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I've been extremely eagerly anticipating Rook City Renegades, which is currently in the state of "everything is fine, nothing is ruined" and I expect to have our own copy here by March. But since I can't go so long without doing a writeup about SOMETHING, I took the time to amend an error with the existing writeups. Namely: I forgot to include the patch changes to incapacitated effects!
For those of you at home keeping score there: any incapacitated effects that would have ordinarily granted a play/power/draw now activate one hero's phase for that respective action. This means that, for example, it's a lot more beneficial to grant Tachyon a card play since she'll almost always get more than one card play out of it, as opposed to the old strat of "haha it's not Unity's play phase wheeeeee!". Not bad, just different, and I don't really make a habit out of abusing incapacitated effects anyway since that means someone doesn't get to play the game.
Oh and Tempest had their one effect nerfed. You know the one.
It's March in dog years! I have my copy of Rook City Renegades and will be doing writeups on a daily basis from here on out, so be excited for that.
Note that since there are some new decks not present in the previous edition, I obviously can't do patch notes for those decks. Instead, I'll bring back the Notable Cards segment for them, showcasing some of the most important gamechangers to keep an eye out for when playing as/against/in those decks.
I'm also going to add the new variant cards to the core set heroes who got them, as well (The Wraith, Bunker, Unity, Fanatic, Haka, and Ra).
Welcome to Rook City, home of the urban, gritty heroes and villains you all know and maybe love. We'll start with Expatriette, at a 4 out of 10 complexity, and widely regarded as the weakest hero in the previous edition. The fundamentals of her kit were fine, but there was so much useless chaff in her deck and no good decksearch tools, she never got a good chance to play the game half the time, leading to her just being a target sitting there inflating the value of H. And even when you did get her up and running, she was so vulnerable to Item destruction that there was pretty good odds of your engine, with a ceiling that honestly didn't match up with most other heroes in her weight class, just getting flattened instantly anyway. Definitive Edition has given her some very, VERY welcome buffs to her playstyle, letting her get up to speed much more quickly, as well as providing some nice tactical options for the rest of the team in a pinch.
If you weren't familiar with her core mechanic before: she's the Gunisher. All of her "powers" are either guns, or getting access to more guns and ammo. Speaking of ammo, you can modify her gun-based powers with a fun variety of extra spicy bullets, allowing you to effectively neutralize almost any foe you encounter. She's a damage dealer par excellence now, and no mistake.
Checklist:
Reliable Damage: Yes. Quick Draw not only serves as a nice basic shot, but also helps you get set up with your bigger, heavier guns much more quickly, and once you have Fists Full of Lead and some nice guns to work with, you're going to be the bullet hose you always wanted to be.
Ongoing Destruction: Yes, but it's on a single one-shot, and Expatriette's decksearch tools are much more focused on her Items. That said, Targeted Explosion missed the notice that you aren't supposed to be able to destroy Ongoings AND Environments with a single card anymore, so that's nice.
Emergency Defenses: No. That's a job for your allies, and one you can help them with, but not something you are personally able to do.
Deck Control: No. At most, Liquid Nitrogen Rounds can bury targets you would otherwise destroy, disarming their on-death effects and keeping them out of the villain trash. Not exactly what you'd want for this category.
Ally Acceleration: Yes. Expatriette lost a bunch of her garbage ammo management cards, but gained a bunch of extremely strong one-shots in their place, allowing you to dish out assorted helping hands to your team as needed. Definitely a different flavor of acceleration here, but undeniably a strong one.
Healing: Yes, but only as one of the buffs you hand out with Backup Plan. A single-target heal for 2 technically counts, and I could stretch that "technically" out to patch a hole in a tanker.
Big-Ass Attack Option: Yes, but you've got to have both a lot of Guns and a lot of Ammo, plus Fists Full of Lead, in play for that to happen. If you've got that, then you can expect a hailstorm of damage that can handle almost any threat you're facing, whether it's single targets, swarms, or precision aiming.
Main Strength:
Expatriette is a reliable bullet hose that also has some handy team support options, putting her right at home with players who like playing frontline commander sorts of characters that like to fight smarter, rather than harder. Her different types of Ammo play into that as well, with Thermite Rounds ignoring damage reduction, Shock Rounds letting you shortcut past the last part of a target's health, and Liquid Nitrogen Rounds safely disarming the threat of any target you wouldn't want destroyed. In short: she is the thinking meathead's DPS, if that makes sense. And if not who cares, haha guns go brrrrrrrrrrr
Main Weakness:
Expatriette has no defenses and virtually no healing, and no ways to really disrupt the villain that isn't gun damage. She's extremely reliant on helping her team get into position to keep things steady in rocky waters, and gets bullied hard if she is ever prevented from dealing her damage for any reason. And, of course, she needs her guns out to do her job, and while she's got some good ways to get them out, she's noticeably lacking in salvage options. Play smartly around villains that can go for big disruptive/bursty turns at a moment's notice, and try to hold on to backups of your most vital guns wherever possible.
Variant Strategies:
First Appearance: Expatriette
If you missed not having a basic attack on your power card for some weird reason, you can instead use Soldier of Misfortune to approximate the older style of Expatriette. Discovering an Item card and getting a free draw of 2 if it was an ammo is... extremely how the old Expatriette played. But hey, now you can have that but with all the fun new toys of the Definitive Edition deck! Everyone wins! You even go back up to the old max HP of 29, just like the good ol' days, when Ammo cards had to be attached to Guns. Bah! Whippersnappers!
Dark Watch: Expatriette
In the previous edition, this variant gave Expatriette the power Aim, which was a weird and janky self-buff that ended up A: not working that well from a rules standpoint, and B: not working that well as a gameplay option. Screw that. Now, she actually gets to use that .50 Cal. Sniper Rifle the artwork saw fit to give her, and convert any Ammo cards you don't feel like using into a beefy 5 fixed projectile damage attack. Sure, it can't capitalize on damage boosts from your team, but that's still a 5 that your enemies can't disregard in any way except for immunity. We take those, yes we do.
Expatriette Eclipse
If you'd rather lean more into the tactician angle opened up in Definitive Edition, there's a... kind of okay option here. Draw 4 is fun, but forcing you to discard any Items drawn this way is less fun. I get what they were going for here, giving Expatriette a way to quickly get those powerful one-shots into her hand without using the Collect keyword to fish out the exact ones you want, or the Discover keyword to immediately get them into play. I just think the execution was a little stumbled here. Not by much though, that's still a handy draw 4.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Flak Jacket, "Prejudice", "Pride", Quick Draw, Reload, Unload, Speed Loading
Renamed:
Base power (Load) -> Quick Draw
Dark Watch variant power (Aim) -> .50 Cal. Sniper Rifle
Tactical Shotgun -> Double-Barrel Shotgun
Hollow Points -> Hollow-Point Rounds
Incendiary Rounds -> Thermite Rounds
Submachine Gun -> Modified SMG
RPG Launcher -> Targeted Explosion
Changes:
Max HP reduced to 28.
Dark Watch variant HP reduced to 27.
Base power (Quick Draw):
Now attacks (2 projectile to 1 target) before playing.
Play now restricted to Item cards.
Dark Watch variant power (.50 Cal. Sniper Rifle):
Completely reworked. Now either discards or destroys 1 Ammo card, attacking (5 fixed projectile to 1 target) if you do.
Incapacitated effects:
Bonus power phase replaced with bonus play phase.
Target destruction replaced with discovering 1 Item.
Damage chaser replaced with granting 1 hero an attack (2 projectile damage to 1 target). NOTE: the attack reads "1 Hero deals 1 target Hero 2 projectile damage", suggesting an extra typo instance of the word "Hero" inconsistent with the usual style.
Dark Watch variant incapacitated effects:
Damage reducer replaced with playing the top card of the environment deck, then burying 1 Environment card.
Gun/Ammo cards:
Ammo no longer requires a Gun to be played next to, and Guns may activate Loaded text from any Ammo cards in play.
All effects of Ammo are now listed under Loaded text.
Destruction effect of Ammo moved to the activating Gun in question.
Thermite Rounds:
Now makes the damage dealt irreducible.
Liquid Nitrogen Rounds:
Slightly reworked. Now, instead of reducing damage dealt by targets, increases the power's damage by 1 and buries targets that would be destroyed by the damage instead.
Shock Rounds:
Completely reworked. Now changes the damage type to lightning, and destroys the target(s) if they have 3 or fewer HP after being dealt damage.
Assault Rifle:
Grants a hero a card draw after dealing damage.
Double-Barrel Shotgun:
Can now activate up to 2 Ammo cards.
Modified SMG:
Grants either 1 Ammo play or 1 draw before checking Loaded effects or dealing damage.
Arsenal Access:
Completely reworked. Now discovers 1 Gun and 1 Ammo, then draws a card and may play 1 Item.
Targeted Explosion:
No longer checks if an ongoing or environment card was destroyed to attack.
Targets for the attack increased to up to 3.
Hairtrigger Reflexes:
Completely reworked. Now grants a reaction that grants an attack (2 projectile to the attacker) and 1 card draw.
Added:
Lock and Load:
One-Shot. Summons 1 Gun, shuffles your trash into your deck, discovers X (number of Guns in play) Ammo, then lets an ally Hero play the top card of their deck.
Black Market Contact:
One-Shot. Discards up to 3 cards, then summons X (number of cards discarded this way +1) Items.
Comprehensive Plan:
One-Shot. Grants 1 hero either a card draw or putting a card from their hand/trash on top of their deck. Grants a second hero a power use. Grants a third hero a card play.
Backup Plan:
One-Shot. Discovers 1 Gun or discovers 1 Ammo. Grants one Hero character an attack (3 melee to 1 target). Grants a second Hero character 2 HP. Grants a third Hero 1 Item salvage.
Fists Full of Lead:
Ongoing, Limited. Grants a power that draws 2. Grants an extra power use during power phase.
Pride and Prejudice:
Item, Gun, Limited. May activate Loaded text on 1 Ammo, then attacks (2 projectile to 1 target), then destroys the activated Ammo. May activate Loaded text on 1 Ammo, then attacks (2 projectile to 1 target), then destroys the activated Ammo.
Next up is Mr. Fixer, one of my favorites from the earlier edition, and the game's cleanest example of a stance fighting character. In the earlier edition, he had some fun shenanigans he could pull, but most of those arose from rules oversights rather than intentional design of the character, resulting in him feeling like a character that was easy to learn but difficult to master, and not in a good way. Definitive Edition lessened the extremity of that feeling, so now the cheeky stuff he can do feels considerably more intentional. Better yet, Mr. Fixer has become the flagship character for abusing the Reaction mechanic in Definitive Edition, and will have a wide variety of reactions to work with that can let him do some very wacky things.
To keep it simple: while there is an extended setup Mr. Fixer can technically build up to, all you really need to get him running at max is one Style card and one Tool card. You have a bunch of these in your deck, and they all provide different benefits, but they're mutually exclusive. So you'll find yourself shifting between them to fit the situation at hand more often than not, and his deck's design strongly supports that kind of playstyle, with each Style having a unique Reaction, and each Tool having a fun extra move built in for when it's played.
Checklist:
Reliable Damage: Yes. Mr. Fixer's gameplan is built all around taking small instances of 1 or 2 melee damage and tuning them up to much more powerful levels. He will never not be attacking.
Ongoing Destruction: Yes. The new on-play effect of the Hoist Chain can not only shut down Ongoings, it's not limited and you have two in your deck. As long as you keep getting access to them, you can keep destroying ongoings, easily.
Emergency Defenses: Yes, but only realistically with a very specific setup: Hoist Chain, Riveting Crane, and a lot of cards in hand to discard when your reaction is procced. And this came at a cost: Grease Gun and the old redirect effect of Driving Mantis are both gone.
Deck Control: No. Unless you mean controlling your own deck to turn it into an easily accessible library, anyway.
Ally Acceleration: Yes, but only off of a single one-shot, Life Worth Living. It's not bad, it's a spike heal of 4 and a free power use, but that's all you've got.
Healing: Yes, but... well, see above.
Big-Ass Attack Option: Yes, but no matter how you approach it, you're either looking at a not-very-impressive ceiling by default, or throwing Bloody Knuckles as a sign to your team "HEY GIVE ME EXTRA CARD PLAYS AND POWER USES AND DEFENSES AND EVERYTHING". In other words, you won't be doing it without help, but it's a definite possibility.
Main Strength:
Mr. Fixer is very similar to Expatriette in that he's a somewhat technical damage dealer that has a wide range of options for how that damage can occur and what it can do. What sets Mr. Fixer apart from almost everyone else is that he needs very little to get his kit running: a Tool and a Style. Get those in play (this will be pretty easy) and you really don't need much else. Sure, Toolbox, Harmony, and Overdrive are NICE and you'll want to have them out, but even if they get wiped, you will always have the fundamentals of your kit on hand, and the only way the villain can stop that is by incapacitating you.
Main Weakness:
Having a low setup ceiling is both a blessing and a curse. Mr. Fixer can get up to full potency very quickly... but that also means it's hard for him to do truly mindbending stuff with his kit alone. Yeah, he can use reactions to shut down threats that even think about attacking him, but compared to the full setup of similar heroes to his playstyle (Expatriette, Ra, or even Tachyon) his full power is a little underwhelming. Not that he's not good, he's just not the kind of good that gets everyone at the table hooting and hollering when your big moves happen. Against disruption-light villains, you might prefer to use a character with a little more flash than Mr. Fixer.
Variant Strategies:
First Appearance: Mr. Fixer
I find it incredibly hilarious that both Mr. Fixer and Expatriette use their First Appearance variants to go "here's as close to the old power as we could get without it being terrible". Sifu Strike does only 1 damage, just like it used to, and instead of speed-cycling your deck the way the base variant or Black Fist do, you just. Let someone draw cards. It's fine, good even. Some heroes (Captain Cosmic, for example) have serious card draw issues that would greatly appreciate the assist from Sifu Strike. It's just... you're going to be even less flashy than usual? As Mr. Fixer? What, do you also avoid putting ice cubes in your water because that makes it "too intense"?
Dark Watch: Mr. Fixer
Bitter Strike was honestly a completely fine power that mostly just needed the team to be ready for the extra disruption it would add. The only change it got in Definitive Edition was letting Mr. Fixer discard instead of wrecking something if needed. And honestly? Hell yeah, that's fine. Your card draw as Mr. Fixer isn't amazing, but it's certainly enough to keep this in play. Consider this the expert's variant for playing Mr. Fixer: big damage instances are there to be modified, it's just gonna be a little harder to get and keep those modifiers active, that's all.
Black Fist
From a flavor perspective... I gotta say, I'm not entirely comfortable with having a variant for Mr. Fixer's origin as a borderline blaxploitation character, but at least it's not over-the-top tasteless. Mechanically, Black Fist serves as a Luigimode to the base Mr. Fixer's Tool collecting, instead using Dynamite Strike to summon a Style before attacking. Styles aren't as impactful to get into play as Tools are, since their main feature is Reactions rather than extra moves when played. Still a nice option to have though, and honestly, it comes down to personal preference for whether you like Styles or Tools more as the basis for your engine.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Pipe Wrench, Grease Gun, Salvage Yard, Meditation
Renamed:
Tool Box -> Toolbox
Changes:
Max HP increased to 29.
Dark Watch variant HP increased to 30.
Base power (Strike):
Damage increased to 2.
May now collect 1 Tool after attacking.
Dark Watch variant power (Bitter Strike):
May now discard a card instead of destroying.
Incapacitated effects:
Bonus draw phase replaced with bonus play phase.
Ongoing destruction replaces with discovering 1 ongoing.
Item play from trash replaced with putting the top card of a hero's trash in their hand.
Dark Watch variant incapacitated effects:
Environment destruction replaced with bonus draw phase.
Trash bury increased to up to 3.
Tool cards:
Now destroys all other Tools instead of returning them to your hand.
Charge:
Now draws 2 before attacking.
Damage increased to 4.
Toolbox:
Completely reworked. Now allows you to draw a card or collect 1 Style at start phase, and lets you discard a card to collect 1 Item at end phase.
Overdrive:
Slightly reworked. Now an Ongoing, Limited that grants up to two uses of the power on your character card at end phase, destroying itself if you do.
Allows you to choose the type of damage Mr. Fixer deals.
Harmony:
Allows you to play a Style or Tool card at start phase.
Bloody Knuckles:
Limited keyword added.
Hoist Chain:
Now either destroys 1 ongoing or draws 2 after destroying Tools.
Damage reduction only applies to non-Hero targets.
Jack Handle:
Slightly reworked. Now, rather than converting all damage to area non-Hero attacks, replaces all game text saying "Mr. Fixer deals 1 target" to "Mr. Fixer deals up to 5 targets".
Now grants an attack (1 melee to up to 5 targets) after destroying Tools.
Dual Crowbars:
Completely reworked. Now increases damage dealt by Mr. Fixer by 1, and decreases damage dealt to Mr. Fixer by 1.
Now grants an attack (1 melee to up to 2 targets) after destroying Tools.
Tire Iron:
Destroy threshold increased to 3.
Now grants an attack (3 melee to 1 target) after destroying Tools.
Alternating Tiger Claw:
Now grants a reaction that grants an attack (2 melee to 1 target).
Riveting Crane:
Completely reworked. Now grants an attack (1 melee to 1 target) after you discard a card, and a reaction that lets you discard up to 3 cards.
Driving Mantis:
Completely reworked. Now grants 2 draw after using a power, and a reaction that grants a power use.
Grease Monkey Fist:
Completely reworked. Now grants an attack (1 melee to 1 target) after one of your cards is destroyed, and a reaction that discovers 1 Item.
Added:
Life Worth Living:
One-Shot. May shuffle your trash into your deck, then draw 2, heal an ally for 4, and if that ally is a Hero, they may use 1 power.
The Manifold Path:
One-Shot. May shuffle your trash into your deck, then may discover 1 Style, then may discover 1 Tool, then heals Mr. Fixer for 3.
Full Throttle:
One-Shot. Attacks (1 melee to 1 target), may play a Style or Tool card, attacks (1 melee to 1 target), and may play a Style or Tool card.
Zen Maintenance:
One-Shot. Salvages any number of Style and/or Tool cards, then collects 1 Tool or Style, collects 1 Limited, and grants a card play.
Now for the part where the reworks get a little weird. Setback's main reason for their rework is simple enough: the earlier edition required you to track "Unlucky" tokens in addition to Setback's health, and not only were there no spinners for hero health, all damage was tracked with tokens. Which effectively meant if you were going to play Setback, you had to source out some alternate tokens from somewhere (I used an old bag of runes I had laying around, and I'll thank you not to ask why I had them). The idea with these tokens was that Setback's "power" was that he was basically subject to an actualized version of the gambler's fallacy, but was also a consistently unlucky person. So you'd spend a lot of time building up those Unlucky tokens with your cards that were mostly full of backlash and costs, only for other cards to spend a ton of those tokens to do some Very Good Things for your team.
The problem arises from how Setback handles the mechanic now. In short: he has a ton of Ongoing cards in his deck that now sport the Unlucky keyword, which do a fun cool thing when played, and have a Start Phase effect that causes problems for your team. To cash them out, he also has a small assortment of Lucky oneshots that let you destroy a bunch of Unlucky cards to get some obscenely powerful effects. Which means that, since they excised the core mechanic from how his deck used to function, pretty much every single card is either new or drastically reworked. So, uh, look forward to that!
Checklist:
Reliable Damage: Yes, but it's not on easily accessible pieces of kit. You're either playing volatile Unlucky cards for quick damage here or there, or using the power on Silver Lining if and when you get it.
Ongoing Destruction: Yes, but only on a single Lucky card, Chain Reaction. Which is good ongoing destruction, but it's also one card, and it's a Lucky card, so for best results you'll need a few Unlucky cards out first.
Emergency Defenses: No. Setback instead engineers situations that require emergency defenses from your allies.
Deck Control: No. If there is ever any single thing Setback has no access to whatsoever, it is "control" of any kind.
Ally Acceleration: Yes. Setback offers a surprising variety of ways to help his team out, both with Unlucky cards like Careless Curiosity, or with Lucky cards like Serendipity or Turn of Events. It's not exactly his main specialty, but he's solid at it.
Healing: Yes. Weirdly enough, there's a decent amount of healing in Setback's deck to work with (albeit mostly as self-heal). For teammates, either Turn of Events or Dangerous Distraction do the job nicely, albeit intermittently. For self-healing, there's a bunch of Lucky cards to work with, plus the reworked effects of Silver Lining.
Big-Ass Attack Option: Yes. This is why you take this deck: so you can hit the Jackpot and swing for a base of 7 damage like that's a realistic number to work with. And even outside of that, your Unlucky cards come with some hefty attacks of their own most of the time. No matter what, everyone will notice a Setback turn.
Main Strength:
If you're playing Setback, you're doing it with the hope that you hit the big highs on your turn and get a monstrously powerful Lucky effect to go off and win the game for you. And make no mistake: every single one of the Lucky cards is a powerful gamechanger. To that end, Setback is designed to play through his deck quickly and haphazardly, with the default Risk power just topdecking for the hell of it, and Push Your Luck giving you a delightful three card topdeck to work with. And if those Lucky cards never show up, Setback proves to be a great way to soak up all those excess Ongoing destruction effects the rest of your team is so worried about. If you look at raw stats, Setback is just a solid, but inconsistent, damage dealer with some okay self-sustain, and some extremely powerful swingy Lucky cards.
Main Weakness:
What do you think?
Every one of Setback's Unlucky cards, if left out, creates problems for your team when his turn next rolls around. And while they're delicious food for any Lucky cards you want to play, unless you have a "reliable" method of acceleration, you will not get to those strong Lucky effects without taking some heat from the Unlucky cards. Add that on to an already-aggressive villain, and Setback might cause more damage to his team than to the enemy. I strongly recommend pairing Setback with characters that can support him, or even administer some control to his deck if needed (Legacy's Keen Vision comes to mind).
Variant Strategies:
First Appearance: Setback
Finally, I get to stop making the same joke here. While the First Appearance does go back to the old max HP of 31, the new power instead allows you a way to get all those delicious Lucky cards into your hand extremely quickly, at the expense of letting the main villain take potshots at you every time you do. You can collect more than just Lucky cards though: Push Your Luck is a very normal card that lets you drastically accelerate Setback's deck, which is definitely a very normal goal you want to have access to at all times. If you want to be the Ace in the Hole, make sure your team can grant you some extra card plays to get those one-shots out even faster.
Dark Watch: Setback
Mitigate used to be... pretty bad, honestly. Reducing your Unlucky token count was normally a strictly bad thing, and the single-shot damage reduction didn't effectively matter at all except as a way to block self-damage from heroes who didn't need to take it for their effects. Since fixed damage exists now, that part got axed, and Mitigate is now a very normal power that destroys an Unlucky card and then grants a draw or play. Weirdly, that's actually not as strong as it sounds, because destroying an Unlucky card before playing means dulling the effects of any Lucky card you would play as a result. As such, I'd use it as a stopgap in situations where you don't have any Lucky cards to work with, but have got a slew of Unlucky cards that aren't gonna clear themselves.
Fey-Cursed Setback
What happens when a leprechaun of the Fey-Court gives Setback the Adhin Talisman normally used by Kismet? This mess! Double Down lets you speedrun through the Unlucky cards in Setback's deck while only taking half the penalties for leaving them in play, and that's great! This variant has a slight HP hit as a result, but before you go jumping right for that magic talisman: you're still accelerating Unlucky cards. Are you SURE you want to do that? Seriously, think it over. Or don't, because you're playing Setback, and you dropped your fear at the door to go play with the shiny red button.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Unlucky tokens, "Whoops! Sorry!", Cash Out, Friendly Fire, Fumbling Fool, Surprising Fortune
Renamed:
Exceeded Expectations -> Exceed Expectations
Plucky Break -> Lucky Break
Uncharmed Life -> Dangerous Distraction
Karmic Retribution -> Jackpot
Changes:
Max HP decreased to 30.
Dark Watch variant HP increased to 32.
Dark Watch variant power (Mitigate):
Completely reworked. Now destroys 1 Unlucky card, then either draws or plays 1.
Incapacitated effects:
Bonus power phase replaced with bonus draw phase.
Bonus play phase replaced with healing a Hero target for 2.
Deck discards replaced with revealing the top card of 1 hero deck, then burying or playing it.
Dark Watch variant incapacitated effects:
Bonus draw phase replaced with forcing a target to deal itself 1 psychic.
Wrong Time and Place:
Unlucky keyword added.
Completely reworked. Now, when played, either grants an attack (3 melee to up to 2 targets) or buries a non-Hero target with 10 or fewer HP. Now discovers 1 target from the Villain deck at start phase.
High Risk Behaviour:
Unlucky keyword added.
Damage boost reduced to 1, but no longer applies to damage dealt to Setback.
Start phase effect added. Now grants the villain with the lowest HP an attack (3 melee to Setback).
Dangerous Distraction:
Unlucky keyword added.
Now allows you to, when played, discard up to 3 cards, healing any target for 2 each time you do.
Damage redirection slightly reworked. Now selects an ally at end phase, redirecting any damage they would take to Setback until your start phase.
Reckless Rush:
Completely reworked. Now an Ongoing, Unlucky that grants an attack (4 melee to 1 target) when played, and grants the villain with the highest HP an attack (3 melee to Setback) at start phase.
Silver Lining:
Limited keyword added.
Completely reworked. Now grants a self-heal for 2 after you play an Unlucky card, and a power that grants an attack (3 melee to 1 target) and you may draw 1.
Cause and Effect:
Completely reworked. Now an Ongoing, Limited that discovers 1 Lucky card when destroyed, and grants a power that discovers 2 Unlucky cards and may destroy 1 Hero Ongoing card.
Exceed Expectations:
Lucky keyword added.
Grants an attack (3 melee to 1 target) before checking Unlucky cards.
Slightly reworked. Now destroys up to 3 Unlucky cards, then grants an attack (7 melee to [number of Unlucky cards destroyed] targets).
Lucky Break:
Lucky keyword added.
Completely reworked. Now discovers 1 Unlucky card, then destroys up to 3 Unlucky cards, then grants an attack ([number of Unlucky cards destroyed times 3] irreducible melee to 1 target).
Turn of Events:
Lucky keyword added.
Now heals each Hero target for 2.
Self-damage removed.
Power uses reworked. Now destroys up to 3 Unlucky cards, granting a different hero a power use each time you do.
Jackpot:
Lucky keyword added.
Slightly reworked. Now discovers 1 Unlucky card, then grants a self-heal for 7 if you destroy an Unlucky card, an attack (7 melee to 1 target) if you destroy an Unlucky card, and 7 draws if you destroy an Unlucky card.
Looking Up:
Completely reworked. Now a One-Shot, Lucky that grants a self-heal for 2, then lets you destroy up to 3 Unlucky cards, granting a self-heal for 5 each time you do.
Added:
Push Your Luck:
One-Shot. Plays the top card of your deck, then may play the top card of your deck, then may play the top card of your deck.
One-Armed Bandit:
One-Shot. Discards the top card of your deck, playing it if it's Unlucky, granting a self-heal for 7, an attack (7 melee to 1 target), and an optional attack (7 melee to a second target) if it's Lucky, and granting an ally a card draw and power use if it's neither.
Careless Curiosity:
Ongoing, Unlucky. When played, lets an ally collect 1 Item, and lets you discard 1 to let that ally discover 1 Item. Now either discards 1 or destroys 1 Item at start phase.
Tempting Button:
Ongoing, Unlucky. When played, destroys 1 Environment card. Now plays the top card of the Environment deck at start phase.
Accidental Immolation:
Ongoing, Unlucky. When played, grants an attack (2 fire to Setback and up to 3 targets). Deals 1 fixed fire to each target at start phase.
Serendipity:
One-Shot, Lucky. Each hero draws 1, then you may destroy up to 3 Unlucky cards, granting an ally 1 draw and 1 play each time you do.
Chain Reaction:
One-Shot, Lucky. Destroys 1 Environment card, then destroys up to 3 Unlucky card, either destroying an Ongoing or burying a target each time you do.
Next up is NightMist, yet another iteration of the heroes that could be really strong if played well, but playing them well required some kind of awkward mechanics that flew counter to expectations. You basically needed to fiend for card draw as hard as possible to fuel your deflection engine from Amulet of the Elder Gods, using that and Mistform to basically play a weird kind of tank, and barely (if ever) casting your actual spells. By this point, it should not be a surprise to see that most of her kit has been polished to a mirror sheen, taking away the slower game control playstyle she had to a degree, but in exchange, letting her actually play the game.
Harkening to her Call of Cthulhu style origins, NightMist uses a Spell number mechanic to lend a variable of unpredictability to her effects. Veteran NightMist players will note that, rather than checking the top card directly when casting a Spell, you now reference the top card of your trash, with most Spell cards baking in a single card mill to approximate the effect. Smart players can use discards from their hand to their benefit, controlling the level of the spell in their favor, but this also means that if you get interrupted by having to discard anything else while you have a Spell lined up, it can mess with your plans.
Checklist:
Reliable Damage: No. At most, you'll be attacking with one-shots here or there, but NightMist isn't meant to get into the thick of things.
Ongoing Destruction: Yes. Droplet of Lethe is capable of destroying multiple ongoings at once, which, I remind you, is something only available to Absolute Zero or a very well set-up Argent Adept in the core set.
Emergency Defenses: Yes. Shielding Winds, meet your pal, Starshield Invocation. Oh, what's that, Starshield Invocation doesn't protect NightMist herself? That's fine, just go Mistform.
Deck Control: Yes. NightMist has Astral Premonition, which is only a one-shot now, but still good, and Isolating Mists, which is a little more expensive to maintain now but still very good.
Ally Acceleration: Yes. Call Forth and Coalescing Spirit can summon items and ongoings respectively from any deck. I should not have to explain exactly how overpoweringly valuable that is.
Healing: Yes, but not very well. Essence Transfer lets you heal a buddy somewhat, and the deck has a little self-heal baked in. Those of you hoping to healtank like the old days will be in for a rude awakening.
Big-Ass Attack Option: Yes, but only as an area attack with Oblivion. NightMist's single target spike damage caps out at Tendrils of Talontus with full setup doing two instances of 5. And that's not bad per se, it's just... not even in the neighborhood of real spike damage.
Main Strength:
NightMist has access to some unique and strong options that make her a valuable support character for the team, controlling the field in the team's favor. Her Spell cards are widely varied, and each able to handle some otherwise-deadly situations with a single card play. What's more, her kit and powers are all built around getting those game-changing Spells out as fast as possible, and tuning them to maximum effectiveness for the situation. Ongoing destruction, deck control, damage reduction, ally card summoning (still can't believe they let that one in), instakills, life drain. If it would be in a D&D wizard kit, she probably has something like it.
Main Weakness:
Setting aside the obvious flaw in that her Spells all depend on a variable number you only have some control over: NightMist really needs a hand of cards to get away with most of her nonsense. Even outside of her engine being strongly focused on card plays over power uses, she'll have ample reason to discard and bury cards from her hand to keep things running, and while her card draw is definitely good once set up, you still do need that setup to really get going. Additionally, if you don't have the right spell for the job at the start of your turn, odds are you won't be able to get it until next turn, if that. The Tome of Elder Magic can only collect or play, not summon.
Variant Strategies:
First Appearance: NightMist
Honestly? Just having a basic "shoot the guy" spell as NightMist is something revolutionary in practice. The damage is a little unpredictable, ranging from 1 to 4 when not set up, but by the time you ARE set up, don't forget: you're playing NightMist, you have the Amulet of the Elder Gods and Master of Magic out. You can just say you're hitting for a minimum of 4 every turn and there ain't nothing the villain can do to stop you. Then again... NightMist isn't exactly meant to be played as a raw damage dealer, y'know? Lots of heroes can hit for a minimum of 4 every turn, that doesn't exactly make you special. It's just a bit of kit NightMist doesn't ordinarily have access to is all.
Dark Watch: NightMist
I'm so glad this variant gets a real power now. Deck controlling your own deck isn't especially useful compared to the base power of just drawing a ton of cards, especially on a hero like NightMist who will need lots of cards at all times. Void Mage, in sharp contrast, opens up a bunch of fun crafty stuff you can do. For example: any time you'd bury a card of yours (like, say, the damage deflection you're going to do on the regular with Amulet of the Elder Gods)? PSYCHE, that card is actually your next move! Or you can bounce it back to your hand to bury it again later. Or, if the villain starts burying your stuff, no they didn't. You gotta be clever with this variant, but it is REWARDING.
Mentor NightMist
Everyone knows wizards teach the rest of the team. That's where Magical Mentor comes in. On the surface, it's just a simple damage booster to a character, and that feels kind of underwhelming with Legacy right there being his usual bombastic self. The trick comes from the other part, where if that hero was going to do damage you don't want them to do, you can basically nullify it outright. This makes Mentor NightMist extremely powerful alongside characters who might have wide-scale attacks hitting targets you ordinarily wouldn't want hit, such as Tempest or, fittingly enough, The Harpy. Having the highest health out of the variants released yet at 28 doesn't hurt either.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Elder Ring, Enlightenment, Mist-Fueled Recovery, Mists of Time, Starshield Necklace
Renamed:
Base power (Investigate) -> Incantation
Dark Watch variant power (Attunement) -> Void Mage
Heedless Lash -> Tendril of Talontus
Mistbound -> Isolating Mists
Planar Banishment -> Droplet of Lethe
Changes:
Spell number mechanic:
Now checks the top card of your trash, rather than forcing a discard.
Max HP decreased to 26.
Dark Watch variant HP decreased to 25.
Base power (Incantation):
Now discards 1 instead of self-damaging.
May now play a Spell card instead of drawing.
Dark Watch variant power (Void Mage):
Completely reworked. Now reveals the bottom card of your deck, then either plays, draws, or discards it.
Incapacitated effects:
Bonus play phase replaced with bonus power phase.
Healing replaced with discarding the top card of a deck, and if it's a target, forcing another target to self-damage for [HP of discarded card] fixed infernal.
Dark Watch variant incapacitated effects:
Bonus draw phase replaced with bonus power phase.
Bonus play phase replaced with healing up to 3 hero targets for 1.
Trash recovery replaced with switching the bottom and top cards of any 1 deck.
Mistform:
Limited keyword replaced with Spell.
Damage immunity now only applies to non-infernal damage.
No longer blocks card plays or power uses.
Extra draws removed.
Start phase reworked. Destroy is now mandatory, but first self-heals for 3.
Scouring Mists:
Discards the top card of the deck before attacking.
Self-damage removed.
Damage increased to 3.
Tendril of Talontus:
Discards the top card of the deck before attacking.
Slightly reworked. Self-damage is now an optional trigger for playing the top card of the trash (assuming NightMist takes the damage).
Droplet of Lethe:
Discards the top card of the deck before destroying.
No longer affects Environment cards.
Oblivion:
Discards the top card of the deck before each attack.
Non-Hero attack now goes first.
All-target attack is now optional.
Isolating Mists:
Slightly reworked. Now an Ongoing, Spell that allows NightMist to discard 1 whenever a non-Hero card would be played, discarding the card and self-damaging for [Spell number] infernal. Destroys itself at start phase.
Astral Premonition:
Completely reworked. Now a One-Shot, Spell that discards the top card of the deck, reveals the top cards of up to [Spell number] decks,, then lets you discard 1 from any deck and play 1 from any deck.
Call Forth:
Slightly reworked. Now summons 1 Item or Relic from any deck or trash in play, then discards from the top of your deck and self-damages for [Spell number] infernal.
Master of Magic:
Completely reworked. Now allows you to discard a card from your hand after discarding from the top of your deck.
End phase effect added. If you have 3 or fewer cards in hand, draw until you have 4.
Tome of Elder Magic:
Limited keyword added.
Power slightly reworked. Now self-damages for 1 infernal, but may play a Spell instead of collecting.
Grants an extra draw during draw phase.
Amulet of the Elder Gods:
Damage redirection slightly reworked. Now works multiple times a turn, but only on infernal damage. Cost is now burying 1 card from your hand, instead of discarding 2.
Increases [Spell number] by 1.
Added:
Essence Transfer:
One-Shot, Spell. Discards the top card of your deck, then attacks ([Spell number] irreducible infernal to 1 target) and heals a different target for [Spell number].
Phial of Exomna:
Item, Relic, Limited. Plays the top card of your deck when destroyed. Grants a power that lets you draw [Spell number] cards and/or self-heal for [Spell number], destroying itself if you do both.
Starshield Invocation:
Ongoing, Spell. Reduces damage dealt to allies by [Spell number]. Forces self-damage for [Spell number] infernal and destroys itself at start phase.
Coalescing Spirit:
One-Shot, Spell. Summons 1 Ongoing from any deck or trash, then discards from the top of your deck and self-damages for [Spell number] infernal.
Planar Banishment:
One-Shot, Spell. Discards the top card of your deck, then either destroys 1 target with [Spell number] or fewer HP, or buries [Spell number] cards from 1 trash.
And now for the hero that occurred the latest in the earlier edition's timeline of development. The Harpy came out with the OblivAeon set alongside multiple other reformed-and-playable villains of assorted caliber, but apparently her story was primarily a heroic one, and her villainous stint as the Matriarch was a short one (as evidenced by her Critical Event not even being the actual Lillian Corvus). So for Definitive Edition, they both put the Matriarch right in the core set, and introduced the Harpy in Rook City Renegades to get the reputation cemented properly from the outset. Her powerful magic is hard to control, netting her a comfy 9 out of 10 complexity, right between Absolute Zero and the Argent Adept. Oh, and they completely reworked one of the latest heroes in the earlier edition's development because guess what: like Setback, she used to use tokens and doesn't anymore.
Her old tokens did actually come printed with OblivAeon: five double-sized tokens, each with an Arcane and an Avian side, representing her struggle between control and power with her magic. In Definitive Edition, that now gets represented by a set of Flock cards she can easily set on the field, which have fun end-of-turn effects, and a steep maintain cost at start phase. Too many birds, and you'll lose your hand, your health, and your Flocks all in one go. What's worse, the Harpy is the first hero to make use of the new Suddenly! mechanic. If you ever have a Suddenly! card in your hand (and it's not the start of the game, where you'd mulligan that card until you don't anymore), that card goes right the hell into play immediately. Ordinarily, the only card that has this effect is Losing Focus, which makes sense. Put on her signature Mask of Sky and Shroud, though, and every Flock also becomes a Suddenly! card as well. How much do you want all of that power?
Checklist:
Reliable Damage: Yes, but not for very much unless you're using one of the higher-damage variants. While the Harpy can fling a lot of attacks in a turn, the heavy reliance on Flocks to do it comes with some steep costs.
Ongoing Destruction: Yes. Do you deck control maniacs miss being able to do that straight up as a power use with the Visionary? Well, good news, the Harpy can now do that with Magical Bequest! She's weirdly better at destroying Hero Ongoings, but hey, she has Flocks, it's fine.
Emergency Defenses: No. You want defenses? Damage blocking? Redirection? We got... birds. They don't do any of that.
Deck Control: No. The Harpy's magic is all about raw power, not fine control.
Ally Acceleration: Yes, but not for very much. Mischief of Magpies can give some heroes extra card draw, and that's nice, it's just. Not exactly a lot to work with.
Healing: Yes. As with her damage, the Harpy only does small bits of healing, either with Huginn the Wise or the Flock's Care, but since she's going to be playing and destroying Flocks all over the place, you'll have a ton of those little instances to work with.
Big-Ass Attack Option: Yes. Just like her villainous iteration, the Harpy's specialty is the death of a thousand cuts, combining the constant damage spam of her countless Flocks with her own damage barrages. Expect something like Unity here, where it's less about having one big hit and more about setting up a good five or so attacks in a turn, every turn, when played right.
Main Strength:
The Harpy is built to set up a bunch of attacks that all fire off at once on each of her turns, relying on her Flocks and her Ongoings that support them to pepper down enemies (which means damage boost her if you can). She's also extremely fast at getting her deck up and running, even by the standards of Definitive Edition: whether it's her engine of Ongoings or her Flocks, she definitely doesn't lack for speedy setup. She's also the first hero in Definitive Edition to just have ongoing destruction as a power use with no strings attached (Argent Adept fans will recall that Sarabande of Destruction requires you to activate its Perform text, which some variants may not be able to safely do). She's also good at destroying hero Ongoings, which can be pretty valuable when you consider some heroes that may not want their Ongoings lingering around and causing trouble, like Setback (or herself if you want).
Main Weakness:
Maintaining a full-strength Harpy is hard, not just because each of her Flocks has a heavy discard cost to fuel, but because you have to destroy those Flocks regularly to activate the effects of Harpy Hex and the Flock's Care, which is something you'll want to do. Your Cohorts are strong pieces of kit, but they're also 8 health targets attached to a deck that isn't strong at defense. And finally, there's the entire aspect of her powers being uncontrollable. Not only are the Suddenly! cards going to throw off your game if you aren't ready for them (but they are very fun when you are), a lot of her attacks are either wide-ranging area attacks, or ask for you to hit a lot of targets at once, usually for a small amount of damage. This can prove catastrophic in fights where you don't want to attack everything, and unlike Tempest, you don't always have the option to just not spam.
Variant Strategies:
First Appearance: The Harpy
Do you miss being able to deal 2 damage with your base power? Weird, but okay. Have Flailing Chaos, which also forces a topdeck just for the hell of it. That's not as damaging as a Setback topdeck can be in either regard, but it can throw off your fine control of things if it happens to include a Flock (or several) coming out that you weren't ready for. Still, having an actually-reliable "hit the guy" move is nice to have, because the Harpy normally has to use one-shots, Muninn the Scarred, or an ephemeral and hard-to-maintain Flock card for that sort of thing, usually. So I guess my advice here is to play First Appearance if you want an unreliable reliable attack, if that makes sense.
Dark Watch: The Harpy
Do you prefer just going full birdmage at all times? Here, Dark Watch variant! Nevermore basically says you get both Cohorts at all times, even if one gets defeated, and that's a really strong benefit to have. Not only are the Cohorts great to have out in general, they're also very rare and pretty much have to be summoned with Avian Aid in regular play. Which, hey, now that Avian Aid doesn't need to summon Cohorts, why not really put the Mask of Sky and Shroud to use? May as well, you're getting loads of card draw one way or another, and Muninn the Scarred can prevent your Flocks from getting too out of hand anyway.
The Harpy: Blood Raven
OW THE EDGE. In exchange for much lower max HP, you get a VERY strong basic attack in the form of Life Witch, allowing you to hit hard right out of the game, leech life, and destroy Hero Ongoings. And remember: you're the Harpy and you showed up in the same set as Setback. That last part is half a feature for you anyway! Plus, it lets you proc the good parts of Harpy Hex and the Flock's Care a little more easily (although the Flock's Care is obviously much better at it). As long as you can survive the lower max HP, this may just be one of the strongest variants the Harpy has access to.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Arcana/Avian tokens, Huginn & Muninn, Ancient Tome, Applied Numerology, Conjured Aura, Directed Strike, Mystical Outburst, Swift Summoning, Tenuous Focus
Renamed:
Base power (Arcane Blast) -> Seeking Order
Dark Watch variant power (Refocus) -> Nevermore
Calling the Flock -> Avian Aid
Changes:
Max HP increased to 29.
Base power (Seeking Order):
Damage reduced to 1.
Now grants either a draw 2 or destroying 1 Flock after attacking.
Dark Watch variant power (Nevermore):
Completely reworked. Now discards 1, summons 1 Cohort, then may discover 1 Flock.
Incapacitated effects:
Melee attack replaced with bonus power phase.
Item play replaced with burying 1 Environment card.
Dark Watch variant incapacitated effects:
Bonus draw phase replaced with bonus power phase.
Bonus play phase replaced with healing up to 3 hero targets for 1.
Trash recovery replaced with switching the bottom and top cards of any 1 deck.
Avian Aid:
Now discovers 1 Flock before summoning.
Summon now works on either 1 Cohort or the Mask of Sky and Shroud.
Attack and heal removed.
Lash of the Elements:
Targets reduced to 1.
Damage instances are now irreducible.
Self-damage replaced with, if there are no Flock cards in play, may either draw 1 or play 1 Ongoing.
Arcane Explosion:
Completely reworked. Now grants an attack (3 infernal to up to 5 targets), then if there are no Flock cards in play, may either draw 1 or play 1 Ongoing.
Eldritch Training:
Completely reworked. Now an Ongoing, Limited that lets you either draw or play 1 when played, and an end phase effect that either draws 2 or destroys 1 Flock.
Uncontrollable Flock:
Completely reworked. Now a One-Shot that shuffles your trash into your deck, discovers 1 Flock, may discover 1 Flock, discovering 1 Flock if you do, then attacks (1 irreducible projectile to [number of Flocks] targets).
Magical Bequest:
Limited keyword added.
On-play effect removed.
Power now destroys 1 Flock before all other text.
Power can no longer draw, but may collect or destroy 1 Ongoing instead of playing.
End phase effect added. Destroys all Flocks, destroying itself if you do.
The Flock's Care:
Completely reworked. Grants a heal to 1 hero target for 1 after a Flock is destroyed. Grants a power that destroys up to 3 Flocks, then discovers 1 Flock.
Harpy Hex:
Damage on play removed.
Damage increased to 2.
Damage trigger changed to after a Flock is destroyed.
End phase effect added. Now may discover 1 Flock.
Added:
Losing Focus:
Suddenly!, One-Shot. Shuffles your trash into your deck, self-damages for 1 fixed psychic, then discovers 1 Flock.
The Mask of Sky and Shroud:
Item, Relic, Limited. Flock cards gain the Suddenly! keyword. Grants a power that draws up to 5 cards.
Reservoirs of Power:
Ongoing, Limited. Grants a power that grants an attack (1 infernal to up to 3 targets), and a card play if the attack damaged at least 1 Hero target. Grants an extra draw during draw phase.
Mischief of Magpies:
Ongoing, Flock. At start phase, discards 2, then if there are no cards in hand, forces self-damage for 2 fixed psychic and destroys itself. Grants up to 2 Heroes a card draw at end phase.
Chatter of Starlings:
Ongoing, Flock. At start phase, discards 2, then if there are no cards in hand, forces self-damage for 2 fixed psychic and destroys itself. Grants attack (1 sonic to each non-Hero target) at end phase.
Boil of Hawks:
Ongoing, Flock. At start phase, discards 2, then if there are no cards in hand, forces self-damage for 2 fixed psychic and destroys itself. Grants attack (2 projectile to up to 3 targets) at end phase.
Siege of Herons:
Ongoing, Flock. At start phase, discards 2, then if there are no cards in hand, forces self-damage for 2 fixed psychic and destroys itself. Grants attack (3 projectile to 1 target) at end phase.
Huginn the Wise:
Cohort, 8 HP. Heals a Hero target for 2 at start phase. Either draws 2 or plays 1 at end phase.
Muninn the Scarred:
Cohort, 8 HP. May destroy 1 Hero Ongoing at start phase. Attacks (3 projectile to up to 2 targets) at end phase.
Something that may chafe a bit at collectors of the previous edition is the fact that Definitive Edition isn't just redoing the mechanics of all the old decks, it's adding entirely new heroes to the game as well. In Rook City Renegades, this comes in the form of the "plus one" for Dark Watch as a team. The roster of the core set was comprised of two major hero teams (The Freedom Five and the Prime Wardens), each of which had an auxiliary sixth character associated with them (Unity is the sidekick/intern for the Freedom Five, and Ra could be thought of as the Green Ranger for the Prime Wardens if you want). For Dark Watch, that sixth hero ended up being Alpha, who is a werewolf. She's also the hero who most leans into the "secret identity" aspect that has been mostly absent from Sentinel Comics: her day job is as an ace reporter for the Rook City Record exposing the seedy underbelly of the city, so learning that she takes to the streets as a feral crimefighter under the full moon would be a strong bit of intel.
As you might expect from a werewolf character, Alpha's a hardy brawler that can take hits and deal them out equally well, with mechanics that involve a fair amount of fighting for self-control. She has six unique Aspect cards through her deck, indicating various traits she would gain from her wolf form: extra strength, claws and fangs, sharper senses, et cetera. However, the more that are out, the more violent she becomes, and not necessarily for the better: every Aspect card comes with an attack at end phase to the lowest health target if you have three or more out, and you do not get a choice for whether you activate it nor whether you aim it. In some instances, that can be nice (villains with a lot of small-fry minions), but it's less fun when it turns you on vulnerable environment, or worse, hero targets.
Checklist:
Reliable Damage: Yes. Alpha's got a solid set of offensive powers to work with, and no shortage of passive attacks off of Aspects or one-shots that can hit a little harder. Nothing better than Rip And Tear for her on that front though.
Ongoing Destruction: Yes, but Bloodcurdling Howl is slow to activate since it only works at start phase. It's also an Aspect and tied to an attack, both of which come with their own hangups.
Emergency Defenses: Yes, but Hamstring can only aim at the villain with the highest HP. That's still NICE, it's basically the Wraith's old Throat Jab but mandating a target, and it does extra damage. It just might not help against swarms.
Deck Control: Yes. If you can maintain it, Lupine Senses as an Aspect lets you check the top card of the villain deck each turn, and chuck it if you don't care for it. That's about as strong as deck control gets in Definitive Edition.
Ally Acceleration: Yes, but only on your one-shots that return Aspects to your hand, and even then only when you didn't have many Aspects in play to begin with. Just... let someone else do it, probably.
Healing: Yes, but only self-healing. Very strong self-healing, mind you, since Thrill of the Hunt and Rip And Tear can combine on their own to give you a heal for at most 4 on power phase in addition to the damage you'd do. Definitely the best healtank in the set.
Big-Ass Attack Option: Yes. One-shots like Lycanthropic Frenzy and Attack of the Direwolf let you hit even harder than usual, and they get stapled onto your power uses and passive attacks from your Aspects (all of which get boosted by Eyes For The Hunt). Will a lot of these attacks be aimed at squishy targets that another hero could clean out with an area attack? Listen... yes. But that's fine.
Main Strength:
Alpha is unquestionably the bulkiest hero in Rook City Renegades, and a highly capable fighter that can do some serious damage. She's also surprisingly versatile in what she can do as a brawler, with her Aspects giving her multiple ways to adjust to the situation with defenses, control, or power as needed. She especially thrives in situations where the villain will field lots of low-health targets that need to be taken out, but which are just hardy enough that the heroes would ordinarily need to devote time to fighting. Since she gets extra attacks (albeit hard-to-control ones) with enough Aspects out, you don't need to worry about finishing off minions until Alpha's turn has concluded and you can see what else is left.
Main Weakness:
The more caution you need to take in a fight, the harder Alpha gets to recommend to a team. If you're sticking to only 2 Aspects at a time, you're functioning at a lower capacity (although to be fair, you don't need the full set to be useful). If you're just going full hog with Aspects, you'll need to be sure you have targets that you're okay with tearing into, because sometimes the environment or heroes will be the focus of your frenzy. And if you're using Silver Bindings to prevent you from hurting others, not only do you need to keep self-healing to maintain them, you also run the risk of hitting The Full Moon as a Suddenly! effect, and when that happens, whoops, time to murder whether you like it or not!
Notable Cards
Silver Bindings: The only item Alpha uses is one that lets her maintain more Aspects at once without activating her extra attacks at end phase. Which is really dang nice if you're bringing her to a fight where the lowest health targets will be heroes! It does come with an upkeep cost at end phase of 2 self-damage, but frankly, you'd be doing more to other heroes without them, and Alpha can heal that damage up just fine. It also gives you extra card draw and you can destroy them if you want another Aspect, so what's the problem?
Full Moon: Oh. That. This Suddenly! card not only gets another Aspect into play, it specifically destroys the Silver Bindings. This means that you can never fully rely on the Silver Bindings to protect your team, because unless you mill out both copies of Full Moon WITHOUT them entering your hand, suddenly that forced card draw from Silver Bindings isn't a straight boon, it's a timer, and an unforgiving one at that.
Insatiable Hunger: All of Alpha's Aspects are good, some situationally, some always, but Insatiable Hunger is the one you should aim for if you're hoping to get set up quickly. Aspects come and go fairly often, but Alpha's non-Aspect Ongoings are just as important since they form the core of her offensive and self-heal engine. You also have only a single copy of each Aspect and more copies of the others, so despite the double-edged sword of Insatiable Hunger, you'll get those pieces of kit out pretty quickly either way.
Variant Strategies:
First Appearance:
Alpha's base Prowl power is a nice way to just play the character extremely straightforward: get Aspects, attack dudes. Hidden Nature lets you instead focus more on defense with your self-healing, and in exchange for the weaker effect of that, you get the ability to accelerate through your deck a little faster, either by drawing it all up or topdecking Aspects out. Really not a whole lot else to say here: use this variant if you want to healtank instead of just bopping.
Reporter Alpha
Tabitha Taft On The Scene! Oh that's cute, letting us play as Alpha's secret identity. Surely she has a nice normal power to work wi-- oh. That may be the first instance I have seen of letting you reveal two cards from the top of a deck and putting them back in any order I have seen in Definitive Edition yet. Okay! Sure! Reporter Alpha is the strongest deck control character they have yet released! Let's just get this straightened out right now. Parse's Extrasensory Awareness was the most overwhelmingly powerful deck-control ability in the game, and it was an Ongoing power that revealed three cards. Tabitha Taft On The Scene is a base power that not only draws two, but buries an Aspect you have to reveal the top two cards of any deck, putting them back however you like. This is a base power on a variant with 31 HP. What in the hell.
Alpha 2000
Meanwhile, in the edgy turn of the millenium, we have the swiftly-canceled cyborg variant of Alpha. Wolf-Tek Barrage is kind of underwhelming as a power since it's only 1 damage, but it's nice as a way to spread the love since it gives you a follow-up attack that targets as many people as you have Aspects out. Note that the first target can be hit again by the second attack, so if you want to double down on a single foe and don't have Rip And Tear out yet, you can just do that and it's fine and nobody can stop you. This is also all energy damage, which is nice considering almost everything else Alpha wields is melee.
That covers it for heroes. Next up is villains, and as is the standard for Sentinels of the Multiverse, the expansion introduces a fair few more villain decks than it does hero decks (with a few entirely-new villains like Alpha). First up is Kismet, returning as a relatively low-threat (4 out of 10 difficulty) nemesis for Setback that now weaves his new Unlucky mechanic into her own deck. Only makes sense since she gave him his powers. Basically, she's a luck siphoner: all the bad fortune she would take goes to you, and all the good fortune you would have goes to her. In practice, she plays this out by slinging a bunch of debuffs at you and occasionally busting out some high-powered Lucky cards of her own, but she's not a huge problem to just fight directly.
Danger Levels:
Minions: Low. The only target in her deck is the Adhin Talisman she starts in play with, and as a pure support that has 7 health, it's trivial to deal with. Besides that, she can deflect attacks to the environment with Inconceivable Obstruction and... that's it.
Direct Offense: Moderate. Kismet's offense is... fine, for a single target threat. When she flips to Deranged Miscreant, she gets some spike damage attacks out if she's had time to throw Unlucky cards your way (she probably has), and she has some damage boosts and can force self-damage, but like... you've seen worse.
Disruption: Low. Not to say she can't disrupt at all, Karmic Disjunction and Shaky Aim are annoying to deal with, and Lady Luck can bleed out your hands if it's left out. But the disruption isn't anywhere close to what some villains can pull without trying.
Defenses: Moderate. The Adhin Talisman basically needs to be dealt with before you can damage Kismet, given how sharply it reduces her damage, and she has a few ways to extend her longevity with Lucky cards. Her max health is nothing to write home about though, and being a single target means focused attacks are extremely strong.
Ongoings: High. You will not have enough Ongoing destruction in this fight. Her deck is almost nothing BUT Ongoings, even some of her Lucky cards are Ongoings. The fact that she has destruction built in doesn't mean you shouldn't destroy them yourselves, even if Kismet forces self-damage on the Charmed Scoundrel side for doing so.
Surprises: High. Kismet thrives on pulling out those Lucky cards at just the wrong times to cause even more problems, with Like A Charm being the scariest one to deal with since it revives The Adhin Talisman and chains right into another Lucky card. And sometimes she can just accelerate to one anyway because screw you.
Charmed Scoundrel: Nemesis: Setback
Kismet's entire playstyle is to bog you down with about fifty-billion Unlucky cards. If there aren't enough for you to count as "bogged down", she gets you some more, otherwise she flips to start capitalizing on that. Beyond that, she's pretty basic as a villain: she attacks at the end of the turn, and forces self-damage for destroying Unlucky cards. Unless the top card of her deck is Lucky, then whoops, she gets an effective second turn and you all just have to deal with it! Since Kismet always starts her turn with discovering Unlucky cards on this side (thus filtering them out as she goes), deck control is basically impossible unless the control is "do not play cards". Oh, and just for that extra bit of fun, Kismet starts out with her main self-buff bit of kit, the Adhin Talisman. It's only a 7 HP target, so like. It's not HARD to get rid of it. But it is there.
Advanced: Kismet gets extra attacks after she plays Lucky cards. Which is... mostly fine? Kismet's offense is decent and this makes it a little better, but she doesn't accelerate through Lucky cards especially quickly unless her deck is stacked juuuuust right.
Deranged Miscreant:
Once enough Unlucky cards have been laid out, Kismet can really unleash the full force of her powers, getting more attacks with Unlucky cards played (and she can play a lot) and saucing up her end phase attack to scale up with the Unlucky cards are out. The good news is that after hitting someone with her end phase attack (for Unlucky +2), she then clears all the Unlucky cards there. The upshot of that is that if you aren't concerned about the passive effects of the Unlucky cards in play, you can just leave them alone until she uses them for her scalar attack, and save your ongoing destruction for her more powerful Lucky cards. That's nice! Note that she flips immediately when the last Unlucky card has cleared out, AND she discovers Unlucky cards immediately after, which means her end-of-turn attack on the last person with Unlucky cards can chain into her Charmed Scoundrel end phase!
Advanced: Discovering Lucky cards is terrifying. Those cards are definitely the strongest ones available to Kismet, and can set up some chains of card plays that can put a confidently-built team on the backfoot in an instant. With this in play, I recommend being even more aggressive on destroying Ongoing cards, including Unlucky ones, just to ensure you spend as little time on this side as possible.
Ideal Strategies:
Ongoing destruction is the most important tool you have in a fight against Kismet. Not just because she has fifty billion Unlucky cards that can debuff you, but because she also has some very strong Lucky cards that make her a lot scarier and a lot harder to take down safely. Beyond that... really, Kismet is fundamentally just a standard single-target villain that you fight head-on. As long as you can keep a handle on the infinite ongoing cards thrown your way, you can handle her. Special notice should be given to Setback: you might recall from his deck that his Lucky cards do not have any restriction on whose Unlucky cards he destroys. This gives him a unique edge in this fight beyond his usual nemesis damage boosts with Kismet: all those debuffs she throws just make him STRONGER.
Things to Avoid:
Oh, yeah, the downside to Setback being able to destroy Unlucky cards is that he also plays a bunch of them, which both gets you to Deranged Miscreant faster and makes that side a lot scarier. Just gonna throw that out there. That aside, really the only mistake you can make in a Kismet fight is... not bringing ongoing destruction? Like, if it's just a straight up slugfest with her, you win, but her entire gameplan is about making it as unfair a fight as she possibly can. Aside from that... I dunno, don't go to target-rich environments. Inconceivable Obstruction gets absurdly powerful if it successfully works on every damage instance she takes that matters.
Event Strategies:
Run of Luck
Collection Limit: 1
Collection Effects: Right Time And Place OR Obsessive Planning
Fortune's Blessing
Oh no, she's doing a bank heist with Highbrow and the Hippo! Which means she's also going to make runs at your decks: if she plays a Lucky card, you'll have to mill 1 from a Hero deck. And if any of its keywords match ANY of the keywords on the card she played (i.e. Lucky, One-Shot, or Ongoing), she plays another card. This obviously makes Lucky cards a little scarier, but by no means an insurmountable threat. For best results, I recommend discarding cards from either heroes that focus mostly on Items or their own unique card types (Unity being one of the best choices), or hedging your bets by choosing based on the heroes you have out which one is least likely to pull a match. That said, this method of acceleration, while scary in theory, isn't likely to see action too often.
Waves of Fortune
Collection Limit: 2
Critical Event: Empowered Kismet
Brimming With Atlantean Power
Weirdly, none of the Critical Events in Rook City Renegades repeat the matching villains' known variants. Instead of the expected Trickster Kismet, we now have a variant that has hijacked the power of the Ruins of Atlantis to become an environment-centric threat. For starters: any time an Environment target would damage her, she just no-sells it and produced an Unlucky card. She also plays an Environment card at the start of her turn, getting a free trash shuffle and Unlucky discover if it's a target, or a spike hit for H if it isn't. However, she also doesn't have the Adhin Talisman, which means she has a little less control, and destroys an Unlucky card in each Hero play area whenever she plays a Lucky card. That's not necessarily a good thing, though: her end phase attack forces self-damage to any hero targets in play areas WITHOUT Unlucky cards.
Doing well in this fight is all about managing environment targets. Most of them you'll just want to fight, either directly or with environment destruction effects if you have them. Some environment targets are beneficial, but if they have benefits just from doing damage to villains, they're not worth keeping around. Otherwise, use your best judgment. If you don't have any environment targets for whatever reason, instead just focus on the conventional Kismet gameplan: ongoing destruction and a conventional fight. Note that Empowered Kismet has more HP than usual, just enough to make her able to take a little more of a beating than usual.
Advanced: More acceleration! Those of you hoping to cheese out Empowered Kismet by playing in target-free environments are probably too cowardly to play on Advanced anyway, but if not, this variant should give you a lot more trouble. Remember, one-shots count for this extra villain card play, too!
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Hapless Strike, Imminent Destruction, Violent Trickster
Renamed:
Jinx keyword -> Unlucky keyword
The Talisman -> The Adhin Talisman
Changes:
Charmed Scoundrel:
Max HP increased to 77.
Start phase effect changed. Now flips if there are H or more Unlucky cards in play, and discovers H-2 Unlucky cards otherwise.
Unlucky destruction effect on Hero damage removed.
End phase effect changed. Now buries the card if it is not Lucky. Gains an attack (2 energy to each target in the play area with the most Unlucky cards) after revealing.
Advanced text reworked. Now grants an attack (2 energy to the Hero target with highest HP) after playing a Lucky card.
Deranged Miscreant:
Max HP increased to 77.
Flip condition changed to if there are no Unlucky cards in play. No longer limited to start phase, and discovers H-2 Unlucky cards before flipping.
Gains an attack (2 psychic to the Hero target with highest HP) after an Unlucky card is played.
End phase attack reworked. Now attacks ([number of Unlucky cards in play area +2] irreducible psychic to each target in play area with the most Unlucky cards) and then destroys all Unlucky cards in that play area.
The Adhin Talisman:
Now a single-sided card.
Indestructible keyword replaced with Relic. Enchanted Heirloom keyword removed.
Damage boost reduced to 1.
Now reduces damage dealt to Kismet by [number of Unlucky cards in play].
Fortune's Smile:
Healing increased to H+3.
Damage increased to 3.
Lady Luck:
Completely reworked. Now heals Kismet for 2 after a Lucky card is played, and forces a Hero to discard 1 after an Unlucky card is played.
Inconceivable Obstruction:
Damage redirection and environment reveal only apply to instances of 3 or more damage, but can apply multiple times a turn.
Glass Jaw:
Now goes to the Hero character with the highest HP.
Now applies damage boost to all targets in its play area.
Shaky Arm:
Now applies damage penalty to all targets in its play area.
Scattered Mind:
Slightly reworked. Now forces self-damage for 1 fixed psychic to each target in its play area after the hero draws a card.
Two Left Feet:
Now goes to the Hero with the most cards in their trash.
Damage type changed to fixed psychic and applies to all targets in the play area.
Weak Heart:
Now goes to the Hero with the fewest cards in hand.
Completely reworked. Now prevents targets in its play area from regaining HP.
Unlucky Break:
Unlucky keyword replaced with Lucky.
Completely reworked. Now discovers H-1 Unlucky cards, forces each Hero target in a play area with an Unlucky cards to self-damage for 2 fixed psychich, then destroys 1 Environment card.
Karmic Disjunction:
Completely reworked. Now an Ongoing, Unlucky that goes to the play area of the Hero character with the lowest HP, and destroys 1 Hero Ongoing or Item there at end phase.
Added:
Shared Fate:
Ongoing, Lucky. After Kismet is dealt damage by a non-Villain target, grants an attack ([amount of damage dealt to Kismet] fixed psychic to the Hero target with highest HP). At start phase, allows the Hero target with highest HP to self-damage for 3 fixed psychic, destroying this card if they do.
Hot Streak:
One-Shot, Lucky. Grants Kismet an attack (2 fire to each non-Villain target), then discovers 1 Unlucky card.
Like a Charm:
One-Shot, Lucky. Summons the Adhin Talisman, then discovers 1 Lucky card.
Next up is a former promo villain with a reputation for being the kind of fight you go to when you just want an extremely generic villain threat to deal with. Ambuscade's seen a little bit of a boost to their stats and a rework of their infamously jank mechanics (trap cards and the Personal Cloaking Device are both out). As an action movie star turned superhero hunter, his fighting style is flashy and direct, definitely potent, but a little susceptible to showing off. For the most part, he remains a very "standard" villain that you can approach with whoever you like without worrying too much about what he can do, but the unique stuff he can do is still pretty memorable.
Danger Levels:
Minions: Moderate. Ambuscade relies on Devices to supplement his own offensives. He's also pretty good at outputting them quickly. The issue is that he doesn't really have that many in his deck, and once they're all discovered, he's at a pretty big disadvantage.
Direct Offense: Moderate. Ambuscade's specialty is obviously in fighting you directly, since he's the star of the show. He's also not above aiming for weakened targets if he finds an opening, but his raw damage trends pretty low, so as long as you protect your fragile heroes, you should be okay.
Disruption: Low. Ambuscade has only a few cards that can throw off your gameplan. Hunter Drones can lower your damage, and Primed Tranq Dart or Rigged to Detonate can break heroes' stuff. Still, neither of those is major enough to really slow you down.
Defenses: High. Ambuscade has relatively low HP for a villain, but he's got Reactive Plating, plenty of self-heal, and oh yeah, that thing where he can turn invisible roughly whenever he wants. You'll need to hit him hard to make a dent in his health, especially early on.
Ongoings: Moderate. Ambuscade's Ongoings are mostly time-delayed One-Shots in all but functionality. They do a thing at End Phase (i.e. when played), and then self-destruct and do another thing at start phase, and they flip him when destroyed. So while they're not vital to wreck, having some way of destroying Ongoings is a nice lever to work with.
Surprises: Moderate. The main trick Ambuscade has with unpredictability is on his One-Shots having varying degrees of power depending on when they're played. Most of them you want to bait out on hero turns yourself, but Steal the Spotlight makes this a little less of a free choice to make.
Hunter of the Mighty: Nemesis: Haka
Ambuscade's sides aren't especially out of the ordinary on their own. He gets two identical attacks on this side, one at start phase and one at end phase. That's all well and good, but after a Villain One-Shot is played, any one-shot at all? He flips as soon as it's done resolving. And he's got a lot of one-shots in his deck, so him flipping is pretty likely to happen. His Ongoings also all last only a single turn before destroying themselves, but flip him when destroyed as well. Beyond that and starting the game with a few extra Devices, though, this is as standard as a Villain character card really gets.
Advanced: Oh, that's rude. Double speed card play is always scary no matter which villain you're up against, and in Ambuscade's case, that means twice as many chances on his turn to flip back to his Invisible Stalker side.
Invisible Stalker:
This side is where the fun begins. As long as he's on this side, Ambuscade is invincible. No damage taken. He only has the one attack, but it gets stronger and focuses on the lowest health Hero (and chains into a Device discover if there's not that many out). However, he retains his flip condition(s) with two extra allowances. The first is that he can now flip off of discarding a one-shot, not just playing it (which is nice for deck control characters but hardly required). The second is that any Hero can, on their start phase, discard a card to check the top card of his deck. If it's a One-Shot, Ambuscade immediately plays it, which means he flips back. Most of Ambuscade's one-shots are designed to be less harmful on hero turns as well, so basically you have to try to bait him out so you can attack him head-on! It's such an elegant way of doing what neither the old Personal Cloaking Device nor the old Trap cards succeeded at, and I love it.
Advanced: Fortunately, this side just increases Villain Device damage, which isn't too scary since only two of the three types attacks anyway, and one of those is purely reactive. Not to completely no-sell it, but I feel like this one is built to be less overbearing than the speedy play of the other side.
Ideal Strategies:
There's a lot of ways to approach Ambuscade as a threat, but the two biggest things to keep on hand are expedited card draw (to make chances to flip him less punishing) and a good way to protect your teammates, since he's willing and able to go for cheap shots on weak targets. Annoyingly, this is a fight where turn order can matter a bit more than it usually does. You'll want your more durable tanky characters first up in line if you're interested in optimizing for that, so as to afford more options for damage dealers later down the pike to come in swinging. If a character reveals Ambuscade on their turn, he'll usually attack them immediately for it, so having that fine control on when he swings is nice.
Things to Avoid:
This also means characters that leave themselves open to punishment with big glass-cannon playstyles are a lot less likely to want to reveal Ambuscade if he's still cloaked by their turn, and if he IS cloaked, you pretty much have to content yourself with fighting his Devices or any errant Environment targets. You also have to be a little cautious about destroying his Ongoing cards. Not that it's a bad idea, it does keep him from busting out some of the stronger start phase effects that way, but it also forces another flip, which can turn him back to his Invisible Stalker side. So if you want to destroy his Ongoings, either do enough at once that you end up with him vulnerable, or just make sure you're fine with not attacking him after.
Event Strategies:
To Hunt a Hero
Collection Limit: 1
Collection Effects: Holographic Lure OR Time to Shine
Only Takes One
It's a much more common occurrence to see a hero or two get incapacitated during a game session than some would care for, but rarely is it such a threat to doom everyone to a loss. Not with this event! Not only does Ambuscade get a free attack to the lowest health hero character on a flip to Hunter of the Mighty, he wins as soon as ANY hero gets incapacitated. This turns defensive measures and healing from simply "nice to have" to a bona-fide requirement for clearing this event. If your lowest health Hero isn't ready to take the heat, do everything in your power to get them back in fighting shape before worrying about Ambuscade.
"La Gloire!"
Collection Limit: 2
Critical Event: Vainglorious Ambuscade
Glory in Battle Nemesis: Prime Wardens (Argent Adept, Fanatic, Captain Cosmic, Tempest, Haka)
This time around, Ambuscade is going low-tech in a flashy head-on assault! No more cloaking and he blows up his Devices for direct attacks at start phase, but every time he deals damage to hero characters, he advances his win condition of "La Gloire". Every such damage instance adds a token to his charactar card, getting him an instant win if he hits 30. I'm not sure how that causes a game over, but here we are. Anyway, he's got less HP and doesn't cloak, but any time he WOULD cloak, he instead heals and gets a free attack on the lowest health hero target. His end phase attack is now a multi-target attack as well.
This fight is deceptively hard, because while he's lower health and doesn't turn invincible, he's got strong self-heal from his Ongoings and his One-Shots will default to their stronger effects on the whole. You can avoid him hitting Hero characters to advance his win condition with auxiliary targets, but more important is just getting enough firepower to punch past the self-heal he does have. Do not let up on him for even a second, because the longer this fight goes on, the lower your chances of victory, and Ambuscade's already-decent offense sees a pretty sizable bump that can make turtling ill-advised.
Advanced: Getting an extra end phase attack to more hero targets AND forcing a hero to discard 2? No, that's mean! That's just two advanced effects stapled together! Not only should you prepare adequately for the added offense speeding up the fight even more, you should be ready to keep up with the discard by playing heroes with strong card draw. At least you get to choose which hero discards, but ugh.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Trap keyword, Armed and Dangerous, Automated Turret, Charged Attacks, Custom Hand-Cannon, Explosive Launcher, Personal Cloaking Device, Sonic Mine
Renamed:
Superhuman Hunter -> Hunter of the Mighty
Quick Stim-Patch -> Auto Stims
Changes:
Hunter of the Mighty:
Max HP increased to 70.
Setup Devices discovered reduced to H-2.
Start phase attack added. Now attacks (H-2 projectile to the hero target with highest HP).
End phase damage reduced to H-2.
Now flips after a Villain One-Shot is played.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now plays the top card of the Villain deck at end phase.
Invisible Stalker:
Max HP increased to 70.
Flip condition changed to after a Villain One-Shot is played or discarded.
Allows heroes to, at their start phases, discard 1 to reveal the top card of the Villain deck, playing it if it's a One-Shot and burying it otherwise.
End phase damage increased to H. Damage type changed to melee.
End phase slightly changed. Now, if there are fewer that H Villain Devices in play, discovers 1 Device after attacking.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now increases damage dealt by Villain Devices by 1.
Auto Stims:
Keyword changed to Device. Effect moved to end phase.
Now a 4 HP target.
No longer shuffles villain trash into their deck.
Card play reworked. Now reveals the top card of the villain deck, playing it if it's a One-Shot and discarding it otherwise.
Reactive Plating:
Max HP reduced to 6.
Damage increased to H-1.
Now counter attacks to itself as well as Ambuscade.
Rigged to Detonate:
Completely reworked. Now a One-Shot that changes effect depending on what turn it was played on.
On Hero turns, grants Ambuscade an attack (H-2 fire to the hero character in question).
On any other turn, grants Ambuscade an attack (2 fire to each Hero target) and destroy 1 Item in each Hero play area.
Unavoidable Explosive:
Completely reworked. Now a One-Shot that changes effect depending on what turn it was played on.
On Hero turns, grants Ambuscade an attack (H-2 energy to the hero character in question).
On any other turn, grants Ambuscade an attack (3 energy to each Hero target).
Run and Gun:
One-Shot keyword replaced with Ongoing.
Damage increased to H-1 and moved to end phase.
Trash shuffle moved to start phase, and destroys itself afterwards.
Now flips Ambuscade when destroyed.
No longer grants an extra Villain card play.
Snatch and Grab:
Completely reworked. Now an Ongoing that flips Ambuscade when destroyed, forces the Hero with the most cards in hand to discard 2 and destroys itself at start phase, and grants Ambuscade an attack (H-1 melee to the hero target with second lowest HP) at end phase.
Added:
Hunter Drone:
Device, 5 HP. Damage dealt by this card is irreducible if Ambuscade is immune to damage. Attacks (H-1 energy to hero target with highest HP) at end phase, and reduces damage dealt by targets damaged this way by 1 until Villain start phase.
Spray and Pray:
Ongoing. Flips Ambuscade when destroyed. Heals Ambuscade for H and destroys itself at start phase. Grants Ambuscade an attack (2 projectile to each Hero target) at end phase.
Primed Tranq Dart:
One-Shot. If played on a Hero turn, grants Ambuscade an attack (H-2 toxic to the hero character in question). On any other turn, grants Ambuscade an attack (2 toxic to each Hero target) and destroys 1 Ongoing in each Hero play area.
Quelle Surprise!
One-Shot. If played on a Hero turn, grants Ambuscade an attack (H-1 projectile to the hero character in question). On any other turn, grants Ambuscade an attack (H+1 irreducible melee to the hero target with highest HP).
Steal the Spotlight:
One-Shot. If played on a Hero turn, heals Ambuscade for H, grants Ambuscade an attack (H projectile to the hero target with highest HP) and discovers 1 Device. Otherwise, grants Ambuscade an attack (2 projectile to the H-1 hero targets with highest HP).
About time we actually got to a Rook City villain proper! Clocking in at 6 out of 10 Difficulty, Plague Rat is an incredibly dangerous foe to face with their lethal combo of high personal damage and debilitating infections they deal out to their victims. They were infamous in the earlier edition for being a terrifyingly fast damage race that could burst down even the most durable of heroes, at the cost of having basically no gameplan outside of just hitting you really hard. This is the same idea here: although Plague Rat now has just a hint of disruption to work with, their main playstyle is still as simple as you'd expect from a six-foot-tall rat monster: run at whatever is a threat and attack it with fangs and claws, optionally until it stops being a threat.
Danger Levels:
Minions: Low. Plague Rat has exactly one target in their deck, and that's the Plague Locus that starts on the field and just makes the damage race go faster. Still destroy it and all, but again: literally the only target in its deck.
Direct Offense: High. Virtually every action Plague Rat takes is going to be damage in some form. Even the Ongoings he throws your way to infect your heroes are just extra vectors for more damage to apply. For extra fun, a lot of this damage is irreducible or fixed, so even the most dedicated tank can't handle it all.
Disruption: Low. There's definitely more than there used to be, i.e. literally any at all. That said, Fatal Disease lets you choose between damage or discarding, Sewer Snacks only breaks 1 Item, and Noxious Bite needs his own Ongoings out to destroy yours. You can handle that.
Defenses: Moderate. Plague Rat has a purely standard health total, infrequent-but-decent self-heal, and a constant immunity to toxic damage just for funsies. Not that, y'know, any heroes really specialize in toxic damage, but it's a thing to watch out for.
Ongoings: High. As isolated effects, the Ongoings Plague Rat throws at the heroes are pretty weak, mostly just inflicting some poison-induced friendly fire. The problem comes from the speed at which they come out, and the Patient Zero side punishing you HARD for disregarding them.
Surprises: Moderate. Again: you already know that no matter what Plague Rat is doing, they're attacking you. The threat mostly comes from timing, i.e. if a lot of Ongoings are out or they're on the Patient Zero side, making cards like Noxious Bite and Slavering Slasher a lot scarier.
Urban Legend: Nemesis: Chrono-Ranger
Plague Rat's initial side is as simple as their gameplan: they start with their nest, the Plague Locus, ready to go. Then they attack you at end phase for Damage and play a second card. They have a toxic immunity and flip before attacking if there's enough Ongoing cards in play, and between the Plague Locus and their entire deck basically slinging Ongoings as fast as possible, they will flip early and often. Keep Plague Rat's damage penalized with any means you have and wreck those Ongoings, to the best of your ability.
Advanced: Irreducible damage, in most villain fights, has probably been a fairly minor thing for most players up until this point. Advanced Plague Rat is here to devour that notion as messily as possible right in front of you. If you don't have either damage blocking outright or ridiculous amounts of healing, do not fight Advanced Plague Rat.
Patient Zero:
In the highly likely event that Plague Rat gets a lot of ongoings out, congrats! They have a constant +2 to all damage they do, plus their end phase attack is irreducible. Your one last saving grace before all that pain is aimed at you is their start phase effect, which lets Infected heroes self-damage for 4 toxic (i.e. probably at least as much as you're gonna take if you don't flip them back right now) to kill one villain Ongoing each. Doing this will shuffle the villain trash into the deck and flip back to their slightly-less-lethal side that only plays two cards a turn and attacks highest HP.
Advanced: Even more attacks! If a Villain Ongoing got destroyed, Plague Rat makes a free hit for 1 3 toxic to the highest health hero. Which means... more of the same, really. It's not irreducible like most of the instance he's throwing your way, at least.
Ideal Strategies:
That's the nice thing about such a single-minded villain approach: the counterplay is relatively obvious. If you have ways to consistently prevent Plague Rat from attacking, or ways to destroy his Ongoings, you basically have everything you need. Better yet, Plague Rat has very little disruption and barely touches the Environment deck, meaning that you can basically set up your ceiling and abuse the environment to your heart's content. I would still suggest getting set up fast, though. You don't exactly have time on your side in this fight.
Things to Avoid:
First, let's just get this out of the way right now. For all intents and purposes, Pike Industrial Complex is Plague Rat's home turf. Not only do they specifically have the Rat keyword to synergize with the Experimental Mutagen, the environment is full of indiscriminate damage, most of it toxic, that Plague Rat can completely shrug off. That aside: while there's not really a WRONG way to face Plague Rat (aside from doing high-risk moves that get you killed vs. anyone, but especially Plague Rat) I would point out that you can't just no-sell them with raw amounts of damage reduction like you can a lot of other villains. Even putting their irreducible damage aside, they have plenty of ways to force the heroes to inflict fixed self-damage, or even just attack each other directly with Maddening Disorder. Yeah there's a reason the Plague Locus boosts damage by Infected heroes, and you won't like it.
Event Strategies:
Dominion of the Plague Rat
Collection Limit: 1
Collection Effects: Compound PR60 OR Evolutionary Accelerant
Rapid Infection
If you think it's too easy to counter Plague Rat just by destroying Ongoings, first of all, stop playing the Visionary, she isn't released yet. Second, this event gets another Ongoing discovered each time Plague Rat flips. I doubt you'll be able to flip Plague Rat from flipping even once, but with this effect in play, it gets harder and harder to pry Plague Rat off of their ever-deadly Patient Zero side. Bring as much Ongoing destruction as you can, because believe me, you're gonna need it.
The Plagued Horde
Collection Limit: 2
Critical Event: Doctor Toxica
Master of the Plagued Horde Nemesis: Lucky Shot (Expatriette, Setback)
Hey, remember how Censor was a completely different villain from the deck he was a critical event for? Same deal here! Doctor Toxica is someone who claims that toxins are just a natural part of human evolution, and really doesn't want you to point out that she definitely did not get her credentials because she wanted to poison a bunch of people FOR SCIENCE. So now she's here with a horde of mutated wild animals and you have to deal with that. She doesn't have the same kind of infections that Plague Rat does, though: if a villain ongoing would be played, she instead adds a token to the heroes with the fewest tokens and discards it. Those tokens are what make you Infected, and the more you have, the more penalties you take: increased incoming damage, damage penalties to attacking Doctor Toxica, and forced discards. She mutates everyone and you lose if every active hero has 4 or more, so you still gotta act as fast as a standard Plague Rat fight, just with a different style. Oh, and her end phase attack deals irreducible damage and adds a token, just for fun.
Because of the penalties you rack up and how they can't be removed, plus the fact that Doctor Toxica doesn't use Ongoings to do it, the strategy for this fight changes a bit. Rather than worrying about Ongoing destruction, instead focus on racing with that damage even harder than usual. Doctor Toxica has less health but can get damage reduction against Infected heroes pretty fast, so irreducible damage on your side can help close the gap too. She also can't destroy your own Ongoings or self-heal as much, so there's even less disruption than usual if you can believe it. Get all your ducks lined up and hit as hard as you can.
Advanced: Ah, there's the self-damage we weren't missing. Tokens mean more fixed psychic damage to the characters involved. This is just a friendly reminder that hey, you can't just do all damage all the time in this fight. You will need to divert some of your considerable resources to healing as well.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Bestial Vitality, Sewer Fiend, Shadowy Ambush, Vicious Onslaught
Renamed:
Plaguebearer -> Urban Legend
Filthy Vermin -> Patient Zero
Infection -> Wasting Sickness
Afflicted Frenzy -> Maddening Disorder
Changes:
Urban Legend:
Rat keyword added.
Max HP increased to 90.
Now immune to toxic damage.
Start phase and Wasting Sickness destroy counter removed.
End phase completely reworked. Now flips if there are 3 or move Villain Ongoings in play, or attacks (H melee to hero target with highest HP) and plays a card otherwise.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now renders Plague Rat's damage irreducible.
Patient Zero:
Rat keyword added.
Max HP increased to 90.
Now immune to toxic damage.
Now increases damage dealt by Plague Rat by 2.
Powers removed.
Start phase slightly reworked. Now allows each Infected Hero character to self-damage for 4 fixed toxic, destroying 1 Villain Ongoing if they do.
Now shuffles the villain trash into the villain deck and flips if there are no Ongoings at play phase.
End phase attack targets reduced to the H targets with highest HP. Damage type changed to toxic.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now grants an attack (1 toxic to the Hero target with highest HP) after a Villain Ongoing is destroyed.
Plague Locus:
Max HP reduced to 9.
End phase completely reworked. Now discovers 1 Ongoing.
Wasting Sickness:
Damage increased to 2 fixed.
Now heals Plague Rat for H instead of playing a villain card.
Now buries itself if the Infected hero is incapacitated.
Maddening Disorder:
Completely reworked. Now plays itself next to a non-Infected Hero character, who is now Infected, or discards itself and heals Plague Rat for H if there are none. Buries itself if the hero is incapacitated. At start phase, forces the hero to attack (2 toxic to the Hero target with highest HP).
Noxious Bite:
Now targets the hero with highest HP.
Wasting Sickness summon replaced with discovering 1 Ongoing if there are fewer than H Villain Ongoings in play.
Destroys [number of Villain Ongoings] Hero Ongoings after discovering.
Ravage:
Attack now deals melee damage and targets all Hero targets.
Now shuffles the villain trash into the villain deck before discovering.
Wasting Sickness summon replaced with discovering 1 Ongoing if there are fewer than H Villain Ongoings in play.
Tooth and Claw:
Now shuffles the villain trash into the villain deck before attacking.
Lowest HP attack removed.
Damage reduced to 3.
Wasting Sickness summon replaced with, if the target attacked is not Infected, discovering 1 Villain Ongoing and playing it next to them.
Added:
Sewer Snacks:
One-Shot. Destroys 1 Item, heals Plague Rat for H, and forces each non-Infected Hero character to self-damage for 2 fixed psychic.
Lurking Plague:
One-Shot. If there are fewer than H Villain Ongoings in play, discovers 1 Ongoing. Grants Plague Rat an attack (3 melee to the Hero target with highest HP) and forces each Infected Hero character to self-damage for 1 toxic.
Slavering Slasher:
One-Shot. Grants Plague Rat an attack (1 melee to the hero target with highest HP). Grants Plague Rat an attack (2 melee to the hero target with highest HP). Grants Plague Rat an attack (3 melee to the hero target with highest HP).
Fatal Disease:
Ongoing. Plays itself next to a non-Infected Hero character, who is now Infected, or discards itself and heals Plague Rat for H if there are none. Buries itself if the hero is incapacitated. At start phase, forces the hero to either discard 2 or self-damage for 4 fixed toxic.
Oh I bet a LOT of people were looking forward to this remake. Spite was, in the earlier edition, a villain with a really cool flavor concept (stop the supermutant serial killer from attacking their victims) that was trying to do a lot of things that really did not work in practice and it showed. The entire debacle was an anti-fun mess that turned off the villain and environment decks in favor of just making a punching bag that rewound your setup every so often and messed with your stuff when you did anything. You can see what they were going for with every step of the old design, but you can also see how it fundamentally falls apart everywhere you look. The new Spite retains his dark feel but makes for a much more interesting fight, actually integrating with the mechanics of the game he's in rather than fighting them like a romhack designer to make an entirely different thing.
Danger Levels:
Minions: Low. The only targets in Spite's deck are the Bystanders, which exist to be reflectors for Spite's many area attacks to throw at you, and to punish you for disregarding them. That said, they do help you if kept alive, which is in no way to be taken as a guarantee.
Direct Offense: Moderate. The main thing keeping Spite's damage at reasonable levels is the fact that he'll usually aim it at Bystanders rather than directly at the heroes, which means you can redirect them to whichever hero is best suited to tank the hit head-on. That said, Bloody Summer and Relentless Stalker can really pull some rude stuff.
Disruption: Low. If Spite's sauced up with lots of tokens, Demon's Kiss and Mynd-Phyre can and will break your stuff, but only in small doses. Aside from that, just, y'know. Don't let the Good Samaritan die.
Defenses: High. Spite starts out with Shadowy Slasher keeping him well-defended despite his health total, and he's got both self-heal and damage immunity in his deck. You will need to bring your best nutcracking tools to get to him.
Ongoings: Moderate. The main thing keeping Spite from being a major threat in this vein is the fact that his Ongoings tend to be self-correcting by virtue of bleeding his token supply, which then destroys all his Ongoings. They're not exactly trivial to handle since they all give him extra attacks and rude modifiers, though.
Surprises: High. By design, Spite's deck will either be fairly-innocuous Bystander cards that are mostly helpful, or balls-to-the-wall offensive maneuvers like Chaos And Disorder or Relentless Stalker. And he can chain a lot of cards together if things line up right, too. Never take a fight against him to be a cakewalk just because the deck is currently playing nice.
Shadowy Slasher: Nemesis: The Wraith
The main flipping dichotomy that Spite now has in his core iteration is one of stealth. On this side, he's laying low and thus reduces damage dealt to him at all times. To represent how close the heroes are to finding him, he gains tokens both at start phase (where the flip check also occurs) and any time he destroys a Bystander or the turn ends with none out, he gets another one. These tokens not only indicate his visibility, they can be used to fuel some of his more aggressive Ongoings. As for Bystanders, these are helpful environment targets folded into his deck, similar to the Hero targets found in the Megalopolis and Freedom Tower environments. However, they're NOT immune to Hero damage, and they have some heavy costs if destroyed. (They'll also appear in the Rook City environment, by the way.) And since Spite's goal is those Bystanders, he'll aim his end phase attacks at them more often than not, preferring the lowest not-him HP target.
Advanced: Oh did you think you, the heroes, were safe because Spite was busy fighting the Bystanders? Nope. Now you, too, can be the proud new owner of an H melee hit to the face every end phase!
Augmented Junkie:
Once Spite becomes visible enough, he leans into it, changing his end phase attacks to be way more indiscriminate and to fight the heroes directly. He also gets a damage boost and plays a second card at start phase, which is REALLY mean because a lot of his cards also activate at start phase. However, maintaining this kind of raw explosive aggression isn't easy for him, so he bleeds out a token a turn even without factoring in the drugs he definitely has on hand. Fortunately, his defenses also drop (unless Lost in the Crowd is out, in which case DESTROY IT IMMEDIATELY) so you have an opening to really unload on him, and you should take it!
Advanced: What's that? More area attacks? YES! Now every token gives Spite a free spray for 1 psychic, and by that I of course mean 2. Better hope the Bystanders are all accounted for!
Ideal Strategies:
Dealing with Spite safely means learning how to reliably handle the Bystanders, which can be a tricky thing to do. While Spite has methods in his deck of removing Bystanders from the game, they're far from ideal. Instead, your approach should be to find ways to defend them while they're out, either by loading up on defenses for your heroes to safely facetank redirected attacks or finding ways to bury Environment targets (such as Legacy's Danger Sense or Expatriette's Liquid Nitrogen Rounds). Note that effects that work on Environment CARDS, like the Wraith's Sonic Neutralizer, do NOT work here. Moreover, irreducible damage and deck control both become incredibly strong when on the Shadowy Slasher side, the first for obvious reasons, and the second so you can filter past the rare and dangerous cards that make Spite's offensive harder to weather for both you and the Bystanders.
Things to Avoid:
Any attack that aims at all non-Hero targets should not exist in this fight (unless, again, you have an effect like Liquid Nitrogen Rounds to make it not kill everyone for Spite). Every Bystander does extremely bad things when destroyed, and they all have very low health totals. Which might lead a theorycrafting player to think, what if they used auxiliary targets? Don't do that either though. Spite has no problems pivoting to area attacks on a timetable of "whenever he wants". Just keep your guard up through this fight. Spite didn't get to be one of the most feared villains in Sentinel Comics by being a pushover.
Event Strategies:
Prelude of the Soulless
Collection Limit: 1
Collection Effects: Grit OR Kindness Repaid
Evil Smile
Spite getting free attacks to the lowest health target whenever one of his Ongoings is destroyed is scary on paper, since again, his Ongoings are incredibly self-curating. That said... only 2 infernal damage? Yeah, if he has all his ducks lined up that's scary, but so is anything else in Spite's deck when all his ducks are lined up, and winning his fight is pretty much entirely about not letting him do that.
Abomination of Desolation
Collection Limit: 3
Critical Event: Abomination Spite
Unkillable Desolator
Did you miss Spite's old Cronenberg-style turbomutant second phase from the earlier edition? First of all... why? Second, now you can have the fun of the aesthetic, but without turning off the villain and environment decks to make it work. In this hulking 100 health form, Spite starts with some Ongoings in play, and turns any Bystanders in his deck or others into power boosts for himself and bonus attacks, putting them under his card when played. His end phase attack scales with the cards under him, too! Oh, and after you destroy his Ongoings since those don't get checked by flipping anymre, he destroys one of yours and also self-heals just because screw you, if he can't have nice things NOBODY CAN.
If you just want a fierce one-on-one showdown with one of the most ruthless villains in the game, look no further. Bring all the single-target spike damage you can, and probably some Ongoing destruction too. And this time, be SURE your defense can take a beating, because all those attacks that were formerly aimed at Bystanders that you could divide up as needed? Yeah they're going for you. Abomination Spite WILL get a hero incapacitated if he sees a chance, and he's good at making those chances come up. Consider this your warmup for when Progeny or Iron Legacy gets released.
Advanced: The token mechanic is still there by the way, distinct from the Bystander cards under him. And now he gets H tokens for free when he starts his turn if he ever has fewer than H. Which means the extra sauce from Chimaeric Mutagen, Mynd-Phyre, and Demon's Kiss are there to drag the fight out even more. Have fun and don't forget your salvage and backups!
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Safe House, Collateral Damage, Forced Entry, Lab Raid, Innocent Bystander, Potential Sidekick, PL531 Compound Upsilon, PL602 Compound Omicron, PL626 Compound Xi
Renamed:
Transhuman Serial Killer -> Shadowy Slasher
Drug-Wracked Monstrosity -> Augmented Junkie
Victim keyword -> Bystander keyword
"Demon's Kiss" -> Demon's Kiss
"Mynd-Phyre" -> Mynd-Phyre
Changes:
Shadowy Slasher:
Max HP reduced to 65.
Setup changed to discovering H-2 Bystanders, then discovering 1 Ongoing.
Now reduces damage dealt to Spite by 2.
No longer heals after dealing damage.
Flip mechanic completely reworked. Now based on tokens. Gains 1 token after a Bystander is destroyed, and gains 1 at start phase, then flips if there are 3 or more on the card.
End phase attack changed. Now deals H melee to the target other than himself with the lowest HP.
End phase card play reworked and moved to after the attack. Now, if there are 2 or fewer Bystander cards in play, adds 1 token and discovers 1 Bystander.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now grants an attack (H melee to the Hero target with the highest HP) at end phase.
Augmented Junkie:
Max HP reduced to 65.
Now increases damage dealt by Spite by 1.
Now flips after the last token is removed from the card, destroying all Villain Ongoings first.
No longer blocks villain card plays.
Start phase effect added that plays a Villain card.
End phase effect added. Grants Spite an attack (H melee to the Hero target with highest HP), then grants Spite an attack (1 infernal to each target except himself), then removes 1 token.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now grants Spite an attack (1 psychic to each target except himself) after a token is removed.
Demon's Kiss:
Drug keyword replaced with Ongoing. Indestructible keyword removed. No longer enters play if it would enter the trash.
Completely reworked. Now, at start phase, grants Spite an attack (2 melee and 2 infernal to the target except himself with highest HP). Then, if there are 3 or more tokens on his character card, removes 1 and destroys 1 Item.
Mynd-Phyre:
Drug keyword replaced with Ongoing. Indestructible keyword removed. No longer enters play if it would enter the trash.
Completely reworked. Now, at start phase, grants Spite an attack (1 psychic to each target except himself with highest HP). Then, if there are 3 or more tokens on his character card, removes 1 and destroys 1 Ongoing.
On The Prowl:
One-Shot keyword replaced with Ongoing.
No longer destroys a Bystander.
Discover increased to H-2.
Discover slightly reworked. Now applies at start phase if no Bystanders are in play, and shuffles the villain trash into the villain deck first, then destroys itself.
End phase effect added. Now grants Spite an attack (2 melee to the target except himself with lowest HP).
Good Samaritan:
Now a 4 HP environment target.
Damage dealt to this card can be redirected to a Hero target.
No longer has any effect at the start of the environment turn.
Destroy effect changed to destroying H Hero Ongoing and/or Item cards.
End phase effect added. Now heals 1 target for 2.
Lost Child:
Now a 3 HP environment target.
Damage dealt to this card can be redirected to a Hero target.
No longer has any effect at the start of hero turns.
Destroy effect changed to forcing each Hero character to self-damage for 3 fixed psychic.
End phase effect added. Now reveals the top card of 1 non-Villain deck, replacing or discarding it.
Added:
Sadistic Choice:
One-Shot. Discovers 2 Bystanders. Removes 1 Bystander from the game. Destroys 1 Bystander. Forces each Hero target to self-damage for 2 fixed psychic.
Chaos and Disorder:
One-Shot. Grants Spite an attack (3 projectile to the Hero target with highest HP), then grants Spite an attack (2 fire to each target except himself), then adds H tokens to Spite's card.
"Can You Save Them?"
One-Shot. Discovers 2 Bystanders, then grants Spite an attack (H melee to the 2 targets except himself with the lowest HP). Removes 1 Bystander from the game, destroys 1 Villain Ongoing, and plays a Villain card if no Bystanders were destroyed by the attacks.
Too Many Potential Victims:
One-Shot. Shuffles the Villain trash into the Villain deck, then discovers 3 Bystanders, discovers 1 Ongoing, and adds 1 token to Spite's card.
Lost in the Crowd:
Ongoing. Spite is immune to damage while any Bystanders are in play. At start phase, buries up to 2 Bystanders, destroying 1 Villain Ongoing each time you do, then playing a Villain card and destroying itself if no Bystanders are in play.
Bloody Summer:
Ongoing. Doubles damage dealt to Hero targets when redirected from Bystanders, after all other modifiers. Grants Spite an attack (H melee to the target except himself with lowest HP) at end phase.
Chimaeric Mutagen:
Ongoing. At start phase, discards 1 from the villain deck, playing it if it's an Ongoing, then, if there are 3 or more tokens on Spite's card, removes 1 and heals Spite for H.
Relentless Stalker:
Ongoing. Renders damage from Spite irreducible. At start phase, grants Spite an attack (1 melee to the target except himself with lowest HP) and buries the Villain trash.
Lab Tech:
Bystander, 5 HP. Is an environment target instead of a villain target. Damage dealt to this card can be redirected to a hero target. Discovers 1 Villain Ongoing when destroyed. Grants a hero a card draw at end phase.
Time for the classic Rook City experience with the Organization. As before, this villain has two character cards: the Chairman as the leader of the biggest criminal underworld Organization there is, and the Operative as his direct subordinate. For the sake of unambiguity, this villain used to be referred to primarily by the Chairman, but here I'll use the term "Organization" for the entire encounter, and refer to each villain character card as their own separate entity, as they are. Which is reflected in the deck design: while the Chairman's deck is the main deck used for the Organization, the Operative has access to a smaller side deck that only she can access, which only plays cards when called to do so by existing villain mechanics. Those of you that played the earlier edition could liken it to the Title deck when fighting Kaargra Warfang, or the Aeon Men deck when fighting OblivAeon.
Oh, the fight itself? Yeah, you're up against pretty much the entire gamut of organized crime, from the limitless flunkies that do the dirty work, to the underbosses that each manage an aspect of the Organization, to the people at the very top. And with the Chairman doing his very best to cover his tracks, and the Operative running the show with blade and fist, you're gonna have your work cut out for you in tracking them down.
Danger Levels:
Minions: High. Again, you're up against a massive criminal Organization with an entire chain of command built into it. It's not out of the question that every single target in the game could be deployed and looking right at you at some point in the fight, and taking any single target down won't mean they stay down.
Direct Offense: Moderate. The Chairman prefers not to get their hands dirty until he's forced to start Handling It Himself. The Operative has no such concerns and devotes most of her time to attacking you directly.
Disruption: Moderate. Two of the Underbosses and their assorted portfolios are built around forcing heroes to discard cards or breaking their things. Keep them down and you won't have much disruption to worry about, but the problem is, well, they don't stay down.
Defenses: High. Remember: the Chairman is invincible until you destroy enough Underbosses, and once you do, he flips and puts them right back into play. Not to mention the defensive layers provided by the Enforcers and Crooked Cops to everyone else. The only target you can hit where damage will actually stick to start out is the Operative, and if she's running Hidden Blade, that's not even a safe bet.
Ongoings: Low. There are exactly three Ongoings in this fight, and not only are they all in the Operative's deck, they're all mutually exclusive Techniques. Not to say destroying them is a waste of time, but I'd probably focus on other things, of which there are a lot, to handle first.
Surprises: Moderate. It's less that any specific card is a surprise and more that you just have so many cards to deal with, and that they all combo together, that you're just going to have to handle a growing and deadly force, ESPECIALLY once you flip the Chairman.
The Chairman Shadowy Mastermind: Nemesis: Mr. Fixer
At the start of the fight, you don't even know who the enigmatic figure known as "The Chairman" could even be. As such, he's immune to damage, and has to be found out by taking down his Underbosses. He starts with a handful of them out, plus some low-level Thugs, but doesn't really do a whole lot himself. He delegates most of his turn to the Operative by activating the Commands text she has (i.e. playing cards from her deck). If you want to do anything about him, you're going to need to get his attention.
Advanced: How do we make a target that's invincible and doesn't attack you directly more of a threat? Easy: accelerate villain card plays! A classic, that one.
Handling It Himself:
Did you get enough Underbosses arrested? Well, now they're all back AND you have to face the Chairman directly. And while he does attack here, his most dangerous trait is still his Organization: he activates EVERY Commands text in play at end phase, which means all of those Underbosses that just got revived are going to be summoning even more Thugs, resulting in a veritable crimesplosion. He'll also get stronger with his start phase attack the more Underbosses you take down but for real this time I swear. Don't forget, though: he still has to be defeated to win, so don't spend too much time on his underlings when you could be damaging him instead.
Advanced: It's possible for both Thugs and Underbosses to reduce the damage they take by up to 2, which sucks. And now the Chairman gets that same courtesy from the existence of literally any Underbosses. So yeah, not only do you have to flip him, you basically need to fight all of those Underbosses AGAIN.
The Operative Pike's Right Hand: Nemesis: Mr. Fixer
And here's the person who will be killing you the most right off the start of the bat. Most of her actions originate from her side deck, including the Techniques she uses much like Mr. Fixer's Tool/Style cards to modify her abilities. She's also the one who gets the Underbosses out of the Chairman's deck most quickly, discovering 1 on each of her end phases (after first attacking you, of course) and passing on Commands to them, which in turn let those Underbosses discover their associated Thug and do some extra chicanery. If you take out the Chairman first, unlikely though it is, she's forced to run the Organization in his stead, which significantly lowers the amounts of her more directly lethal cards aimed your way. Either way, taking out one of the two main villains you're facing represents a major boon to your progress.
Advanced: Defeating the Chairman before the Operative is a fun theoretical that can even be practical in the right situations. Advanced mode is not one of those situations, since the Operative will block damage done to the Chairman even if he's actually vulnerable.
Claimed By The Dragon:
With the Operative left for dead (or at least, claimed by Zhu Long and thus no longer an active participant in the fight), all her character card does now is provide a passive +1 damage boost to the Chairman, which honestly? That barely registers with how infrequently he attacks. The Chairman can still issue Commands to his Underbosses without the Operative active, but she's an undeniable force multiplier for the Organization, so with her gone, as with the reverse scenario, you've got a lot less pressure to deal with now.
Advanced: She can still serve as an accelerant with her Incapacitated side by activating an Underboss' Commands at end phase. Which might be a fun time to remind you that, unlike powers or phase text, there's no limits on how many times you can activate specialized triggers like this, or the Argent Adept's Perform/Accompany effects, in a turn. You don't want the Contract activating twice in a round, trust me.
Ideal Strategies:
Obviously, high-powered area attacks are incredibly valuable for this fight. Yeah, the chaff targets can and will return, but if you just nova the field every turn, they won't last long enough to do much! This holds especially true when you read what the Thug cards actually do: unless they're getting Orders from an Underboss, they either just provide passive damage reduction (easily cleared with irreducible damage or destroy effects like Final Dive) or activate an effect the first time an Environment card is played in a turn (which means if you can prevent that from happening somehow or destroy the Thugs in question before environment turn, they don't do anything). You should also pick your targets wisely when forced to choose: Thugs without the matching Underboss are fairly directionless and won't be as big of a threat to you, and depriving an Underboss of the Thugs they manage can cut their power out from under them.
Things to Avoid:
As easy as it is to just go ham on the many, many Thugs and Underbosses in front of you, don't forget your main targets and their rules. The Chairman, in particular, is at his most dangerous when he's about to flip, and about to revive all the Underbosses you'd worked so hard to bring down. Going in half-cocked will bring down the wrath of the entire Organization on you. Don't disregard the Operative either: she's just as important a target as the rest and there's no reason not to hit her when you have a chance, and she can potentially play two cards a turn if the Chairman throws a card that gives her Commands. Control the situation in front of you, but don't forget the primary objective.
Event Strategies:
Built In A Day
Collection Limit: 1
Collection Effects: Word On The Street OR Shady Suppliers
Retaliatory Patrolling
Okay, what mechanics from the earlier edition can we bring back. Unnerfed Prison Break? No, that's basically the Chairman's flip. Weird trash dependence for reviving Thugs? Gross, we went to Definitive Edition to get AWAY from that. Damage boosting Thugs? No thank you I would rather not die because a Hitman did an area attack for 6. How about the Operative getting her counter back when you destroy a Villain target? ...Yeah, that could work. Still a thing you want to do, naturally, but now going ham on area attacks without a plan (like, say, a sudden spat of damage immunity) is a surefire way to get bodyslammed into oblivion.
The Making of the Organization
Collection Limit: 2
Critical Event: The Bear
Organizing Crime
Another new villain! In this case, it's the Bear, a burly knife-fighting criminal serving as the predecessor of the Operative in the formative years of the Organization. Here, the Chairman isn't even visible as an actor in the encounter, and there's no other Underbosses. For all intents and purposes, this is just the Bear commanding all types of Thugs directly. This can be pretty mean in practice: any time an Underboss would be played, they go under the Bear's card, granting him an area attack to hit low-HP hero targets and buffing his end of turn attack to the main Hero. He also starts with a lot of Thugs in play, discovers one at start phase if there isn't enough for his tastes, and can activate all their Orders at once after his end phase attack. Oh, and any Commands that would happen just become another card play, which gets really scary when you realize how many cards in the Chairman's deck are "do a thing also activate the Operative's Commands".
The Bear provides a lot more direct combat power than the Chairman would, but it comes at a cost: he's a much more obvious target, and his personal defenses leave a lot to be desired, even with the Underboss keyword letting him enjoy the protection of the Crooked Cops. The Bear has no damage immunity and a pretty underwhelming max HP pool at 60. So even if you can't hurt his entourage of Thugs (but you should do that since they get Orders each turn), you CAN hurt him, and should.
Advanced: Naturally, the Advanced text does a fair bit to patch that hole in the Bear's strategy, giving him some end phase regen that scales with how many cards he's got under him. It'd be worth pivoting away from area attacks in a pinch to put as much pain on him as possible to get around that weakness, I'd say.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Renamed:
Master of the Underworld -> Shadowy Mastermind
Chairman Pike -> Handling It Himself
Assassin -> Pike's Right Hand
Incapacitated -> Claimed By The Dragon
Hired Gun -> Hitman
Enforcers -> Enforcer
Changes:
Shadowy Mastermind:
Max HP increased to 40.
Setup changed to discovering H-2 Underbosses and H-1 Thugs.
Destroyed Underbosses are now placed under the character card.
Flip requirement changed to H.
Flip mechanic slightly reworked. Now checks Underbosses under the character card, playing them all before flipping.
End phase added. Now activates the Commands text on the Operative's card.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now grants an extra card play at end phase.
Handling It Himself:
Max HP increased to 40.
Destroyed Underbosses are now placed under the character card.
Completely reworked. Now attacks ([number of cards under the character card] melee to the hero target with highest HP) at start phase, and attacks (H-1 melee to the hero target with highest HP) and activates all Commands text in play at start phase.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now reduces damage dealt to the Chairman by 2 if any Underbosses are in play.
Pike's Right Hand:
No longer prevents victory, as that is an implicit condition by all active villain characters.
Counterattack on villain card destruction removed.
Commands text added. Plays the top card of the Operative's deck.
Start phase effect added. Now discovers 1 Technique from the Operative's deck if none are in play.
End phase attack (2 melee to the hero target with highest HP) added before discover.
Discover now activates Commands text on the card discovered.
Advanced damage reduction increased to 2, but no longer applies to the Operative.
Claimed By The Dragon:
Removes all cards from the Operative's side deck when flipped to this side.
Incapacitated keyword gained. Text confirming that destroying the Chairman is a win condition added.
Advanced text completely reworked. Now activates the Commands text on the Underboss with highest HP.
The Deputy:
Max HP reduced to 8.
Healing reduced to 2, but now applies to all Thugs.
Healing moves to Commands text, which discovers 1 Crooked Cop before healing.
End phase reworked. Now activates Orders text on each Crooked Cop.
The Muscle:
Start phase attack removed.
End phase reworked. Now activates Orders text on each Enforcer.
Commands text added. Discovers 1 Enforcer, then attacks (3 melee to the Hero target with highest HP).
The Contract:
Max HP increased to 8.
Damage boost removed.
End phase reworked. Now activates Orders text on each Hitman.
Commands text added. Discovers 1 Hitman, then attacks (2 projectile to the Hero target with lowest HP).
The Broker:
Max HP increased to 8.
Start phase effect removed.
End phase reworked. Now activates Orders text on each Informant.
Commands text added. Discovers 1 Informant, then discards the top card of each Hero deck, healing each Villain target for 1 any time an Ongoing is discarded this way.
The Fence:
Max HP increased to 8.
Healing removed.
End phase reworked. Now activates Orders text on each Thief.
Commands text added. Discovers 1 Thief, then buries the Villain trash.
Crooked Cop:
Max HP reduced to 4.
Damage reduction now only applies to Underbosses.
Orders text added. Randomly plays 1 card from under the Chairman's character card.
Enforcer:
Max HP reduced to 4.
Completely reworked. Now reduces damage dealt to Thugs by 1.
Orders text added. Grants an attack (H-2 melee to the Hero target with second lowest HP).
Hitman:
Max HP increased to 4.
Attack trigger changed to after the first time an Environment card is played each turn.
Orders text added. Grants an attack (3 projectile to the Hero target with highest HP).
Informant:
Max HP increased to 4.
Completely reworked. Now forces a hero discard after the first time an Environment card is played each turn.
Orders text added. Forces H-1 Heroes to discard 1.
Thief:
Max HP increased to 4.
Destroy effect triggers changed to either Orders text or after the first time an Environment card is played each turn.
Perfect Human Specimens:
Healing reduced to H.
Activates Commands text on the Operative's card after healing.
Prison Break:
Completely reworked. Now shuffles the Chairman's trash into their deck, then discovers 1 Underboss, or randomly plays 1 card from under the Chairman's character card if none are discovered.
"Rook City Is Mine!":
Environment card plays reduced to 1.
Activates Commands text on the Operative's card after playing.
Undivided Attention:
Moved to the Operative's side deck.
Completely reworked. Now an Ongoing, Technique that destroys all other Techniques when played, redirects all damage dealt by the Operative to the Hero target with the highest HP, and grants the Operative an attack (H+1 melee to the Hero target with highest HP) at end phase.
Added:
Top Level Directives:
One-Shot. Activates Commands text on the Operative's card, then grants an attack (3 melee to the Hero target with highest HP) if the Operative is incapacitated.
New Assignments:
One-Shot. Randomly plays a card from under the Chairman's card, then, if there are no cards under the Chairman's card, activates Commands text on the Underboss with highest HP.
Side Deck: The Operative:
Play The System:
One-Shot. Heals the Operative and each Underboss for H, then activates the Commands text on the Deputy.
Blade and Battery:
One-Shot. Grants the Operative an attack (4 melee to the Hero target with highest HP), then activates the Commands text on the Muscle.
Mark for Execution:
One-Shot. Grants the Operative an attack (2 projectile to the 3 Hero targets with highest HP), then activates the Commands text on the Contract.
Insider Info:
One-Shot. Destroys 1 Hero Ongoing or Item, then activates the Commands text on the Broker.
Take From The Weak:
One-Shot. Grants the Operative an attack (3 melee to the Hero target with lowest HP), then activates the Commands text on the Fence.
Lethal Foe:
One-Shot. Grants the Operative an attack (H melee to the Hero target with highest HP), then destroys that target if it has 4 or fewer HP.
Show of Force:
One-Shot. Discovers H Thugs from the Chairman's deck.
Skimming Strikes:
Ongoing, Technique. Destroys all other Techniques when played. Renders damage dealt by the Operative irreducible. Grants the Operative an attack (2 melee to each Hero target) at end phase.
Hidden Blade:
Ongoing, Technique. Destroys all other Techniques when played. Allows the Operative to counter (2 melee) any damage she takes from a non-Villain target. Grants the Operative an attack (3 melee to the Hero target with lowest HP) at end phase.
SURPRISE! The highest difficulty villain in Rook City Renegades is everyone's favorite jobber of a cult god, GloomWeaver! In the earlier edition, GloomWeaver was notable for being a villain with a flip condition too hard to achieve, a win condition too easy to achieve, and basically no way to do anything to you if you knew what damage reducers were. It got to the point where people played with Advanced text as part of the default rules block and STILL didn't consider them much of a threat. Not anymore though. Ranking in at 8 out of 10 Difficulty, the new GloomWeaver enjoys a highly revamped deck, notably with the instant win condition made a fair bit harder for a few reasons, and the cards he plays are almost universally kicked up in threat level.
Danger Levels:
Minions: High. GloomWeaver relies on his cult of followers to enact his will, and there are many of his Chosen that are very good at their jobs. There's also the Relics that serve as summoning foci for his flip condition, and they pack a kick and give GloomWeaver even more to work with.
Direct Offense: Moderate. While GloomWeaver's starting side has a constant aura of spookiness that deals damage to everyone, he doesn't really attack that much himself until flipped. He's got a few one-shots though, and once he becomes Demon-God Incarnate, he WILL start killing you directly at an incredible pace.
Disruption: Moderate. There's a few ways that GloomWeaver can break your things, but he largely prefers making your team discard all the time, whether to offset the attack of the Grimoire of Curses or just because he feels like it. Card draw and salvage are both important tools here.
Defenses: Moderate. GloomWeaver is a high-health target you're not incentivized to attack early on compared to the Chosen, who are difficult but not impossible to deal with, and the Relics, which are massive HP sponges. And if he flips to Demon-God Incarnate, GloomWeaver will get a LOT of self-heal as they turn all their Cultists into delicious candy. Not much in terms of immunity or reducers, there's just a LOT of damage that needs doing.
Ongoings: Low. There's only two Ongoings in the deck: Summoning Circle (which relies on Cultists and discovers a lot), and Strength of the Grave (which buffs Zombies and discovers a lot). Both terrifying if they stick around and have their respective dudes to work with, but you don't have to destroy the Ongoings themselves if you can attack the support characters.
Surprises: High. GloomWeaver is a self-acceleration beast, with huge amounts of discover to filter weak cards out of their deck and a high prioritization on getting dangerous Chosen and Relics out. Anything you can do to keep them from getting more threats out is a good thing.
Madness Awakening: Nemesis: NightMist
GloomWeaver does not start the fight in our world. Instead, there is a constant plot to summon them from their Chosen, using his three Relics as the keys. What this means for you is that if you take down enough of the Chosen, you stop their plot and win, and if all three Relics get into play, GloomWeaver flips, which could very well spell the end for your team. That aside: GloomWeaver himself doesn't do much: he plays a card as usual, maybe playing an extra card if he had a Chosen or Relic on top of his deck, then does an area attack of minor psychic damage to reflect the spookiness inherent to his existence. Your actual goal to start with is to take on both the Relic that starts in play, and any Chosen that pop up, to avoid letting him flip in the first place.
Advanced: What's that? All that discover and filtering isn't enough? Okay, now he buries his trash and discovers 1 target (could be a Cultists or Zombies, but probably going to be a Chosen or Relic). Act fast!
Demon-God Incarnate:
If you ever have to read this text, assume that you screwed up. Demon-God Incarnate Gloomweaver instantly heals up based on how close you were because your suffering is delicious, and no longer provides the easy win condition. Now you HAVE to beat past his massive health total, and he turns all his Cultists into snacks on his start phase to heal up. With that, plus the Relics that are still out creating more problems, AND his new attack being heavy and irreducible, this fight is an incredible uphill battle no matter how you slice it, not least because you'll already be worn down from trying to fight through his Chosen before. If you have been holding any kind of option before now, first of all, why, and second of all, USE IT. You aren't getting a second chance.
Advanced: You are not immune to deck acceleration. Just because GloomWeaver no longer needs his engine in play, that doesn't mean he can't just get another card play for the hell of it.
Ideal Strategies:
The most important things you can bring to this fight are damage and deck control. Damage because you'll want to shut down the Chosen and Relics as quickly as possible, and because they're chunky targets that cause loads of problems. Deck control because as scary as all those Chosen and Relics are... you can still keep GloomWeaver from pulling out threats by at the very least seeing what his next card is and doing something about it. Sometimes you can just make him play a single Zombie Servants. NightMist also bears mention as GloomWeaver's nemesis for her Amulet of the Elder Gods, which lets her reflect infernal damage for the low cost of burying a card from her hand, and guess what damage type is among the favorite of the Cult of Gloom?
Things to Avoid:
Aside from, y'know, ignoring the mechanics of GloomWeaver's deck to hit him directly, the biggest danger here is neglecting your card draw. GloomWeaver LOVES discard effects way more than the traditional disruption mode of destroying your stuff, and while his many Cultists are happy to simply punch or curse you for damage, his Chosen and Relics get a bit more creative by damaging your hand as much as your HP. Treat each discard carefully, because you never really know whether you'll start your next turn with a hand at all.
Event Strategies:
Fabric of Despair
Collection Limit: 1
Collection Effects: The Fang of Taranerach OR Forbidden Magicks
True Believers
Conventional strategy for GloomWeaver is, obviously, to fight the Chosen and instantly win. So here, have some Chosen to fight, discover 1 at the end of the villain turn. In fact, since you like fighting Chosen so much, now they all heal for H too, so you can keep fighting them. Don't lose sight of the main goal here, as scary as this is. Pick one to focus on at a time and keep them down, and remember they don't revive unless GloomWeaver flips. Don't neglect that either, mind you: those Relics are still around and still need to be destroyed.
Diamonds Are Forever
Collection Limit: 3
Critical Event: Soultaker GloomWeaver
Wielding the Diamond Soul
In this iteration, GloomWeaver isn't being summoned directly, but instead Possessing his underlings to use as avatars. He starts with H-2 Chosen in play and picks the one with the highest health to be Possessed, turning them into an effective NightMist nemesis character card. Possession comes with some fun perks: that target gets persistent damage reduction and can wield all of GloomWeaver's cards as their own. If you destroy the Possessed target enough times, you win, but GloomWeaver is smart enough to swap out at the start of each of their turns to a more able-bodied avatar. He also gets more vicious as you take down his Possessed targets, using them to fuel his end-of-turn attacks. The only bit of good news is that the Relics don't exist for this fight.
The big trick to this fight is that your attacks only "count" if you destroy the target while they're Possessed. If you drop Cult Leader Massey to 1 HP and GloomWeaver's turn rolls around, welp, now you have to deal with Deathrattle instead and destroying Cult Leader Massey gets you no points. Not to say you SHOULDN'T finish off those targets. Quite the opposite, keeping them off the table means limiting GloomWeaver's options and forcing them to take much weaker Possession targets. You should still try to make sure you actually drop whoever you're aiming at, though, especially since he's going to discover another target at each start phase, so you'll face the Chosen as a virtual guarantee each turn.
Advanced: Free self-damage to all heroes each time GloomWeaver Possesses a new target. It's not much, only 1, but still enough that those extra attacks will add up pretty quickly over time if not accounted for. And it's fixed, so no tanking it: bring healing.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Crimson Pin, Indigo Pin, Sable Pin, Profane Zealot
Renamed:
Cultist keyword -> Cultists keyword
Zombie keyword -> Zombies keyword
Familiar keyword -> Chosen keyword
Nightmare Walker -> Madness Awakening
Chosen Disciple -> Deathrattle
Cursed Acolyte -> Ronwe, the Cursed
Zombie Servant -> Zombie Servants
Changes:
Madness Awakening:
Max HP increased to 100.
Setup changed to discovering 1 Relic and H-2 Cultists.
Instant win condition changed to having H cards under the character card. Destroyed Chosen are now placed under the character card.
Flip condition slightly reworked. Now checks if there are 3 or more Relics in the Villain play area, and does not specifically require Villain Relics.
Now reveals the top card of the Villain deck, playing if it it's a Chosen or Relic and discarding it otherwise, after checking for flip condition.
Cultists destroy trigger removed.
End phase attack added. Now attacks (1 psychic to each non-Villain target).
Advanced text completely reworked. Now buries the Villain trash and discovers 1 target at end phase.
Demon-God Incarnate:
Max HP increased to 100.
Destroys all cards under the character card when flipped.
Healing on flip now for H, per card under the character card destroyed.
Start phase effect added. Destroys each Cultists card, self-healing for H for each card destroyed this way.
End phase attack reworked. Now attacks (H irreducible infernal to the 2 Hero targets with highest HP).
Advanced text completely reworked. Now plays the top card of the villain deck.
Ophidia, the Deceiver:
Max HP increased to 13.
Completely reworked. Now reveals the top card of the Villain deck at end phase, playing it if it's a target and discarding it otherwise, or forces the Hero character with second-lowest HP to either destroy 1 of their Ongoings or self-damage for H psychic.
Deathrattle:
Max HP increased to 13.
Cultists keyword replaced with Chosen.
Zombies play reworked. Now, at start phase, discovers 1 Zombies, shuffling the Villain trash into its deck if none were discovered.
Damage reduced to X+1.
Now attacks the hero target with lowest HP.
Damage type changed to infernal.
Ronwe, the Cursed:
Max HP increased to 13.
Cultists keyword replaced with Chosen.
Damage reduced to 1 fire.
Start phase attack added. Now attacks (3 infernal to the H-1 Hero targets with highest HP).
Drum of Despair:
Max HP increased to 30.
Completely reworked. Now discovers 1 Cultists card at end phase, forcing each Hero to discard 1 if none were discovered.
Heals each Hero target for 3 when destroyed.
Grimoire of Curses:
Max HP increased to 30.
Attack moved to end phase and now targets non-Villain targets.
Grants 3 card draw to each Hero when destroyed.
Pouch of Bones:
Max HP increased to 30.
Completely reworked. Now discovers 1 Zombies card at end phase, shuffling the Villain trash into the deck and granting GloomWeaver an attack (1 psychic to each Hero target) if none were discovered.
Forces each Villain target to self-damage for 3 fixed psychic when destroyed.
Zombie Servants:
Max HP increased to 3.
Damage increased to H.
Now targets the Hero target with highest HP.
Strength of the Grave:
Damage reduction removed.
Damage boost reduced to 1.
Now discovers 1 Zombies after a Chosen or Cultists card is destroyed.
Vast Following:
Slightly reworked. Now shuffles the Villain trash into the deck, then discovers H-1 Cultists.
Extra card play removed.
Added:
Master Xian Niu:
Chosen, 13 HP. Plays a Villain card at start phase. Destroys H-2 Hero Ongoings and/or Items at end phase.
Cult Leader Massey:
Chosen, 13 HP. Discovers a Cultists at start phase. Attacks (2 infernal to the non-Villain target and the Cultists card with lowest HP) at end phase, discovering 1 Relic if a target was destroyed this way.
Devoted Disciples:
Cultists, 6 HP. Attacks (1 infernal to the 3 Hero targets with highest HP) at end phase.
Ardent Acolytes:
Cultists, 6 HP. Attacks (3 melee to the Hero target with highest HP) at end phase.
Summoning Circle:
Ongoing. Discovers H-1 Cultists when played. At start phase, reveals [number of Cultists] cards from the Villain deck, plays all Relics revealed, and discards everything else revealed.
Malevolent Malaise:
One-Shot. Grants GloomWeaver an attack (2 psychic to each Hero target), forces each hero to discard 1, then plays another Villain card.
Tear At Reality's Veil:
One-Shot. Discovers 1 Chosen, destroys the non-Hero target other than GloomWeaver with lowest HP, then grants GloomWeaver an attack (3 psychic to each non-Villain target).
Rook City Renegades introduces three entirely new villains to the card game, the first and "easiest" of which is the Fey-Court. Strictly speaking, it's an environment, but the devs decided it would work better as a Villain deck with how central their presence in the fictional comics was, which... okay. Sure. I will say that the Fey-Court is an interesting concept as a villain, of someone you're not necessarily trying to "defeat", but merely placate and work with to start out. It's probably the most oddball of the villains yet, and one that you really have to play directly to get the gist of, I feel like, but I'll do my best to explain here. The Fey-Court is led by the Dagda and the Morrigan, both character cards like the Organization has, but between the two of them there's a win condition and a loss condition. These are achieved with tokens that loosely reflect the attention that each character is paying you and your standing in the court: higher is better.
Danger Levels:
Minions: Low. There's a lot of targets in the Fey-Court, obviously, but generally speaking most of them aren't too harmful, and the Advisors can even be pretty beneficial to leave out so as to add tokens to the character cards.
Direct Offense: Low. The Dagda and the Morrigan don't attack unless they're on their hostile sides, and usually they won't flip to those unless you start fighting them or the deck decides to flip them or hit you with The Court's Displeasure.
Disruption: Moderate. Weirdly, the Fey-Court spends just as much time accelerating the heroes with Bonds as it does disrupting them. Most of the disruption comes from when heroes are unwilling or unable to pay the cost on the Bonds, causing problems for themselves and others in the process.
Defenses: High. It's not so much that you CAN'T hurt the Dadga or the Morrigan as it is that you usually don't WANT to. Directly attacking isn't a smart idea until after they've already flipped and gone hostile, and it's DEFINITELY not smart if The Court's Displeasure is out. They have above-average HP and a bit of healing, sure, but it's mostly incentive-based defenses.
Ongoings: Moderate. The only thing keeping me from ranking this high is because there is only one Ongoing, The Court's Displeasure. It's a scary enough card that I would suggest destroying it immediately once it comes out, ESPECIALLY if you intend to fight your way past the Morrigan.
Surprises: High. Your gameplan on any given turn is going to vary sharply with the game state. Sometimes you don't want to fight anyone, sometimes you want to go nova, and sometimes you don't get a choice in the matter because your Bond has a menacing aura. Be prepared for things to change rapidly.
The Dagda Lord of Bounty: Nemesis: The Harpy
The Dagda holds a win condition for the heroes on this side: if you can get him H+6 tokens, he'll send you on your way with a blessing, congrats, game won! H+6 is KIND OF A LOT THOUGH. He also won't give that blessing if you attack him, which instantly flips him to his much more hostile Lord of Ruin side. That aside, all he'll do on his turn is give one of your heroes a Bond, which is basically a card that does cool things at start phase, and VERY BAD things at end phase if you violated the terms of the Bond (usually made harder by the cool thing it does, of course). He's also got the half of the character card with setup instructions, indicating you start with an Advisor (a good way to generate extra tokens) and a handful of Courtiers (filler targets that nonetheless can be a nuisance).
Advanced: If you're gunning for the instawin effect, you should hope you're good at generating those tokens, because with the Dagda healing everything in the Fey-Court for H each turn, you're not gonna be winning through raw damage, I can tell you that.
Lord of Ruin:
If you anger the Dagda, he'll pay you back in spades for the kindness he's delivered to you (whether you asked for it or not). Every token he's got fuels his end phase attack, and if you're playing towards his win condition, you could be seeing double-digit attacks from him there! Fortunately, the Dagda can be appeased by discarding at his start phase: each Hero can chip in up to 2, and all he wants is H cards. It's your call whether him giving you Bonds is less dangerous than attacking you, although if you're going for the insta-win, I'll tell you the answer: it's the Bonds. Don't get hit for 9 cold (unless you're Absolute Zero, of course).
Advanced: Even if you're not gunning for the win condition, the Dagda still affords everything in the Fey-Court a damage boost, and there's a decent amount of attacks in there. Not a huge amount, but enough to make this a problem.
The Morrigan Queen of the Hearth: Nemesis: The Harpy
The other major player at the Fey-Court is the Morrigan, who offers no instant win condition on her initial side. All she does is give you some extra card draw for the Hero who has the fewest cards in hand, and call more members of the Fey-court out sometimes. That said, you REALLY shouldn't piss her off. The second she takes a hit from you, she buries the Advisor with lowest HP, summons The Court's Displeasure (THIS IS BAD), and flips to the Queen of War side. She might flip over to that side on her own, but trust me on this: you do NOT want to be the one putting her there. The Morrigan starts with 4 tokens on her card, which is definitely nice even if she doesn't give you anything for having a lot.
Advanced: I guess she gets more impatient here and just loses a token each turn. That's... really bad, and makes it ever more imperative that you do anything possible to keep tokens on her card whenever possible.
Queen of War:
Once the Morrigan flips, the danger of angering the Fey-Court becomes apparent. If this side ever has no tokens, game over, you're never getting home again. Like the Dagda, it's possible to appease the Morrigan during her start phase (albeit this time with curiously non-fixed optional self-damage for each hero target rather than cards). That doesn't do anything for you if she ends up empty on her turn after start phase. Her end phase attack is a two-hit area move for 1 melee and 1 infernal, which is certainly scary but not damning, especially with damage reduction available. Still, the threat of instant loss is enough that I recommend keeping her off of this side as much as possible.
Advanced: Unlike the Dagda's side, the Morrigan just gives herself the damage boost here. Which is still scary since that applies to both hits of her area attack. And that stacks with the Dagda's damage boost, too. DEFINITELY bring damage reducers here.
Ideal Strategies:
Early on, you need to play politics with the Fey-Court to keep tokens on the Morrigan at the very least. Depending on how good your generation is, you could throw some spare tokens on the Dagda as well, and shoot for the instawin. To that end, you should try to keep the Advisors alive, especially Champion Lugh, since they're the most reliable ways to generate tokens. However, all of that takes time, and you have a lot of Bonds piling up giving you some dangerous power amplification. This leads to the actual way to win the fight: setup stacked to the heavens, so even if the tokens don't play nice, you can dispense with politics when it suits you and just go sicko mode on the characters. Remember, there's no penalty for attacking them on their flipped side unless the Court's Displeasure is out, and if you really need to, you can flip the Morrigan and then immediately destroy The Court's Displeasure! It's legal AND recommended!
Things to Avoid:
It's VERY tempting for an impatient player to just immediately go ham and say screw politics, I have fists. Don't do this. Don't even think of doing this. In fact, don't attack the character cards unless they're already hostile to you, and probably don't attack the Advisors easier unless you have good reason not to. The Courtiers are fair game, mind you, and they can get very aggravating very quickly, so multi-target attacks that let you pick and choose who you're hitting are just fine. Just don't attack the Dagda or the Morrigan if they're still cooperating, and do NOT entirely disregard tokens on their cards. Ignoring them will mean they bleed dry, which means all it takes is one bad one-shot from the villain deck to instantly kill you.
Notable Cards:
The Court's Displeasure: The only Ongoing in the Fey-Court's deck is definitely worth mention for being THE reason you don't just immediately attack the Morrigan. Not only does it grant the highest-health villain an extra attack during end phase, it costs 2 tokens to damage either of the character cards. It's possible to bypass the penalty here by attacking the Morrigan once, then destroying the card, but you need to have enough tokens on her card to not risk instantly losing if you do. This card is reason enough to always have an Ongoing destroy effect on hand for this fight.
Champion Lugh: Of the three Advisors, the changeling is the most immediately useful since destroying Villain targets means getting tokens. That's something that you'll be doing almost constantly with the assortment of Courtiers the deck will be throwing your way, although in a pinch you can also take on the other Advisors if needed. Just note that destroying Lugh himself isn't worth a token, since the effect stops happening after he's destroyed.
Seasons Change: There's two one-shots that flip the character cards and remove tokens, but this one is most interesting because it only flips whichever one has the most tokens on it. Generally speaking, this incentivizes having more tokens on the Dagda, since his card flipping is less volatile than the Morrigan and he needs more tokens for his condition anyway, but since you're likely going to try to appease both of them at start phase unless you're done playing nice, it's likely to make whoever you're up against go hostile, so be ready for that.
Event Strategies:
The Curse of the Fey-Court
Collection Limit: 1
Collection Effects: Beguiling Melody OR Fey Summerwine
Mercurial Court Proceedings
Hey remember how Advisors are a nice way to get tokens out reliably? What if you never had a say in which Advisor was out at any given time? Starting each turn off by destroying one Advisor and discovering a new one is already tricky because it means you can never realistically get the full set out at once. To make matters worse, if no Advisors would be played or destroyed (because they're all in the trash) both character cards lose a token and they get a trash shuffle. Which means you need to be incredibly on-the-ball for getting your tokens generated while the advisors are out to help you. Go ham on destroying things while Champion Lugh is out, feel free to get rid of Bonds if Elder Ogma is out, and don't feel afraid to attack the characters in a pinch if Trickster Puck is out.
A Winter's Engagement
Collection Limit: 2
Critical Event: War-Girded Dagda & Morrigan
Yule-Bright Conquerors Nemesis: The Harpy, K.N.Y.F.E.
For this holiday season, the rules will work a little differently. The Dagda and the Morrigan suit up and declare war on the mortal realm, lighting a Yule log that blots out the sun! No courtly intrigue here, and any time that would happen (i.e. token state would change or a character would flip) the duo attacks for 2 radiant instead. Furthermore, they give out no Bonds on their own, instead taxing the heroes with a discard. Instead, the heroes can use a power on their turn to self-damage for 2 fixed infernal and discover a Bond from the deck to use as their own. These bonds are harder to maintain, as the Fey-Court not only gets an area attack at end phase, they also check one of your Bonds' end phase for the bad effect.
That is a lot of attacks headed your way for such an ordinarily-peaceful deck, but you can handle it. Putting the ability to get Bonds out on your own terms is very powerful, but even more powerful is the Fey-Court giving up all pretense of playing nice. Unless one of your Bonds explicitly indicates not to go total ham on everything in front of you, go for it! Sling everything you've got at all times, hold nothing back. Fight the Advisors too, since all their goodwill not only no longer matters, but is now fuel for the Dagda and Morrigan to attack again.
Advanced: Probably at least one of you should be trying to discover a Bond each round, but sometimes you just like the other stuff you have. In that case, the Dagda and the Morrigan combo attack your highest health hero for 2 and 2. Which is entirely reasonable if you have a hardy tank sort on your team, and terrifying enough to warrant playing with Bonds otherwise.
If we're introducing an entirely new hero in Rook City Renegades, you better believe we're having a nemesis for them in that same set. To that end, here is Apex the Wolf-King, a werewolf supremacist and Alpha's grandfather, leading a pack of werewolves to live their best life by killing anyone they find weaker than themselves (i.e. most other people). However, you might guess that what amounts to a band of marauders that rule by "might makes right" aren't exactly the most cohesive group, so while there's a lot of Werewolves in Apex's deck and they're all decently beefy targets, it's more than possible to use their in-fighting against each other to force them to reconsider who really leads the pack (or, if you're playing a Werewolf hero, establish your own dominance).
Danger Levels:
Minions: High. While there aren't a lot of targets in the deck, each Werewolf is a powerhouse on its own, able to shrug off attacks from weaker targets and enjoying HP universally in the low 20s. Even the lone Vampire in the deck, Magistra Damaris, has decent health and irreducible area attacks.
Direct Offense: High. Apex definitely has what it takes to rule, with a constant damage boost as long as he is King By Right of Claw and plenty of attacks. Pretty much every card in his deck exists in service of doing more damage, too, and they're not shy about going for weak targets where possible.
Disruption: None. That's right! Apex is the first villain deck in Definitive Edition to have absolutely NO disruption effects! Even Plague Rat does more disruption!
Defenses: Moderate. Apex has low health, but he and all his Werewolves enjoy damage reduction when attacked by anything with less HP than them, and he also gets to heal up almost constantly. In particular, he's got some attacks that let him heal based on how many targets he attacks. That said, the Werewolves will self-damage a lot, because they'd like to be at the top of the pack by any means necessary.
Ongoings: Moderate. Many of the Ongoings only give out some extra attacks to Werewolves, but a few of them can mess with the gamestate in annoying ways, like Moonless Night. Ongoing destruction is definitely worth having for stuff like Blood Magic's Boon, although a few of them destroy themselves at start phase, so you can pick and choose.
Surprises: Moderate. There's no cards in Apex's deck that are "safe", but the ways they can deal damage, or even destroy low-health targets without warning, can catch an incautious player off-guard. And while there's not many Werewolves, they're all big enough that anything that discovers more is worth being ready for.
King By Right of Claw: Nemesis: Alpha
Apex, as the leader of the pack, has a personal damage-boosting effect as long as he's on this side, plus some regen based on how many Werewolves (villain or otherwise) are in play. He also makes damn sure that he stays in charge, attacking not only the top-health Hero but every other Werewolf at end phase, and for good reason: if he starts his turn at lower health than any other Werewolf, he flips as they claim leadership for the moment. Between that and his damage reduction when hit by lower-health targets, attacking Apex head-on is a difficult but necessary task to tip the odds in your favor. He also starts with a Werewolf or three in play, and as repeatedly mentioned, they're all high-health threats that do significant damage themselves. Use the in-fighting to your advantage and get Apex to have to fight against his own pack as well as you!
Advanced: Oh, no. All that in-fighting you were going to leverage to win the fight? We got rid of it, sorry. Now all those attacks are aimed at the heroes instead, and since there's gonna be a lot of enemy Werewolves, that's a lot of attacks. Get those defenses up and get them up yesterday!
Once And Future King:
Once Apex's claim to rule is contested, it becomes a lot more volatile, with the damage boost he used to have instead getting handed to whichever Werewolf is currently the highest HP (and yes, this can be a Hero). With blood in the water, so to speak, more Werewolves come out at end phase, and Apex goes even wilder, attacking everyone that's not him at end phase, and healing for every target he hits. Which means that he'll heal up VERY quickly if you don't do something about that damage output. Take your chance to hit him as hard as you can here, and keep your own health totals up so he doesn't outpace you and get back to his spot at the top!
Advanced: The fighting gets especially vicious here, with each Villain healing up after it attacks. Which means it's going to last even longer, AND none of that healing applies to the heroes. Really is just "this deck that has lots of healing in it, what if it had more healing?"
Ideal Strategies:
Realistically, unless you have area attacks capable of doing huge amounts of damage at a time, all of your damage efforts should probably be aimed at Apex. The other Werewolves might die from backup attacks here or there, but you need to punch past that strong self-heal and damage reduction no matter how scary everything else is. Irreducible damage is handy early on, but once you pass the HP threshold you're facing (made easier by having healing of your own), it's less important than just hitting as hard as possible. Also valuable is blocking the damage the Werewolves do, with damage reduction doing well for multiple attacks (until Blood Magic's Boon enters play) and prevention stopping Once and Future King Apex from healing at all.
Things to Avoid:
Absolutely do not run any characters that rely on auxiliary targets in this fight unless you can either stop Apex from damaging them or are fine with them dying in droves. The Werewolves have lots of area and lowest-health attacks that will make any kind of reliance on those options much harder to maintain. Remember: they don't have any actual disruption. If you want an engine stacked to the heavens, just do one that doesn't have HP on it, okay? Also keep your eye on the Environment deck's targets, while we're at it. Werewolves have no problems attacking those targets and will usually shrug off their attacks by virtue of the Environment health totals trending low. You don't want the Environment making your job harder while not slowing down the wolves at all.
Notable Cards:
Magistra Damaris: The sole Vampire in the deck and the lowest health target at a still-high value of 13, Magistra Damaris is "helping" the Werewolves while also having her own agenda, as represented by her ability to attack everything that isn't a Vampire for 1 irreducible infernal. She also adds even more healing to the Villains after a Werewolf is destroyed, which is... honestly going to be her doing more than not. Since she's separate from most of the mechanics in Apex's deck, it's pretty easy to deal with her on the side if needed.
Blood Magic's Boon: She's not the only one that can do infernal damage. With the power of blood magic, she can pass on that irreducible infernal goodness to every Werewolf in place of their existing melee attacks. The start phase self-damage (weirdly not fixed) to whichever Werewolf is currently leader isn't much consolation prize, since that chains into a card play if that Werewolf wasn't Apex. This is one of those destroy-on-sight Ongoings you hate to see.
Moonless Night: Unless Blood Magic's Boon is out, Moonless Night has enough damage reduction both ways for all the Werewolves that it basically represents an off-tempo turn. Use its appearance to get all your ducks lined up for next turn without needing to worry about ramping up damage output (or for cheap shots if you have irreducible damage). If Blood Magic's Boon IS out and Moonless Night exists, WHERE IS YOUR ONGOING DESTRUCTION GET IT RIGHT NOW
Event Strategies:
Throne To The Wolves
Collection Limit: 2
Collection Effects: Bloodcurdling Recording OR Latent Senses
Leader of the Pack
Obviously, conventional wisdom for the other Werewolves is to just ignore them, let them fight, and go after Apex directly. With this Event, that's no longer an option, as Apex instantly kills the lowest HP Werewolf to keep himself alive in this mode. That said, he only self-heals for 10 each time this happens, so if you're facing Werewolves that have more than that amount of health... just go for Apex anyway. Odds are good that most of the Werewolves will have their fair share of damage, but it's still likely to mostly just extend Apex's health total by small bits, not leaps and bounds.
The Strength of the Wolf
Collection Limit: 2
Critical Event: Blood-Leashed Apex
Blood Pact For The Blood Pack
Magistra Damaris takes a much more central role for this fight, summoning herself at start phase and aiming powerful infernal attacks at the lowest health target each turn, AND playing an extra card if that target was a Hero character. She's also amplifying the power of Apex and the other wolves, with the big guy himself getting permanent damage reduction and more HP and focusing his attacks on the highest health Hero. As for the other wolves, they add some disruption when played by destroying a Hero Ongoing, and some acceleration when destroyed by discovering 1 Villain Ongoing.
As scary as all of that is... It doesn't really change your strategy for the fight. Taking down Magistra Damaris doesn't mean much since she revives anyway, and you already didn't really want to destroy Werewolves aside from Apex unless you had a really good reason to. You also don't really care about going for Magistra Damaris unless you're about to do an area attack that wipes all the Werewolves for some weird reason since she grants healing after a Werewolf is destroyed. (Note that any effects that would keep her out of Apex's deck or trash will stop her from being summoned, which is very strong, but mostly likely to be rare and volatile environment effects.) Just... just attack Apex head-on and keep your defenses up like you always do.
Advanced: Oh, here's a reason to destroy Magistra Damaris. After she damages a non-Villain target, she also amplifies future damage that target would take until the next Villain start phase. If she's first in the turn order, she's going to let all the Werewolves acting after her enjoy that boost, not to mention any damage dealt on later turns. However, if she's destroyed, those boosts vanish until she summons again, so you can avoid the worst of it.
I saved my favorite new addition for last! The Terrorform is a giant killer robot, and while we definitely already have one of those that's a very fun fight, they're two extremely different flavors. Omnitron is a very by-the-books killer AI with lots of factory chassis and hostile code to cause problems on purpose. The Terrorform, on the other hand, is kind of a mashup between kaiju and cyberpunk flavors! It's a colossal skyscraper of a mech created by Revocorp, one of Baron Blade's shell corporations that's started to develop into its own behind-the-scenes villain of sorts. The heroes have to stop the titan from destroying everything and everyone around it, and then Revocorp comes in after its destroyed to clean everything up (and snag those sweet land and mineral rights when nobody's looking). Fighting it head-on is impossible even for superheroes: you have to climb on, in, and around the thing to really get some damage done.
Danger Levels:
Minions: Moderate. The Devices and Minions that come out are plentiful and take a decent amount of time to bring down (especially with the powerful armor the Revokers have) but they're only really threatening in terms of numbers.
Direct Offense: High. Every Device that comes out gives more and more potent attacks to the Terrorform, and they have pretty significant damage to them. The Terrorform also has zero problems with attacking the environment as well, which can be very dangerous in the wrong places.
Disruption: Low. All of the disruption only happens on the Mecha-Titan of Industry side, and even there it's either infrequent or self-inflicted to juice up Access cards.
Defenses: High. Terrorform ties the massive HP total of Akash'Bhuta at 200, but far from providing multiple vectors to attack them from, they have a damage reducer! You pretty much have to use Access cards to get in, and even then you're still facing a huge wall of HP (with healing supports). Oh, and all the Minion Revokers have damage reduction too.
Ongoings: None. All of the Terrorform's existing mechanics don't really leave much room for Ongoings to exist. The closest thing there is would be Access cards, and those are mostly beneficial vehicles to flip.
Surprises: Moderate. "Send Everyone!" is obviously bad news, as is the Troop Egress Hatch, since those will suddenly output a lot more targets than usual and force you to deal with HP totals that aren't the massive pool of the Terrorform. That's... really about it though. You could do deck control to make some Access cards easier to do, but like... nah.
Mecha-Titan of Industry: Nemesis: Akash'Thriya
Tying Akash'Bhuta's colossal health total of 200 is already a daunting enough task, but Terrorform also packs some damage reduction as well, making fighting them seem impossible from the outset. The good news is that there's a way to even the odds: the Access cards in their deck! These cards allow heroes to attempt side objectives to find a way to flip Terrorform and get to their much easier side to fight. Terrorform begins with an Access card (and a Device card that gives it extra moves) in play to start, and discovers an Access card at end phase. Other things it does at end phase: attack the two non-Villain targets with highest health for H (i.e. a lot) and accelerate the Environment, since it's just so dang big that you're going to have more of the Environment in play to deal with. No matter the approach, you should get those Access cards dealt with so you can find a way to actually attack.
Advanced: Another attack for Terrorform at end phase is mean and all, but like... 1 energy damage to non-Villain targets? That's it? Not especially intimidating since Terrorform has no damage boosters in their deck. At most, it makes the Environment much more destructible than usual, which CAN be an issue on occasion.
The Heart of the Machine:
Getting Access to the Heart of the Machine turns the fight from unending to very winnable, halving Terrorform's maximum AND current health and removing their damage reduction. It also disables a lot of the extra effects their Devices can do. However, Terrorform starts pulling out all the stops to defend its core, with any further Access cards turning into multi-target attacks and getting double-speed card play. Not that they have a lot of "kill this now" cards to deal with or anything, but basically, once you get in, they're wide open and you should swing for the fences immediately.
Advanced: Also: now that you're up close, all those Minions coming out get a damage boost. And there are a LOT of Minions, most of them attack, and they are not exactly trivial to take down. Bring some extra area attacks for this part if possible.
Ideal Strategies:
Because there's no disruption and no ongoings to deal with, plus the time frame needed for you to get Access cards cleared, heavy setup characters are absolutely the way to go. If you can get your engine up and running, particularly to the point where you can no-sell the Terrorform's attacks, there really isn't anything they can do to stop you from unleashing. It should also go without saying that irreducible damage is very strong for this fight, but more than that: don't disregard the usefulness of just attacking Terrorform directly even before it flips. Sure, it'll probably take a while to make a dent that way (especially with the Revoker Nano-Mechanics healing it) but there's no rule saying you can't do it, and spike damage still works best aimed at them than the targets in its deck that don't even break 10 HP.
Things to Avoid:
While the Revokers aim exclusively at Heroes, Terrorform itself is, by design, considerably more indiscriminate, not caring whether it targets Heroes or Environment targets. This can cause Problems in especially volatile places like Rook City or Pike Industrial Complex, and it's not too great for heroes that rely on auxiliary targets either. Additionally, while Terrorform has no damage boosters or irreducible damage, the raw punch it slings with each hit is high enough that you should keep your guard up and make sure it doesn't go too far with its offensive. And those extra Devices give it a lot more attacks to work with too. So as much as you want to bring the big guy down, do not neglect your area attacks!
Notable Cards:
Troop Egress Hatches: Of the Devices to take down, this is most likely your highest priority. Discovering H-2 Minions is bad enough, but it also deploys an extra Device if Terrorform has enough health (i.e. it's on the Mecha-Titan of Industry side). I shouldn't have to tell you how mean villain acceleration is, right? Blow this thing right the hell up at the earliest possible moment.
Revoker Nano-Mechanics: Similarly, this support-focused Revoker is your highest priority Minion to take down. All the others just do damage and that's whatever, but this one heals each Device. And remember: Terrorform counts as a Device. (Which immediately prompted a panicked look through character variants, but no, don't worry, Eclipse Expatriette's incap effect only BURIES a Device, which doesn't work on character cards. Good, we don't need a return of cheese strats involving teamkilling.)
Climb Along The Outside: When it comes to Access cards, the most important check is whether your hero can do them without interrupting their tempo, which is usually the case. Two of them are villain end phase effects, two of them are alternate powers the heroes can use, and two of them are conditionals based on hero offensive, but Climb Along The Outside is the only one that asks a hero to skip a phase, specifically Draw Phase. Which is either completely terrifying or absolutely not a problem depending on your hero. Anyone with loads of extra sources of card draw and/or collect, like the Wraith or Mr. Fixer, gets this one easy.
Event Strategies:
Terrorform Mark II
Collection Limit: 2
Collection Effects: Mark I Laser OR Prototype Resonator Coil
Mark II
The second iteration of Terrorform isn't especially fancy compared to its normal form, it's just developed some countermeasures for the methods used to defeat it the first time. It gets a Hero area attack for 2 lightning after you complete an Access card (oh boy, three trivial area attacks per game) and a damage boost at 50 health or lower to make the Heart of the Machine side a little scarier. And make no mistake, a damage boost on Terrorform is nothing to sneeze at. But really, at the stage where that damage boost comes into play, you should have all your ducks lined up to spike damage past the health that remains.
Terror's True Form
Collection Limit: 3
Critical Event: Terrorform Mark III
Phased Across Realities
Now you've done it, Revocorp. They took a look at the problems created by Akash'Mecha and said "what if we installed the essence of a primordial earth spirit that hates technologies into a machine bent on destruction of the natural world?" and now we have a dimension-shifting killer mech to deal with. THANKS, GUYS. The Mark III absorbs both the Access cards in its deck when they're about to be played, and the top card of the Environment deck at start phase, and uses those as reactive repairs when a Device is attacked but not destroyed. It only has 150 HP and no damage reduction, but... you don't get to use Access cards for an easy way out. It just attacks you, eats cards as repairs, and you just have to deal with a massive beeftank causing way too much damage. Oh, and at low health (50) it gets another card play at start phase just for the hell of it.
The most important thing here is making sure those repairs don't get anywhere near the Terrorform itself. Bait them out by attacking the other Devices it deploys, then aim the brunt of your assault at the Mark III directly. 150 damage to a single target is already an incredibly gross amount of damage to wade through, you don't need to make it worse for yourself and everyone else. Area attacks are a convenient way to do this IF you have enough targets: bop the auxiliary Devices first to get the absorbed cards out, then finish with attacking Terrorform. Does this mean you're going to have the Devices out a lot more this way? Well, yeah, but keep a steady rate up and Terrorform will drop below the HP threshold for the extra effects before too long.
Advanced: This strategy becomes even more important on Advanced Terrorform Mark III, since it now enjoys a damage boost when it has any cards under it whatsoever. Which, again, happens at start phase. The safest way to quickly dispense of that is to get a reaction attack of some kind: take the hit on whoever has the reaction, bait out the card(s) under it on whatever Device you hit, suddenly you aren't taking nearly as much damage anymore.
For the environments of Rook City Renegades, while we obviously have the locations central to the city itself, we're also going to get some locations important to the characters involved. In this case, the Realm of Discord is a, ethereal, chaotic dimension home to all manner of entropic creatures existing and unexisting in equal measure. It's notable to this expansion for being the original domain of GloomWeaver, and as a banishing point for many villains throughout their story arcs. Not exactly a welcoming place for a lot of people, but at only a 5 out of 10 peril, if you're flexible enough to roll with the chaos, it could be a lot worse.
Checklist:
Hero Support: Yes, but very inconsistently. The Oracle of Discord allows you to change hero variants out midgame, which can be extremely valuable, but that's not exactly something reliable, and most of the other stuff that does it is by accident.
Hero Disruption: Yes. Spinning Vortex and Reversed Gravity will mess with your cards in play or in your hand, although the nice thing is the former also messes with Villain Ongoings.
Field Modifiers: Neutral. Each Distortion that comes up can mess with either side, but as a general rule, they're going to be equally obstructive or helpful to the villains and heroes alike.
Villain Acceleration: Yes, but Time Flies also accelerates the Heroes nicely too, boosting your card play and card draw. Whether that's worth doubling the villain's speed as well is up to you.
Ongoings: Yes, but each Distortion that comes out cleans up after it, so you only have one at a time to deal with. Ongoing destruction is still nice if you end up with one your team can't handle, though.
Hostile Targets: Neutral. As with the Distortions, the Denizens of the Realm of Discord aren't especially picky about whether they bother the villains or the heroes. Play smart and you could get some much-needed help from them.
Ideal Strategies:
Because the Realm of Discord is such a tumultuous and capricious place, the most important toolset you can bring to it is to have a team that can benefit from any of the Distortions that come out, and to adapt your playstyle for Distortions that show up. For example, having a high setup ceiling means you can weather the Spinning Vortex a lot longer than usual. But by that same token, a low setup ceiling in a one-shot reliant deck loves the abuse potential of Ghostly Images. The same strategy applies to the villains: minion-heavy foes love the Claustrophobic Delusion, while solo badasses might instead prefer Reversed Gravity since they don't suffer from its effects. Pay attention as the Distortions come up, use the ones that work to your advantage, and destroy the others.
Things to Avoid:
The odd thing about so much of the strategy for the Realm of Discord being tied up in extending the good Distortions and avoiding the bad ones is that, outside of environment deck control or even a cursory amount of ongoing destruction (both good ideas), there aren't many ways to really influence what it's doing? There's not many Denizens and most of them are basically okay to handle, and they're already perfectly happy attacking villains or helping heroes as needed. I'd also avoid playing characters that strongly depend on one specific style of play to get results, but that's much rarer in Definitive Edition than it used to be.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Imbued Vitality, Ethereal Bonds
Renamed:
Imbued Frailty -> Pervasive Frailty
Negative Energy Field -> Miasma of Pain
Changes:
Distortion cards:
Ongoing keyword added.
Distortion destruction clarified as after the card is played.
Time Crawls:
Damage reduction replaced with skipping the first End Phase effect that occurs on the villain turn.
Time Flies:
Extra villain card play moved to environment end phase.
Positive Energy Field:
Healing increased to 2.
Healing now only occurs at end phase.
Miasma of Pain:
Damage is now fixed self-damage and increased to 2.
Damage now only occurs at end phase.
Claustrophobic Delusion:
Damage immunity exceptions are now the Hero target and Villain target with lowest HP.
Spinning Vortex:
Ongoing and Distortion keywords added.
On play effect completely reworked. Now destroys all other Distortions after playing.
End phase completely reworked. Now destroys 1 Hero Ongoing and 1 Villain Ongoing, then forces each non-Environment card to self-damage for 1 fixed sonic.
Ghostly Images:
Ongoing and Distortion keywords added.
On play effect completely reworked. Now destroys all other Distortions after playing.
End phase completely reworked. Now reveals the bottom card of each non-Environment deck in turn order, playing any One-Shots and discarding the rest.
Portal Fiend:
Denizen keyword added.
Max HP reduced to 11.
Damage reduced to 3.
End phase effect added. Now reveals the top card of the Environment deck, playing it if it's a Distortion, and discarding it and self-healing for H otherwise.
Explosive Bubbles:
Denizen keyword added.
Max HP reduced to 3.
Now reduces all damage taken by this card to 1.
End phase attack slightly reworked. Now attacks ([current HP] to the 3 non-Environment targets with highest HP).
Added:
Buffeting Ephemeral Winds:
Ongoing, Distortion. Destroys all other Distortions after playing. Reduces all damage dealt by 1.
Reversed Gravity:
Ongoing, Distortion. Destroys all other Distortions after playing. Forces 2 fixed melee self-damage to each target that enters play. At end phase, forces each Hero to discard 1.
The Oracle of Discord:
Denizen, 20 HP. When played, allows a hero to replace 1 active Hero character card with a different variant for that Hero and restore them to the new maximum HP, attacking (2 psychic to each target) if they do not. At end phase, discovers 1 Ongoing from the deck in the play area with the target with lowest HP.
The next stop on our tour is in the same dimension as Rook City but still very far away from it. Nestled in the peaks of the Himalayas, the Temple of Zhu Long is basically doing a foreign exchange program with the Fey-Court: while that is an environment that turned into a villain, Zhu Long is a recurring foe of Dark Watch in particular who prefers to work behind the scenes enough that an Environment fits what he does more. He's an ancient draconic sorcerer with knowledge over life and death, and while he's not strictly averse to sharing his knowledge, he asks a very high price that most won't find to be worth it.
Checklist:
Hero Support: Yes. This is a VERY strong deck for keeping the heroes alive, whether indirectly with support from the Temple Trials and Mysterious Ceremonies, or very bluntly with one of the rare revives in the game off of Pool of Revival.
Hero Disruption: Yes, but solely due to the Shinobi Assassin's mechanics eating a card draw whenever it comes out. Which is something you have far more control over than pretty much anything else any other Environment deck could do.
Field Modifiers: Neutral. Most of the Temple of Zhu Long's modifiers serve to protect itself, with Unbreakable Bargain just flat reducing all damage to its targets and the Apprentice Poisoner hampering damage from whoever they're aiming at.
Villain Acceleration: Yes. Mostly it's in terms of healing. Resurrection Rites can return Villain targets to play very quickly, and Unbreakable Bargain is an extremely strong heal for the Villains. Beyond that, Temple Trials can get targets from the Villain deck, as well, but that's kind of deck dependent.
Ongoings: Favorable. Most of them are good, and the ones that aren't can be handled with Mysterious Ceremonies or by just beating up Zhu Long when he appears. Take what you need and avoid the rest, that's all.
Hostile Targets: Yes. This is another environment where any individual target won't be too dangerous (aside from the Dragon Master obviously), but there's enough self-acceleration from the mechanics that you won't have a lot of ways to not have them in play.
Ideal Strategies:
This environment is roughly evenly divided between mostly-helpful Rituals and mostly-antagonistic targets. There's also a degree of impartiality on which side they attack/support moreso than most other environments: they never attack themselves, but are more than happy to fight heroes and villains, or make them fight each other, in equal measure. This means the most important strategy for this area is making sure the attacks are aimed at the villians, and that they can't enjoy the healing benefits after getting attacked. To that end, use the support of the beneficial Rituals like Mysterious Ceremonies to control what you are facing, and don't be afraid to fight the Environment directly if the tide starts turning against you.
Things to Avoid:
The Temple of Zhu Long gets a lot stronger and a lot harder to control when facing target-heavy Villains. Temple Trials becomes harder and harder to succeed against, and Unbreakable Bargain is something you kind of want to leave out at that point since it does the meanest effect when played. Of course, then you have to contend with all the environment threats lasting a lot longer if you don't have irreducible damage. The nice thing there is that you can aim the Disciples at the targets you're facing, though. Ordinarily you'd need to bring heavy defensive measures to survive the Disciples, but if you can keep some small fries alive for the Environment to bully, it can work out okay.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Master of the Temple
Renamed:
Dragon's Student keyword -> Disciple keyword
Resurrection Ritual -> Resurrection Rites
Rites of Revival -> Pool of Revival
Changes:
The True Form:
Master Dragon keyword replaced with Dragon Master.
Now buries itself when Zhu Long is played.
Shinobi Assassin:
Suddenly! keyword added.
Max HP increased to 4.
Damage reduced to 2.
No longer plays when revealed/discarded.
Apprentice Poisoner:
Max HP increased to 4.
On-destroy attack removed.
Attack now reduces damage from damaged targets by 1 until Environment start phase.
Resurrection Rites:
Ongoing and Ritual keywords added.
Now randomly chooses a card under it when playing.
End phase condition changed to if a Dragon Master is in play.
Pool of Revival:
Ongoing and Ritual keywords added.
Cost moved to after revival and changed to each other Hero discarding 2 cards.
Destroys itself after reviving.
Revived heroes no longer prevented from damaging environment targets.
Mysterious Ceremonies:
Ongoing and Ritual keywords added.
End phase can now allow a Hero to shuffle their trash into their deck instead of drawing/playing.
Destroy condition slightly reworked. Now allows a hero to discard 3, destroying 1 Ritual if they do.
Added:
Zhu Long:
Dragon Master, 9 HP. Mr. Fixer Nemesis. Destroys all Rituals and buries himself when The True Form is played. Discovers The True Form when destroyed. Discovers 1 Ritual at end phase.
Oni Berserker:
Disciple, 8 HP. Attacks (3 melee to the non-Environment targets with highest HP) and attacks (1 infernal to itself and each non-Environment target) at end phase.
Unbreakable Bargain:
Ongoing, Ritual. Heals each Villain character for H and the H Villain targets with the lowest HP for H when played. Reduces damage dealt to Environment targets by 1.
Temple Trials:
Ongoing, Ritual. Puts the top card of each Hero deck under it when played. At end phase, reveals the top card of the Villain deck, playing it if it's a target and destroying it and a card under itself otherwise, then plays the top card of each Hero deck and destroys itself if there are no cards under it.
Service of Service:
Ongoing, Ritual. Grants the non-Environment target with the lowest HP an attack (2 melee to the H-2 non-Environment targets with highest HP) at end phase.
We've finally made it! If Megalopolis is the big city's positive aspects in superhero fiction, saving people from scenery chewers and getting adulation from people and the key to the city, Rook City is all the negative aspects. This is a mean city, so inundated in crime you can barely struggle to survive, let alone treat the issues at hand. Not to say it doesn't have good people in it, but you'll have to work real hard to find them, and even harder to protect them. If anything, the villains are more at home here than you are, simply because people here are expected to be villains here. You're making waves just by existing here.
Checklist:
Hero Support: Yes, but solely attached to two fragile targets that are extremely damaging if they're destroyed. Dr. Tremata and Thiago Diaz are both valuable to have around for their acceleration (even if Anti-Hero Sentiment might make them chew you out a bit), but how long can you keep them safe?
Hero Disruption: Yes. Loads of discard effects, and every single target in here messes with your stuff in some way when destroyed. Bring some salvage.
Field Modifiers: No. In the earlier edition, Rook City's biggest weapon was just turbospeeding the villain by skewing stats away from the heroes and giving them extra card plays. Not so much this time around, though.
Villain Acceleration: Yes, but they mostly do so by healing the Villains and giving Villain targets extra punch when played. No extra card plays, and nothing actively persistent for active threats.
Ongoings: Yes. Every Ongoing in this deck is rude as hell, and a few of them even have the Smear keyword as a new way to synergize with some of the new friends, like Bruce Watkins and Urban Blight. At least Tony Taurus includes a built-in way to destroy them that's pretty cheap if you can keep him alive.
Hostile Targets: Yes. It's not just the Thugs causing problems, although they very much will just beat the hell out of you (and in the case of the Street Gang, everyone else, too). Anti-Hero Sentiment turns everyone in Rook City against you, forcing you to dispel the sentiment or weather it.
Ideal Strategies:
Rook City gets most of its strength from its targets, all of which do rude things when destroyed. The easiest way to get around that is to use effects that bury targets instead of destroying them, since that bypasses the threat entirely. Rook City's Ongoings are also dangerous here, but that has a much easier solution (and Tony Taurus definitely helps). So, bury and ongoing destruction are your main weapons for dealing with Rook City's bad parts, so how about the good parts? Well, for starters, even though most of the damage here comes from forcing fixed self-damage, having someone play as a dedicated defensive powerhouse, like Haka, Absolute Zero, or Alpha can help take the heat for if any Bystanders get attacked. Healing also helps, especially if that healing isn't constrained to hero targets and can be given to the Bystanders.
Things to Avoid:
Widescale area damage is very tempting in this environment, but at the very least one has to use it judiciously even if there are no Bystanders out. Remember, every destroyed target here has the last laugh when destroyed. And Bruce Watkins spends half the time invincible anyway. And if the Bystanders are out, you now have to aim those extra instances at heroes or risk your cool blasting getting zeroed out in practice. I'd also avoid fighting against target-happy villains here since they can enjoy the benefits of assists from Mayor Overbrook or Media Pressure, and of course, indiscriminate Villains who attack the environment (especially Spite) will turn the destroy effects of Rook City against you very quickly.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Removed: Blighted Streets, Scum and Villainy, Twisting Back Alleys, Toxic Sludge, Falling Statuary
Changes:
Tony Taurus:
Private Eye keyword replaced with Bystander.
No longer immune to Hero damage.
Damage dealt to this card may be redirected to a Hero target.
Forces each Hero to discard 1 when destroyed.
End phase completely reworked. Now allows a hero to discard 1, destroying 1 Ongoing if they do.
Dr. Tremata:
Max HP reduced to 5.
Forensic Scientist keyword replaced with Bystander.
No longer immune to Hero damage.
Damage dealt to this card may be redirected to a Hero target.
Heals each Villain target for 3 when destroyed.
End phase completely reworked. Now lets each hero draw 1.
Ambitious Racketeer:
Max HP reduced to 5.
Thug keyword added.
Destroys 1 Hero Ongoing when destroyed.
End phase completely reworked. Now allows each Hero to discard 1, then attacks ([H - number of cards discarded this way] projectile to each Hero character).
Added:
Thiago Diaz:
Bystander, 4 HP. Damage dealt to this card may be redirected to a Hero target. Forces each Hero target to self-damage for 3 fixed psychic when destroyed. Grants a Hero a power use at end phase.
Street Gang:
Thug, 9 HP. Destroys 1 Item card when destroyed. Attacks (1 melee and 1 projectile to each target except themselves) at end phase.
Mayor Overbrook:
"Elected" Official, 7 HP. The Wraith nemesis. Plays the top card of the Environment deck when destroyed. Discards the top card of each Hero deck and heals the Villain target with lowest HP for H at end phase.
Bruce Watkins:
Reporter, 3 HP. Immune to damage if any Smears are in play. Discovers 1 Smear when destroyed. Discovers 1 Smear at end phase.
Pernicious Propaganda:
Ongoing, Smear. Discards the top of each Hero deck at start phase, then forces each Hero to discard 1 card that matches a keyword on the discarded card. Forces each hero character to self-damage for 1 fixed psychic at end phase.
Anti-Hero Sentiment:
Ongoing, Smear. Forces a Hero to discard 2 after an Environment target is played. Grants each Environment target an attack (1 sonic to the Hero target with highest HP) at end phase.
Media Pressure:
Ongoing, Smear. Forces each Hero character to self-damage for 1 fixed psychic after a Villain target is played. Forces each Hero to discard 1 at end phase.
Despair and Decay:
Ongoing. Forces each target to self-damage for 1 fixed psychic at start phase. At end phase, if there are no Bystanders in play, discovers 1 Environment target.
Urban Blight:
Ongoing. Discovers 1 Smear when played. Forces each Hero character to self-damage for [number of Smears in play] fixed psychic at end phase.
As with Megalopolis having a more "concentrated" version of itself as a magnet for super fighting in the form of Freedom Tower, Rook City is home to Pike Industrial Complex, also known as the OSHA Violations Festival. This former pharmaceutical company building is now used to make all sorts of messed up science projects that should never see the light of day and would probably disintegrate if exposed to it anyway. No matter who you're fighting here, it will be dangerous, both to you and whoever you're up against. Unless it's Plague Rat. They're built different, I guess.
Checklist:
Hero Support: No. Nothing here can help you. Even attacking the Biomimetic Plasma Vat for healing isn't going to make the heroes come out ahead.
Hero Disruption: Yes. The Vats can break your stuff when destroyed, and with Chemical Explosion in the deck, they WILL be destroyed. Ongoings are more vulnerable than Items here owing to the Biomimetic Plasma Vat, but that at least can target villain or environment Ongoings.
Field Modifiers: Hostile. In the earlier edition, Pike Industrial Complex used to be all about modifying damage dealt and taken by everyone. Now, the only thing that modifies damage is the Experimental Mutagen, and last I checked, there aren't any Rat heroes in the game yet.
Villain Acceleration: No. Most villains don't want to be in this environment any more than the heroes do.
Ongoings: Yes, but it's literally just Experimental Mutagen. Which, yeah, it's rude as hell, but not only can you just get rid of it yourself, it'll get cleaned out when the right Vats explode.
Hostile Targets: Yes. Obviously, there's loads of Rats in here that are perfectly content to chew on whoever, but the Vats are also hanging out being a looming counterattacking threat. The only mercy with them is the Vats don't attack if you leave them alone (until Chemical Explosion happens, anyway).
Ideal Strategies:
Most Environments that rely on damage to pose a threat tend to do so with hostile creatures that can be goaded into attacking Villain minions, so careful control of who you attack and when can pay off. That's not the case in Pike Industrial Complex. Like, yes, the Rats and the Imperfect Human Specimen can spread their attacks around, but generally they're not the biggest threats since they have low health totals, relatively. The Vats and Chemical Explosion just attack everything for fixed damage and you just have to deal with it. To that end, bring some healing (damage reduction won't be enough, obviously) and make sure your area attacks are selective, so you can avoid accidentally hitting the Vats and causing problems.
Things to Avoid:
Now, while area attacking and hitting all the Vats and getting all their attacks off is a bad thing, you don't have to completely hold off on area attacks here. First of all, the Vats don't get to do their area attack thing when destroyed by an attack, because all of that is reactive from taking damage, and they don't get to make that attack after leaving play. So if you can handle the on-destroy effects, better to finish them off yourself (or, y'know, bury them or get them out of play without destroying them). Second: the rest of the targets in Pike Industrial Complex have no such countermeasures and low enough health that a decent area offensive can clean out the Rats pretty quickly if they aren't toxic. And off the top of my head, there are no heroes yet released who rely on toxic damage for area attacks.
Patch Notes:
Code:
Renamed:
Biomemetic Plasma Vat -> Biomimetic Plasma Vat
Changes:
Escaped Lab Rat:
Max HP increased to 4.
Attack now targets H-2 non-Rats with lowest HP.
Biomimetic Plasma Vat:
Completely reworked. Now a 5 HP target that attacks (1 fixed toxic to each non-Environment target) then heals the attacker for H after taking damage, and destroys H-2 Ongoings when destroyed.
Irradiated Cyclohexane Vat:
Completely reworked. Now a 5 HP target that attacks (1 fixed energy to each non-Environment target) then destroys 1 Ongoing then discovers 1 Ongoing from the destroyed card's deck after taking damage, and attacks (2 energy to each non-Environment target) when destroyed.
Supercooled Trisolvent Vat:
Completely reworked. Now a 5 HP target that attacks (1 fixed cold to each non-Environment target) then destroys 1 target with 1 HP after taking damage, and destroys 1 Item or Ongoing in each play area when destroyed.
Experimental Mutagen:
Ongoing keyword added.
On-play effect removed.
Destroy effect removed.
Damage reduction replaced with toxic damage immunity.
Now discovers 1 Rat at start phase.
Chemical Explosion:
Discovers 1 Vat before attacking.
Damage reduced to X and is now fixed self-damage to non-Environment targets.
Vat destruction moved to after attacking.
Added:
Mutated Sewer Rat:
Rat, 6 HP. Attacks (2 toxic to the H non-Rat targets with highest HP) at end phase.
Imperfect Human Specimen:
Clone, 8 HP. Forces each Hero target to self-damage for 1 fixed psychic when played. Attacks (3 melee to the non-Environment target with lowest HP) and heals itself for 3 at end phase.
Our final environment deck, and the last new deck in Rook City Renegades, is the ersatz home base of Dark Watch, Diamond Manor. This mystical swamp mansion is where NightMist keeps all of the weird eldritch relics she discovers on her mystery-chasing, and it's very plausible that the heroes could wield those relics to help deal with any possible intruders. It is equally possible that the villains grab some relics of their own, and use them to bolster their own plans.
Checklist:
Hero Support: Yes. Damage boosts, healing, card draw, sure, we can do that. But we can do even better. How about blocking destroy attempts on your Ongoings? Or how about AN EXTRA TURN?
Hero Disruption: Yes, but solely off of the destroy condition of "The Edifice of Respite", and that buries Environment and Villain Ongoings as much as it does Hero ones.
Field Modifiers: Neutral. The Bloodless Reliquary gives a damage boost to everything in its play area, and the Diamond Book of Monsters boosts the heroes as long as they can keep it. It's the "keeping it" part that's tricky for both, though. Villains can easily claim either or both.
Villain Acceleration: Yes. For more on this, please review the "Hero Support" section. Pretty much everything there can be applied to the Villains too if they get the right relics.
Ongoings: Neutral. Each one does something when played and has an end phase that does other things, and while they're generally helpful to the heroes, it's not a guarantee that they'll be good effects.
Hostile Targets: Favorable. The only actually-attacking resident of Diamond Manor is Locke, the Afflicted, and while he's a chunky threat, he explicitly focuses on the highest health target, and even then only if a Relic is in Villain possession. So... that's honestly fine, really.
Ideal Strategies:
The name of the game here is, obviously, controlling who gets Relics, keeping as many for yourself as possible while preventing them from ending up in Villain hands. Obviously, this isn't going to be possible all the time, but there are some ways to control this. Kuranchu, the Groundskeeper is the most reliable way to do this, although there are other methods. That said, some of the Relics, like the Prison of the Inner Eye, aren't exactly what I'd call safe to work with. The Arcane Observatory lets you destroy particularly unsafe Relics as needed, which is good because outside of it or explicit Environment or Relic destruction, you aren't getting rid of the Relics, just shuffling them between play areas.
Things to Avoid:
Be sure to make use of the ample healing afforded by this environment to avoid the hostile Prison of the Inner Eye or The Bloodless Reliquary. The latter can be strong if wielded properly since it provides damage and healing all its own, but it's a threat if you ever drop to low health. In fact, the healing here is so strong that you honestly don't need to worry as much about bringing your own sources of healing. Better to devote the resources you'd have for that to attacking the villain instead, yeah? Speaking of Villains: you might have noticed that GloomWeaver's flip condition just cares about Relics in his play area. Which means yes, Diamond Manor can prematurely flip him. So that's fun.
Notable Cards:
Balov's Clock: This notorious Relic can grant you an extra turn by destroying itself at End Phase, bumping the respective turn up to Start Phase when you do. There's two catches to this relic, though. The first is that if you use its End Phase destroy effect on the same turn the deck in question sets out strong Ongoings that destroy at Start Phase, well, congratulations, those Ongoings are immediately gone, ARE YOU PROUD OF YOURSELF. The second is that anyone can interrupt their turn, even the villain, by destroying this prematurely by any means on their turn. So watch out for that.
Brigit, the Refugee: Two of the three end phase effects she does are helpful, giving you some extra card draw and healing. The last effect of moving a Relic from the Environment area to the highest HP target's possession is less nice, because again, that's usually the Villain. As helpful as she can be to you, it's often worth it to take her down if she shows up early so she can't pass the villain all the Relics to abuse.
Mystic Library: The on-play effect is pretty conditional on the rest of the decks as to whether it's helpful or not. The more Ongoings the heroes have and the fewer the Villain has, the better. The problem is the end phase effect, which discovers Ongoings from the deck with the fewest cards out. Generally speaking, most hero decks that want Ongoings out will have a lot of cards already in play, and those that don't are things like Setback or the Harpy, which could cause a lot of problems if left unchecked.
The next expansion, Disparation, has been cooking in the lab for a bit now, and I expect that Jen and I will be getting our copy sometime in the next few months. For this one they're doing a lot of the more standalone heroes that don't really have a team but are more involved with alternate reality things (Visionary fans rejoice).
Oh, and yeah, new decks aside from the reworked ones. I hope you like Evil Hell Demons!
The next expansion, Disparation, has been cooking in the lab for a bit now, and I expect that Jen and I will be getting our copy sometime in the next few months.
Christopher Badell apparently had a major health issue re: his neck that's gonna require extensive surgery, so this particular update will have to be delayed a lot. So if you were expecting me to write a lot about various new SotM content, well, I was expecting to play it by now, but if you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything, yeah? I hope he recovers as fully as possible.
