Wow. Like seriously wow.
Holy cheese balls that was close. The Arsonator hitting both sides for 3 several times did a lot to take down FT, and was basically the only thing that could touch Biomancer early on. When Wraith played Grappling Hook, I really worried about whether I was making the right choice to leave Iaijutsu in play, but Operative is by far the least dangerous Vengeance villain, so I risked it, and instead got a Mission Objective off Bunker. I couldn’t find any kit for her, with only Combat Stance as a damage source, and the shortage of bots was a nightmare for Unity (if I play this again, I will certainly take the draw-2 turn a couple times, so that I won’t end up discarding a Construction Pylon because I clearly won’t ever need two of them). At least Benchmark did okay.
I consistently focused on Fright Train and Sarge Steel, managing to take them out, and with a bit of work I could also use Volatile Parts to take out the Operative, but not long after I lost Bunker and Wraith to a Twist of Flesh. With the old couple down, the young lovebirds were at 1 each for a couple rounds, thanks to Unity miscalculating and leaving BM alive at like 4, so he could bounce back to about 12. Also somewhere around here was Benchmark using several of his extra attacks on Unity’s low-HP bots, at first to get Smoke Bombs to better protect the full heroes, then to do on Operative, and finally to kill Homunculus because I couldn’t afford to leave any damage source on the field while struggling to take its master out. I made that mistake for Sarge and the Field Inventor, which resulted in 5 extra damage plus 1 for every attack from Arsonator or Sharpshooter; focusing fire on Sarge to take out all of his minions at once did work out this time, but at quite a cost, and the game was more desperate as a result. Making the same decision for BM and his normally fairly harmless minion would probably have led to a game over, since neither of the surviving heroes could be spared.
A particular point of interest, right after the team half-wipe, was Benchmark having to use Ally Matrix (probably the first time I’ve ever used that card, since I kept getting a glitch where out-of-turn powers wouldn’t work for me), so that Unity could play Champion Bot after her turn, for no other reason than to keep Fright Train’s incap from downing a real hero. Luckily, this worked (the glitch is either fixed or it only shows up in longer games), and now that I had two incapped heroes who both allowed Unity to play a card outright, it was easy enough to set up a Powered Shock Wave and some Raptor Bot action to shred Biomancer most of the way. Meanwhile, two of Benchmark’s turns had involved combining the Inferno Missile Pod with the Software where you draw 2 and discard 2, plus playing a Software to trigger the card which deals 2 cold to two targets, and grants an extra power to double dip on Secondary Cannon. That let me shoot 4 micro-missiles both times, and the second such barrage left Biomancer at -2.
So it was a win, but just barely. Hm, sounds familiar somehow…