Complexity: AA vs Unity

AA is high complexity more for the option space he inhabits. With three cards (Lyre, Supertonic, Inventive Preparation) he can be giving soemone else a power card and play on all his turns. And that only expands as his gets set up. You can do so many different things that it can lead t9 options paralysis, especially when you’re kicking off a chain of abilities.

Additionally, his Cadence means you have to make five decisions about what goes into play and what into where in his deck. It can take a while, even with an experiend player. Especially if she then chains them(mentioning no Ameena’s). 

Aditional aditionality, Argent needs to know what everyone else can do. By himself he”s lackluster. He’s team support, so you need to be able to take in much more of the table set up. Unity can focus entirely on herself, with only the occasional “it it ok if I destroy that to bring out a bot?” question.

I think Argent Adept is a little easier to do something with - play an Ongoing, activate the person text, but a lot more complex to get the most out of in terms of chaining his own abilities and the kind of global awareness of where the team will get the maximum benefit from draws, plays and power usages.

I initially struggled with Unity as well. It can certainly feel like you’re flailing around without achieving a whole lot when you first play her, but once you under stand her deck better, she becomes more straightforward to play. Getting the bots into play can be a struggle, but once she gets a good set up going she can get a lot done. She does require specific cards to get set up though as she needs both Bots and Equipment to trade for them, but don’t be afraid to double skip early game for the additional card draw. 

Unity can be kind of swingy - if you have either all Equipments or all bots in hand, you can find yourself lacking things to do. Anyone who can give Unity an out of turn card play (such as, funnily enough, the Adept ;)) is basically her best friend as it means she can get bots out much faster than usual. And then she wrecks stuff >:). You can also combo Bee Bot with End of Days/Apocalypse to only destroy things you want destroyed, then destroy Bee Bot, who destroys End of Days/Apocalypse and prevents any further destruction.

It took me a few games with the Adept to get the hang of his deck, since there are quite a few things to learn, but he then became my favourite hero, and remains such alongside a couple of others. His turn can take a while because you have to think over what options you have (what is that about chaining all four Arcane Cadences, I'm sure I don't know what you mean ;)), and it helps to know, for example, which instruments are good with which combinations of songs, so you know which one you want to find when you play an Instrumental Conjuration. Also, note that while he Adept is very much a support hero (and in all but a couple of the games I've played as him, I play him as such), he can actually be pretty good at damage - Scherzo with a buff or two suddenly becomes 2+2 damage, or 3+3, etc, and that's always a strong thing to have if stuff needs thwacking :D.

Consider also that some heroe just "click" better for players than others - we don't all think the same, we each have our own playstyles, and it may just be that the Adept fits yours better than Unity does. There are a few heroes I'm not a huge fan of playing (Fanatic and Setback spring to mind) - I don't dislike them, per sé, it's more that they just don't quite fit my preferred playstyle. But that's fine - there's about 40 more heroes I can play instead :D.

Complexity is just a guide as determined mostly by Christopher.  Some heroes are easier to grasp for different people than others.   However, I would not expect to hand a new player either Argent Adept or Unity and expect they will understand how they work immediately physical or digitally.   

I think if you're repeating Lyra/Harp -> Inspiring Supertonic -> Harp/Lyra -> Inspiring Supertonic -> Bell or Innate then AA isn't too complex, but Alacritious Subdominant makes him considerably more complicated. 

Some things work much better with a particular order of operations and Alacritious lets you mix that up considerably e.g. you want to hit Voss's team with Hypersonic Assault but there's a Gene-Bound Guard in play so you need to start with Bell Perform for Syncopated Onslaught first, then Alacritious Accompany to extend the chain.  Then you might use a Harp perform, which you could Inspiring Supertonic to split the chain of instrument activations (but if you Inspiring into Horn and use Horn Alacritious Accompany the chain of effects will end up resolving and destroying Alacritious Subdominant before Harp gets a chance to use its Harmony Accompany on Alacritious, which is usually bad) OR use your Harp perform on Alacritious to let someone play a card and then follow with its accompany on Alacritious, before at some point you use Drum or Lyra to Inventive Prep Hypersonic into play.  AA is roughly as complicated as the phrasing of my previous sentence was clunky.

I find Unity's equipment destruction awkward rather than complicated, but that's me. 

Unity is probably the single hero I have used the skipping a turn to draw two cards the most for. If you're playing just out of hand without knowing her deck too well and don't have a hand that flows well she can be uninituive for that and you need to know when is best to just choose to draw two. She can stall hard, probably the worst hero for it, a bad matchup for Unity generally goes really bad for her which could be taken as not getting her, when it's just that she is kinda swingy even when you do get her.

AA is the exact opposite of that, I don't think I have ever felt the need to skip to draw two for him, he always has options of what to do that can help immensely. I never struggled to play him and get him to be at least minimally useful, but it did take a while for me to get him to really shine how I'd heard others talking about him. This was notable as one of the first heroes I played was AZ and almost instantly loved his mechanics, so AA was the first I really had that issue with.

Have you read flamethrower49's "guide" to Unity (https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/a-heros-guide-to-unity-3145)?  Maybe that would help you get a feel for it.  In a much condensed version, I think that getting out the Stealth Bot/Swift Bot combo ASAP is the key to making Unity work.  Having Stealth Bot there to tank damage away from the other bots and having Swift Bot to let Unity play/draw multiple cards are both crucial; otherwise she ends up playing bots *painfully* slowly and they get killed as soon as she puts them out.  I've also found that I prefer Termi-Nation Unity and Freedom Six Unity to regular Unity; I think the tweaks in their powers make it slightly easier for her to access the cards she needs. 

FWIW, though, I have a similar reaction to you re: Unity vs. AA, but I would describe my issue with Unity not so much that she is "complex" to play, but that her deck seems to be much more susceptible to card draw luck.  Some games I get the right cards early and she's churning out the damage and tanking with Stealth Bot.  Other games I'm sitting either with a bunch of bots in my hand that I can't play, or with *no* bots to play, and just some one-shots, or I get the bad guys who aim for the "lowest HP hero target" and her bots get destroyed as soon as they come out. 

I think it comes down to Unity's deck search/deck churn options not being nearly as good as AA's.  Even if I get an initial bad draw with AA, he has *4* Arcane Cadences which allow him to pull 5 cards at a time.  He also has *4* Instrumental Conjurations that allow him to search his entire deck/trash for the instrument he wants and get an additional card draw on top of that.  The odds of you getting one of these cards in your initial 4-card hand is high; about 60.6% (thank you Hypergeometric Calculator - https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/hypergeometric.aspx).  So unless you get really bad luck, by Turn 2 you'll probably have a decent instrument/song combo in play, and will be giving out extra card plays or power usages.  Even the really nasty villains like Dawn/Omnitron/Progeny that wipe out multiple equipments/ongoings at once can't keep AA down, because Instrumental Conjuration lets you pull things from your trash, and if that weren't enough, AA also has 4 Vernal Sonatas that let everybody search their trash for the card they want.  Think about it -- out of a 40-card deck, 12 of AA's cards are really good ways of getting the cards you want quickly.  

Compare that with Unity.  She has 2 Flash Forges, which I guess you could say are her equivalent of Instrumental Conjuration.  But she only has 2 of them (as opposed to AA's 4), you can only search her deck (as opposed to deck or trash) and it require you to discard cards already in hand to get the new cards.  Instrumental Conjuration lets you search deck or trash, gives you the instrument for free, and gives you a card draw on top of that.  Robot Reclamation is also limited -- there are only 2 copies, and you can only search your trash.  She has nothing that's even remotely close to Arcane Cadence - Inspired Repair (just 2 copies) gives you an extra card draw/play, but doesn't let you churn your deck for 5 cards, and Brainstorm (4 copies) lets you draw 2 cards and deal some damage.  (BTW, I think you can make a similar comparison between Benchmark and AZ:  I've had lots of games where I sit around waiting to get the IsoTrans/Null-Point/Thermal Shockwave combo into play.  I don't think I've ever had a Benchmark game where I didn't get a full or near-full panoply of hardware and software going, and again, I think the difference is that Benchmark's deck-search/deck-churn cards are more numerous and robust than AZ's.)

That now gets me thinking -- what about a tinkered Unity deck in which you swap 2 Flash Forges and 2 Robot Reclamations for 4 Instrumental Conjurations (substituting "bot" for "instrument"), and swap 2 Inspired Repair and 4 Brainstorms for 2 Vernal Sonatas and 4 Arcane Cadences?  I'm tempted to try that just to see what happens....

Hands full of bots are why I prefer to play Unity in teams that have a "who's turn is it anyway" thing going on or just playing her with people that play cards from her own deck which don't have any limitations on what Unity can throw out.  And if you get both going, well, you kinda just win because Unity's damage output is just bonkers when fully set up.

Don't forget, btw, that her power doesn't say "destroy one of YOUR Equipment cards." If you have bots and no equipment cards, you can turn one of Wraith's extra toys into a Raptor. She has a bunch, she shouldn't mind that much.

She also has lots of cards to help her own card draw: Brainstorm, Supply Crate, Inspired Repair, and of course Flash Forge can help you get what you need, or at least a decent approximation thereof.

Stuntman loves it when his jacket turns into a ninja golem!  And Mainstay?  Just eat his entire aresenal why don't you?

Hey, Stuntman likes to interrupt everybody else.  Serves him right to have somebody mess with him now and then.

Philosophical question: would Stuntman and Guise be best buds, or drive each other crazy?

Those two are not necessarily mutually exclusive... ;-) 

"Hey KNYFE! Cool laser sword thing! Mind if I take it? Neat thanks!"

"I didn't- Eh, whatever. I'll get a new one."

The scene opens with a closeup on Mainstay's face, his beard blowing in the wind, his strong jaw clenched and tight. The deep rumble of Sweet Rhonda's motor competes with Born to Be Wild playing in the background. We pan out and slightly forward, and we see Stuntman riding another motorcycle (possibly on a tricked-out red sports superbike, and it's higher, faster whine overlays the existing soundtrack) alongside Mainstay.

Then, record scratch sound effect and Born to be Wild cuts out, New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle opening synth line kicks in, and Gritty Reboot Guise whips between the two of them, then falls back while popping a wheelie on his shark. "Hello, my fellow loose cannons, how are your cannons loosening today?"

Thursdays this fall, Road Warriors 2: Electric Rebootaloo.