Weekly One-Shot #324: The Cold Equations

Wow, nobody has posted one-shots in a while. Let’s catch up.

FF Bunker, F6 Wraith, Mr. Fixer, Malpractice Dr. Medico, and the Naturalist defend the world against Advanced Oblivaeon with Progeny and Empyreon in Rook City and Nexus of the Void. I still haven’t committed to trying an Oblivaeon game, so I don’t know if I’m missing anything. Good luck!

Three tries that week led to three failures, and I gave up. It’s not just Advanced OblivAeon, but all the Advanced Scions too! By the time I thought I had gotten it manageable in phase 3, there were too many Destruction tokens, no more Scions left to kill to remove any, and no spare environments. That’s when I knew it was time to throw in the towel.

I don’t know how I ever managed the Ultimate OblivAeon achievement. I’m sure it was the cheesiest game ever, with innumerable instances of Undo.

I haven’t tried this particular OblivAeon game, but overall I recommend them. The app handles all the fiddly details with ease, and the messages you get for every new hero are super cool (the ones for Scions were neat at first too, though with only ten of them showing up, almost all of them in almost every game, the novelty will wear off pretty soon). It’s a long slog, but very achievable with practice and system mastery. I have about four wins under my belt, and four losses if you don’t count retries.

This one was awful and I gave up after two tries. D: It’s just impossible to get the Shield flipped and also avoid environments blowing up pretty much every round.

Failed at my first attempt of this. Things got out of hand pretty quickly. In hindsight the error I made was pretty clear. When choosing things for Oblivaeon to blow up on the turn he destroyed 1 of the environments, I chose Empyreon first, who apparently when flipped, has an advanced rule that adds a devestation token for every card destroyed. Lesson learned; read things in future.

Going back in, I went with my usual plan when fighting Oblivaeon like this. Get the starting heroes incapped as quickly as possible (whilst gaining rewards and flipping the shield) and replace them with the OP characters in the game. (TLTachyon, Hunted Naturalist, DC Argent Adept, The Scholar and F5 Legacy) Get Legacy set up with both of his Next Evolutions, a Legacy Ring and a Lead from the Front and suddenly Infernal and Energy damage aren’t much of a problem anymore. Pretty much from there, just focused down on Oblivaeon, and then beat him all over again when Voss decided he wanted a turn at being smacked about. Hard match, but fun Near Mint.

I love that your list of the most OP characters includes just the bog standard Scholar right out of the box. A little surprised that you pick FV Legacy over Grandpa, not that I think it’s wrong, but just that I didn’t know that the concensus had shifted on AGL being the single best hero.

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Oh yeah Grandpa Legacy is probably a better option than F5 Legacy in general but I like using F5 Legacy more against Oblivaeon as it can help me get setup quicker -getting the cards I need into play faster to make my strat get going.

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What keeps fouling me up is when the card comes up which moves all the Aeon men into Oblivaeon’s play area (on turn 2). He then destroys most of them, which increases devastation.

I had a similar issue in my eventually-successful replay of an older OblivAeon game, “The Source of Foes”, which revolves around killing very specific numbers of Aeon Men to break the shield; Fanatic was charging up End of Days to blow all the Aeon Men up, but she was in Zone 2, and the zone 1 Scions played that card, pulling them all alway and leaving her to blow up her buddy The Every Man for no benefit.

Aeon Assault doesn’t always do a lot of damage, but the movement mechanics in OA games are one of their weak points, since almost nothing that the heroes can do can deal with unexpected movements. It makes me quite sad that Tactics fizzled out, as while it wasn’t overall a great game, it did have movement-based mechanics that don’t feature in SOTM, and while it’s flavorfully inappropriate for OblivAeon to appear in Tactics, it would nonetheless be interesting to use the Tactics mechanics to represent Blivs and his minions spacewarping each other AND the heroes around the battlefield, while the heroes scramble to get back into position for effective attacks.

Does anyone have any suggestion for overall initial tactics? I’ve tried moving the following openings, all of which result in, at best, slow attrition leading to collapse on turn 4 (as in only one environment to spare and 25+ devastation tokens), and at worst an obviously untenable situation on turn 3. I will mention that I avoid hitting Empyreon if Progeny is around.)

  1. Keep everyone in Zone 1 and try and whittle down scions. Results in disaster.
  2. Move everyone to Zone 2 and get rid of all the aeon men (I got it down to only one left, with only one HP) so that they can’t be pulled into Zone 1. Unfortunately, this gives up a couple of devastation tokens. I’ve then moved all the heroes to Zone 1 (to trigger the shield flip), but invariably I end up with 12 devastation and a wipe of those heroes.
  3. Try to do a mix (move some heroes, keep enough in zone 1 to keep an eye on the scions.) Unfortunately, this doesn’t work so well. It ends up taking too long to bring down the shield.

Any advice? This is the only weekly (up through 325) that I haven’t actually beaten eventually, and it is driving me crazy.

Sadly I can’t help you, as this is the seventh OblivAeon weekly, and I only just got around to tackling the fourth. Best advice I can give is don’t feel bad about shameless abusing the Undo and Restart functions to learn exactly what’s coming up, and plan around that as best you can. Won’t work super well for characters who shuffle a lot, but I think even then, it’s deterministic, ie a deck shuffled at the exact same moment will always have the exact same sequence. So write down every possible version of every deck sequence, and hopefully among all possible interactions of those cards, you’ll find one outcome that results in a win. (Nightmist looks at Benchmark and holds up one finger.)

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A couple of things I’ve tried that almost work.

  1. Avoid damaging Progeny. This also means secondary damage, like from Empyreon. (Hoist Chain works pretty well to avoid that.)
  2. Wipe out as many Aeon Vassals and Loci in area 2. This way they won’t end up in Area 1 and give extra card plays and devastation.
  3. Try and flip Empyreon at exactly the right time. After you’ve killed Aeon men, and then let OblivAeon nuke him when he destroys an environment. The initial heroes have almost no ability to take Empyreon out after he flips, since they heavily rely on melee, missile, and energy.
    I did this and still lost, but at least I got OblivAeon down to less than 100 HP.

Got as close as possible. I lost only two heroes (Bunker and two versions of Tachyon), and was down to Voss (replacing OblivAeon) with less than 30 HP, but the last environment blew up. The secret sauce was Dr. Medico using his power and the Aeon Shard.

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