Played Agent of Gloom for the first time recently, the first time our group has gone up against a villain that requires a fairly specific strategy to beat. Lost the first time because we didn't read the back first, so when he flipped he promptly killed one of us and reduced the rest to <5 HP... not pretty.
The second time, our first idea was to keep him from flipping at all. This caused us to realize that his rule, "At the end of the villain turn.... If there are more cards under the safe house than drugs face up, flip a drug face down," seems to be largely pointless.
- It's obviously impossible to achieve on his first turn.
- On his second turn, he flips a second drug at the start of his turn, so at the end, he'll unflip a drug only if there are 3 or more safe victims. In a 3-player game, that's H, so he'll flip to his reverse side first.
- In a 4-player game, this would incredibly lucky with most teams (would require chaining a Good Samaritan into another Good Samaritan, with no Forced Entry, Collateral Damage, or On the Prowl drawn), and kind of lucky even with a team specifically geared toward this strategy. If you don't do it in the first round, it will no longer be possible.
- In a 5-player game, you'd have 2 turns to rescue 4 victims for the unflip to happen. With a team chosen specifically for this, that's very doable. But it seems odd to have a mechanic that really only makes sense under this specific circumstance.
Am I missing something?
(Fortunately, we did win the second time, even though we failed at our initial strategy, because we had the deck manipulation so that he did Forced Entry immediately upon flipping. Easy peasy, finished him with <5 damage on any hero.)
You need specific circumstances but it is possible to do. Remember he still starts out with one victim in play due to Safe House. Ideally you need that victim or the card he plays to be Good Samaritan if you want to try to get ahead of the curve. It's also a case where Omnitron-X puts the top card of Spite's deck in play so you get an extra victim or use Super Scientific Tachyon to possibly get two victims in play.
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I've used Parse/Wraith/Visionary to manipulate his card plays and force the drugs out of play. It's not easy, I'll give you that.
Yeah, our team was Sentinels, Parse, Dark Visionary, and Rogue Agent KNYFE. And even with that, he got 3 drugs out before we flipped him. The unflip rule seems so corner-case that I don't understand why it even exists.
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Much as I praise Agent of Gloom for being a lot more fun than normal Spite because of the hope that unflip rule provides, I realize now that I have never activated it once. It's not an easy thing to do!
It seems *slightly* less broken if you fight him in Rook City, which has so very many ways of playing extra villain cards (that might be Victims).
This is one of the weird cases where the fact the new Spite only plays 1 card a turn and not 2 actually sort of works against you.
I do agree this is so cornercase I've never seen it happen. I still like Agent of Gloom's flip, if only because you can do it before he's gotten all 5 drugs out so you don't have to deal with all 5, but the drug flipping only seems like it'd happen in 1/100 games unless you stacked a team (SS Tachyon, Omnitron, Parse, etc) specifically to accomplish it. If you can't cause Spite to play additional cards, literally the only way to do it is to get lucky with a Samaritan.
It's a little sad because when I first read it, I LOVED this ability. Till I realized A.) Spite has first turn, so he's +1 drug up (meaning you'd need 3 by the end of his second turn) And B.) It's >, not >=. Those turn an interesting thematic ability into a mostly useless one. I'd love it if when they corrected the typo on the oversized villain card they made it >= so it occassionally influenced games against him.
Or made it so that the check happened at the start of the turn, before he started flipping them back up.
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