A Guide to the Advanced Ennead

I've borrowed flamethrower's style to write a guide that I think should exist. Hopefully flamethrower's okay with it.

• Primary Damage Types: Fire, Infernal
• Secondary Damage Types: Lightning, Cold, Melee, Projectile
• Most Dangerous Attack: Elemental Storm
• Most Dangerous Utility: Rise to Power
• Most Annoying: Mass Overheating
• Honorable Mention: Ancient Magicks
• Card You Most Want to See: Any Ankh card (Atum not in play), Taste of Immortality (post-flip)
• Nemeses: Ra, Anubis, Each Other

The Ennead, normally, are not all that threatening. It’s just their nature: There will be just as many Ennead members as there are heroes, and they have similar power levels, but the heroes can use actual strategies, while the Ennead have to get lucky. From time to time, they might bust out some powerful combos, but usually they’re a walk in the park.

Until you fight them on Advanced. No other villain in the game has an Advanced Mode that makes the fight as wildly different, and if the statistics page is to be believed, the Advanced Ennead might actually be more difficult than advanced terrors like the Chairman or the Matriarch. Despite this, or maybe because of this, I believe that the Advanced Ennead is one of the most fun fights that Sentinels of the Multiverse has to offer, and that is what inspired me to write this guide.

Before Starting

Before you even start shuffling the deck, you really need to think about the strategy you’re going to use in the fight. Barring some insanely unlikely circumstances, you’re going to have to fight all 9 of them, and you want to take them out in a certain order. Generally, you want to defeat the ones with the most dangerous front sides first, and leave the ones with dangerous flipped sides for last. That in mind, here’s the order I like to handle them in, if possible:

Nuit > Atum > Osiris > Isis > Geb > Nephthys > Set > Shu > Tefnut

You might have your own ideas for what order you’d rather handle them (maybe you’d rather off Set early, maybe you don’t want Osiris killing off targets), but it’s important to keep a good idea of which ones you want dead and which ones you’d prefer alive. Even if the cards don’t come out in exactly the order you want, it can be a useful guideline.

Earlygame

At least one Ennead member will show up every turn, including the first, so depending on how many heroes you brought and how lucky they get, you will generally have somewhere between three and five turns to prepare for the flip. Ideally, you want to take out at least two or three of them before that time comes, because they become much more tenacious after flipping.

Eventually, all nine will show up, but due to the order of effects, the Ennead checks to see whether the Shrine is empty before you put one into play, so you’ll get one last turn before the Ennead flips. You probably want to save your Hypersonic Assaults, Take Downs, Grease Guns and Ground Pounds until this moment, because the game gets much more difficult at this point.

The Flip

Once flipped, the Ennead’s damage is increased by 1, and while that might not sound like much, remember that they tend to do their damage in bursts of small increments of damage. So, if the Ennead has flipped, and they draw an Elemental Storm, assuming that all of them are alive, the Storm will hit each player for 6 damage, then Set and Nephthys hit everyone for 2 each, then Geb hits two heroes for 3, Isis and Tefnut will each hit one more hero for 3, which will average out to around 13 damage to each hero. You probably don’t want this to happen. Damage reduction is your friend here; having just 1 damage reduction will save a hero from 6 damage here, and something like Smoke Bombs will work wonders. Also remember that this attack and many others come from the villain with the lowest HP, so that’s the one you should probably be hitting with your Throat Jabs, Hoist Chains, and Neurotoxin Darts if you can.

Remember also that the Ennead heal H-2 at the end of every turn after flipping. This in mind, the best way to deal with them is by focusing on one at a time; 2 or 3 health won’t mean all that much if you’re hitting for 20 every turn. Beyond that, hang in there: the fight gets easier the more of them you take down.

The Ennead in Detail

Nuit might as well be wearing a giant “Kick Me” sign on her back.. She gives 1 damage reduction to all of her friends, but not to herself, so she should always be your first target. She can heal herself, but without that damage reduction, it should only buy her an extra turn at best. Sometimes, she might not show her face until the last minute before the flip, but this isn’t too bad: it just means that you had a chance to wail on the other priority targets before then.

Nuit’s incapacitated side is basically just a waste of time; shuffling the Environment deck on the Villain Phase means that it only happens after the Environment Phase. This means that your deck manipulation still works on the environment deck, so this effect really only hurts Dr. Tremata, the Phase Beast, and the Time-Crazed Prisoner. Poor, poor Time-Crazed Prisoner.

Atum has one of the strongest abilities of his team: the first Ankh played leads to a free Q card, which will then let Set take an extra turn. Q’s are generally much more dangerous than Ankhs anyway, so Atum is definitely a high-priority target.

His flipped side can range from being a time-waster to being a serious problem. Shuffling the villain deck every turn means that deck manipulation is a no-go against the Ennead. If you brought the Visionary or her dark counterpart, this can be frustrating, and it makes the Infrared Eyepiece into a glorified version of Bunker’s base power. That said, it’s not worth leaving Atum alive to avoid, as the Wraith can just do damage instead, and the Visionary can still manipulate the Environment deck.

Set is a strange one. Like Atum, he allows the Ennead to get extra turns. He also has an attack that hits the entire team. This, in theory, should make him one of the highest priority targets of them all.

But as bad as he is, his flipped side tends to be even worse. It might sound fair at first, but remember why the heroes tend to have an advantage over the villains: they have the ability to choose what they play, while the villains play randomly. Set’s flipped side takes that advantage away from the heroes. Also, a Villain card is usually worth a team of heroes’ play, power, and draw combined; the heroes only get the play in this scenario. Lastly, remember the fact that you’ll occasionally draw Limited cards you already have in play, and that this is not an Atlantean Font of Power. Put all that together, and I can not recommend killing Set until you’re close to the end of the fight.

Geb is the heaviest hitter on the team, as well as the beefiest. His attack hits two targets, and even though they’ll be the targets with the highest health, the damage will add up. Even though Geb’s health might seem somewhat daunting compared to the others, it’s probably best to deal with him early, after the high-priority threats have been taken down.

His incapacitated side, meanwhile, messes with the Hero decks a little bit. Putting the top card of the hero deck on the bottom is usually meaningless, but it can be a bit annoying if you have Tempest or Argent Adept on the team. If you do, though, there’s an easy way around it: put one of them in first. That way, when Reclaim from the Deep or Vernal Sonata is used, the heroes all get to draw their cards before Geb can stop them.

Isis doesn’t hit quite as hard as Geb does, but she hits twice as often, which will average out to the same amount of damage. In addition, she targets the hero with the most cards, which could be anyone, while Geb’s targets will usually be heroes who can take it. It’s for this reason that I usually defeat Isis before Geb.

Her incapacitated side works similarly to Geb’s, and can be dealt with the same way. It can be a bit annoying sometimes, by messing with effects that search through the deck, but those are usually played early, and many let you look through the trash. It can also be helpful for Tachyon, but the Tachyon player should be careful about how many cards are in her deck; the last thing she wants is a reshuffle before hitting with that Lightspeed Barrage.

Shu is an annoying one. He heals the team, and is immune to melee and projectile damage. Luckily, his health is quite low, so once you’ve decided to kill him, he won’t last long. I usually save him for later, mostly because healing the villains isn’t nearly as bad as hurting the heroes, but if there’s a risk of heroes dying, leaving only heroes like Haka, Wraith, or Legacy to deal with him, move him up on your priority list. You don’t want to be near the end of the fight, only to be stopped by not being able to harm this guy.

His incapacitated side is also obnoxious, however. Certain environment decks (looking at you, Rook City) can be just as bad, if not worse, than the villain deck. Remember, though, that most Environment cards only take effect at the end of the Environment phase, giving your heroes time to deal with them.

Nephthys is the team’s all-rounder. She hits the heroes and heals the villains, and has decent health to boot. Whether to take her down early or late depends on your team makeup; if you can deal with the global damage, leave her alone, if not, go for it.

But be wary of her flipped side. 1 health recovery for the team isn’t much, but considering the fact that it happens every turn, she’s about as useful dead as she is alive. This is why I leave her for later; it just isn’t very meaningful to kill her.

Tefnut doesn’t hit very hard or frequently, but she does go after your team’s weakest link. I always kill her last, though. If you have a character with 2 health left and no way to save him or her besides killing Tefnut, maybe you could go for it earlier. That’s a big maybe, though.

Because Tefnut’s incapacitated side is the Ennead's most powerful one. Making you discard every turn means that, unless you’re playing someone like Haka or Nightmist, you’ll run out of cards quickly. You cannot afford to keep this around for an extended period of time.

Osiris, finally, could be the most dangerous member of the team. Discarding can be quite painful, and if you brought someone like Ra or Legacy, he can use your own damage boosts against you. On the bright side, he doesn’t get much mileage out of the flip, but if the Ennead flips and Osiris is still around, you have bigger things to worry about. Definitely a high-priority target.

His flipped side can often be beneficial for the team, too. Environment cards tend to be skewed against the players, so you’ll quite often be thankful when he gets rid of them for you. There’s really no reason not to kill Osiris quickly. Unless you brought Unity. Which brings me to my next point…

Don’t Bring Unity

All right, that’s probably going a little far, but this might be her worst matchup in the game. She gets beaten so badly by the Ennead that you’d think she was their nemesis. The Ennead loves global damage, Tefnut hits whoever has the lowest health (i.e. that Raptor Bot you just played), and one of the Ennead’s biggest threats becomes even more dangerous to her dead. It becomes a catch-22; if you kill Osiris, you’ll lose all your bots. If you don’t, everyone will run out of cards quickly.

If you really have to bring Unity, your team will eventually want to kill Osiris even in spite of you. Once that happens, remember that he always destroys the target with the lowest health. Put in Bee Bots to make that benefit you, try to knock Environment targets down to low health, but really, it’s probably best to leave the bots in the garage.

Other Things to Remember

The Ennead actually count as nemeses to each other, according to Christopher. So if you can use Nightmist or Fixer to redirect their attacks at each other, you’ll get a nice boost out of it. Anubis also gets a nemesis bonus, for what that’s worth, and one of them will often have the second highest health.

The vast majority of the Ennead’s attacks are elemental in nature, so Omnitron-X could prove very useful in this fight. The aforementioned Elemental Storm would do no damage to him at all with an Elemental Exochassis. Just be careful that he doesn’t get hit by Geb, Isis, and Tefnut in ways that would destroy his components. Keep his health somewhere in the middle, or make sure he doesn’t have too many cards out at once.

Beyond that, even with this advice, the Ennead can and will crush you from time to time. Don’t be afraid of that. The Ennead are a ridiculously fun fight on Advanced, and it would be a shame to miss out on it just because you’re afraid of losing.