I see The Matriatrch consistently listed as one of the hardest enemies. Either my group is playing her wrong, or y'all are, as we've only ever lost to her once, and that was when we got cocky and left the Pillars of Hercules in play. Most games, we overwhelm her decisively.
She has some nasty cards available in her deck, but so much of her deck (60%!) is filled with the chaff of 1-HP Fowl that (in our experience) she never works up any momentum. [We typically read card text aloud when they come into play, but for Fowl cards, we just say: "At the start of the Villain turn, this card will already be dead."] If she does manage to play something nasty, we almost always just focus fire on it, and it goes down in a round or two, before it can form an evil combo (this, of course, includes the Mask that she starts with). Horrid Cacophony is unpleasant, but she only has two of them; compare against Sedative Flechettes, which is objectively worse in 95% of games, and we don't rate Omnitron as a hard villain.
I suppose if you're allowing her retaliation strikes to destroy hero cards, then she'd give you a harder time. Don't do that! Just take the HP damage. You'll kill her far faster than she will kill you that way.
Just checking: you're chaining fowl, right? If she gets a lot of birds out very quickly (which happens often) you will end up having to kill them sooner or later, and that retaliation damage can really add up. And then she brings them all back with Darken The Skies.
I admit she's easier than the other difficulty 4 villains and she can sometimes be a walkover if she doesn't get much in the way of bird chains, but in general I don't think she's an easy villain at all.
Matriarch was the first villain I played out of Rook City. We didn't look at difficulty at all, and we were still a fairly inexperienced group of players. That ended... poorly.
It also depends on whether or not you're using a team of heroes that can cancel retaliation damage for a turn while you obliterate the birds. Tachyon's Hypersonic Assault does a good job of this if you have a Galvanize out.
OP, It sounds like you are not taking damage whenever a fowl is destroyed. As Pyro said, are you using the Oversized card with the newer print of her deck?
Originally, that line was in every fowl card, but it caused problems with some mechanics, like Hair Trigger Reflexes. For the new edition, thry took the line off the birds and put it on Matty. However, the over-sized card is from the old version. So, if 6ou used the new cards with the over-sized card, that text was lost.
If it makes you feel any better, you can completely ruin her day with an H=3 group if that group involves Unity, Legacy, or three characters who have armor effects. Unity is my favorite; put out Stealth-Bot, and the Matriarch’s counterattacks will never get through. I couldn’t stop laughing the time I figure that out.
Having the Wraith Stun Bolt her would be pretty effective too, since it doesn't even matter if Muninn is out - Stun Bolt doesn't need to deal damage in orfer to nerf it :). That wouldn't help much against the Carrion Fields, admittedly, but you could Stun Bolt Lilian and one of the Fields, or something…
True, but I kind of assumed you’d be putting everything you have into wrecking both the ravens up, which, with the kind of damage output Unity can muster, ain’t hard for her to solo.
The funny thing is that Hair trigger is in the SAME expansion. How that issue was never considered while that expansion was being designed or during playtesting is quite surprising to me.
