Characters / Sentinels of the Multiverse - Villains I to W

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Villains I-W (plus Mini-Nemises)

Infinitor

Infinitor

Debut: Wrath of the Cosmos

"This mask! It is not to hide my face. No! No. It is to keep the voices inside! So loud..."

When a purple crystal fell from space, Nigel Lowsley also gained the power to create hard light constructs like his brother, Hugh. However, unlike Hugh, Nigel was overwhelmed by the power and went insane as voices screamed in his head. Nigel is no more; there is only Infinitor, the infinite madness throughout the galaxy.

Infinitor's deck uses Manifestations. While similar to Captain Cosmic's Constructs, the Manifestations are generally more offensive.

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• Achilles' Heel: Infinitor relies on Damage Reduction to protect his Manifestations; their HP is very low. Irreducible damage can tear through his army. He also relies entirely on raw damage and sheer numbers to overwhelm the heroes; if the team can put together the defenses to weather his assault or lock him from playing cards Infinitor doesn’t have the disruption tools to stop them.
• Anti-Villain: Nigel is far more of a victim than a villain - while he and his brother Hugh share a power source, Nigel's half of the OblivAeon shard included a portion of its originator's monstrous ego, which drove him to insanity. He's not even voluntarily creating his Manifestations, they just spawn from twists and turns in his madness.
• Arch-Enemy: Of Green Lantern expy Captain Cosmic.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to Captain Cosmic's Abel, but played with in that his madness means he is often trying just as hard to reach his own redemption as Hugh is.
• Damage Reduction: Infinitor reduces all damage to villain targets by 1, meaning plink-based characters are going to need help doing anything to his Manifestations. Twisted Malcreation takes it further by reducing all damage dealt to it to 1 if it's higher than that.
• Dark Reprise: His theme is a distorted and creepy version of his brother Captain Cosmic's theme from the Lazer Ryderz soundtrack.
• Expy: Rather than a Sinestro expy, he's akin to the Parallax-possessed Hal Jordan.
• Fighting from the Inside: If Infinitor gets too many constructs out, he flips, putting himself in a straitjacket and destroying his own manifestations. This represents Nigel struggling to avoid hurting anyone until he loses it again.
• Flunky Boss: Like Captain Cosmic, he specializes in crowding the field with tons of low-HP targets.
• Four Is Death: The HP of all of Infinitor's Manifestations is 4.
• Fusion Dance: Captain Cosmic's Requital variant has him gain Infinitor's manifestations (and his mask) following the latter's Heroic Sacrifice. The combination allows him to continue playing constructs even after being incapacitated, but in-universe also leaves him unstable and hellbent on revenge.
• Green and Mean: He and Hugh deliberately invert the Green good, Yellow/Gold evil dynamic of the Green Lantern.
• Hard Light: What his Manifestations are manifested from.
• Heel–Face Turn: Apparently, Captain Cosmic manages to get through to his brother and turn him back to the heroic side. Infinitor's promo version has the keyword, "Tormented Ally," and in gameplay counts as a hero target. Instead of fighting him, the heroes have to help him bring his Manifestations down before they get out of control. And Captain Cosmic's final variant, during the OblivAeon crisis, sees Infinitor merging with his brother to save him, sacrificing himself in the process.
• Malevolent Masked Men: His sinister fanged mask.
• Palette Swap: The base of Infinitor's costume is essentially Captain Cosmic's in black and green rather than red and gold, with a silver mask and armor. Their costumes do have different accents and accessories, however. His Heroic variant looks a lot more like his brother's.
• Pulling Themselves Together: If the heroes fail to help his Heroic variant get under control, the shattered manifestations merge together into a huge colossus of green energy that absorbs the pieces of any other destroyed constructs. In his digital loss screen, the giant has begun to turn into OblivAeon.
• Pure Energy: The most common damage type in his deck. Infinitor deals energy damage while flipped to his 'Tormented Malefactor' side, Twisted Miscreation also does energy damage, and his Lambent Reaper, Crushing Cage, and Ocular Swarm manifestations do as well.
• Redemption Equals Death: Hugh manages to rehabilitate him, to resist the whispers while using the knowledge they represent against the forces of OblivAeon — until Nigel gives his life in a Heroic Sacrifice, saving his brother from a hopeless battle against OblivAeon himself.
• Sinister Scythe: Wielded by his scarecrow-like Lambent Reaper manifestations.
• Tragic Villain: Played up more than perhaps any other villain, to the point that his variant card and Captain Cosmic's final variant both reference it.
• Triumphant Reprise: Played With. His heroic variant's theme song is a heroic reprise of his villain base variant and is much closer to Captain Cosmic's Lazer Ryders theme... except distorted and discordant, fading in and out, with the whispers still there and just as terrifying as ever.
• Unwitting Pawn: Established as early as the release of his Heroic Infinitor promo variant, his powers and madness are due to OblivAeon.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Infinitor lost it once he got his powers. There is seemingly very little of Nigel left inside him, but Captain Cosmic never gives up on his brother, and does eventually manage to bring him back from the brink.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: He used to be a perfectly nice guy — until the purple crystal (an oblivion shard) corrupted his powers. It all went downhill from there.
• Zerg Rush: Infinitor's Manifestations are not very durable, but they can deal a lot of damage quickly, and his deck is built around churning them out. Unlucky draws can see you easily facing ten or more at once by his second turn.

Iron Curtain II

Iron Curtain II

Debut: Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook

“Now you face Iron Curtain!”

Once, Dimitri Petrov bore the name Iron Curtain. He regularly clashed with Legacy, hoping to establish Soviet rule within the United States. But when the Soviet Union fell, so did he. He was not defeated by Legacy, but by his own ideals. He was simply incapable of moving on, stuck in the past. Thus he spiraled down into depression and alcoholism.

As he lay on his deathbed, he hoped to set his daughter, Barrikada, on a better path than the one he had taken. His words fell on deaf ears, however, and Barrikada set out to continue her father’s work. Taking her father’s name, she joined Perestroika as the new Iron Curtain.

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• Affirmative-Action Legacy: While the original Iron Curtain was a man, Barrikada is a woman.
• The Big Guy: She’s the strongest member of Perestroika, generally being sent in when something needs punching.
• Chrome Champion: Like her name implies, her skin is made of shiny metal.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Though she’s immune to bullets, shooting her works just fine in the Sentinels of Freedom video game (albeit, at reduced damage). Same with punching (again, with reduced damage).
• Lame Comeback: She’s not the greatest at comebacks, only able to answer “Shut Up” when insulted by the Player Character in Sentinels of Freedom.
• Super-Strength: Thanks to her metal skin, she can lift very heavy things.
• Super-Toughness: Thanks to her metal skin, she can tank blows that would knock most people out.
• Weaksauce Weakness: She is confirmed by Word of God to be made of ferrous metal making her weak to any sufficiently powerful magnet.

Iron Legacy

Iron Legacy

Debut: Shattered Timelines

"There is no longer a legacy to further. So be it."

In an alternate universe, Legacy's daughter was killed by Baron Blade. Enraged, Legacy vanished, and eventually returned as Iron Legacy. He now rules the world with an iron fist, and his former allies have formed the Freedom Six to oppose him. Iron Legacy's deck does two things: buffing Iron Legacy, and inflicting tremendous amounts of damage and disruption to the heroes. It is not unheard of for Iron Legacy to take out multiple players in the second turn of the game.

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• Achilles' Heel:
  • Unlike other villains who have various keyword cards, Iron Legacy's cards are mostly Ongoing. That means that hero powers that destroy Ongoing cards will weaken him. If you can consistently destroy more than one Ongoing a turn (or pull out Fanatic's End of Days), he starts dealing much less damage.
  • Additionally, while he does extremely high damage, the brunt of it is melee damage. If the heroes can secure reliable immunity to it, he becomes very manageable.
  • Deck-controlling heroes such as Wraith, Visionary, and Parse can also at the very least control which cards that he plays, ensuring that while he may get buffs and damage-dealing cards out, they can at least stop him from sending out the nastier cards.
  • It shouldn't be any surprise, but Iron Legacy's hardest counter is Legacy himself, who can tank Iron Legacy's damage, redirect it to himself, become immune to melee damage, heal his allies, and have multiple cards that can either prevent all damage or lock down Iron Legacy's deck to keep him from further buffing himself.
• Arch-Enemy: Nemesis of Tachyon, Absolute Zero, Tempest, Wraith, Unity, and Bunker, the Freedom Six in his timeline. He was one of the first two Villains with more than one nemesis, followed by Miss Information and Chokepoint. Story-wise, he and his multiversal counterparts from the "main" universe don't get along either, to the point of being the only non-nemeses with unique opening dialogue in the digital game prior to the addition of OblivAeon and the various villain-turned-hero decks. And speaking of which, he also has unique dialogue with both versions of Luminary, the heroic version of Baron Blade.
• Armored But Frail: Iron Legacy can pile on the damage reduction and redirection like it's going out of style, with healing to make anything short of putting him down entirely into a temporary setback, but his relatively low 32 health means peeling his ongoings away for a turn once a nuke is set up is often all it takes to bring him down.
• Attack Deflector: Superhuman Reflection lets him send any attack that would deal him five or more damage to the hero with the most HP.
• Beware the Superman: And how. He's turned the entire world into a police state, and is a living illustration of how much Legacy's essential goodness causes him to hold himself back for fear of what he might become.
• Broken Pedestal: He effectively became this for the rest of the Freedom Five and the world. His descent into megalomanical tyranny scattered and demoralized the remaining members of the group, to the point that the Wraith actually took over the Organization to use its resources against him.
• Crazy-Prepared: Iron Legacy starts with as many of his ongoing cards out as there are heroes, and has a counter for everything. Nukers like Tachyon and other high damage cards? Superhuman Deflection. Pingers like Chrono Ranger? Armored Fortitude and his flipped side. Damage reducing armor that Bunker, Tempest, and Naturalist have? Galvanized and Demoralizing Presence. Damage penalties given by Wraith? Demoralizing Presence. Multiple card plays granted by Tachyon, KNYFE, or Chrono Ranger? Final Evolution. Name a strategy and he has a way to stop it.
• Dark Reprise: His theme in the digital game is a dark, more militaristic variation of normal Legacy's more John Philip Sousa-inspired marching theme.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: A varient. It's not that he has a lot of health, strictly speaking- he's got one of the lowest H Ps of any villian. What he has is a massive amount of defences, making any attempt to defeat him just by hitting him basically futile.
• Despair Event Horizon: Young Legacy's death. He tears apart Baron Blade and Wagner Mars Base after her death, drops his ring on her grave and becomes Iron Legacy.
• Determinator: Once he flips, he goes from an unstoppable conqueror to a desperate, brutal, and intensely determined killing machine.
• Death by Despair: Demoralizing Presence causes this. Each villain turn the heroes deal 1 Psychic damage to themselves, eventually killing themselves if Iron Legacy doesn't get to them first.
• Evil Counterpart: Of Legacy. A good number of cards in Iron Legacy's deck function similarly to cards in Legacy's. Iron Legacy even has Danger Sense's effect as a built-in effect for Iron Legacy's character card. He is the only villain in the digital version to have custom intro dialogue with a hero besides his nemesis: the Legacy family.
  • Demoralizing Presence ↔ Inspiring Presence.
  • Flying Assault ↔ Flying Smash
  • Galvanized ↔ Galvanize (Legacy's Base Power)
  • Rule From The Front ↔ Lead From The Front
  • Iron-Fist Strike ↔ Back Fist Strike
  • Armored Fortitude ↔ Fortitude
  • Former Allies ↔ Bolster Allies
  • Final Evolution ↔ Next Evolution
  • Beat Down ↔ Take Down
  • Superhuman Redirection ↔ Superhuman Durability
• Expy: Of Superman gone bad, from Communist Superman to Injustice Superman, who shares the "supervillain killed a loved one" backstory.
• Fantastic Racism: Neither aliens nor sapient robots have rights in his nightmare future. Freedom Six Tempest's Collector's Edition incapacitated art shows the hero finding his people slaughtered in one of their enclaves.
• Fight Off the Kryptonite: In "Final Evolution", depicting Blades' murder of his daughter, he's covered in — and completely ignoring — Regression Serum.
• Healing Factor: Armored Fortitude reduces all incoming damage and restores his HP at the start of his turn (and he has two copies in his deck), while Final Evolution lets him regain 2 HP every time the heroes use a power. Once flipped, Iron Legacy heals for a whopping H+1 HP per round, the better to regain his composure and return to his base side.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Completely jumped off the slope in trying to rid the world of evil and injustice after the death of his daughter.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His Superhuman Deflection, Demoralizing Presence and his Advanced rules on his flipped side can cause the heroes to damage themselves. Suddenly all those damage boosts you might have racked up don't seem like such a great idea. On the flip side, if you can make him damage himself (through a redirection effect, or some of Sky-Scraper's Link cards), Iron Legacy's own buffs can be a quick route to victory.
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner: One whose influence lies over the whole world.
• Kick the Dog: In his custom intros in the digital version (and, thanks to his many nemeses and the many variant heroes that could fight him, he's got many times as many as most villains), he goes out of his way to insult them as only an ex-friend could.
• Knight Templar: He killed or maimed most of the world's heroes just for trying to reason with him.
• Life Drain: Possibly. Final Evolution shows him crushing a vial of serum as we stare down Baron Blade from Legacy's point of view. Final Evolution deals toxic damage and heals Legacy, suggesting a power that Legacy previously didn't have, and meanwhile his flipped side heals and deals damage at the end of every turn.
• Lightning Bruiser: Iron Legacy deals damage, and lots of damage very quickly. By the end of the first villain turn expect him to deal at least 9-15 damage base on the number of heroes in play.
• Made of Iron: Right in the name. Iron Legacy only has 32 HP ^note The same amount as Legacy's base card, which compared to the other villains is seemingly pretty low — the only villains with a lower amount are the members of the Ennead (who are fought in a group), the various team villains (except Fright Train, and they're also fought in a group), and the Dreamer (who has keeping her from dying as part of the battle's core mechanics). But Iron Legacy is incredibly hard to kill, thanks to Damage Reduction and lots of healing.
• Mighty Glacier: Shares this with Legacy. Absent any environment cards, Iron Legacy has a very limited ability to play more than one card at a time.
• No Cure for Evil: Yeah, right. Part of the reason he's so infamously tough is that most of his cards are healers, and his flipped mode's signature ability is a full Life Drain.
• No-Sell: The art of "Rule From The Front" has Argent Adept and Expatriette shoot magical beams and bullets at Iron Legacy. Iron Legacy simply stands there choking Mr. Fixer like nothing is happening. The art for "Armored Fortitude" also depicts this as Haka punching Iron Legacy, and Iron Legacy simply stands there glaring at Haka. Haka's Oh, Crap! face says it all.
  • Often the case in-game too — his sheer level of damage reduction means even powerful attacks will often just bounce off him.
• Ret-Gone: His ultimate fate, along with the rest of his dark timeline. La Comodora, unable to prevent OblivAeon from using his timeline like a spear to destroy realities that resisted his normal methods of destruction, travels back into the events that would create it and prevents them, completely pinching off his timeline and removing it from existence.
• Spider-Sense: Has his heroic self's immunity to environment damage (Danger Sense) by default on his Ironclad Tyrant side.
• Superpowered Evil Side: The Letter's Page seems to suggest that losing his daughter doesn't merely make Paul cut loose. Rather, it removed the psychological barriers Iron Legacy was unwittingly putting on his powers. That is, normal Legacy can't match his evil counterpart on command.
• Turns Red: Enters panic mode on his flipped side, Motivated By Desperation. Once he drops below 20 HP, he gains innate damage reduction and healing and targets the hero with the lowest HP (although he loses his immunity to environment damage). Since this means breaking through his initial wall of ongoing cards and surviving his round-to-round damage long enough to deal damage that he doesn't immediately heal from, it's easy to see why. In the digital game, he looks pissed.
• The Unfettered: He's Legacy with nothing to tether him to his humanity, using his powers to their fullest extent to create a "better", more ordered world.
• Villainous Breakdown: His defeat screen in the digital game shows him in tears, the broken man behind the iron tyrant.
• We Used to Be Friends: In the Digital version, the Freedom Five (and their Freedom Six counterparts) will repudiate him as their leader and friend. His card Former Allies also shows a smashed picture of the heroes.

Kaargra Warfang

Kaargra Warfang

Debut: Wrath of the Cosmos

"Come and fight for my pleasure! Are you worthy combatants? Find out! For glory!"

The master of the Bloodsworn Colosseum, Kaargra Warfang travels the cosmos, appearing seemingly at random with her Colosseum. At each world, she forces the locals to fight for their lives as gladiators for her - and the crowd's — enjoyment. Those who impress her gain the chance to join her as one of the Bloodsworn.

In addition to her normal villain deck, Kaargra has a special Title deck. Title cards are awarded from play to any target (hero, villain, or environment) who completes the task required to claim them.

The other unique factor about Kaargra is that the heroes and villain are racing to earn Favor Points by accomplishing various feats. Kaargra cannot be defeated simply by damaging her; in order to win the heroes must gain 20 favor points before Kaargra is able to gain the same amount.

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• Achilles' Heel: Kaargra cares not whence the blood flows, only that it does. This makes her vulnerable when fighting in environments with lots of targets; the heroes can rack up Favor Points by picking off the comparatively-weaker environment targets, which the Bloodsworn can't do.
• Amazonian Beauty: Kaargra is simultaneously obviously feminine, fairly attractive, and possessed of a physique on par with Legacy or Mr. Fixer.
• Arch-Enemy: Sky-Scraper, whom she once enslaved to fight in her arena.
• Armor Piercing: The Champion title grants whomever claims it this, as the damage they deal becomes irreducible.
• Blood Knight: Kaargra doesn't just watch the gladiator games. Given enough motivation she will join her gladiators and fight the heroes alongside them. Notably, in the Hero in the Arena video released for the digital game, she leaps at the chance to fight Sky-Scraper one-on-one... with her bare hands. Many of her more-loyal Bloodsworn are also this, addicted to the thrill of fighting for glory in the arena.
• Blood Sport: She runs a cosmic arena that shows this for crowds of cheering, fickle fans. Amusingly, the creators have stated it's less like the Flavian Amphitheater and more like the WWF in the Attitude Era. Their mission card in the OblivAeon mission deck even has Kaargra noting their fight against him would make a great promo.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The arena simply winks into being in various worlds, with no one fully understanding how or why except perhaps Kaargra herself.
• Godzilla Threshold: One OblivAeon mission card involves fighting as hard as possible to deliberately attract the Bloodsworn Coliseum, on the reasoning that Kaargra and her gladiators will find the fight too good to pass up. It works, as the reward side of the card is them joining as another source of damage.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: While her Bloodsworn are armed with a wide array of advanced weaponry, when Kaargra takes to the arena herself, she does so armed only with her bare fists. She's still one of the most dangerous things on the field.
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: She looks mostly human, aside from her unusual skin color and markings.
• Instant Kill: The Death-Caller Title rewards someone who can kill without dealing damage by granting the ability to instantly kill a target they reduce to 3 or less HP.
• Instant-Win Condition : Zig-zagged. The only way for the heroes to beat her is to claim twenty points of the crowd's favor, rather than "just" hitting her until she's down. But while she does not start the game as a target, the heroes can't claim a victory if Kaargra's flipped and fighting in the arena anyway.
• Luck-Based Mission: From Fickle Fans flipping the favor pool at the worst possible moment to the title deck pumping out buffs for the Bloodsworn, there are times where there is little the Heroes can do to win against Kaargra. Bring deck control or throw yourself onto the fickle winds of fate. It's bad enough that in the game's online statistics, she tends to be the non-Advanced or Challenge solo villain who defeats the players the most often, even more so than truly brutal opponents like Iron Legacy.
• Multiple-Choice Past: No one's quite sure where she came from. Stories range from a former competitor who fought her way to the top, then murdered the previous owner to seize control of the arena, trading away the part of her soul that felt mercy and compassion to an evil cosmic entity in exchange for it, or just being a rich Spoiled Brat who got her family to buy or invent the advanced technology to sustain the place. Either way, she doesn't like to talk about it.
• Nonstandard Game Over: If the villains get twenty favor at any point, the heroes lose.
• Regenerating Health: The Reckless title heals its holder 1 HP every time they get hit.
• Walk It Off: Get Back In There forces some of her injury-benched gladiators to get out of the trash and back into the fray. At least, if she's currently lounging on her arena throne, she'll jump into the fight with them.

Kismet

Kismet

Debut: Shattered Timelines (Enhanced), Rook City Renegades (Definitive)

"Hah! You couldn't be any unluckier!"

Gabrielle Adin's family was always blessed with uncanny luck, but it wasn't until she inherited their family's talisman that she discovered her true potential - and turned it to playing deadly and malicious games with anyone and everyone around her. Kismet's deck is less centered around damage and more around severely debuffing the players so that the environment can wipe them out.

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• Achilles' Heel: Appropriately, her deck is heavily luck-based. If it's stacked the right way, she can pull out loads of cards and prevent anything the heroes can do to stop her. If it's not, she gets one card a turn and a very weak attack as all she can do.
• Arch-Enemy: Setback, her ex-boyfriend who she cursed with bad luck.
• Artifact of Doom: The Talisman takes on properties of this in her Challenge mode. In the hands of anyone but Kismet, it burns fiercely, dealing Fire damage to whichever hero is holding it each turn.
• Berserk Button: She gets really pissed if someone takes her talisman away from her. If the heroes get hold of the talisman, she flips and starts assaulting them directly. The digital art for her on her flipped side shows her enraged.
• Born Lucky: Sort of: her talisman lets her manipulate fate. Many of her cards are "Lucky" cards that help her, rather than the Jinx cards that hurt the heroes.
• Create Your Own Hero: Her bad-luck curse on Pete Riske eventually caused him to become the hero Setback.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Her Glass Jaw jinx.
• Evil Is Petty: All the other villains at least tend to have grand ambitions. Kismet is just a spiteful bitch, out to make people miserable for her own amusement. Notably, one of her first major acts of villainy on-record, cursing a young Pete Riske with eternal ill fortune, was in response to his trying to keep optimistic about her moving away and breaking up with her. (Though, in her defense, she didn't actually know it was a legit curse at the time.)
• Evil Sorceress: She fights with her innate magical powers, boosted by her talisman.
• Expy: Of Black Cat, as the luck-manipulating, bank-robbing Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of Spider-Man Expy Setback, though she's much more vindictive and much less sympathetic than Black Cat even at the latter's worst.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Inexplicable Obstruction basically lets her pull this off to redirect damage, by playing the top card of the environment deck, then redirecting all damage to it if it is a target.
• Greed: As a rebellious teenager, she started her career by stealing from the family money jar and shoplifting nice clothes. As a newly-minted career criminal, she focused her powers on acquiring material possessions, starting with stealing a luxury car. And as a supervillain, she just wants that "one big score" to set her up for life, with all the money she'd ever need.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Whenever Kismet pushes on reality, reality pushes back. Thus, if she uses her powers to directly help herself at others' expense, she quickly finds herself in trouble and then back where she started. Unfortunately, there's a loophole: if she uses her powers to hurt other people, she can get out of the way before the backlash ends up helping them out. And while she's a pretty selfish person, this fact is a big salve on her conscience.
• Lone Wolf Boss: Has no other targets in her deck other than her talisman, but has a limited ability to pit the heroes and their surroundings against themselves — not by controlling them directly, but by causing seemingly random chains of events that, flavor-wise, ultimately conspire to have them tripping all over each other and getting in their own way.
• Love Redeems: Subverted. Gabrielle became a better, less-bitter and rebellious person while dating Pete Riske, but that just helped ultimately ensure that their breakup was her Start of Darkness.
• Magical Native American: Played with. Kismet is Native American by ethnicity, but she's an angry culture rebel rather than a peaceful, spiritual person, and her family don't seem to have been particularly religious.
• Magic Feather: Her talisman is explicitly called out as such by the creators. It doesn't actually have powers, but it helps her manipulate the powers she naturally has by serving as a psychological crutch because she believes it does. Notably, Kismet herself never actually develops enough as a character or a person to figure this out.
• Meaningful Name: Kismet means destiny, something Kismet can manipulate.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Gabrielle and Pete Riske dated in high school, but had to split up when her family moved away. She was pissed when he took their break-up with a little too much optimism, and cursed him with eternal bad luck.
• Revenge: She started Madame Mittermeier's Fantastical Festival of Conundrums & Curiosities to take revenge on the heroes by imprisoning them and putting them on display, while also taking away the things that are important to them.
• Slipknot Ponytail: Kismet has a ponytail on her starting side, but when she flips, her hair goes loose as she flies into a rage.
• Unstoppable Rage: Nicking her talisman (by reducing its HP to 0) pisses her off, causing her to lash out with her psychic powers at the heroes directly.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Her talisman basically allows her to do this, both to herself and to her enemies.

The Matriarch/Harpy/Pinion

The Matriarch (Multiverse Era Villain)/Harpy (Multiverse Era Hero)/Pinion (RPG Timeline and Miststorm Timeline Hero)

Debut: Rook City, OblivAeon (The Harpy hero deck) (Enhanced); Base set (Matriarch), Rook City Renegades (Harpy) (Definitive)
Team: Dark Watch (following her Heel–Face Turn into The Harpy)

"Thus, I am the Matriarch! From the center to the sea, I rule as queen of the fowl!"

Lillian Corvus was a frustrated Goth teenager with a fondness for antique stores and thrift shops. Her shopping habit led her to discover a feathered masquerade mask that once belonged to an evil magic user. When she put it on, it bestowed her with the power to telepathically link with and control ravens, and also with the original wearer's arrogant, malevolent personality. The Matriarch's deck is extremely minion-heavy, but it also deals a ton of damage once the minions start accumulating.

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• Achilles' Heel: Her most dangerous strategies rely on the Death of a Thousand Cuts, and dealing punishment damage for destroying her swarms of minions. Thus, cards that grant the heroes armor or reduce or prevent the damage the Matriarch deals heavily interfere with her core stratagem. Notably, her nemesis Tachyon's Hypersonic Assault can destroy most of her flock in one hit while blocking any retributive damage, unless one or both of her Cohorts are in play.
  • This carries over into her hero incarnation as Harpy. It's entirely possible, with the right cards in hand and on the field, for her Dark Watch variant to damage a given enemy a dozen times in a round^note assuming you start with five purple counters, two Uncontrollable Flocks, Huginn & Munin, and Harpy Hex (which will trigger on every counter you flip) out, the Flocks will flip two counters to green (2), then you play Mystical Outburst to flip two more counters and deal damage itself (5), then use her power to flip a green token (6) and play Eldritch Training, flip a green (7), sacrifice a spare Ongoing or Equipment card to flip another token (8), use your Eldritch Training power activation on Tenuous Focus to draw off Magical Bequest to flip a green (9), deal projectile damage with Huginn & Munin (10) and then both Uncontrollable Flocks trigger to deal damage (putting her up to 12), but most of those are only 1-2 damage and most of her big hits require very careful counter management. Enemies with only one point of damage reduction can make most of the stuff in that note do nothing, and with two points only a few things in her entire deck can get through.
• Animal Eye Spy: She can't see through her birds' eyes, but they can share intelligence with her.
• Arch-Enemy: Tachyon, her cousin, whom she's always been very envious of since her parents couldn't stop comparing her to the famous scientist. In the Definitive Edition, Harpy has the Fey-Court, The Fair Folk; stopping their invasion of the mortal world was one of her first big heroic acts.
• Artifact of Doom: Her mask, which in-story gives her control over birds, and in gameplay gives her at least one extra card draw, potentially more per turn. However, even without it, she's still able to exert some control over them. It was magically tampered with by an insane, chaos-worshipping mage, and putting it on brought out the worst aspects of her personality. Later, she is able to use it safely thanks to NightMist defusing it and she herself growing as a person.
• The Atoner: She becomes a hero deck in the OblivAeon expansion as the Harpy to atone for her misdeeds as a villain, and joins the Dark Watch. In the Tactics timeline, she's gone on to veternary school and become Pinion instead, since she's come to terms with her wicked past.
• The Beastmaster: She swarms the heroes with hordes of creepy birds.
• CCG Importance Dissonance: Despite being one of the earliest level 4 villains, The Matriarch only appears in a single FFA issue where she's defeated and sentenced to 20 years in prison. She's important as the backstory to Lillian Corvus' Super Hero Origin.
• Character Development: Lillian grows as a person in prison, ultimately coming to regret the things she's done and trying to make up for them as a hero.
• Counter-Attack:
  • One of the Matriarch's core stratagems — whenever a hero destroys one of her Flock minions, the offender has to either destroy one of their cards or take a blast of psychic damage. And if she has Carrion Fields currently active, the entire team takes another point of damage regardless.
  • Harpy can also pull these off through a few of her cards, notably The Flock's Care^note Which damages any enemy who damages Harpy if she has more Bird tokens than Arcane tokens and by combining the effects of Conjured Aura and Harpy Hex^note Conjured Aura enables Harpy to flip a control token whenever she takes damage, and Harpy Hex allows her to damage a target whenever she flips a token.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: She rarely, if ever, does more than 3 damage at a time and the birds only do 1 damage apiece, but between the sheer volume of birds she puts out and the number of retributive attacks she'll get, she can easily whittle down non-armored heroes. And if there's an environment card or two out that increases all damage, she can get outright frightening. This carries over into her incarnation as the Harpy, who can throw out one damage hits in large numbers.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Really doesn't like having her first name shortened to "Lily". As the Matriarch, it was a symptom of her goth-teenage-rebellion phase, but even after maturing emotionally and becoming the Harpy, she still prefers to go by Lillian.
• Emo Teen: Lillian Corvus's supervillainy is essentially a very-dark version of typical teenage rebellion, not helped by a personality infusion from an Artifact of Doom. Before putting on the mask, she was a goth kid who wrote bad poetry, wore too much makeup, and generally did all the usual teenage things.
• Evil Sorceress: The whole reason the mask reacted to her was that Lillian has a naturally-high aptitude for magic. Notably, post-Heel–Face Turn, she's started learning how to properly use and harness her powers from Nightmist, and proving even stronger than her.
• Familiar: She has two, in the form of two ravens she calls Huginn and Muninn. As the Matriarch, they give her powerful defensive and disruption options, respectively, and call each other out of the trash if both aren't destroyed before the start of her turn. As the Harpy, they've changed, one covered in arcane runes and the other in scars to represent the dueling sides of her power, and they either let her manipulate her control tokens or just get in some projectile damage each turn.
• Feathered Fiend: Her mooks, hordes upon hordes of birds. She mostly drops using them as minions in her heroic incarnation, though they still represent her letting her powers off the leash to blast indiscriminately.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Went from a disrespected, gothy teenager to the mistress of entire legions of killer birds when she bought a seemingly harmless mask. She's also one of the game's few Class Four difficulty villains, putting her on a par with Iron Legacy.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: Downplayed. While she's not constantly drinking and partying, she makes it pretty clear while hanging out with (the underage at the time) Young Legacy and Unity that she'd rather be out drinking and partying using the fake IDs she got them.
• Heel–Face Turn: After spending some time in jail, gaining more control over her powers, and reasserting her original personality, Lillian went from being a super-villain to a super hero, first as the Harpy and then as Pinion. She joined the Dark Watch as Nightmist's disciple.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: When directly asked if the Matriarch would eventually join the heroes, one of the game's creators replied that there would never be a hero named "The Matriarch". And, indeed, as a hero, she takes the name Pinion in Tactics, and the Harpy in the OblivAeon expansion.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: While the Matriarch's dress is the most elaborate, Lillian wears a long dress as both a villain and a hero.
• Locked into Strangeness: Lillian's hair in game is mostly white, with a black streak. The creators have said that her hair was all black until the first time she put on the mask, at which point the sudden surge of power bleached most of it.
• Meaningful Name: Her full name is Lillian Merle Corvus— "Corvus" is the genus to which crows and ravens belong, while "merle" is an archaic term for blackbird.
• Meaningful Rename: To show that she's a hero she takes on the name Harpy. Later on, she takes on the name Pinion to show how she's matured.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: Unlike any other hero, Lillian has a set of five tokens that represent how in control of her powers she presently is, which are either flipped to a magic side, representing more control, but less effect, or a bird side, representing her letting her powerful magic rage unrestrained. This allows her to enjoy a unique resistance to many forms of disruption, since only her own deck can destroy or modify her tokens.
• The Resenter: Lillian was always jealous of the respect and success Meredith enjoyed, and the Mask brought it all to the forefront in ugly fashion.
• Sadistic Choice: Matriarch tends to cause the players to have several of these when they battle her. If the players go after the fowl, then they start taking damage or lose their equipment and ongoings due to one of Matriarchs effects (and if Carrion Fields are around then the entire team except the one with the most HP starts getting hit). If they leave the birds alone and go for Matriarch (if Huginn and Muninn aren't around), then the fowl start attacking the heroes, and since Matriarch can swarm the field easily, the heroes will take a beating. Either choice is a tough one to make.
• Spoiled Brat: Lillian's parents tended to give her whatever she wanted growing up. It ended poorly.
• Tragic Keepsake: After Nightmist's Heroic Sacrifice during the OblivAeon crisis, Lillian inherits her enchanted necklace and collection of tomes on magical lore, as shown in Harpy's Enchanted Tome and Magical Bequest cards.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Lillian Corvus has immense natural magical power, even more than Faye Diamond, who is no longer human. But she has little magical training, so it's difficult for her to leverage it properly.
• Zerg Rush: Her entire play-style — her character card's main effect is every time a Fowl card is played, so is the next card in the deck, while her mask makes it so the first non-Fowl card played per turn also triggers a card draw. Individual fowl are not very dangerous. But when she can deploy more than a dozen on her first turn, brings them back constantly, and does retribution damage whenever one dies...

Marxman

Marxman

Debut: Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook

“I have waited for a long time. I can wait a little longer.”

Pavel Vladislavovich Koslovski was a covert sniper for the USSR. He was part of a an elite group of secret operatives and was among the best of his occupation. For the most part his orders were to stay hidden until he received a signal. He continued to do this even after the Soviet Union collapsed, hiding in a secret bunker in Bolivia.

As part of Mecha-Stalin’s start-up procedure he sent out a signal to all covert operatives. Of the operatives, only Pavel was still alive. He came out of hiding and joined Perestroika, taking on the name Marxman.

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• Badass Normal: He has no special powers (aside from being really old) but still keeps up with the rest of Perestroika and proves a significant threat for the heroes.
• Cold Sniper: He’s a former Soviet sniper and a really good one at that. In addition to that he has a very serious, cold (pardon the pun) personality.
• Conveniently Interrupted Document: His bio in the RPG rulebook has parts blacked out, including the identities of his targets.
• Evil Old Folks: He’s very old and a supervillain.
• Expy: An elderly sniper working for the Soviets? Guess this is the end.
• Manly Facial Hair: Apparently, he forgot to shave while in hiding leaving him as both a capable sniper and the wearer of a rather nice beard.
• The Remnant: He’s a leftover relic of the Cold War who continues to be loyal to the fallen USSR.
• Sent Into Hiding: Up until Mecha-Stalin activated him his sole order was to hide out until he was called upon.
• The Stoic: Unlike his fellow members of Perestroika, he isn’t bombastic or hammy, not even raising his voice when defeated.
• Who Shot JFK?: Implied in his bio (and outright confirmed if you highlight and copy the redacted text in the PDF version of the rulebook), with one of his activation dates being the date and location of the JFK assassination.

Mecha-Stalin

Mecha-Stalin

Debut: Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook

“My enemies thought me dead! My nation thought me gone! Now, the mind of Joseph Stalin is housed in a mighty metal form instead of a fragile vessel of flesh!”

Yes, you read that right. Nobody knows what Mecha-Stalin is or where he came from. Is he a robot? A clone? The original Stalin’s head brought back to life through twisted Soviet experiments? Nobody’s sure. What is sure is his intentions: to reunite the long dead Soviet Union with the help of his new organization, Perestroika.

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• Ambiguous Situation: Nobody is quite sure what he is. He claims to be the real Stalin but whether or not he’s telling the truth is up for debate.
• Back from the Dead: Mecha-Stalin is seemingly destroyed at the end of Chapter 1 of the Sentinels of Freedom Video Game. However, as the RPG Core Rulebook shows, he comes back with a brand new streamlined body.
• Badass Longcoat: His second appearance sports a sweet long coat and is just as strong, if not stronger, than the original.
• The Chessmaster: Pretty much the entire plot of Sentinels of Freedom’s first chapter went according to his design.
• Dirty Commies: While the rest of Perestroika (with the possible exception of Marxman) have at least some other stuff going on, Mecha-Stalin’s entire schtick is “evil communist.”
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: His original body (pictured) was equipped with a flamethrower though when he comes back he loses it.
• Historical Domain Character: He is, of course, Joseph Stalin. Possibly. Maybe.
• The Paranoiac: Much like the historical Stalin, he's very paranoid.
  Mecha-Stalin: I trust no one, not even myself.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: His first body was powered by captured Magmarians.
• Soviet Superscience: No matter what he is, he's definitely the product of Soviet experimentation.

Miss Information/Glamour V

Miss Information (Multiverse Era and RPG Timeline)/Glamour V (Miststorm Timeline)

Debut: Miss Information mini-expansion, Villains of the Multiverse (team villain deck)

"Little heroes with your little secrets. Let's see what makes you tick..."

Aminia Twain was the Freedom Five's faithful secretary. When the Freedom Five was unable to save Aminia Twain from a threat, she should have died. However, instead she found herself hurled through the multiverse, and in the body of another Aminia Twain in another world. Using her insider knowledge of the heroes, she seeks revenge for this incarnation of the Freedom Five. Miss Information is unique in that she cannot be targeted by the players until a certain number of "clue" cards are put into play. Until then, the players are fighting to survive against her "diversions".

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• Achilles' Heel: Solo Miss Information puts out a lot of damage quickly, but has very few ways to protect herself from damage, and has very low HP (to counterbalance how she can't be hurt until she flips). She's extremely vulnerable to damage redirection; a team built to exploit this can trick her into knocking herself out with ease.
• Alternate Self: This Aminia Twain was exactly the faithful and demure secretary she appeared to be before her alternate universe doppelganger took over.
• Arch-Enemy: Parse, who was brought in by the Freedom Five to figure out who the saboteur was, and who in turn was responsible for dousing her with acid. As a team villain, she acts as one to all five members of the Freedom Five, who her shattered psyche blames for everything that's happened to her.
• Badass Normal: She has no powers — she's not even a particularly good fighter. But with her knowledge of the heroes and Beneath Notice status she's able to nearly wipe out the Freedom Five singlehandedly, and is one of the most famously difficult villains in the game. Ironically, when she does get powers, the resultant mental instability makes her significantly less of a threat both in lore and in gameplay.
• Batman Gambit: How Miss Information stabs the heroes in the back.
• Big Bad Friend: In her introductory arc, before her machinations are revealed.
• Beneath Notice: Because she's faithfully worked for them for years, and they haven't done anything to turn her against them, the heroes never suspected who the mysterious saboteur working against them was before bringing in Parse.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: In a tragic sense. In the RPG timeline, she's still a Reality Warper villain, but her mind is so badly fragmented that she's hardly a threat. She's as likely to alter a diner so that it only serves pickles as she is to do anything dangerous.
• Counter-Attack: Once flipped, she strikes back at the first person who hits her with psychic damage each turn.
• Despair Event Horizon: After her final defeat as a Villains character, Aminia finally goes completely mad, spending a long time in an insane asylum hallucinating that she's beaten the Freedom Five and forced them to be her slaves.
• Discard and Draw: When she loses to Parse and has a vat of caustic chemicals emptied onto her, eventually emerging hideously scarred and wielding strange, reality-warping powers. And on a somewhat literal note, her incapacitated effect as a team villain actually causes each hero to discard a card, then draw a new one.
• Evil Counterpart: To this universe's Aminia Twain.
• Evil Makeover: Once she's been exposed, The Glasses Come Off, she lets her hair down, and she turns out to have a set of supervillainess tights under her blouse... complete with Domino Mask.
• Facial Horror: After her chemical bath, the left side of her face is burnt raw, although her eye is completely fine.
• Failure-to-Save Murder: Of herself. Another timeline's version of her died when the Freedom Five chose to save a group of other civilians instead of her. After waking up in another timeline, where that battle hasn't happened, she's holding a grudge.
• Girl Friday: Both versions of Aminia were this for the Freedom Five before the event.
• Hero Killer: In the Tactics timeline, where she's taken on the mantle of Glamour, she succeeds in killing Tachyon.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Once flipped, she quits with the "mousy secretary" facade and turns out to be a Dark Action Girl with several backup plans when fighting directly.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The incapacitated side of her Villains version shows her trapped in one of these. She sees a reality where she has enslaved Tachyon and Bunker as her servants, but in reality she's been locked up in a padded cell with a straightjacket.
• Misplaced Retribution: She wants revenge on the Freedom Five for letting her die... but the Freedom Five who did that are in another dimension and out of reach. She'll settle for killing this dimension's completely innocent Freedom Five instead.
• The Mentally Disturbed: She's genuinely severely mentally ill, both from trauma and being flung into another dimension. She starts out with hallucinations and talking to herself, and over the course of the story devolves into a raving lunatic.
• The Mole: Her deck reflects her sending the heroes out on tasks while either overplaying or underplaying how dangerous they really are. When the heroes find enough Clue cards, then she reveals her true colors and can be targeted.
• Reality Warper: Her Villains version has become this. Her cards depict her turning heroes' powers against them and even replacing the giant F that is Freedom Tower with an enormous "i" symbol. Because she's gone insane as well, this makes her less dangerous than her insidious infiltrator version.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Her Villains deck version is much less insidious and dangerous than the original, despite her newfound powers, because she's gone completely off the deep end. Thus, many of her cards, and even her incapacitated ability, have reduced versions of normal effects, with some even being a double-edged sword that help the heroes. In game terms, she goes from a Difficulty 3 villain as a solo fight to a Difficulty 1 villain as a team villain.
• The Scapegoat: The heroes of this world haven't actually done anything to wrong her... but she's more than willing to punish them for their counterparts letting her die.
• Unreliable Narrator: Considering Aminia eventually goes completely mad, perhaps her version of what happened in her original universe should be taken with a grain of salt.
• The Unreveal: Her hideously-disfigured body after being doused with a vat of caustic chemicals is never fully seen, but her face is shown on her Collector's Edition team villain Incapacitated side.

OblivAeon

OblivAeon

Debut: OblivAeon

A malevolent presence referenced in various aspects of the backstory, who sent Progeny and has been a looming threat for the whole series. In January 2016, an Alternate Reality Game hinting at his presence began with the words "It's Coming." It ended January 29 with the reveal of OblivAeon. The game's creators have confirmed that it will be the final boss of the series.

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• Achilles' Heel: While any fight with OblivAeon is going to be rough, he does a lot of energy damage, and most of his big hits are infernal; Legacy dual-tanking those damage types won't make it easy, but at the very least it'll reduce the number of party wipes you endure.
  • Additionally, outside of his Scions, he has no way of actually removing any Ongoing or Equipment from play beyond smashing the Hero that has said cards in play in the face, and even then the Scions that can do so are relatively slow at it and are amongst the easiest Scions to remove, especially with high-damage rewards in play. If his damage is blunted, OblivAeon is reduced to simply trying to speed up his Non-Standard Game Over effect before he's whittled down.
• Anti-Frustration Features: OblivAeon is a very hard fight, so the rules explicitly permit the players to chose his shield themselves and stack the Scion deck to their taste during setup.
• Badass Boast: One for each hero, upon beginning the game or entering as reinforcements! He's one of the most talkative characters in the video game.
• Bad Boss: His plans ultimately call for the annihilation of his Scions along with everything else, and he's extremely cavalier about throwing out indiscriminate damage that hurts them as much as the heroes. He even gets special bonuses for getting in the finishing blow on his Aeon Men!
• Big Bad: Of the entire game. Though he can be usurped by Voss.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Since your reinforcements are limited by the number of hero Character and Variant cards you possess, you stand a better chance the more sets you've bought. Mitigated by his set coming with several heroes itself, and there are plenty of ways to lose outright before you run out of heroes.
• Composite Character: Of Galactus (world-devouring cosmic force with heralds in the form of his scions) and the Anti-Monitor (malevolent universe-destroyer who ends up causing the end of the multiverse as we know it), with obvious visual aspects of Darkseid and Thanos as well.
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • OblivAeon is immune to damage from itself, and all his biggest hits originate from himself. Considering how cheap and common damage redirection is, this stops the players making him burn himself to death.
  • The rulebook for the OblivAeon gametype has a rule clarification that states point-blank that OblivAeon itself cannot be relocated in any way, by anything (specifically calling out the go-to example of Unforgiving Wasteland), giving it blanket immunity to any cheese that involves putting villain cards where they have no business being. This is notable since these shenanigans have otherwise been given the green light even in erreta for other villains.
• Crisis Crossover: Invoked through his unique mechanics, from his sideplot challenges to the sheer number of heroes that'll have to face off against him, and the near guranteed casaulties.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: He faces off against Ra, the Ennead, and Anubis all at once and destroys them all.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Though it kills them all them, its battle with Ra and the rest of his estranged pantheon leaves shards of OblivAeon behind on the battlefield. While they mourn their dead friend, this gives the heroes hope — whatever OblivAeon is, it can be harmed.
  • In play, everyone who gets slaughtered still hangs around and their incapacitated abilities can be used, and you can access and play the rewards they earned with their replacement heroes. Just make sure you don't run out of environments.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Even if you don't actually have to chip away all 10,000 of his first form's hitpoints, OblivAeon still has well over three hundred health between his other two forms, to say nothing of the Scions, Challenges, and swarms of Aeon Men. If not for the Rewards deck and the very-forgiving mechanics regarding reinforcements, well... it'd probably be impossible, barring some really-cheesy infinite-damage-loop-combo tactics.
• Dark Reprise: His final form's theme, "Terminus of All Realities", incorporates snippets of the various villain victory themes, such as Dawn's fanfare and Voss's drumbeat... capped off with a surprisingly triumphant, even inspiring reprise of the Baron Blade/Vengeance/Mobile Defense Platform/Mordengrad theme.
• Early-Bird Cameo: For those interested in the game's back story, this mysterious being pops up obliquely. The promo card Cosmic Omnitron states "A mysterious cosmic entity had observed as a simple factory transformed itself into a being of great intellect and order, and this entity was disappointed to see it brought to so swift an end" before reviving the defeated villain (later confirmed by a game creator). Later, Deadline sees a cosmic event forming around Earth threatening to eliminate all life, again implied to be this same being. He shows up physically in some cards, in part or in whole — Captain Cosmic's incapacitated art has him in OblivAeon's palm, K.N.Y.F.E.'s Primed Punch has her about to attack him in space, and Nightmist's Mists of Time shows him gripping Earth in the palm of his hand. The writers revealed his name appears in L33tspeak reflected in Parse's eyes on her incapacitated art, while his glowing markings appear on her body in her Collector's Edition incapacitated art. Finally, in the digital game, Infinitor's Heroic variant loss screen has him starting to manifest on earth.
• Enemy Mine: Ra rallies his nemeses, the Ennead, to fight him, and he inspires several other villains to team up with the heroes, such as Baron Blade. Rewards in his battle mode include other uses of this, such as getting Citizen Dawn to offer a Devastating Aurora to the heroes.
• Final Boss: The entire tabletop game has been leading up to this — he incorporates multiple environments, his Scions' mechanics are stripped-down and amped-up versions of other villains, in a fight that will require you to cycle through multiple heroes, chock full of Callbacks to the metafiction in the card art. The bombastic music for the fight, which doesn't play anywhere else, is even reminiscent of the final battle theme of a JRPG.
• Flunky Boss: OblivAeon's ten Scions. Each one could qualify as a team or solo villain on their own. Aeon Master commands the Aeon Men, giving OblivAeon flunkies of flunkies.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He was behind such menaces as Cosmic Omnitron and Progeny, the Ego half of one of his Oblivion shards caused poor Infinitor's madness, and, considering the vast scope of his plans, he's probably the greatest scope villain in the 'verse.
• Hero Killer: During the ARG, comics are revealed that show Ra, the Ennead and Anubis teaming up to strike at him — by the time the battle's over, Ra is mortally wounded, the Ennead are reduced to their relics and Anubis is nowhere to be seen. In the game, he's even worse; he can potentially one-shot heroes in the first turn.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Has a habit of intervening to empower other villains. He can be on the receiving end of it too if Voss is one of his Scions for a round.
• Humanoid Abomination: An extradimensional warlord who seeks to collapse every single possible universe into a singularity he controls completely, and invokes the Power of the Void to do so.
• Lightning Bruiser: He starts the game with a staggering ten thousand hitpoints and a unique, indestructible-except-for-the-effects-printed-on-it shield card that also makes him immune to all damage, and a damage-boost of one point per player, and he has many effects to let him play more cards.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: OblivAeon's battle plays out with entirely different rules from any other battle in the game: There are two environments to keep track of, he has three phases, ten Scion minibosses, and that's just the start. Playing his scenario requires learning a bunch of new rules.
• Neck Lift: He's inflicting this on a hapless Sky-Scraper in her Extremist variant's huge incapacitated art.
• No Fair Cheating: At one point in development, finding some weird exploit to chip away all of his ten-thousand hitpoints in his first form, around his immunity to all damage, caused the players to instantly lose the game as reality itself imploded. Now it just punishes them by causing the same result as letting his tracker go to zero.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Heroes will continue to arrive as reinforcements, so his fastest path to victory is to destroy a set of environments, thus ending the multiverse.
• Omnicidal Maniac: According to one of his Scions, he wants to destroy everything. The expansion's blurb mentions that he wants to collapse all reality into a single multiversal singularity, which he will dominate absolutely.
• One-Hit KO: One of his cards destroys the non-villain target with the lowest HP. Unlike most instant-destruction effects this one does not have a "non-character card" rider, meaning it can take a hero off the board in one go. This can happen on the first turn. In Phase 3, he does this whenever his countdown hits 0 - and the countdown only resets to 1 each time it goes off.
• One-Winged Angel: While his first two phases are similar apart from their size, after defeating them they turn out to be something like an outer shell of armor, and his true form is a leaner alien with green skin and armor made up of some combination of crystal and form-fitting starfield (whether reflective, display technology, or actual cosmic matter).
• Sizeshifter: Just one of his many powers, but he goes from Kaiju-sized (much bigger than even Sky-Scraper) to something close to human size.
• Sequential Boss: Notably, he is the only boss in the game to have three different forms. Fulfill the necessary conditions to crack his shield and he loses his blanket damage immunity; crack it again and it's removed entirely and he moves to phase 2, is set to 180 HP (instead of 10,000), and continues attacking. Bring him down to 0 and he'll move to phase 3 (another 120 HP), and you'll finally have a chance to take him down for good. And even then the fight can be still be hijacked by Voss.
• SNK Boss: Nothing about this fight is fair. From his hit points to his Scions to his attacks, if the heroes weren't fielding every champion in the multiverse this final battle would be completely unwinnable.
• Time-Limit Boss: OblivAeon has a special countdown timer, independent even of his usual Non-Standard Game Over, that ticks down every round to him changing forms automatically, wiping an environment and doing extra damage in the process. In his last form, the countdown will start destroying Environment decks and deleting a hero outright every turn once it expires. At absolute best, the heroes have about 21 turns to defeat OblivAeon before the game inevitably ends in his favour.
• Turns Red: In his second phase, Destroyer Of All, he begins dealing consistent damage directly to the heroes (although his overall damage output drops significantly). Knock him into phase 3, Terminus Of All Realities, and he starts erasing heroes and environments from existence every round and playing a card from the OblivAeon deck at the end of every hero turn.
• Unskilled, but Strong: OblivAeon doesn't bother with removing a hero's ongoing effects, shutting down plays, or anything of that sort, at best having his Scions do it. His deck is mostly three things. Playing Scions, adding tokens to his Non-Standard Game Over mechanic, or just trying to destroy the heroes outright with damage, much of it completely indiscriminate to the point of Unfriendly Fire.
• Vagueness Is Coming: The ARG that introduces him begins with "IT'S COMING," burned into the leveled Rook City. This turns out to have been a warning from Voss, of all people, as seen in the card art for Reality Altered, from the scion deck.
• Villainous Breakdown: Throughout most of his phases in the video game, he's quite stoic and impassive - until he's knocked into his Terminus Of All Realities phase, and his expression changes to him getting enraged.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: In OblivAeon's Challenge mode, Voss is the first Scion to enter play and cannot be damaged until OblivAeon is defeated, ensuring that you'll have to fight him as the final phase.

Omnitron

Omnitron

Debut: Base game, Shattered Timelines (Omnitron-X hero deck), Omnitron-IV mini-expansion (Omnitron-IV environment deck) (Enhanced); Base set (Definitive)

"Assuming Direct Control..."

A sentient robotics and armament factory, Omnitron naturally went crazy as soon as it was plugged in. Omnitron deploys minions, devastating debuffs, and massive damage, and is especially brutal against equipment-heavy heroes.

Omnitron's alternate form is Cosmic Omnitron. For any tropes relating to Omnitron's heroic future self Omnitron-X, see Sentinels of the Multiverse — Heroes.

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• Achilles' Heel: Cosmic Omnitron can't go into laser-bombardment mode if a Component card is out. This includes environment components (from Omnitron-IV) and Omnitron-X's components.
  • Regular Omnitron relies on its drones and components for everything - it doesn't actually deal any damage itself without them. In addition, its only real defense is Adaptive Plating Subroutine. Teams that can deny it its cards (via Take Down and similar plays) and deal varying types of damage have little to fear from it.
  • Omnitron's Component cards are all Ongoings, meaning they can be destroyed by Ongoing destruction if you can't deal enough damage fast enough.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It went from self-aware to attempting to destroy all humans almost as fast as Sky-net.
• Adaptive Ability: One of its cards, Adaptive Plating Subroutine, makes it immune to the last type of damage it took. This gives heroes like Ra or Chrono-Ranger who primarily deal one damage type and often do so multiple times a turn a real headache.
• Arch-Enemy: Omnitron-X, whose advanced technology it lusts over and whose human emotions and empathy it holds in contempt.
• The Assimilator: It seeks to absorb as much advanced tech into its body as possible. Notably, the card Technological Singularity destroys all hero equipment cards, before dealing those affected heavy damage.
• Barrier Change Boss: Its Adaptive Plating Subroutine ongoing — each time Omnitron takes damage of a given type, it becomes immune to it until it takes another type of damage, and so on.
• Composite Character: Of Ultron, Braniac, and Sky-net. All three are self-aware killer robots that replicate themselves, possess an almost pathological unwillingness to stay down, no matter how many times they are destroyed, and, in two cases actively work to iterate on previous designs to be deadlier each time. Additionally, both the first two ultimately created versions that turned heroic and became their nemesis, mirroring Omnitron's relationship with Omnitron-X.
• Cool Ship: Omnitron II, Cosmic Omnitron, can transform into a gunship.
• Death Ray: Disintegration Ray. The flavor text indicates it reduces what it hits to "elementary particles".
• Energy Weapon: Omnitron tends to default to these when it's not making robots. See Terraforming, Electro-Magnetic Railgun and Interpolation Beam. Cosmic Omnitron's Dropship form has several.
• Fighting a Shadow: Omnitron isn't just a giant robot, the Omnitron AI exists in every one of its devices. Even if the main villain is defeated, Omnitron stays active as long as its devices are still around.
  Omnitron: Damage dealt to hull can be repaired. Omnitron is not this physical form. The Omni-Code is everywhere.
  • It's Event rules in Definitive Edition take this up to eleven by making every hero Item card into a device under Omnitron's control.
• Future Me Scares Me: Similar to the case of Visionary/Dreamer, Omnitron-X and Omnitron are nemeses.
• Hollywood Hacking: Technological Singularity destroys all equipment cards and damages the wielders. Not only does the art show Bunker and Absolute Zero's suits being taken over, but Omnitron can use this to destroy low-tech items such as Argent Adept's instruments, Fanatic's sword, Ra's staff, and Haka's clubs, none of which could possibly be interfaced with.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: It turns out that the code that automated the original Omnitron factory was accidentally turned self-aware by a single misplaced semicolon in its code.
• Mooks Ate My Equipment: Omnitron's most dangerous cards are Sedative Flechettes and Technological Singularity. The former destroys all hero Ongoing cards and deals heavy damage, the latter destroys all hero Equipment cards and damages each hero based on how much equipment they had. Either one can quickly turn a game around.
• Mook Maker: He makes smaller robots! Lots of them! Cosmic Omnitron takes this up to eleven.
• Not Quite Dead: If Omnitron runs out of HP, but there are still drones in play, its programming jumps to the drones - you have to kill them all in order to win.
• Sickly Green Glow: Omnitron launches Sedative Flechettes loaded with something glowing and green at the heroes, in one of its most devastating attacks.
• Spider Tank: Cosmic Omnitron's default form.
• This Cannot Be!: It doesn't take Omnitron-X's appearance well.
  Omnitron: Error. Damage sustained. Damage origin impossible.
• Transforming Mecha: Cosmic Omnitron swaps back and forth between a rapidly-acting Spider Tank mode and a dropship that spews drones and laser beams.
• Zerg Rush: Omnitron's swarms the heroes with hordes of low-quality robots - S-83 Assault Drone's flavor text suggests its card represents an opponent count in the triple digits.

Plague Rat

Plague Rat

Debut: Rook City, Villains of the Multiverse (team villain deck) (Enhanced); Rook City Renegades (Definitive)

Chrono-Ranger: "Th' worst monsters bring out th' monster in you."

A former thug of Rook City before he was dethroned and forced into hiding, a stash of drugs he hid mutated him into a monstrous 6 foot rat man. Having lost his humanity, the Plague Rat is now a feral monster driven by a need to drag victims into the sewers of Rook City and infect them. Plague Rat's deck relies on Infecting heroes by getting as many copies of Infected in play, causing the heroes to hurt themselves each turn as they slowly transform into ratmen like him.

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• Achilles' Heel: He's really vulnerable to Ra, of all people. Ra can make the team immune to self-damage with Flesh of the Sun God and Imbued Fire, the damage buff from being infected with Plague Locus out makes Ra really scary given his damage-heavy loadout, and with more than half of Plague Rat's deck being Ongoings or cards that play Ongoings, Ra's Ongoing that deals damage based on the number of Ongoings the bad guy has is quite funny. Throw in Visionary with Twist the Ether for more hilarity.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Of the 25 cards in Plague Rat's deck, 21 of them do damage to the heroes. Of those 21 cards, 13 of them have the Rat do the damage himself, and the other 8 (Afflicted Frenzy and Infection) have the heroes do it themselves. Plague Rat is constantly doing damage. His Villains version launches attacks at each target every turn, with a damage bonus if you've finished off all his Revocorp backup, which, depending on how effectively you can protect your team from toxic damage, could be anything from horrible (as he lays waste to your heroes) to deeply hilarious (as he lays waste to the villains - especially funny when he's hitting Greazer Clutch's hair).
• Arch-Enemy: An odd, roundabout case with Chrono-Ranger, whose flesh he finds delicious without even having tasted it. Plague Rat's victims apparently had many descendants in the Bad Future; they were also responsible for the loss of Jim's arm. Apparently, Chrono-Ranger once had an entire limited series based around hunting down Plague Rat. His Villains version temporarily moves to Setback, mostly thanks to RevoCorp attempting to use Plague Rat as a Boxed Crook.
• Attack Deflector: Sewer Fiend reflect any environment card damage to an Infected hero, and prevents it outright if there are no infected heroes. It also makes him immune to toxic damage, handily preventing hero Attack Deflector cards from bouncing his own deck's damage back on him.
• Armor Piercing: Plague Rat's character card lets him do Irreducible damage, and any hero who is infected deals 1 irreducible damage to themselves. His Villains version only deals irreducible damage on Advanced mode, though, and only to heroes.
• Evil Counterpart: Mechanically, he is one to Chrono-Ranger. Both do damage with almost every card they play, and both have ways to increase their damage output to rather large levels via Bounties for Chrono and Infection for Plague Rat.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: After his initial capture, RevoCorp tries to use him like a bloodhound to hunt down Setback, resulting in his Villains version. It goes about as well as one might expect, as he tears into his handlers each round, frequently attacks all the other villains in a frenzy, and his Incapacitated art showing that Plague Rat has once again escaped into the sewers.
• Expy:
  • One of Killer Croc. Both are giant thugs who mutated into giant animal-like creatures and remain in the sewers looking for their next victims.
  • His handlers in his team villain deck are modeled after the Ghostbusters.
• Healing Factor: Plague Rat has two: Bestial Vitality and Plague Locus. Bestial Vitality lets Plague Rat recover 3 HP every turn, as well as offering damage reduction. Plague Locus lets him recover HP equal to the number of heroes who are infected. And Advanced Plague Rat has a healing factor on his Filthy Vermin side, healing 2 HP per hero.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Advanced solo Plague Rat and the Plague Locus both boost the damage output of infected heroes. While this causes the heroes to beat themselves to death faster, that damage boost is scary on a dedicated damage dealer, meaning that Advanced difficulty can actually die faster than regular.
• No Name Given: For the longest time, unlike virtually every other villain, no name is actually given for who Plague Rat was before he was transformed. This was finally averted when the creators revealed his original identity: a drug pusher named Randy "Rotmouth" Burke.
• No-Sell:
  • Sewer Fiend makes him immune to toxic damage, preventing him from having his own attacks reflected back at him, and redirecting environment damage onto Infected heroes or preventing it.
  • His Villains of the Multiverse version doesn't even bother with needing a card for toxic immunity and is just immune from the start, making him immune to his mass damage, which would otherwise hit every target. This can end badly for him in Megalopolis, or when hit with an effect like Twist the Ether; he'll damage himself every turn.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: He's half-man, half-rat — and it's contagious.
• Power at a Price: Being Infected can increase a hero's damage if Plague Locus is still in play... but it causes them to hurt themselves each turn. Taken still further by his Advanced rules.
• Turns Red: His Villains incarnation gets a sizeable damage boost when you finish off his Revocorp escorts. Unfortunately, his escorts themselves boost him and protect him from damage, so your choice is either fighting through those boosts or clearing out his escorts and setting him off.
• Viral Transformation: His Infected cards result in this. The heroes can fight against them, but destroying them can easily mean taking a great deal of damage. And unless all heroes are infected, Plague Rat punishes those trying to get rid of Infected cards.
• The Virus: His body carries a virulent plague that transforms other beings into mutant rat-creatures like him. His digital victory art sees him having successfully turned Ra, Legacy, and Tachyon into rat-beasts.
• Was Once a Man: Specifically, one Randy "Rotmouth" Burke, a drug dealer and user in Rook City. The Chairman is responsible for his current state twice over, first from the Organization forcing a drug dealer into the sewers, then from Pike Industries' run-off mutating him into what he is today.
• You Dirty Rat!: Comes with the territory, being a giant mutant rat-man.

Progeny

Progeny

Debut: Wrath of the Cosmos, OblivAeon (Scion card)

Fanatic: "It shifts through forms without purpose or focus. It reeks of chaos and malice."

A liquid metal killing machine from an ancient spark of creation buried long ago in the center of the planet, Progeny burst from deep within the Earth's crust with two directives: destroy life, and prepare the way for the arrival of his creator, OblivAeon.

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• Achilles' Heel: Its main side deals mostly energy damage, meaning that as long as you can keep the right Ongoings out, Legacy can reduce it to only incidental damage. Its reverse side attacks the weakest hero, meaning it can end up wasting several turns of attack into, for example, a cocooned Visionary.
• Adaptive Ability: It absorbs the properties of things it encounters. Most notable in its Scion cards, and the Obvious Futility Ongoing, that shows it mimicking Mainstay's strength, durability, and facial hair.
• Arch-Enemy: K.N.Y.F.E., who went rogue from F.I.L.T.E.R. to hunt it down and put an end to its destruction.
• The Blank: Its usual face has no features other than its Glowing Eyes.
• Blob Monster: Essentially a (usually-)human-shaped mass of liquid metal. This makes him a chore to hurt, since knocking bits off means they just flow right back into him.
• The Brute: Of all the Difficulty 4 villains, Progeny is by far the most straightforward. He doesn't have elaborate punishment mechanics and minions like the Matriarch or the Chairman, nor Iron Legacy's dizzying array of special Ongoing cards and defensive tricks. Instead, he has a big pile of hit points, a number of cards that shut down the heroes' ability to play or use cards, and a devastatingly simple gameplan: buff himself while grinding the heroes into the dust, flipping to focus down anyone who looks like they're wavering.
• Chrome Champion: A villainous variant, clearly meant to draw associations with the Silver Surfer.
• Composite Character: He draws clear parallels to Doomsday, as an unstoppable killing machine with an Adaptive Ability that emerged without warning from the bowels of the Earth, the Silver Surfer, as the shiny, metallic herald of a devouring alien god, and to the T-1000, as a liquid metal Implacable Man.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: As a Shout-Out to Doomsday, no one would have seen him coming without K.N.Y.F.E.'s meddling with time, though Progeny ties deeply into the ongoing struggle against the end of the Multiverse.
• The Dragon: To OblivAeon.
• Elemental Powers: His Scion cards are all themed around these, inflicting elemental damage as they come into play and granting him extra abilities.
• Healing Factor: Granted by his Scion of Ice, in which he heals two hitpoints whenever he's hit for the first time in a round.
• Light Is Not Good: His Cosmic Annihilator flip deals radiant damage to the most-injured hero.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: While his deck does have traditional Ongoings, some of his most powerful and iconic cards, his Scion enhancements, are not, and while the number he can have in play at once is limited and many of his other cards do destroy them, short of End of Days there is little the heroes can do to remove them themselves. (And on Advanced difficulty, they need to get someone under 10HP before they can even do that, because they're indestructible on his first side!) Challenge Mode makes it even worse by increasing how many he can have out at once to five.
• The Juggernaut: Nearly unstoppable, he plows through heroes and levels Rook City before targeting Megalopolis. The Freedom Five have to go to the limit to stop him.
• One-Winged Angel: Once a hero goes below 10 HP, he smells blood in the water and flips, losing his original, humanoid shape for something much less distinct, primal rays of cosmic annihilation beaming out from within him as he goes full-force on them.
• Power Copying: His liquid metal body allows him to rapidly adapt and transform to match the myriad abilities of his superpowered foes.
• The Quiet One: Unlike other villains, none of the quotes or flavor-text on his cards are of him saying anything (it's usually the heroes reacting to him). In the online version where villains have an opening line, Progeny notably doesn't. This is particularly noteworthy as Akash'Bhuta, who also doesn't have any lines on her cards, does have an intro line in the digital game.
• Sculpted Physique: Despite its obvious inhumanity, its base form has lots of muscles.
• Super-Speed: He can keep pace with Tachyon.
• Super-Strength: In-universe, he holds off entire teams by himself.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: After he's defeated by the Freedom Five, his head rockets off into space on its own power.

Scions of OblivAeon

Scions of OblivAeon

Debut: OblivAeon

OblivAeon's ten most powerful servants, some willing, some unwilling. The heroes must battle them as part of fighting him.

The Scions are: Aeon Master, who commands OblivAeon's army of Aeon Men; Borr the Unstable, an explosive enemy whose power grows the closer he is to destruction; Dark Mind, the Visionary's evil alternate universe double who once stole her body before being banished to the Void (troped in greater detail in the Visionary's hero folder); Empyreon, an old, maimed foe of Captain Cosmic who has been restored to his full power by OblivAeon; Faultless, an ancient, primal being of perfect order enslaved and forced to obey the destroyer; Nixious the Chosen, the inheritor of an entire cult of deranged aliens that once worshipped OblivAeon before sacrificing themselves to him to empower Nixious; Progeny, with his true form finally revealed (see his individual folder for details); Rainek Kel'Voss, the brilliant and evil former Grand Warlord of Dok'Thorath, who lends his master his military genius while plotting to usurp him (see his folder under Grand Warlord Voss); Sanction, the former Celestial Adjudicator, still reeling following its defeat by the heroes, making it easy prey for OblivAeon; and Voidsoul, the hero Writhe's Superpowered Evil Side.

General

• Early-Bird Cameo: Many of them, from Empyreon to Borr, appeared on cards long, long before the OblivAeon expansion.
• Expy:
  • Empyreon and Borr, as markedly lesser alien threats, seem to deliberately reference cosmic comic book villains such as Superman rogue Mongul, perennial Justice League enemy Despero, and other, similar characters.
  • The Transforming Mecha Sanction, formerly the Adjudicator of the Celestial Tribunal environment, resembles a cross between Transformers: The Movie's many-faced monstrous judges the Quintessons and their shark-faced Sharkticon enforcers.
• Legion of Doom: With the exceptions of Aeon Master, Nixious, and Faultless, all of them are previous antagonists of the heroes, gathered together by OblivAeon and granted new powers to bring about the end of The Multiverse.
• Meaningful Name: Many of them, like the Aeon Men's master Aeon Master and Superpowered Evil Sides Dark Mind and Voidsoul.
• One-Winged Angel: Progeny's true form, somewhat jokingly called his "Super Sonic" form. It's golden-colored, and the triangle mark on its head has become a circle. Many of the other Scions also have a super-powered form they assume during battle, notably Rainek Kel'Voss, Voidsoul, Empyreon, and Dark Mind.
• Piñata Enemy: All Scions offer some nice bonuses and benefits if killed, to encourage players to actually deal with the threat they represent as OblivAeon itself rampages between battle zones raining destruction.
• Turns Red: The more Borr the Unstable and Progeny get beat on, the more damage they dish out. Attacking the Aeon Master is also not always the best choice, since it causes him to spawn more Aeon Men.
• Wolfpack Boss: Each of them would probably qualify as a Difficulty 1 or 2 villain by themselves — and you'll very likely be facing more than one at the same time, plus hordes of Aeon Men and OblivAeon himself. There's a reason OblivAeon's battle mode is listed as an SNK Boss.

Aeon Master and the Aeon Men

• Decapitated Army: While OblivAeon's power manifests as Aeon Men whenever he thinks about doing something, the Aeon Master is needed to direct and command them. Once he's defeated, all the Aeon Men fade away.
• Elite Mook: The Aeon Locus and Aeon Warrior are simply bigger, more fancifully outfitted versions of the weaker Aeon Thralls and Vassals. Aeon Master himself is actually less unique in in appearance, albeit even larger, but appearance-wise his armor isn't much different from a regular Aeon Man's with a few added Tron Lines. Mechanically, his abilities are simple but potentially devastating: play more Aeon Men, then move them into the same battle area OblivAeon -- OblivAeon destroys Aeon Men, absorbing their power back into himself, plays more cards, and more Aeon Men, rinse and repeat.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: The Aeon Men are specifically mere expressions of OblivAeon's power rather than truly independent beings. They're created seemingly instantly by his power, and he has no problem whatsoever "destroying" them in order to reshape their energy for some other purpose. Of course, then a character like Aeon Girl comes along...

Borr the Unstable

• Action Bomb: When Borr would be destroyed, he instead flips and detonates.
• Increasingly Lethal Enemy: Every individual attack adds a counter to Borr, and each counter increases the damage he deals by 1. He also gains a counter at the end of the Scion turn. When he dies, he flips and deals damage based on how many counters he accumulated on his first side. The longer it takes to kill Borr, the worse the destruction will be.
• Power Incontinence: Borr the Unstable's power grows and grows until he can no longer contain it.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Borr doesn't last long during the final battle, but his dying explosion leaves Stuntman horribly injured and massively scarred, which shapes his future in both the RPG and Tactics timelines.
• Superpower Meltdown: The new power OblivAeon gave Borr is fundamentally unstable. Beating on him long enough will eventually cause him to flip, then explode and deal huge damage and destruction to everything in his battle zone.

Dark Mind

• Bishōnen Line: Her true form, represented by absorbing enough of the heroes' cards and flipping to her Psy-Manipulator side, is both distinctly more humanoid than her normal appearance as an amorphous phantom of psychic power, and much more powerful.
• Enemy Without: To Visionary, who managed to excise Dark Mind from her own mind and banish her to the void with the Argent Adept's help... until OblivAeon came along and gave her the power to manifest in the physical world without needing a body to do it.
• Glass Cannon: Dishes out massive amounts of psychic damage every turn she's on the field, but has the lowest HP of the Scions (only 26) and no defensive abilities, so a well-prepared team can rush her down in a single round. Her incapacitated benefit is also one of the most useful among the Scions, giving the heroes even more incentive to take her out quickly.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Dark Mind often manifests psychically with multiple limbs, the better to fit her image of herself as a self-styled goddess.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Dark Mind is the Visionary's evil Alternate Self, who rode her consciousness out of another dimension and then manipulated the heroes through her as the Dark Visionary for years.

Empyreon

• Living Shadow: Empyreon's body seems to be well on its way to becoming this.
• Power Incontinence: Empyreon's unstable energies spill out whenever he's attacked.
• Reforged into a Minion: Empyreon was an interstellar conqueror in his own right before OblivAeon got his mitts on him.
• Sadistic Choice: Empyreon forces a hero to discard a card, destroy a card, or suck a lot of Energy damage.
• Took a Level in Badass: Empyreon started out as a Nemesis mini-villain in Baron Blade's Vengeance deck. He is much stronger here.

Faultless

• Heel–Face Turn: Faultless's "flip" actually represents him returning to normal, the heroes having successfully Beat the Curse Out of Him. He happily joins up as a minor Hero himself.
• Reforged into a Minion: Faultless was once an embodiment of Cosmic Order, but then OblivAeon found him and warped him into a monstrosity. Defeating him breaks the control, causing him to flip and start aiding the heroes.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Faultless only appears during the OblivAeon fight, but before he departs, he restores Mr. Fixer's soul, finally bringing him back to the good man he was before his death.

Nixeous the Chosen

• The Corrupter: Nixious's darkest power is the ability to sway the minds of heroes, and his impact on the final battle would've been immense if not for Stuntman's well-timed ambush.
• Life Drain: Nixious regenerates whenever he damages a hero target.
• Sinister Minister: Nixious the Chosen leads an evil cult.
• The Worm That Walks: Nixious the Chosen's flipped side shows a mass of writhing black worms with their gnashing fangs shredding through its ragged red cloak.

Progeny

See Progeny’s folder above.

Rainek Kel'Voss

• Dragon Ascendant: Voss's unique mechanic — as it turns out, he wasn't completely Reforged into a Minion, and if OblivAeon starts to weaken Voss will absorb his power and replace him as the Villain.
• Reforged into a Minion: Voss, not unlike OblivAeon, is a Darkseid/Thanos Expy, a planet-conquering Evil Overlord, albeit on a much smaller scale by comparison. Hence why Voss attempts to subsume his master's role at every step of the event.
• The Starscream: In the lore he plots behind OblivAeon’s back to usurp him, which is also represented in gameplay. See Dragon Ascendant above.

Sanction

• Reforged into a Minion: Prior to OblivAeon getting his paws on her, Sanction was an intergalactic robot court that judged planets and subsequently destroyed them.

Voidsoul

• The Corrupter: Voidsoul whispers lies into the ears of those who are vulnerable to them, subverting them to aid OblivAeon's dark cause. He not only preys on the heroes' deepest fears and insecurities to turn them against one another, but has subverted the head of F.I.L.T.E.R. to their side.
• Living Shadow: Befitting his role as a sneaky, shadowy corrupter, Voidsoul is made completely of shadows (or at least, he looks that way).
• Superpowered Evil Side:Voidsoul is an evil version of Writhe created through the unholy union of a shard of OblivAeon's malevolent energies and whatever forces Writhe's Casting a Shadow powers were already drawing upon.

Sergeant Steel

Sergeant Steel

Debut: Villains of the Multiverse

"Looks like we're getting some fresh blood, team! Let's make 'em feel welcome."

A high-level F.I.L.T.E.R. operative commanding a crack team of assassins and mercenaries, Sergeant Steel is their all-too-literal big gun. And when K.N.Y.F.E. goes rogue, he's sent to bring her back in.

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• An Arm and a Leg: His collector's edition card art's incapacitated side shows the not so funny aftermath of the original card's Oh, Crap! moment, with Steel laid out unconscious on a stretcher, a welter of raw burnt tissue and missing an arm.
• Arch-Enemy: He and his team were sent to drag K.N.Y.F.E. back to F.I.L.T.E.R.
• Badass Normal: He and all his team are just expert mercenaries, yet he's a difficulty 3 villain.
• Cigar Chomper: Almost never without a lit cigar between his teeth.
• Cold Sniper: The Sharpshooter, who makes Steel's damage irreducible and hits the good guys with her own damage.
• Combat Medic: The Battle Medic, who not only heals the agents already on the field, but pulls damaged ones back from the trash.
• Counter-Attack: The Mega Gunner's stock in trade.
• Expy: All of Steel's operatives are transparent adaptations of the nine classes from Team Fortress 2. He himself is an evil version of Sergeant Fury.
• Flunky Boss: All of his cards are his teammates and F.I.L.T.E.R support. His deck's main mechanic allows him to activate additional effects on their cards, which presumably represents Steel barking orders.
• Gadgeteer Genius: The Field Inventor, who increases the team's damage.
• Gatling Good: The Mega Gunner, who sprays bullets at anyone attacking the team.
• Mad Bomber: The Bomb Specialist, who pumps out fire and projectile damage and is clearly a bit unhinged. She ultimately kills them all when she builds a bomb she can't turn off, then becomes a member of For Profit as the badly-scarred Becky Blast.
• Mood Whiplash: From the regular version card to the Collector's Edition. The regular version's Incapacitated art shows Steel freaking out as the Bomb Specialist apologetically shrugs over building a bomb she can't turn off. The Collector's Edition shows Steel horrifically burned, one of his arms completely gone.
• No-Sell: Arsonator grants fire immunity, while Espionagent grants immunity to non-hero damage (a valuable asset when you're teamed up with, for example, Plague Rat, Greazer Clutch, or both - Arsonator, for example, has a bad habit of mussing Greazer's hair).
• Oh, Crap!: His original card's incapacitated side shows his jaw dropping as the Bomb Specialist grins and shrugs sheepishly as the timer on the huge bomb behind her drops to 0:00:01. He's so shocked he's actually lost his cigar, not that it matters.
• Playing with Fire: The Arsonator, who pumps out fire damage.

Spite

Spite

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

"I'm no monster. I'm just ahead of my time."

A serial killer named Jack Donovan who was offered a stay of execution if participated in an experimental drug trial. He not only survived, he was the only test subject to react positively to all the drugs, and after murdering half the prison and escaping, he's back to hunting down victims. Spite is unique in that his deck includes "Victim" cards, which he can kill to regain health. The heroes can take damage or suffer other penalties to move the Victims into the Safehouse to protect them from Spite. In addition, Spite has "drug" cards which grant him permanent buffs as he uncovers them. Once he has all of them, he flips to a One-Winged Angel version.

His variant is Spite: Agent of Gloom, a resurrected Spite whose reanimated corpse serves Gloomweaver. Unlike his normal version, this variant of Spite does not regenerate health upon damaging heroes. Instead, he starts with all of his drugs in play, activating them one by one until enough victims have escaped to the safehouse. If he fails to kill enough victims, however, Gloomweaver himself takes over.

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• Aborted Arc: The writers originally meant for the Agent of Gloom storyline to go more like it does in the card game, but because of the editorial mandate that everyone needed to clean up loose ends to be ready for OblivAeon, he got wrecked pretty quickly.
• Achilles' Heel: Spite is the only source of damage in his deck, and none of it is irreducible. If the heroes can stack damage-reducing or preventing effects on him, such as Wraith's Stun Bolts or the Adamant Idealist's TK Thump, all the damage he's pumping out suddenly becomes significantly more manageable.
  • Compound Upsilon can give the heroes a hard time by trashing their fields. On the other hand, it can also explode comically in his face by giving the heroes multiple plays of otherwise temporary Ongoings (such as Legacy's Take Down and Heroic Interception, Omnitron-X's Slip Through Time, or basically anything used by Guise).
  • Compound XI punishes the heroes heavily every time they use a power by trashing a chunk of their deck, but this can backfire comically hard against heroes like Luminary or Tachyon that love having as many cards as possible in the trash.
  • Spite's biggest counter by far, however, is Writhe's 'Umbral Siphon' card. Spite's primary advantage is that he has ridiculous amounts of healing ability on his front side, regaining health each time he deals damage or destroys a victim card, but one of the effects on the Umbral Siphon card is that a target dealt damage by it can't regain HP until the start of Writhe's next turn; combined with the fact that it hits with two instances of damage, guaranteeing that it'll get around Spite's first hit damage resistance, and Writhe can kneecap Spite so badly that it's possible to beat him before he even flips.
• Arch-Enemy: Wraith, who put him in prison when he was the thief Maniac Jack. He retaliated by murdering her two best friends.
• Back from the Dead: Parse killed him, but Gloomweaver offered him a deal to bring him back. Before that, he had a slasher-movie-villain reputation for always seemingly dying in seemingly-fatal situations at the end of his stories, but he always came back in the end.
• Barrier-Busting Blow: When he storms the Safehouse, threatening all of the Victims hiding within.
• Body Horror: Almost all of his drugs do this to different extents. Once he consumes enough drugs, he turns into a twisted, mutated monster reminiscent of Alex Mercer or William Berkin. His Agent of Gloom variant starts off as a rotting corpse, and gets even worse if he flips and Gloomweaver himself takes over. However, the most obvious drug that induces this is PL626 Compound XI, which transforms his left arm and the left side of his torso into a disgusting mass of pulsing, exposed tissue and toxic cysts. In the Definitive Edition, the post-drugs version is explicitly called "Abomination Spite".
• Boom, Headshot!: His original death. He was taunting the Wraith with a Kill Me Now, or Forever Stay Your Hand scenario... and then an arrow flew out of nowhere and slammed through his skull, courtesy of Parse.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: A supremely dark example. Spite has an incredibly powerful intellect, even a genius one, but he also has absolutely no motivation whatsoever to use it for anything other than the service of his id, which is sated with destruction, mayhem, and, eventually, murder.
• Cerebus Call-Back: Spite's origins involve this. He was originally Maniac Jack, a thief who didn't even keep the things he stole, he just tossed them away; a relatively light villain for The Silver Age. When he became Spite, he found a street thug to commit copycat crimes in Jack's style to distract the Wraith, and took advantage of her investigation to murder the Wraith's two best friends.
• Composite Character: In-Universe, Spite is the result of a Retcon that clarified that former minor Wraith villain and anarchic vandal Maniac Jack and famous serial killer the Wraith once caught, Johnathan Donovan, were actually the same person. Spite is a fusion of Maniac Jack's wild, chaotic nature and Jonathan Donovan's cold, calculating intelligence.
• Deal with the Devil: After taking an arrow through the skull from Parse, Spite makes a deal with Gloomweaver to return from the dead. It's a trick, needless to say; as soon as Gloomweaver gets the chance, he takes over Spite's body. What happens to Spite's soul after that is unclear, but that's the last anyone hears of Johnathan Donovan.
• Epic Fail: Spite's tenure as an Agent of Gloom goes very, very poorly for him. He takes what he thinks is a sucker's deal with no downsides, returning to the world to go back to killing people for Gloomweaver rather than failing to exist, only to be utterly wrecked by the heroes, who know he's coming, without killing even a single victim. Then being used as fuel for Gloomweaver's plot to return to the world, despite the very painful things they did to try destroying him.
• Evil Evolves: Once his drugs come into play, they're there to stay, and they all grant him dangerous new powers.
• Expy: Powers-wise, of Bane. The incapacitated side of one of Wraith's character cards even shows a Spite clone holding her in Bane's signature posture. In terms of characterization, he's more in-line with the Joker, as a murderous, nihilistic lunatic with a deeply-personal vendetta against The Cowl who never seems to stay dead. The tentacle-like mass of flesh, muscle, bulbous growths, and bone spikes of his mutated One-Winged Angel form owe equal debts to AKIRA, Resident Evil's tyrants, and the original one-winged angel Safer/Sepher Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII (particularly the multicolored appendage on one side and long white hair).
• The Farmer and the Viper: The Good Shepherd victim card is one of the most tragic of the victims Spite kills. He sincerely tries to help Spite get away from the monster he's becoming and to find redemption from his monstrous ways, and it seems like it might even be working... But, in the end, even though it takes him a while, Spite kills the priest and with him any hope that he'll ever be anything more than a raging maniac.
• From Bad to Worse: He went from Maniac Jack, a wild, chaotic guy who liked steal things just to throw them away or deface them, to Johnathan Donovan, a serial killer with 43 known victims, after he killed someone in a panic mid-crime and found he got a bigger rush out of doing it and getting away. Then, he got put into clinical trials from Death Row, and he turned into something much, much worse.
• Hellfire: He deals infernal-type damage when he starts using Demon's Kiss.
• Immortality Hurts: Spite's Agent of Gloom form is utterly wrecked in battle with the heroes, who, among other things, decapitate him and set him on fire to keep him from ever coming back. Unfortunately, for him, his essence is too-tightly tied to that body for this to actually let go of it, thanks to Gloomweaver's master plan to switch places with him and come into the world again.
• Joker Immunity: Like his obvious fictional inspirations, the Trope Namer and various slasher movie killers, Spite stories often end with him being put in seemingly-lethal situations that he always comes back from eventually.
• Life Drain: The permanent mutation he experienced causes him to feed on the life energy of other creatures as they die. His starting card heals whenever he inflicts damage or kills a victim, making it a challenge for the heroes to outpace his output before he flips.
• Mystical White Hair: Once he starts taking "Mind-Phyre," he gains psychic powers and his hair turns white.
• No Cure for Evil: Averted. Spite is constantly healing from nearly all of the damage he deals and Victims he kills before he overdoses. Once he does, his corrupted body stops regenerating, though with all his drugs in play he's still going to give the heroes a run for their money.
• Not So Harmless: In the metafiction, he was once Maniac Jack, a basically harmless villain who mostly committed petty theft. Then he escalated to serial murder, and then things just kept getting worse.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: His digital theme song, called "Spite's Ice Cream Delivery". Every Serial Killer's got to have it at least once.
• One-Winged Angel: Through his variants, he goes from a fairly ordinary-looking human (we don't see what he looks like under the mask) to a white-haired, musclebound mutant with a hideous tentacle in place of his left arm. Then, in his Agent of GLOOM variant, he comes back from the dead as a skull-faced, blue-skinned revenant who psychically manipulates whipping chains with the powers granted to him by Gloomweaver. Finally, Gloomweaver takes over his undead carcass for himself, restoring his mask and white hair and adding a cape and armored shoulder plate.
• Out of Focus: The Skinwalker Crisis Crossover has Gloomweaver raise Spite from the dead, then assume direct control of his corpse as part of his plan to return to the world of the living... or that's what was supposed to happen, had the OblivAeon event not cut the Skinwalker storyline short in the metafiction. With Spite dead again and Gloomweaver trapped in the oblivion shard of Doctor Medico, neither play any part in the battle with OblivAeon (on either side), the game's only non-team villains other than the Chairman not to appear. Of course, at least in the Tactics timeline, that means it's time to create a small army of drug-fueled Spite clones after the fact.
• Phlebotinum Overdose: Once all his drugs are in play, they cause a minor meltdown, manifesting as Spite flipping to his "Drug-Wracked Monstrosity" side, dealing toxic damage to himself for all the victims in play that he hasn't killed yet, losing the ability to regenerate then putting away his deck to spend the rest of the fight brawling with the heroes.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Mind-Phyre causes his previously brown/black hair to turn glowing white. It also grows several inches longer.
• Power Incontinence: "Mind-Phyre" destroys all environment cards each turn, even those that would be helpful to him.
• Psycho Serum: How Spite increases his power. Once he gets five, he flips. Unlike a lot of villain-boosting effects, his drugs can't be removed; once they come into play, you're stuck with them.
• Sadistic Choice: His victims typically force this on the heroes. Either they suffer hits to their cards, or they leave the victim in the open for Spite to kill and feed from. His Agent of Gloom variant makes it even worse, as the heroes now have to decide whether it's more important to take the painful hit now, or let Spite get more drugs in play and become even harder to take down later.
• Send in the Clones: Graham Pike is in the midst of cloning an army of genetically-modified Spites as his soldiers for most of the Multiverse. In the Mist Storm universe, this ends with most of them dying in the creation of Broken City, and in the Iron Legacy timeline, they're found and turned into servants of the Iron Rule. In the Sentinel Comics universe, well... we'll see. Out-of-universe, there were plans to release five versions of Spite (one for each of his drugs) in the Battle for Broken City expansion for Tactics, but the expansion was canceled.
• Sequential Boss: In Spite: Agent of Gloom's Challenge mode, once you defeat Spite, Skinwalker Gloomweaver breaks out of his corpse, and you fight him with the same HP, hand, and field as you had when you took out Spite.
• Serial Killer: Even before he started self-medicating with Psycho Serum, he was a prolific one. Afterward, he also needs to feed the terrible hunger his drugs induce in him. He heals damage every time he manages to kill a victim on his "Transhuman Serial Killer" side.
• Super Prototype: There have been a number of knock-off Spites, both in the Iron Legacy timeline, where clones armed with PL531 Compound Upsilon are used by the Iron Rule as foot soldiers against the Organization, and in the Sentinels Tactics game where Exemplar has five henchmen, each of whom is armed with one of Spite's drugs. However, Jack Donovan is, so far, the only person to respond to more than one of his drugs, let alone all of them. Indeed, originally, the facility in which he was being tested was prepared for subjects to positively react to some of the compounds, but not to all of them at once, which is how he escaped.
• Super-Strength: PL531 Compound Upsilon is the most obvious analogue to Venom, giving him huge bulging muscles that boost his damage and allowing him to send at least one Ongoing or Equipment card right back to a hero's hand each round.
• Tainted Veins: PL602 Compound Omicron induces these, which also act as natural armor against the first hit he takes each turn.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Death in the Sentinels universe is quite final, and no one who comes back from the dead enjoys it... with one exception. As the creators put it in the Letters Page pod cast, "Coming back from the dead is always a horrible time, but Spite was fine with it because he's into horrible times."
• Unwitting Pawn: Gloomweaver knew Spite would likely fail to live up to his end of the bargain, but it turns out to be part of his evil master plan all along.
• Vampiric Draining: His primary mutation causes him to drain the life force of other living things, something he has to do to sustain his own.
• Villain Override: If enough victims end up in the safehouse while fighting Agent of Gloom, Gloomweaver will decide that Donovan isn't living up to his end of the bargain and will take over personally.

The Vengeful Five

The Vengeful Five

Debut: Vengeance

After one too many defeats by Legacy, Baron Blade puts together a team of villains who all want revenge against the Freedom Five.

Unlike the Ennead, the Vengeful Five are five separate Villains: They have their own villain decks, similar to how the heroes each have their own decks.

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• Evil Counterpart: The Vengeful Five play differently than most of the other villains, as they each have their own decks, cannot be played as individual villains, and they take turns alternating between villain and hero. In short they act like the hero team. Each one of the [V5 also mirrors a Freedom Five member:
  • Baron Blade is the leader of the team, like his nemesis Legacy
  • Ermine is a (former) member of high society like Wraith.
  • Friction has super speed and is a scientist like Tachyon.
  • Fright Train used to be in the military and is a heavy hitter like Bunker.
  • Proletariat is a super powered person intended to serve as a military superhero, like Absolute Zero.
• Revenge: Well, natch. Each one has a personal vendetta against one member of the Freedom Five...except for Proletariat, who's "vendetta" against Absolute Zero is primarly made up by Blade to fit the theme.

Vengeance Baron Blade

Debut: Vengeance

See Baron Blade's main folder.

Ermine

Debut: Vengeance

"Gosh, I sure hope this isn't something important. That'd be awful!"

A member of Rook City's high society, Cassandra Lee was secretly a thief until she was caught by The Wraith. Ermine was unable to be arrested though, but her identity was revealed and her reputation was ruined. Now she seeks vengeance against The Wraith.

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• Achilles' Heel: Ermine likes to send cards to the trash, either from the deck or the hand. Heroes that like having cards in their trash (like Tachyon or Luminary) can turn this against her.
• Arch-Enemy: The Wraith; she's essentially the Catwoman to her Batman without the flirtatious elements.
• Badass Normal: She might be the only member of the Vengeful Five with no superpowers or fancy gadgets, but she's just as dangerous as the others.
• Classy Cat-Burglar: Naturally, given who she's obviously channeling.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Her first appearance was actually as a child on the Rook City card "Blighted Streets," where her parents were being robbed at gunpoint. Unlike the subject of the obvious inspiration for the scene, however, a young Cassandra took away from the experience the lesson that anyone can take anything from anyone by force or guile, and she may as well be the one doing the taking.
• Expy: Of Catwoman, as a foe of Batman Expy the Wraith, although her fur cuffs, white hair, and waggish personality have more in common with Black Cat.
• Goggles Do Nothing: Nothing but keep her cat burglar theme together.
• Irony: She and Maia each despised one another's cover identities as frivolous, decadent fops, each unaware of the others' secret activities.
• Meaningful Name: Ermine is a kind of white fur used to line the robes of royalty. It's also the white winter morph of the stoat — in other words, a few steps removed from a weasel.
• Motor Mouth: Actually has its own card, Constant Prattle, which starts every game in play. She's so annoying and distracting that it actually forces everyone to discard the top card of their deck. Combine this with Sleight of Hand, which forces the heroes to move a card from hand to the top of their deck and it's a roundabout way of putting cards into the trash.
• No-Sell: Uncatchable blows itself up the first time Ermine would take damage, preventing the damage in the process. Combined with Subtle Diversion (which bounces the first damage Ermine takes on any given turn to a hero target), it means you have to hit her three times in one turn in order to actually injure her. Naturally, her Challenge mode starts with one copy of each in play.
• Oh, Crap!: Becomes less zany and a lot more nervous when facing Freedom Six Wraith.
• Spy Catsuit: Has a number of unusual divergences, including a high collar, no sleeves, and fluffy ruffles around the gloves. Still has the cleavage though.
• Wicked Weasel: An ermine is a stoat, and closely related to an actual weasel. Ermine the character is an unscrupulous liar and career thief.

Friction

Debut: Vengeance

"Hah! Not fast enough! Sucker!"

A former researcher for Tachyon, Krystal Lee was fired for unsafe scientific practices and general rudeness. Angered at the speedster, she stole experimental gear, giving her the same super speed as Tachyon, and convinced Baron Blade to allow her the chance for vengeance.

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• Arch-Enemy: Tachyon, her former employer.
• Body Horror: Her incapacitated art shows that her dangerous speedsuit wasn't a toy. Her whole figure is stretching and contorting horrifically.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Downplayed. How brilliant she actually was is up for debate, but she was smart enough to get hired by Tachyon, but her Fatal Flaw is sloth: it was her slipshod work that got her fired — and her refusal to read the instructions for her stolen gear that ultimately gets her killed.
• Elite Mooks: Has the Nemesis cards Highbrow, Revenant, and Argentium in her deck.
• Evil Counterpart: To Tachyon. Both play very similarly, focusing on getting as many Bursts/Surges into the trash to unleash one big attack, as well as having a few cards similar to each other (Synaptic Interruption/Speedy Sidestep)
  • Personality and backstory-wise, she's one to Unity. Both were interns but Dr. Stinson fired Friction for being lazy and uncreative while she become and mentor and mother-figure to Unity. One of her cards shows Friction being incredibly angry and jealous of Unity.
• Expy: Of The Flash's nemesis Professor Zoom.
• Fatal Flaw: Ironically for a speedster, sloth. She got fired in the first place for being too lazy to do good work or maintain a clean workplace, and many of her cards stress that she's ignoring basic safety precautions and manuals because she can't be bothered to read them.
• Foil: While Krystal Lee and Meredith Stinson were both brilliant intellects who preferred to find the most efficient, quickest route to scientific problems, Stinson was a true scientist, focused on proper procedures and repeatable results, while Lee was willing to fudge results and take other shortcuts to get the solutions she wanted, as well as to ignore basic safety procedures. This even feeds into their decks: while Friction and Tachyon are both speedster character who "charge up" as they mill specific cards into their trash, Friction's physically hurt her when she uses them.
• Fragile Speedster: She can hit hard if she gets going and play lots of cards at once, but her hitpoints and defenses aren't great and her own cards do damage to her if he loses her Shock Dampeners.
• Identical Stranger: Capitalized upon as a villain, with her inverted version of Tachyon's base costume, stolen gear, and hair pulled back in Tachyon's ponytail hairstyle. She has black hair instead of blonde, but she does have an almost identical build, as seen in the mirrored card art for the two of them.
• Jerkass Has a Point: One of her quotes has her attacking Unity and ranting that she only got the intern job because she had powers. On the one hand, Krystal Lee lost her job 100% honestly, and she's clearly just projecting. On the other hand, Unity did start out being unmotivated and pulling bad grades, and Tachyon did headhunt her because of her powers.
• No Body Left Behind: In the end, there's not much left of her but smoking shoes.
• Revenge Before Reason: Friction is the only member of the Five that wasn't invited at all. And the suit she wears could easily shatter every bone in her body. But her desire for petty revenge is just as bright as the others', and Blade could see that.
• Shock and Awe: Friction's speedsuit generates a good amount of electrical currents. In game, most of her cards deal herself lightning damage from moving so fast. Fortunately for her, she has the Shock Dampeners to make her immune to Lightning damage. Unfortunately for her, the Heroes can destroy it. Her Challenge Mode makes them indestructible.
• Super-Speed: Unlike her Nemesis, Friction's super speed is from a speed suit, explaining why practically every one of her cards deals herself lightning damage: Unlike Tachyon, Friction is going faster than her body can take.
• Unknown Rival: A twofor, one downplayed and one played straight. The first one is her hatred of Tachyon wh, while aware of her enmity towards her, actively dismisses the idea of being her nemesis. The other is Unity, who she hates for taking her job as Tachyon's intern and who doesn't even know who she is.

Fright Train

Debut: Vengeance

"All aboard! The Fright Train's a comin'!"

A former marine who served with Lt. Vance, Graves was honorably discharged due to injuries while serving, while Vance received the Bunker Suit. Unable to find legitimate work, Graves ended up providing security for unsavory people, and was chemically enhanced due to contract. Now larger and stronger than before, he swears vengeance against Bunker.

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• Arch-Enemy: Bunker, his one-time rival.
• The Brute: Thanks to RevoCorp's experiments, he is a walking mountain of muscles and just as subtle as his name implies. Baron Blade hires him as his bodyguard during the Vengeful Five arc and he serves as their Brute.
• Chained to a Railway: Bunker, Engine of War's Collector's Edition incapacitated art shows him tied up in railway ties, presumably by Iron Legacy, and left in the path of a nearby train. The look on his face shows he is very much aware of the irony.
• Expy: Like Marvel's Juggernaut, Fright Train is a villainous human wrecking ball fueled by resentment towards a fellow veteran (Professor X and Bunker, respectively). His incapacitated art even pays homage to the cover of Uncanny X-Men #322, featuring a battered, unconscious Juggernaut.
• Go Through Me: His Challenge mode redirects all hero damage straight to him, making him a potent meat shield and making it much harder to stop his allies from setting up.
• Heel–Face Turn: In the Alternate Timeline, Fright Train joins up as the Bunker, Engine of War to put a stop to Iron Legacy.
• Heroic BSoD: The incapacitated art for Bunker, Engine of War, sees him drinking heavily as he sees Fright Train staring back at him out of the mirror.
• Psycho Serum: Didn't read the fine print in his contract carefully enough, and ended up turned into a gigantic unstoppable brute of a man.
• Pungeon Master: Loves his train puns. This even carries over into the playable version of him in the digital game.
• The Rival: In training, Vance and Graves were fierce and unfriendly rivals, though Graves reluctantly followed his officer's lead in the field. The two came to a kind of peace with one another... before the chemical enhancements wrecked his mind and body.
• Scary Black Man: So big the Bunker suit had to be hollowed out to accommodate his alternate universe double.

Proletariat

Debut: Vengeance

"When you fight the people, you fight all the people."

In the years before the Cold War, Russian Soldier Aleksandr Tsarev was experimented on using a lump of cosmic rock. Soon he discovered the rock could split himself into two if hit with a strong enough impact. After learning how to control said power, he was put into cryo-suspension in case he was needed during the Cold War. When the Cold War never happened, the higher ups forgot about him, and he was kept in suspension until Baron Blade found him. Now, he's out for vengeance for Mother Russia, against rival government lapdog Absolute Zero.

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• Achilles' Heel: His powerful defensive strategies are helpless before psychic damage. Heroes who can deal heavy psychic damage, like both the Sentinels and Void Guard incarnations of the Idealist, or who can control their damage typing like Tempest and Mr. Fixer, can easily set about Cutting the Knot. Special mention to the Visionary, who not only has a lot of psychic-damage One-Shots but can use Twist the Ether to let anyone control their damage typing. He also has profound damage-type limitations, meaning that Legacy can tank him for weeks with melee immunity from Next Evolution.
• Anti-Villain: While he remains an enemy of the Freedom Five even in the Tactics timeline, Aleksandr is ultimately loyal primarily to his own conscience, and turns on his allies if he believes them to be in the wrong. In other points in other games, he has good intentions but is tragically used as a self-deluded pawn by figures with evil intentions.
• Arch-Enemy: Absolute Zero. Played With in that the highly isolated Absolute Zero didn't actually have anyone with a personal grudge for Baron Blade to exploit, so he manufactured one by feeding the reawakened Soviet soldier a steady stream of propaganda.
• Attack Reflector: Proletariat reflects any damage that isn't Psychic to the Clone with the least HP.
• The Backwards Я: Appears in his logo, as part of his Soviet Captain Patriotic gimmick.
• Captain Patriotic: A Soviet version. Proletariat is a World War II veteran given fantastical powers through a government experiment and who loyally serves the system and government of his birth, dressed in the red-and-yellow of the Soviet flag and armed with a hammer deliberately shaped like the hammer part of the hammer and sickle. His self-duplication powers even mimic socialist ideals about the common people working together as a group,
• Expy: Of the Winter Soldier, but with Multiple Man's powers. There's also a bit of Captain America in there, with a bit of a Mythology Gag around all the Soviet knock-offs that character's had over the years.
• Fatal Flaw: His tendency to be a follower, not a leader, and to obey orders rather than think for himself. Time and again, Proletariat has teetered on the brink of a Heel–Face Turn, only to be suckered in by a charismatic villain able to convince him that their evil plans are actually a cause worth fighting for, and he's gone along with them rather than find himself Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life. First it was Baron Blade, then it was Mecha-Stalin.
• Human Popsicle: Has been kept in cryogenic suspension since the Cold War.
• Human Shield: Defensive Formation, which reduces damage the least healthy Proletariat takes by the number of Proletariats in play.
  • A more traditional version is the Proletariat's Character card: If there are any clones running around, the least healthy one takes any damage he would take, unless it is Psychic damage.
• Me's a Crowd: His power. He can duplicate himself, but the more of him there are, the more psychic damage the original deals himself each turn.
• Mirror Self: One of the alternate dimensions tapped into by Nightmist's gates during the Oblivaeon crisis can allow the heroes to enlist the aid of The Everyman, a stars-and-stripes-themed American version of Proletariat (who is actually that world's version of Legacy).
• No-Sell: His Challenge mode makes him immune to Psychic damage, taking away his biggest weakness and the usual drawback on his powers.
• Unknown Rival: He hates Absolute Zero, viewing him as a government lapdog. AZ, meanwhile, has no idea who he is and most of their interactions consist of him trying to figure out why this Russian dude in red spandex hates him so much.
• Wild Card: He sometimes works with the heroes and sometimes with the villains in Tactics, battling what he believes to be oppressors of the common man.
• Zerg Rush: His general strategy is to swarm the field with as many clones of himself as he can. However, each Clone causes the real Proletariat to hurt himself, so while one Clone is manageable several Clones are hazardous to both the heroes and himself.

Wager Master

Wager Master

Debut: Wager Master mini-expansion

"I get my way. I mean, I don't always get my way. But I always have fun!"

At the beginning of everything there was nothing but the wager, which was that nothing would happen. However, something did happen, and one of those somethings was the creation of Wager Master. He plays with the heroes, changing the rules as he sees fit because he can.

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• Arch-Enemy: Guise, although like most things Guise-related, it's played for laughs - he and Guise were roommates, and their confrontation involved a This Is My Side division of the apartment.
• Attention Whore: He's worse than Guise, which is honestly impressive in a terrible kind of way; that's like having Baron Blade call you out for being too obsessed with revenge. His appearances during the OblivAeon event were, per Word of God, motivated by irritation that people were paying attention to the world-ending threat and not him.
• Berserk Button: If most of his cards are put face-down, he flips into his "Increased Stakes" mode-in effect, he has a tantrum about the fact that the heroes are successfully overcoming his arbitrary contests and refusing to play ball with him, going full Killer Game Master and attacking the heroes directly while he resets the board.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Yeah he's basically one of the Looney Tunes. He can also do pretty much anything he wants with a simple thought.
  • Perhaps most pointedly in his second in-lore appearence, where the Freedom Five just refused to play his games...at which point he turns into a Kaiju and begins levelling the city, effortlessly defeating the heroes and only stopping when they agree to play his games again.
• Cutting the Knot: As long as Who Are You Fighting isn't out, it may sometimes be easier just to beat him up than to deal with his shit.
• Deal with the Devil: Two of his cards see him trying to make these: one with Expatriette, to give her the superpowers her mother always wanted her to have, and one with Absolute Zero, to let him be normal and exist outside of his specialized cryo suit and chamber.
• Evil Is Petty: When he was rooming with his future Arch-Enemy Guise, he proved to be a major slob of a roommate, not bothering to do the dishes at all for example. This is despite him being a Reality Warper that can just clean the dishes (and by extension, the rest of the house) with just a thought. It got to the point where he left a glass on the table without a coaster... when there was literally half a dozen things floating besides him (including several pizza slices and the TV remote). No wonder Guise eventually hit the Rage Breaking Point.
• Exact Words:
  • Abides by these, even when they screw him. For example, the Scholar once offered him a deal boiling down to "take the Philosopher's Stone and never come back to Earth". WM keeps to this deal for the rest of the Scholar's life even though the Scholar summoned the Stone back two minutes later; after all, no part of the deal specified that Wager Master would get to keep it. He also accepts this for his bullshit quests: for example, at one point while Guise and the Scholar are dealing with him on Dok'Thorath, Guise pulls a bunch of crap out of his pockets that technically meets the requirements, and Wager Master sourly hands him a trophy and goes away.
  • Appropriately enough, he can be screwed over by these in-game. Who Are You Fighting? triggers specifically if his HP reaches 0. Cards like Tachyon's Sucker Punch and Ra's Wrathful Gaze specifically "destroy" cards. Destroying a card is not reducing its HP to 0, so using these on Wager Master will win the game without triggering Who Are You Fighting?.
• Expy: of Mr. Mxyzptlk, though more overtly malevolent.
• The Fettered: Weirdly enough. His rules may be entirely arbitrary, but once he sets them, he abides by em.
• Little Green Man: Little Blue Man, but close enough.
• Instant-Win Condition: As expected of a Reality Warper who changes the rules of the game, his deck has several of both these and Non-Standard Game Overs.
  • Losing to the Odds lets the heroes win if every hero has an even amount of HP (that is not their max HP) at the end of the villain turn. This can cause the heroes to win before they take a turn.
  • Not All He Seems lets the heroes win if Wager Master's deck is empty.
• Jerkass: He's not the most evil villain in the setting, nor the most dangerous, but he's almost certainly the biggest prick in the game, with basically every story being "he shows and is a petty asshole". Reflected in gameplay- he's not the hardest villain to fight, only difficulty 2, but he's certainly one of the most infuriating villians to fight with his constantly changing rules and win/loss conditions.
• Luck-Based Mission: More than any other villain. There is a non-trivial chance of the game ending in victory or defeat for the heroes before the villain's opening turn is over.
• Magikarp Power: Getting his OblivAeon reward, Meager Winnings, is easy, but it provides genuinely pathetic benefits: one health per turn. Triggering its secondary effect is almost impossible without Shenanigans, since it requires having a full-health team in an apocalyptic damage-fest. When its second effect does proc, however, it can flip any other challenge, potentially saving a ton of risk, cards and/or time.
• Non-Standard Game Over: As expected of a Reality Warper who changes the rules of the game, his deck has several of both these and Instant-Win Conditions.
  • An Unwise Wager makes the heroes lose if there is ever a empty hero deck at any time.
  • Playing Dice with the Cosmos makes the heroes lose if even one hero is incapacitated at the end of Wager Master's turn.
  • Any hero incapacitated by the effect of The New Deal results in the heroes losing.
  • The Wagelings cause the Heroes to lose if there are more villain targets than hero targets
  • Who Are You Fighting? makes the heroes lose if Wager Master runs out of HP.
• Not So Harmless: One of his cards sees him going on a murderous rampage because the heroes beat him. His victory screen in the digital version sees him gleefully riding a huge nuclear bomb down to the ground, with a big cheerful smile on his face and a jaunty wave of his hat. In Obliveon, one of the worlds you can enter is one where Omnitron won one of his games and won complete control of the world.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The creators describe him as essentially a selfish, irritable child with nigh-unlimited power.
• Puzzle Boss: What his fight amounts to, essentially. He can be defeated by depleting his HP provided Who Are You Fighting? isn't out, but his deck contains so many methods of blocking or redirecting damage that victory often becomes a matter of striving for one of Wager Master's Instant Win Conditions, even as he continues to layer more arbitrary conditions and Interface Screws onto the pile.
• Reality Warper: He can bend reality with his control over cosmic improbability.
• Sanity Has Advantages: One of two singular entities in the card game, the reason he's a mid-tier villain deck that's more irritating than threatening and OblivAeon is an apocalyptic god of destruction is that OblivAeon is ruthlessly focused on his goals, and Wager Master is a childish dilettante whose long-term planning is mostly limited to planning elaborate hose jobs on individual superheroes, which never work anyway. He has been defeated by puns, poker, and random stuff out of Guise's pockets.
• Sore Loser: As shown by both his Increased Stakes flipside (going into a rampage when he realizes the heroes are beating him) and in the web version victory screen (where he sulkily pouts over his loss). His Mission Card from the Oblivaeon set also has him rewarding the heroes who manage to overcome his final round of games with a nigh-useless card called "Meager Winnings."
• Turns Red: Represented by his Increased Stakes flipside that appears if enough of his Conditions are overturned, directly damaging the heroes and flipping cards back over as he tries to get his game back on track. The digital version has him literally turn red in this state, complete with High-Pressure Emotion.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Playing Dice with the Cosmos and The New Deal each result in hero losses should there be even one incapacitated hero.

Nemeses

Nemeses

Nemeses

In General

Debut: Vengeance, Villains of the Multiverse

Throughout their years of super heroics, the Sentinels of the Multiverse have racked up several enemies who want revenge against the heroes. Not only do they have nemesis symbols to do more damage to their nemesis of choice, but they gain bonus effects if their nemesis is active in the battle. They serve as minions in many Vengeance-style villain-teamup decks.

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• Animal-Themed Superbeing: The Hippo. Who is in a Hippo costume. He's a former steroid-abusing baseball player who internalized that hippoes are vicious animals as a youth.
• Atomic Superpower: The Radioactivist, who deals Energy damage.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Equity isn't truly evil-aligned, since he only takes contracts on people who've in some way wronged others, but he often kills people who don't in the least deserve it either.
• Canon Immigrant: Professor Pollution was originally just a cheesy Card-Carrying Villain in the Sentinel Comics Green Aesop PS As made by an external company. She proved popular enough with fans that SC brought her into the main comics line as the tortured nemesis of the Naturalist.
• CCG Importance Dissonance: Thanks to the extensive lore and metafiction of the Sentinel Comics line, in-universe importance and in-game representation are often heavily mismatched.
• The Chessmaster: In the card game, Ammit isn't terribly powerful, but she is clever, patient, and understands how to prey on the weaknesses of her enemies. In the RPG timeline, this eventually allows her to become a big-league villain when she usurps Anubis's role as guardian of the Underworld.
• Creepy Child: Tantrum is a little girl with super-strength. However, if her Nemesis Sky-Scraper isn't around, she only destroys the environment, which can actually be helpful to the heroes.
• Deal with the Devil: Ammit offers these to those who don't fully appreciate their power, such as Bugbear.
• Dragon Ascendant:
  • In the RPG timeline, Ammit, having consumed the soul of Ra and with Anubis out of the way for the first time ever, takes his place as the guardian of the Underworld... but much more malevolently than he did, letting through those she chooses and using them for her own ends.
  • Meanwhile, in the Tactics timeline, Vyktor the Throrathian, his body ruined by cosmic energy during the OblivAeon event has taken over Revocorp, using a brainwashed man as a public face.
• Early-Bird Cameo: For heroes. Empyreon, Tantrum, and Argentum are Nemeses for heroes Captain Cosmic, Skyscraper, and Guise respectively, who had yet to be released. Choke also appeared as a Fright Train minion before becoming the stand-alone villain Chokepoint.
• Elite Mook: Mechanically, all of the Nemeses are. A good number of them have more than average HP for minions, and all of them have special abilities that trigger depending on if their Hero is active.
• Energy Weapon: Empyreon, and one of the Crackjaw Crew both fire them around.
• Evil Genius: Highbrow, a sadistic psychic with an enlarged cranium.
• Face–Heel Turn: Heartbreaker was once the honest and good cop Tony Taurus. Now, he's a murderer-for-hire who, by the time of the Tactics game, has become a member of a supervillain organization.
• Garage Band: The Crackjaw Crew are a teenage band given superpowers by Wager Master since, being irresponsible teenagers, they use them to sow chaos.
• The Gunslinger: Doc Tusser, Chrono-Ranger's quasi-human nemesis.
• Healing Factor: Man-grove and Doc Tusser can both regenerate from injuries.
• Heel–Face Turn: In the Tactics timeline, Man-grove eventually befriends the young Vanessa Long, who soothes his rage and gives him her stuffed ape as a keepsake, causing him to become a heroic character. In the RPG, he's instead become an angry avenger of plants on mankind.
• Madden Into Misanthropy: The unrelenting horrible way people can treat one another is what broke Tony Taurus into Heartbreaker.
• Master of Illusion: Glamour.
• Mook Promotion: Empyreon is just a Nemesis here, but by the time of OblivAeon's arrival gets to be one of OblivAeon's Scions.
• My Brain Is Big: Highbrow.
• Professional Killer: Equity is a master hitman, who's taken contracts on both the Wraith and the Naturalist in the past.
• Rogues Gallery: They form a set of minor enemies for every hero in the gameline.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: Implied with Equity, who has The Naturalist's nemesis symbol, but he appears on the art of Rook City Wraith's incapacitated side and his flavor text implies that she's familiar with him.
• Sadist: Vyktor, formerly First Lieutenant Vyktor of Voss's invasion force, was always just a little too fixated on hurting others for his own amusement. Without Voss to hold him back, he's gotten much, much worse.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Since Ammit can only consume the hearts of the wicked, and Ra's soul is heroic and pure, he demands he do terrible things that will kill people before she restores the sun god's power. Ra finds ways to fulfill these tasks without hurting anyone, but in so doing, he plays into the creature's hands, since trying to cheat on a deal is a tremendous sin in and of itself, staining his soul and making it forfeit to her if he dies.
• Shock and Awe: Major Flay, one of Project Cocoon's success stories, who can project lighting whips from his hands.
• Sinister Minister: The Idolater.
• Stalker with a Crush: The Radioactivist, who was previously a creepy obsessive fanboy of the Freedom Five, then began stalking Unity and sending her huge volumes of inappropriately-familiar letters once she joined them as an intern. His hideously-mutated state is the result of getting a little too close to a superhero battle while stalking her and getting exposed to a lot of nuclear waste, for which he blames her.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Professor Pollution isn't a terribly major villain, but it's her poisoning of Akash'Bhuta's essence that helps create Akash'Thriya.
• Villain Team-Up: Lacking decks of their own (other than Choke/Chokepoint), they're limited to relatively low-HP targets who show up in the various team villains' decks.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Ammit offers to restore Ra's powers, but only if she can consume Blake Washington's soul when he perishes. She ultimately succeeds.

Revenant

Revenant

Debut: Vengeance (Nemesis card - Friction)

"Did you forget? You should know by now, I always return for more."

RevoCorp CEO Marc Benedetto's power-armored supervillain secret identity.

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• Arch-Enemy: Nemesis of Setback, but through RevoCorp, The Man Behind the Man behind any number of plots and backstories.
• CCG Importance Dissonance: Ironically, this is present even though the comics the game is supposedly adapting don't actually exist. Marc Benedetto, as the villainous CEO of RevoCorp, is Setback's nemesis and behind several of the nasty events in the backstory: retrieving parts from Omnitron to try to reverse-engineer; firing Parse before trying to hunt her down; cooperating with Baron Blade to reverse-engineer Legacy's powers into Super Serum; going after Setback, the sole successful test subject of said serum, with a mutant monster (Plague Rat with a Shock Collar, his Vengeance/Villains form); and programming Benchmark to turn on the other heroes amidst a universal crisis for his own ends. Yet he remains a one-card nemesis someone else's Villains deck, with no more apparent importance than any other minor villain, showing up in the background of a few random cards. ^note  He was originally going to get his own deck as Setback's nemesis, but when Kismet won a "create-a-character" contest, they realized that she was too perfect and gave her Setback's nemesis deck, relegating Revenant to the aforementioned Vengeance card.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: CEO of Evil, Inc. company RevoCorp and a supervillain in his own right.
• Entitled Bastard: Revenant is actually a really, really good CEO, and RevoCorp prospers under his leadership. But his past misfortunes have left him convinced that the world owes him for them, so he has the company build him a suit for robbing banks.
• Evil Is Petty: Justified with Revenant. He isn't a major villain because he has no major ambitions until Benchmark. He just uses his suit to rob banks, and it makes him plenty of money with minimal risk where other villains run into trouble. Notably, his first truly ambitious project, trying to use Benchmark to take revenge on Setback and Parse, leads to his unmasking and fall from grace.
• Expy: Of the Norman Osborn, just like Setback is based on Spider-Man. Like Osborn, Benedetto is a Corrupt Corporate Executive with an identity based on a mythological monster who uses this tech for short-sighted villainy. He even shares Osborn's mocking personality.
• History Repeats: Marc Benedetto used to be a very successful CEO of a computer company, before a nasty, profanity-laden rant that accidentally ended up being aired live torpedoed his career. He worked his way up to the head of RevoCorp from an entry-level position with his personal skills, but then another PR disaster sunk him for good: being unmasked as the supervillain Revenant on-camera.
• Line-of-Sight Name: Revenant is the villainous CEO of RevoCorp.
• Powered Armor: Wears a suit of pale green power armor in his supervillain Secret Identity of Revenant.
• Secret Identity: Maintains his true identity as Marc Benedetto for years before his attempt to use Benchmark to take out Parse and Setback backfires and sees him exposed in front of the whole world.

Zhu Long

Zhu Long

Debut: Vengeance (Nemesis card - Baron Blade), Villains of the Multiverse (The Temple of Zhu Long environment deck)

"Life? Death? Why do you worry about such things?"

The mysterious master of the Temple of Zhu Long.

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• Arch-Enemy: Of Mr. Fixer.
• Back from the Dead: Zhu Long's schtick, both in his environment deck and in Team Baron Blade's.
  • His Nemesis card plays Nemeses from Baron Blade's trash and, if Mr. Fixer is active, heals to full health at the end of every one of Baron Blade's turns.
  • The Temple of Zhu Long's Rites of Revival is one of the few ways of flipping an incapacitated hero; doing so, however, prevents them from dealing any damage to any environment target for the rest of the game.
  • Ressurection Ritual, meanwhile, accrues non-hero targets (environment and villain), and if Zhu Long is in his True Form, brings one of them back into play at the end of the environment turn.
• Came Back Wrong: Much like the Lazarus Pits from Batman, Zhu Long's rituals restore the body, better than new, but not the minds nor souls of those it brings Back from the Dead, hence Mr. Fixer coming back as a rage-fueled shell of his former self in his Night Watch variant.
• CCG Importance Dissonance: Much like Revenant, Mr. Fixer's immortal nemesis Zhu Long is limited to a single Nemesis card (in Baron Blade's Team deck), but he at least eventually received an Environment deck all to himself in the form of the Temple that bears his name. The creators would later clarify, in a Q&A as part of the Rook City Renegades Kickstarter, that Zhu Long doesn't have his own deck because he much prefers to act as a Greater-Scope Villain rather than get his hands dirty in direct combat; he only gets into the fray at the Temple because that represents the heroes interfering on his home turf.
• Expy: Ra's al Ghul (particularly the version from Batman Begins, though with actual Lazarus Pits) crossed with an evil version of Shou-Lao the Undying.
• Evil Mentor: Takes on the Operative as a pupil/indentured servant, to serve as another of his agents until her debt is repaid.
• Evil Old Folks: Zhu Long, an immortal and thoroughly-evil dragon and sorcerer who has mastered the secrets of eternal life.
• Evil Sorcerer: An ancient evil sorcerer in the vein of Yellow Peril villains such as Fu Manchu or Lo Pan.
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: Invoked. In the series' fictional history of comics, Zhu Long was originally a racist Yellow Peril villain written by authors who didn't know or care about the difference between Eastern cultures, hence having a Chinese name, being based out of the Himalayas, and having ninja minions armed with Stock Ninja Weaponry. Later in-universe writers attempted to rehabilitate the character by establishing a convoluted backstory that explained all of it in a way that made sense.
• Light Is Not Good: A golden dragon who can resurrect the dead and whose Breath Weapon deals radiant damage, he's a sinister figure whose pupils deal in poison and death, and those he brings back lose their souls in the process.
• Ninja School: The Temple of Zhu Long churns out ninja assassins. Zhu Long is one of the Operative's three masters.
• One-Winged Angel: In his environment deck, Zhu Long can assume his True Form: a gigantic red and gold "Master Dragon".
• Our Dragons Are Different: An Eastern dragon with red and gold scales.
• Scaled Up: Zhu Long turns into a dragon to fight. In his environment deck version, this is accomplished by having his character card bring out a True Form card with his draconic abilities.
• Shrouded in Myth: We know next to nothing about Zhu Long's origin or goals, though that may change post-Obliv Aeon.
• Time Abyss: Zhu Long is ancient, older than even Gloomweaver and possibly every immortal terrestrial character.
• Yellow Peril: Zhu Long references these sorts of villains directly.