Striking a Chord: An Amateur Argent Adept Analysis

Having played all other characters in the game first, I finally tried out the Argent Adept several weeks ago, and found him to be quite difficult to wrap my head around.  By now, I've gotten far enough in the process to feel like trying to formalize my existing understanding, and develop a little more, through a full writeup of his capabilities as I see them.  (With only 37.6 games under my belt thus far, I'm certainly no expert, hence the thread title.)

The Opening Note

Few heroes are more dependant on the luck of the draw for their opening hand than Argent Adept; he's among the most likely Heroes to take the "draw two cards" option on his first turn, since his Power does literally nothing without a card in play, and he's by no means guaranteed to have something worth doing on turn 1.  His ideal opening hand contains the card Arcane Cadence, which is essentially his version of those "draw a card and play a card" nifties that most heroes have; it gives you some control over what you'll draw at the end of the turn - and what you'll have in your Trash for later fetching, versus what you send to the bottom of your deck and hope never to see again - without leaving you down a card or being the only thing you play.  Rather than drawing a card to replace itself, it lets you pick from several cards to put into your hand, and rather than letting you play one of the cards already in your hand, it plays another of the several cards, while repositioning the last three as mentioned above.  Thusly, you might "draw" an Instrumental Conjuration, dump an Instrument into the trash from which you can fetch it, send a weak "song" to the bottom, keep a good one on the top, and ideally find another Arcane Cadence to play again, getting you a fifth card into your hand and continuing to leave you with something still to play.  Argent is definitely a good hero for players who like having a lot of things to do during their turn; equally obviously, he is not the hero for people whose friends dislike a long wait while he thinks through his options for the turn.  (Also note that cards which are put to your hand by Arcane Cadence are not actually "drawn", and thus do not trigger damage from an Interpolation Beam or the like.)

If you are not so fortunate as to have Arcane Cadence in your opening 4, look for a "song" whose effects are beneficial on turn 1, so that you can Perform it before ending your turn...you'll still be a bit underwhelmed by your turn, compared to what other heroes can do with a card play AND a relevant power (Absolute Zero and Unity are the only characters likely to sympathize with AA's plight in this regard).  If you don't find such a thing, the draw-two option is probably your best bet.  Never, ever play an Instrument until you have a Song out which it can immediately play.

I Write the Songs That Make The Whole World Sing

The Ongoing cards in AA's deck are all typed as either Melody, Harmony, or Rhythm; collectively, players term these "songs", and they are the bulk of what AA can do.  Unlike other heroes' Ongoings, which either function automatically as static effects or have a Power that may be used once per turn, Argent's songs have Perform abilities which are activated by his other Powers, whether his innate Vocalize or the Powers of his Instruments (more on those below).  As long as you have at least one Instrument plus the ability to use multiple Powers, it's possible to Perform the same card's ability multiple times, making them different from other Ongoings which grant you a Power.  Additionally, most Songs have a second such ability called Accompany, which is similar to Perform except that different cards activate it at different times (notably, you do not automatically have any access to Accompanies without a card effect, as with your Vocalizing a Perform).

In order to understand how to use the Songs, you should first make yourself intimately familiar with the three types they come in, and the three distinct songs in each type (with two copies of each in the deck).

The three types of songs:

* Melodies never have Accompany effects; they have a single, moderately useful Perform ability.

* Harmonies have very potent Perform abilities which are often key to making Argent's deck function well, with more situational Accompanies attached.

* Rhythms are generally the weakest Songs, though they do have Accompanies which are of some value (one being the best Accompany ability overall, and the other two having rather weak ones, one of which synergizes with the same card's Perform and one of which doesn't).

With those groups identified, we'll move on to the particular songs.

* Melody 1:  Rhapsody of Vigor.  In a 5-player game, this card's Perform is likely used simply to heal every Hero for 1.  With fewer players, you have a bit of extra healing to use somehow...you can repair Visionary's decoy, Unity's bots, a useful Environment character such as Tony Taurus, or even The Dreamer, but in most cases the extra will go to waste and you will still just be healing everyone for 1.

* Melody 2:  Sarabande of Destruction.  The most potent of the Melodies under most circumstances, the Sarabande offers repeatable Ongoing and Environment destruction.  While its art is misleading, in that it does nothing versus the Primeval Limbs of Akash'Bhuta, it does come in very handy against Ongoing-heavy villains like Iron Legacy, Omnitron and Citizen Dawn, as well as in nearly every Environment.  This one's definitely a keeper, though only occasionally worth playing and Vocalizing on your first turn.

* Melody 3:  Scherzo of Frost and Flame.  Such as it is, this is the best damage-dealing card in Argent's deck, dishing out 1 fire and 1 cold to the same or different targets.  Though better with a damage boost, it's always rather weak; if the heroes need AA to deal damage, they're probably in bad shape regardless, but can make themselves feel a bit less silly by granting Argent a bonus to both instances of the damage.  If the opponent has any kind of damage reduction, this card is a prime target for discarding or dumping on the bottom of your deck.

* Harmony 1:  Inspiring Supertonic.  This is almost unquestionably the best card in Argent's deck, and beats even Arcane Cadence for its ability to make your game hum by its presence, or dampen your potential by remaining absent.   Performing it, you can grant your allies the use of a Power on your turn, which is always potentially strong (particularly for setting up combos, such as letting Absolute Zero perform a Coolant Blast right after he hit himself with a huge Thermal Shockave), but that's not the really exciting part - the best (or at least most unique) way to use the Supertonic is to give yourself an extra Power while having at least two Instruments out, both of them capable of playing the Supertonic!  While the "each power can be used only once per turn" rule (and the nonexistence of duplicate Instruments) keeps you from "going infinite", you can still eke a great deal of extra Accompaniment out of a good collection of Instruments, activating a large number of individually-small effects to add up to one big turn (assuming your friends don't all pack up and head home while you're durdling your way through the entire process).  Apart from all this, the Supertonic also has an Accompany which rapidly regenerates AA's pitifully low health; the right set of Instruments, if playing the Supertonic's Perform repeatedly, generate extra Accompanies which can be devoted to the Supertonic to regain 6 or 8 health in a turn!

* Harmony 2:  Alacritous Subdominant.  Arguably even better than the Supertonic, though without the insane chain potential, this card's Perform is definitely a more welcome sight on the first turn, as it helps you to get Songs and Instruments into play faster, setting you up for the later "big turns".  Like Supertonic, it's also usable to help your allies, although this tends to be more of an act of self-deprivation; without at least one Instrument, Argent doesn't need extra Powers, but he can definitely always benefit from the ability to play more songs and Instruments, getting the whole orchestra together and having a wide variety of options on each of his turns.  The Accompany of the Subdominant is generally one-use, giving you an extra Power but then destroying the Subdominant; it's a poor man's Supertonic if you don't have (or, due to having out only Xu's Bell, can't usefully activate upon yourself) that card, but also combines very nicely with that card, as you can potentially use the gained Power to activate another Instrument, which plays the Accompany of the not-yet-destroyed Subdominant, gaining another Power before the card finally self-destructs.  Unlike the Supertonic's Perform, the Subdominant's Accompany only grants a power to yourself, never another player, and since your only Powers (unless you gained The Talisman from Kismet or a Treasure from Anubis) are activating Performs and Accompanies, the effects of usefully using the Subdominant's granted power are entirely determined by how much stuff you already have in play, so the sacrifice of having one less Perform ability to tap into (and an incredibly good one at that) means that you should never Accompany this card lightly...wait until just the right moment when you absolutely must throw everything you've got at the Villain (or are about to lose it all anyway to a prophesied mass-destruct, of course).

* Harmony 3:  Cedistic Dissonant.  Of the three Harmonies, this is the only one which you don't want to Perform at every possible opportunity.  Its effect is immensely powerful, being able to match all the destructive power of the Sarabande....in addition to blowing up any Target which the Villain or Environment deck spits out, regardless of its HP!  Voss's ships?  Gone!  Gloomweaver's Relics?  Gone!  Anubis?  The T-Rex?  Electro-Pulse Explosives?  Gone, gone, and gone!  But the price is steep - for each card you annihilate, you must sacrifice one of your own Instruments, of which you have only six in the deck, and four Instrumental Conjurations which can resurrect them (assuming these weren't needed to extract them from the deck in the first place), after which you're stuck until your deck reshuffles.  Naturally, demolishing your own mechanical lynchpins is seldom desireable except when the entire game is at stake, and tragically the Dissonant is powerless to affect the Operative or the members of the Ennead, even though they aren't singular villains.  But in games where an extremely tough nut requires cracking, the Dissonant can do the job like nothing else - destroying a different Citizen while Citizen Truth is in play, demolishing a Runes of Malediction before it finds any Demons to resurrect - those genuinely desperate moments.  The Dissonant's Accompany text requires far less discussion, and is one of the best of the bunch (particularly being a good one to hit with Silver Shadow, which we'll get into later); it lets you draw three cards after first discarding two, and the fact that you discard first can sometimes be painful if all the cards in your hand seem better than whatever you're randomly likely to draw.  But of much greater significance is the fact that, if your hand is completely empty (as it well might be after several turns of Performing Alacritous Subdominant on yourself), you simply draw three cards without surrendering anything beforehand.

* Rhythm 1:  Syncopated Onslaught.  This is the only song whose Perform and Accompany very specifically synergize with each other to any real extent (technically Cedistic's Accompany helps you find more Instruments to sack to its Perform, but that's not really a "combo" so much as just the general function of card-drawing), a fact that would be more useful if not for the fact that most Instruments activate powers of two different songs.  Still, if you have out Xu's Bell, or if you have two appropriate Instruments and the Powers to use them both, playing the Onslaught's two halves in order can first grant you a bonus to damage, then let you deal some.  Generally, however, it's more useful to have the Onslaught's Perform grant damage bonuses to other heroes (or occasionally to an Environment card which is positioned to shoot at the villain, or even to the villain itself on rare occasions, mostly related to effects like Superhuman Durability or Synaptic Interruption), as you only get to pick two Targets to gain the benefit, and it's uncommon for you to be one of the two best options.  If you manage to Perform the Onslaught twice in one turn, you'll have the choice of extending the bonus to more Heroes or stacking a second bonus on one or both of the first selected Targets; in a five-player game, boosting all of the other Heroes might be for the best (particularly if Legacy isn't around), but if Argent is being escorted by Fanatic and Chrono-Ranger, piling a +2 onto each of their many small damage bonuses is generally much more useful than extending the effect to himself or to a masochistic character like Nightmist.  The Onslaught's Accompany merits little discussion; while one of only two sources of damage in the Adept's entire deck, it's a measly single point and thus seldom of incredible effectiveness.  If you don't have anything better to do with an Accompany effect, you can try to pick off a straggler from a minion-heavy villain's herd, or whittle away at the villain himself if he lacks armor.  If you get a lot of extra Accompanies from setting off a multi-Instrument chain in the late game, the damage from these Onslaughts might eventually add up, even without the bonus from the Perform, but any kind of damage reduction on the villains will still make you a sad panda.

* Rhythm 2:  Counterpoint Bulwark.  The "counterpart" to Syncopated Onslaught, Bulwark's Perform grants damage reduction instead of...er...expansion to the two selected targets; courtesy of his lowest-in-the-game starting health, Argent will pick himself as one of the two targets far more often than with the Onslaught, and should probably generally devote the other instance to the highest-HP hero, as they tend to get shot at specifically rather often.  Of course, late in the game, Argent might well not be the lowest HP anymore, and should protect that hero instead.  It can also occasionally be handy to shield a useful Environment target, protect a dangerously self-destructive Villain card (eg Ambuscade's Sonic Mine) from casual bruising, or spare the Dreamer from damage.  Unity's Bots give you lots of targets to protect, and note carefully the interaction with Visionary's Decoy Projection - if the Visionary herself is shielded, damage which is redirected to her Projection does not get reduced, so Bulwark the Projection itself instead (or in addition, if you really want her kept safe).  As with the Onslaught, the Bulwark is sometimes worth stacking two instances of on the same target, if you can Perform it twice within a round somehow.  (Note that per recent rulings on self-damage effects, if Argent is reducing damage to himself and then plays Polyphoric Flare, it will not grant him an extra power because he didn't take the full 2 damage.  If your group contradicts this ruling, of course, the thought of him Bulwarking himself twice in order to completely resist the damage, and using the gained Power to Bulwark himself a third time, is immensely amusing.  Turning a 24-HP music geek into the party tank is always fun; a pity this particular exploit isn't strictly legal as far as I can tell.)  Like the previous Rhythm, Counterpoint has a relatively weak Accompany, though one that might be more useful under a lot of circumstances, particularly if you can pile up several activations in a turn - letting one player draw a card.  Obviously this is a bit more useful on players downstream of yourself in the turn order, giving them extra options for their impending turn, but as always the situation will determine who really needs the cards most - if AA is having trouble getting set up, drawing more cards might help, and this is a poor man's option, while you can also feed cards to a character like Bunker or Nightmist in order to help keep them rolling, or just help someone who just dumped their hand to an Environment effect get back into the game in a hurry.

* Rhythm 3:  Inventive Preparation.  The last of the Songs has probably the single weakest Perform effect (certainly the weakest of the non-Melodies, except under highly unusual circumstances), as all it does is let players exercise a little veto power over their next draw.  While particularly useful in combination with the Accompany of Counterpoint Bulwark, it's far from a spectacular effect, providing a handy incremental effect whose utility diminishes if you try to Perform it multiple times in a turn.  IP, however, handily makes up for the relative weakness of its Perform by having the far and away best Accompany effect (except possibly for Alacritous Subdominant, if you can manage to chain it into activating multiple times before it self-destructs).  Though a strict downgrade from the Subdominant's Perform effect, Preparation's Accompany is nonetheless always an immensely powerful card, particularly given the relative ease of activating Accompanies multiple times during a multi-instrument chain.  You could end up letting everyone else in the game play a card on your turn!  Or get one player to play out their entire hand!  Or let a player downstream of you set up "start of turn" effects to fire almost immediately!  (Omnitron-X especially loves this one, and Mr. Fixer is happy to get a Grease Gun played right after he's taken his turn, but nearly every character has a few effects which profit from this unusual timing, though you should watch out that a downstream beneficiary doesn't short-circuit the effects of a card such as Slip Through Time by playing it out of turn.)  This Accompany comboes nicely with that of Counterpoint Bulwark, and the pair can be particularly well set up by the Perform of Preparation itself, if you have the right setup to be able to activate all these cards in a row.  But even if all you do is toss off a Silver Shadow on your turn, letting both yourself and another player play an extra card, this Accompany is virtually certain to make a contribution to the group's effectiveness.

Well, that takes care of all the Songs.  We'll move on, shortly, to talking about the cards that let you activate them.