Pretty easy mint, but more interesting than last week’s cakewalk. 5-hero teams including Chrono-Ranger tend not to have much trouble with mostly-single-target, not terribly tough villains with limited destruction in a fairly predictable environment. The inclusion of promo Sky-Scraper was a fun detail, but made only a modest difference to the match; the very potent Dark Visionary and corrupt Writhe are also extremely powerful control-and-survive hero promos, which were largely overshadowed by the straightforward destructive awesomeness of Knyfe and CR. Deadline did get off one big boom that took out both Orbital Bombardments and most of the Gene-Bound, hitting the heroes for a total of 5 plus at least 4 more from the Catastrophes before they blew up, and was set up to do an even bigger such salvo in the upcoming round (double Orogenesis plus his advanced text is a minimum of six damage to everyone right there, with Subduction for more and then the wipe for 3+), but two Kill on Sights had gotten Jim every card he could need, and Sky didn’t even get a fourth turn.
The same way it’s pretty sad that heroes who are fighting Spite almost never bother trying to save Victims, I’m also growing slightly less fond of Deadline (he’s still definitely in my top ten villains, but probably a slot or two lower than he was at first), because not only does he tend to be fairly easy, but more importantly he encourages the heroes not to try and prevent the destruction he causes. All these Catastrophes he engineers, you get a turn to try and stop them, but he just keeps spitting more out, and ultimately it’s just necessary to let him blow up half the environment while you beat in his face. The Advanced version in particular punishes you SO badly for trying to stop his disasters that it kind of isn’t even an option, and it ends up feeling more like a boxing match than a struggle for the fate of the world. Like Spite and a few other villains (Kismet comes to mind as another example that could play out as a non-combat scenario but basically never does; doubtless you can think of more), I feel like Deadline is a cool story idea where the mechanics of the SOTM game engine don’t really do full justice to it. It’s still a great fight, but I feel like it could be amazing if you had a sufficiently out-of-the-box idea of how to take it to the next level.
