Whew! This week it’s Advanced Voss in the Court of Blood vs. La Comodora, DW Expatriette, the Adamant Sentinels, and Luminary.
I squeaked by with Mint: 6 / 8 / 6,8,6,6 / 7 HP. Voss played his entire deck! 
I think the Court was down to 5 cards in its deck. Had to revive Idealist and Medico once each. Flipped Voss early and kept him on the back the whole game. Reducing damage dealt via Expat’s cold ammo, Idealist’s power, and Luminary’s Regression Turrets definitely saved me here!
wew, lads
I lost the first try, but felt like a few changes to my plays would make a world of difference, so I went right back in.
It did make a difference! I lost at a completely different point in time! :B Then I got demoralized. This one’s gonna take some effort.
Regression Turret is a lifesaver though, considering it isn’t affected by Voss’s advanced rule on the front side.
Expat was the star for me, with some boosts from La Comodora. Paradoja Figurehead went to her area and stayed there, and Temporal Rigging let her Aim and prepare for a big damage turn! SMG helped clear the board of minions this way - at least three times, after Take Time blew up Forced Deployment. I wasn’t about to let all the Gene-Bound return on Voss’s turn and do damage - there’s no way to survive that!
Eventually got enough in Luminary’s trash to use the destroy cards doomsday device and get rid of double Unhallowed Halls for a little much-needed healing. Probably would have been better just zapping Voss with the Death Laser for 15, possibly ending it a round sooner.
Whew! That was a nailbiter, all right!
I spent a couple of rounds just trying to keep the minions under control while I got set up; Regression Turret was a big help, though I was disappointed to find I couldn’t combine Shock Rounds and Liquid Nitrogen Rounds to make Pride reduce damage dealt by everyone I hit.
La Comodora recycled The Sentinels’ Team Communication every round, giving them access to virtually their entire deck almost from the beginning.
Expatriette plinked at just about everything with Hairtrigger Reflexes, boosted by a Figurehead and her base power; this helped put a damper on Voss’ Forced Deployments - then on her last turn, she played Unload with four guns in play, and tore into everything in sight!
The Sentinels, sporting a 20+ card hand, tanked, healed, and hit as only four heroes in one can - The Idealist moderated some of the harder hitting baddies, Mainstay nullified a ton of damage with Human Shield and Durasteel Chains, and Doc Medico kept everybody on the shiny side of zero - only Writhe had trouble finding a role.
Luminary - Luminary deployed a Regression Turret to help the team survive, and got off two doomsday devices - first a Terralunar Translocator to shatter the Grand Warlord’s army, then striking the final blow a few turns later with his Orbital Death Laser!
Good fight - had everything on the last turn not come together to allow the heroes to finish Voss, the vampires and minions would likely have been victorious before the next hero turn.
Welp, no Mint for me. I had La Commodora set up with two Figureheads and a Futuretech Deck-Gun, able to kill Minions even with Guards in play, but only two Take Times gave me nowhere near enough Ongoing removal to be able to pop the Forced Deployments first, so I couldn’t avoid taking onslaughts of damage. Once the two Lieutenants showed up on the same turn, it was all over. With the last two heroes left at 1, Run Aground and Orbital Death-Laser took Voss down to 24, but I don’t know where I could have spared anywhere near that much extra damage if I’d known exactly what to do, so I don’t think there was any hope of my strategy succeeding. And I hate hate hate the Unhallowed Halls, it is the bane of my existence, particularly when I’m playing the Sentinels, and especially this version (where Medico healing the team kind of replaces Mainstay blocking for them).
EDIT: Got it on try 2. Still went with the Futuretech Gun, but knowing what was coming allowed me to conserve my Take Times for when they were crucially necessary. And I stumbled on a fun interaction - in game 1 I took out the first-round Infecting An Heir with one of the Take Times, but this time I left it, and eventually Erszi started picking off the low-hanging fruit which I previously didn’t know to leave for her. On one turn when there wasn’t any fruit available, she instead bit Doctor Medico, and thanks to Hippocratic Oath, I got to heal the party by 2 for every target in play (plus or minus 1 here and there), divided up as it would best benefit me. I’m definitely going to have to bring The Sentinels back to the Court Of Blood again…WITH someone who’s really good at removing the Unhallowed Halls and so forth.
Dunno why my game was so different from everyone elses, but Mint with everyone near 20 hp / the Sentinels at full.
Never really felt in danger, never really felt out of control. La Comodora kept out a Brig Teleporter to help overcome the Guards DR or block the AoE minions. Expat with Hairtrigger, Aim, and a Figurehead could pop most things as they came out, including an entire play of Forced Deployment. Sentinels did Sentinels things, mostly healing and Idealist reducing damage dealt. Luminary played low HP targets to soak damage and built up for a Death Laser that was ultimately not needed.
Two points that may have made a difference, La Comodora cycled a ton of Harnessed Anomalies because they are great, along with quite a few Take Times. I didn’t really get a good draw cycle going with her, so I used those to destroy vampires/unhallowed halls and draw lots of cards. Secondly, she used Rudder in the Timestream every chance she could to remove Minions from the trash and put them back in the deck so Voss couldn’t Force Deploy them again.
~A-Kat
That’s gotta be it. I hadn’t figured out how to make good use of LC’s recycling, so I was stuck with a bunch of environment cards out. Luckily, I made use of the vampires to beat on minions or devices and not heroes. I never think of using Rudder either. That would’ve saved Expat having to play street sweeper three times, especially if the Guards never came back out!
Nice! I’ll have to try that whenever I can unlock DW Expat. Fails against a Guard and anybody else who shows up after it, though. And it doesn’t stop Translocators from activating. So a powerful combo, but still pretty fair. Doesn’t require Commodora either, you can do it with Legacy or Argent or probably several other heroes.
Are they? I’ve never found “play a random card” particularly effective, even when the card doing it is half-“free” (a completely “free” card is something like Sentinels’ Unique Capabilities, where you both play and draw another card).
You probably already know this, but just in case you don’t, one of the keys to making Cappy and her expensive arsenal work is that your #1 priority card to play as soon as possible is the Concordant Helm. If you always take your Draw step first and then your Play and Power in some order, you get an extra card every single turn. (When Breaking the Rules was first discussed upon the release of Wager Master, Christopher said on the old forum that RAI was that if you took your draw step first and drew two cards, you were honor-bound not to play or power afterward. Apparently they’ve either changed their mind since then, or didn’t want to program anything into the app to mechanically enforce this expectation, since both Breaking the Rules and Concordant Helm now work to give you two cards a turn while leaving your Play and Power phases available.)
Y’know, I feel really dumb now, because it absolutely never occurred to me to use that card that way. I generally just think of it as “Power: Draw a card” and occasionally useful for recycling things like Staves of Ra; it never occurred to me to use it on a non-hero deck. I do believe that Omnitron and Dora are going to be meeting in my very near future… (Wonder what’s a good Environment for this. I can’t think of one offhand that does much trash recursion, since they have so few cards in the first place.)
It wasn’t amazing, but one key feature of both my games was having Caliginous Form out, so Writhe was the last Sentinel to die in the bad game, and functioned as something of a tank in the good one. Was never tempted to use his power, though, even though it is one of the other ways of dealing with Forced Deployment - there were just other things I wanted to do. Still, it is one of the most unique abilities possessed by the FA Sentinels, who I’m nowhere near unlocking, so I probably shoulda tried it (would solve the Guard problem with Starkenburg’s combo nicely).
I know, right? This is probably one of the big reasons why Expatriette is my least favorite hero, having slipped below even Bunker since I started playing the app and saw more chances for him to shine (well, glint at least). Most other heroes I look at their cards and I see what you can do; Expat, I look at her cards and I ask why she has to work so hard to accomplish so little. I’m going to have to look at the stats project sometime and see if other people get the same kind of underwhelming results with her that I do. (Incidentally, do app games get harvested for statistical purposes at all? I’ve got like 200 of them under my belt by now, it’d be nice if they were being logged.)
I never noticed this before, but it made a huge difference in my second game. I love how even a core set character can still give me little discoveries like this once in a while.
Despite some missteps, a comfortable mint the first time, with the heroes at 15/15/(12,13,11,14)/17. The replay was a nail-biter, with everybody at 4 except the Idealist at 3. I’m not sure where I went wrong, but having the Conqueror destroy Hairtrigger Reflexes sure didn’t help.
Something that really helped with unwanted environment cards was letting the Angry Mob run amok, with a Regression Turret keeping them from hurting anybody. They took care of some annoying cards before they finally died.
