Ultimate Citizen Dawn versus the variant Void Guard at Insula Primalis!
FIGHT!
This is a rough one. I beat it on my third try by completely changing my usual strategy for dealing with Dawn. Normally I aim to get her to flip and unflip as soon as possible and keep the citizens off the table to avoid their nastier pair interactions, but in this case, that's suicide. Dawn hits back when you kill citizens, and she needs so many citizens in play to unflip that you'll die while she's still invincible.
The way I won was to only remove the most dangerous citizens (Hammer, Tears, and Anvil, mainly), making sure to stay under Dawn's limit so she wouldn't flip, and keep focusing fire on Dawn herself. I think I only used Malpractice Medico's power once in the whole game; I thought was more useful to me to get his Healing Pulse in play and keep the team upright than to blast out lots of damage, but I may not be using RedMed to his full potential.
The Mark 2 Shadow Projector blocked a ton of damage, often self-damage, because I tend to use it on Medico (keeping him from hurting himself while he heals the team) or Mainstay (to avoid Shard Strength's cost).
Now, some of this is going to depend on how Writhe's deck reshuffles after you pull his shadow cloak out. If you can use Grasping Shadow Cloth once or twice, you can really strangle Dawn's forward progress, and if you drop one at the right moment, you may even discard the Aurora that she plays around turn 6. It's just luck if you do that at the right moment, though, without multiple replays to figure out her deck order and have the Cloth in hand when you need it.
Mainstay is pretty great in this fight. I kept his Shard Strength up for nearly the entire match until the Aurora blew it away. I used Mano-a-Mano a couple times to take out weakened citizens or just deal some damage to Dawn, though of course that's a risky play if you don't have an equipment to blow it up when the risk is greater than the reward.
But the real star is of course Idealist. It's a trick to keep enough Concepts in play to keep charging the big robot, but the work is worth it when you can hit for 8, 9, or more damage every turn.
The environment is a problem, and I had to take Lava damage more than once, but everyone but Medico has at least one way to remove environment cards, so keeping that under control isn't a huge problem. Just make sure you leave a weakened citizen around for the raptors to gnaw on.
I managed to win right after Mainstay took himself out dealing one last mano-a-mano hit to Dawn after a Lonesome Highway that really smacked her hard, and weathering the counter-attack until Idealist could bring the giant robo in for significant overkill. Everyone was in single digits after the Aurora wiped out Medico's ability to keep the heals going and we were all short on cards thanks to multiple blinding blasts, but they managed to end it just before Dawn could come in for the kill.
Tried a second time, looking like I was gonna make it, but then Medico went down and Writhe followed not long after. D: This is looking like the kind of game you have to do everything exactly right to win.
Well, that was a nightmare and a half.
I ended up winning on my fourth try, but it was the cheesiest of possible wins. I had Mainstay tank attacks straight to death, and then doubled-played Writhe's power so that he would protect Medico, Medico would heal, and then Writhe would protect himself, drawing five cards per turn. Idealist dropped pretty early, but it wasn't long before Writhe had his entire deck out and then I just chewed the citizens to pieces, dropped them to the bottom of the deck to keep Dawn from flipping, and then blasted her to death.
Mint, 7/6/5/5, on round 7 or 8 (after Blinding Blast). This required precision in thought and action. The tactic Escher describes is my standard tactic for dealing with Dawn. I usually find it much easier to live with a few citizens out then it is to live through merging with the sun. Grasping Shadow Cloak is a great hit for this game plan, so of course I didn't draw any in time.
Spring, Battery, and Dare were out the whole game. Writhe covered the highest, usually Medico, and at equal health they fended off the attacks from Dawn and Battery and T-Rex each turn. Idealist and Mainstay were free to try to come up with as much damage as they could. I generally avoided Void Guard Medico and Idealist base powers. I habitually underutilize these two, I'm sure, but their card suite proved enough here.
Yeah this one hurts a lot ^^;
My advice: take out hammer + Tears ASAP (I think I did both on turn 1 by killing hammer with writhe and dealing 3 damage to tears with Idealist then on Mainstay's turn used his power so when tears hit the party I could first hit mainstay and kill tears and spare everyone else the damage). Once I got that it wasn't too bad. Writhe was able to put citizens on the bottom and slow dawn's deck considerably. If you can keep Writhe as top HP with shadow cloak out he can defend against 2 attacks per turn which neutralizes dawn and battery. Keeping Mainstay lowest on HP is also useful as it allows you to deal lots of damage with him. After try to set up Idealist ASAP strained super ego + the karate robot just start to melt her for about 7-10 HP per turn.
For anyone who wants is (spoilers below) dawn's decklist
Tears, Spring, Blood, (these guys come out first) - Hammer - battery - anvil (which brings back hammer) - Dare - Aurora - Eclipse - Blinding blast (I killed her after this came out)
If able I recomend using Writhe to block Dawn's card plays on the turn after Dare to delay aurora one turn, and then the turn after channel the eclipse so she takes extra 2 extra free damage. Using this the T-rex will be immediatly killed by dawn taking it out of the equation, and the velcitrator packs are free to chomp on some enemies as you will tuck 2 citizens on the bottom very quickly.
So I tried this, and keeping Writhe the highest via his own power was fantastic.
Unfortunately, he didn't have the Shadow Cloth when Dare came out, so I wasn't able to do anything but muddle my way through the next few turns blind. Which maybe would have been fine, except I made a mistake that kept her from flipping for an extra turn, and when she did, she wrecked the whole team in one go. :( I hate this one-shot.
I managed a "fine" with only Idealist and Writhe still standing, both with single-digit HP.
Once it came out, I left "Monster of Id" out for the rest of the game, never feeding it any cards. I've never done that before, but it really boosted the damage Karate Robot could do, so I think I used "Form the Head" only once early on. Writhe's power prevented it from hurting Idealist.
It seems to me that "Form the head" would take quite a while to build up enough to be better than "Karate Robot" even without "Monster of Id". I've never had a game where it made sense to me to use it more than a couple of times. Maybe I'm not holding it right?
I've used "Red right hand" to do a bunch of damage in some other games, but this time Medico spent most of his time healing everyone, and particularly Mainstay, so Mainstay could take the hits and deal payback damage. So Medico went down first, followed by Mainstay a couple of rounds later.
Form the Head is stronger in the long-term because it only costs one card each time you use it instead of losing all the fragments, but it does take multiple uses to get to the same damage output as Karate Robot. Often, it isn't worth the effort.
Assuming you have enough Conceptualize/Bright Ideas/etc to keep your concepts in play even if you consume them for Form the Head (you always remove concepts from under Idealist first, naturally, so they're available to recycle), then it takes 4 to 6 uses of Form the Head to exceed the focused damage output of Karate Robot, depending on how many cards you can stash each turn and whether Id or other damage-boosters are in play. It's definitely the long-game.
The real benefit of Form the Head is to convert concepts that are no longer useful into good output, at which point it's a more efficient version of Bored Now. For example, if you had several cards under Stabby Knives and then most of the minions got wiped out, or Monster of the Id has been eating cards for while, then Form the Head converts those into damage better than Bored Now. Similarly, if your Karate Robot is loaded for bear and suddenly you either have no targets or only a weakling that you'd seriously overkill (say, because Dawn just flipped), it's more efficient to push all those cards into the Head and lose only one of them to confirm the kill.
It's also worth noting that card stashed in your Head aren't vulnerable to card destruction effects, so Dawn's Aurora and other Ongoing-destruction effects can't touch them there. In this particular game that isn't a major issue, but it's worth mentioning as a benefit against certain villains.