Imagine you need to pick four heroes to go up against an unknown villain in an unknown environment. Imagine that the villain and environment could be anything – decks you’ve never seen before.
Who would you choose?
I’d go with Legacy, Visionary, Tempest, and The Wraith (and in that order).
I would want to stay away from heroes that are too ongoing and equipment heavy, since it is unknown if the villian/environment would love to keep destroying them everytime you get something out. Legacy can still at least galvanize each round allow their innate powers to do some fairly decent damage, Tempest Squall will be able to do two damage to each target lowing their health to where Ra’s Pyre could do three damage or Fanatic will deal four to someone. So even their combination of Innate powers are already really successful. Plus they each have some really good one-shots that’ll come in handy in that situation.
Now if there isn’t a much of a need to worry about equipment/ongoing destruction, than this time will do even better, Ra could get out his super combination and even allow Fanatic to no longer damager herself since he can change all damage to fire along with making everyone immune to fire. And if there is a minion that is immune to fire, Tempest can always have is equipment card out that changes his damage type, thus will fix that situation. I could also just skip imbue fire all together if there are a lot of enemies immune to fire.
Lead From The Front and Next Generation is quite good for stopping large scale damage output.
Savage Mana can stall mechanics that manipulate the villain’s trash.
You have 3 cards that stop most/all damage, one that stops the villain playing cards, and Stratosphere to stall the villain out.
Finally you have 2 group heals, and Fixer is able to provide great utility.
It might be my play style, but these four are my staple favourites for tough fights.
Legacy and Tempest both have damage boosting/resisting capabilities. They can both also heal the entire group, which has been a huge lifesaver for me in the past.
With the Legacy Ring, Legacy can theoretically keep everyone buffed with a +2 to damage and heal everyone for 1 while dealing damage. Next evolution gives him options for immunity to damage types.
If Tempest gets his shackles on, he’s able to get +4 damage against the villain character card with Legacy’s help. His healing rain capabilities make him really useful as well. He can also potentially resist and deal any damage type, which is very good going into an unknown situation.
Fixer has many options available to him, including the only options I can think of that allow heroes to deal irreducible damage to villain/environment targets. Combined with Legacy’s damage increases, his versatility is able to get past most defenses. He also allows people to get equipment cards back, which would be helpful if the environment or villain targets those.
Wraith has her computer cards which can reduce environment damage, her stealth power is one of the few ways to avoid irreducible damage, smoke bombs can be used in conjunction with Legacy and Tempest’s damage resistance to greatly reduce overall damage done to heroes, and stun bolt/throat jab are extremely useful against targets who get multiple attacks or target all heroes.
Oh, I didn’t even think of Mr. Fixer. I may trade for him instead of Fanatic… Nah, I’ll go ahead and stick with Fanatic I guess since I said her originally. Plus her End of Days will certainly come in handy.
I find this discussion super exciting! If we ever get the necessary rules and staff together to run a formal tournament, I’m very curious what sort of “metagame” will develop.
This amuses me. I always dish out heroes before picking villain and environment. Most of the time, it’s all random draw (I used an old deck of cards to make randomizers).
This probably explains my streak of exciting losses.
I had one guy complain through the entire game because he was using Bunker against Citizen Dawn and got all his equipment wiped out… twice. That game also included Tempest (my wife’s favorite), Mister Fixer, Haka, and Absolute Zero. We really lost that game.
But in another game, Expatriette, the Wraith, Tempest, and Fanatic cleaned house against Omnitron, probably the definitive anti-technology villain.
One of the things I love about Sentinels: Luck and strategy in equal measure.
Yeah, we too kind of choose a team and then choose a random villain and enviroment. That said if I went to a tournament or something I would want a tough, quickly accelerating brawler like Haka or a versatile crowd controller like Tempest. Hopefully my team would include some direct nuking damage (Ra), pure control (Visionary) and then another versatile character.
I’d probably play Wraith, Tachyon, Visionary, Legacy. Wraith has a lot of damage reduction and/or deck stacking, Tachyon has some substantial minion control, ongoing/environment destruction, and lots of power, Visionary has tons of control or stacking tricks, and Legacy has the survivability and general utility to keep them all alive and offset the mediocre damage output they’ll have to work with if they’re always stuck doing tricksy things.
Then again, this set of heroes could definitely crash and burn against some villains… Never bring Legacy to a plague fight, for instance.
It’s also not that bad if Legacy goes first. Then you can see if it is safe to Galvanize everyone or not. Or just simply use his ongoings. As long as don’t buff the rest of the heroes while they’re Infected, he’s great against Plague Rat.
What we usually do is pick everything randomly. If we get crushed, we keep the villain and environment and see if we can pick (or to use appropriate Avengers parlance, “assemble”) the best team for the job given the number of players.
To be honest, I’ve never played a random game, but that’d be my choice for this sort of thing too. I’ll probably try a random game next time I play. It seems exciting. My group of friends pretty much pick mostly the same heroes nowadays (my roommate more or less only plays Ra and AZ), so it’ll be fun to mix it up for everyone. Even me.
Maybe those of us who have volunteered to help at Gen Con could get something going…? ???
I say those of us who have volunteered to help and will be at Gen Con for sure should pass around some PMs about any things you’d like us to set up. Like a campaign or something. I know >G already has this “points” thing planned out, but we can help in more ways…
We could have a table or two for people who are familiar with the game to play with special scenarios. Special games like the brilliant Spiff created (sincere respect, sir). We could use those scenarios, and some of us could come up with ones for Rook City. And, those of us who are playtesters could be making scenarios for Infernal Relics (Which will obviously be secret among us until Gen Con).
Pretty much all I ever do is random. I give new players the opportunity to choose, but our regulars go random. We did recently do a “Each pick 2 random and choose one from there” and that was successful as well.
evandan once you go random you may never go back. It makes for some great games!
Random is extremely fun, it’s getting a bit difficult to do with dice now since there isn’t a 15 sided die. Currently rolling a d20 and anything 16 or higher requires a re-roll. Now I wonder what i’ll do once it hits 21 and more? Guess percentile dice will start being used. Maybe i’ll even throw in the promo characters as their own seperate entity. Currently if someone rolls and gets Legacy, they can choose either Legacy.
Oh, I didn’t even think about that. It’s a shame the HP trackers aren’t going to be continued. Even though the numbers are so close together they still have some awesome art.
Maybe start drawing heroes from a hat when there becomes too many?
I’d love to see Randomizer cards (a la deckbuilding games like Dominion, Thunderstone, Nightfall, etc.) released.
I would be willing to purchase a randomizer deck for existing heroes/villains/environments from the store, assuming that future expansions would include randomizers for all of the new content.