Silly name for a brutal one-shot. Ultimate Mad Bomber Blade (-2 damage taken both sides, front is put 3 cards under his card end of turn and back is play an extra card) at The Enclave. Captain Cosmic, Prime Wardens Fanatic, KNYFE, Void Akash, and Sky-Scraper are the only ones close enough to get blown up… I mean stop him.
Best of luck heroes!
~A-Kat
Fanatic spent the front side using Resolute into Sacrosanct Martyr to actually do any damage to him. KNYFE used the Fist to kill Endlings to destroy ongoings. Akash and Cosmic did all they could to keep Fanatic from dying, and sky built up useful cards. Finally did enough damage to flip him with a Vitalized thorns before he blew everyone remaining up.
Second side was slower, but still terrifying due to low Hp. You know it’s bad when Blades Death Ray takes out Akash’Flora for 10 because it’s the highest hp. Fanatic saved up and used a Wrathful to deal 28 damage, and Sky got a fun combo of Aggression Modulator and Compulsion Canisters going to deal irreducible damage. Endlings were wildcards at this point, but mostly helpful. Ended by chucking an Urdid at Blade after Sky compelled him to attack blade like 5 times.
Bleh
~A-Kat
One of the best weeklies ever in my opinion, though I’m a trifle biased, as the Endclave is one of my three or so favorite Environments. I was super eager to try out the promo of Akash’Thriya for the first time, but disappointed that it was in a match where Challenge Mode absolutely negates her innate power’s damage-dealing aspect.
I’d have done a lot better in this match if I had managed to RTFC; on round 3 I played End of Days, thinking it would wipe out the 10 cards under Blade and keep him from wiping the board when he flipped (so I wiped the board myself…like I said, I didn’t really think this through). Because I had this coming, I intentionally left him at 1, so he blew up the whole party real good. I spent the rest of the game scrambling to recover from that mistake, and gave up my chance at a Mint by Undoing because I figured I was dead anyway. However, somehow, I managed to pull off a narrow victory in the long run. My survival was greatly assisted by using Chastise on Immutus to buy time for healing and setup just after the flip. Unfortunately, the Baron healed as well; I’ve literally never before been more than slightly annoyed by a Flesh-Repair Nannites, which in a normal Blade game is just him saying “no you guys go ahead, I’m not doing anything this round”, but when he plays a second card each turn and has -2 DR, one of his card plays giving him back 10 HP is actually significant.
The only survivors by the end were Akash’Thriya at 1 (thanks, Bloogo) and Sky-Scraper at 3; KNYFE died in the aforementioned 10-point blast, Fanatic ran out of Aegises of Resurrection eventually and succumbed to a Death Ray shot, and Captain Cosmic tanked one Death Ray blast with the Cosmic Crest, but then somehow lost it and was disintegrated as well (actually it wasn’t the Death Ray now that I think of it; two Debilitators stopped both the death ray shot and the 5 damage from a Slash and Burn, but the 7 damage to high-HP Cap was exactly enough to kill him). Akash kept the Endclave more or less under control, and Sky was a dynamite superstar, looping two Neutralizing Debilitators to more or less permanently stop the Death Rays (Fanatic died during a one-turn fumble in this process), while repeatedly reusing Compulsion Canisters either to boost up an Aggression-Modulated Phrentat or to get Blade to trigger his own Backlash Field. Either way resulted in 3 damage to him per Canister, and I could always have at least one of them per turn, sometimes both if I got Undetectable Relinking.
My favorite moment of the whole game was when Akash’thriya played a Restraining Roots from her hand, because her Thrashing Brambles was the only +1 damage effect in the whole game, and thus the only way to let the party deal 1 damage through Nanobot Power Armor so that Sky could deal irreducible damage with Hitch A Ride. Then at the end of the game, a different Roots was Tectonically Chokeslammed in order to destroy 3-HP Blade, since using the Chokeslam on Blade directly would have only done 2 damage to him, triggered Backlash Field to kill Sky, and also probably killed 1-HP Thriya with the flying rubble. But instead, grabbing a giant handful of roots and using them to strangle Blade before the flying rubble could hit anyone - it was a very cinematic ending.
Like I said, an awesome match. Will definitely replay someday if I live long enough. (Is there someone keeping a list of these games somewhere, with like user ratings or something?)
I had a much easier Mint, and I’m going to credit lucky timing with Wrecking Uppercut, because I very specifically remember discarding Flesh-Repair Nanites.
Other than that, flip him as quickly as possible – Resolute into Sacrosanct Martyr is, of course, a fantastic combo – and then heal Captain Cosmic up with the Primordial Tree. Once he’s got Cosmic Crest out, you can safely ignore Blade’s mounting end of turn damage and slowly (oh, so slowly) whittle him down because you forgot he destroyed stuff when he flipped and so lost all your best cards. >:|
Mint, but WOW did the Baron ever make me work for it!
Had a rough time keeping CC’s constructs up long enough to pull a Construct Cataclysm, and Catch A Ride never turned up for me, so my only real irreducible damage came from Compulsion Canisters; I never thought to combine one with Aggression Modulators, but that’s one to remember!
A fortuitous Wrathful Retribution flipped Blade before he became too deadly, but Fanatic was stripped of her Aegis soon after and fell first. I misread his Devious Disruption card, though, and thought Rebounding Debilitator would protect me - which it did…once; then he started taking people out. Would have wiped had I not let Blade hit the gadgeteers first.
Soon it was down to Captain Cosmic and Akash, and the Cosmic Crest-less Captain fell to the Baron.
But Akash’thriya survived, though her foe was still far from defeated.
There’s something thrilling about a lone hero, her allies all fallen, holding fast against the villain, and Akash came through beautifully. With 2 HP remaining when Immutus came out, but a full array of ongoings and primordial seeds in play, she was able to gain HP and whittle Blade down until her Rapid Growth could finish him!
Things I learned from this fight:
Bloogo plus Chastise plus Akash’flora is sweeeet! and makes me think about how much fun Legacy or Mainstay, or even a Stealth Bot could have with such a combo.
Akash’thriya’s base power was blocked here by Challenge Baron’s damage reduction - so I turned the seeds on one another, and got to hurt Blade after all with a couple of Vitalized Thorns - take that, hard-mode Blade!
A wild, exciting fight, all in all, punishing but ultimately satisfying.
Keeping the Primordial Tree alive while Mad Bomber is charging up was a definite struggle. I used Cortex Hyperstimulator to help with this; had I ended Blade promptly, the Tree might well have survived the whole fight, or at least taken a Death Ray hit in place of a hero.
I forgot to mention in my game report that I was suffering the glitch I earlier mentioned from my OblivAon game. If you switch play-areas too often, it seems as if the program will eventually just say “you’re not allowed to change the view inside of turns anymore”, and this renders power usages such as Dynamic Syphon unavailable. One more reason why my game was way harder than it shoulda been.
Sounds like a pretty nasty bug - I hope they’re working on a fix!
I hope so too, but I don’t know if it’s something I can hold out for. I don’t even know if the problem is in the program or in my phone; the fact that it happens intermittently, mostly in long games, suggests that it might be an issue of system resources, rather than something in the actual code.
You can workaround that issue by returning to the main menu and continuing the game. It’s been a difficult problem for us to reproduce and thus to fix.
Finally! Credit goes to Fanatic, who burned hard and fast, Brutally Censuring herself on the second round for another big Resolute/Sacrosanct Martyr combo before being incapacitated by Backlash Field. It was enough damage for Sky-Scraper to Tectonically Chokeslam the Baron and flip him with only 7 cards below. Then the rebuilding began…
Managed to discard Flesh-Repair Nanites and one Devious Disruption, but the second DD took out the Tree, Seeds, and Constructs. After that there was nothing too horrible left in Blade’s deck, so Captain Cosmic started pulling constructs back out with Unflagging Animation - starting with Cosmic Crest, most definitely! Some Healing Pollen made sure he remained the highest HP hero target to tank the death ray. Flip-side Fanatic mostly granted powers to Sky-Scraper, who got an Aggression Modulator on Korrupton and kept recycling Compulsion Canister to bypass Blade’s DR. Once the last Infektor went down, she switched to Urdid and kept doing the same. KNYFE was just… kinda there. 
She didn’t want to hit Blade too much while a Backlash Field was out. Cosmic was preparing for a big Construct Cataclysm of a dozen or more, but Blade got so low from the Compulsion Canisters that he got destroyed by Strangling Roots as they got wiped.
Nice challenge, had me sweating for a little bit there at the beginning! Just made the victory that much more satisfying!
I think we’re all agreed that this was an awesome nail-biter of a game, no?
I certainly couldn’t have cut it much closer!
