OblivAeon Shields and Scions are Complicated

The easiest Shield in my view is ‘The Primary Objective’ mainly because all you need to get past the first side is to complete missions. You’ll need to complete missions to win through in the later stages anyway, so this is the only Shield you can beat by just setting up your power base as you want to anyway. The second side also isn’t too bad - deal 5 damage to ObliVeon in a single turn past DR 2 - relatively straight forward.

I’ve only played 3 timed vs ObliVeon so far and the only victory was with this Shield. My one try with a different Shield was definitely much harder - all the others require you to go out of your way to trigger which can hurt your set up time. It is possible to luck into some of them though.

As for the Scions, they have a difficulty ranking in the rule book between 1 - 3. Arguably Voss should be ranked higher than 3, as he’s pretty difficult to deal with early game and adds a whole extra wrinkle to the late game. 

Faultless, Empyron and Sanction are the easiest 3 Scions. Faultless in particular can be a massive asset when flipped providing lots of healing and Power plays to the heroes, potentially for a while if you can keep him in play.

So far, the best I've done was get Oblivaeon down to 94 HP before the end of the Multiverse. 

I had thought for a while that Effusion of Pain was the easiest shield to beat because it sometimes flipped itself out of the gate and on a couple of plays, it seemed pretty easy to beat - just keep the team together in Ob's Environment and wait for it. And since it's early game and I'm usually playing scrubs, l'd split the team and let him vaporize half of team, since they were going to get wiped anyway and now the shield was totally gone. But, then I spent most of my attempts this weekend just chasing him back and forth as he jumps between Environments leaving me more and more beat up. Or worse, I've got everyone in the right spot at the start of Ob's turn and he'd wipe out 1-2 heroes and then when the shield finally gets to go, it doesn't affect "H" heroes so it doesn't flip. 

I honestly have been so bad at Oblivaeon Mode (I'm doing this on my ipad, but the game play is the same) that I started sorting the Scions from 1-3 and leaving Voss last because OMG he's such a pain late game. 

If anyone's putting a guide together (and I'll happily help if I can), I'd love to see:

1) Advice on the heroes and environments to use early in the game so you can flip shields faster. 

2) Advice on the heroes and environments are good mid-game while you're collecting goodies and whittling down Oblivaeon. 

3) Advice on how to survive the end game when he's throwing all those "wipe them out, all of them" cards left and right. 

Sidenote: I'm working on getting OblivAeon data added to the Sentinels Statistics Project.  I usually get the data shortly after the first of the month; hopefully I'll have the analysis part done by then.  That will give us actual statistics on exactly how much each shield and scion contributes to the likelihood of a win.

That data will be really interesting to see.

At this point, I kind of wonder why they bothered with difficulty rankings on the Scions. I mean, it's not like you don't often see more than half of them in a single game. So they kind of all blur together into an overall average difficulty level, unless you start with easy ones and are extremely careful to manage them (and extremely lucky).

You do tend to see quite a few, but I still think you’d have an easier ride of it if you stack them in difficulty order with Faultless first and Voss last. Voss especially adds a massive wrinkle to the game - you have to deal with him one way or another, and his damage reduction in his first form is pretty crazy, which means you likely need to plan for taking him on at the end. 

I've had as few as 4 of them show up in one game.  Voidsoul, Faultless, Nixious, and Progeny in my last game (and Progeny came out so late he died before getting a second turn).  Since you are allowed to stack the deck, I definitely think it matters.