I've never liked playing against Spite so I was pleasantly suprised when he got an alternate villain card. I was hoping it would fix the problems I had with Spite, namely:
1) Lack of variety and excitement. Having only 5 drugs and needing 5 drugs to flip means every game ends the same. This is exacerbated by his not playing cards once he flips and one of his drugs destroying enviornment cards as soon as they come out. Suddenly there's no villain turn or environment turn.
2) Incredibly swingy. If you are not prepared to deal with the drugs or his flip, it's going to be bad. If you are fortunate and pile a bunch of Victims under there in time for the flip (without losing them), it's cake.
Played against him last night and had to cheese him with a Mr. Fixer grease gun. Without that card we would have lost.
Here's what I think Agent of Gloom does right:
1) Consistent drug delivery. There's no way to get lab raided to death in this version.
2) That's it.
The main problem is that if you don't draw victim cards, he's going to snowball out of control in 5 turns and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.
Granted, I may have been doing something wrong (not the first time with SotM), so hopefully someone will shed some light on how AoG spite is supposed to work. I was anticipating a constant struggle with keeping certain drugs in play while saving victims but that was not the case. Instead I got 5 drugs in 5 turns and back to the same old Spite (except with a massive damage increase).
"Defeat by Hippocalypse is no shame, Sentinel. For against Hippocalypse even the strong must fall."
We played him last night, and got beat, but it was a pretty close match. Greatest Legacy, Haka, Unity, Redeemer Fanatic.
We got lucky in that we got 4 Victims in the first four turns. That means... he's flips on the fifth turn, before his fifth drug flips over, right? That spared us whatever the drug is that does 2 Toxic when you use your power and a five-card burn. As you note, we were lucky there.
Our main downfalls were:
1) We drew... something damaging on the turn after he flipped (maybe Lab Raid?) and there were four victims under the Safehouse. That means we took 6 damage on the Infernal Damage Drug, 5 damage on the environmental-destruction card, Mind-Phyre. We were playing Wagner Base and I think Villianous Weaponry was out that turn, so we actually took 7 damage on the Infernal Damage drug, as the Infernal drug was out earlier in the sequence.
2) We played Wagner. Maintenance Level meant we took two cards worth of damage from Mind-Phyre. Mind-Phyre was late in the sequence of drugs, so Spite would get the damage boost on his inherent damage and the Infernal from the Villainous Weaponries before Mind-Phyre destroyed the VW. We also never got Self-Destruct out. Meteor Storm saved our hash once or twice, though. So did Haka's Ground Pound.
3) We got the victims out of the Safehouse, and all those Victim destroying cards Spite didn't draw on his first side kept coming out later, inflicting the psychic damage and healing him.
As I recall, we lost Legacy and Unity, Fanatic drew the Wrath card, Haka played a Battle Mana, and between them they did about 40 points of damage. We had Spite down to about 5 HPs. Fanatic drew Absolution and Aegis, but lost them to Pervasive Red Dust and the Mind-Phyre destroyed PRD, preventing us from recovering the equipment. Fanatic fell the next round, and then Haka.
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But yeah, he's tough and a bit monotonous. Not only does he get the massive damage boost from his own inherent power, but he doesn't stop playing his own cards like his core version does. How you actually turn drugs face down again, we're not sure. You have to have a way to increase villain draw and hope you get the Victims. Right...?
Avid player, playtester
That was my conclusion as well. Since he requires more victims then drugs to flip drugs back down its an uphill battle from the start. By the end of his first turn you need two victims saved just to flip one down and prevent another. So you would have to hope he played a victim and then had something else get him to play another card and hope thats a victim, then save them both. OX is the only hero i can think of that could do it on the first turn, and even he would need to get lucky twice.
Spite is currently my least favorite villain (and I don't even have a second-least-favorite picked out...at a guess it'd probably be Blade just because he's kind of wimpy, or maybe Ambuscade for being wimpy and annoyingly fiddly). Agent of Gloom is an improvement, but not a sufficient one. He was an interesting experiment in an alternate style of villain deck, but ultimately I think he just doesn't work especially well.
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
Wah? PRD gives you back equipment regardless of how it's destroyed. Would you have won if Fanatic could have stood back up from Aegis?
"I'm not prone to hyperbole, but she is the Antichrist." - chwineka
Does it? We thought we had to do something to remove it to enable that condition. It was late...
Hard to tell if it would have made a difference. She would have died on the first hit from Spite (low HP), come back at 10, and then take the infernal and the mindphyre damage. That would have left her with 5 HP, Haka down anyway from Infernal and Mind-Phyre, and her with Absolution to do 1 damage (because of his H-2 damage reduction) when Spite had 5. Legacy and Unity's incaps would have given her two more shots on their turn for 1 each. She didn't have any other damage cards as I recall to soften him up on the one-shot. If she had,she might have just pulled it off.
But... probably not.
Avid player, playtester
When Pervasive Red Dust is destroyed (regardless of how that happens), all heroes may retrieve one equipment card from their trash (if they have any) and stick it straight into play. So it's okay for everyone to lose an equipment card each if you know you're shortly to destroy that card, because then everyone will get their stuff straight back again :).
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I personally find Agent of Gloom to be just as swingy as classic Spite. The Drug that flips first still can really dictate how your game goes. And the Good Samaritan still has laughable survivability.
But, hey! Spite's just not my kind of villain, I suppose!
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Draw, God of the Sun
The Matriarch's Psychic damage is her forcing a gratuitous amount of Snapple facts about birds into a hero's brain.
We played AoG Spite the other night with the Naturalist, Chrono Ranger, Grandpa Legacy, and KNYFE
Didnt bother saving a single vicitim, just pounded on him. We got +1 damage drug, then 1 damage to all drug, then kill environment, then first time damage redux of 2, then power take 2 damage. So a lucky flip if you ask me. We were just pounding on him non stop until Prison Riot hit the table and we ended up with 3 inmates. Mindphyre wiped out the naturalist and the next round killed chrono ranger. We ended up with Grandpa Legacy at 5 HP and KNYFE at 1 when we ended him.
Tough fight, but yeah. Just a slog fest.
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The fight against Spite has never been difficult IMO, but more about his insane ability to survive. He can be a tedious and drawn out fight depending on his card draw, but yes, it ultimately leads to one conclusion, him flipping. That's his story, he keeps using more drugs until be goes berserk.
AoG Spite does change things up a bit. The longer you allow him a connection to gloomy, the stronger he gets. So it makes sense that he would get more drugs each turn. And it would make the fight to easy if you could just flip the drugs down. It is still a tedious fight, but I think for the character and story it works
When the dust clears.... there is only Bunker
Reading some of this brings up a question. What is the correct handling for flipping AoG Spite's drugs? It doesn't say any kind of order on the card so when he flips up a drug we've been choosing which one he flips.
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I shuffle the drugs before the game starts and don't look at them before laying them face-down, then just reveal them in the order they were laid. It doesn't actually specify how you're supposed to manage the set-up beyond "lay all the drugs face-down", so I suppose you could just look at them all and decide the order since it doesn't tell you that you can't...but I just feel like it's supposed to be random so that's how I play it.
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Basically, I like writing stuff ;)
actually, it's worse than I described above, since PRD being destroyed would have given Fanatic only one piece of equipment back, Absolution or Aegis.
She would have had to take Aegis to survive, but that would have left her no way to overcome the two-DP threshold.
So no, it wouldn't have made a difference if she got one piece of equipment back. Even if she got back two, it would have been iffy.
Avid player, playtester
Um, she could beat it by playing a one-shot, thus using up Spite's damage prevention ability. That would allow her to damage Spite with her Power.
Beyond that, exorcism is a two damage instance power. The first would get soaked, but the second would get through.
Even better, if it turns up before you have an Equipment out, you can get Equipment for free! (The presence of Visionary on the art is a hint, since she doesn't have any equipment, and her two versions can either Enlighten heroes to let them discard Equipment, or Turmoil the Environment deck to make Pervasive Red Dust show up at the right time.)
"Is there beauty in a forest, if no creature stops and calls it lovely, now and then? Isn't that what 'sapience' is for?"
--David Brin, "Brightness Reef"
If she had those cards, yes. She didn't, having used them up on previous turns to get through the damage reduction those times.
Avid player, playtester