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Absolute Zero

Absolute Zero

Debut: Base game (both versions)
Team: Freedom Five; Freedom Six (Iron Legacy timeline)

"Too cold? Welcome to my life."

Formerly a janitor for Pike Cryogenics, Ryan Frost was caught in a cryogenic explosion that caused his core temperature to drop. After spending ten years in a coma, he awoke to discover he had to stay inside a cryochamber. The government offered to give him a cryosuit and let him work off the cost by being a hero, and he (eventually) became Absolute Zero.

Absolute Zero's playstyle focuses on equipping components that let him manipulate fire and cold, either reducing or healing from them or inflicting fire or cold damage to enemies. He is considered the most complex of the base game's heroes, as his basic power involves him inflicting damage on himself.

Absolute Zero has three alternate forms: One, from Iron Legacy's Bad Future, is Absolute Zero: Elemental Wrath. Another, which takes place after encountering a technology-absorbing villain named Chokepoint, is Termi-Nation Absolute Zero. Finally there's Freedom Five Absolute Zero, which was revealed during the OblivAeon kickstarter. Definitive edition thus far adds First Appearance Absolute Zero, representing his first ever appearance in Sentinel Comics, and Frostbite, an Alternate Universe version of him as a turncoat vampire fighting against his former allies.

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• 24-Hour Armor: Justified, his armor is also his life-support. He's seen wearing a suit over it while attending Baron Blade's funeral.
• Achilles' Heel: Both in the lore and on the tabletop, Absolute Zero is screwed without his suit. Lots of artwork shows him getting the visor cracked, with presumably near-deadly results. And in-game, losing all of his equipment puts Zero in a bind, since much of his deck needs at least one Module card in play to do anything more than ineffectually cause him to hurt himself.
• And I Must Scream: Elemental Wrath Absolute Zero's powers have evolved, creating ice armor that protects him in response to injuries to keep him from being exposed to the killing heat of the outside world. However, it's not a power he consciously has control over, and it happens automatically. His incapacitated artwork shows him encased in a massive glacier... with his faceplate intact and glowing to indicate he's still fully conscious in there.
• An Ice Person: Unlike his base variant, his Elemental Wrath incarnation has developed outright ice-blasting powers.
• Anti-Hero: The most distinctive of the Freedom Five. He's not (initially) a superhero to save lives or protect the Earth. He's a superhero so he can pay off the ridiculously expensive power suit he wears that keeps him alive.
• Artistic License – Physics: Lampshaded on the Isothermic Transducer's flavor text, where Tachyon tries to point out that its power — that Absolute Zero can turn any fire damage he takes into a cold attack on someone else — doesn't square with the laws of thermodynamics. Absolute Zero cuts her off to say he doesn't know why, but heat and cold just get weird around him.
• Blessed with Suck: He may have cool thermodynamic powers, but at the cost of a body temperature so low that he can only exist comfortably inside his suit or a specialized "cryo chamber." One of Wager Master's cards, the first time his face was ever revealed, shows him weeping at the feeling of wind on his face for the first time in years. Elemental Wrath Absolute Zero has it even worse, since not only does he have to live in a dystopian Bad Future, but he's become so cold he can't feel much of anything anymore, while his powers could potentially go out-of-control and trap him in a glacier forever.
• Cast from Hit Points: While he has some attacks that don't count on this, the bulk of his damage comes from him taking or doing himself fire damage that he then converts to cold damage.
• Character Development: Undergoes more of it than any other member of the Freedom Five, to the point that it's he, rather than the others, who rallies them together to fight OblivAeon. His "Day in the Life" one-shot also features him taking the time to find and forgive the man who killed his fiancee and led to his depression.
• Counter-Attack: One of his modules makes him do cold damage equal to every time he takes fire damage, while another makes him do one gigantic attack equal to all the fire damage he's taken since his last turn.
• A Day in the Limelight: Has a comic version of this, according to the Letters Page podcast. It starts with him being his usual grumpy loose-cannon self in a fight with Omnitron, only to clock out early so he can meet, talk to, and forgive the person who killed his fiancee in a car accident.
• Deadpan Snarker: A lot of his commentary on his cards, as well as on others' powers.
• Death or Glory Attack: His Termi-Nation promo's power boosts the damage he deals out and takes by 2 for a turn, and the promo has lower HP than his normal or Elemental Wrath versions. This means he can deal out obscene amounts of damage, but is immensely fragile — and when he hits himself, it's boosted by 4^note +2 for the 'dealing damage' boost, +2 for the 'damage received' debuff. It's entirely possible to bring him from full HP to well below zero in a single turn, or to completely restore his hitpoints when he's on the brink of death. Or both.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Went from depressed and apathetic victim who only joined the Freedom Five because his only other choice was to sit alone in an empty room bored out of his mind to, by the time of the OblivAeon crisis and Sentinels Tactics, a genuinely committed hero and a devoted member of the Freedom Five, whom he regards as a new surrogate family. In the RPG, he's gone on to become a mentor to the newest generation of heroes, teaching them the humanities, and to think about the ethics and meaning of what they do.
• Determinator: By the time of the RPG he reaches this sort of paradoxical state where he's so pessimistic that he's effectively impossible to demoralize. He's already gone through so many rock bottom things and come out still kicking that eventually no possible setback fazes him any more.
• Difficult, but Awesome: As mentioned, he's fairly complex — his base power causes him damage, as do most of his one-shot attacks and other powers. But correct use of his equipment makes him quite formidable, able to constantly counter attack, do huge amounts of damage after building up, or even heal himself. And because of the mechanics of his primary means of attack (dealing himself fire damage, then dealing a villain the same amount of cold damage), damage buffs double their money on him, since they work on both.
• Dirty Communists: Not Ryan, but his Alternate Universe Evil Doppelgänger The Red Menace, a Pyromaniac who shows up during the OblivAeon battle. Naturally, he's opposed by The Everyman, an American Captain Patriotic version of Proletariat.
• Elemental Absorption: One of his modules heals Absolute Zero every time he takes cold damage.
• Expy: Of Mr. Freeze — ice powers, environment suit, and a girlfriend who actually died as opposed to Victor Fries's beloved, cryogenically suspended Nora — but as a hero. To some extent because he's forced to be (at first), as the government pays for accommodations and will only let him use the suit if he also uses it on their behalf.
• Glass Cannon: Termi-Nation Absolute Zero's Violent Shivers turns him into this, boosting the damage he does by 2 while also increasing how much damage he takes by 2.
• Feed It with Fire: Or in his case, ice — as mentioned above, one module lets Absolute Zero heal when he'd normally take cold damage.
• Freak Lab Accident: The cryogenic explosion that caused his unique condition.
• Good Feels Good: After Wraith pays off the remainder of the debt for his suit, he decides he's happiest being a hero with the Five.
• Heart Light: A blue triangle that functions as his Chest Insignia.
• Hidden Depths: He's a lifelong fan of jazz music, which is the foundation of his friendship with Writhe, and he is a very introspective person under all that depression. This feeds into his becoming a teacher of the humanities in the RPG timeline.
• How Dare You Die on Me!: Gives such a speech to Tachyon, when the latter lies wounded after the initial battle with Progeny. Tachyon starts musing about how so much has changed since the team first formed.
  Tachyon: Legacy called us together to stop Baron Blade. A man. Not a monster from far beyond known space. it all started so very different from—
  Absolute Zero: Don't say "how it ended." It's not over yet, Doc.
• Human Popsicle: Puns aside, he was kept in stasis for a decade after his exposure to Pike Industries chemicals.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Positively relishes making ice-related puns. They're all over his card quotes, and he makes one at the beginning of a match.
  Absolute Zero: Tempers are running hot. Time to cool things down.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's crabby, blunt, sarcastic, and—as he puts it—"doesn't care about being liked" and "isn't there to make friends". But he still can be counted on to be a hero and to care about and make sacrifices to help his friends, and in the end it's him who teaches the Freedom Academy students about the ethics of what being a good person means.
• Kill It with Fire: One half of his powerset in the game, the one tied to his suit.
• Kill It with Ice: The other half of his powers, and the one that's innate to him. Specifically, while he doesn't create fire, he can manipulate cold, in part by draining ambient heat — the more heat he has to work with, the more cold he can generate.
• Kryptonite-Proof Suit: His suit stops him from taking fire damage, in story at least. In gameplay, it can make him immune to and heal from cold attacks.
• The Needless: Ryan Frost's mutation has removed his need to eat, drink, breathe, or sleep. He misses these things.
• Odd Friendship: He and Tachyon are extremely close as friends, even though they don't share many interests or have much in common. For instance, while music is his passion, she can't sit still and quiet her mind enough to properly digest it down, while he doesn't really like the kinds of magic shows she's so fond of. They do both read, and apparently have an ongoing reading circle.
• Personality Powers: Before he got ice powers, Ryan Frost was a deeply depressed person. Afterward, he's still a bit of a downer.
• Playing with Fire: Can cause fire damage as a byproduct of his cold attacks; usually the fire damage he causes to himself, but with a couple cards, he hits enemies with it instead.
• Powered Armor: The cryosuit.
• Power Incontinence: A potential future version of Zero suffers from this.
• Power Palms: Absolute Zero's ice blasts are generated by outlets in his hands. The Focused Apertures card increases Absolute Zero's cold damage, and shows a close-up of them.
• Punch-Clock Hero: At least to begin with, as he needed to pay for the cryosuit. He was actually so unwilling to become a hero at first that he chose to stay in the life-preserving cryo chamber that kept him alive for two years before raw boredom led to him agreeing to join the Freedom Five. Though by the time of Sentinels: Tactics he's voluntarily chosen to stay with the team because they're his only family.
• Rogues Gallery: Ryan himself tends to have fewer of these than most as he lacks adventures where he's a solo hero to pick up people who dislike him personally versus more him just being a hero in their way in general. Proletariat in the card game ends up as Absolute Zero's nemesis more because Baron Blade required a nemesis for a guy who didn't have one and manipulated Proletariat into being one. That said, he eventually picks up a few in a Letters Page episode which backfills a lineup for him: A Dumb Muscle sort of thug going by The Yeti who essentially has a downplayed version of both his power origin and powers, Degenerate who is a young anarchist punk who can dissolve things with her hands, and an alien AI named Schema who is drawn specifically to being obsessed with him and his suit in particular.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: This is basically Ryan's personality in a nutshell. He spends a lot of his time being surly, aloof, and sarcastic, but it's due to a combination of his depression, and both a fear of being hurt by losing someone again and a fear of hurting others with his powers.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: Ryan Frost ended up with ice powers.
• What You Are in the Dark: Despite his constant griping how he hates everything about being a hero and he "doesn't want to be there", it's still the case that any time a villain actually offers him a self-serving way out he always turns them down and does the right thing anyway, even when there's no one around but him to care.
• Wrecked Weapon: Absolute Zero's stuff is constantly being trashed in card art. Lampshaded on the flavor text for team villain Baron Blade's card "Turn the Tables":
  "Every time! Someone always destroys my gear! What's with these guys?!"

Aeon Girl

Aeon Girl

Debut: Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook

Team: Daybreak

During the OblivAeon event, the hero known as Lifeline (formerly the villain Deadline) absorbed a massive amount of cosmic energy from one of OblivAeon’s Scions, Aeon Master. Unable to contain this energy, he used it to generate a new being who comes to be known as Aeon Girl. Afterwards, he goes off to have space adventures, leaving Aeon Girl in the care of the heroes at Freedom Plaza.

Taking the name Windy Farrum, Aeon Girl becomes a student at Freedom Academy, learning to be a hero alongside her fellow classmates in the team Daybreak.

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• Amazing Technicolor Population: Aeon Girl’s skin is a sort of dark metallic color.
• Disappeared Dad: Lifeline, the closest thing she has to a dad, kind of just dumps her on the Freedom Plaza heroes and goes off to do space stuff. Any attempts she makes to contact him ultimately fail.
• Energy Absorption: She has the ability to absorb both Cosmic and Infernal energy (both of which are rather nebulous, all-encompassing terms for a variety of energy).
• Energy Beings: She is made entirely of cosmic energy, though unlike most examples she can interact with the world the same way a normal human could.
• Hand Blast: She’s capable of firing blasts of energy from her hands.
• Naïve Newcomer: Aeon Girl is a Naive Newcomer to existing at all. She lacks quite a bit of knowledge about how the world works, requiring her more worldly friends to explain things to her.
• Superpower Lottery: She played it (or rather, Lifeline played it) and won, being one of the most powerful heroes in the Sentinels Universe. Her powers include flight, energy beams, density alteration, teleportation, energy absorption, and more undiscovered powers. Her only limit is her unwillingness to delve deeper into her powers without mastering what she already knows.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Aeon Girl is pretty much always positive no matter what.

The Argent Adept

The Argent Adept

Debut: Infernal Relics (Enhanced), base game (Definitive)
Team: Prime Wardens

Voiced By: Anthony Badell

"Virtuosos of the ages, lend me your strength!"

The latest hero to hold the title of Virtuoso of the Void, Anthony Drake learned of his destiny upon taking hold of a the ancient Chinese bell of Xu: To stop the avatar of annihilation Akash’Bhuta.

Argent's deck focuses heavily on buffing and supporting other players, along with stringing together combos using instruments and melodies to achieve powerful effects.

Argent's alt forms are Prime Wardens Argent Adept, the costume he assumes after founding the Prime Wardens to defeat Akash'Bhuta, Kvothe Six-String Argent Adept/Dark Conductor Argent Adept ^note since Kvothe was created and sold for the The Kingkiller Chronicle author's charity, Dark Conductor is a version of the card with different artwork/flavor that was made so people could have a complete variant set without infringing on the charity card, representing the period of time when he fell under the influence of the Crimson Conductor's Baton, and XTREME Prime Wardens Argent Adept, his punk rock-themed Alternate Self from the XTREMEverse. Definitive edition thus far adds First Appearance Argent Adept, representing his first ever appearance in Sentinel Comics.

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• Achilles' Heel: To be effective, needs both his instruments (which are equipment) and his music (which are ongoing cards.) This makes him take a bit longer than most other heroes to set up, and means that he's vulnerable to villain cards that destroy either - in particular, losing all his ongoing cards can leave him with a bunch of instruments and nothing to play with them. Also, not to put to find a point on it, while there are many heroes who can pull out a win when all their teammates have fallen, the Argent Adept isn’t usually one of them. He has a couple minor attacks, but without allies to boost to victory he will usually struggle to win on his own.
• Alliterative Name: He's the current Virtuoso of the Void, and he and all his predecessors have color-themed alliterative titles: the Amber Accompanist, the Sallow Skald, the Jade Jinx, the Cerulean Sorcerer, Sister Saffron, the Crimson Conductor, the Chartreuse Chanteuse, and, of course, the Argent Adept.
• Artifact of Doom: The previous Virtuosos of the Void became such because of their affinity for both the Void and for music, not necessarily for being good people (although most were). At least one of these "dark" instruments, the baton of the Crimson Conductor, has a negative effect on the bearer's personality. After reclaiming it from one of Biomancer's flesh constructs, Anthony almost loses himself to its power. Only by the time of Tactics has he learned to manage it properly.
• Art Initiates Life: In Arataki's universe he's the Argent Artist, since the Virtuosos are all "Vessels of the Void" who cast their magic via various types of visual arts and crafting rather than music.
• Artistic License – Music:
  • The art on Telamon's Lyra actually depicts a lute.
  • Likewise, the art on Musaragni's Harp actually depicts a lyre.
  • Scherzo of Frost and Flame is a card which deals 1 point of cold damage and 1 point of fire damage. A scherzo is typically a playful, lighthearted composition. Not technically wrong, exactly, but still perhaps thematically odd.
  • Sarabande of Destruction is a card that instantly destroys any Ongoing or environment card. A sarabande is a slow elegant court dance (and the related music). Again, not wrong, exactly, but a bit odd.
• Asexuality: Originally, this was just the nature of the comics of his era. Nowadays, it's been established that he is indeed both asexual and aromantic.
• Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: His outfit in the RPG goes from his usual "bard superhero" look to "D&D bard that happens to be in a superhero comic".
• Badass Cape: A constant in all of his variants in the main game, including Kvothe and Dark Conductor. He seems to have eventually traded it for a Scarf of Asskicking in the Tactics box art, though, and drops it completely in the RPG.
• The Bard: Both thematically and practically: a good Argent Adept plays support for his team using musical instruments.
• The Bartender: Before becoming a hero, he did odd jobs between gigs. Kvothe Six-String's incapacitated art has him doing this to represent some sort of Despair Event Horizon that pushed him into retirement.
• Blood Magic: The baton of the Dark Conductor came from a power-hungry virtuoso who dabbled in it, and its power includes this form of magic.
• Call to Adventure: A twist is that his came late, as Akash'Bhuta killed and devoured his predecessor and smashed his fiddle to slow the transmission of musical knowledge to Anthony.
• The Chosen One: The current Virtuoso of the Void.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: In the Shipping episode, the creators say it's a Running Gag in the Prime Wardens book that whenever they show up to save the day, there inevitably is a bunch of onlookers who swoon over the "aloof pretty boy musician". This then leads his teammates to have to explain that "sorry folks he's just not interested in anything but his music" (though of course this generally just intrigues everyone even more).
• Color Character: "Argent" being another word for "silver." All the other Virtuosos had their own colors.
• Crucified Hero Shot: His base incapacitated artwork shows him bound to a wooden X with a pile of skulls in the foreground.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: In "Polyphoric Flare" he's seen firing one of his spells back through his own chest to take out Siege-Breaker who's got him in a chokehold.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Focuses on stringing together increasingly long and intricate action combos utilizing three different types of music with a Perform and an Accompany component. Used correctly, the Argent Adept can magnify the number of actions of the entire team... but he needs to have both an instrument and some music out to work to his full potential, and you have to be able to plan ahead to get out the ones you need when you need them. On top of this, since his best powers are about giving other people additional actions, you don't just have to know his deck perfectly, you need to understand all of your allies as well!
• Expy: Of red-headed magician and bartender Kvothe from The Kingkiller Chronicle, to the point that a promo card features Kvothe explicitly. His title and legacy role as one of the world's premier mages and protector of the world from a godlike supernatural entity (Akash'Bhuta standing in for Dormammu) as the Virtuoso of the Void also nod to Doctor Strange's alliterative mantle of the Sorcerer Supreme.
• Glowing Eyes: Almost always depicted with his eyes glowing with the same green hue his magical energies have, though they glow red during the time he's being corrupted by the Crimson Conductor's baton.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: One of the most useful heroes in the game despite having mostly support options and only a couple of weak direct damage attacks, as he can provide almost every single buff and support option in the game. With one of his variants having villain deck manipulation as a potential power, it goes from "almost every" to "every".
• An Ice Person: Scherzo of Frost and Flame is partially a cold attack. The art depicts him trapping an opponent in a block of ice.
• Instrument of Murder: Can break his instruments to destroy cards.
• It's All About Me: In the digital game, to unlock the Crimson Conductor variant, during a winning game with any other version of the Argent Adept on the team, any time the Argent Adept uses an effect that can benefit him, he has to use it on himself. (He can still use it on others if it can affect more than one target.) He also has to deal at least 20 points of damage.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: While his improvisational nature is key to using his powers and saves the day more often than not, there have been a number of times it's instead backfired into this trope, as noted under Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
• Legacy of the Chosen: Whenever Akash'Bhuta awakens, a Virtuoso of the Void arises to do battle with her and force her back into dormancy. However, because she snapped the line of succession generations ago, Anthony is far behind where he should be.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: He originally sports this look, with a combination of shoulder-length red hair, slender features, a slim figure, and an original outfit of an androgynous-looking almost dress-like tunic and leggings. He eventually gets an Expository Hairstyle Change to short-cropped hair and more masculine outfits, but that just turns him into, as one fan put it, "some combination of hunk and pretty boy". At one point the creators crack a joke about him brushing back his hair and having rose petals burst out of it.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: The special power of XTREME Prime Wardens Argent Adept lets him bust out a supersonic rock shout called Rebel Yell. It does a serviceable-but-unimpressive two sonic damage to any target, but turning it on a friendly hero gives them a card play and a power use.
• Magical Flutist: Since he started out as just a singer, Drake eventually creates a set of pipes as his signature instrument after thinking back to his days of playing the recorder as a middle school student.
• Magic Music: How he buffs the team.
• Magikarp Power: It can take the Adept a while to build up to full power, especially if his starting hand isn't very good (e.g. lots of instruments and nothing to play on them), but when he gets there, he becomes an unstoppable support engine.
• The Mentor: He helps the Naturalist gain control of his shapeshifting powers granted from being cursed by Akash'Bhuta, helps Visionary defeat the Dark Visionary side of herself, helps Idealist with a project, and along with Mr. Fixer helps Unity use her powers to build Chrono-Ranger's future AI buddy Con (a.k.a. the Concordant Harmonic Entity). However, because his own training is incomplete, he doesn't have time to fully embrace this trope.
• Musical Assassin: Though most of his tunes enhance his fellow heroes, a couple of them do elemental damage, and the base power of his XTREME! Prime Wardens variant has a direct attack (which can also allow other party members to both play a card and use a power. There's also Cedistic Dominant, which lets him destroy any non-indestructible non-character card (including things which other characters can't affect, like Relics or Progeny's Scion cards) regardless of HP, at the cost of shattering one of his instruments.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • When he destroyed Xu's Bell to destroy one of Voss's ships, it shattered her connection to the physical world from the Void, where she existed on as a spirit, and left her spirit a husk of its former self.
  • When he does this again on purpose to his own Pipes, he's only saved from dying by an equal dubious connection to a conductor's baton tainted by Blood Magic (belonging to the evil Crimson Conductor), which he then leans more and more heavily on until he finally actually breaks his connection to the Void for a time.
  • Then during the OblivAeon conflict he comes up with the idea of summoning the voidforms of the previous Virtuosos to help in the fight. Slight hitch: This turns out to make the main universe similar to another universe where the Virtuosos continue to fight on as voidforms even after they die as mortals... which means OblivAeon can now use his power of being able to collide and instantly destroy any two universes that are too similar. And since the main universe is the only one able to stop OblivAeon, this by extension means OblivAeon can now finally commence with destroying everything as planned. Oops. Only a bit of very quick thinking and interdimensional intervention by La Comodora averts the matter and prevents the destruction.
  • In the Tactics timeline he seems to be less violently following some of the same mistakes as the Crimson Conductor, via collecting Virtuoso power in the form of finding connecting the existing instruments and their power to himself in a way that might once again cut off future Virtuosos from their destiny.
• Not Himself: When he reclaims the baton of the Crimson Conductor from the Carbon Adept, Biomancer's fleshchild Evil Knockoff of him, it begins affecting Anthony's heroic personality, turning him cold, controlling, and arrogant.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: The SFX in the digital game for the power of his Dark Conductor variant features a jarring pipe organ chord.
• Order Versus Chaos: On the side of Order, as represented by his music.
• Playing with Fire: Scherzo of Frost and Flame involves a fire attack. On its own, it's not very effective, but it can catch a melody trigger that would otherwise be wasted.
• The Power of Rock: All of his powers stem from his music. Most of his songs allow him to play one of a couple of different variants, allowing him to have various buffs/debuffs.
• Psychotic Smirk: The incap of his Dark Conductor variant is one of the very few times we see the normally serious and stoic Anthony smiling, but since he's being corrupted by evil influence at the time it ends up being incredibly creepy and disturbing◊. It then goes straight up into a full-blown Slasher Smile in one of his portraits in the digital version.
• Punk Rock: One of his alternate universe twins seems to be a rebellious punk rocker (with "Rebel Yell" as a power), as a meta Affectionate Parody of the The Dark Age of Comic Books.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Anthony's power aura is normally green. However, when he's being overwhelmed by the spirit of the Crimson Conductor through his baton, his eyes instead begin glowing red.
• Redhead In Green: In the RPG timeline his outfit is a silver vest over a forest green shirt and trousers. Almost happened in the card game as well, since they almost went with "Viridian Virtuoso" (a bluish-green color) as his superhero name before deciding it was a bit too much of a mouthful.
• Retroactive Legacy: The previous Virtuosos of the Void weren't mentioned before his introduction.
• Rockers Smash Guitars: Not usually much into rock, but the Perform effect of Cedistic Dominant allows him to destroy any non-character card in play with the power unleashed by breaking any of his magical instruments.
• Rogues Gallery: Akash'bhuta, the avatar of natural destruction and chaos that the Virtuoso of the Void is summoned forth to battle; Ruin, a skeletal monstrosity that feeds on the Void energy contained within his music; and — along with the rest of the Prime Wardens — Balarian, a monster from another universe with tentacles and what the Adept considers a worrying amount of teeth.
• Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: On account of being inspired by Kvothe. Also the energy from his spells is neon-green-hued, which means he frequently is depicted with glowing green eyes to boot.
• Spell Book: In the Tactics timeline he has gathered so much power in the form of instruments that he can't contain it all, so he has Harpy teach him a ritual that creates a magical songbook that contains and is attuned to his personal power, which then connects the various instruments to the songbook instead of to the Void. It's implied this is not actually a very good idea, but neither Harpy nor Anthony realize it at the time.
• Squishy Wizard: Both in- and out-of-universe. In game mechanics he can do many powerful effects with his magic but his variants tend to have the least HP of any solo hero (i.e. other than the Southwest Sentinels) in the game, his base HP of 24 tied with a select few other characters, like Void Guard Dr. Medico and Idealist, and Tempest and Omnitron-X's variants; with his Crimson Conductor variant, at only 23 HP, the only solo hero with lower HP is Void Guard Writhe. In the game's lore he's of average height and much slimmer in build than the other male characters and has no fighting skills to speak of. In the Vengeance event Baron Blade even takes him out simply by sneaking up behind him and sucker-punching him during a moment he's too distracted to react with a spell.
• Summon to Hand: He can summon instruments out of the Void to perform his different songs of power.
• Support Party Member: One of the most straightforward examples, with a variety of ways of healing and buffing his teammates, debuffing enemies by removing their ongoing cards, and destroying environment cards, but little in the way of direct damage and, at the time of his introduction, the lowest base HP of any hero.
• Technician Versus Performer: The Performer to NightMist's Technician. As opposed to her scholarly, carefully-practiced approach to magic, Anthony prefers improvising, working on the fly with the instruments and music available to him. Ironically, thanks to his connection to the Void and the careful order of his music, his on-the-fly style produces more-reliable results than their chaos-magic.
• Tenor Boy: The sound effect of him singing for his Vocalize power in the digital game reveals him to be this. Further solidified by the creators picking Billy Boyd as their Hypothetical Casting for the voice of his animated version.
• The Tragic Rose:
  • A feature of the Crimson Conductor's baton, as a symbol and enabler of its partly Blood Magic nature.
  • In his RPG version Anthony is seen wearing a rose tied to one of his upper arms for unknown reasons.
• Wandering Minstrel: A modern variant.
• Worthy Opponent: In the digital version Akash'Bhuta notes that she actually kinda likes Anthony's XTREME punk rock alternate universe double better for being "loud and dissonant" and "chaotic", though she's still going to kill him anyway.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: In the Vertex Universe he eventually loses sight of his original heroic aims and instead becomes obsessed with gaining more and more Void power via collecting every Virtuoso instrument he can find. As a result the Singular Entity of Conquest eventually chooses him as a champion in the Prime War, wanting him to "find the Virtuosos of the Void of the realities and take their power". At least at first, Anthony is, shall we say, less than thrilled about being chosen/recognized this way.

Alpha

Alpha

Debut: Rook City Renegades

"You call yourself a king. You will fall like so many tyrants before you: weak, alone, crying in the dark."

By day, Tabitha Taft is a brusque, brash, and tenacious reporter for the Rook City Record. By night, she's the Werewolf superhero Alpha. Ordinarily, she has an above average amount of control over her Werewolf instincts but sometimes that control slips.

Mechanically speaking, Alpha deals a lot of damage. Unfortunately, she can't always control where that damage goes and she can just as easily end up wiping out her fellow heroes as the villain she's fighting. An important part of her deck are her Aspect cards, which give various effects as long as they're in play but can be harmful as if there are three or more of them out they force Alpha to deal damage to the target with the lowest HP, no matter who that target is.

Alpha has three variants, First Appearance Alpha, representing her first ever appearance in Sentinel Comics as The Wolf-Woman, Reporter Alpha, representing her as the reporter Tabitha Taft, sniffing (pun intended) out scoops for the Rook City Record, and Alpha 2000, representing an unpopular time in comics where she got an edgy cyberpunk makeover and didn't struggle so much with the whole "killing innocents" thing.

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• '90s Anti-Hero: The Alpha 2000 era is a parody of this, with Alpha abandoning all qualms about killing and eating people and getting kitted out with edgy futuristic Wolf-Tek gadgets. Additionally, Alpha 2000 era Tabitha is deliberately drawn with an absurdly small waist.
• Achilles' Heel: When up against a villain or environment with very few and/or beneficial targets, Alpha frequently becomes a liability as the player will have difficulty keeping her from taking out a helpful target or even her fellow heroes.
• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Alpha's claws are capable of shredding human flesh rather easily and are her main source of damage alongside her teeth.
• I Am a Humanitarian: While normally Alpha is super against killing people, with her struggle to keep her Werewolf killing instincts under control being a huge part of her deck mechanically, she was a lot more blasé about it during the Alpha 2000 era, as represented by the card Fatal Feast which shows her having outright eaten a guy.
  Alpha: A girl's gotta eat, and this girl is awfully hungry.
• Intrepid Reporter: Her day job is as a reporter for the Rook City Record and she's noted to be particularly tenacious and as having a "nose for a scoop." Her as a reporter is even one of her variants.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Alpha lines up pretty well with a lot of usual werewolf tropes, having become a werewolf via being bitten and often struggling to keep her wolfish nature in check. The exception is during the Alpha 2000 era where she becomes a pseudo-cyborg who has no qualms with killing.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Alpha is fairly against killing, with her First Appearance variant's incap even being her horrified at the possibility that she killed somebody while a Werewolf.
• Wolves Always Howl at the Moon: The card "Bloodcurdling Howl" features Alpha howling at the moon in its art.
• Wonderful Werewolf: For all her struggles with controlling her animal instincts Alpha is generally a nice and heroic person.

Beacon/Young Legacy/Legacy IV

Young Legacy (Multiverse Era)/Beacon (Miststorm Timeline)/Legacy IV (RPG Timeline)

Debut: Base game (Legacy deck), America's Newest Legacy promo card
Team: Freedom Five (card game & Tactics), Daybreak (Sentinel Comics RPG)

"Out of the way, drones! Or, I mean, please do stay in the way! Look, just line up for me, OK?"

Being Legacy's daughter, Pauline Felicia Parsons is the eighth member of the Parsons family line, and adds laser vision to her family's Legacy of powers. Young Legacy is an alternate form of Legacy; therefore Young Legacy has no deck of her own, but can replace her father and use his deck if she is a player's chosen hero. However in both the Tactics and RPG universes Beacon becomes more of her own person both in- and out-of-universe.

In the card game, she shares a deck with her father; as such, many of the tropes related to gameplay and their respective powersets in Legacy's folder also apply to her.

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• Affirmative-Action Legacy: The first female Legacy since the family first got powers in the late 1700s, to the point where her father is Paul Parsons VIII.
• Arch-Enemy: Baron Blade, like her father before her.
• Coming of Age Story: Felicia's origin as America's Youngest Legacy. After her father is killed by Baron Blade, she takes charge, arranges his funeral and steps in as the new Legacy.
• Discard and Draw: In card game terms, she trades in some of her father's utility (his Galvanize power) for a reliable attack, allowing her to be more active instead of acting as pure support.
• Distaff Counterpart: Of her father. In the third timeline presented in Sentinels Tactics, Young Legacy takes the name of Beacon until her father passes the title of Legacy to her.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": She doesn't make too big a deal out of it, but she prefers to go by "Felicia" instead of "Pauline".
• Expy: Visually, in terms of costume, and card art, she's a dead ringer for Supergirl, with the same powerset and the same slight build compared to resident Flying Brick Legacy, the resident Superman expy — although she's the previous Legacy's daughter rather than his cousin..
• Eye Beams: Each member of the Parsons line adds a new superpower to the Parsons legacy; Felicia's addition is a set of eye beams she dubbed "the Atomic Glare".
• Generation Xerox: She's training to be a hero like her father, and even has the same powers as him. However, she has laser vision in addition to the powers she inherited from him.
  • Subverted as Beacon. She tends to be more brash and hands-on than her father, preferring to use her invulnerability to get up close to her enemies and hit them with her Atomic Glare.
• Hot-Blooded: Beacon is a lot more aggressive and eager to jump into a fight than her father is. In Tactics she's seen throwing around furniture in annoyance when the Operative insists on playing coy with her, and is frustrated at being left behind to "babysit" while her dad is off fighting.
• Missing Mom: There's no mention of Felicia's mother either in her or her dad's or Iron Legacy's back stories. Plus, Legacy takes care of household tasks (at least he cooks). Word of God, however, says that she's alive and fine — she's just busy as a U.S. Senator and not involved in the family superheroics, and therefore doesn't show up in the card game. Her only on-card appearance, according to the Letters Page podcast, is as a hostage in the Madame Mittermeier’s Fantastical Festival of Conundrums & Curiosities environment deck. She appears in artwork in the RPG corebook as well.
• Odd Friendship: With Expatriette: They've both been significantly influenced by their super-powered parents, in completely opposite directions.
• Secret Identity: She has two - her birth name of Pauline Parsons, and the name she registered for college under, "Felicia Fields".
• Ship Tease: The Weekly One-Shots really like pairing her with Heroic Luminary (the female version of Baron Blade from an alternate timeline where Legacy is a villain). One of them (which has her, Heroic Luminary, Expatriette, and Setback versus Ambuscade) is even named "Double Date".

Benchmark

Benchmark

Debut: Benchmark mini-expansion
Team: None, affiliated with RevoCorp

"Huh. Well, I'd say I didn't sign up for this, but that's obviously not the case."

Randall Butler is Benchmark, a Cyborg superhero created by the infamously-shady corporation RevoCorp. While they originally planned to release him as part of a devious scheme involving disabling most of the world's superheroes, they've instead decided to let him out to help with the OblivAeon crisis. Either he'll save the world and earn them a ton of good publicity, or everything everywhere will die and then it will hardly matter.

He has one variant, Supply and Demand, from an alternate reality where he's the only hero left in the world, backed by the benevolent angel-investor-funded RevoCorp.

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• The Ace: Deconstructed. Randall Butler was a man born with a huge array of natural talents, from academics to charisma and good looks, to athletic ability, and never had to work hard at anything in his life to get ahead. While he's not really arrogant, he's very self-centered, and has some foolish and simple ideas about how the world works.
• Achilles' Heel: He needs to have a lot of equipment and ongoing cards out in order to operate at maximum efficiency, and the number of Software cards he can keep in play is directly capped by how many Hardware cards he has out. This limits his usefulness against villains who quickly destroy hero cards, and against those like Baron Blade and Omnitron who can deal damage based on how many cards the heroes have in play, he can be more of a hindrance than a help.
• Arch-Enemy: OblivAeon. An Omnicidal Maniac like that does tend to inspire hostility.
• Birds of a Feather: Ends up dating Unity in the RPG timeline after the events of OblivAeon, thanks to their shared experiences of being screwed over by RevoCorp. Also, a cyborg and a technopath is just a good match.
• Character Development: After the OblivAeon event, he learns that being a hero is about more than just trying to be cool and heroic to impress people. In the Tactics timeline, in which people turn against heroes en masse, he decides that he's not really cut out to be a hero, and goes back to acting and charity work to try to make the world a better place. In the RPG timeline, in which RevoCorp gets bought out by a better-natured company, he instead stays as Benchmark, and for the right reasons.
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: The basis of his character — he was recruited by RevoCorp to (unwittingly) disable and supplant the world's superheroes. Then OblivAeon showed up, and they decided they'd be better off saving the world first, and basking in the good P/R. His Character Development in the metanarrative has him eventually grow out of this, and turn against his corporate masters.
• Counter-Attack: Countermeasures, preemptively. Mechanically it works by preventing an attack from a low-HP target, destroying the target outright instead.
• Cyborg: The entire suit isn't hardwired into him, but he does have an interface under his skin to make it work like a part of his body.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: As he builds momentum, he can whittle down single opponents with multiple hits per round. Secondary Cannon and his Inferno Missile Pod are fueled by discarding cards, with many of his other Hardware/Software cards focusing on drawing cards and returning cards from his trash back to his hand.
• Flight: Most of his cards depict him in the air. His go-to damage one-shot, Fly-By, emphasizes his speed and maneuverability, allowing him to strafe multiple targets, then either play an additional card or put Fly-By back in your hand for Benchmark's next turn.
• Genius Bruiser: Randall Butler, even without his suit's powers, is a champion chess player and boxer. Between the two, he's able to disable the Benchmark suit to avoid hurting the other heroes, and then take on Revenant with the broken, hotwired pieces.
• The Gift: Randall Butler, between his good looks, likable personality, brilliant mind, and athletic ability, was born with loads of talent.
• Glory Seeker: Defied. While Randall Butler didn't become Benchmark for the right reasons, he doesn't actually just want to be famous and respected. He just has the wrong idea of what helping people really means.
• Good Twin: Played with. His Supply and Demand variant comes from a Post Cyber Punk universe where he is the only superhero in the world, and RevoCorp is funded by wealthy philanthropists rather than villains. In that reality, many of the villains have the powers of their heroic nemeses, and the world has never had any superheroes before him.
• Healing Factor: His Subcutaneous Cybernetics allow him to heal from Scratch Damage, regaining HP at the end of his turn and the first time he's damage each other turn.
• Improbable Piloting Skills: Subverted. Fly-By and other cards show him outflying enemy targets and strafing enemy targets with laser blasts, but his abilities have a lot to do with the suit's automated systems.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Though he has a giant ego it also seems that he doesn't really consider himself a true hero as indicated by some of his cards' flavor text.
  "Come on, come on, come on... you're making me look bad in front of all the REAL heroes!"
  —Load on Initialization
• Macross Missile Massacre: His "Inferno" Missile Pod fires a spread of missiles at the end of his turn, dealing a death of a dozen fiery explosions to a single target. Countermeasures is also based on firing missiles back at his pursuers.
• Meaningful Name: Benchmarking refers to comparing corporate practices/performance metrics against industry standards from other companies, and attempting to create best practices from what your competitors are doing. It applies to both how RevoCorp built the suit in the first place, as well as how Randall, despite his good intentions, is constantly comparing himself to other heroes, rather than focusing on saving people first and foremost, regardless of how cool he looks or who's the "better" superhero.
• More Dakka: Less so than Bunker, but his Secondary Cannon is a small, ring-shaped drone outfitted with machine guns, dealing projectile damage each time you discard a card.
• Necessary Drawback: His deck features two kinds of cards: Hardware cards, and Software cards. Software cards are much more powerful than Hardware, but he can't have more Software in play than Hardware without destroying two Software cards. This is part of what makes his variant's power of playing the top card of his deck a bit of a risk.
• The Paragon: Deconstructed. Randall Butler genuinely wants to be a hero and help people, but thanks to his charmed life, he thinks he can do this via, at first, being an actor, then being a superhero mascot.
• People Puppets: When RevoCorp overrides his suit and has him attack his alies, he can see and feel everything that's happening but can't control any of it.
• Powered Armor: The Benchmark suit. Much more form-fitting than the Bunker armor, however.
• Robo Cam: His visor, especially when control of his suit gets overridden by RevoCorp.
• Science Hero: Subverted. Very much a case of what technology can accomplish, but it's not his technology, and RevoCorp's motives are suspect at best. He does learn quickly enough to disable the suit when it goes on a RevoCorp-initiated rampage against Benchmark's fellow heroes Parse and Setback, both, like Benchmark, (former) RevoCorp employees.
• Stat-O-Vision: Supplied by his big red visor. The incapacitated side of his Collector's Edition base card has the suit scanning Parse and Setback just before RevoCorp forces him to attack them both.
• Transformation Sequence: The card art for Deployment Actuation shows a rocket powered drone catching Randall in midair and suiting him up.
• Unwitting Pawn: Benchmark is unaware of the more sinister activities of his employer/sponsor, RevoCorp. His incapacitated art shows him being forced to attack a former RevoCorp employee and an ex-guinea pig (Parse and Setback, respectively) thanks to Directive 4.
• Walking Armory: A heavily equipment-based deck, with standard kinetic weapons, lasers, missiles, cold projectors, armor, shielding, and the onboard computer systems to make them all work at Randall's command.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: Easy — as a Corporate-Sponsored Superhero, all his weapons, equipment, and the software to run it are supplied by his parent company, RevoCorp.
• X-Pac Heat: In-universe. In the metafiction, Benchmark was supposed to be a complex figure who came across as likable, but still naive and in need of personal growth, so that he could show that growth during the OblivAeon event. However, the readers of the comics instead found him kind of insufferable, partly because he kept showing up to save beloved and well-established heroes in their books in the process. This faded, fortunately, following the immediate aftermath of OblivAeon.

Bunker

Bunker

Debut: Base game (Enhanced), base game (Definitive)
Team: Freedom Five; Freedom Six (Iron Legacy timeline)

BUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDA

Lt. Tyler Vance is a mechanic serving in the armed forces. Due to his skill during a situation in the Middle East, the government recruited him for their Freedom Five initiative and gave him the Personal Armament Exo-Chassis YS-1300t suit.

Bunker's playstyle focuses on equipping weapons and components to his suit and then inflicting massive damage. He can switch between different modes to draw equipment cards, equip them, and then start unloading upon villains, although he is relatively vulnerable early on while deploying his weapons.

Bunker's Alternate forms are G.I. Bunker, Engine of War, Termi-Nation Bunker, and Freedom Five Bunker. Similar to Legacy's Alternate forms, Bunker's first two Alt Forms are different characters: The Engine of War is the villainous Fright Train, who in the Alternate Timeline joined the Freedom Six to oppose Iron Legacy, and G.I. Bunker is the World War 2 soldier who wore the first version of the armor. The third is a refit he goes through after encountering the technology-absorbing villain Chokepoint. Definitive Edition thus far adds First Appearance Bunker, representing his first ever appearance in Sentinel Comics, and Stealth Suit Bunker, which is an alternate suit meant for stealth operations.

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• Achilles' Heel: He's dependent upon his equipment to get any of his strategies going, which can be preyed upon by certain villains (e.g. Chokepoint). Furthermore, his strongest damage dealing card, Omni-Cannon, requires a great deal of cards fed into it in order to deal massive damage, and while he does have several ways to draw cards his main one - Ammo Drop - requires enemy cards to be destroyed.
• Affirmative-Action Legacy: Zig-zagged, as while the current Bunker is white and his successor is black, playing it straight, it's inverted as G.I. Bunker was also black. So the known wearers of the suit are black-white-black.
• Arm Cannon: Both his Flak Cannon and Gatling Gun replace an arm of his suit.
• Armor Piercing: G.I. Bunker's baseline power lets him pick a target, and all damage dealt to that target is irreducible.
• Boring, but Practical: Bunker’s kit isn’t complex, and he doesn’t specialize at any given role, but it doesn’t take long for him to provide immediate fire support for his teammates; all he needs is the right equipment card at the given time. This is useful against villains who are a damage race to win against, such as Deadline.
• Chummy Commies: Not in the main timelines, but in an Alternate Universe seen during the OblivAeon battle the Bunker equivalent is a red-starred hero named Cold War.
• Crazy-Prepared: Bunker’s entire kit can be treated as this. He can deal multiple sources of damage (projectile, fire, energy), can deal damage to multiple targets (either all non-heroes or selectively), has extra armor for dealing with damage (Heavy Plating and Recharge Mode), heal himself (Maintenance Unit), can stop the environment from playing a card to avoid more unanticipated changes to the game (Adhesive Foam Grenade), has several different “Mode” cards which can affect his ability to tank damage or deal more damage of his own, and has several ways of drawing cards just in case he can’t get what he needs at first. Justified, as in-universe Bunker is a One-Man Army mechanized suit of armor designed to fight in several different terrains and combat varying threats.
  • The Engine of War variant also gives more utility to Bunker’s deck by granting him a way to destroy Ongoing cards, something no other variant can do.
• Determinator: G.I. Bunker died fighting his way through a Nazi fortress single-handed. As his suit took damage and began to lock up, he tore the damaged parts off rather than retreat or surrender. His incapacitated art depicts him down to a pistol, missing his helmet and one arm of the suit, with his fuel tank on fire, yet he's still pushing forward.
• Discard and Draw: Termi-Nation Bunker's base power, Modulize, requires him to destroy one of his Ongoing or Equipment cards, but in exchange he can draw a card, play a card, and use a power in whichever order the player chooses. That's essentially an entire second turn, for the record.
• Expy: He's one of War Machine, as a military hero in powered armor.
• Gatling Good: His card Gatling Gun, which deals damage to a single target at the start of each of Bunker's turns- so long as you discard a card at the end of his turns. It’ll still continue to gun down opponents even while he is using a Mode card, making it a reliable source of damage as long as you have cards to spare.
• Guns Akimbo: All of Bunker's damage dealing powers are gun related. His Turret Mode card takes this up to eleven with the fact that not only are both of his arms turned into gatling guns, he even can use his other powers like Flak Cannon; Grenade Launcher; and Omni-Cannon, along with potentially having a Gatling Gun card active on top of all that firepower.
• Heel–Face Turn: The Engine of War Bunker variant features a different pilot than normal, the once villainous Fright Train, in a Bad Future where Legacy goes mad with power; becomes known as Iron Legacy; and murders Tyler Lance, the original operator of the Bunker suit. Fright Train decided to give up a life of crime and help out people instead, which led to the Tachyon of that timeline recruiting him while providing him with an experimental Bunker suit due to his military background. Humorously, Fright Train was too big to fit into the suit, so it was hollowed out and used instead as armor complete with guns.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The WWII Bunker, Engine of Freedom, went down in a blaze of glory, taking on a Nazi bunker single-handed in order to kill Hitler.
• Hyperaffixation: Bunker has a number of devices called the "Bunker-[something]", most notably the "Bunker-Copter" in the Tactics timeline.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The vast majority of Bunker's attacks deal projectile damage, lots of it, and don’t have complicated strategies involved to work nor are Cast from Hit Points.
• Kill It with Fire: External Combustion overheats Bunker's armor - dealing damage to himself as a result - in return for dealing heavy fire damage to all non-hero targets.
• The Lancer: To Legacy's Hero.
• Military Superhero: Played with. Bunker is considered a hero first, military man second, but he is affiliated with the military due to their involvement in the Freedom Five Initiative. The team tends to lean on him for strategic operations, which makes sense considering his background of fighting in Fallujah.
• More Dakka: Especially in Turret Mode. The card's flavor text lampshades this, with "BUDDABUDDABUDDA" filling the entire text bubble.
• Official Couple: In the RPG timeline, he and Wraith have gotten together.
• One-Man Army: The Bunker suit is described as having as much firepower as an entire armored battalion. Even its predecessor, the GI Bunker, smashed through a entire fortress filled with Nazis during World War II by himself in order to take out Hitler.
• Powered Armor: Wears a mechanized suit developed as part of the US military's “Ironclad Project.”
• Real Robot: While the Bunker Suit is fantastic technology, it edges more toward realism than something like Iron Man's armor — Tyler is only able to use it because he's also an engineer, and in the prequel comic, he describes operating it as a monumental task in itself. He's constantly having to maintain and improve the suit, and the main reason there aren't armies of Bunkers isn't because the tech is particularly special or unique, but that the thing is very difficult to operate and maintain.
• Rogues Gallery: Fright Train, his Vengeful Five counterpart and old army rival; Miss Information, along with the rest of the Freedom Five; and Chokepoint, a ferropath who hates metal being put to "unworthy" use.
• Superhero Packing Heat: See Walking Armory. Bunker goes into battle loaded for bear.
• Super-Strength: The Engine of War Bunker variant features a heroic version of Fright Train, whose powers listed this amongst others. This is reflected in his baseline power, Locomotion, which allows him to destroy an Ongoing card at the cost of discarding a Mode card in his hand.
• The Team Normal: While he is a skilled military tactician and mechanic, he's nevertheless the most "standard human" of the Freedom Five since even Wraith has her wealth status; finely honed martial arts; and analytical skills. In the "Animated Series" episodes of the Letters Page, he's portrayed as sometimes suffering from a sort of Imposter Syndrome as a result.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Definitive Edition version of Bunker's deck removes the restrictions from his Mode cards, making them straight buffs instead of limitations, and allows him to buff his weapons by putting cards under them, vastly increasing his damage output.
• Walking Armory: He has flak cannons, a minigun, a grenade launcher, missiles (Engine of War variant, and only by appearance), and an Omni-Cannon. On the non-lethal side he has a sticky grenade launcher, which is useful for keeping out unwelcome environment cards while not damaging any friendly ones.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The OmniCannon, which can hit for massive damage. It allows the player to store three cards per turn, then unleash an attack whose damage is double the number of cards stored up that way.

Captain Cosmic

Captain Cosmic

Debut: Wrath of the Cosmos (Enhanced), base game (Definitive)
Team: Prime Wardens

"Who put me in charge? No one. But someone must stand for the world."

One night while Hugh Lowsley and his brother Nigel were stargazing, a purple crystal fell from outer space and struck both them with energy. After awakening, Hugh discovered that he had the ability to create constructs of gold energy. He took the name of "Captain Cosmic" to search for his brother, who had vanished after the purple energy gave Hugh his powers.

In game, Captain Cosmic relies on playing Construct cards to provide bonuses to the hero they are attached to. He can also on occasion destroy them to deal damage when he need to go on the offence.

Captain Cosmic's alternate forms are Prime Wardens Captain Cosmic, depicting his look after joining the titular team, XTREME Prime Wardens Captain Cosmic, his Alternate Self from the XTREMEverse who takes a more aggressive bent on their mutual powers, and Captain Cosmic: Requital, his final variant depicting the new form he takes on after undergoing a Fusion Dance with his brother, Nigel/Infinitor. Definitive Edition thus far adds First Appearance Captain Cosmic, representing his first ever appearance in Sentinel Comics, and Inversiverse Captain Cosmic, a variant from the Inverse Universe where Galactra fills his role.

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• Achilles' Heel: Captain Cosmic can run excellent support for any hero team, and although his constructs are easy to destroy, he has many ways to mitigate this and even turn it to his advantage in both forms. However, his ability to actually deal damage and run touchdowns on his own is very limited, and either heavily-randomized (Harsh Offense), reliant on destroying his constructs (Construct Cataclysm, Potent Disruption, Destructive Response), or tied to a fragile and easily-destroyed contruct (Autonomous Blade, Cosmic Weapon). If his team gets picked off or shut down around him, he will have trouble keeping things going on his own. Also, any effect that does enough damage to destroy a construct outright prevents its effects from going off, and their hitpoints are, again, quite low.
• Badass Longcoat: Sports a nice one in his Prime Wardens variant.
• Boldly Coming: Much like KNYFE, he's another "sleeps with aliens" type during his various space-faring tales, including even an alien princess at least once. Though he is more likely to have actual relationships with said aliens, versus KNYFE's "lay 'em and leave 'em" mentality.
• Cain and Abel: Defied. No matter how bad things get, Hugh never gives up on Nigel's ability to redeem himself, and Nigel never actually brings himself to kill his brother. Even their more-thuggish XTREME variants are still brothers to the end.
• Captain Superhero: Though ironically he's not only not a military Captain but he's not the leader of the Prime Wardens either (he's more The Lancer instead).
• Cast from Hit Points: Unflagging Animation, which lets him play a free construct from out of his trash each turn, at the cost of taking irreducible psychic damage. He also casts from his constructs' HP, destroying them to deal damage based on their remaining health or causing them to aid his allies when damaged.
• Counter-Attack: Wounding Buffer, which damages whomever hurts the hero it's next to. One of his ongoings also causes destroyed constructs to deal damage to other targets, though he can intentionally trigger this himself by detonating them or allowing teammates to detonate them (such as Fanatic using them as improvised throwing weapons with Final Dive).
• Crusading Lawyer: A sort of literal one, since he started out as a barrister before getting his powers.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: His XTREME variant's new power deals a target one energy damage, then causes each of his constructs in play to deal that same target one energy damage.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Some of his constructs, such as Augmented Ally or Unflagging Animation, are copies of his allies.
• Energy Shield: Energy Bracer reduces the damage dealt to whomever it is attached to.
• Expy: One of Green Lantern, a space-traveling cosmic policeman of sorts whose powers allow him to create anything he can imagine as a Hard Light projection, though rather than using green energy for his constructs, Captain Cosmic uses gold energy like Green Lantern's Archenemy Sinestro.
• Hard Light: What his Constructs are made of.
• Laser Blade:
  • Cosmic Weapon, which grants whomever it is attached to a powerful energy attack power.
  • Autonomous Blade is one as well, which can deal damage whenever its user damages something.
• Life Drain: Inverted. His Vitality Conduit funnels the energy contained within it to heal its wearer whenever it takes damage.
• Lower-Class Lout: His XTREME incarnation brandishes guns, and has a much lower-class, more confrontational attitude than his normal counterpart.
• More Dakka: XTREME Captain Cosmic shouts in his intro dialogue in the digital game he has "more golden guns than you've had hot dinners".
• No-Sell: Cosmic Crest makes him and all his constructs immune to all energy damage.
• Rogues Gallery: Infinitor, his own brother who was driven insane by powers similar to Captain Cosmic's, Empyreon, a man whose energy powers harm himself and those around him, Galactra, a woman who claims to wield the true power of the cosmos, and - like the rest of the Prime Wardens - Balarian, a grinning tentacled monstrosity from another universe full of its kind.
• Secret Identity: Mostly back during the Silver Age, when he tried to keep his job as a lawyer as well as being a space superhero. His Letters Page episode has Christopher and Adam commenting on how implausible this was given that he was frequently in space for months at a time.
• Taken for Granite: His Prime Wardens incapacitated artwork shows him transformed into a golden statue.
• Team Dad: Christopher has described him as being "Space Dad" in personality, and he ended up being a father figure to Parse in particular.

Chrono-Ranger/Renegade/Time Slinger

Chrono-Ranger (Multiverse Era)/Renegade (Miststorm Timeline)/Time Slinger (RPG Timeline)

Debut: Shattered Timelines (Enhanced), Disparation (Definitive)

"I'd waste bullets as soon as waste words."

A sheriff from the town of Silver Gulch in 1883, James "Jim" Brooks was hurled though time by accident and sent thousands of years forward into a Bad Future where various cryptids have made mankind all-but extinct. Outfitted with future gear and a time machine by a sapient robot factory, Chrono-Ranger travels through time, ending the monsters in the past before they can ravage the future.

Chrono-Ranger is all about inflicting damage; nearly every card he has either inflicts or amplifies damage. His alternate version is Chrono-Ranger: The Best of Times, after he's temporarily stranded outside the timestream, then recruited and given new gear by La Comodora to help the heroes defeat OblivAeon. Definitive Edition thus far adds Wind-Walker, a long-teased, Gender-Flipped, Native American alternate version of Chrono-Ranger.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • He's very dependent on his bounties. Two of his weapons and Hunter and Hunted key off them, and the bonus damage lets him do more than the ping damage he's usually stuck with. Opponents who can destroy those cards are a serious problem.
  • Enemies with even basic damage reduction can nullify the one point of bonus damage off of many of his cards.
• An Adventurer Is You: DPS. All of his one-shots let him do a single point of damage to targets, and he can mark targets with bounties to amplify the damage further. With his bigger guns (Masada and Danny-boy) plus a few bounties and "Hunter and Hunted", he moves into Nuker territory.
• Anatomy Arsenal: Replaces his missing hand with a variety of different weapons.
• Arch-Enemy: An odd example in Plague Rat, in that Jim's actual archenemies started off as the rat beasts of the Final Wasteland — a species of cryptids apparently descended from the original Plague Rat and his victims. They ate Jim's arm — Plague Rat thinks Chrono-Ranger smells delicious ("Tasty old meat..."). In Villains Mode, meanwhile, he's after the bounty on a young La Capitan.
• Bounty Hunter: One of his core mechanics involves posting and claiming "bounties" on various targets during the match, drawing cards when they're taken out and gaining different benefits for going after them.
• Composite Character: Scarred cowboy Bounty Hunter Jonah Hex, but hurled into the future and drafted as a time cop. Alternatively, Cable but from the Wild West.
• Counter-Attack: The Ultimate Target bounty lets Chrono-Ranger use a power when the target deals damage to anything, not just himself. This can even include the target dealing damage to itself (this can get really funny with Akash'Bhuta, for example).
• Creator's Favorite: Adam deliberately drew Chrono-Ranger to be his ideal of the "rugged manly type", and the resulting mancrush has turned into a Running Gag in the fandom.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: "The Ultimate Target" buffs his own damage against a target, while "By Any Means" increases all damage. "Hunter and Hunted", meanwhile, increases all his damage, dealt and taken, by the number of bounties currently in play.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Jim's not packing massive damage-dealing combos without outside support or his heaviest weapons coupled with bounties. However, he hits often, usually getting multiple shots in per turn, and just about all of his one-shots let him inflict an extra point of damage as a side effect. Paired with a damage booster like Legacy, or his Hunter and Hunted card...
• Glass Cannon: On his own, Chrono has no Damage Reduction and very little healing. He becomes a true Glass Cannon with Hunter and Hunted: With it, the damage he deals and is dealt increases by 1 for every Bounty he has.
• The Gunslinger: He starts with his old six-gun, but can play a variety of other time-displaced firearms.
• I Call It "Vera": Danny-Boy, a flamethrower.
• I Work Alone: A downplayed example. He's willing to fight alongside other heroes if the threat is serious enough, but he never teams up with them in any permanent capacity.
• Mysterious Stranger: He's appeared to assist the other heroes against a number of dangerous villains, such as Akash'Bhuta and The Dreamer, but always departs immediately after. None of the other heroes know much about him.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: He's a time-traveling, cybernetic cowboy bounty hunter.
• Not Himself: Con's bounties start out with Chrono-Ranger going after monsters, but eventually start taking darker and darker turns via asking Jim to go after sapient beings, and then later outright kill them, even though Jim had already made his refusal to kill people clear. Turns out this is because Biomancer had used a Chrono-Ranger clone to compromise Con's systems.
• One-Man Army: His Renegade incarnation in Tactics. He's waging a one-man war with Exemplar and winning, and For Profit doesn't think one man is going to be a match for a team of supervillains.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: He prefers his six-gun, though he will admit that the Masada is a fine piece of work.
• Rogues Gallery: Those arm-thievin' rat beasts in the Final Wasteland environment, Plague Rat, their apparent progenitor who also seems to finds his flesh delicious, the time-traveling bandit La Capitan, and a low-down snake of an alien gunslinger with a Healing Factor named Doc Tusser. The Tactics timeline also has him fighting the forces of Exemplar, known as the Chairman before he started taking all that Psycho Serum, including the mercenary group For Profit.
• Schizo Tech: His arsenal includes a classic six-shooter coupled with an energy cannon, neuro-toxic dartgun, incendiary missile launcher, time-warping grenades, and a cybernetic arm that can turn into a bow-and-arrow.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Chrono-Ranger's objective. The Final Wasteland is full of dangerous monsters. Chrono-Ranger hunts them down in the past, before they can destroy civilization. He also tracks down the occasional dangerous supervillain, such as Ambuscade or Akash'Bhuta.
• Time Travel: Coupled with Big Damn Heroes as his profession. Some of the flavor text on his cards indicates that he simply appears among the rest of the superhero team to deal with the current threat, then tips his hat, turns around, and zaps back home when the job is done. Eventually, the chrono-badge that he uses to move through time is damaged, leaving him stranded in time... until a much older La Capitan finds him, offers him help, and he agrees to help her right her previous mistakes, becoming his alternate Best of Times version.
  • Additionally, he's actually the only character with time travel as every other character who supposedly comes from the future actually comes from an Alternate Universe. The only other person who comes close to actual time travel is La Capitan and she's still technically traveling between universes it's just that she can visit the same universe more than once in a row.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: In-universe, Jim is fine with killing all manner of monsters, but draws the line at killing human beings to prevent the Bad Future. However, he ultimately has few qualms about horrifically destroying Doc Tusser by turning his Healing Factor against itself, even though the creature is clearly intelligent.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: Con, an artificial intelligence from a Bad Future, keeps him supplied with advanced weaponry.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Hates the giant rats of the Final Wasteland, after one ate his arm.

Expatriette

Expatriette

Debut: Rook City (Enhanced), Rook City Renegades (Definitive)
Team: Dark Watch

Voiced By: Blythe Renay

"One for wrath...and one for ruin."

The human daughter of Citizen Dawn, Amanda Cohen was born without powers, a failure for which her father was murdered. She left the compound of the Citizens of the Sun, and made her way to Rook City after a "disagreement" with her mother that cost her her eye. There, she became the vigilante gunfighter Expatriette, coming to respect and admire the superhero community before becoming a part of it.

Expatriette's entire deck is built around three things: getting guns, putting specialized ammunition them, and shooting the enemy with said guns, many, many times.

Expatriette's alternate form is Dark Watch Expatriette, the costume she wears after founding the Dark Watch. Definitive Edition thus far adds First Appearance Expatriette, representing her first ever appearance in Sentinel Comics, and Expatriette: Eclipse, from a brief arc where she works undercover as a "villain".

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• Abnormal Ammo: Can do elemental damage with certain bullets.
• Achilles' Heel: Has a level of equipment dependency rivalling the Wraith, but with worse tutor effects to bring them out and very little in the way of card draw.
• Art Shift: Reload is black-and-white, with prominent blood spatter in the background.
• Badass Normal: Nearly everyone else has superpowers, hyper-advanced technology, crazy biology, time-traveling ability, and magic to back them up. Expatriette simply packs a massive arsenal of guns and the skills to use them.
• Boring, but Practical: Other damage dealing heroes might spike higher with enough set-up time, but Expatriette comes online the minute she has one or two guns in play and can provide steady fire-support throughout the game.
• Bulletproof Vest: Flak Jacket. It will completely prevent any one attack that would deal at least three points of damage.
• Character Development: Went from a bitter, scarred vigilante with a big grudge against all people with superpowers to a happier person who's worked through many of her issues over the course of the storyline.
• Composite Character: She's a female version of The Punisher — a Badass Normal who relies purely on her Training from Hell and being a Walking Armory of various guns, to fight both normal criminals as well as supers. She also has shades of the Huntress, with her blue-black and white tights, her Let's You and Him Fight Cape Busters career hunting other superhumans early on before she realized they weren't all as bad as the Citizens of the Sun, and in particular the fact that her archenemy is her parent.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Not on one of her cards, but on Setback's Dark Watch variant's incapacitated side, it depicts him holding her in this manner, though it's unclear if she's supposed to be injured or dead.
• Disappeared Dad: When Citizen Dawn was torturing her in hopes of unlocking latent powers (the incident in which Expatriette lost her eye), her father tried to intervene, and Dawn killed him for it. This cemented Amanda's decision to leave. Out of universe, Amanda's father was going to appear in Citizen Dawn's deck, but was cut during the design phase; him being dead in-universe is an in-joke to this.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Amanda is a child of two cult-like parents, one of whom are disappointed that she was born 'different' from them, eventually casting her out on the streets. Over time, she learns that there's nothing wrong with her, and that she's got both the mental and physical strength to compete with people like her parents. If this weren't a game about super heroes, Expatriette's backstory would have a slightly different tone.
• Emergency Stash: She keeps these all over the place in the form of stashed weapons, ammunition, and other supplies. Word of God is that this is what is represented whenever you play one of her Gun cards; it's her digging it out from one of these stashes.
• Eyepatch of Power: She lost her eye in battle when she left the Citizens of the Sun.
• Firing One-Handed: Expatriette does this with an assault rifle.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Downplayed. She smokes in Arsenal Access and Quick Draw, but appears to avoid it when she's working.
• Guns Akimbo: Almost as big an offender as Bunker. With the right build, she can actually wield five guns simultaneously. One of her signature pistols even has a rider on its power usage to let you use the other one for free.
• The Gunslinger: Her playstyle is all about pulling out a bunch of different guns and trick ammunition, and letting rip once you're set up.
• Had to Be Sharp: She grew up in a primordial volcanic island full of dinosaurs where she was the only kid without any superpowers. If she weren't tough as nails and twice as stubborn, it wouldn't have been an environment she could survive in. She learned how to deal with people who have superpowers as a girl, hence her original appearance as an expert mercenary specializing in taking them out.
• Harmful to Minors: Amanda was twelve when Citizen Dawn got impatient for her powers to emerge and burned out her eye to try to jump-start the process. Then killed her father in front of her. It prompted her to steal some old poacher's guns and set out on her own through a dinosaur-infested jungle.
• Heel–Face Turn: In her "comic" backstory, mirroring The Punisher. She originally shows up as a mercenary specializing in taking out people with super powers, with her tragic past only later being filled in, before becoming a somewhat more-conventional hero through her relationship with the other heroes.
• Heroic BSoD: Implied by her Dark Watch variant's Collector's Edition incapacitated art, which sees her training her crosshairs on Zhu Long's newest recruit... only to see it's a mind-controlled Setback.
• Heroic Build: Amanda is 6'1"/180lb and jacked. Not as noticeable in earlier depictions, but more detailed art depicts her all muscled up◊. Even more remarkable as she's a Muggle Born of Mages and has no superpowers - it's all willpower and training.
• I Call It "Vera": Her main guns are a pair of custom pieces she named Pride and Prejudice.
• Kill It with Fire: Incendiary Rounds do more damage and fire damage.
• Kill It with Ice: Liquid Nitrogen Rounds do ice damage and reduce the damage of whoever they hit.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Meta example. Some of her cards' art includes apparently glowing doves flying about, and doves are featured on her custom guns, Pride and Prejudice, leading to speculation among players that she has some kind of power that nobody realizes yet. This theory was later Jossed, however. Or it might just be a John Woo reference.
• Meaningful Name: She's a (female) expatriate of Insula Primalis, banished from Citizen Dawn's new nation for her lack of powers.
• Mexican Standoff: She faces off with an undercover Ambuscade in this manner in Quick Draw.
• More Dakka: Normally, but it gets even crazier if you have all five of her guns out and drop the Unload card, which lets her shoot off all of them at once. Unlocking Dark Watch Expatriette requires you to invoke this - you need to defeat Baron Blade in Rook City by playing Unload and hitting him with the powers of at least three guns.
• Muggle Born of Mages: She's got no powers, making her a pariah and disappointment to the Citizens of the Sun — led by her mother Citizen Dawn, who was expecting to have a child with her own vast powers as a successor.
• Non-Powered Costumed Hero: One of the two major heroic examples (the other being the Wraith).
• Odd Friendship: With Young Legacy. They are both shaped by their super-powered parents in completely different ways.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In Pterodactyl Thief, from the Insula Primalis environment deck, a pterodactyl is stealing Expatriette's rocket launcher. In her card RPG Launcher, she's riding the pterodactyl while shooting a T-Rex with the RPG.
• One-Woman Army: In gameplay, she's able to mow down whole hordes of goons, especially if she attaches Hollow Points to the Submachine Gun or has a couple boosts attached to Shock Rounds. The art for Unload shows her taking on a group of Voss's minions with a gun in each hand and a grenade in her teeth and, given the flavor text is one of Voss's commanders wondering why said platoon hasn't reported in, she apparently wins.
• Pitbull Dates Puppy: Her and Setback's relationship in a nutshell. She's a hyperaggressive gunslinger who feels violence is a perfectly good answer, and he's an adorably sweet Nice Guy.
• Pragmatic Hero: Sticks to simple methods, like shooting anything that gets in her way.
• Quick Draw:
  • One of her cards lets her do 1 damage to any non-hero target as soon as it's played. Properly buffed, she can mow down whole legions of minions before they can even attack.
  • She also has a card named "Quick Draw," which lets her search through her deck for one of her signature guns and put it directly into play.
• Relationship Upgrade: With Setback, as of the point where they've formed the Dark Watch.
• Rogues Gallery: All of the Citizens, really, though Citizen Slash from Baron Blade's Vengeance deck and her abusive mother Citizen Dawn are the only ones she's mechanically the nemesis of. Being part of the Dark Watch also gets her the fallen lawman Heartbreaker. According to one of her cards, she's also had run-ins with Ambuscade, both before and after he was enhanced.
• Shooting Superman: Hollow Points depicts her unloading her weapons into Argentium, a villain made of liquid metal. Although the shots are blowing holes in his body, he only seems mildly annoyed.
• The Strategist: Explicitly stated to be the brains of the Dark Watch.
• Super Hero Packing Heat: We have mentioned that she uses guns, yes?
• Taking the Bullet: Her Dark Watch incapacitated card shows her leaping in front of Setback to shield him from an explosion. His Dark Watch incapacitated card shows his reaction.
• Tempting Fate: From "Hair-Trigger Reflexes", a card that lets Expatriette shoot any targets that enter play:
  Blade Battalion Commander: Get out there! She can't shoot all of you!
• Theme Naming: Her Iconic Item is a pair of pistols called Pride and Prejudice. Amusingly, they don't have those names because of a specific event - growing up around the Citizens of the Sun, it never occurred to Expatriette not to give a pair of things themed names.
• Unorthodox Reload: Speed Loading shows her holding Pride and Prejudice upside down and allowing fresh clips to fall into them.
• Vigilante Man: A Lighter and Softer version of gritty anti-heroes like the Punisher.
• Walking Armory: Carries an enormous range of guns and specialized ammo.

Fanatic

Fanatic

Debut: Base game (Enhanced), base game (Definitive)
Team: Prime Wardens

"REPENT."

An amnesiac young woman with huge, white wings, Helena has dedicated her life to a holy crusade after temporarily dying in an accident as a child and returning with heavenly visions.

Fanatic's playstyle is one of the more diverse in the game, incorporating damage effects, healing, buffs, and methods for locking down villains or destroying their cards. Many of her cards require Fanatic to damage herself or discard/destroy her own cards to achieve their fullest effects.

Fanatic's alternate forms are Redeemer Fanatic, the new costume she wears after her harrowing first encounter with Apostate, Prime Wardens Fanatic, depicting Fanatic after she's matured emotionally and joined the titular team, and XTREME Prime Wardens Fanatic, her (much skimpier dressed) Alternate Self from the XTREMEverse. Definitive Edition thus far adds First Appearance Fanatic, representing her first ever appearance in Sentinel Comics, and Haunted Fanatic, a Glass Cannon that draws power from being infested with ghosts.

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• Achilles' Heel: While Fanatic has a large number of ways to deal damage to enemies, most of them either require her to damage herself or are are of the "one or two points at a time" variety, including her original card's base power. Thus, enemies with even a single point of damage reduction can quickly leave her in a bit of a fix.
• All Crimes Are Equal: A bit of a character flaw, as she approaches stopping small-time crimes with the same zeal and violence she would an alien invasion. As such, she can be difficult for other heroes, like Legacy, to work with. In the Letters Page podcast, the writers summed this up as, "Voss is attacking? Grab Fanatic, she'll be a big help. ... Bank robbery? Nobody tell Fanatic." Her Prime Warden variant explicitly notes that she's mellowed out a bit.
• Appropriated Appellation: Averted, actually. Fanatic is her superhero name, the name of her comics, and something she's known as in-universe, but it's not a moniker Helena uses herself: after all, what kind of person actually describes him or herself as "fanatic?" She only really takes it up after Ra dies.
• Back from the Dead: With no memories and apparent visions from heaven, at age 6. She also has Aegis of Resurrection, which revives her if she drops to zero hit points.
• Badass Creed: "Absolution you are called, and Absolution you shall deliver."
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: She and Ra don't really click theologically, but they still have a clear attraction to one another. His death leaves her devastated, and somewhat resentful of his "replacement" in the Tactics timeline.
• Blind Weaponmaster: Played with. Her Redeemer Fanatic armor covers her eyes completely, as part of trying to shut Apostate out of her head. Prime Warden Fanatic wears half of her eye covering.
• Cast From Hitpoints: Her stock in trade. Several of her more potent one-shots and ongoing effects depend on Fanatic doing damage to herself or another hero in the process — further encouraged by her Wrathful Retribution Desperation Attack dealing damage based on how much HP she's lost. The most direct example of this is Sacrosanct Martyr, a card whose power allows her to deal damage based on how much radiant damage she's taken on her turn — and allows her to deal up to 5 radiant damage on the spot. Her Xtreme Prime Wardens variant can turn this to her advantage by redirecting the damage wherever she likes via her base power.
• Church Militant: YES, though she chills out a little by her Prime Wardens incarnation.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Fanatic's powers spring from her faith. Helena's armor and sword don't naturally have power. They do because she believes they should. She's okay with this, though, because she has faith. And her faith has power because of her nature as a spirit in a human body.
• Cool Sword: Absolution has a cool cross motif and can deal melee, fire, or radiant damage. It's also huge, so huge that she wields it as an axe after the top part shatters on Citizen Truth's shield with minimal difficulty, since it's still big enough to be dangerous.
• Critical Status Buff: Many of the cards in her Definitive Edition deck get significantly stronger if she's at 10 HP or less. This is to the point that one of her Rook City Renegade variants has a maximum of 10 HP - one good hit can take her out, but all her cards start in their stronger forms.
• Desperation Attack: She has two of them.
  • End of Days, which wipes the board of everything short of the heroes and villains themselves and relics. Reserved for that moment where everything is going to hell.
  • Wrathful Retribution lets her do damage equal to her max HP minus her current HP, making it a devastating attack that's at its best when she's in dire straits.
• Determinator: Undaunted gives her solid damage resistance, and Aegis of Resurrection actually brings her back from zero hit points to keep fighting. Both, like the rest of her powers, are fueled by her faith and determination.
• Evil Doppelgänger: Hellion, an Alternate Universe version who carries a sword called Aberration and is opposed by Seraph, the heroic counterpart of Apostate. Unlike Apostate, she was possessed by a spirit of Chaos instead of one of Deception.
• Evil Mentor: The Idolater was once a minister she looked up to and confided in, before learning that he was literally feeding on the faith of his flock for his own ends.
• Expy: A milder case: winged woman, seemingly divine powers, deeply religious, huge sword, red and white color scheme, ruthless streak a mile wide? She looks a lot like one of the Living Saints◊ from Warhammer 40,000.
• Godzilla Threshold: End Of Days, as noted above. Generally held back until you're in a situation where losing all your active hero cards is acceptable to stop everything the villains are throwing at you.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: One of her cards, Final Dive, makes use of this, instantly destroying one target below a certain health threshold, then dealing damage to another target based on its remaining health.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Her weapon is a powerful magical sword called Absolution. It deals a three damage in her choice of either melee, fire, or radiant. Collectively, this helps her circumvent many forms of type-based damage reduction, and is one of her few ways to deal more than one or two points of damage without hurting herself. It also restores a single hitpoint when it comes into play.
• Heroic BSoD: She honestly runs into this a lot, seeing as how her powers spring from faith. She suffered one in her first encounter with Apostate. Her Redeemer variant is her emerging from that period with renewed fervor. Other highlights from her incapacitated art include seeing what a monster the Idolater really is and shattering her sword on Citizen Truth's shield.
• Holy Hand Grenade: Most of her powers deal radiant damage, which is typically flavored as holy-type. In the video game, the sound effect for radiant damage is a held note sung by a heavenly choir.
• Humanity Ensues: Fanatic was, originally a spirit of judgement who became trapped in the body of a little girl, and grew up raised in a very-Catholic environment. But, in the end, she becomes something virtually-inseparable from a human being, with a few quirks. While also being an angel. It's complicated.
• I Am Not Shazam: "Fanatic" is the name of her comic book, not her superhero name. It's actually a bit of a slur thrown at her by the Idolater. She only embraces it during the OblivAeon event.
• Identity Amnesia: After an accident at age 6 that left her dead for three minutes.
• I'll Kill You!: To Apostate, of course.
  Fanatic: I swear on all that is holy, you shall fall.
• Knight Templar: Somewhat-literally: her relics are all old gear from the knightly order. She fits the trope most-heavily, though, because of her nature as a judgement spirit in human form.
• Light Is Good: Mostly. She is a hero who has white, angelic wings and has heavenly powers, but as her name suggests, she does edge towards Knight Templar tendencies.
• Love Is a Weakness: After Ra's death, and her subsequent mourning, she decides to cut herself off from other people, so as not to be hurt again in a way that might interfere with her mission. It's more pronounced in the RPG timeline, since by the time she reappears in Tactics she's had more time to cope.
• Meaningful Name: Once her angelic wings were revealed, she's been pretty focused on her task and faith.
• Mysterious Past: Found at six years old, no known family, no one picked her up in the hospital before nuns took her in, and no one can explain where, exactly, her powers come from. The creators, in the Letters Page, actually acknowledged this, and cautioned that, since the mystery is a big part of the character, some of their reveals might not be something the audience actually wants to hear.
• Named Weapons: Her sword, Absolution.
• No-Sell: Both she and her nemesis, Apostate, have powerful cards that wipe the field of everything but relics and character cards. Both of them also have relics in their decks.
• Odd Friendship: Although she is a devout Christian whose powers are fueled by faith and Ra is the incarnation of a pagan god, the two get along very well. When Ra dies, he does so in her arms, telling her that he always believed in her.
• Older and Wiser: By the time she's joined the Prime Wardens, she's gotten better at moderation, tempering her zeal and avenging with compassion and defending the innocent.
• Only One Name: She was given the name Helena by a nun, she has no memory of her name before this.
• Order Versus Chaos: In an alternate universe she's Hellion who is a spirit of Chaos instead of Deception, while Seraph (that universe's version of Apostate) is a spirit of Order instead of Judgement.
• Perpetual Frowner: None of her cards show her smiling. This is in opposition to Apostate, who is almost always shown smiling.
• Pietà Plagiarism: The cover art in the ARG for Ra's death has Fanatic holding him in this pose — the art even depicts them in clothing closer to the Pieta than to their normal outfits.
• Powers via Possession: In the main universe Fanatic gets her powers due to being possessed by a spirit from the Host. In Arataki's universe she can actually have any of the host spirits possess her at will depending on what she needs.
• Rogues Gallery: Apostate, the fallen angel who claims to have created her, Blood Countess Bathory, an immortal and evil vampires whom she can never seem to permanently destroy, the Seer, a martial artist who can manipulate emotional weaknesses and promotes a philosophy of pain, and the Idolator, a evil priest who feeds on the faith of his congregation and sets them against Fanatic because she previously stopped him. Unbeknownst to her, all of them but Bathory are also connected to her via the Host: Apostate is a rogue deceit spirit, the Seer traded his soul to a spirit of domination for power, and the Idolator has trapped a spirit of faith in his staff and uses it to feed on his congregation. Membership in the Prime Wardens also makes her the enemy of the toothy and tentacled Balarian, who kinda breaks the theme.
• Self-Surgery: Fanatic resets her dislocated shoulder in Undaunted.
• Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains: While her default armor shows a bit of her cleavage and the sides of her midriff, it's still pretty sensible, and her Redeemer armor is even moreso. Meanwhile, her nemesis, Apostate, is a Walking Shirtless Scene.
• The Smurfette Principle: The only female member of the Prime Wardens' Five-Man Band, though she averts most of the stereotypes associated with the trope: she's stern, a powerful melee fighter, moral and upright rather than compassionate and nurturing, in no way traditionally feminine, and isn't a Love Interest to anyone on the team. After Visionary and Sky-Scraper join the team following the OblivAeon crisis, she no longer fits this trope.
• Super-Strength: A Required Secondary Power, considering the weight of all of her gear. The armor alone weighs over one hundred pounds!
• Terror Hero: Striking fear into the hearts of the wicked is basically Fanatic's thing, followed up by doing things like flinging people from great heights or bringing holy destruction down on everyone whenever they're not filled with enough fear. Other heroes specifically make sure to only call for her help for bad guys who actually deserve her level of wrath.
  Gene-Bound Soldier: The team was killed by an angry human with wings and a sword! It was terrible!
• Willing Channeler: See the Powers via Possession entry, where in Arataki's universe she's fully aware of her state and has embraced it.
• Winged Humanoid: She grew wings after coming back from the dead. Nobody's sure why. Apostate claims he did it, but Apostate is a liar. Turns out, she did it to herself, unconsciously.
• Wrecked Weapon: Absolution shatters when she tries to break Citizen Truth's shield, but there's still enough blade left on the hilt for her to use it as a weapon.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: In the Vertex Universe Fanatic learns she has the ability to essentially "absorb" a person's sinful side and take it into herself. While this does make a person turn good or at least neutral, it's also effectively Brainwashing for the Greater Good that removes part of the person's free will and original personality. This attracts the attention of the Singular Entity of Conquest who chooses her as a champion because he admires her "dictat[ing] the rules of what is good and what is evil and push[ing] that on other people". Fanatic, meanwhile, is at least initially vocally upset by and protesting of this sort of labeling and recognition because she still thinks of herself as a hero trying to help people.
• You Shall Not Pass!: The art on Divine Sacrifice evokes the trope, with Fanatic facing down an army of Mooks, and its effect plays it out — Fanatic does damage to three targets, and all damage those targets do is redirected to her until the start of her next turn.

Guise

Guise

Debut: Guise mini-expansion

Voiced By: Joe Zieja

"Heck, yeah! Zombie pirate ninja fanboy in space!"

Guise believes he's the best hero in literally all of everything. He used to be a simple tabloid reporter but was destined to be the hero.

He's got two alternate forms: Santa Guise brings the joy of Gift-Mas to the battlefield, while Completionist Guise owns every single promo of all heroes!

Alternatively, Guise describes himself here.

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• Achilles' Heel: His deck falls apart if he can't get a good card churn or something stops him from playing; all his Ongoings explode after a turn, and they're most of what keeps him operating, so he needs to keep replacing them when they get taken out.
• Air Guitar: Let Me See That... demands the player do that when it's destroyed. Luckily, you are spared the indignity if you play the digital game.
• Anti-Hero: He's more interested in goofing off and stealing the spotlight than in saving the day, though the latter does still happen along the way.
• Arch-Enemy: Wager Master because... he refused to use a coaster when they were roommates. Yes, really.
  • To be entirely fair, said coaster incident was just the last straw in a long list of incidents where Wager Master was being a slob (for no good reason considering he's a Reality Warper that can just clean stuff with a thought), but still. It's not exactly Baron Blade vs. Legacy.
• Armor Piercing: When he's X-Treeeeeme, any damage he does is irreducible, and can't be redirected as a fringe benefit!
• Attack Deflector: Total Beefcake redirects the first damage that would be dealt to Guise each turn. Inverted with his X-Treeeeme!!! card, which prevents his damage from being redirected.
• Attention Whore: Loves stealing the spotlight from others. In the metafiction, he crashes other heroes' titles on a regular basis, and mechanically his deck has various effects that go off on on characters' turns, copy their card effects, and his deck runs on Audience Participation on the part of the player out of universe, requiring them to get out of their seat, throw high fives, cheer out loud, play air guitar, and more.
• Back from the Dead: Before he was Guise, Joe King was crushed by a falling grand piano in the collateral damage of the heroes' original fight with Wager Master. 'Particles of improbability' seeped into the resulting Ludicrous Gibs, which then reformed into Guise. He seeming dies again during OblivAeon, reduced to a puddle of sludge, but then the Scholar, as part of his mentorship of Guise, molding him into the next bearer of the Philosopher's Stone, saves him, as seen on The Apex of Humanity, flipped side of the Infusion of Power mission card.
• Badass Santa: When the other holidays (various villains handpicked by Wager Master, like the Green Grosser dressed up in a pilgrim costume wielding a weaponized cornucopia as Thanksgiving) declare war on Christmas, it's up to Guise to save the day.
• Berserk Button: When the two of them were roommates, Guise's now-Arch-Enemy Wager Master... put his drink on Guise's table without a coaster. This proved to be the inciting incident for a This Is My Side incident. Admittedly, Wager Master is a Reality Warper who can make stuff float (and, Guise says, had any number of things floating next to him at the time), so it was completely deliberate.
• It's the Best Whatever, Ever!: One of Guise's cards is called the "Best Card Ever" and, seeing as it's incredibly useful for starting or continuing chains, it is pretty great.
• Character Development: Gradually gains a sense of responsibility through his "apprenticeship" under the Scholar.
• Combos: Basically the entire point of his deck, especially with his standard variant (which can play extra cards with its power), is to come up with absurd antics involving nailing his stuff together in destructive ways and possibly borrowing stuff from everyone else: Guise the Barbarian with Blatant Reference for heavy damage, for example, or sweeping the field by grabbing Mr Fixer's Jack Handle or Dual Crowbars and then chaining Best Card Ever into Hey, Look What I Found, or spamming cards by copying Requital Captain Cosmic's power, or cloning Legacy's field to double up on buffs and make Heroic Interception team-wide...
• Chest Insignia: Which can change to suit his mood and shape, and helps him express himself despite his lack of a mouth.
• Composite Character: Deadpool (wearing tights, the lack of a fourth wall), The Mask (changing up his wardrobe with the occasional trip into Hammerspace), and Plastic Man (stretching and being less than unambiguously heroic) may immediately spring to mind, but he also owes a lot to Ambush Bug.
• Ditto Fighter: Cards like "I Can Do That Too!", "Let Me See That...", "Uh, Yeah, I'm That Guy!" let him (respectively) imitate his teammates' powers, borrow/steal their equipment, or copy all their ongoings for a round. Copying teamwide buffs like Legacy's "Galvanize" and Ra's "Imbued Fire" allows them to stack.]
• Expy: Personality-wise, between the constant wise-cracking and No Fourth Wall attitude, he's clearly based off of Deadpool.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: He's a disruptive glory hog who's more interested in goofing off than being an actual hero. Word of God invoked has it that, in the metafiction, the Scholar is the only one who really hangs around with him of his own free will, in part because the Scholar apparently sees Guise and his powers as a successor for his own legacy as bearer of the Philosopher's Stone.
• The Load: When he was still just Joseph King, he constantly got in the way of the superheroes. ^note  as seen in the card "Hostage Situation" in the Megalopolis deck. It got to the point where a fed-up Fanatic downright threatened him with death in one of her cards. ^note Final Dive.
• Meaningful Name: "Guise," as in "disguise" or "mask". His pre-Guise name was Joseph (as in "Joe") King.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Invoked on his Selling Out card, where he is, quote, a "Zombie Ninja Pirate Fanboy IN SPACE!" Complete with a real t-shirt and plushie of Unity's Mr. Chomps/Raptor Bot.
• No Fourth Wall: He knows he's in a comic book, in a game, and in a video game. He's one of the only characters in the digital game who's voiced, other than one-offs like Argent Adept's singing or Miss Information laughing her head off in her theme music, and often addresses the player directly on his cards and when changing from pose to pose in the video game. The game's final variant, Completionist Guise, has Guise as a collector of Sentinels of the Multiverse comics, and his power allows him to swap out the other heroes' (and his own) variant cards on the fly.
• No Mouth: Though the shape of it is sometimes sort of visible through his mask.
• Paparazzi: He used to be one as Joseph King before his resurrection as Guise. And, if his Letters Page episode is any indication, he still works as one as Guise... somehow.
• Power Copying: His primary mechanic, via Voluntary Shapeshifting, is copying the various effects and powers of his fellow heroes.
• Purple Is Powerful: Magenta and purple tights, and via Power Copying, capable of doing anything the other characters can, at least for a round. Difficult, but Awesome in that it requires a very good knowledge of all the other decks to really use it to its best advantage.
• Rogues Gallery: Wager Master, a blue space gnome with a gambling addiction; Argentium, a liquid metal hitman; Cueball, a pool-themed nemesis who hangs out on the World's Largest Pool Table and has a head shaped like Exactly What It Says on the Tin; and the Green Grosser, a green-skinned nut who rigs fruit to explode and declared war on Christmas.
• Self-Proclaimed Love Interest: In the RPG timeline he believes that he has a sort of Batman-Catwoman relationship with a villainess known as Concealin' Cary who finds him utterly obnoxious and gross and wishes he would leave her alone.
• Shout-Out: One of his hobbies:
  • Guise the Barbarian!
  • Crush your enemies, drive them before you, and LAMINATE THEIR WOMEN!
  • Mr. Fixer is sick of Guise asking if he wants me to wax on, wax off.
  • His Blatant Reference card is exactly that: he turns into Samuel L Coolguy. SAY WHAT AGAIN!
  • Lemme See That has him turn into KISS's Gene Simmons and play Freebird on the Argent Adept's Lyra.
  • Super Ultra Kawaii lets him turn into a "Magical Love Prince", turning everything monochrome and the art style into manga for a round (only on the card itself, sadly).
• Small Name, Big Ego: He has a markedly inflated self-opinion of himself, often proclaiming himself to be "the greatest hero" despite his status as The Friend Nobody Likes.
  • This was present before he became Guise. Joseph King proclaimed himself the "King of Capes" owing to his status as a superhero photographer. Suffice to say that nobody actually called him that.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: The right combination of his cards lets him use his teammates' cards as if he was them, stealing their thunder.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Mostly humanoid shapes, and he doesn't seem to be able to change his face or the color of his tights. He does have an Unlimited Wardrobe of props and wigs and costumes that he can pull out of Hammerspace.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: X-Treeeeeme!!!!, which has him turn into an enormously buff gun-toting '90s Anti-Hero.

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