Weekly One-Shot #303: Thunder and Mud

[Thunderbird]

Look, it’s a floating head that’s simultaneously cool and goofy!

Progeny managed not to be too awful of a threat this time, more of an annoyance with Scions that don’t go away. When Blight starts on the table, you end up with a discard fest where nearly all the heroes have one or no cards left in hand. Oh well, there was enough damage boosting from multiple sources going on here to overcome his healing from Frost. Some darts from Wraith and Chrono Ranger kept him from beating the ever-lovin’ tarnation out of the team. He never even made it to his flip side.

Heroes - 1, big shiny dude - 0.

[The_Justifier]

Based on the flavor text I was rather hoping that this deck was stacked to have him start out with double Scion of Fire.

Oh well, another decent challenge, around the same difficulty level as last week (that was Deadline doing a little better than average, this was Progeny being much less vicious than he can be). I firmly believe Progeny is the least-worst of the difficulty 4 villains, not really much more dangerous than GWV or Citizen Dawn. He is unpredictable, and occasionally he can really pile on the hurt to a crazy degree, but compared to Iron Legacy or The Chairman or even The Matriarch, he’s relatively manageable, and this game was a good example of that.

He did wipe out my stuff with Beginning of the End, but that was more of an annoyance than a disaster. CR plus four other heroes is devastating against a solo villain, KNYFE piled on a lot of nemesis damage, Parse used Gauge to pick a lot of his weaker card plays (two turns in a row, he fired 1+1+1 damage against Stuntman in his Stylish Armor) and got a bunch of lucky pulls from her power which helped her set up double Critical Multiplier and Snap Decision, and Wraith was able to get her Micro-Targeting Razor twice. I don’t have a lot of experience with promo Stuntman, and it was interesting to play him (“Sacre-bleu, my innate power doesn’t get better outside of my turn!”), but he didn’t really do incredibly well. Healing constantly only let Progeny survive a little longer against the level of a beating he was taking, and the Blight discards were only somewhat painful, since there were several heroes who didn’t hit him on their turn, but helped set the others up (mostly Wraith and Parse before they were set up).

So it was a challenge, but it wasn’t a challenge challenge. (I still wonder a bit whether the Challenge Modes for the WotC villains, which weren’t yet public at the time, knew enough about how those villains would work in order to really balance their CMs, or if it was just an a guess at what might make a good tease of what was coming.)

[TakeWalker]

This ended up being a super easy Progeny fight. Best part was giving Stuntman the Crystalloid Behemoth, so on one environment turn, it was discard Behemoth->draw 3 cards, including In Medias Res->take damage from fire crystal and gain that->give to Ember Shaman to play In Medias Res.

Otherwise, Wraith did lots of heavy lifting with Eyepiece, Stun Bolt and Smoke Bombs. I know I had Big Grey dealing 0 damage to everyone but Knyfe for a couple rounds.

[doppelgangerung]

Sounds pretty similar to my experience. Stun Bolt and Neuro-Toxin Dart Thrower neutralized most of Progeny’s damage, and even subtracting 2 HP from the heroes’ damage dealt each turn wasn’t enough to keep the big jerk safe.

Scion of Blight was annoying - my worst error in play was probably fat-fingering Wraith to discard after a hit on Progeny, and her having to discard an Impromptu Invention. But when a second Scion of Frost came out, and I burned Buffer Overflow to trash it instead, I realized that I did not want to let 5 Scion cards out just to remove 1!

So I put up with it for a while, but when Hour of Reckoning came out I resisted the urge to destroy it with a Temporal Grenade, sacrificing an ongoing card from each hero just to keep their hands intact for a change.

Magmaria didn’t factor in much (though I think Crystalloid Behemoth might have dealt more damage while it was out than Progeny ever managed to) - Parse picked up a shard, and used it to sic Seismic Defender on Progeny for 6 more points of damage, but other than that the heroes pretty much ignored the environment, and it largely returned the favor.

Progeny never flipped - he could have, had he survived one more round, but a final assault from K.N.Y.F.E. ended his rampage instead.

Rollicking fight, much easier than I expected Challenge Progeny to be.

[FrivYeti]

@The_Justifier

I firmly believe Progeny is the least-worst of the difficulty 4 villains, not really much more dangerous than GWV or Citizen Dawn. He is unpredictable, and occasionally he can really pile on the hurt to a crazy degree, but compared to Iron Legacy or The Chairman or even The Matriarch, he’s relatively manageable, and this game was a good example of that.

I think the trick with Progeny is that he’s a bit more of a puzzle villain than the other Difficulty 4s. If you go up against him with a totally random team layout and not much idea of how to manage scions he can absolutely devastate you, but his shtick is one of the easiest to figure out and adapt to, and the tools to manage him are more common than for the other three; damage reduction really wrecks his day, and he only has a few cunning tricks.

[_Mad_Dog]

For a Progeny fight, that wasn’t that bad.
Mint with heroes at 18/20/20/18/17 and the game was over mid round on round 5, with the heroes’ big hitters still waiting to go.

I built KNYFE as the team’s big damage-dealer this game, and was feeling pretty good when she did 23 points of damage on Progeny on one turn. Then Stuntman said (the French equivalent of) “Nice one: now hold my beer and watch this” (and I’m sure KNYFE drank his beer). On Wraith’s turn, Stuntman:

• destroyed “Steal the Scene” and attacked Progeny,
• Use his innate power to boost his damage and play “Violent Escalation” and attack Progeny a second time,
• this card let Progeny made a meager 1-point attack back,
• Stuntman used “No Time to Bleed” to attack Progeny a third time,
• and then since Stuntman took that small amount of damage, his “Moving Target” was destroyed and let Stuntman use “Lance-Flammes” and crispy-fry Progeny.
  Stuntman did 29 points of damage on (someone else’s) turn (not counting the 7 points of overkill damage Stuntman did on that last attack).

I like Action Hero Stuntman, and have used him to good effect, but this was really nice and a bit surprising how well it played out. I wish I could say I planned it out, but it just sorta worked out incredibly well. I was confident that the heroes were going to defeat Progeny this round, but I did not think it would happen quite like this.

The only thing the environment did was give Chrono-Ranger a target to throw “KIll on SIght” on, so that he got some extra card draws when that target was destroyed. And man, the team needed those extra card draws. The entire team was thin on cards in hand due to “Scion of Blight”.

Like others have said:

• Wraith and Chrono-Ranger tamped down Progeny’s damage by hitting him with “Stun Bolts” and “Dart Thrower” most rounds;
• Wraith controlled Progeny’s deck, moving ineffective cards to the top of Progeny’s deck;
• KNYFE hit Progeny, hard, many, many times;
• Parse played her usual excellent support role;
• and Stuntman single-handedly saved the day! (well, that’s the way he remembers it).

Fun match. 5/5. Would fight again.

[The_Justifier]

I don’t really ever use DR against Progeny, oddly. (Spite is the villain which I’ve come to associate most with using cards like Stun Bolt, since he always does the pings to everyone like three times a turn.) My strategy is generally just to keep pounding on him, unless he has the Scions that punish you for doing that, and maybe even then if you can hit hard enough to make it worth it. The amount of damage that you can pile onto a single target is just absurd, particularly with heroes like KNYFE and CR which are specialized for that, and that seems to be my playstyle in general.