Characters / Sentinels of the Multiverse - Villains A to G

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Villains A-G

Akash'Bhuta/Akash'Thriya/Akash'Flora/Akash'Dharsha

Akash'Bhuta (Multiverse Era Villain)/Akash'Thriya (Multiverse Era Hero)/Akash'Flora (RPG Timeline Tree)/Akash'Dharsha (Miststorm Timeline Villain)

Debut: Infernal Relics, OblivAeon (Akash'Thriya hero deck) (Enhanced); Base set (Definitive)

"The natural order is one of chaos! Flee and fail, you temporary beings."

The living embodiment of chaos and destruction in nature, Akash'Bhuta exists solely to destroy, and feeds off death and destruction. She is effectively the most durable villain in the entire game, sitting at two hundred hit points. Akash'Bhuta's deck combines immense durability with the ability to turn hostile environment cards against the party, turning the battle into a long endurance match.

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• Achilles' Heel: As Akash'Thriya, getting her stuff into the environment deck can take ages, and it comes out at random when it's in there - making getting the right seed sometimes a bit difficult. In particular, she has trouble in OblivAeon fights because he blows up environments faster than she can usually seed them.
  • As a villain, Akash'Bhuta relies heavily on the environment deck to get her cards out. In Insula Primis, Enclave of the Endlings, or other target-heavy decks, she can be a terror. In Freedom Tower, she tends to falter.
• Alien Hair: In her Chaos-Bound Creator form? Vines. Her Avatar of Destruction form has lava. Her Akash'Thriya form has a crown of green leaves, topped off with wooden antlers — in the digital game, the leaves turn orange when she drops below 10 HP. Her Spirit of the Void variant is a Chrome Champion with a head of blazing purple-white flames.
• Arch-Enemy: The Argent Adept, and, from a non-gameplay perspective, his various predecessors in the role of Virtuoso of the Void.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Akash'Bhuta" in Sanskrit is more or less "aether or space" and "ghost". In other words: "Void Spirit". "Akash'Thriya", meanwhile, is "Void Woman".
• Cast from Hit Points: One of her central mechanics.
  • Inverted as a villain — her Primeval Limbs don't cost her anything when they're played, but cause her to deal herself energy damage equal to their initial HP when they're destroyed.
  • Played Straight as a hero, as a lot of her cards as Akash'Thriya deal her psychic damage, and the power on Thrashing Brambles has her hit herself before going after others. That pool of 40-50 HP is not just there for show.
• Chrome Champion: Her Spirit of the Void form has silvery metallic skin.
• The Corrupter: During her battle with the Crimson Conductor, she infected him with her devouring nature, leading him down a dark path of Blood Magic and trying to drain other potential Void adepts of their life force and power instead of teaching them to be new Virtuosos as he was supposed to. In the process, she slowly siphoned and fed on the power he was tapping, until finally Franz's body burnt out - and then, she could emerge more powerful than ever before with no Virtuoso to stop her rampage.
• Damage Reduction: Her Mountainous Carapace limb reduces all damage she takes by one, including damage from lost limbs, and she can have more than one in play. It even protects her from the damage she takes when it dies (at least in the digital game).
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Has the highest HP of the Classic mode villains at a staggering 200. To compensate for this, whenever one of her body part cards — such as hands made from the earth, tendrils of vines — is destroyed, she takes damage equivalent to its max HP, but many of her limbs have big HP counts of their own, and Akash'Bhuta has cards that can rapidly restore them to full health. Amusingly, this partially carries over into Akash'Thriya, who starts the game with nearly twice as much health as a normal hero.
• Enemy Mine: As a spirit of the Earth, even she joins with the heroes when OblivAeon attacks, as Akash'Thriya.
• Even Evil Has Standards: She comments that, honestly, killing the Argent Adept's Dark Conductor variant before the baton of the Crimson Conductor fully consumes his mind and personality is doing him a favor.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Akash'Thriya is no friend to civilization, but OblivAeon is a threat to all reality.
• Extra Eyes: Four Monochromatic Eyes.
• Forever War: Hundreds of millions of years ago, the spirit who would become Akash'Bhuta fought a hundred-million year long conflict with an army of alien parasites trying to devour the Nexus of the Void. She did this by consuming other Void protector-spirits when they became injured to increase her own powers.
• From Bad to Worse: In the Tactics timeline, an injured Akash'Thriya goes into a regeneration slumber, but drawing on the energy of OblivAeon shards rather than the Void. This has horrific consequences, and she emerges as Akash'Darcha, worse than ever before, now less a force of natural chaos than malevolent destruction, though perhaps weaker than she used to be.
• Geo Effects: She effectively turns the environment - which is normally neutral - against the heroes, using it to gain extra card plays or simply to swarm at the heroes. And her flips are dictated by its flips. Her hero form's main mechanic involves Primordial Seeds, which she has many ways to get into the Environment deck, and which not only have boosted effects when played from there, but effectively turn the Environment turn in the heroes' favor by crowding out "normal" Environment cards.
• Green Thumb: Akash'Thriya loses the giant stone body, leaving her with plant-themed Primordial Seeds and cards with names like Rapid Growth and Thrashing Brambles.
• Heel–Face Turn: After having her essence poisoned by Professor Pollution, the Naturalist, a man she once cursed into the shape of an animal, convinces her that she too must now change to survive, and helps mold her into the hero Akash'Thriya. It sticks in the RPG timeline, in which Akash'Thriya undergoes two Heroic Sacrifices but survives as Akash'Flora, a massive tree containing her essence that has merged with Megalopolis. This incarnation of her has even ceased all animosity with the Argent Adept, who has become her caretaker.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the RPG timeline branch of the OblivAeon crisis, Akash'Thriya nearly burns herself out creating a massive tree in Megalopolis to heal and protect its people and her fellow heroes in a moment of selfless compassion. Then, when the Argent Adept helps her attune back to the Void so that the backlash won't kill her, she uses up all of that form's power as well, leaving only her essence inside the tree.
• Kaiju: She commonly appears as a moving mountain.
• Monochromatic Eyes: Four of them, red when she's angry (which is most of the time). They're often green as Akash'Thriya, and white tinged with purple in her Spirit of the Void form.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Her minions are "primeval limbs" which emerge from her body to attack heroes or defend her. Destroying these limbs also inflicts damage back to Akash'Bhuta
• Nature Is Not Nice: The goddess of that trope, in fact.
• No Mouth: Just a blank expanse of wood/earth.
• The Noseless: No nose or nostrils.
• No-Sell: Her Challenge mode makes her immune to environment damage and self damage, meaning that she no longer takes damage when a Primeval Limb is destroyed. Every one of her 200 hit points are the player's responsibility to take out.
• Power of the Void: She's a Void spirit, although she uses the Void energy as a power source rather than a weapon.
• Purple Is Powerful: Her Spirit of the Void form's mostly-white flames have a slight purple tinge.
• Redemption Demotion: Akash'thriya is significantly smaller and less-powerful than her previous form, since she represents changing into something new to survive.
• Shapeshifting: She can tower taller than a mountain or shrink small enough to caress Anthony's cheek with one of her earthen hands.
• Squishy Wizard: Subverted for Akash'Thriya, whose base and variant forms have the absolute highest base health of any heroes in the game at 50 and 40 respectively — but many of her powers are Cast from Hit Points, and the game's targeting mechanics ensure she'll be eating a lot of hits.
• Stop Worshipping Me: Though not because she doesn't want them to worship her. She just destroys her worshipers along with everything else in her path.
• Suddenly Voiced: In the physical version of the card game, she has no lines in her villain deck but in the digital version she has dialogue before each fight, including unique dialogue for when she fights Argent Adept, just like the other villains.
• Support Party Member: She's not without aggressive options, especially in her Spirit of the Void form, but Akash'Thriya has a bunch of seeds that heal and protect the party and only one that really focuses on damage. Akash'Flora, her magic tree, can also damage itself to hand out power uses (particularly funny if Heroic Interception is out; the whole party can get power uses for free).
• Tainted Veins: Akash'Thriya's incapacitated art has them thanks to being pumped full of toxic chemicals by Professor Pollution, likely in a callback to her Avatar of Destruction form. Allies of the Earth shows her inflicting them on Insula Primalis dinosaurs to restore herself.
• Taken for Granite: Entomb, as she starts turning the heroes into wood. Mechanically, it deals damage instead of slowing the heroes down in some way.
• Time Abyss: She has existed as a discrete, free-willed entity for two hundred fifty million years. Part of the reason she kills humans is that their perception of her influences her, and she dislikes being bound to their small-minded perception of time.
• Vampiric Draining: As a Void spirit trying to resist ever returning to the Void, Akash'Bhuta needs to feed on Void energy to sustain herself and recover her powers. To this end, she has devoured many other Void spirits and previous Virtuosos of the Void, as well as keeping their instruments to drain over time, and she infected Franz Vogel, the Crimson Conductor, with this part of her nature so that she could tempt him into engaging in it himself while also secretly feeding her.
• Volcanic Veins: Her Avatar of Destruction form has quite literal ones, since that form's elemental attunement is to lava.

Ambuscade/Stuntman/Night Hunter

Ambuscade (Multiverse Era and Miststorm Timeline Villain)/Stuntman (Multiverse Era Hero)/Night Hunter (RPG Timeline Hero)

Debut: Ambuscade mini-expansion, Villains of the Multiverse (team villain deck), Stuntman mini-expansion (Stuntman hero deck) (Enhanced); Rook City Renegades (normal villain deck) (Definitive)

"They say the clothes make the man. So much more the tools, oui?"

A French former movie star, whose passion for big game hunting got out of control. A botched experiment scarred his face, but the end of his acting career was the beginning of his career as a superhuman hunter. Ambuscade's deck and tactics involve him switching between stealth and offensive modes, as well as disabling and debuffing heroes, making him especially dangerous in hostile environments.

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• Accidental Misnaming: Sort of. Everyone calls him Ambuscāde, with a long a (Ambuscāde, rhymes with paid), including the creators. The proper pronunciation in French, however, is Ambuscâde, with a short a (Ambuscâde, rhymes with dad). This is something that he protests to but nobody actually pays attention and calls him Ambuscāde anyways.
• Achilles' Heel:
  • As a normal villain, Ambuscade doesn't have any means with which to destroy Ongoing or Equipment cards. If the heroes can survive his initial rush and finish their setups, he has no way to regain control of the fight.
  • Stuntman has limited defensive options and only reaches his full potential in other people's turns. He really, really wants some decent support, and ideally someone like Dark Watch Mr Fixer to blow up his stuff.
• The Ahnold: On top of paying homage to various comic book characters, Ambuscade's background as an eccentric French-speaking action star/martial artist brings to mind Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• Agent Peacock: Ambuscade is petty, vain, and French, with a reputation as a pretty boy, but he's also a skilled and intuitive martial artist, marksman, and stuntman, and a dangerous villain and hunter.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: While the main universe Ambuscade is a bit of a comical character, both of his alternate universe versions are formidable and dangerous: the Iron Hand is Iron Legacy's top enforcer and the man who killed Tachyon, while his Action Hero Stuntman variant is simultaneously a Badass Normal superhero and a famous movie star whose scars are badges of honor gained during his superheroics.
• Arch-Enemy: Haka in his base deck and in the metafiction. His team villain card has him as the Naturalist's nemesis instead, as the ringleader of the Slaughterhouse Six.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Stuntman's basic power lets him deal irreducible damage, ignoring enemy armor.
• Attention Whore: His hero deck is designed to portray him as this: Dramatic Cliffhanger lets him hijack the environment turn, Steal The Scene allows him to pop up in someone else's turn to show off, most of his powers have bonus effects when it's someone else's turn, and, funniest of all, In Medias Res lets him skip people's entire turns to fast-forward the game-state to his next turn in the spotlight. Even his basic power deals bonus damage if he's using it outside of his normal turn order!
• Badass Normal: While his villain deck doesn't count, due to his energy powers, they eventually melted down thanks to their unnatural origins. Yet he remains a formidable adversary with his arsenal of gadgets and training as both the hero Stuntman and following his return to villainy in Sentinels Tactics.
• Bloodbath Villain Origin: Inverted! A giant killing spree where he and Mainstay brought down a drug cartel was his first heroic deed.
• Career-Ending Injury: Parodied. Ambuscade's backstory involves him quitting acting after a hunting accident left him irreversably scarred, hence the mask. Throughout the card game we're led to believe that whatever is under the mask is a horrifying mess of a face. Then comes Villains of the Multiverse where his incap art finally reveals his horrible... cheek scratch? Yes, Ambuscade is so vain that a simple scratch caused him to quit acting.
• Composite Character: A doozy. Ancel is a former actor like Clayface, whose obsession with stalking big game spiked into hunting superhumans like Kraven the Hunter after he ended his career over a relatively minor bit of facial scarring his ego blew out of all proportion like Doctor Doom. He's also dressed like Deathstroke and has energy powers similar to Gambit. Finally, Stuntman's incapacitated art shows him actually disfigured after fighting Borr the Unstable, leaving his face noseless and raw, like the Red Skull's.
• Counter-Attack: Reactive Plating, though only if the attack manages to overcome the damage reduction it also provides.
• The Cowl: In the RPG Timeline, he becomes the hero known as the Night Hunter, helping innocent people from the shadows of Rook City.
• Deflector Shields: Reactive Plating reduces all damage that would be dealt to him by 1, and also functions as a Counter-Attack.
• Drowning My Sorrows: The Collector's Edition Incapacitated side of his team version shows Ansel drinking in a bar, with Mainstay approaching him. This is presumably the moment right before Mainstay convinced him to take his Heel–Face Turn.
• Dull Surprise: Played with. He was always better renowned for his stuntwork and action chops than his acting ability, and his line reads were often a bit wooden, particularly in the rom-com-action movie hybrid he once did. However, like many action hero actors, he has at least one genuinely well-regarded performance under his belt, in a role in which he was able to do a lot of physical acting and silent emoting without having to read a lot of lines, which played to his strengths and let a lot of subtlety come through.
• Egomaniac Hunter: His Start of Darkness was brought on by a minor scar — see Minor Injury Overreaction. He's very dismissive of the his targets, up to and including Ra, a deity.
  Ambuscade: Huh. Some god.
• Extra Turn: As the hero Stuntman, he has the card In Media Res, which immediately skips to the start of his next turn. Play this outside your turn (which he has plenty of ways to do) and it's like having an extra turn. This is all part of his characterisation as an Attention Whore, he does his best work when he's stealing the spotlight from someone else.
• Face–Heel Turn: In the Tactics timeline, his horrific scarring after fighting Borr convinces him that heroism is pointless and thankless work. He goes back to villainy, this time taking on deadly assassination jobs, and alternating between blowing his dwindling monetary supplies on dangerous surgeries to either fix his ruined looks or give him back his powers, and recovering from them for long stretches of time.
• For Want Of A Nail: While Stuntman is largely an amusing minor character during the battle with OblivAeon, he contributes in two important places: ambushing Nixious the Chosen with a flamethrower at just the right moment to turn the tide on the Scion, and cooperating with Mainstay to take down Borr the Unstable for good... at a price.
• French Jerk: Ancel Moreau is both very French and fairly evil. Even his heroic incarnation, Stuntman, is a Glory Seeker whose playstyle revolves around upstaging the other heroes and stealing their limelight.
• Future Badass: While the current Ambuscade isn't quite a Harmless Villain, he stands far below most of the other single-deck villains in terms of both overall evil and threat level. His Iron Legacy timeline counterpart, the Iron Hand, is one of that villain's top enforcers, and, in Team Leader Tachyon's incapacitated card art, has successfully knee-capped the speedster before, in her Collector's card incapacitated art, closing in to finish her off "execution style." He succeeds.
• Good Twin: His Action Hero Stuntman variant comes from a universe where Ancel Moreau is a genuine hero who is also a movie star. And unlike the normal timeline Ancel's ridiculous overreaction to a tiny scar that he got as part of some shady business, that one treats his scars as badges of honor, since he got them fighting the good fight and saving innocent lives.
• Gratuitous French: Stuntman's base power, "Tireur Incroyable," or "Incredible Shot." He also curses in French in Parse's Impossible Shot.
• Hand Cannon: Invoked by name — his Custom Hand-Cannons do a lot of damage, and he can dual-wield them.
• Harmless Villain: To an extent — as mentioned under Unknown Rival, he was once defeated by Haka without Haka ever realizing there was a fight, and gameplay-wise, he's considered one of the easiest villains since he has relatively low hitpoints and no Ongoing or Equipment destruction, meaning the heroes can get set up without worrying about a disruption. He's still evil, and he's dangerous enough he once got an annual title in which he was the main threat, but he's not on the same level as his competition. He also generally avoids killing people, never threatening someone he isn't sure the heroes will be able to save. Ironically, his bloodbath hero origin as Stuntman, in which he and Mainstay team up to take on a massive army of narcos, sees him killing many times more people than he ever killed as Ambuscade.
• Heel–Face Turn: Eventually, he gets tired of being bested by the heroes and returns to Champions Studio to film his most ambitious movie "Hunter IV". Then, after Champions Studio are destroyed by Aeon Men before the movie could be finished, he gears up to fight OblivAeon alongside the heroes as Stuntman to get revenge. It sticks in the RPG timeline, in which, with his life in ruins and his body actually disfigured, he sets up shop in Rook City as a private eye by day and a shadowy vigilante by night, still trying to do the right thing.
• Hero Killer: Ancel Moreau's Iron Legacy timeline counterpart, the Iron Hand, succeeds where all the might of his world's superpowered tyrant failed, and kills Tachyon. With a quick ambush, a kneecap shot, and finishing her off "execution style."
• Hired Guns: He maintains a lavish lifestyle even besides his expensive "hobby," so he pays for it with lots of mercenary work for other villains on the side.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: The "Dangerous Game" being superhumans, with Haka as his favorite target.
• Invisibility Cloak: His signature piece of gear in his solo villain deck. Until his Personal Cloaking Device is destroyed, Ambuscade flips to his stealth mode where he is invulnerable to damage, and any time he plays Vanish, the device is immediately put back into play.
• It's Personal: Parodied. When OblivAeon destroyed an entire city, he also destroyed the movie studios where Ancel had returned to acting, along with every copy of his big comeback film and the entire cast and crew. This is what caused him to leap into the fray as Stuntman for revenge.
• Meaningful Name: Ambuscade means "ambush". Ambuscade lives up to his namesake quite well.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: His original bio states that he left acting because the treatments that gave him powers left him "disfigured." His incapacitated art in the Villains of the Multiverse deck, as well as his character art as Stuntman, indicate this was just a small scar on his cheek. In the Promo version of Stuntman, an alternate universe Ancel Moreau never left Hollywood and instead uses the scar for his Rambo/Schwarzenegger-esque Action Hero persona, to tremendous popular success.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In the most unselfish act of his life, Ancel Moreau sacrifices himself to save others from Borr the Unstable. In the process, he becomes hideously burnt and scarred from head to chest, leaving his whole life in ruins. In the Tactics timeline, this hardens him, causing him to become even more evil and dangerous after seeing what trying to be a hero got him.
• No Stunt Double: Ancel Moreau, in any universe, is a genuine badass who does all this own stunts. This is why a former actor is a legitimate threat to a superhero team. This apparently extends to flying his own fighter jets.
• Old Shame: The one role he's actually ashamed of was in the daytime drama Forbidden Fruit, in which he played the Latin Lover... despite making no effort to hide his accent.
• Pretty Boy: Much is made in-universe of Ambuscade's "pretty face". It's a good chunk of how he got discovered as an actor in the first place, and his vanity over having it marred is what drove him to become a villain.
• Private Detective: His day job in the RPG timeline, in which he sets up shop in Rook City. He turns away many requests, either because they're beyond his abilities or his clients' ability to pay, but he goes on to secretly aid them as the shadowy vigilante known as the Night Hunter.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: While Haka is his Arch-Enemy, his Villains deck, representing his work at the head of the supervillain team called the Slaughterhouse Six, sees him instead targeting the Naturalist. The Hunted Naturalist variant represents him coming apart as the Slaughterhouse Six hunt him down.
• Secret Identity: Has the most effective one in the Multiverse; with only two characters being confirmed to know that Ancel Moreau and Ambuscade are one and the same.
• Stealth Expert: Comes into play while flipped to his Invisible Stalker side with his base deck. As long as his Personal Cloaking Device is in play, Ambuscade can't be damaged at all.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: His deck's schtick as Stuntman. Almost all his cards rely on being destroyed at the beginning or end of either a Hero, Villain, or Environment turn with one card even skipping an entire round back to his turn, essentially allowing him two turns.
• Superpower Meltdown: Parodied. His "hideous disfigurement" was actually just a tiny little cheek scar that his ego couldn't handle.
• Throwaway Guns: His hero deck is sort of built around this concept, with powerful cards that destroy themselves, only to let him draw or play more.
• Trick Bomb: He has several of these, including Sonic Mine (which deals damage to everyone if someone destroys it, so you'll have to watch those indiscriminate attacks) and hidden explosives which are reshuffled into his deck face-up. When they get revealed, they go off.
• Unknown Rival: Sort of. By Word of God, Haka once defeated him without even knowing about it through "wacky hijinx."
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Many of his cards deal set damage or have set damage reduction rather than H +/- damage / reduction. This means that he's more of a threat to smaller hero teams than larger ones, since Ambuscade doesn't scale nearly as much as most villains.
• Villainous BSoD: After Chrono-Ranger spares his life on Mars, Ancel hangs up his mask and ends up drifting around for a while. He ends up meeting Mainstay, and being inspired to go back into movies after a dramatic series of adventures in the desert.
• Walking Armory: He has explosives, mines, automated drones, multiple heavy guns and custom hand-cannons. Armed and Dangerous has him posing with his gear. His Villains version has a card literally called "Too Many Guns," with him posing in Liefeld-esque artwork.
• Warmup Boss: Veterans like to suggest Ambuscade as the first villain for newcomers to the game to take on, since he comes in a standalone set and makes for a straightforward fight while still testing out all the rules. Those same veterans like taking him on themselves, as his kit won't disrupt trying out new, setup-heavy heroes or champions they want to experiment with.

Apostate

Apostate

Debut: Infernal Relics

"We are diamonds that shine without fire!"

A mysterious Fallen Angel of sorts who claimed to have created Fanatic and continuously endeavours to turn her to the side of evil. Apostate's deck focuses on a collection of unholy Relics that empower Apostate and are destroyed in his place if his HP falls to zero, as well as demonic servants that attack and impede the heroes.

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• Achilles' Heel: Putting down Apostate can be a pain thanks to his constant damage output and ability to keep reviving himself as long as he has Relics on the field, but his deck does have two significant weaknesses:
  • 99% of the damage in Apostate's deck is dealt by the man himself (the only other source is the easily-destroyed Fiendish Pugilist), and the majority of it is of the Death of a Thousand Cuts variety. Steady application of damage-reduction effects or having a tank like Legacy or the Scholar on the field will really ruin his day.
  • His Relics are heavily reliant on Damage Reduction and redirection to avoid getting destroyed, so consistent sources of Irreducible damage from characters like Bunker and Parse will make getting them out of the way much easier.
• Arch-Enemy: Fanatic; as a spirit of lies and deceit, he's the elemental opposite to the spirit of justice possessing her.
• Artifact of Doom: All of his relics count as these. They combine to empower him and make destroying him difficult.
• Beat Still, My Heart: Apostate holds a heart over a cauldron in Profane Summons.
• BFS: Condemnation, Apostate's equivalent of Fanatic's sword Absolution, is inlaid with screaming faces in torment, accessorized with a green materia orb that hovers in midair in a notch in the blade, and impractically serrated and swoopier than necessary in general. But it looks neat.
• Consummate Liar: Before his episode of the Letters Page, most of the things the players knew about Apostate came from his own mouth... and Apostate is a liar. Card text and some of the dialogue from the digital version implies this is because he literally draws power from those who believe his lies, a dark mirror to his nemesis's faith-based superpowers. And, as a spirit of deceit, it's literally a core part of his nature.
• The Corrupter: His Relics are all items people had some sort of sentimental connection to, that he has used to feed on and pervert. And his demonic servants are all people he's corrupted and twisted to serve him.
• Cutting the Knot: Fanatic is usually in a bind when enemies bring lots of Damage Reduction to the field... but Apostate's deck actually does relatively little to actually protect him, and his hitpoints are not incredibly high for a villain. Thus, Fanatic usually finds it easier to just focus all her damage on him, personally, and let that take care of the relics in play.
• Damage Reduction: A great many of his relics have very powerful, sometimes stacking damage reduction, and until they're all destroyed, he can't be.
• Evil Counterpart: To Fanatic. Both are Winged Humanoids with a religious theme, they both use Relics of great power, and they both have cards quoting Dio. Even their swords, Absolution and Condemnation, are Evil Counterparts.
• Fantastic Racism: He has nothing but contempt for mortal, fleshy creatures. Fanatic trapping him, a higher spirit, in the physical world and wounding his spirit form is what led him to go from "spout some lies and mischief to mess with her and get even for her foiling my previous cons" to "conquer the world."
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Apostate has a massive one extending from the left side of his chest to his right side, inflicted by Fanatic. Because she channeled her power as the Spirit of Judgement into it, it trapped him in the mortal realm and shackled him to corpse-bodies, all of which bear that scar. His Dark Corrupter flip has even more, and they glow. This is probably a side effect of his host bodies being those of corpses he's molded into Meat Puppets.
• Good Twin: His heroic alternate universe counterpart, Seraph, who fights against an evil version of Fanatic called Hellion.
• Hellfire: His deck puts a heavy focus on Infernal damage, and he uses it to blast a fiery hole in a civilian in Remorseless Provocation.
• Laughably Evil: A lot of his style and lies are so outrageously ludicrous that they veer into Crosses the Line Twice and make it hard not to laugh even as you empathize with Fanatic finding him infuriating.
• The Legions of Hell: His minions include a range of demonic beasts.
• The Man Behind the Man: The rest of Fanatic's Rogues Gallery (save for the Blood Countess) turn out to have been led down their dark paths by his intervention.
• Meaningful Name: Bezaliel, "shadow of God," and a fallen angel from the Apocryphal Book of Enoch.
  • Also note that three letters in there literally spell the word "lie".
• Meat Puppet: Unlike his nemesis, Fanatic, Apostate possesses a string of corpses to manifest in the world, and if they're destroyed it matters little to him: he can always possess and mold another into the shape he likes.
• No Cure for Evil: If Apostate would be killed on his Infernal Emissary side and he has a relic, he blows up one with the least HP and flips to his Dark Corrupter side, healing 20 HP in the process. And his Dark Corrupter side regenerates health every turn. What's more, if he has any relics while he's on his Dark Corrupter side, he blows one up and flips back to his Infernal Emissary side, getting 20 HP back in the process. The only way to take Apostate down for good is to clear the field of his relics before landing the killing blow.
• Number of the Beast: 666 health would be completely absurd, so Apostate settles for having 66.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: His theme in the digital version is full of it: "Sumus adamas luceat sine ignes, ignes, ignes... SUMUS! ADAMAS! Luceat sine ignes!" It's a translation the verse from the Dio song Fallen Angels that he quotes on one of his cards.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: His theme song runs on this trope, deliberately composed to be a twisted version of Catholic cathedral music.
• Perpetual Smiler: In opposition to Fanatic, Apostate is always smiling. The only time he isn't smiling is on the back side of his character cards.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: They show up when he's being especially sinister, as in his character portrait.
• Satanic Archetype: Naturally, complete with a "fall from grace," manipulating people into deals, and drawing power from lies and deception, though a lot of the more aesthetic aspects are just him really leaning into the "fallen angel" thing after what Fanatic did to him.
• Troll: After a certain point he gives up on trying to seriously deceive Fanatic and starts just telling her more and more outrageous lies merely to mess with her and annoy her, including stuff like pretending he's a concerned family member cheesily trying to wake her from a coma and pretending they're both really heroes with ludicrous power origins.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Unlike many of the other examples in Sentinels, Apostate doesn't even bother with a vest, or collar, or anything else above the waist. Of course, his wings mean that he can't use conventional clothes, but Fanatic doesn't let that stop her.
• Was Once a Man: His various demonic servants were all once regular people, whom he's corrupted and twisted with his lies.
• Winged Humanoid: Claims to be the same type of being as Fanatic, and her creator. She...did not take that claim well.

Baron Blade/Luminary

Baron Blade (Multiverse Era, RPG Timeline, and Miststorm Timeline Villain)/Luminary (Multiverse Era "Hero")

Debut: Base game, Vengeance (team villain deck), OblivAeon (Luminary hero deck) (Enhanced); Base set (Definitive)

"Come now, you should know by now the utter futility of fighting Baron Blade!"

Ivan Grigori Ramonat was the son of a Cold War scientist killed at the hands of the previous Legacy. Dubbing himself Baron Blade after taking back his hometown from Soviet control, he goes on a one-man war against the Legacy family line and seeks to either take vengeance for his father or die trying. The overall Big Bad of the card game until OblivAeon, his simple deck throws nearly every trick in the book at the players: minions, defensive weapons, destructive superweapons, and devastating debuffs.

Baron Blade has an alternate form: Mad Bomber Blade, which sacrifices his minions and targetable devices to let him do ever-increasing damage to the heroes. He then returns with a different deck for Vengeance, which gives him constant healing and aims to hinder heroes.

For the OblivAeon expansion, Baron Blade temporarily becomes a hero named Luminary. Post-card game, he's an Affably Evil playable character in Tactics and is once again the Big Bad in the RPG.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • Baron Blade (as a normal villain) can do a bit of everything - field disruption, big hits, discarding, healing - but none of his defenses are hard to remove, and his health pool is miniscule by villain standards. Once his Mobile Defense Platform is gone, all he can really do is try to keep the heroes distracted while building up to his Non-Standard Game Over.
  • Luminary is extremely dependent on his 5 HP Devices, and his big hits like the Kill Sat not only refuse to work if he has less than 15 cards in his trash, they reshuffle said trash and then explode. Compare Tachyon's Lightspeed Barrage, which can be used whenever and leaves the trash in place for another Barrage.
• Affably Evil: In Tactics, Baron Blade's plans have gone from "taking revenge" to "being a mild annoyance to the Freedom Five", according to Christopher and Adam.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Not in gameplay, but in the story, his final confrontation with Legacy before returning as Luminary is a stalemate in the Realm of Discord, where a Positive Energy Field keeps them from doing any damage to one another. Instead, they talk, and eventually Blade simply disappears, returning only when OblivAeon is coming.
  • Gets hit with an inversion several times:
    • The Mad Bomber arc had him spend months setting up a huge plan, from building bombs everywhere to creating a Death Ray that would have killed Legacy in a single hit. He even went and set up an entire business in Megalopolis to further assist his various schemes and plots. He finally enacts it by filming the location of the bombs and bragging to the Freedom Five that they can't stop him and they'll lose their city, all in an attempt to once more harm the public's opinion on them. How did the Freedom Five react? They couldn't, because they were on Mars fighting an Alien Invasion.
    • In the main timeline, he ends up setting up one big trap for Legacy on Mars. This same trap killed Legacy in one timeline, and Young Legacy in another. It ends up foiled here because both Parsons were in the hospital because Iron Legacy (ironically from the timeline in which Young Legacy dies) appeared on Earth and nearly slaughtered everyone.
• Arch-Enemy: Legacy (and by extension, Young Legacy and Greatest Legacy); he and Legacy both accuse the other of killing a member of their family (Baron Blade's father, Legacy's grandfather), making Baron Blade Legacy's answer to Lex Luthor. By proxy, he's also considered this by the Freedom Four/Five as a whole.
• Artificial Limbs: Before returning as Luminary, he ends up removing his own left arm due to it getting completely mangled during the Cosmic Contest. He replaces it for an arm made of nanites. It can create holograms and turn into a blade. To quote Christopher and Adam, "This arm is pretty good, but what if it was better?"
  • In Tactics, he overlays this metal arm with a gauntlet that can do much more, from firing Regression Serum to redistributing kinetic energy.
  • In the RPG, it appears Baron Blade is becoming more and more of a Cyborg and has gotten a metal eye and what appears to be a bionic heart.
  • Meanwhile, the alternate universe Luminary's promo shows her with an entirely metal right arm, which may have been the result of battle.
• Attack Deflector: Elemental Redistributor, but only for fire, cold, or lightning damage .
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Sovereign leader of a Lithuanian nation he built himself from the ground up.
• Axe-Crazy: Normal Baron Blade is unhinged, but Mad Bomber Blade is completely psychotic. When he flips to his Maniacal Death Ray Wielder side, he's laughing psychotically while wielding a huge energy gun.
• Badass Normal: Blade has no superpowers, just genius intellect and a whole arsenal of gadgets, weapons, drones, and minions. Mad Bomber Blade doesn't even have the drones or minions; he's just a lunatic with bombs and a death ray, and he still manages to be a serious threat to the heroes.
• Bad Boss:
  • Depending on your view, it's justified for the Blade Battalions soldiers and Mordengrad as a whole, who either work in the factories, work as Battalions, or leave the country. If the timeline is anything to go by, Mordengrad has only been standing in its repaired, Communist-free state for something around 30 years.
  • Hinted at for RevoCorp. His anger issues were noted briefly in the Setback podcast, and scientists were quick to steer Pete away from his robot duplicate. He also abandons it, leaving the figurehead CEO as the actual CEO.
• Big Bad: He assembled and leads the Vengeful Five.
• Bootstrapped Leitmotif: Inverted. His theme song in the digital version was turned into a Recurring Riff for all of the Vengeance Team-Up versions of the villains.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: According to the Letters Page, Baron Blade is the kind of person who would get a 4x4 table, begin assembling a puzzle on it, and once he realizes it's not doing anything for him, get a 5x5 table and put it over the 4x4 table. He's prone to giving up on inventions that aren't working out how he wants or, when finally finished, they suffer from being made by someone with short-sighted goals.
• The Chessmaster: Despite his usual short-sightedness, he manages to pull off an impressive gambit during the OblivAeon event, with his manipulation being a massive part of the reason the heroes won.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: His hero deck makes this into a mechanic with Triple Cross, which requires him to first destroy a hero card — but in return, he then destroys up to 3 low-HP targets. He then causes a target to deal themselves psychic damage, which in-game typically represents damage to morale.
• Colony Drop: His base version's signature mechanic, using a tractor beam device to pull the Moon into the Earth and end the game. His Team version doesn't bother with such grand gestures, but as Luminary, he finally gets to accomplish this goal, this time using his new Terralunar Translocator doomsday device to teleport chunks of the Moon directly onto his hapless foes.
• Complexity Addiction: Per Word of God, he is very dramatic in his vendetta against Legacy. In the Letters Page podcast, the game's writers point out that hugely dramatic plots like the Terralunar Impulsion Beam plot failed, but the timeline in which he kills Legacy or Young Legacy, his plot consists of, "Weaken them with regression serum, then stab."
• Composite Character: Doctor Doom's personal nation-state, scarred face, and alliterative title, Lex Luthor's hatred of the resident Superman Substitute, Powered Armor, and giant corporation (briefly), the revenge motive of Ivan Vanko, and like all three, a technological genius. As Luminary he wears a tank top, leggings, and goggles which make him resemble MCU Tony Stark at work, including operating a holographic computer. Meanwhile, his mooks wear uniforms that remind one of HYDRA's minions in the comics.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Downplayed. He sets up Revocorp during the Mad Bomber scheme, but the most we know he does with it is gather Omnitron's parts twice and create Progression Serum. After Vengeance, he's basically done with the company.
• Counter-Attack: Backlash Field hits would-be attackers with lightning.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: By Vengeance he decides to start renting out his Mobile Defense Platforms to other villains, turning them into environments. According to the Letters Page podcast, he will sell weapons and technology to whoever will pay for them to finance his own schemes. He also sets up Revocorp, which even after he leaves he gets cuts from.
• Death Ray: Mad Bomber Blade has one once he flips.
• Death Equals Redemption: As Luminary, he sacrifices himself to save some of the heroes, including Legacy; this leads to the back of his shiny character card, which shows his funeral, with the Freedom Five in mourning, believing he died a hero. Subverted in that he faked his death and returns as a villain in both the RPG and Tactics.
• Deflector Shields: His base deck's Mobile Defense Platforms render Blade himself immune to damage until they're destroyed. His Living Force Field ongoing cards are personal, man-portable shields. His hero deck has a number of Disposable Defenders which project Beehive Barriers and can redirect damage to themselves.
• Dirty Communists: In-universe, before Sentinels Comics turned Baron Blade into a Mad Scientist archtype, his and Legacy's comics were more along the line of propaganda due to Blade's European heritage and the fact he was made during the WWII/Cold War era. Despite this, Baron Blade was on the receiving end of Communism in his country; before going off to fight Legacy, he was fighting Soviets himself.
• Doomsday Device: His specialty tends to be devastating superweapons. As Luminary he has several such doomsday machines which will trigger when he has 15 or more cards in his trash.
• Elite Mooks: As part of the Vengeful Five, his deck contains Citizen Slash, Ruin, Omni-Blade, Zhu Long, and Empyreon, the Nemeses of Ex-Patriette, Argent Adept, Omnitron-X, Mr. Fixer, and Captain Cosmic.
• Enemy Mine: The threat of OblivAeon is enough to make him put aside his differences with the heroes and join up to fight them as Luminary. During this time, he makes several useful inventions and, in particular, assists Sky-Scraper to develop new enhancement devices to boost her size-shifting potential, resulting in her promo version Extremist Sky-Scraper.
• Evil Genius: All his decks are full of his inventions, and he rebuilt Friction's stolen speedsuit for her.
• Evil Minions: The Blade Battalion.
• Expy: A pretty clear-cut one for Doctor Doom; as a Mad Scientist who runs his own nation, has aspirations of world domination, and harbors an obsessive grudge towards a particular hero, he's got everything but the metal mask and green cloak. Also one for Lex Luthor; as again, a Mad Scientist who opposes the local Superman Substitute, forms and leads a team of supervillains against the main heroic team led by said Superman Substitute, use of large, warsuit-like Powered Armor, and focus on both obtaining his rival's powers.
• Faking the Dead: The Collector's Edition of Luminary's incapacitated art sees the Freedom Five attending his funeral, with Legacy giving the eulogy... and a shadowy figure watching from a nearby hill. (The original card art shows the same scene from his own position, standing in the treeline with a new scar, but not whose funeral it is, i.e. his own.) And, indeed, Baron Blade is back to being an antagonist in Tactics and the RPG.
• Fatal Flaw: Russian-roulettes between being egotistical, impulsive/short-sighted, and wrathful.
• Force Field: Has one in his base deck called "Living Force Field" and ends up taking it into Tactics, and all Mobile Defense Platforms come equipped with one.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Mad Bomber Blade has a huge burn scar down one side of his face. Prior to that, he has a trendy eye scar on his right eye.
  • The size of his scars seems to be inversely proportional to his sanity with the entire left half of his face being scarred by the time of Vengeance and the scars disappearing completely when he becomes Luminary. Then he gets new scars in both the RPG and Tactics to symbolize his return to evil.
• Good Twin: With a side of Gender Flip, where one of the alt universe heroes that answers the call to fight OblivAeon is Ivana Ramonat, a Science Heroine who on her world fights against the Legacy of Destruction.
• Heel Realization: Downplayed. Baron Blade never really stops being a villain, but during the Vengeance event, his battle with Legacy ends with simply talking things out. He then disappears for an in-universe span of two to three years, and his following appearance has him as Luminary. While he doesn't do much in the way of major battles, he creates equipment for several heroes and "dies" to save several people, including Legacy. When he comes back...
  • In the RPG, he Subverts the trope - he views the card game timeline as his rise to being a better supervillain and ends up becoming the The Man Behind the Man of all the other villains.
  • In Tactics, he continues to downplay the trope. Although still being the main nemesis to Legacy, he's become remarkably less self-destructive, worked on outfitting himself and his troops with better gear, and changes his aim from taking revenge to just being a hassle. Compare and contrast his opening plans: pulling the Moon into the Earth versus destroying a single building in a single town.
• Heroic Build: Super Serum has its perks!
• Hero Killer: He killed the World War II-era Legacy, and in the original timeline, kills the current Legacy. In an alternate timeline, he instead kills Young Legacy.
  • Invoked in the digital version. In order to unlock Young Legacy, you need to let Baron Blade personally knock out Legacy in the Wagner Mars Base.
• A Hero to His Hometown: The Blade Battalion is partially made up of true-believers who see Baron Blade as a force of good.
  • Although Gameplay and Story Segregation comes into play if you field Luminary in Mordengrad or Mobile Defense Platform; the various forces arrayed there will fire on him as cheerfully as they do any other hero (and his presence will make the Black Hole Generator worse). Even the main hero-benefiting card, Conscripted Engineer, isn't much help for him because he doesn't use Equipment. But at least he can take advantage of the Device Assembly Line and Mobile Alert Platform, and Timely Disruption can help keep Mordengrad's many device cards under control.
• I Hate Past Me: Their dialogue in the video game has Baron Blade dismiss Luminary as an impostor, only for the latter to be aghast he can't recognize a temporal anomaly when he sees it.
• Joker Immunity: Whether blown up, trapped in another dimension, or performing a Heroic Sacrifice to kill a bigger villain, Baron Blade always come back.
• Kill Sat: His villain version eschews this in favor of the Terralunar Impulsion Beam, but Luminary does come equipped with an Orbital Death Laser among his Doomsday devices. Like all of his Doomsday cards, it can be quite dramatic, dealing a minimum of 15 irreducible damage.
• Large Ham: He lives and breaths this trope with almost all of his card quotes being super hammy speeches or hilariously hammy boasts.
• Mad Bomber: Invoked. His Mad Bomber Blade variant ditches the minions and inventions in favor of Area of Effect damage that steadily builds from round to round.
• Mad Scientist: He's got a huge range of technology at his command, represented by his Device-heavy deck. His original plot is to use a giant energy beam to pull the Moon into the Earth to avenge himself against Legacy, a textbook case of And Then What? if there ever was one. His team villain deck, hero deck (as Luminary), and associated environment deck of Mordengrad showcase even more of his inventions.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: His Luminary deck continues to use Device cards (which are otherwise villain exclusive) rather than the Equipment cards the other heroes use. This makes him very resistant to disruption by villains and also means that villains that buff their own Devices buff his as well.
• Nanomachines: Another of the technologies at his command, used to repair his own body and occasionally his various devices.
• No Cure for Evil: Averted in every iteration:
  • His base deck contains one card, Flesh-Repair Nanites, that regain his HP by 10. Fortunately, he only has one copy, and it's entirely possible for him to discard it if he's set on Advance in either variant.
  • "Genetically Fused Physique" from his Vengeance deck heals him for 2 HP every turn and reduces the damage he takes by 1.
  • Luminary comes with Repair Nanites, which sit on the field until destroyed and repair either Luminary's body or his other devices as long as they last. He has three of them, which actually makes him one of the more durable characters.
• Nonstandard Game Over: If he has enough cards in his trash, he wins via Colony Drop. His advanced setting amplifies this, as every turn he discards three cards into his trash, and on the digital version, his Challenge Mode keeps the Colony Drop win on both sides, and he never shuffles his trash into his deck.
• No-Sell: Negation Bands can negate one attack each turn and heal him at the same time.
• Offhand Backhand: Baron Blade takes it up to eleven with the art for Backlash Field — he doesn't even need to lift a hand to stop Tachyon, his shield does it for him. Same thing happens with his forcefields in Tactics.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Robots, flying bases, energy manipulation and Deflector Shields, his own personal Super Serum, a black hole generator... Blade is every bit as broad-minded as Tachyon, and that's somehow without her ability to learn and think at superspeed.
• One-Man Army: Mad Bomber Blade doesn't use minions or defense platforms. Even by himself, armed with just a death ray, a few gadgets, and a multitude of explosives, he remains a credible threat to the superheroes.
• Power at a Price: Seems to be a Running Gag with Christopher and Adam, if their jokes about Baron Blade creating rocket-propelled mail carriers and double-ended cheese squeezers were serious. To list a few: his first, working battle suit had a vent right next to the face; his Progression Serum severely damages your body; Friction's shock dampeners were incredibly fragile; Sky-Scraper's size-changers eventually did backfire; and the aforementioned inventions that may have been jokes.
• Powered Armor: Gets some once his standard version flips, carries it over into Tactics, and apparently creates several versions for other villains to use.
• Revenge Before Reason: Kind of his whole thing. He'll do anything to get revenge on the Legacy line for killing his father, up to and including dropping the moon on the earth while he's standing on it.
• Sanity Slippage: He gets crazier and more ragged every time. Subverted when he becomes Luminary and continued into Tactics, when he realizes how much of his life he's wasted - while he's still a villain, he's a lot more easygoing and less personal about it.
• Scars Are Forever: A Zigzagged Trope. Started off with him receiving a bayonet scar on the right side after mouthing off to a Soviet general (which blinds him in that eye to boot), then gains burn scars to go with after the Impulsion Beam fails and his suit blows up near his face. Post-Vengeance, every scar is gone; then in the RPG, his faked death gives him a brand new scar and removes his sight again. Adam remarks about how his right side seems cursed, and it's especially true when you look at Luminary's variant and notice how her entire right arm is replaced by a robotic one.
• Slasher Smile: His signature expression. The one he gets in the digital game while under 10 HP as the theoretically heroic Luminary is particularly diabolical.
• Squishy Wizard: Notably averted thanks to his nanotech-based Healing Factor, various Deflector Shields, and Powered Armor.
• Starter Villain: In gameplay terms, his base game incarnation is one of only a couple villains listed at the lowest difficulty. In story terms, according to the online comic, he's the villain who makes Legacy form the Freedom Four, recruiting Tachyon, Bunker, and The Wraith to stop him. In the digital game, he's the opponent in the tutorial.
• Super Serum: How Baron Blade turned into a badass. However, it wasn't quite complete and has serious side-effects. Eventually, by the time he becomes Luminary, he's had to flush it all out of his system, and his bios indicate that he's still suffering from the after-effects.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Played with; around Vengeance, it's possible his form letters end with, "If you kill Legacy for me, I will forever be in your debt". By OblivAeon it's zig-zagged, with his motives partially being to fight so he and Legacy live another day to fight and partially for some unknown means.
• Unexplained Recovery: Subverted. His scars disappeared as a result of the Positive Energy Field event. However, his Progression Serum stunt still took its toll on his body, and it's brought up in both Luminary's profile and his Tactics bio that - despite C&A stating his podcast that the energy field washed it out of his body - he's still aching.
• Villainous Breakdown: Offscreen version. Mad Bomber Blade is Baron Blade after getting stomped by the heroes, and compared with his previous self, he's disheveled, scarred, and even more insane than he was previously. He didn't take his last defeat well at all.
  • Played for Laughs on Setback's card "Silver Linings", where he is not thrilled that one of his experiments worked for someone else:
    "I have been experimenting with the reversed regression serum for years, and it works on this guy?!"
• Villain Has a Point: Pulls this with a good dose of realistic outcomes when an off-screen plot against the Freedom Five; he built a device in the middle of town, the Freedom Five destroyed it before he could activate it, and he pulled them into court and won because he not only had a legal right to build thanks to permits and blueprints that showed the device wasn't in any way harmful, but also was attacked before any proof the device was dangerous was shown. He ends up showing Megalopolis that they can't always trust their heroes and shakes their belief in them, proves you can't immediately fall into brawling, and it's why the Terra Lunar Impulsion Beam has a countdown to begin with: the heroes could not attack until it was obvious that it was a dangerous device.
• You Killed My Father: His reason for hating the Parsons; the Legacy of the Cold War killed Blade's father when he was developing Soviet superweapons, which directly led to the almost literal collapse of the city that had grown up around said weapons' production plants.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: While he's one of the lowest-difficulty rated villains, some of his cards can be devastating if you thought you could take your time with him — one, for instance, allows the players to destroy their equipment or ongoing cards, and then does damage to every hero target based on how many total are left on the table — if you've got an equipment or ongoing-heavy hero like Argent Adept, Wraith, or Absolute Zero on the table, that means either wiping their gear, or a potential Total Party Kill. If you're playing with advanced rules, he also becomes one of the hardest villains period simply because he discards up to three cards into his trash every turn... which means you need to unload a minimum of fifty points of damage into him within five turns (forty for Blade and ten for his first defense platform), and that's assuming he doesn't bring out Living Force Field, another defense platform, or a bunch of one-shots that also feed his trash.

Biomancer

Biomancer

Debut: Villains of the Multiverse

"The truth is horrifying. There is not a thing you can trust. Especially not me."

A centuries old alchemist with powers that allow him to animate and control living flesh. He uses them to build and animate body-doubles and doppelgangers that serve his evil designs. The Biomancer's deck consists of Fleshchild minions that mimic other heroes and villains, as well as other cards that heal them and himself, or bring fresh new creations into play.

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• Achilles' Heel: While he does a lot with his low health pool thanks to good damage reduction and healing, attacks with sufficiently high damage can give him very bad days - given a sufficiently populous battlefield, the Scholar can one-shot him with Grace Under Fire, and if the game gets to the late stages, Tachyon can put him clean through a wall with Lightspeed Barrage. Repeated minor attacks can also mess him up, since his DR only works against the first attack each turn.
• Actually a Doombot: In his incapacitated art, the heroes think they've caught him for good, only to find out that they've really captured yet another of his replicas.
• Alchemy Is Magic: Played with. Biomancer is both a capable scientist and a powerful wizard, but his downfall is his inability to combine the two together to create "true" alchemy.
• Arch-Enemy: The Scholar, who perfected the Philosopher's Stone Biomancer threw away, earning Biomancer's undying enmity.
• Body Horror: The creators, and his own descriptions, don't shy away from how horribly disgusting his powers are to see in action.
• Boxed Crook: Briefly, in the Iron Legacy timeline, in which he's tracked down by Mr. Fixer and forced to create a new body to house Devra Caspit's mind, creating Golem Unity.
• Create Your Own Hero: The Scholar's Philosopher's Stone was originally one of Biomancer's experiments, which he carelessly discarded out in the wilderness when it turned out to be flawed.
• Damage Reduction: He reduces the first damage he takes each turn by 2, making him difficult to harm.
• Doppelgänger: Most of his Fleshchildren resemble other heroes and villains, primarily the Dark Watch and Prime Wardens.
• Driven by Envy: His rivalry with the Scholar comes from recognizing that the Scholar is not only able to marry magic and science together into alchemy in a way Biomancer never could, but in seeing his own failed Philosopher's Stone perfected in the Scholar's hands.
• Evil Sorcerer: Many of his feats are accomplished via dark sorcery and Blood Magic.
• Expy: To the Jackal, a Spider-Man villain similarly focused on cloning; his backstory even includes a reference to the Jackal's role in The Clone Saga, since he was similarly used to retcon years of Tempest continuity by retroactively declaring 20 years worth of Tempest's appearances to be one of his clones.
• Healing Factor: He can use his powers in this way, and does so often in the cardgame. In particular, he and all his Fleshchildren regenerate a substantial amount of health each turn.
• Historical Domain Character: He started out as the real-life 3rd/4th-century alchemist and mystic Zosimos of Panopolis, also known as Zosimus Alchemista.
• Human Resources: He creates and rebuilds his Fleshchildren, and, to an extent, his own body, with chunks of others' parts.
• Immortality Immorality: His blurb outright says that his powers have eroded away his moral compass over the centuries. The creators have called him one of the most evil villains in the game.
• Mad Scientist: He spends a lot of time dabbling in "dark science" and creating strange warped inventions in an attempt to combine science and magic, before eventually settling more heavily on the magic side of things.
• Mistaken for an Imposter: In-universe, since some of his cards cause heroes to mistake one another for Fleshchildren copies and attack.
• No Cure for Evil: As befitting his flesh control, this is completely averted. Many of his cards are him drawing on his Healing Factor or repairing his minions.
• Paranoia Fuel: In-universe, in which he builds perfect recreations of other heroes and causes them to doubt one another. His incapacitated ability also invokes this, increasing all damage heroes do to themselves and to one another.
• Squishy Wizard: Subverted. He only has 18 HP, but he has such a powerful Healing Factor and so much Damage Reduction that it doesn't actually make him that squishy.
• Weak, but Skilled: The creators have said that he is every bit the dangerous world-level threat as Akash'bhuta or Baron Blade, but that because of his willingness to operate in a low-key manner, he flies under the radar... and so is all the more insidious.

Bugbear

Bugbear

Debut: Villains of the Multiverse

"You're in serious trouble, little hero. I have your scent. You'll be mine soon enough."

Moris Dugal was once hired muscle for a drug lord, before an ambush sent him fleeing into the jungles of Mesoamerica. There, in an ancient pyramid, he lay down to bleed out, only to reawaken, transformed into a bestial state and clutching a gemstone that contained his lifeforce. Now he stalks the jungle, slaughtering everything in his path to feed the hunger of the gemstone.

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• Beast Man: From his wild hair to his claws and feral hunting patterns.
• Blood Magic: The crimson gem that fuels him requires blood to keep him working.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: One of his cards causes him to attack his allies for a quick power-up. He even gets extra benefits for finishing them off.
• Composite Character: In terms of his size, Healing Factor, and bestial personality, he's one of Wolverine's Arch-Enemy Sabretooth. His Super-Persistent Predator tendencies in the metafiction loosely resemble those of perennial Spider-Man foe Kraven the Hunter. Visually, his striped tights make him look most like Sabretooth, but the the ruff of hair on his shoulders is part of both characters' iconic costumes (though Kraven's lion mane vest is more similar to Haka's base costume).
• Deal with the Devil: Makes one with Ammit for more power, which ultimately leads to the end of his hero career and any hope of the man inside him ever being free of the beast.
• Dumb Muscle: Both the Visionary and the Dark Visionary comment that he's not terribly bright. It's his unwillingness or inability to fully understand and appreciate his powers that leads him to make a Deal with the Devil with Ammit.
• Heel–Face Turn: NightMist is temporarily able to contain the magic inside him, separating the beast from the man. He becomes a hero, for a while...
  • Heel–Face Door-Slam: During a battle with Citizens Hammer and Anvil, the magic containing his bestial nature slips loose, and he turns on the heroes. The Dark Visionary casually lashes out with her power and leaves him nearly-lobotomized, destroying any hope of him ever returning to being human. NightMist then, sadly, banishes him to the magical plane, where he at least won't be able to hurt anyone else.
• Horror Hunger: It's mentioned that the death toll if he ever gets to a populated area would likely be catastrophic.
• Life Drain: All of his attacks heal him when he does damage, and many charge him up if he finishes off their targets.
• Natural Weapon: He rarely fights with more than his fangs and claws.
• Super-Persistent Predator: One of his cards involves him running a hero down so hard that they deal themselves psychic damage from the exhausting pursuit. He ran down the Naturalist this way when the poor guy's powers were starting to come apart.
• Wolfpack Boss: While this is true of all team villains by default, Bugbear in particular grows in power as you finish off the other villains. He gains a +1 bonus to all damage for each downed character — this includes heroes as well — which, combined with his Life Drain ability, makes him especially dangerous to take down last.

La Capitan/La Comodora & Her Crew

La Capitan (Multiverse Era Villain)/La Comodora (Multiverse Era Hero)

Debut: Shattered Timelines, Villains of the Multiverse (team villain deck), OblivAeon (La Comodora hero deck)

"Your reckoning is at hand! Embrace eternity!"

A pirate who uses a mysterious time-traveling ship to travel through various timelines, recruiting the deadliest crew from various realities, and together stealing everything they can get their hands on.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • As La Comodora, being unable to draw cards is a huge pain, as her deck's strategy is heavily reliant on maintaining card churn and many of her Equipment cards explode if she can't discard cards to maintain them. Hostile effects that move cards between deck and trash can also mess up her ability to play big-hitter cards like Weigh Anchor and Run Aground, which are reliant on having cards in certain places at the right time.
  • As a (regular) villain, La Capitan needs her ship. Her cards burn through her deck at a fast clip, and if La Paradoja Magnifica is out of commission, she loses the ability to recycle her deck. Multi-target attacks also cause her a lot of trouble, as her crew aren't particularly bulky - a Rampage from Haka will leave almost all of them on death's door.
• An Adventurer Is You: The Resource Master with a side of Nuker as the heroic La Comodora. She provides additional power uses, specializes in manipulating other heroes' trash, benefits more than most from discarding cards from her own hand, and has a unique ability to set up chain reactions by placing cards on the bottom of her own deck, in order, then playing them all together with Weigh Anchor. Then, once all those cards end up back in the trash, she can finish her enemies off by crashing her timeship into them with Run Aground.
• Anachronic Order: Not terribly surprising, for a villain themed around Time Travel. Her first appearance came in Shattered Timelines, as an established captain with a crew. Then, in Villains of the Multiverse, we see another La Capitan villain deck, this one from just after she began time traveling, and sans crew. Come OblivAeon, we see the oldest version of the character yet, La Comodora, as an established hero. And finally, her promo as La Comodora is set at the start of her Heel–Face Turn, years before the base card but after the villain deck — but also at the very end of her days, with the consciousness of her future self. She's her own Origin Story.
  • Exaggerated with her hero deck in general, as while she seems to be continuously teleporting around a single battle, she's actually jumping through portals in time, and often spends much longer on the other side of her portals than it outwardly appears, setting into motion whatever the "present" battle demands.
• Arch-Enemy: The Southwest Sentinels, who she holds a grudge against for defeating her when she was younger. (Thanks to Anachronic Order, this happened after the first time the Sentinels fought her, linearly speaking.)
• The Atoner: Eventually she comes to regret much of what she's done and sets out to fix it. Her first step is finding a time-stranded Chrono-Ranger, fixing him up, and enlisting his help to fix those wrongs. In OblivAeon, she joins the heroes in the fight as the Older and Wiser La Comodora.
• Badass Longcoat: Wears a bright red one with a Jolly Roger on each shoulder at the height of her knowledge and experience as La Comodora.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Black eyes of cataclysmic temporal power overload when she's near-death (or fully incapacitated) in her Curse of the Black Spot variant.
• Black Spot: Her final promo variant. In-universe it's apparently a "message" from her future self, kicking off the events she needs to eventually be in a position to do something about OblivAeon. But it doesn't look healthy — a black hole over her heart, Tainted Veins spreading throughout her body.
• Character Development: At first, soon after developing her time powers, she jaunts around time and space fiddling with time for her own amusement. (Her Villains deck.) Then, she eventually finds her ship, assembles a crew of time-shifted ne'er do wells, and sets out to plunder all the riches of history. (Her original Shattered Timelines deck.) Finally, after losing her crew and much of her gear, she grows up, and aids the heroes in stopping not only her younger self but the end of all timelines as the hero La Comodora.
• The Chessmaster: As La Comodora, she spends most of her time (which she has a lot of) setting up complex plans to defeat OblivAeon, manipulating various heroes and villains into being in the right place at the right time. This makes her one of the most instrumental players in the fight against OblivAeon along with Luminary.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Her hero deck shows that she's the one who brings America's Greatest Legacy (WWI Legacy) to the present, bungee-jumping through a portal on top of OblivAeon in the art for Temporal Rigging.
• Cool Ship: La Paradoja Magnifica, a sailing ship capable of both space and time travel.
• Extra Turn: In her team villain incarnation she has the card Stitch In Time, which causes her to take an extra turn when it is destroyed. Even if the heroes don't destroy it themselves, it automatically destroys itself at the end of the environment turn. This represents her time manipulation powers, in particular the more reckless antics that her older selves are too savvy to attempt.
• Future Me Scares Me: Not directly her own nemesis, but La Comodora is often at odds with her younger self's temporal shenanigans. This is reflected with unique dialogue in the digital game.
  • The Definitive Edition changes her nemesis to La Comodora, bringing her more in line with this trope.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Her nickname and the name of her ship are in Spanish, she speaks in Spanish-flavored Poirot Speak, and several of the cards in her team villain deck are in Spanish as well: ¿Donde? ¡Aqui! ("Where? Here!"), ¿Quando? ¡Ahora! ("When? Now!"), Off Tiempo (off time), and Chiquito (affectionate diminutive of boy, i.e. "little boy").
• Heel–Face Turn: La Capitan reforms in her old age. She rescues Chrono-Ranger (in the backstory for his promo card), confronts her younger self in the Villains variant's incapacitated side, and actually gets her own hero deck in the OblivAeon expansion.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Runs her ship into OblivAeon, and in the process is thrown outside of the multiverse... and with the collapse of the multiverse following OblivAeon's death, there's no way for her to get back, or anyone to get to her to rescue her.
• I Hate Past Me: Chrono-Ranger's promo is the result of La Comodora fixing him up in exchange for fighting her younger self and fixing the messes she made (hence why her Villains of the Multiverse deck has Chrono-Ranger as a nemesis rather than The Sentinels).
• Impossible Thief: While it makes sense for her to steal Equipment cards, she can also steal Ongoings and even One-Shots, meaning she can literally steal actions the players would otherwise be able to take. Which makes more sense when Time Travel is involved than it otherwise might.
• Knight of Cerebus: Inverted — a formerly wacky and lighthearted villain becomes a serious, even noble hero in the face of the cosmic-level threat that is OblivAeon.
• Laser Blade: Wields one occasionally.
• Meaningful Name: La Capitan: literally, the Captain, and she's a pirate captain (though she's not The Captain). La Paradoja Magnifica — "The Magnificent Paradox" — is itself a Spanish galleon that can Time Travel. Most of her crewmen have fanciful nicknames as well.
• Not Quite Dead: Or "Not Quite Fate Worse than Death" in this case. The Editor's Note #11 podcast has confirmed that it's still possible to travel between universes after OblivAeon (just significantly more difficult), and that this explicitly means La Comodora can be saved.
• Of Corsets Sexy: Wears a bodice with her heaving bosom pushed out over the top in her Curse of the Black Spot variant.
• Older and Wiser: La Comodora has grown beyond her youthful greed, but at great personal cost: the loss of her beloved crew.
• Overly Long Name: La Capitan's full name is Maria Helena Teresa Fafila Servanda Jimena Mansuara Paterna Domenga Gelvira Placia Sendina Belita Eufemia Columba Gontina Aldonza Mafalda Cristina Tegrida de Falcon.
• Pirate Girl: More like a Pirate Woman (and Pirate Cool Old Lady as La Comodora), but still counts. La Comodora's Curse of the Black Spot variant looks closest to the part — but is chronologically both the oldest and youngest we've seen her, with her future self's mind in her younger self's body.
• Poirot Speak: Peppers her quotes with Gratuitous Spanish.
• Prince Of Thieves: A pirate queen of sorts in her heyday.
• Ramming Always Works: As La Comodora, "Run Aground" deals irresistible energy damage based on the number of equipment cards in her trash, which it then shuffles back into the deck. Flavourfully, it represents her slamming the Magnifica into her opponent.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: In her team deck, one of her cards is ¿Quando? ¡Ahora! (meaning "When? Now!") Except "quando" is Italian (or Portuguese, or Latin); in Spanish, it would be "cuando".
• Shout-Out:
  • Her last name is de Falcon. Yes, she's Captain Falcon.
  • Her red Badass Longcoat as La Comodora is a nod to the similarly vivid, Jolly Roger-emblazoned coat worn by Queen Emeraldas.
• Stable Time Loop: While actual details are limited, she apparently engineered her own Origin Story at the end of her life, as part of her overarching Long Game to defeat OblivAeon.
• Support Party Member: As La Comodora, she can provide persistent damage bonuses, power uses, cards and even free plays.
• Swashbuckler: A self-styled example. Deconstructed in that she's the villain.
• Sword and Gun: L'Epeiste has Musketeer as one of his keywords, but actually only fights with a Laser Blade. It's la Capitan herself who fights with the classic cutlass-and-flintlock combo.
• Tainted Veins: Unhealthy purple veins thrumming with cosmic energy extending out from the Black Spot in her final(/first) variant.
• Taking You with Me: The quote for Run Aground in her hero deck suggests this is one possible exit for her, the Paradoja, and OblivAeon.
  La Comodora: Buen viaje,^note Bon voyage OblivAeon. You and I will be gone from this time.
• Tears of Blood: Tears of inky black nothingness when she drops below 10 HP in her Black Spot variant in the digital game.
• Thinking Up Portals: By the time she is La Comodora, she is good enough with temporal manipulation to open up temporal portals to specific parts of her ship (such as the cannons for example) in the middle of combat for an attack. She also has a habit of grabbing various swords and/or guns throughout space and time through portals for a single slash/shot and then discarding them back through portals once they are expended.
• Video Game Stealing: Her primary mechanic as a villain. Whenever a hero card is destroyed by a villain card, it goes under her card rather than the player's trash, allowing her to take equipment, ongoings and other cards out of play temporarily. In team villain mode, it's her animal sidekick Chiquito who does the stealing and blocks the damage instead.
• Walk the Plank: Invoked as one of La Capitan's cards in her solo villain deck. Hero characters damaged as a result can't use powers until the next villain turn.
• Weaponized Teleportation: Her many time portals as La Comodora, as noted under Thinking Up Portals. Played with in that despite appearances, they aren't instantaneous — the quote for Combat Timing notes that for her, the time she left was actually "so long ago."

The Crew of La Paradoja Magnifica

Debut: Shattered Timelines

La Capitan's crew of temporal buccaneers, brought together aboard her timeship from across time and space.

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• Army of The Ages: The crew includes a Rōnin, a Viking, a French Musketeer, an acrobat, a World War One Flying Ace, a Spanish cavalryman, and a Mongolian archer, all of them wielding Enhanced Archaic Weapon.
• Badass Crew: Count as one together, as La Capitan has deliberately traveled through time to hand-pick the biggest badasses in history. Her team consists of a World War I flying ace, a Samurai assassin with poison powers, a Power Armored future Demolitions Expert, and many more besides.
• Healing Factor: Trueshot regains H-1 HP every single time any hero card is played and has 9 HP, which basically forces you to refrain from playing cards until you knock her out.
• Horny Vikings: Crew member Battle Forged, although unlike most Horny Vikings, Battle Forged's helmet does not have horns on it. His Rape, Pillage, and Burn mentality translates into playing an extra villain card whenever he scores a kill.
• Laser Blade: Wielded by L'Epeiste as one of the crew's most potentially damaging attacks (it deals energy damage based on the number of hero equipment and ongoing cards in play). Battle Forged wields a laser axe instead.
• Made of Iron: Battle Forged, Final Breath, and Siege-Breaker have higher hit points, but Trueshot's Healing Factor means she can outlast them all.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Battle Forged is a veteran Viking warrior and has the most HP of the crew.
  • L'Epeiste is a Master Swordsman. His name is French for "The Epeeist" — an epee being a large fencing foil.
  • Rōnin Final Breath focuses on finishing off low-HP targets (he gets a damage buff against targets with 10 HP or fewer) with toxic damage.
  • Siege-Breaker has damage reduction thanks to his Powered Armor and deals irreducible damage thanks to his high-tech halberd.
  • Trueshot is a Mongolian archer.
• The Musketeer: Subverted. L'Epeiste is an actual Musketeer (possibly — his card art shows the Eiffel Tower in ruins in the background) in full regalia, but only wields a Laser Blade, not a gun.
• Poisonous Person: Final Breath's katana deals toxic damage.
• Rōnin: Final Breath even has the classic one-sleeve-on, one-sleeve-off kimono of a movie Ronin.
• Samurai: Final Breath's keyword, other than crew, is Rōnin.
• She-Fu: The Amazing Mable, a trapeze artist whose weaponized circus acrobatics not only let her destroy a hero ongoing or equipment card every round, but render her immune to melee damage, a feat usually limited in-game to planes and starships... and she plays an extra villain card every turn as well. She doesn't deal damage and she only has 5 HP, but she's definitely not to be ignored.

Chiquito

Debut: Villains of the Multiverse

A young Capitan's simian companion, the lone target in her deck, from whom she seems to have picked up the knack of swiping moments out of time and protecting herself with them.

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• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Sidekick Creature Nuisance Chiquito, her sidekick from her team villain deck, is a green monkey-like creature with what looks like an iguana's tail.
• A Dog Named "Dog": A variation. Chiquito means, simply, "little boy", and translated back into English is somewhat akin to a dog named "good boy".
• Impossible Thief: In the same vein as La Capitan herself, Chiquito steals cards from players — which can mean equipment, sure, but also attacks, abilities, and events.
• No-Sell: In a lesser but more persistent version of La Capitan's solo version's flipped mechanic, Chiquito can block damage to La Capitan's Villains incarnation and himself by discarding stolen cards.
• Shout-Out: Chiquito is the masculine form of Chiquita, who are one of the world's largest distributors of bananas.
• Video Game Stealing: Chiquito steals the first card a hero discards per turn and holds on to it. Any damage that would affect Chiquito or his master is prevented, with Chiquito simply discarding a stolen card instead.

The Chairman/Exemplar & The Organization

The Chairman (Multiverse Era RPG Timeline)/Exemplar (Miststorm Timeline)

Debut: Rook City (Enhanced); Rook City Renegades (Definitive)

"I built this city; challenge me here and you will find out I am not just a creator..."

The shadowy ruler of Rook City and the CEO of Pike Industries. Graham Pike rules his city with an iron fist, at once turning it into a criminal empire and a corporate paradise, making money hand over fist from its rampant crime while the city's corruption ensures he profits. The Chairman's deck is a minion-heavy one, with lower-ranking minions being led by "Underbosses" and requiring the heroes fight their way up the ladder to take out several of them — "interrogating" them, if you will — before they can fight Pike himself.

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• Achilles' Heel: The Chairman relies heavily on trash recycling to operate. Keeping cards out of his trash (such as with Savage Mana or Brain Burn) breaks the mechanic his deck relies on, seriously blunting his offense.
• Arch-Enemy: Effectively the Kingpin to Mr. Fixer's Daredevil.
• Back from the Dead: In a gameplay twist, if the Chairman is brought to 0 HP before the Operative is, his card is destroyed and put into the trash. If the game goes on long enough for the trash to be reshuffled into the deck, The Chairman can be put into play again, forcing the heroes to start over.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: When Pike personally steps in to brawl with the heroes, he does so in his full suit coat and tie. In the Digital version, he even fixes his tie between rounds. The Contract and his Gunman Thugs are similarly well-dressed.
• By the Eyes of the Blind: Graham Pike looks like a normal, suit-clad businessman. But Mr. Fixer, who sees the world through his Aura Vision, finds just being in his malevolent presence interferes with his battle with the Operative.
• Composite Character: Of The Kingpin and Ra's al Ghul; the Lazarus Vats in particular are a direct reference to the latter.
• Continuity Drift: The Chairman's defeat screen in the digital version of the game clearly shows both his completely-intact hands as he clenches his fists in rage... long before the creators revealed he's missing a finger on one of them.
• Counter-Attack: When he flips, he deals damage back to the first hero to damage him each turn.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Of Rook City. It's a Polluted Wasteland thanks to him perverting his father's dream into his own image.
• Creative Sterility: Downplayed. The creators point out that the three things Graham Pike is most known for (his massive organized crime ring, his massive, corrupt company, and his Lazarus Vats) aren't things he created himself, just things he stole from other people. His real talent is to organize them and make them run.
• Crippling Overspecialization: His deck has two key weaknesses that, when exploited, make him much easier to take on.
  • The vast majority of it is Melee type, with only The Contract and Gunmen dealing projectile. With Next Evolution and Lead from the Front, Legacy can effectively neutralize most of that. Incapacitated Tempest can also let the team be immune to one damage type for a round to the same effect.
  • The Chairman's strategy is tied to having Thugs in the trash. So if the trash is empty, either via Visionary's Brain Burn or just getting him to draw enough to force a reshuffle, then Thugs are much less likely to come out and cards like Prison Break are rendered harmless. Similarly, cards that remove his minions from play rather than simply destroying them, like Haka's Savage Mana or the Final Wasteland's Unforgiving Wasteland, prevent them from being pulled back into the fray.
• Driven by Envy: The creators repeatedly describe him as "covetous" in the Letters Page podcast: he wants things not so much for their own sake as because he sees other people having them.
• Dual Boss: With the Operative. Downplayed, in that he has a bunch of other minions, too, and can fight perfectly well without her.
• Fingore: Zhu Long demanded his little finger as a "down payment" on his gift of a small vial of the liquid that Pike eventually reverse-engineered into the Lazarus Vats.
• Flunky Boss: Dangerous as the Chairman himself is, it's the sheer volume of underbosses and thugs his deck continuously churns out that makes him as dangerous as he is, one of the few Difficulty 4 villain decks in the game.
• Fountain of Youth: His Lazarus Vats can't heal death, but they can regenerate and revitalize his body. After a century, he remains in his prime thanks to regular baths in them.
• The Ghost: He hides away from Rook City as a whole to avoid revealing his eternal youth.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the Tactics timeline, in which his Lazarus Vat is tainted by the toxic run-off he dumped into the Rook City sewers for decades, driving him insane.
• Home Field Advantage: He's at his most dangerous in Rook City. More neutral environments take some of the edge off, and Final Wasteland can gut his deck in exactly the way you'd expect if a criminal gang tried to operate in a monster-infested wilderness.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: Jonathan Pike was a heroic visionary, more than a century ahead of his time in the fields of medicine, green energy, and overall philanthropy, who dreamed of making Overbrook City into a shining city on a hill. Graham Pike, who murdered his father to seize control of his company, is a man driven by covetousness and greed, who turned his father's noble pharmaceutical company into something that liberally spreads pollution, overcharges for lifesaving legal drugs while pumping out and pushing illegal ones, and remade Rook City into the Wretched Hive and Polluted Wasteland it is today.
• The Man Behind the Man: Of every man in Rook City. In the RPG timeline, where he never emerged from his hidden bunker following Progeny's assault, there's a new CEO in charge of Pike Industries and a new head of the Organization. The heroes aren't dumb. They know he has to be behind it somehow. But they can't prove it. This is even true mechanically speaking, as the Chairman does nothing and is immune to damage until at least three underbosses (only one in advanced mode) end up in the villain trash.
• No OSHA Compliance: The Pike Industries Environment deck features such charming cards as huge, mutated rats, exposed pits of supercooled solvent with no guard rails, and frequent vat explosions.
• Out of Focus: The Chairman goes to ground after Progeny destroys Rook City and wipes out his Organization, and along with Gloomweaver and Spite (both defeated after the Skinwalker Crisis Crossover) plays no part in the OblivAeon event. He comes back, driven even more insane by another Lazarus Vats treatment, in the Tactics timeline.
• Patricide: Poisoned his health-nut of a father to seize control of the family business.
• Pet the Dog: Pike is an evil bastard, but he appreciates good service. He is exceptionally generous to the impoverished Sophia DeLeon, offering her the use of the same Lazarus Vats that keep him in his physical prime and making her the second-highest member of his organization despite her humble origins. When the heroes take her out, he gets a big damage boost. This is in stark contrast to how he treated her predecessor.
• Really 700 Years Old: Pike is one hundred and seventeen years old, and founded Rook City. He, and the Operative, use regular chemical baths in vats of rejuvenating chemicals to remain in their prime.
• Sanity Slippage: In Sentinels Tactics, following a one-two-three punch of having his Organization dismantled, his city reduced to rubble, and having his Lazarus Vat tainted by toxic chemicals, Pike has gone stark raving mad and, backed by insane minions each armed with one of Spite's drugs, he plans to remake Broken City in his image.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: Be very careful if you plan to let Unforgiving Wasteland take out the Chairman's minions. The Chairman only flips when three or more Underbosses are in his trash. If three or more are removed from the game before he flips, he can't flip, you can't hurt him, and the game is lost. This is corrected in the Definitive Edition, where defeated Underbosses are instead placed under his card before any effects that would mess with their placement would trigger, ensuring that he can be flipped regardless of circumstances.
• You Have Failed Me: The first Operative, Boris "The Bear," who was taken out by Black Fist and thrown into jail. The Chairman contacted him to inform him that he'd rot there, then left him, knowing there was nothing he could do about it.

The Operative (Multiverse Era)/Dragonclaw (RPG Timeline)

Debut: Rook City (Assassin card - The Chairman), Villains of the Multiverse (team villain deck)

"I have learned from many. All have failed me. I persevere."

An orphan from Rook City, Sophia Anna Isabel DeLeon grew up understanding that the strong took what they wanted from the weak. She grew up to be a powerful thug of the underworld, and drew the attention of The Chairman. Now, she works as his right hand woman. When fighting the Chairman, although The Chairman is technically the only Villain card — meaning that defeating him is the only actual objective — the Operative must be defeated before the game can be won. The Operative becomes a villain on her own in Villains of the Multiverse, albeit as part of a team.

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• Arch-Enemy: Mr. Fixer, her former martial arts teacher.
• Counter-Attack: She punishes anyone who destroys an Underboss or Thug.
• Crippling Overspecialization: In her Villains incarnation, the Operative deals multiple instances of damage quite frequently, often with hero disruption or damage-mitigation attached and a dangerous extra attack in Iaido Strike if she ever secures a kill... but, with the exception of that attack, most of her damage is actually quite low, and her disruption effects are contingent on actually inflicting damage. A tough team can easily stall her with damage-reduction effects while beating up her team, and even setting that aside, any team which isn't impacted by her powerful-but-situational incapacitated effect can choose to rush her down first.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: She was never a match for Mr. Fixer before she took her first dip in a Lazarus Vat. Afterward... well, the reverse applied.
• The Dragon: of The Chairman. Not only does she handle all of the logistics of recruiting and "motivating" the underbosses, but she "discourages" the heroes from taking them out... by punching their lights out whenever they do.
• Dragon Ascendant: In the Villains of the Multiverse expansion, she gets her own villain deck, having taken up with Zhu Long after he killed her and stole her body. By Tactics, she's outright taken over the Organization.
• Empowered Badass Normal: She was no match for Mr. Fixer before the Chairman "upgraded" her with a dip in the Lazarus Vats.
• Fountain of Youth: Before their destruction, the Operative also benefited from Pike's Lazarus Vats, an unprecedented honor. The card that lets him heal up with a quick dip in them also benefits her.
• Iaijutsu Practitioner: Her Villains version uses iaijutsu attacks as one of her many ways of dealing damage.
• Hero Killer: Murdered Mr. Fixer in a rooftop duel after her first "enhancement" in the Lazarus Vat.
• Poisoned Weapons: A major part of her arsenal in her team deck, courtesy of lessons learned from Zhu Long.
• A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: She was already on a dark road when H. R. started teaching her martial arts. But, when he retired from heroics, she had no one to lead her off it. Now, she's come under the evil influence of both his nemeses.

The Organization

Debut: Rook City

The Orginization's Logo

A vast criminal syndicate, through which the Chairman rules Rook City with an iron fist.

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• Badass Normal: While the Operative and Pike himself are not — he's a genetically-modified "peak human specimen" who is over a century old — the Organization is made up exclusively of unpowered human thugs, soldiers, thieves, dirty cops, and informants. Yet they're well-armed and have the resources to pose one of the more daunting challenges in the entire game.
• Dirty Cop: The Deputy and the Dirty Cop. The latter reduces damage to all of the other minions, while the former heals the Dirty Cop and brings him back out into play if he's destroyed.
• Hired Guns: The Organization's damage-dealing underbosses and their respective thugs:
  • The Contract is a well-dressed hitman, while his Gunmen do massive damage each turn to the heroes.
  • The Muscle is a crowbar-wielding goon who also does damage to the heroes each turn, and brings out packs of Enforcers, who will either wreck your weakest hero or force them to discard cards.
• The Informant: The Broker's thugs are Informants, each of which plays a villain card every time a hero card is played, which actually makes them extremely dangerous to ignore.
• Knowledge Broker: The Broker Underboss, who plays a villain card at the start of each villain turn.
• Phantom Thief: The Thief thug, who destroys one equipment or ongoing card each turn. If the Fence underboss is in play, then this heals Pike and the Operative.
• The Syndicate: The most powerful one in the setting. It consists of five major branches: hired guns and hitmen, loyal to the Contract; information gatherers and blackmailers, controlled by the Broker; enforcers and protection racketeers, under the Muscle; burglars, thieves, and art forgers, organized by the Fence; and crooked police officers, overseen by the Deputy. The Organization as a whole is overseen by the Operative, who in turn reports to the Chairman himself.
• Tier System: The Chairman somehow weaponized it. At the end of the villain turn, the Operative (Top Tier) plays an Underboss (Middle Tier) from the deck. Each Underboss in play then plays a Thug (Bottom Tier) from the trash.

Chokepoint

Chokepoint

Debut: Vengeance ("Choke" Nemesis card - Fright Train), Chokepoint mini-expansion (villain deck)

"What hope do you have? The metal in all things calls to me, and I answer with commands!"

Debuting as a minion in the Vengeance expansion (as part of Fright Train's deck), Choke was originally Evelyn Moore, a baby girl "adopted" by the Ironclad Project because of her severe social difficulties and ability to talk to machines. In a desperate attempt to "prove herself," she absorbed a tank, only to flee when soldiers opened fire on her in a panic, before becoming a supervillain. She apparently met her end after being stabbed by K.N.Y.F.E. However, she saves herself by merging with Deadline's crystal (which apparently has a mind of its own) and becomes the villain Chokepoint. A mini-expansion for pre-ordering Villains of the Multiverse, Chokepoint has now decided to adopt Deadline's "tough-love" plans to save the planet, destroying the world's weak points to toughen it up.

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• Ambiguously Brown: Her name is very ethnically-neutral, and her skin color is on the coffee-with-cream side.
• Amplifier Artifact: The blue Power Crystal which drives itself into her side unlocks the full potential of her powers at the cost of her already shaky sanity.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Can temporarily imbue the heroes' equipment with "life" using her Shocking Animation ongoing.
• Anti-Gravity Clothing: Her orbiting metal halo and the two metallic orbs she "inherited" from Deadline hover independently around her head.
• Arch-Enemy: As a Nemesis in Fright Train's deck, she's one for K.N.Y.F.E., who's trying to stop her from abusing her powers. As her own villain, her desire to take over and subvert technology puts her on the bad side of Absolute Zero, Bunker, and Unity, who all need that technology in different ways.
• Continuity Nod: Her metal halo and orbs and the blue energy crystal which upgrades her powers are the same ones Deadline left behind after his defeat.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Her deck is almost entirely about grabbing the heroes' equipment and turning it against them. Against opponents who don't use them, she's even weaker than usual.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Played with. She had severe social difficulties and was raised in a very poor environment, which contributed to her becoming a supervillain in the first place. Yet merging with Deadline's energy crystal caused her to become detached from her humanity.
• Early-Bird Cameo: From minor Vengeance Elite Mook to main villain with her own deck.
• Evil Counterpart: To Unity, as an evil technopath with a desperate need to "prove" herself, and to Bunker, who is an heroic product of the Ironclad Project.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Her powers are based on "speaking" to and manipulating metal, with added elements of Magnetism Manipulation and Technopathy.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How she nearly died, with K.N.Y.F.E. stabbing her through the gut with an energy blade in the card art for For The Greater Good.
• Improvised Armor: Molds the gear she steals from the heroes into a form-fitting armored shell when she flips.
• Lone Wolf Boss: Has no targets in her deck. Her only mooks are the ones she creates by temporarily turning the heroes' gear against them with Shocking Animation.
• Magnetism Manipulation: Her metalbending powers allow her to pull off a number of Magneto's most famous feats.
• Near-Death Experience: The game's blog even described her as "fatally wounded" following Vengeance.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Her assault on the Adamant Sentinels ended up super-charging them into the Void Guard. Downplayed, in that there were some nasty side-effects, and while Chokepoint is defeated, the corrupting influence of the oblivion shards plays right into OblivAeon's hands, and has some nasty lingering effects in both the Tactics and RPG timelines.
• No Cure for Evil: Averted. She can absorb some nearby energy for a quick pick-me-up, and gains even more health if doing so destroys a target.
• No-Sell: Her Armored Animus side reduces all damage she takes by 1, and further reduces all damage dealt to her by heroes whose stolen cards she has in her play area.
• Orbiting Particle Shield: One of the many uses of her powers: she can protect herself with fields of floating metal debris.
• Power Copying: Thematically, if not practically — her powers are based on turning the heroes' own equipment against them, and her Armored Animus side's Improvised Armor is made up of bits and pieces of the heroes' most iconic gear; even the Power Crystal that upgraded her powers was something Fort Adamant salvaged in the wake of Deadline's onslaught. Mechanically this doesn't allow her to mimic the actual effects or powers of that gear, and to ensure she's not helpless against characters whose decks don't contain much (or any) equipment cards, she can also lock down ongoing cards, one-shots, and environment cards.
• Power Crystal: Has Deadline's blue energy crystal (later revealed to be an oblivion shard) embedded in her abdomen.
• Technopath: Before her powers got supercharged, she could "talk" to machines, and control them to a limited extent. Afterward, "[her] scope is without limit," and she is capable of merging and absorbing huge varieties of technology into a kind of armored suit.
• Video Game Stealing: Chokepoint "steals" hero cards until she reaches a tipping point, flipping to her "Armored Animus" side and gaining both damage bonuses and damage reduction against any heroes she controls the cards of. At this point, notably, she starts destroying the stolen cards, dealing damage to whoever owned said card in the process (unless it's an environment card she blows up).
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Originally, the whole mess started thanks to Choke's desperate desire to "prove herself" to the Ironclad Project, and it still drives her as Chokepoint, even after she's abandoned so much of her humanity.

Citizen Dawn & The Citizens of the Sun

Citizen Dawn

Debut: Base game (Enhanced and Definitive)

"Cast off lesser things and embrace the light."

Born with powerful light-based abilities, Dawn Cohen found herself frustrated with life among normal people. Approached by others who believed she had the potential for leadership, and believing herself the most powerful individual alive, she formed the Citizens of the Sun, a group dedicated to elevating superhumans to godlike status. Citizen Dawn's deck combines powerful minions with a lot of damage-dealing/healing cards, letting her deal a lot of hurt and soaking it right back up.

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• Abusive Parents: Dawn is very abusive towards Expatriette. Heck, her dialogue in the digital version where she confronts Expatriette has her outright saying that because she doesn't have any powers, Expatriette isn't her daughter.
• Achilles' Heel: There are a few ways around her flipping:
  • Cards have to be in the trash to flip her. Getting them eaten by the environment or Savage Mana doesn't count. (That said, be careful of Devastating Aurora, since it will instantly drop the minions under Savage Mana into her trash...)
  • Similarly, cards that enter the trash but don't stay there don't count; No Executions and Brain Burn can allow you to deal with troublesome minions without setting her off.
  • Heroes with milling like Lifeline, Setback and Guise can try to dump Citizens directly into the trash so that she flips at, or close to, her threshold for flipping back.
  • Deck manipulation can limit her output to the most manageable Citizens, allowing you to rush her more effectively.
• Arch-Enemy: Expatriette, her own (human) daughter, who she disowned, nearly killed, and half-blinded for her "weakness".
• Beware the Superman: As Expatriette points out in the digital version, when her Dark Watch variant fights her mother, many people with powers use them for the good of all. Dawn instead uses them to try to dominate and subjugate all others.
• Corrupted Character Copy: To Magneto. While both are dedicated to protecting superhumans from the bigotry of non-powered humans and providing them a land of their own, Magneto is a Noble Demon who truly regrets what he must do for his people. Dawn...isn't.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Dawn has not had a happy time of life, and neither have many of her Citizens.
• Deadly Upgrade: Channel the Eclipse gives Dawn an additional card play... but also causes her to begin dealing ice damage to herself each Villain turn. Its flavor text features her boasting that using such power will eventually kill her, but not before it kills the heroes.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: All Citizen Dawn asks of her followers is their loyalty and that they have superpowers, whether they innately have them or gained them later on in life. Ethnic background, gender identity, socioeconomic status, religion, or any other concerns are all equally meaningless to her.
• Expy: As a Knight Templar villainous and visionary leader of a band of superhumans with occasionally self-destructive and dangerous powers, she's one to Magneto; she also shares his motivation of protecting superhumans from the prejudices of "lesser" humanity by establishing a superhuman state at any cost.
• Good Powers, Bad People: Citizen Dawn's primary powers are the manipulation of light and life energy. She is also a remorseless egotist and, practically speaking, cult leader.
• Healing Hands: Citizen Dawn herself has healing and life-channeling powers and in-game can bring the dead back to life.
• It Only Works Once: Unlike most villains that can freely flip between their card's two sides throughout the game, Dawn can only flip to her Nigh-Invulnerable alternate side once.
• Invincible Villain: In-game, she temporarily becomes this when flipped to her "Merged with The Power of the Sun" form.
• Just the First Citizen: As her name implies, her only title in the superhuman society she's creating is "Citizen," just like the others, and she styles herself as merely the "first among equals." This also impacts gameplay, as when Dawn flips, she stays that way until H-1 Citizens are in play. Since Dawn is also considered a Citizen, only H-2 Citizen minions need to be out for her to flip back to her non-invincible side.
• Knight Templar: Dawn thoroughly believes she is doing the right thing by conquering the world for her superpowered Citizens.
• Lack of Empathy: As revealed in the Letters Page Episode 5, after a Superpower Meltdown of hers that destroyed a library and the kids within it, she was shocked and horrified by the destruction...of the books. Subverted when it comes to the Citizens, though; her One-Winged Angel form is an Unstoppable Rage provoked by hurting her team too much.
• Light 'em Up: The basis of Dawn's powers is light manipulation, which she can use to heal or hurt as she chooses. The bulk of her direct offensive attacks come in the form of bursts of light that can blind, harm, or both.
• Light Is Not Good: Her light- and life-based powers actually directly led to her coming to believe that superhumans were superior to ordinary human beings.
• Loners Are Freaks: She was this when younger, though she's become more social as she grew up. This unfortunately led her to begin forming the Citizens of the Sun...
• Mate or Die: Expatriette's father, Citizen Pain, was in fact married to someone else. Dawn gave him this ultimatum because she liked how powerful he was and wanted powerful offspring.
• A Mother to Her Men: Citizen Dawn is shown to care for her citizens at least. Kill too many of them and she merges with the sun, channeling its power and becoming invincible until more of her citizens join her.
• My Greatest Failure: Dawn's daughter Amanda (AKA Expatriette), and the latter's lack of powers. This is why Dawn has never attempted to have another child with another father: secretly, she's terrified at the idea that the problem was her, rather than Citizen Pain, and her worldview couldn't take that blow.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Brutal, violent, prejudiced against anyone who isn't part of her "superior race" of powered individuals (even her own daughter) and bent on conquest. Heck, her Leitmotif in the digital version, Citizens To Victory, even sounds reminiscent of a Nazi march. Ironic, considering that Cohen is usually a Jewish name, and probably not a coincidence given that she's based on Magneto.
• No Cure for Evil: A notable aversion, and actually a bit of a theme in Dawn's deck. Light Is Not Good and "light equals healing" are in full effect: Luminous Leadership and Citizen Spring each heal 1 HP a turn, while Healing Light fully heals every citizen except Dawn, who heals for 10 HP. And while the heroes normally have somewhere between no access and very limited access to reviving other heroes, Dawn can literally pull her minions Back from the Dead. (Anvil can do this, but possibly only with Hammer, while Spring is said to be able to do the same, to a lesser degree, but not in gameplay.)
• Pet the Dog: Despite her many negative qualities, many of her people are personally loyal to her thanks to her often showing them the first human kindness they've ever felt. This is reflected in her deck: unlike some villains, Dawn does not have cards that destroy her own minions (all Citizens in their own right), and instead has two Ongoings dedicated to healing them.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Of the villains, Dawn is one of the most personally powerful, and in The Letters Page, the writers said that no single hero can reliably beat her one-on-one. Even in the Bad Future where Iron Legacy has single-handedly killed or imprisoned nearly every superpowered individual on Earth, Dawn and her organization are still going strong.
• Sadistic Choice: She forces one from a gameplay perspective. Either you avoid destroying very many of her Citizens for the whole game, or you have to deal with her temporarily merging with the power of the sun to become invincible. And she'll only flip back once more citizens are in play.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: Dawn Cohen manifested light-based superpowers. And Cohen comes from a Hebrew word for priest — she went on to become the leader of a cult.
• Theme Naming: Citizen Dawn's powers are light-based (it's also her real name). Every Citizen of the Sun has a similarly chosen Meaningful Name.
• Tragic Villain: Dawn's story starts with her being bullied as a child, before accidentally killing a bunch of children with her powers, then being taken by the government to be experimented on. Though The Letters Page indicates she didn't actually care about killing those children, how she was treated afterward was pretty traumatic. Many of the Citizens of the Sun lived very sad lives thanks to their superpowers, and are loyal to Dawn because she treated them like people instead of monsters.
• Turns Red: Cut down too many of her fellow Citizens and she'll flip (literally) and Merge With The Power Of The Sun, making her invincible. She turns back to normal once enough Citizens are back on the table.
• Unstoppable Rage: Dawn becomes enraged if you defeat too many of her Citizens. Once that happens, she flips, and temporarily becomes invincible until H-2 Citizens are in play^note Technically, it's H-1, as Dawn herself counts as a Citizen for this, representing how pissed off she is that you're wiping out her minions.
• Villain Respect: According to the writers, post-OblivAeon, Dawn still hates Expatriette, but has come to respect her, at least a little.
• Villainous Rescue: Early in the OblivAeon event, Expatriette goes to her mother and entreats her to help defend the world against OblivAeon. Dawn sends her away. But when all seems lost, Dawn arrives on the battlefield and performs her Devastating Aurora on OblivAeon's forces, giving the heroes a much-needed window to win the battle.
• You Have Failed Me: According to Word of God, she killed Expatriette's father for his failure to sire a powered heir. He was originally going to be a powerful minion in her deck, and his being scrapped is represented by his "death" in the lore. They later specified that he was specifically killed during an argument, when Dawn was using her powers to torture Amanda a bit to try to jump-start her (nonexistent) powers.

Citizen Hammer & Citizen Anvil

Debut: Base game (Citizen cards - Citizen Dawn), Villains of the Multiverse (team villain deck)

"Yeesh, Lucas. Try to have a little fun with it. You're always so serious!"

"HALT."

Two of Citizen Dawn's top enforcers.

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• Arch-Enemy: Of the Visionary, who Citizen Dawn at one point orders them to bring into the Citizens' fold — by force, if need be.
• Author Avatar: Sort of, as they are based on the creators' old World of Warcraft characters and deliberately drawn here to resemble Christopher and Adam visually. Hammer was Adam's mage and Anvil was Christopher's paladin. ('Sort of' in that they very much don't have the creators' personalities or were meant to literally be them—though there's a Running Gag on the Letters Page about how Hammer and Anvil are the greatest.)
• Auto-Revive:
  • In Citizen Dawn's deck, Anvil has the ability to play Hammer from the villain trash.
  • In their team villain deck, meanwhile, if Hammer is incapacitated, Anvil flips him back over with all 17 HP. Even worse, if the Bastion Position is in play and Hammer is still active, if Anvil is ever incapacitated, it will flip him back with 5 HP.
• Bash Brothers: Citizen Dawn's top enforcers make for an inseparable team, to the point where they make up a single team villain deck on their own.
• Combo Platter Powers: Citizen Anvil has Healing Hands, light projection powers, some degree of superhuman durability, and can teleport.
• Friendly Fireproof: Their team villain character cards are immune to each other's damage.

• Knightly Sword and Shield: Anvil wields a warhammer and shield. Based on a paladin character from World of Warcraft, he's one of Dawn's most loyal followers and, like Dawn herself, believes firmly in the rightness of their cause.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Citizen Anvil carries a heavy shield which he uses to protect other Citizens.
• Light Is Not Good: Citizen Anvil is essentially The Paladin as a supervillain. He wields a shield and hammer, has healing powers, and can project enormous wings of golden light from his back.
• Mook Promotion: Citizens Anvil and Hammer, originally just minor minions in Dawn's deck, became a team villain deck unto themselves in the Villains of the Multiverse expansion, though each of them has fewer hit points than other team-based villains (18 HP for Anvil, 17 HP for Hammer).
• No Cure for Evil: Notably averted — Team Citizen Anvil has a number of cards that restore villain HP.
• Non-Indicative Name: Their names are reversed: Anvil hits things with a hammer, Hammer burns things (i.e. thrusting them into a fire and beating them into shape).
• Playing with Fire: Hammer's superpower, the one Dawn recruited him for.
• The Quiet One: Anvil. He says one word ("Halt.") in both Citizen Dawn's deck and his shared team villain deck with Hammer. Hammer does enough talking for the both of them.

• Winged Humanoid: Not actual wings like Fanatic or Apostate, but rather huge luminous projections in the shape of angel wings.

Citizens of the Sun

Debut: Base game

The superpowered citizens of Citizen Dawn's burgeoning new world order.

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• Ascended Extra: Sentinels Tactics provides names and backgrounds for all of the Citizens, some of which are quite sad.
• Bash Brothers: Many of the Citizens with Theme Naming complement one another when they're both in play. In many cases these Citizens have shared backgrounds explaining why they work so well together. Truth and Dare actually are brothers (and come from the same project that created Visionary).
• BFS: Citizen Battery wields a massive sword charged with energy.
• Cult: The Citizens of the Sun are a superpowered one, dedicated to ridding the world of "impurities" and living as gods among normal humans.
• Hard Light: Citizen Truth uses barriers of light to deflect incoming attacks. Not only does he reduce damage to himself, but he also renders all other Citizens immune to damage.
• Healing Hands: Citizen Spring can heal with a touch, even bringing the dead back to life.
• An Ice Person: Citizen Winter, whose ice attacks hit the entire hero team.
• Playing with Fire: Citizens Summer and Hammer both wield fire powers.
• Power Trio: Citizens Blood, Sweat, and Tears were close friends even before they got powers and joined the Citizens. They're among the weaker Citizens individually, but each of them empowers the others' card effects — if all three are on the field at the same time, prepare for pain. When the Citizens fold in the aftermath of OblivAeon, they remain a group as a new team of villains, called The Vandals.
• Psychic Powers: Citizens Truth, Dare, and Slash all have powers that are psychic in origin. The former two gained their abilities from Project Cocoon, the same organization that gave Visionary her powers.
• Technically-Living Zombie: Citizens Blood, Sweat, and Tears are these, with their Death of a Thousand Cuts and card-destroying abilities seeming to suggest something akin to Vampiric Draining. Backstory for the three reveals that their abilities are sourced from a Tome of Eldritch Lore called The Fabric of Despair.
• Theme Naming: Each citizen's name is a one-word Meaningful Name based on their powers. Citizens whose powers interact or are thematically similar are given Punny Names, like Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the aforementioned Hammer and Anvil, Assault and Battery, Truth or Dare (the two can't be in play at the same time), and the elementally powered but otherwise unconnected Citizens Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.
• Walking Wasteland: Citizen Autumn's ability to destroy ongoing cards, and what she did to the world around her before Dawn taught her to control her powers.
• Wolverine Claws: Citizen Slash, who appears in Baron Blade's team villain deck as a Nemesis to Expatriette, has a set of these composed of pink energy. He also has pointed "wings" of hair like those of the Trope Namer.

Deadline/Lifeline

Deadline (Multiverse Era Villain)/Lifeline (Multiverse Era and RPG Timeline Hero)

Debut: Wrath of the Cosmos, OblivAeon (Lifeline hero deck)

"The suffering I bring to your world is a mere fraction of what I seek to prevent."

Tarogath is the Last of His Kind, and would have died alongside them if he had not been granted the chance to preserve his racial memory by the Terminarch. Now, 700 years later, he has lived among the Endlings, others who are the last of their species, in the Enclave of the Endlings. However, he recently noticed cosmic events converge on the planet Earth similar to those which destroyed his own civilization. Fearful for that world's survival, he took the name Deadline, traveling to Earth so that he may save humanity... by destroying their civilization and knocking them back into the dark ages.

Deadline's deck focus on the use of his Catastrophe cards to slowly destroy enough of the Earth to cause the cosmic event that is converging towards the Earth to either slow down or leave altogether.

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• Achilles' Heel: His fight is very much a damage race, so heroes who hit hard like Ra can take him down quickly. Akash'Thriya can protect the environment deck by mixing in her Seeds.
  • All of Deadline's Catastrophes are also Ongoings, and their effects don't activate until the start of Deadline's next turn. Characters good at removing Ongoings can greatly reduce Deadline's impact.
• All for Nothing: In failing to cast human civilization into a new dark age and thus make Earth unworthy of OblivAeon's attention, it means all the deaths he did cause were meaningless, a fact which is not lost on him by the time he becomes Lifeline — nor the fact that OblivAeon ultimately turns out to be intent on destroying all worlds, and all universes, so his actions as Deadline were perhaps never truly going to accomplish anything but, at most, buying some time.
• Anti-Villain: Deadline only wants to save all reality by sparing Earth from OblivAeon's attention — but the only way he can think of to do so is to destroy all human civilization and plunge it into a new dark age. His victory screen in the digital version shows him shuddering in horror, eyes closed.
  Deadline: The suffering I bring to the world is a mere fraction of what I seek to prevent.
  • After he's stopped and returned to the Endlings, the threat of OblivAeon influences the Terminarch to send him back — to fight alongside the heroes as Lifeline.
• Arch-Enemy: The Naturalist, since he's literally killing the planet.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Most notably, his flipped side deals irreducible damage from destroying the environment, as do some of his Catastrophes.
• The Atoner: Played With. While Tarogath found his actions as Deadline despicable and unforgivable, even as Lifeline he doesn't fully believe they were the wrong thing to do, given what he knew at the time — he seeks to make up for his actions, but not to be forgiven. In the RPG timeline, his journey through space isn't really a journey to find redemption, per se, though the creators have hinted that redemption may still be something he finds.
• Blood Magic: Ironically, he only started using the stuff once he made a Heel–Face Turn. Lifeline's variant uses it to deal himself and each villain target two Infernal damage. Notably, he also used it to disrupt Gloomweaver's Skinwalker body during that event.
• Cast from Hit Points: Many of Lifeline's powerful One-Shots require him to self-damage in order to get their powerful effects to go off. His Blood Mage variant leans most heavily into this; its base power involves self-damaging to throw out a powerful area attack.
• Character Development: Once he's no longer frozen in time by the Enclave, Tarogath slowly begins growing a little as a person, bit by bit.
• Deader than Dead: Deadline's Remorseful Eco-Vandal side removes cards in the environment deck from play completely, which is something that very few characters in SotM can do.
• Deal with the Devil: As Lifeline, he strikes a deal with Elizabet Bathory the Blood Countess to gain more power via Blood Magic to use in trying to help stop the end of all things with OblivAeon. The creators have mockingly stated that this is definitely going to turn out fine and not to worry about it. Notably, during the Cosmic Contest, Elizabet demonstrated that she has total power over him, if she desires it.
• Earthquake Machine: The majority of his Catastrophes are seismic in origin, with Calculated Orogenesis causing a mountain to suddenly grow in a crowded city, Magnetic Pole Shift doing Exactly What It Says on the Tin, with disastrous results for hero Equipment and Ongoing cards, and Subduction Super-Zone creating an earthquake so powerful it causes lava to spurt into the air.
• Emo Teen: Tarogath was actually a bit of a youth by the standards of his race when the Terminarch saved him from the destruction of his race. This plays into his angsty "total edgelord" loner personality as Lifeline, and perhaps to his "ends justify the means" characterization as Deadline: though seven hundred years have past, he never truly had the chance to grow up, since the Enclave effectively froze him in time.
• Evil Counterpart: Deadline and Naturalist are both beings who wish to protect nature. However, Deadline goes about that goal destroying what he wishes to protect while Naturalist turned his back on his environment destroying ways.
• Glass Cannon: While he has many options to shave some of the cost of his Cast from Hit Points damage effects, particularly the Terminarch's Casing and the Vitality Battery, Lifeline can also choose to really lean into his high-risk, high-reward playstyle with Cosmic Immolation, a card that offers him free card draws and an impressive damage boost... but also boosts damage non-Heroes deal to him by the same amount, to say nothing of the inherent risk in boosting all damage by a character who likes to self-damage. And he can potentially have two out at once.
• Heel–Face Turn: Jansa Vi Dero, reclaiming him after his failure to "save" Earth and seeing his willingness to bend the ways of the Endlings for the greater good, gives him her blessing and a new arsenal of powerful magic and equipment to battle with the heroes as Lifeline against OblivAeon.
• He Who Fights Monsters: He is deeply aware of the horrific cost of what he's doing, yet at least a few of his cards see him smiling as he goes about his dark work.
  Deadline: To save the Multiverse, I had to become my greatest fear.
• Hoist Hero over Head: Does Spite one better by doing it one-handed in the Naturalist's incapacitated art.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Deadline is not pleased with what he is doing, but he sees no other options.
  Deadline: It is not my way to wield the weapons of war. But it is the only way.
• Ineffectual Loner: At first, Lifeline has this problem, preferring to work alone. Almost dying in combat with the revitalized Empyreon before Tempest and the Visionary cooperate to defeat him and save him, as well as being reminded that the other heroes beat him in the first place via working together, teaches him the value of teamwork.
• Instant Armor: Deadline's Auto-Armor Caster prevents the first instance of damage he would take each turn while it's in play. Lifeline's Terminarch's Casing adds another layer to the armor he already wears.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Ironically, once he becomes Lifeline, he also becomes much more of a jerk, because his conscience is no longer being tortured by his actions.
• Last of His Kind: Deadline is the last of his kind, as are all of the others at the Enclave of the Endlings.
• Life Drain: He inflicts this on the planet with the Severed Ley-Line Catastrophe, which heals him while shuffling hero trash into the heroes' hands. The Scholar is horrified in the flavor text. Later, once he masters Blood Magic as the hero Lifeline, he starts doing it to enemies, whether with the Vitality Battery that lets him gain health for destroying enemies, or using the same magic to repair and restore the ley lines he once severed to heal the party.
• Lizardfolk: Procitor, technically, but he looks like a humanoid lizard with a veined fin on his head.
• Magic Knight: He is both a powerful ley-line sorcerer and a powerful physical combatant, armed with a variety of advanced weaponry and armor and an imposing, muscular eight-foot physique. This is also true for Lifeline, who has access to both his powerful alien magic and several physical weapons.
• Magitek: His advanced alien tech is often also magical in origin. Notably, he is one of the few characters capable of dealing Infernal damage, usually associated with mystical strength, and one of his Catastrophe cards interacts with the planet's ley-lines rather than causing a straightforward disaster like an earthquake or hurricane. Furthermore, two of his Devices, the Ataxia Sphere and the Pandemonium Key, are also Relics, a keyword usually reserved for powerful magic items like Fanatic's sword, Ra's staff, Nightmist's protective amulets, or Apostate's world-ending evil artifacts. As Lifeline, Urdid's Nordidian Sulph-Axe, which he received as a gift, is similarly a techno-magical weapon of immense power.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Lifeline's use of Blood Magic to disrupt Gloomweaver's Skinwalker body, only to end up turning him into the Rotting God.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: One of the nastiest aspects of Deadline is how he doesn't play by typical villain rules regarding giving the heroes a chance to thwart him. Rather than giving the heroes a turn to react upon getting a lot of Catastrophes in play, for instance, as most villains do, Deadline flips during his turn upon moving them onto the field, before destroying them, dealing the heroes irreducible fire damage and destroying several environment cards to further his endgame.
• No Place for Me There: Once the battle with OblivAeon is won, and he's created an "offspring" in Aeon Girl, Tarogath chooses not to remain on Earth, instead travelling the cosmos battling evil. This is because he does not believe himself to be worthy of having a peaceful life or receiving forgiveness, or capable of being a good parent.
• Non-Standard Game Over: If there are no cards Environment cards left during Deadline's Remorseful Eco-Vandal trick, the heroes lose.
• The Paragon: Like all Endlings, Tarogath is a peak, ideal specimen of his dead race. As Lifeline, he embodies their physical prowess, magical skill, and their wisdom and compassion.
• Parental Abandonment: After giving "birth" to Aeon Girl following the events of the OblivAeon crisis, he leaves her in the care of other heroes and chooses to wander space battling evil instead, making no effort to stay in touch with her. This is because he still has a great deal of damage over the terrible things he once did, and believes he would be a poor parent and a bad influence on his "offspring" if he were to stay.
• Power Crystal: A hovering blue crystal is just one of the many pieces of magical/hypertech artifacts in his cobbled-together arsenal of alien weaponry.
• Really 700 Years Old: At the least. Comes with the package of being an Endling.
• Reformed, but Rejected: Played with. Many of the heroes were unhappy to work with someone who had the blood of a hundreds of innocent people on his hands, and his standoffish, "total edgelord" persona didn't help. But the Void Guard stood up for him, and he and a few other heroes eventually opened up to one another. In the RPG timeline, in which he did not take the Terminarch's offer to return to the Enclave, he remains largely outside the superhero community... but not, perhaps, forever.
• Rejected Apology: Inverted. Tarogath doesn't get a lot of forgiveness from either the heroes or Jansa Vi Dero following his Heel–Face Turn, but this is his own fault, at least in part. Not just because of his arrogant, standoffish loner personality, but because he cannot forgive himself for his acts as Deadline, and so has never really apologized for them, simply because he doesn't believe he deserves forgiveness.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Played With. Deadline is a reptile and a villain, but he is also one of the most tragic, complex, well-intentioned, and sympathetic villains in the game.
• Scarf of Asskicking: Deadline wears one, which often hides his face while he's concentrating, brooding, or mourning. Sadly, Lifeline seems to have discarded it.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: In the Tactics timeline, he takes Jansa Vi Dero's offer to return to the Enclave as she moves it outside of reality to protect it, and is not present for the final battle with OblivAeon.
• Sky Surfing: As a villain, he got around on a flying platform similar to the one used by Saren in Mass Effect, with both being not dissimilar to a combination of Norman Osborn's Goblin Glider and the Silver Surfer's surfboard.
• Tragic Villain: The tragedy being that the actions he believed so necessary not only came to naught, but were quite possibly never going to save anyone in the first place. Both the harm he caused and his own guilt were All for Nothing.
• Walking Armory: In both his villain and heroic forms, he comes to Earth with a variety of alien relics and artifacts of dead alien civilizations — but an entirely different set in each game.
• Walking the Earth: Once Jansa Vi Dero sends him forth to combat the end of all things, he wanders the cosmos seeking powerful challenges to help himself grow stronger. Notably, he saves the Void Guard from the Bloodsworn Colosseum, battles a lot of ninjas in the Temple of Zhu Long, and learns Blood Magic in the Court of Blood.
• Weather-Control Machine: One of his Catastrophes is a massive hurricane that blows away hero cards back onto their decks, then deals damage.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Deadline meant to save the human race, sincerely. And he planned to do it by killing something like two-thirds of them. The creators have said that his actions are simultaneously a selfless act of genuine compassion, and a horrible crime he cannot really forgive himself for.
• Wrecked Weapon: His villain defeat pose in the digital game shows him staring at the pieces of his shattered Endling weapons in the wake of his failure.

The Dreamer/Muse

The Dreamer (Multiverse Era)/Muse (RPG Timeline)

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

Haka: "She looks so peaceful... don't be fooled!"

As a child, Vanessa Long (a.k.a The Visionary) and her family were saved from Project Cocoon. However, Vanessa's psychic powers awakened and caused her dreams to project themselves into the real world. The Dreamer's deck involves deploying a large number of minions who need to be destroyed while avoiding hurting the Dreamer herself; however, these projections tend to be powerful.

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• Arch-Enemy: The Visionary, her future self, who subconsciously terrifies her.
• Children Are Innocent: The Dreamer isn't in control of her immense powers, hence why you lose if she drops to 0 HP.
• Creepy Child: But it's not her fault.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Challenge Mode's "Frail Child" has the Dreamer do this to herself. See Glass Cannon below.
• Damage Reduction: Granite Oni reduces all incoming damage to itself by 1.
• Dem Bones: Played With. Macabre Specter is a man in a top hat in skeleton tights — but with a literal Expressive Skull for a head. Also a case of Borrowin' Samedi.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Dreamer's front side is called "The Dreamer Dreams."
• Dark Is Evil: Her projections are literal nightmares come to life. Averted in the case of the Dreamer herself, however, as she's an innocent.
• Evil Twin: Her Dark Hero, a projection of Legacy. Dark Hero buffs Villain cards and reduces damage dealt to Projections, which is Legacy's role on the heroes team.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: The Dreamer has a stuffed ape beside her on her "The Dreamer Dreams" side. The Treacherous Ape appears to be based on it; her Definitive Edition version clarifies it is, and that's why it called "Treacherous".
• Golem: Granite Oni is a stone golem, and looks like what you'd get if a samurai had been sculpted as a member of the Terracotta Army.
• Future Me Scares Me: Well, considering how Visionary and Dreamer are nemeses, this counts.
• Glass Cannon: The Dreamer turns into one during Challenge Mode's "Frail Child" Challenge. In it, any damage The Dreamer would take is increased by five, turning any blow dealt to her a lethal one.
• Healing Factor: Macabre Specter fully heals when a target other than him dies. He only has 3 HP though so it's minor compared to the other villain targets that can heal.
• Hostage Situation: A unique one where the hostage and the hostage-taker are the same person. If the Dreamer runs out of HP or is destroyed, the heroes lose; this is because she's an innocent girl who has no control over her psychic powers, so the goal is breaking her out of them rather than defeating her.
• Improperly Paranoid: According to the Letter's Page Podcast she has a bit of a paranoid streak, resulting in nightmares like the Dark Hero.
• Killer Gorilla: Treacherous Ape counts, although its orange fur suggests it might be some kind of orangutan. It resembles her stuffed animal.
• Living Dream: The Dreamer is bringing her nightmares to life with her Reality Warper powers.
• Living Toys: The Toy Master's stock in trade, as also seen in the art for Night Terrors.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Huge snaggletoothed maws full of fangs are a recurring theme among the various nightmares.
• Nerf: Her Definitive Edition version places destroyed Nightmares under her card, flipping once enough are amassed. Compared to the Enhanced version, where the field needs to be cleaned of Nightmares entirely, this makes getting to her second phase significantly less painful.
• Non-Standard Game Over: If Dreamer is killed, the heroes lose.
• Obliviously Evil: The Dreamer isn't evil or malicious and she's as much a victim of her own powers as anyone else.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: Her theme music from the digital game. Of course.
• One-Hit KO: Both for Dreamer and the heroes. Challenge Mode's "Frail Child" Challenge makes any damage Dreamer takes lethal, and if she dies, it's game over.
• Our Monsters Are Different: As filtered through the overactive imagination of a scared little girl, the usual rules don't necessarily apply.
• Police Brutality: Megalopolis's Police Backup can indeed be this if Dreamer has the most HP come the end of the Environment Turn. It's only 1 damage though, and since they are Environments the heroes can take the damage for Dreamer. It's even worse in Challenge Mode.
• Power Incontinence: She's not actually evil, it's just that her Psychic Powers are causing her nightmares to manifest in the real world.
• Psychic Powers: She shares the same powers as her older self but due to lacking any inhibitors, hers are multiplied tenfold. In the RPG timeline, they're much weaker due to some rather justified paranoia that if she lets loose another Dreamer event might happen.
• Reality Warper: The Visionary's full powers, but none of her control or various limiting factors.
• Spiders Are Scary: Grotesque Arachnoid, who looks like a cross between Venom and Man-Spider.
• Squishy Wizard: Dreamer only has 6 HP. You do not want to send large amounts of damage her way.
  • Exaggerated in Challenge Mode. See Glass Cannon and One-Hit KO.
• Taking the Bullet: Since Dreamer's death results in the heroes losing, the hero with the least HP can redirect Environment Damage to themselves and take the damage for her.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the RPG timeline, she grows up to become the hero Muse.
• Tooth Fairy: Subverted with an evil version that steals teeth and eats them.
• Unicorn: The malevolent whipacorn, a unicorn with a whip for a horn.
  Ra: Why does it have a whip for a horn?
  Mainstay: For whipping!
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Well, tabletop, but treating the Dreamer like any other villain and roundhouse kicking the traumatised 9 year old in the face will get you a well-deserved Non-Standard Game Over.

The Ennead

The Ennead

Debut: Infernal Relics

"Our power has seen millennia! You shall fall before the Ennead!"

A team of fortune-hunting archaeologists who followed in the wake of Blake Washington, the current Ra. On an ill-fated expedition, they were trapped inside a pyramid containing relics associated with a group of Egyptian gods whom Ra had defeated and imprisoned. Taking up the artifacts, they were transformed just as Washington was, only now the Ennead are bent toward power and destruction. The Ennead's deck involves the team gradually awakening and assembling, with each card in their deck triggering different members of the Ennead to activate their effects based on the colored symbol of a card they play; as a result, once the Ennead get rolling, they are at best a serious handful, and at worst they will steamroll the heroes.

In addition to being comprised of multiple character cards, the other unique mechanic of the Ennead's deck are the symbols on each of their one-shots: a black ankh, a green hand, and a red sun disk of Aten. Each symbol triggers a corresponding effect or effects on the Ennead's character cards, which can trigger multiple villain team members and can go off more than once per round.

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• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Tefnut has both the head and claws of a lioness.
• Achilles' Heel: Their deck is entirely based on One-Shots, with the Ennead themselves having effects that trigger when a specific One-Shot from their deck is played; their only automatic effects that work every turn are on their Incapacitated sides — other villains may do damage at the end of their turn or as a counterattack, but the Ennead can't. As a result, cards that lock down their plays, such as Legacy's Take Down, will limit them to just their incapacitated effects until end of turn (and some of those incap effects can be just as dangerous to the Ennead; Set, for example, gives a free play to everyone). They also all share a nemesis icon, so effects that redirect damage cause them to get bonus damage on each other.
• All Your Powers Combined: Played with. Challenge Mode gives each card in their deck all three of their trigger symbols (Orange, Green, Purple), meaning the cards that are supposed to trigger specific members of the Ennead trigger each member instead. Note that two of them play extra cards when triggered.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Osiris, as he often is in ancient Egyptian murals, is green.
• Arch-Enemy: Oddly enough, of the ostensible leader of the Egyptian pantheon, Ra.
• Barrier Warrior: Nuit reduces all damage to other Ennead members by 1.
• Big Bad: Atum leads the Ennead.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Shu's arms end in long sharp spikes. The Grave Beckons, which destroys all targets with 3 HP or fewer, shows him stabbing the Argent Adept through the chest.
• Boss Rush: They start out with as many members of the Ennead on the field as there are heroes, and their numbers just increase. Once they all come out, things get really bad...
• Breath Weapon: Atum's beetles breathe fire on Blast of Flame. Nephthys constantly breathes out clouds of glowing orange energy and deals fire damage.
• Cat Girl: Tefnut is a more-realistic, less-fetishy cat woman.
• Death by Despair: Osiris inflicts psychic damage and forces players to discard cards.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Very few of their attacks do more than 1 or 2 damage, with the strongest effects tending to be H-2 damage, which maxes out at 3 damage. With the way their symbols work, however, you could have several of them attacking in one turn in addition to the one-shot cards, so by the end of their turn, they can deal in the double digits in total.
• Divided We Fall: The Ennead grow in strength when they're in proximity to one another, and when all nine artifacts have active bearers at once. When Ra returned as a Horus, he led the heroes in splitting the Ennead up and engaging them in small groups, so that by the time they united they were weakened. Notably, this is how a battle with them plays out in the cardgame, as the heroes try to take out the Ennead they're facing before the others have a chance to join them.
• Elemental Embodiment: Shu in particular is a transparent spirit of air whose title is "Breath of the Wind".
• Elemental Powers:
  • Dishing Out Dirt: Geb, whose title is "Earthquake Speaker", has this as his main power. In-game this is represented as melee damage. The Desert's Wrath's environmental destruction and projectile damage are represented as a giant pharaoh made of sand emerging out of the desert dunes.
  • Fire, Ice, Lightning: Elemental Storm deals 1 point of each damage type to all hero targets.
  • Hellfire: Isis, the "Matron of Magic", deals infernal damage, as do Ancient Magicks and Death's Grasp.
  • Playing with Fire: Nephthys the "Life Warden" breathes both fire and life. Cards with the red sun disk symbol focus on fire damage, and include Blast Of Flame, Mass Overheating, and Sun's Fury. On an ankh, Atum reveals cards from the Ennead's deck until he finds a red symbol and plays it, and the card for Blast of Flame shows his two golden scarabs blasting the weakening barrier Unity is hiding behind with continuous gouts of flame bigger than they are.
  • Shock and Awe: Set, "God of Storms", deals lightning damage when the green "nature" symbol is played, and is, naturally, the god depicted on the art for Elemental Storm.
• Enemy Mine: None of them like each other much, though their common hatred of Ra unites them. Comically, due to game mechanics, they technically count as each others's nemeses as much as Ra's, so their attacks, if redirected, gain a damage bonus. Notably, their biggest disadvantage, in what is almost certainly an intentional twist, is their lack of teamwork compared to the heroes and their tendency to step on each others' toes.
• Evil Counterpart: They're basically a team of supervillains, with roughly around the same amount of health as the heroes. They even flip when they're defeated rather than being put in the trash, allowing them to continue to have nasty effects on the battlefield via their version of incapacitated abilities. Atum in particular is one to Ra, as another fire-themed sun deity, who even has a similar mechanic for dredging the Ennead deck to play the various fire-based red symbol one-shots.
• Eye of Horus Means Egypt: It's the shared nemesis symbol for the Ennead and Ra.

• Glowing Eyes of Doom: All of them share these with Ra. Nepthys combines it with a Throat Light.
• Fog Feet: Below the waist, Shu's body trails off into the standard genie/ghost-style tail of mist.
• Grave Robbing: The current Ennead are composed of those unsavory characters who hoped to plunder the riches of their temple.
• Healing Factor: Nuit regains 2 HP whenever the red symbol goes into the villain trash. The Ennead In Force (their character card when flipped) causes them to begin recovering health each turn.
• Heel–Face Turn: While the current crop of Ennead were mostly-bad people even before becoming gods and as such are all villains, the next generation in the Sentinel Tactics gameline are largely either heroic or non-malevolent. In particular, Tefnut and Nuit become out-and-out heroes, and only Atum, the son of the previous Atum, remains a true supervillain.
• Legacy Character: Like Ra, all of them exist as personas that various bearers have "worn" over the millennia. Notably, they are not always evil and malevolent. The current crop are largely because Anubis arranged for their appearance to punish Ra's hubris. Also, while certain personality traits cross over from incarnation to incarnation, and while they are always the same biological sex as the original hosts, interpersonal relationships do not: Isis and Osiris are not automatically attracted to one another, as an example.
• The Medic: Nephthys and Shu heal all Ennead members when their triggering symbols appear (only the black ankh in Nephthys's case, but both other symbols for Shu). Shu doesn't do much damage, but is immune to the two very-common damage types of melee and projectile, while Nephthys can also dish out fire damage too, and she continues healing the Ennead even while incapacitated.
• Mix-and-Match Critter: Set, as in the mythology, has the head of the Set animal, also known as a "sha" or "Typhonic beast," a mysterious creature with aspects of many other animals.
• Mummy: Nepthys has both the Undeathly Pallor and linen wrappings of one of these.
• Non-Human Head: As Egyptian gods, this is to be expected. Geb has a cobra head, Tefnut has the head of a lioness, and Set, as always, has the head of the unknown Set animal.
• No-Sell: Shu is immune to both projectile and melee damage. Notably, this means that a team of the Wraith, Legacy, and Parse fighting him in wrong environment is in one of the true Unwinnable situations in the card game.
• One-Hit KO: The Grave Beckons kills every non villain with 3 or less HP. Incapacitated Osiris kills the non-character target with the least HP each turn.
• Person of Mass Destruction: When Ethiopia arranged a massive military assault to try to free Egypt from their occupation, Atum obliterated one of their cities to break their will. Deconstructed in that doing so was a once-in-a-century expenditure of power for him, and the hubris of it led to his and his team's eventual defeat.
• Reconcile the Bitter Foes: Briefly. They are awed when they see the full manifestation of Ra's power during the "setting sun" phase of his cycle, and willingly follow him as their king, along with Anubis, to launch an alpha-strike against OblivAeon, who threatens all of reality, losing their lives in the process.
• Sadly Mythtaken: Naturally, being comic book versions of the ancient deities, the Ennead weren't evil in the source material. Of course, these are also just the current batch.
• Scarab Power: Very important in Egyptian iconography, most prominent with Atum, who has a scarab bracer, a scarab tiara/forehead emblem, and two fire-breathing kickball-sized golden scarab Attack Animals.
• Sculpted Physique: Geb's body, apart from his head, is made of chiseled stone.
• Stone Wall: Nuit doesn't deal damage on her own, but shields all the other members of the Ennead as a passive benefit and can regenerate if harmed.
• Unwanted Assistance: Their greatest weakness, compared to the heroes, is their inability to properly coordinate with one another and leverage their numerical advantages with teamwork.
• Wolfpack Boss: Each is roughly as powerful as one of the heroes.

Gloomweaver

Gloomweaver

Debut: Infernal Relics (Enhanced); Rook City Renegades (Definitive)

"All this delicious despair. I can almost taste it. Let me in, mortals!"

A powerful extradimensional demon of gloom and fear. His cultists are trying to acquire the three relics required to summon him to the mortal world. Gloomweaver's deck is heavy on minions and targets, primarily zombies and cultists, but also on debuff-applying voodoo pins and his trio of extremely dangerous relics.

His variant is Skinwalker Gloomweaver, who has made a pact with the resurrected Spite and inhabited a body formed from the remains of Spite's victims. After the heroes defeat him, his physical shell turns into a nightmarish colossus of rotting flesh that rapidly devours its own minions to try to remain in play.

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• Achilles' Heel: Because he's in a different dimension for most of his fight, regular Gloomweaver never actually does anything himself. His gameplan is reliant on getting cards out of his deck - locking it up with Take Down or using deck control means there's not a thing he can do to you. (Cards that can force him to discard from his deck, like Parse's Extrasensory Awareness, can let the heroes win without ever dealing a single point of damage simply by dumping all three of his relics into his trash.)
• Arch-Enemy: Nightmist, whom he tried to tempt into evil when she was younger, and whose Sealed Evil in a Can status is her job to maintain.
• Artifact of Doom: All of his relics, which he seeded with his essence long ago in the physical world. If all three are out at once, it is bad news.
• Bad Boss: His deck recycles cultists into zombies, and his Skinwalker variant slaughters his own minions when it flips. Notably, its henchmen from the Realm of Chaos, such as Ruin, don't like him much, and Ruin in particular goes off-script to try to get enough power to oust him and reclaim his old place in the order. Plus, Jian Yu, the Master, took over the Realm of Discord in the Tactics timeline during his absence.
• Body of Bodies: The Rotting God, which turns out to make it very difficult for the heroes to destroy.
• The Chessmaster: Thanks to his immortality and the bizarre nature of time in the Realm of Discord, Gloomweaver's plans are lengthy and patient. The plan to use his relics to emerge into the world was centuries in the making, and his plan to switch places with Spite was clever and lengthy. Furthermore, he often acts behind the scenes, such as sending Ruin, a Void entity he broke and enslaved during his rise to power millenia ago, to represent his interests during the Vengeance event (though it ended up going after the Argent Adept instead), or subtly trying to turn the Dark Watch against one another during their turbulent founding.
• Cult: Gloomweaver's Cthulhu-esque cult forms a major part of his firepower.
• Damage Over Time: The Rotting God is rapidly melting as a result of the heroes wrecking his body and forcing it to flip. Unfortunately, it can regenerate by consuming any destroyed target, and it slaughters its own minions to keep healing.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: His Skinwalker variant has a total of 150 HP, with his normal side having 50 HP and his flipped side having 100 more, and both need to be depleted to win. This makes said variant the second-most durable villain in the game behind Akash'Thriya, and starting play with the Pouch of Bones that gives him Damage Reduction and self-healing might make him take even longer to beat.
• The Dark Side Will Make You Forget: Gloomweaver is aware, in an academic sense, that he Was Once a Man, but he can no longer remember nor care about who he was or what he looked like.
• Dimension Lord: He rules his realm of fear, misery, and death so as to maximize his ability to feed on the despair they produce. And he's always looking to absorb more. His ultimate plan is to emerge into the physical world and turn it into a horrible nightmare.
• Expy: As an extradimensional magical entity appearing as a tall figure with a flaming skull for a head, he's one of Dormammu, the Arch-Enemy of Doctor Strange.
• Emotion Eater: He feeds on gloom and despair.
• Familiar: His is an albino snake known as Ophidua the Deceiver. She was his familiar when he was human, and her undead spirit serves as a conduit for his power on the mortal plane.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: On his default Nightmare Walker side, Gloomweaver is notable for being one of the few villains that cannot directly attack the players, outside of the card effects of his Relics and voodoo pins. This is because, story-wise, he's still trapped within the Realm of Discord and is waiting for his cultists to release him, only able to hinder the heroes through indirect methods in the meantime. Once he flips to his Demon-God Incarnate side, and by default with his Skinwalker variant, he's successfully manifested in the physical world and has no trouble taking the fight to the heroes himself.
• Hollywood Voodoo: Part of his deck involves voodoo pins, that cause negative effects to heroes if they are not destroyed.
• Instant-Win Condition: If he's in his Nightmare Walker state, then putting all three of his relics into the trash results in instant victory for the heroes.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Skinwalker's flipped side, the Rotting God, heals whenever any target is destroyed. It is implied that he eats them. Considering a good number of his minions are human Cultists...
• Lich: What he was in his mortal life. His demonic form still resembles one.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Sends one of his most loyal cultist to teach a young Nightmist the ways of magic while secretly siphoning a portion of her power. While this does indeed lead to some of her power being stowed away, she still ends up one of the major obstacles to his plans and a very powerful hero from this.
• Night of the Living Mooks: Zombies form a big part of his hordes, and his cultists both become zombies when they are destroyed and bring destroyed zombies back from the trash.
• No Cure for Evil: Notably Averted. When GloomWeaver flips he heals H * 10 Hp.^note H = the number of Heroes
  • Averted even more in his Skinwalker variant. Due to being a Zombie while the Skinwalker, he can use the Pouch of Bones to heal when Zombies rise. Then, as the Rotting God, any time any target dies, he heals from it. Which is good as he tend to do even more damage to his own side than he does to the heroes'.
• Out of Focus: Out of all the classic mode villains, Gloom and Spite alone seem to play no direct role in the OblivAeon Crisis Crossover, not as minions of OblivAeon or aiding the heroes — the Chairman at least has the excuse of having been in Rook City when Progeny leveled the place — but they return with a vengeance after the fact. In the meta-fiction, this is explained by the event having cut short the smaller Skinwalker crossover — with Gloomweaver trapped in Dr. Medico's oblivion shard (thus giving rise to his Malpractice variant, and later to possess him completely).
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Rotting God's essence is ultimately trapped within Dr. Medico's OblivAeon shard shortly before the start of the OblivAeon event. Unfortunately for the good Doctor, in the Tactics timeline, this eventually leads to Gloomweaver poking through the Shard to eat him alive from the inside out, wearing his energy-body like a suit. With an OblivAeon shard.
• Took a Level in Badass: Original Gloomweaver is widely considered one of the weakest villains in the game. Definitive Edition Gloomweaver is vastly more dangerous. He retains his Instant-Win Condition, but it now revolves around destroying his Elite Mook cultists, who are significantly harder to bring down than his Relics... which are themselves rather more powerful than before. On top of that, just being near Gloomweaver's summoning ritual deals damage to the heroes, meaning Gloomweaver can no long be locked out entirely with deck control.
• The Undead: Zombies form the core of his minions, and every time a cultist dies they get raised as a zombie. Becomes one himself as the Skinwalker, though he has fewer hitpoints to reflect that it is weaker than his Discordian form.
• Was Once a Man: Gloomweaver was once a human sorcerer, thousands of years in the past. He willingly gave up his humanity to become a demonic tyrant in the Realm of Discord.
• The Worf Effect: In Gloomweaver's first great moment of triumph, as all the heroes brawled with him at once while he emerged into the physical world, the Dark Visionary seized control of her counterpart, burst from her cocoon, and instantly forced him back into the Realm of Discord, then sealed the portal so he couldn't get back. Later, other heroes throw themselves at his Skinwalker form and get defeated to show how dangerous it is, before the introduction of Lifeline.

Grand Warlord Voss

Grand Warlord Voss

Debut: Base game, OblivAeon ("Rainek Kel'Voss" Scion card) (Enhanced); Base set (Definitive)

"What I cannot have, I will destroy."

A highborn member of the Thorathian race who chose a military career and made great strides in scientific discovery, but was exiled for experimenting on his fellow citizens. Returning from his exile, he managed to conquer his homeworld and has now set his sights on the rest of the universe. Voss' deck is heavy on the minions, both deploying and supporting them. He has a lot of mooks to send your way.

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• Achilles' Heel: His deck has two significant weaknesses that, exploited in tandem, makes him a lot easier to deal with:
  • The vast majority of his minions only have 3 HP, so mass-damage attacks (including and especially from his nemesis Tempest) will rip them to shreds if he doesn't have a Gene-Bound Guard or First Lieutenant Tamar on the field to protect them.
  • He has very few ways of playing more than one card per turn, and almost no forms of direct damage when not flipped. If a character like Visionary or Wraith can consistently scry his deck and prevent him from pulling out big-hitter cards like Forced Deployment or one of the Starships, his ability to maintain offensive pressure deflates like a balloon.
• Arch-Enemy: Tempest, whose world he enslaved, and the majority of whose people he twisted into the Gene-Bound Shock Troops.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: At the start of the game, Voss stands back and lets his minions run rampant. When things get dire enough, though, he wades into the fray himself, proving that he is also a Super-Thorathian Warrior.
• Badass Boast:
  Grand Warlord Voss: What I cannot have, I will destroy.
• Beyond the Impossible: Upon encountering a fully powered OblivAeon, he gets in a fight with the cosmic entity and actually manages to damage him (knocking off six OblivAeon shards that got scattered through the main timeline's time stream and creating such characters as Captain Cosmic and Infinitor) without any special powers. This is why OblivAeon made him a scion.
• The Chessmaster: Succesfully manipulates everybody, up to and including OblivAeon, into giving him exactly what he wants (OblivAeon's power). The only reason he's defeated is because of the individual schemes of La Comadora and Luminary.
• Decapitated Army: Played with. Voss's defeat on Earth led to a civil war breaking out on his homeworld. His armies still far outnumber the rebels... but the rebels are now far better united and organized than they.
• Dragon Ascendant: One possible outcome when battling OblivAeon — if the players are about to win the game and Voss is still active, he flips, regains a massive amount of HP, and usurps OblivAeon's power — intent on conquering the multiverse, rather than destroying it.
• Energy Ball: One of Voss's attacks on his Super-Thorathian Warrior side.
• Evil Overlord: Every resource of the worlds he conquers is bent to the conquest of the next one. This includes the inhabitants.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: As "Willful Servant" Rainek Kel'Voss, he's been Reforged into a Minion by OblivAeon, but is still Fighting from the Inside, seemingly to assist the heroes. Because, of course, if the multiverse is annihilated, there won't be anything left for Voss to conquer.
• Emperor Scientist: All of his "soldiers" are the result of remorseless gene-tinkering conquered peoples to create more-dangerous troops for his hordes. Notably, he only conquered his race as a result of his immense scientific genius, allowing him to create the first Gene-Bound soldiers.
• Fighting from the Inside: As one of OblivAeon's Scions, his default side is "Willful Servant", and while he's forced to fight the heroes, he'll also damage fellow Scions in the same battle zone.
• Genius Bruiser: He's a master tactician and gifted geneticist, and when he flips it turns out his bulk is not for show.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Has the ability to pull this on OblivAeon, usurping him and becoming the final boss.
• Home Field Advantage: Decidedly shows why he became Grand Warlord in Dok'Thorath Capital, where the addition of Thorathian Military cards who won't attack him, Gene-Bound Ravagers who won't hurt his other Minions, and the presence of three extra Minion cards (the aforementioned Ravagers) in the environment deck makes the possibility of a Non-Standard Game Over far more pressing. (The latter actually makes him even more dangerous on Baron Blade's Mobile Defense Platform, which has six minions in its environment deck.)
• Human Shield: Voss takes 2 less damage for each minion he has in play, representing the sheer number of minions his army brings to bear. To effectively hurt him the minions must die first. Which can be problematic, thanks to the meat shield being able to fight back.
• Out-Gambitted: Despite his masterfully executed plan during the OblivAeon event working, he's out-gambitted by Luminary who knew he would betray them and planned accordingly.
• Non-Standard Game Over: If Voss starts his turn with ten or more minions in play, his forces have overrun the Earth and he instantly wins.
• Playing with Fire: Voss hurls fire and energy while flipped to his Super-Thorathian Warrior side.
• Spikes of Villainy: Voss and his right and left-hand minions, fellow Thorathians First Lieutenant Vyktor and Field Lieutenant Tamar, have these on their backs, elbows, and knees. The spikes are a racial trait of all Thorathians — though not all Thorathians are evil, as Sky-Scraper and her fellow rebels demonstrate.
• The Starscream: After OblivAeon turns him into a scion he enacts a plan to betray him and steal his powers, which works really well.
• Reforged into a Minion: What he does to his Gene-bound troops. Also what OblivAeon attempted to do to him. As it turns out, Voss has more than enough willpower to fight back from the inside.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Voss was presumed dead by everyone, including the fandom (mostly. There were quite a few theories involving him being a scion, which were right) but it turns out he was just trapped outside of time and was eventually found by OblivAeon, who made him a scion.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Loses the armor for his final form after stealing OblivAeon's thunder for himself.
• Zerg Rush: His underlying strategy. Voss starts the game with one minion in play for each hero opposing him. He also has three copies of the dreaded Forced Deployment card, which upon destruction lets him get every Minion in his trash back onto the battlefield, which is a more traditional use of this trope.

Voss's Troops

Debut: Base game

Voss brought an army to conquer Earth, which extends far beyond the cards that actually enter play. In addition to his ships and lieutenants, the backbone of Voss's invasion force are the Gene-Bound Thralls, the genetically-modified remnants of those species which he has already conquered, which now serve him as mindlessly loyal ground troops.

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• Auto-Revive: Forced Deployment. When destroyed all dead Minions are played from the villain trash, and the card automatically destroys itself at the start of the villain turn. It's often safer for the heroes to destroy it sooner, so they can at least knock out a few of the more damaging minions before the next villain turn.
• Battle Thralls: All of Voss's Gene-Bound Thralls are once-free races genetically modified to emphasize those traits Voss found useful, discarding the rest.
• Brain in a Jar: The Gene-Bound Psi-Weavers appear to be floating brains in mech-bodies shaped like Creepy Centipedes.
• Cool Gate: The Quark-Drive Translocator looks like a stargate and spits out even more minions. Mechanically speaking, it plays the top card of Voss's deck the first time each turn that one of Voss's Minion cards enters play.
• Cool Starship: The TCF Conqueror and TCF Stalwart, far and away the most powerful targets in Voss' deck.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: First Lieutenant Vyktor increases all damage dealt to the heroes, including damage from the environment, self-damage, etc.
• Healing Factor: The flavor text of the Gene-Bound Guards says this is the source of their incredible toughness, though they don't actually regain HP from turn to turn.
• Human Resources: Once Voss has conquered a people, they're more or less extinct. Notably, several of the Endlings are the direct result of his swath of destruction across the stars.
• Human Shield: Gene-Bound Guard plays this a little straighter, as each one reduces damage to all villain targets by 1.
• An Ice Person: The animalistic Gene-Bound Frost Hound deals cold damage to all non-villain targets.
• Laser Blade: Each Gene-Bound Ion-Lancer wields one, dealing energy damage.
• No-Sell: Each Gene-Bound minion is immune to the damage type it causes, while each Gene-Bound Guard adds a stacking 1-point damage reduction to all villain targets. First Lieutenant Tamar adds a further point of damage reduction to everything but ships and the Quark-Drive Translocator. Voss's two battleships are in space, and as such are immune to Melee damage.
• Playing with Fire: The Gene-Bound Firesworn, from a species of magma men.
• Poisonous Person: The Gene-Bound Bionauts deal poison damage.
• Psychic Powers: The Gene-Bound Psi-Weavers deal AOE psychic damage.
• Sonic Scream: The undead-looking Gene-Bound Banshees deal sonic damage with a shriek that visibly distorts the air.
• Takes One to Kill One: Inverted. All the Minions (save Gene-Bound Guard, which doesn't deal damage) are immune to the type of damage they deal.
• Reforged into a Minion: Each of them was the dominant species of a planet already conquered by the Thorathians.
• We Have Reserves: Voss's quote on the Forced Deployment card says it all:
  Voss: These people are engineered to live and die at my command!
• Zerg Rush: Voss's deck is full of targets, most of them low-HP Minions. Other than the Gene-Bound Guards, all any of them can do is deal damage, overwhelming the heroes by sheer volume of attacks.

Greazer Clutch

Greazer Clutch

Debut: Villains of the Multiverse

"That Greazer, he's a real cool cat. That's what they all say, right?"

A cosmic bounty hunter for hire riding through the stars on his sweet ride, the Pink Lady. Greazer picks a random hero to be his "living paycheck," treating them as a nemesis for the rest of the game. Then, he pulls out his hunter tech to try to drag them off.

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• Achilles' Heel: He's vulnerable to redirection effects and those that force cards to damage themselves, because he'll counter-attack anyone who messes with his hair - including his teammates, himself, or the hair itself.
• Anti-Villain: In and out of universe, Greazer is a popular fan-favorite character despite being a villain. This is due to a mixture of his own charisma and his not doing anything particularly heinous or ambitious despite being a selfish jerk who often ends up tangling with heroes. He's a villain, without actually being evil, ya dig?
• Arch-Enemy: Notable in that he's an aversion - he doesn't share a Nemesis icon with any other character. Instead, he places the card "Living Paycheck" in one hero's play area, which makes them his Nemesis for the rest of the game. If that hero is incapacitated, he grabs them and flies off, incapacitating himself.
• Badass Biker: One that can go toe-to-toe with Earth's best and brightest with his arsenal of gadgets and groovy moves.
• Cool Bike: The Pink Lady, which improbably doubles as a Cool Starship.
• Counter-Attack: His Thermobaric Mines automatically deal fire damage whenever the hero they're attached to plays cards.
• Delinquent Hair: A sweet pompadour. Amusingly, it's actually a card in his deck that is put in play at the start of each game. Damaging it makes him brutally counter-attack the offender, but if it's at 0 HP or less at the start of his turn, it deals him a blow to his morale in the form of psychic damage, as he hurries to get it back into shape.
• Disco Dan: His slang and style of dress are all more than half-a-century old by Earth standards.
• Evil Virtues: Despite his lack of ambition and selfish greed, the creators note that Greazer has a lot of positive aspects. He is a handy, meticulous person, as demonstrated by his carefully-pomped hair, the ride he takes good care of, and the forged merch he carefully put together himself, and he's willing to work hard if he thinks there'll be a big payout at the end of it.
• Expy: His blue skin, red eyes, bike/starship and profession as a cosmic bounty-hunter all recall the Main Man, though he's more of a 50's biker than a modern one. His treatment as a character (going from a popular background character to the Villain Protagonist of his own stories, starting to move in the direction of a Lighter and Softer Anti-Hero before being firmly moved back to villainy by fan and editorial response) also mirrors Lobo.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: "Nightmare" is probably a stretch, but Greazer was once a loser grifter alternating between selling overpriced knock-off merch from his space van parked outside the Bloodsworn Colosseum, and, after a few crazy adventures, has gone on to become one of the best, and most feared, bounty hunters in the galaxy.
• Greaser Delinquents: His name and '50s style recalls this era of fashion and attitude, as if the name weren't a giveaway.
• Interspecies Romance: The creators have gone out of their way to clarify: he's from a star cluster where lots of different alien races intermingle in that way, and he has a lot of flings with other races across the galaxy.
• Improbable Weapon User: On top of his thermobaric mines, electric shackles, and a pretty big gun, Greazer comes armed with, of all things, a weaponized jukebox called the H.Y.P. Displacer. That he causes to attack the heroes with sonic and energy damage by whacking it just right.
  Greazer: Work, you bucket of bolts! Or I'll leave you in some square diner!
• Lighter and Softer: In and out of universe. In-universe, the comics actually started moving him from Anti-Villain to Anti-Hero, playing up his sympathetic qualities, before editorial firmly clamped down and insisted that the character remain a villain. Out-of-universe, some of the creative team started getting into the idea of flipping him to a hero deck for the OblivAeon event, but the eventual decision was made to instead keep him as he is.
• Lovable Rogue: From his early days scalping tickets and selling cheap knock-off Bloodsworn merch, to his later career as a star-hopping bounty hunter, Greaser is generally a shady guy who's still cool enough, and lacking enough in genuine evil, for the audience to like.
• Meaningful Name: Greazer is a neo-greaser; a clutch is how you change gears on a motorcycle.
• Nobody Touches the Hair: If its health is above 0, anyway. If someone messes with it, it's counterattack time. This can get hilarious given some of the cards that exist in team mode. If Plague Rat uses Chemical Frenzy without a Revocorp Restrainer out, for example, it will hit Greazer's hair, causing Greazer to punch the Rat - then the hair will attack itself, causing Greazer to punch the hair - and then Greazer will trigger his own counter-attack and punch himself! Notably, if his hair is below 0 on his turn, he'll fix it up, restoring it to full health, then deal himself psychic damage as his ruined 'do hurts his morale.
• Non-Indicative Name: His spaceship "The Pink Lady" doesn't have even a dash of pink on it. There's a pin-up of an alien woman on the side, but even then, she's red, not pink. This is because it's actually named for the robotic gambling savant he saved/kidnapped in his very first adventure, who pegged him as a man about to "pay out," then was mortally wounded and perished escaping with him. It was her confidence in him, and her generous contribution of her retirement fund, that gave him the confidence in himself, and the financial means, to go from a low-brow grifter to one of the most skilled and feared bounty hunters in the cosmos.
• Only in It for the Money: If his target ever gets incapacitated, so does he, since he bails after swiping them. He also tends to fire on his target to the exclusion of other heroes. Notably, his incapacitated effect is potentially very dangerous, so heroes probably don't want to take him out early if they can help it.
• Percussive Maintenance: Despite apparently being quite handy, Greazer is pictured fixing the H.Y.P. Displacer by whacking it.
• Villain Protagonist: He actually started as the protagonist of his own book, which is quite unusual for an ostensible villain, even in comics.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: Part of what makes Greazer dangerous is his array of extraterrestrial technology. This is part of why he's gotta turn to bounty huntin' to pay the bills, ya dig? These groovy moves don't come cheap!