. Games like this really make me wish it were feasible for the game to automatically dump a log of some sort, as the discarding of hero cards by incapped Ermine and the removal of villain decks as the villains are incapacitated makes it impossible for me to look back on how we might have gotten to the point we arrive at, once it became clear that I had turned a corner from losing the game to winning it.

I do know these facts at least:

  • Ermine’s first card play of The Long Con made me discard a card for each hero, and I picked Harpy’s discard as Arcane Explosion, the “5 damage to all enemies and some amount to all allies, depending on your token count” card, immediately thinking “I’ll probably regret that”. Then, all the way around the round again at Nightmist’s second turn, I tossed Oblivion (which I think was my first-turn play in the original version of this game, which I lost), and it produced a 4 and a 3, so 7 damage to all enemies. Probably just as well to lose one of those big blasts if you’ve got the other one (although the Harpy one would have left the Handlers alive, which is a major advantage given that Revocorp Backup never turned up in this game).

  • Plague Rat was really off the chain in this game, but with Natch perpetually in Rhino form (solely on the advice of this thread), and frequently having at least an additional -1 from Bestial Shift, if not tanking for the whole party with Indomitable Force (this mostly only happened toward the end), combined with a bunch of healing from Akash, allowing the Rat to consistently deal 3-6 damage across the entire board for each of like 3 turns in a row turned out surprisingly well. I’m really not a hundred percent sure why it worked so well, although working around the Jade Estuary for a couple of turns probably helped, giving me lots of extra powers while I carefully kept all the villains on odd HP. Eventually we shifted over to Eternal Timbre, which did annoyingly heal and protect the villains as well as us, but somehow I was able to make it work out; I think this was still out when I finished Ermine off.

  • Harpy used Ancient Tome to get incredibly well set up in the early game, and Ermine’s early death meant that she never lost any of those toys, though some of them did stop being useful once she shifted over from 5 purples to 5 greens. But part of the reason Plague Rat didn’t eventually kill us was that she dumped her whole head to Direct Strike while having H&M in play, dealing 10 to Plague Rat plus a couple of Harpy Hex zaps where they’d do the most good. Eventually once everyone else was dead, she managed to deal the final blow to Biomancer by dropping Uncontrollable Flock, doing 2 damage to him, and then doing 2 damage to Nightmist, who used her last two cards on the Amulet to redirect it to Biomancer and finish him off.

  • One moment where my plans went badly wrong was Natch doing a Threatening Stomp on Biomancer. This was in a round where Akash’Thriya was using As The Earth Turns to cancel every villain play and dig a bunch of her Seeds out of the enviro deck, while also constantly shifting biomes so that I didn’t have to try and plan around whichever one was originally out. Harpy’s Applied Numerology halved the damage from Earth Turning, so even a single-digit-HP Akash felt safe doing it. However, here’s a pro tip for this match: if running ATET, make sure Setback doesn’t use Mitigate right before Biomancer’s turn. Thanks to this blunder, I couldn’t stop Twist of Flesh being played, and with only -1 to damage up, Rhinoturalist took quite a few plinks. Thanks, Setback!

  • Killing Bugbear wasn’t quite priority alpha in this game, as it had been in my first; he was able to do an annoying amount of healing, and as per this thread’s advice, I did allow Ermine to die first, after which I pretty consistently beat up on all the villains at once with Plague Rat’s help. Fright Train died slightly before the others, and his incap ability happened to land on Nightmist, who dealt herself 2 toxic damage, but used the Amulet to deal it to her nemesis Bugbear instead, and then did a Heedless Lash on her turn to finish him off with 6 more Amuletted damage. All the extra powers from Jade Estuary were what got her this many turns; Setback would Mitigate, then she’d draw two cards without actually damaging herself, and meanwhile the Rhino would heal, Akash would do her thing, and Harpy would either read her Ancient Tome or Refocus herself. A pity I couldn’t get the Nexus to stop shifting and actually let us stay in that one Biome for a while, since it was easily the most beneficial one.

  • Thanks to a Void Slave, I delayed playing Ongoings for several turns, though at one critical moment I forgot this policy and got lucky, getting a truly critical Akash’Bhuta card (I forget which one) to land. The Reclusive Keeper did us a lot of favors by crippling guys like Tempersonation when they came out; with a Savannah Nocturna bonus, he was able to almost kill Choke, though it hardly mattered since Fright Train was on 3 HP at the time. Unfortunately he misfired a bit when Rhino was tanking and some Primordial Seeds were played; that was annoying, but he was still mostly on our side, and thanks to the Rat constantly murdering everything, even the 12-HP Keeper didn’t last long.

  • The Rat’s first card play killed the Primordial Tree before I could get it up and running, and while I followed the thread’s advice about trying to use Strangling Roots on Bugbear to hold him down, it only happened once. Thanks to Savannah Nocturna, Bugbear’s Unpredictable Powers plus a small bite on Natch was able to heal him for about 8 in one turn, leaving him at 20, but it was a fair trade to get rid of his Feral Brawn, one of the most irritating cards in his deck. Without any armor, mauling him by enough each round to overcome his healing (with only one incapped character in play to boost it) was a satisfying but entirely achievable challenge.

Okay, I think that’s all the details I can manage to reconstruct. Like I said, hopefully someday we’ll get logs that we can study in depth to figure out how such chaotic games take shape; for now, they just make for a lot of fun experiences and cool stories, without us ever being able to fully understand everything about them.

It does save a log, instructions for accessing it on windows and android are here (I don’t know if/how you can access it on IOS or mac). It overwrites this every time you play a game so if you want to keep it you have to make a copy of it afterwards.

Well I wish I knew that two hours ago when I played another game (and a very vanilla one at that). Oh well, worth knowing for next time.

Incidentally, the same folder that contains this Log also has an immense number of “EndGame.dat” files with various numerical strings. I’m guessing there’s one for every game I play; can I do anything with these?