YMMV / Sentinels of the Multiverse

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did the heroes of her universe really just choose to save five total strangers without trying to save Aminia? Or is that just an oversimplification of a more complex situation that she's ignoring to have someone to blame? After all, she is mentally disturbed.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Wager Master with his instant-win/lose conditions. The heroes can get powers, build themselves up, get all the combos they need and then Wager Master draws a card and the game instantly ends. It's even entirely possible for the game to end before the players can play any cards at all.
  • Also, in universe. Yet another confrontation between Wraith and Spite. Wraith finally has the chance to kill Spite. And then Parse just drops into the scene, kills Spite in one shot, and leaves. Granted, Wraith couldn't bring herself to kill him, but still.
• Awesome Ego: In Christopher's portrayals of Argent Adept in roleplaying streams and the podcast, Anthony comes off as somewhat pompous, over-the-top, and self-aggrandizing ("powerful but a bit haughty" as Christopher put it), but he also cares fully about being a hero and has plenty of power to back up his claims, so people still generally like him both in- and out of universe.
  • Greaser. Blue alien bounty hunter who is one giant love letter to the fifties and has an ego the size of a whale? That's pretty awesome.
  • Ambuscade, particularly in his Stuntman incarnation. Sure, he's a spotlight-hogging jerk who gets bonuses for grabbing attention on other people's turns, but you'll appreciate him when he stops the villain turn dead with an out-of-turn In Medias Res in order to do his big show-off entrance.
• Awesome Music:
  • The digital version has a soundtrack with a theme for every single villain and environment, over 60 of them all tailored specifically to that villain or environment's personality/flavor with each having their own unique leitmotif and genre (though heavily related villains and environments sometimes share similar leitmotifs). These individual genres range wildly from things like pastiches of 80s action movie themes to creepy electronic music to sinister cathedral music with pipes and Ominous Latin Chanting to timey-wimey Spanish dance music to pastiches of old 60s and 70s cartoon themes to heavy metal music. All done by one programmer whose previous digital music experience was in chiptunes (though he did have traditional music experience and training).
  • On top of that, when the Team Villain mode was created, this presented a unique challenge where instead of only one villain theme song on the victory screen, they now had to come up with something for five villains. Their decision? Create 15 different themes that could be mixed together on the fly via all having the same underlying cadence/riff based on Baron Blade's theme. While having them all still sound different. And they succeeded. So, we start with this mad sciencey tune.
    • And move on to Russian folk music.
    • And to a more dark Frankenstein's monster mad scientist tune.
    • And a tribal jungle sound with wooden blocks and drums.
    • Or a chaotic hard rock anthem.
    • Or even a spacey rockabilly tune. Again, but still all the same underlying leitmotif!
    • See a demo of this here.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • Iron Legacy is brutal, does hideous damage and can be straight up overwhelming. But the theme of the character and the challenge makes him one of the more popular fights and it's incredibly satisfying when you manage to bring him down. And even if you can't beat him, at least the game's over quickly.
  • Ambuscade is another favorite. Because his damaging cards are all targets with relatively low HP (and thus fairly manageable) and he has no Ongoing or Equipment destruction in his deck, he's the go-to villain for players who want to test out characters who might take a long time to set up and are disrupted by Equipment or Ongoing wipes, like Absolute Zero or Argent Adept. Because he's so straightforward, he's also ideal for introducing newcomers to the game. This is probably why his difficulty was reduced to 1 during the major difficulty adjustments for the Ultimate Collector's Box insert.
• Badass Decay: The Chairman, now Exemplar, in the Vertex universe. There he isn't as much of a threat as he used to be. His Organization is significantly smaller and his rather shaky mental state means he's not as clever as he used to be. As a result he is actually losing to Renegade (formerly Chrono Ranger) which is something that would have never happened in the Card Game timeline, where it took a team of five to even make a dent in the Organization and even then it wasn't a particularly big dent.
• Best Level Ever: Time Cataclysm is a fan favorite thanks to Fixed Point. Making every card except itself indestructible opens up all kinds of shenanigans, ranging from putting out normally impossible combinations (mixing multiples of Mr. Fixer's tools or styles or multiple platings for Omnitron-X) to absurd amounts of damage (with Twist the Ether or Imbued Fire, Absolute Zero can put himself in an infinite-damage loop) to getting an extra free round out of Ongoings that either destroy themselves at the start of a turn or have a maintenance cost.
• Broken Base: While the fanbase is pretty tame by most standards, there is a minor debate about whether or not Setback's Dark Watch variant is useless.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Certain teams and heroes see a lot of use because their combinations make the game much easier.
  • As one guide put it, everyone loves Legacy on the team. He can boost all of his team's damage by 2, give everyone a free draw, tank huge amounts of damage, keep the villain from playing any cards, and even make the rest of his team invincible for a round. He can even heal the team while he's doing damage. One variant, Greatest Legacy, has a base power to heal one character and let them use a power and can use it on himself, making him even more of a tank.
  • Heroes with deck control, like Visionary, the Wraith and Parse, are also popular, since they let you avoid the kinds of things listed under That One Attack. Of these, Dark Visionary is considered "easy mode," since her deck control is her base power, meaning she can start scrying the villain or environment deck first turn no matter what.
  • The Scholar, like Legacy, has a lot of combinations that make winning the game easy — sometimes boringly so. Scholar can give himself Damage Reduction at 4 with little cost and has numerous ways to heal, meaning if worse comes to worst, he can wait until either the environment kills the villain or he gets one of his nuke cards available. More than one table has sat back with little to do while the Scholar turtles up and lets a volcano lay waste to his enemies.
  • Haka's ability to "eat" minions and environment cards via Savage Mana makes him a favorite for controlling nasty decks. Put him in the Final Wasteland and he can eat every negative card so that the deck constantly heals you and lets you draw more cards. Combine that with his ability to draw up to three cards when a environment card goes away, and his ability to turn cards into raw damage or healing, and you have a fun character who can thrive in almost any set-up.
  • The Block is a favorite of players who don't want to worry about the environment much. In theory, it takes place in the middle of a prison riot, but in practice, this means that half of the cards in the deck are just focused on eliminating or neutralizing the other half and won't interfere with the players at all.
  • The Mobile Defense Platform has very few cards that actually do damage, instead focusing on healing and blocking damage to most of its cards. The few cards that deal damage don't deal much and can be neutralized pretty easily by many team builds. The end result is an environment that grows pretty big, but is relatively harmless.
• Complete Monster: Spite originally started out as Jonathan "Maniac Jack" Donovan, a petty delinquent and minor member of the Wraith's street-level Rogues Gallery in Rook City. After getting stopped by the Wraith one too many times, Donovan became a Serial Killer, and after finding out the Wraith's secret identity, Donovan dropped her two best friends off a skyscraper in front of her. After finally being captured, Donovan avoided execution by agreeing to secret drug testing. When the drugs granted him Super-Strength and other abilities, Spite broke out of prison and went back to his murderous ways, while also using any drugs he could get his hands on to fuel his new addictions. Spite's villain card deck reflects all this by often forcing the players to make sadistic choices between saving victims or themselves, and his potential victims include a teenage wanna-be sidekick, an innocent priest in a soup kitchen, and a trusting little girl. Even the heroes deciding to just kill him this time didn't faze him; when the demon god Gloomweaver offered Spite a chance to be resurrected in exchange for killing lots and lots of people to spread enough fear and misery to allow Gloomweaver to be summoned to our reality, Spite saw it as a win-win sucker's bet where he got to live again—even though resurrection is normally a very unpleasant occurrence in this universe—in exchange for doing the mayhem he wanted to do anyway. While nowhere near as powerful as other beings in the universe, Spite is as bad as it gets for a street-level villain.
• Creator Worship: The fandom, especially listeners of the Letters Page, tend to consider Christopher and Adam, the games creators, to be gods or god-like beings. Unlike most examples, nobody actually takes this seriously and its more of a running joke among the fandom than actual worship.
• Demonic Spiders: Some minions are really painful to deal with, either by dealing outsized damage or by making other minions harder to deal with.
  • Gloomweaver's Cursed Acolyte hits every hero target H - 2 fire damage and infernal damage. Even with a smaller party of heroes, that can be quite a lot of damage if anything's boosting it. At higher levels? He can singlehandedly turn a winning game into a losing one. And since many of Gloomweaver's cards summon multiple cultists or replay them from his trash, it can be very difficult to permanently get rid of him, especially if Profane Zealot, who applies Damage Reduction to all villain targets and regenerates to full health if any of them are destroyed, is also out.
  • Grand Warlord Voss's Gene-Bound Guards apply Damage Reduction to all villain targets... and Voss tends to flood the field with lots of villain targets. If multiples are in play, or if one of his unique minions is around, they can apply a staggering four damage reduction to almost all villain targets, more than many heroes are capable of penetrating. And this not only means that Voss's other minions can wail on the heroes while they're trying to penetrate all that armor, but that his Non-Standard Game Over is marching ever closer.
  • Apostate's Runes of Malediction applies Damage Reduction to all other artifacts, one of which redirects all damage pointed at relics at itself, one of which summons the Runes back to the field if not destroyed, and the rest of which buff Apostate up. And when destroyed, the Runes pull Demon cards out of his trash and back into play... one of which, the Relic Spirit, pulls Relics out of the trash when destroyed. Oh, and Apostate can't lose while there's any relics still in play, so have fun.
  • Aeon Locuses aren't so bad themselves, but their ability to give OblivAeon extra card plays when he obliterates them can be nightmarish, particularly in his first form where anything with the word "damage" in it is That One Attack.
  • Glamour's reflection effect can get really inconvenient, really quickly, particularly in combination with all-villain-target attacks.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The Rook City expansion. It includes the first two 4-difficulty villains, The Chairman and The Matriarch, its 2-difficulty villains are considered a pain in the ass and a high-speed damage race and it has one of the most punishing environments in the game in Rook City itself. These present much more challenging game scenarios compared to what was available in the base set.
  • Certain villains spike up or down sharply depending on how many heroes you have.
    • Gloomweaver, for instance, starts with H zombies, who each do H-2 damage; against a three-hero team, this means the opening turn will see 3 HP of damage, and a high HP character with DR or healing can tank easily. Against a five-hero team, however, that's 15 damage spread to everyone just in the first round. The same applies to his Cursed Acolyte — against a three-hero team, he does two instances of 1 HP damage to every hero target — easily soaked by just about any DR effect and rendered powerless by things like Stun Bolt or Twist the Ether — but against a five-hero team, it's two instances of 3 HP, one of the heaviest mook attacks in the game.
    • The Dreamer is manageable with a three-hero team but, well, a nightmare for a 5 hero team because so many of her effects are based on the number of heroes. She starts with H number of projections out, and needs to have H * 2 number of projections under her on her flipped side to be defeated. In addition to that, when she flips — and you must go through her flipped side to win — first destroys H ongoing cards, then each round it plays an extra H-2 cards and deals H-2 damage to all hero targets. Her second worst card — Violent Nightmares — reveals cards until she plays H-2 Projections, and the Illusory Demon does H damage. A three-man team will only need to fight three projections at the start, lose three ongoings and defeat six projections on her flipped side to win while Dreamer plays one extra card and does 1 damage across the board per round, while a five-man team will have to fight five and defeat ten, while the Dreamer destroys five ongoings and then plays a whopping three extra cards per round and does 3 damage to all hero targets. And with that many card plays, it increases A. the chance of the Dreamer reshuffling her trash into her deck, putting the worst cards you thought you were done with back in rotation; B. playing Violent Nightmares and multiplying the number of damaging targets on the field; and C. playing Night Terrors, which does global damage equal to the number of Projections in play plus one. It's not uncommon for Dreamer's first round flipped to do upwards of 10 damage to all hero targets — and that's This combines for an almost guaranteed loss for the heroes unless the party is extremely well prepared to soak damage — which they may not be if they had to destroy crucial Ongoings.
    • By contrast, Infinitor's damage is mostly fixed, and with his inherent damage reduction, a smaller team has hard time doing enough damage to take out his constructs before the damage is simply overwhelming, while a larger team has more time and actions available to them before Infinitor's turn pops up again.
    • Simultaneously, Ambuscade is a fair challenge for a smaller team, since he too does mostly fixed damage, and destroying his cloaking device and gadgetry to make him vulnerable and less-deadly is more of a challenge, especially if he takes out some of the team before they get fully set up. But a five-man team of heroes is going to squash him, even if he gets lucky enough to have several cardplays in a row, especially because his is the only villain deck that contains no mechanisms for destroying hero Equipment or Ongoing cards.
  • Villain advanced and challenge modes are also not even remotely equivalent: in particular, Iron Legacy, Progeny and the Ennead are really brutal on Advanced, even by comparison to their usual fights, while Miss Information and Cosmic Omnitron have borderline sadistic Challenge modes, and Ultimate Gloomweaver may be Unwinnable with the wrong lineup since he's immune to melee and projectile attack and has invincible relics (meanwhile, Challenge Mode Skinwalker Gloomweaver is likely easier than normal because you get an entire fight worth of setup first).
  • Akash'Bhuta's Challenge mode renders her immune to Environment and Villain damage. This not only means that there won't be any help coming in whittling down that 200 HP from the Environment, but that breaking and smashing her limbs doesn't help drain her HP pool either.
  • Ambuscade's Challenge mode is deceptively difficult for its relatively simple effect, which causes his traps to start out prepped automatically, and whenever a trap is played, then discarded, he automatically gets to play the next card of his deck... which could be another trap, or several cards that do something then play another card from his deck, meaning any turn against Ambuscade could see nearly half his deck played instantly, with grevious results.
  • The Ennead's Advanced rules are generally agreed to trigger one of the harshest in the game, since they mean a new member of the Ennead comes out every round rather than when specific cards are played.
  • Miss Information is one of the villains with the most excessive disparity between standard play and higher difficulties, although unlike the Ennead, it's her Challenge mode that is excessive. Normal MI plays one card per turn and, once flipped, sacrifices one Clue per turn. Challenge MI gets a free play every time she plays a Clue. Including Clues played as the free play from other Clues. This can rapidly get out of hand, given that Miss Information's Ongoings are deeply obnoxious things that increase damage dealt by villain cards, recur minions from the trash, protect MI from damage, trash your field, cut off party synergies and force you to damage yourself.
  • Normal Cosmic Omnitron is difficult but manageable. Challenge Cosmic Omnitron is faintly excessive by doubling H. This means even with a three-hero party, he's starting with four components. In a five-hero team, he puts out all of them. Assuming a team of three heroes, if those components are two Disintegrator Rays and two Electro-Magnetic Railguns, that's 24 damage to a team of three heroes before it even gets to play a card. This affects his minions, too — one of whom has both starting HP and damage based on H, meaning if it comes out to a five-hero team, it's walloping someone for 10 HP.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Originally just a one off thing for the OblivAeon ARG, the Extreme Prime Wardens became enough of a Dark Horse to get their own variant cards.
  • Fashion started off as basically just the backstory for one of Kaargra's gladiators, a romance comic character turned into a superhero similar to Marvel's Hellcat, and C&A's tone in describing her suggested they found her to be a rather silly, slightly throwaway idea, though even during the episode they admitted that they were starting to like some of the ideas they were coming up with. But the RL fandom's reaction to hearing about a superheroine fashion engineer who created her own stylish clothes that had gadgets sewn into them was "OMG she is so cool, more please!" It turned into a Running Gag to ask after her every chance the fans got, and C&A eventually made an announcement on the podcast about her getting her own major comic in-universe, suggesting she might eventually become a major character in the RL tabletop RPG spinoff.
  • In Argent Adept's Supporting Cast episode of the podcast, one the characters they ended up creating was a sort of Friendly Rival named Soothsayer Carmichael. He was created as basically an opposite Foil to Argent: nerdy and somewhat plain to Argent's flamboyant Pretty Boy, a book-learned wizard to Argent's in-born sorcerer-like power, logical and Crazy-Prepared to Argent's "hold my beer" tendencies, and tending to thus be constantly flying off the handle and ranting about Argent's impulsive, sometimes ill-thought-out approach to magic. He proved so popular that virtually all of the followup questions about the episode focused solely on Carmichael alone and Christopher noted that "you all love him, turns out!"
  • In the OblivAeon portion of the storyline, one of the universes destroyed was the Telenovelaverse which is exactly what you'd expect it to be: An entire universe based on "What if Sentinels but everyone acts like a character in a Latin soap opera". Christopher's over-the-top Latin Lover voice acting and the sheer hilarious insanity of the idea in general caused everyone to immediately fall in love with it and then go into Denial at it being gone. The begging for it to be brought back somehow got so numerous that Christopher eventually outright rebelled and said the more people asked about it, the more it was definitely staying dead.
  • Of all things, a one-off joke from the Letters Page accidentally became one of the most popular set of characters. Specifically, the Secret Lads, a fictional book series about kid spies that has absolutely nothing to do with Sentinel Comics whatsoever. Oh and by the way, this all happened because Christopher misread the branding (Secret Lab) on Adam's chair.
  • Guise-Cat, a character from the RPG whose schtick is that he is a regular street cat that Guise put a costume on, has become increasingly popular with multiple demands for a plushie to be made of him in the same vein as Mr. Chomps.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Omnitron is called Omni for short.
  • Like Omnitron, Omnitron-X is called Omni, Omni-X, or simply OX for short.
  • The Legacies: Legs for Legacy, Baby Legacy for Young Legacy, Angry Paul for Iron Legacy, and Old Legs for Greatest Legacy.
  • Greatest Legacy has also gained the nickname Grandpa Legacy from both the creators and fanbase alike.
  • Expatriette is shorted to Expat.
  • Turducken, for the rare occasion when Naturalist is able to finagle all three of his form cards out at once.
  • Omnitron's (the villain) variant, Cosmic Omnitron or Omnitron II is also known as Cosmitron.
  • Captain Cosmic often gets called "Space Dad" for his stereotypically dad-like looks and serious, sometimes mentorly demeanor (also the fact that he has a habit of leaving children scattered around the cosmos). This one Christopher and Adam themselves started using.
  • Sky-Scraper gets "Sky-Sky" from one of Handelabra's streamers calling her that and it catching on afterwards.
  • Darkstrife, a hero exclusive to the Letter's Page, is often spelled as Darkstryfe as some fans believes it fits his purposely overly edgy persona better.
• Game-Breaker: Certain combinations can be incredibly potent, and certain cards can outright shut down villains in the right situation:
  • Haka's Savage Mana has the potential to take a lot of bite out of minion-heavy decks; by putting them under the card instead of in the trash, Voss's minions can't come back during Forced Deployment, Citizen Dawn may never flip, Baron Blade's Non-Standard Game Over is curtailed, The Chairman's Prison Break does nothing, and the Matriarch's Darken the Sky brings nothing back from her trash. Apostate with his dependency on Relics (and his Relic Spirits pulling them out of the trash) also gets hit hard. It also makes certain variant unlocks in the video game much easier. Unlocking Baron Blade's variant, for instance, requires destroying Citizens Blood, Sweat and Tears in a single round — which means enduring at least one round of multiple discards, ongoing destruction and heavy damage... unless you have Haka eat them individually, then use Savage Mana's power to destroy them all at once.
  • Wraith's Infrared Eyepiece can make any villain deck without lots of bonus card plays almost trivial — if used every round, you can tightly control what cards are played. This means the cards listed under That One Attack never have to come up. And it's not Limited, so she can have — and with the Utility Belt, use — two at a time, just in case you're unlucky enough to have two equally-bad cards back-to-back come up the first time she looks. In addition, using it lets you draw an extra card, which will eventually get you anything you might need. Other characters like Dark Visionary work similarly.
    • If combined with a character like Guise who can discard the top card of a deck, it allows you to remove particularly troublesome cards before they hit.
    • And then Parse's Extrasensory Awareness is the same idea except even better in that it lets you actually discard the problem card in question so you very definitely never have to deal with it.
  • Against The Chairman, Visionary's Brain Burn — which puts the villain's trash at the bottom of the villain's deck — turns him from a terrifying, tier-4 villain to almost a joke. So much of his strategy revolves around bringing Thug cards out of the trash that if they're not there — and won't be drawn from the deck for a while — he's screwed.
  • Absent an environment with Ongoing destruction, Visionary and Ra can completely shut down villains who do most, if not all, of their damage on their own, like Spite or Plague Rat. Ra can make the whole party immune to fire damage, while visionary's Twist the Ether lets her change the damage type of any one target. Ra can also change the party's damage type to fire, rendering self-damage cards, like Plague Rat's Infection, harmless.
    • By the same token, base Tempest's incapacitated ability lets him render all heroes immune to a given damage type. Given most villains primarily do a single type of damage, and a decent number do only one type, this can shut down a villain near completely- perversely making Tempest often more useful dead then alive.
    • Not quite as powerful as some of the other combinations listed here, but Visionary using Twist the Ether on Absolute Zero can have amazing effects if he has the Thermal Shockwave out. By controlling the type of damage (and increasing it), Absolute Zero can either take damage to slaughter anyone in front of him, or gain massive healing, all without ever having to worry about dramatically self-destructing if he loses track of the math.
  • The Unforgiving Wasteland Environment card is trouble for minion-heavy decks too, just like Haka's Savage Mana, causing any target destroyed by the environment to be removed from the game. The difference is that it's much harder for many villains to destroy, and most of the cryptids of the Final Wasteland target lowest HP enemies. Of course, it can easily break the game in the other direction too, and is the potential source of many Unwinnable scenarios for those poor heroes taking on villains that need to have cards in play or in the trash to beat.
    • The Final Wasteland also has a card that lets each hero draw two extra cards at the start of their turn, and one that lets all heroes heal one point. Both of these come at a cost of drawing an extra card from the environment deck. Using Savage Mana to remove the rest of the deck, while time consuming, makes these abilities free. Putting out three Mega Computers or using Mass Levitation is the next best thing, as the targets in the deck only do damage.
  • Extremely powerful is the combination of Legacy (any version), Visionary and Omnitron-X. Legacy has an Ongoing card that prevents the villain from playing any cards, but causes the villain to do energy damage him and goes into the trash after a turn; Visionary has a power that lets any character move an Ongoing from the trash to the top of the deck; and Omnitron-X's base power lets him play the card on top of any deck. And because the damage rider on his Ongoing happens at the end of Legacy's turn — and not when the card is played — this combination can completely and permanently lock down almost any villain deck for free.
  • Freedom Six Tachyon has a Boring, but Practical version. Her base power Team Leader allows every player to draw a card. Sounds simple but it's incredibly powerful as it gives every player an extra draw, allowing heroes more chances to get the cards they need. It also feeds very well into heroes who can play more than one card a turn (like Expatriette or Guise) or discard cards from their hand for damage (like Haka or The Scholar) and combos very well with cards like Reclaim from the Deep. She's slightly offset by the fact that she sacrifices her nuking power (she gets cards into her trash slower and draws cards faster meaning that a player could potentially have too many cards in your hand and not enough in the trash) but it's a small price for the bonus she gives her teammates. And one of Tachyon's deck's core strengths is already the ability to play large numbers of cards at once.
  • America's Greatest Legacy is another Boring, but Practical one — his power lets you choose any one hero to heal one health and use another power (including himself.) In practice, this means that his default power is always slightly better than the best power anyone has in play, allowing you to double-up on already-broken powers like Freedom Six Tachyon while regenerating health at the same time.
  • The combination of Fixed Point, Mr. Fixer's Dual Crowbars and Setback's Friendly Fire can instantly win any game that can be won by reducing the villain to 0 HP. Setback's Friendly Fire lets any ally damage Setback when they hit a non-hero target; Dual Crowbars make it so every time Fixer does any damage, he can do a second set to another target; Fixed Point makes everything else indestructible. With all three in play, Fixer can hit a villain, then trigger Friendly Fire to hit Setback, which triggers Dual Crowbars to hit a villain, which triggers Friendly Fire, etc. until the villain is safely under 0 HP.
  • A ruling from the game's writer briefly created an un-interruptable damage loop that could win nearly any fight in a single turn. Prime Wardens Captain Cosmic's power makes it so that if any of his Construct cards are destroyed, he can shuffle the construct into his deck and either draw or play a card. Originally, this wouldn't stack — no matter how many times he used the power, he would only get one draw or one play out of a card's destruction. A newer ruling made it stack with multiple power uses. So if one construct was destroyed, he could draw and play multiple cards. This made his card Construct Cataclysm all but an instant win — it destroys all his constructs and does damage based on how many constructs were destroyed. With the multiple draws and plays, he could easily just keep recycling his constructs into play infinitely, with the only real limit being the other players' patience and houserules. This stood above the other gamebreakers because while they need specific environments, hero teams and cards, Prime Wardens Captain Cosmic could do it on his own in any environment. After discussion on the game's forum, the writer agreed and a later update to the video game undid the loop.
  • At his best, Guise can be this. His deck gives him lots of ways to rip off cards and powers that other heroes can use, and it can be extraordinarily silly when he uses this to combine abilities from different heroes in ways that were never meant to interact. His deck also features a self-contained infinite-loop that allows him to enter a constant cycle of playing cards, topdecking them from his trash, drawing them, and playing them again while dealing damage to enemies; the absurdly difficult setup renders it impractical in standard play, but combinations of allied heroes can allow him to set it up much more reliably.
  • Because most villains deal with one or two primary methods of damage, Legacy (any version) with two copies of Next Stage of Evolution, the Legacy Ring, and Lead from the Front, can turn most villains into a joke, by becoming immune to their two most common damage types, and then redirecting all damage from their attacks to himself. Throw in Danger sense so he doesn't need to worry about the environment. Add in Fortitude and some minor healing (like America's Greatest Legacy) and even if some off damage gets through, Legacy can recover. Visionary's Twist the Ether can also help with this, if all or most damage comes from the primary source.
  • Interactions between some of the heroes and OblivAeon rewards can get very silly. For example, Mr Fixer can combine Bloody Knuckles, Alternating Tiger Claw, Harmony, and Dual Crowbars with the Mecha-Knight to deal anywhere up to 25 points of irreducible damage to one target and 45 to another, with one power use, without even a damage buff from outside. Throw on other effects like El Mejor Legado or an OblivAeon Shard at high Doom and you can obliterate even the usually Nigh-Invulnerable Scion version of Rainek Kel'Voss in seconds while also dealing heavy damage to other opponents. (The kicker? This may still not be enough to even slow down with OblivAeon.)
• Genius Bonus:
  • In Egyptian mythology, there were three Ras, representing three different sun-gods conflated together into one god with three aspects. The first was Khepri-Ra, the Ra of daybreak, the second was Horakhty-Ra, the Ra of the noon, or the "Horus of two horizons," and the third was the Atem-Ra, the Ra of the setting sun. In-game, Ra has three variants, the second of which is actually called the "Horus of Two Horizons," and the third and final of which is "Ra: Setting Sun". Notably, the leader of his nemeses, the Ennead, is actually Atum, a kind of "false Ra," and, in-universe, during the days of ancient Egypt, the first-ever Ra, who was murdered by the Ennead, was replaced by Horus, the second-ever Ra, who trapped them in the tomb the modern Ennead found their artifacts in.
  • The Argent Adept's Dark Dynamics variant involves his trying to wield one of the "dark" instruments of the Virtuosos of the Void, a conductor's baton made with Blood Magic and created by one of his more power-hungry and selfish predecessors. In it, he's wearing a segno on his chest. Musically, a segno denotes a point at which a piece of music begins repeating itself from. And, indeed, Anthony begins repeating the mistakes of the Crimson Conductor until he can come to his senses and break free of its influence.
  • In Spite's backstory during his prison sentence he's given a stay of execution along with other death row inmates in exchange for undergoing drug testing in the Barzakh Wing of Pike Laboratories, with said drug testing's results causing his metamorphosis into super-powered serial killer. In Islamic mythology "barzakh" refers to a sort of limbo between life and death where souls wait until Judgement Day.
• Goddamned Bats: In the digital version, any environment (like Surprise Shopping Trip) or villain card that does one damage to all heroes quickly becomes annoying. Often players redirect and reduce that damage but in many cases you have to confirm the redirect every. single. time. It's not uncommon for players to waste a valuable card/power to destroy the offending card even when it's doing no damage because of how tedious it is. The Matriarch is one of the least popular tier 4 bosses on the digital version again just because of how annoying it is to play her. This has been mitigated slightly by the ability to mark a decision to be repeated for the rest of the turn, or the rest of the game. Still slow, but not as slow.
• Goddamned Boss: As well-designed as many villains are, some are just bothersome to run, play against, or both.
  • Kaargra Warfang has a reputation for being a real pain in the neck, due to the players having to juggle multiple additional mechanics while playing her (Favor pools, the Title deck, etc.), and having a very swingy deck that often makes victory and defeat seem random rather than the result of her difficulty as an enemy. The digital version highlights the latter flaws by taking care of the former for the players.
  • Wager Master's status as a Difficulty 2 villain is well-put, but between the many forms of Nonstandard Game Over he can inflict on both himself and the heroes and the wide array of nasty Interface Screws his deck can cause, it doesn't quite capture how annoying he can be.
  • As stated earlier the Matriarch, despite one of being the easiest of the level 4 villains, is also the least popular level 4 boss to play in digital. In a regular tabletop game, she's not bad but her death of a thousand cuts is just annoying in the digital version. You have to reconfirm redirects or taking damage every. single. time. which in the digital version requires at least a plurality of players voting. Her games can easily take twice as long as a result with most of it consisting of waiting for your teammates to press the right button. This has been mitigated slightly by the ability to mark a decision to be repeated for the rest of the turn, or the rest of the game. Still slow, but not as slow.
  • Akash'Bhuta can be annoying to play on the tabletop because of her massive HP pool, which is larger than any other villain's save for OblivAeon. Unless you bring an entire team of high damage dealers, expect her to take a while to defeat.
  • Miss Information's flipped stage isn't so bad, it's the first half that's utterly infuriating. Miss Information's first form is completely invulnerable and she needs H clue cards in play to flip, representing how you need to uncover her identity before fighting her. Fine in principle, but the problem is that Miss Information doesn't reveal clue cards or draw at a higher rate— it's pure luck of the draw with her standard one villain card per turn, and while they're in play they'll rapidly eat up any setup so you can't even prepare while you wait. Quite often the first half of the battle just feels like an overly long prelude to the actual start of the game, except you start with serious damage and a half-games worth of villain cards to deal with.
  • Spite is less annoying and more just really boring. For the first half of the battle he's nearly indestructible due to a massive Healing Factor, with most of the fight based around saving his victims. If he kills the victim, he heals — but he has, as mentioned, a massive Healing Factor anyway, so it's pretty pointless. Once he flips, he stops playing cards and shuts down the environment, meaning each turn is him doing the the same amount of damage with the same five indestructible ongoing each turn until either he or the heroes die. It's the most tedious fighting a genetically enhanced serial killer can be.
• Growing the Beard: While Enhanced Edition is a solid card game with plenty of positives, practically all Sentinels fans agree that Definitive Edition was a MASSIVE improvement across the board. Every hero, villain, and environment was rebalanced in such a way that addressed many of the flaws they had in the original game and made them far more fun to play with; annoying or boring villain mechanics were tossed, overly complex hero gimmicks (setback's luck tokens, harpy's control tokens, ect.) were replaced with more streamlined effects, and games move along FAR faster than they did before.
• I Knew It!:
  • At least half the forums called that Grand Warlord Voss was the tenth Scion of OblivAeon. Christopher and Adam had been getting letters about it since the start of the Letters Page podcast.
  • As soon as the Kickstarter for Rook City Renegades (basically, the Definitive Edition version of the Rook City/Infernal Relics combo) went live, people immediately predicted the redacted hero was Alpha, a character who originated in the Letters Page, and by extension one of the redacted villains was her nemesis, Apex.
• LGBT Fanbase: Due to the significant amount of LGBT+ characters (Tachyon, who is both gay and in a relationship, being the most well known of them but there are quite a few others) the game, or at the very least the Letters Page Podcast, has acquired quite a following from the LGBT+ community with the creators of the game frequently receiving letters from fans of varying sexualities and gender identities on the Letters Page.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Rook City heroes have some players seeing significant weaknesses and attempting fixes. Both of them are seen as performing much better when they have allies to support them. And in both cases, many prefer their variant cards. Notably, the Rook City expansion was only the second in the gameline's history, and, unlike the original core set, never had an "updated" re-release, meaning they are also the oldest heroes in the gameline.
• Memetic Badass: Guise-Cat, a normal cat in a Guise costume, is considered by the fandom to be the most badass character in the franchise, capable of taking down even the toughest of villains including OblivAeon.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • #Sparks and #brightbackdebbie ^explanation After the Unity episode of the Letters page, any lettera relating to Unity will tend to end in #Sparks or #bringbackdebbie or both because of the in-universe hashtags that people who wanted to be contrarian would post post-Unity immigrating to the main canon. One user even turned it into an SCP.
  • Baron Blade's Moon Obsession ^explanation Due to Baron Blade's most well known plot being the Terralunar Impulsion Beam (a powerful tractor beam that pulls the moon into the earth), a running gag among the fandom is him being obsessed with the moon. The fact that Mordengrad's crest prominently features the moon doesn't help. This is seemingly an Ascended Meme as the logo for his hero version, Luminary, also features the moon and he not only questions why they are not pulling the moon into OblivAeon but actually summons a chunk of the moon.
  • "Ice up the whole rat." ^explanation During an episode of the Letters Page, the creators used this phrase to describe Absolute Zero freezing Plague Rat. Both the creators and the fandom swiftly latched onto the as it turns out very versatile phrase and set out to give it as many uses as possible.
  • Whenever Ansel G. Moreau (alias Ambuscade later Stuntman) is brought up its mandatory for it to be mentioned that he's a world famous movie star who does all his own stunts.
  • "Who can say. Time will tell." ^explanation A phrase frequently used by Christopher and Adam when asked a question they don't want to reveal the answer of quite yet.
  • Food Metaphors ^explanation Another meme from the Letter's Page resulting from the Void being referred to as Jelly in an early episode and spiraling out from there to include such things as OblivAeon Peanut Butter, Reality Bread (now contained in a sandwich bag), and more.
• Memetic Personality Change: Alpha in canon is one of Sentinels' grittier heroes, being a werewolf with a screwed up backstory who has canonically eaten at least one person. In fanon, however, Alpha's most stand out personality trait is acting like a dog. In some interpretations she keeps the grittiness but often can't stop herself from acting like a dog, in other interpretations she is literally just a dog.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The digital game has a lot of fantastic general sound effects—for instance, each type of damage has its own sound effect (crackling of lightning for Lightning, Audible Sharpness for Radiant, a "squishy" sound for Toxic, etc.)—but some sounds really stand out and a small few characters get all the stops pulled out:
  • The little angelic note that plays whenever you heal some hit points.
  • Kaargra Warfang's Bloodsworn Colosseum has a crowd that makes cheering or jeering sounds, or general sports stadium-style chatter, which was all created by the community itself recording and sharing their voices. And you'll definitely love it when it's you they're cheering for or the Bloodsworn they're jeering at.
  • Argent Adept gets quite a few specific effects thanks to his bard abilities:
    • Each of his instruments has a brief snippet of that instrument being played when the power is used: The harp has harp strings being plucked, the pipes have a brief flute melody, the drum a little percussion ditty, etc.
    • The Vocalize power on his normal card features a brief tenor-voiced aria being sung.
    • The Conduct power on his Prime Wardens variant primarily features an alternate flute melody with all of his other instruments as accompaniment.
    • His Rebel Yell power on his XTREME Prime Wardens variant has his alternate universe double letting out a punk rock-sounding YEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!
    • And his Dark Conductor variant has an Ominous Pipe Organ scare chord.
  • Guise's No Fourth Wall shtick means he gets a lot of love put into his own effects.
    • He often will have small snippets of dialogue when playing specific cards, like when playing Gritty Reboot Guise will say "Everyone I know is dead..."
    • He also says "Avenge meeeeeeee..." when incapacitated.
    • Changing the volume has him cheer if you turn it up or give a Big "NO!" if you turn it down.
    • To go with Argent Adept's entry above: If you use Let Me See That's equipment borrowing to borrow the instruments, Guise will use his voice to imitate the instruments' sound effects... badly.
    • Likewise, using I Can Do That Too! to copy Argent Adept's Vocalize power will have Guise sing the same aria... badly, and Conduct has Guise imitate the flute melody... badly.
    • Say Cheese has a camera click sound effect.
  • The guitar cords that play when you unlock a variant.
• Narm:
  • The battle with Progeny is one of the darkest, harshest, most violent events in the story before the coming of OblivAeon. Then... his head pops off and flies off into space. It's a bit... wacky, by even Christopher Badell's own admission. Not helped by the name of K.N.Y.F.E.'s limited series that has her chasing it — "Headhunter."
  • All battles in the video game have the theme song of the environment, not the villain. Usually this is fine, but things can quickly take a turn for the ridiculous if you have, say, the wacky "Flash Gordon" style Enclave Of The Endlings theme playing as you try to stop Spite from gutting children, or the dark and intense Pike Industrial Complex theme playing as Wager Master makes you play silly games due to being a bad roommate.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Spite's One-Winged Angel form shows his body ravaged from the drugs he took, including his left side having turned into a giant tentacle-shaped mess of viscera, blood vessels, pustules, bone, sinew, and exposed guts in general. The game's artist has said it's "possibly the most disgusting piece of art he's ever drawn".
  • Skinwalker Gloomweaver, aka "The Rotting God", has a theme song which isn't so much music as it is an ambiance of all things hissing, squishy, skittering, slithering, and dripping. The composer has said he can't even stand to listen to it any more after composing it because it grosses even him out.
  • Biomancer's power involves him manipulating and animating flesh into Frankenstein's Monster-like creations, or even into his own body to keep himself effectively immortal, and he views everyone as potential resources and test subjects. His cards often show his twisted creations or his own barely-human form, and his theme song is a "dark science"-inspired tune full of bubbling and tools clinking. The creators frequently call him "gross" and express disgust whenever they discuss him on the podcast.
• Never Live It Down: The creators have pulled this on themselves, refusing to live down the Il Allimento food podcast Extrasode since it wasn't very well liked.
  • Similarly, they can't seem to let themselves live down the Sentinels/Void Guard episode which was a whopping three hours in length. Needless to say, noone wants another episode that long.
• Protection from Editors: In the Metafiction, part of the downfall of the Vertex line (the Sentinel Tactics timeline) was that the writers were old-guard Sentinel Comics writers given too little oversight and blanket permission to do what they liked, leading to a whole lot of Darker and Edgier stuff happening and the line eventually imploding.
• Special Effect Failure: The digital game's attempt to replicate the foil effect of the character card foil reprints ends up simply giving the cards a weird green tint.
• That One Achievement: A few of the achievements in the video game are tricky, but the one to unlock Darkwatch Setback takes the cake. To unlock it, you need to win a game against The Chairman in Rook City with a team consisting of Setback, Darkwatch Nightmist, Darkwatch Expatriette, and Darkwatch Mr. Fixer. To put this in perspective, the One Shot (official weekly challenges) which has Dark Watch Expatriette, DW Fixer, and DW Nightmist against the Chairman in Rook City is called "Ridiculous Challenge Time" and has been reported by the digital creators to have a win percentage rate in the single digits.
  • Unlocking Completionist Guise is almost worse. It requires you to legitimately unlock every hero variant, including the aforementioned Dark Watch Setback.
  • The first two steps of unlocking Heroic Luminary are deceptively simple: win a game against Baron Blade in the Realm of Discord, then win a game in Freedom Tower using the Freedom Five. The third step, however, is the kicker: in a game in Megapolis, using Luminary, use all three of Luminary's Doomsday Devices. This means filling Luminary's trash with at least fifteen cards, then playing and setting off a Doomsday Device, three times. Most games don't last nearly long enough to put fifteen cards into anyone's trash, and even though Luminary has built-in ways to dump cards into his trash, doing it thrice is still a massive chore.
• That One Attack: Several boss decks, particularly those rated 3 or 4 in difficulty, have these.
  • The Chairman has Prison Break, which brings every Underboss in the trash back into play, who in turn each bring a thug back from the trash.
  • Grand Warlord Voss has Forced Deployment, which resurrects every minion in the trash at the start of his turn — this could easily bring a dozen damaging cards, many with global damage, back to the field if it pops up late in the game. If he's flipped to the wrong side at the time, it could easily mean his victory. And destroying it ahead of time just gives you more time to react by playing the bad guys immediately.
  • Baron Blade and Omnitron each have a card that's this trope for set-up heavy heroes. Baron Blade's allows players to destroy as many equipment and ongoing cards as they want, and afterward he does every hero target X damage, where X equals 3 plus however many equipment cards are still on the table. This means either wiping your equipment and ongoings out, or everyone taking massive damage — it can easily become a Total Party Kill, especially in 5-hero games. Omnitron's outright destroys the equipment, and does damage to each hero based on how many of their equipment cards were destroyed at a rate of 2 to 1, which can be devastating to heroes like Bunker, The Wraith, or Absolute Zero.
  • On Advanced, Baron Blade also has Consider the Price of Victory, especially with a larger hero team. The damage isn't the problem; it's the discarding from the top of the deck, which can bring about his Non-Standard Game Over alarmingly quickly.
  • Apostate has Apocalypse which wipes the board of ongoing, environment, and equipment cards on the environment turn. It also doesn't affect his relic cards, so he effectively wipes away all the hero cards while he keeps his weapons. Though the upside at least is that unlike Forced Deployment or Mass Rebirth, this one does nothing if you get to destroy it before it triggers.
  • Citizen Dawn has many.
    • Devastating Aurora, a card that destroys all hero equipment and ongoing cards as well as destroying environment cards. This one attack is able to completely turn an entire game around, especially if it fires while Dawn has several powerful minions out. It's so infamous that it's known on the forums simply as "That Card."
    • If Citizens Truth and Anvil are out, not only is all damage inflicted by the heroes reduced by two, but only Truth can be hurt. This effectively renders most damage dealing base powers impotent, and only high-powered cards can actually get through to even hurt Truth, who needs to get brought down before you can attack any other Citizen.
    • Rise With The Dawn doesn't do direct damage... it just brings out a Citizen from Dawn's trash. That minion you thought you were finally done with? They're back.
    • Citizens Blood, Sweat, and Tears, if they're out together. You'll be shedding ongoing cards like water, discarding multiple cards from hands, and taking heavy damage the entire time.
    • Look, let's be honest... when the least damaging cards Citizen Dawn can throw out are ones that let her draw more villain cards or damage the entire party and force them to discard cards, you know you've got a deck loaded with this trope.
  • The Matriarch has Darken the Sky, which brings out all of the Fowl cards in her trash. When considering the number of fowl she has and how fast you'll likely be burning through them, you could go form dealing with a few each turn to fight a dozen at a time.
  • Kaargra Warfang's Fickle Fans can instantly lose the game for the heroes because of Kaargra's Crowd Favor mechanics. It takes (H) favor from one pool and puts it into the other. If the heroes are in the lead and this card puts the villains over 20 favor, the heroes lose instantly. Can be subverted, though, because the card works both ways — savvy and prepared players can set it up so the heroes get the boost.
  • Miss Information is already a difficult boss, but her nastiest trick is Another Reality's Debt, which forces every hero to either discard their hand or discard all of their cards. Outside of a few very specific heroes who are limited in their ability to have multiple cards into play at once or players whose hands are already almost-dry, this is a Sadistic Choice of the highest order.
  • Biomancer has Mass Rebirth, which, if not destroyed before the end of the Environment turn (and therefore, meaning that it is especially difficult to deal with if he goes last in the villain turn order), brings all his Fleshchildren back from his trash. Even destroying it in advance still restores 10 HP to him.
  • Kismet's primary weakness is that her many Jinx ongoings can be destroyed by the right opponents. Lady Luck, a Lucky ongoing card, reveals the top card of her deck, putting it into play if it is a Lucky card (all of which help her greatly, and one of which, Inconceivable Obstruction, can be a headache and a half to deal with in its own right), and discarding it and preventing the destruction if it is not.
  • Gloomweaver's Strength of the Grave, which gives damage resistance to zombies and a damage boost based on the number of zombies you have. On turn 1, with five heroes, each of his starter wave of zombies will be dealing eight damage.
    • Vast Following shuffles Gloomweaver's trash and deals out H cards, with any Cultists and Relics revealed put back into play. Gloomweaver's Cultists are deeply obnoxious to deal with, and this card undoes all the work you put into getting rid of them. It can also snatch the win away from you at the last second if it flips the Relics back out, or worse, set him up to flip. The free play he gets afterwards is just a parting insult.
  • Wager Master's "What Do You Really Know?" Ongoing. It shuffles a card from each hero's deck into Wager Master's, and deals 4 psychic damage to a hero whenever one of their cards is on top of the deck (including when you reveal cards with someone like Parse or Visionary). It shuffles another round of cards every turn, is indestructible, and is not a Condition, so not even flipping Wager Master will make it go away — it's there forever. This can fast make a Wager Master game Unwinnable if you don't have the exact right things out in both your field and WM's. Wager Master has one Condition that makes killing him an instant loss, and another that lets you win by decking him out — but with "What Do You Really Know?" out, decking him out will involve taking a ton of psychic damage, so unless you also have Legacy with Next Evolution and Lead From The Front, or a tanked-up Scholar, it's going to be a painful process.
  • The Dreamer has Night Terrors, which deals all non-villain targets X damage, with X being the number of Projections in play. Given that you can't use multi-target attacks in this fight because you lose if you kill the Dreamer, there are probably going to be plenty of Projections on the field. And given that after she flips, the Dreamer plays two cards each villain turn, it's entirely possible for her to pull both copies of Night Terrors in a row.
  • OblivAeon, in his first form (the one with 10,000 HP), has Tear Through Reality and Global Devastation. Early OblivAeon has a substantial damage buff (on top of being completely invincible until you've dealt with his Shield, which can be a painful process), and both of these will hit all of your heroes for enormous amounts of damage — particularly Global Devastation, which even bypasses the battle zones mechanic and hits everyone regardless of location. Impending Doom, too, is deeply the opposite of hilarious; if it goes off, which it does if OblivAeon is in that battle zone at the end of his turn, it does a ridiculous 9999 points of Infernal damage to everything except OblivAeon and his Scions — basically a guaranteed wipe of every hero in that area without the exact right cards, while only being useful against the Scions if you have one of the few damage reflection effects out. And for bonus points, if any of these moves take out an Aeon Locus while he's rampaging indiscriminately? He gets another play. And there are six Aeon Locuses in the deck.
• That One Boss:
  • The Chairman stands above several of the other villains — even others rated at the highest difficulty, like he is — and can easily overwhelm players who don't know exactly how to handle him. Of his 25 cards, 10 are "Thug" cards, who do damage, destroy hero ongoing or equipment cards, protect the higher level minions, or play a villain card every time a hero card is played. Five of the other cards are "Underbosses," who buff the villains' damage, heal them, and revive the Thug cards at the end of each Villain turn. Players must keep the minions in check, because they will overwhelm your team if you don't... but each minion you destroy has The Operative attack one of the heroes for heavy damage. Each turn guarantees at least one Underboss play, and when you do start making real headway, Prison Break can revive all the underbosses you've put down, and Undivided Attention will do severe damage to someone on your team. Oh, and The Chairman is invincible for most of the fight, and when you do get to hit him, he retaliates against the damage dealer for heavy damage, and buffs his Thugs' damage by up to +3, doubling most of their damage. Other villain decks have similar mechanics — Citizen Dawn's minions are just as much trouble and boost one another, while The Matriarch uses similar swarm and revival tactics while doing similar retaliatory damage — but The Chairman does it with a consistency and scale that is above and beyond the others.
  • Unlike every other villain, Spite's buffing cards — the drugs — are indestructible and cannot be removed from play once they're out. He also heals with every bit of damage he does on his front side and is constantly doing damage, making it hard to make anything stick. His victim cards — which heal him when he destroys them — tend to extract a substantial toll to be put under the Safe House, but Spite has cards to undo the hard work of getting them under there. Deck control is of limited use because he plays two cards a round — so even if you make sure he'll play a relatively harmless card at the middle of his turn, there's no real guarantee he won't play something like Drug Raid at the end of it. Even though he's rated at a 2, an unprepared team can have a mountain of trouble facing him. What saves him from being on The Chairman's level is that the effects of his drugs include nerfed versions of normal effects — one gives him H-2 Damage Reduction, but only to the first hit a turn instead of permanent every hit; another makes the players put H-2 equipment or ongoing cards back into their hands, rather than destroying them — and the fact that he's the only damage dealer in his deck, so cards like Elbow Jab and Twist the Ether can hold him back significantly and the Potential Sidekick victim card, which lets the heroes draw two cards every villain turn as long as he's out. Other difficult villains, such as the Chairman and Iron Legacy, are generally seen as well-crafted challenges, but many on the game's forums feel that Spite is not very fun to play against and he's often accused of simply having poorly-designed game mechanics, particularly since, once he flips, he does the exact same thing every turn until he wins or dies. This may be part of why he was later re-classified as a difficulty 3 villain for the Ultimate Collector's reference.
  • Spite's Agent of Gloom variant is another headache. He starts with all the Drug cards face down, and flips one face up at the start of his turn unless there are (H) victims in the safe house, in which case he flips instead. The variant opens the turn flipping one drug card face up (and the players don't know beforehand which is which), the Safe House puts a Victim into play and, at best, Spite plays another victim card, as the variant only plays one card per turn. The only way to flip a drug card face down again is to end Spite's turn with more victims in the safe house than there are drugs face up. Unless the players can force him to play an additional victim (i.e., if you're using one of the tiny handful of heroes who can do so, or if he plays the Good Samaritan, which can play the villain's top card to go in the safehouse), there's no way to outpace the drugs going face up before he flips and the flipped side has no mechanism to flip back or flip the drug cards. And on his flipped side? Every instance of his damage is boosted by 1 for every card under the Safe House, so if you're in a 5-hero game, he's doing obscene amounts of damage until you can get some of them back out.
  • One of the nastier elements of Miss Information is that for the most part, her clues cause the heroes to do damage to themselves. She effectively turns around damage-boosting powers and artifacts to hurt the heroes, because a lot of the more powerful damage mitigating cards specify that they prevent damage from villain or environment targets and not heroes. Since her Clues are necessary to reveal her and get her to flip, the players have to deal with these devastating cards for some time before they can take her out. And because she's not a target until she flips, it becomes a waiting game for the clues to come out where the heroes have little option but to sit back and get hammered by her and the environment. Finally, some of her most-dangerous cards, her Diversions, are not Ongoings and cannot be destroyed by hero cards targeting them, only by the often-crippling means printed on the card.
  • The Dreamer is a combination of the nastier mook swarm-based decks with the added caveat that the most effective minion-clearing abilities are often useless, as they most often target all villain targets, including the Dreamer herself, and the objective when fighting her is to keep her alive. Not only do you have to fight off packs of minions, but once you get the Dreamer to a flip to the side that will let you start knocking out minions to save her, she destroys (H) hero ongoings, which can be crippling, starts blasting your team with continuous psychic attacks every turn, and plays an additional H-2 cards each turn, topping out at four card plays total counting the normal draw. And one of her one-shots does every non-villain target damage based on how many Projections are out. More than a few hero teams have been breezing along pretty well, only to be wiped by the sucker punch of Dreamer's normal attack, several projections coming out, followed by another huge global attack.
  • Iron Legacy. He has no minions. He has the lowest HP of any single villain aside from the Dreamer. He's just one target to hit. All he has is a non-stop onslaught of ongoing cards that reduce damage dealt to him, amplify damage dealt to heroes, and generally ruin your day. His damage output is so high that it's not implausible that you'll have downed heroes by the second turn. He's a terrifying example of a Legacy who isn't holding back.
  • La Capitan may be rated a 2, but her deck can be an irritating pain to deal with. Her ship, which starts the game in play and has a hefty 15 HP, both plays an extra card at the end of her turn and shuffles the villain deck at the start, makes most deck control useless and destroying her cards a much less-permanent setback. Her minions are each unique, and therefore have fairly high HP and do solid damage and/or have fairly powerful effects. She has cards that draw a certain amount of minions from her deck or her trash; worse yet, unlike Gloomweaver or Akash'Bhuta, whose cards say to reveal (H) cards and play whatever minions you find, La Capitan's cards instead have you search until you find H-2 or H-1 minions so you're all but guaranteed to have several come out unless you're lucky enough to get the trash search while they're all in her deck or vice versa. She has another card that can bring the ship back out of the trash. She has an Ongoing card that does revenge damage to every hero target when one of her minions goes down. Her card says that any time the villains destroy a hero card, it goes under her, making the heroes' trash searches next to useless and allowing her to eventually flip and shrug off attacks while healing herself and her crew. The combination of these means without both good deck control and enough damage to deal with her ship quickly, it's very easy to simply be swarmed by her goons within a couple turns and lacking key Ongoing or Equipment cards to deal with her. The Ultimate Collector's reference upped her difficulty to 3 to reflect this.
  • Infinitor, especially on Advanced, where he can play his entire deck in one turn and gives it all either damage resistance or a damage boost. This is especially nasty given the existence of Ocular Swarm, an obnoxious little creature that plays from the top of the deck and damages all the heroes whenever one of his Manifestations is destroyed — including Ocular Swarm.
  • In team mode, Hammer and Anvil are obnoxious as hell. They're tanky for team mode villains, with 35 health between them — but they also have solid damage output, Hammer can't be brought down while Anvil is still active, and some of their Position cards provide them and sometimes all the villains with nasty buffs. And just for more fun, Position cards are neither targets nor Ongoings, making them almost impossible to remove.
• That One Level:
  • As environments go, Rook City is by far the least friendly to the heroes. Several cards buff the villains' damage and defenses or give the villains extra card plays. If you don't have environment destruction, you have to tolerate extra card plays for the environment or villain. Toxic Sludge only hurts things with more than five hitpoints and hurts those with more than ten more, meaning that it won't affect many minions and will never kill them for the heroes, though it *does* have a rider that can help heroes get the rest of the city back under control. There are only three cards that don't necessarily make things harder for the heroes: Falling Gargoyle, which deals irreducible damage to the lowest HP target (usually a Minion), and Tony Taurus and Dr. Tremata, who scry the villain and environment decks, respectively, while being immune to hero damage... and then get punched by the villain for a pile of damage unless a hero intercepts it for them, forcing the heroes to decide whether they want to keep these useful effects in play or eat a nasty hit. Rook City can turn even the easiest villain into a nightmare and offers little to compensate the heroes in return.
  • While not nearly on the same scale as Rook City, Megalopolis can be a pain in its own way, with cards that prevent playing cards, drawing cards, or using powers, and Cramped Quarters Combat changes all damage to Melee, a pain when you're playing a hero dependent on a damage type (like Absolute Zero or The Wraith) or up against enemies immune to it (Advanced Gloomweaver, Shu of the Ennead, Voss's ships).
  • The Ruins of Atlantis falls under this mainly for one card: The Pillars of Hercules. While it has an upside for the heroes, adding an extra play, power, and draw, the downside far outweighs it, as it lets the villain deck play a card at the start of every turn. Even if you decide to skip a turn to destroy it, it plays the villain card before the player can exercise that option, meaning you're getting at least two extra villain cards in play before you can do anything about it.
  • The Freedom Tower, ironically, is one of the nastier places to play. A lot of room cards give the heroes slightly useful benefits, but just as many are annoying or harmful, and the multiple Forced Entry Point cards each give all villains a +1 to damage, and stop the effects of one of the room cards in play. If you can't get control of the deck, it quickly becomes a massive problem. (This makes a kind of narrative sense, since the longer a brawl goes on in the heroes' headquarters itself, the worse things are probably going for them.)
  • Mordengrad, as fits Baron Blade's home turf, is notably hostile: most of the cards in it attack you, and some of them give the villain free plays when they die.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Metafiction example. Part of the downfall of the Vertex universe was that its increasingly dark storytelling, with the heroes turning into villains, becoming antiheroes and/or dying, began to turn off readers — not helped by the glut of comics produced during the early popular period.

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