Tabletop Game / Sentinels of the Multiverse

Play, Power, Draw^note Clockwise from bottom: Wraith, Tachyon, Absolute Zero, Baron Blade, and Bunker Center: Legacy

Sentinels of the Multiverse, according to its rulebook, is the World's Greatest Cooperative, Comic-Book Based, Fixed-Deck Card Game. Created in 2011 by Christopher Badell, Paul Bender, and Adam Rebottaro, under the moniker of Greater Than Games, Sentinels pits three to five heroes—each represented by a unique deck of cards—against one of several varied and interesting villains, each represented by their own unique deck. One of several environments (also represented by a deck of cards) plays cards throughout the fight, hindering or helping both sides of the battle and creating a dynamic flow to the game.

The variety of the villains and environments are not simply alternate skins; each villain and environment deck has its own unique mechanics, and the villains' character and rules cards are double-sided, representing multiple phases of the fight. Each of them has a unique "flipping" mechanic (a trigger that makes them flip to the opposite side of their card) and drastically different effects based off of which side they are on. They also have an optional, advanced rule on each side that further empowers them and complicates victory for the heroes.

The game has a huge roster. Visit the (currently in progress) Character sheet for more information on the cast.

A digital version of the base card game was released in December 2014, with each expansion being released as DLC afterwards.

A tactical combat game Sentinel Tactics: The Flame of Freedom was funded through Kickstarter and released in 2014. Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game was also funded through Kickstarter for 2020. In addition, a video game based on the franchise (not to be confused with the digital adaption of the card game) called Sentinels of Freedom was funded on Kickstarter for PC, Switch, PS4, and XBox. As of this writing, only the PC and Switch versions have come out.

A revised version of Sentinels titled 'Definitive Edition' with new art, re-balanced mechanics, and new cards is currently in development with Kickstarter pre-orders becoming available on March 30, 2021 and the commercial release being slated for August 5th, 2021. The first expansion for this version, titled 'Rook City Renegades', successfully funded on Kickstarter on March 31st, 2022.

An official crossover with Mutants & Masterminds called Sentinels of Earth-Prime also exists.

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Provides examples of:

A-D

• Achievements in Ignorance: A meta example: Santa Guise's variant is incredibly easy to unlock by accident in the digital version, but the official community game surrounding the unlocks also requires as one of the rules figuring out what the specific unlock conditions are, and it took more than six months to accomplish that part.
  • As a more story oriented example, due to the nature of his powers, Setback tends to do this, as implied by the flavor text.
• Actually Four Mooks: Some of the minion and environment cards represent groups — the Blade Battalion and Raptor Pack, for instance, show several members of the group on the card art. Many of them deal damage (or other affects) based on how many hit points they have left to represent how many of their numbers are left. Implied in the case of Grand Warlord Voss's minions — while there's only one shown on each card, the fact that only ten are needed to overrun the world indicates they represent larger groups of his army.
• Adaptation Expansion: Or clarification. With the addition of nemesis dialog and the expanded or new bios for variant heroes in the video game version, more tidbits about the universe, the relationships between the heroes and villains and their personalities came to light than had been previously available:
  • The Freedom Six Wraith's art caused a lot of speculation in the fandom as to why she had The Operative's weapons; her video game bio and dialog with Iron Legacy clarified that she had in fact killed The Operative and The Chairman and taken their place.
  • While the familial relationship between Tachyon and her nemesis The Matriarch had been known via Word of God for some time, their nemesis dialog is the first place it was confirmed within the game itself that they were cousins.
  • The video game's bios also confirmed that Freedom 6 Unity was a separate entity from the original Unity, who died of her wounds from Iron Legacy's attack in that timeline, while the original promo bio left it ambiguous.
• The Adjectival Superhero: A few of the heroes or their variants, such as the Indestructible Bunker, the Savage Haka, and the Super-Scientific Tachyon.
• An Adventurer Is You: Since the game is built around team gameplay, these archetypes come up frequently, though most characters fit into two or even three:
  • Tank: Legacy, Haka, Bunker, The Scholar, Void Guard Mainstay and Rhino Naturalist, though anyone with an Armor or self-healing ability will do in a pinch, and Visionary and NightMist can take up the role when playing the cards that grant them invulnerability.
  • Healer: Legacy (1940's), Argent Adept, The Scholar, Tempest, Void Guard Doctor Medico.
  • DPS: Ra, Haka, Fanatic, Chrono-Ranger, Void Guard Idealest.
  • Nuker: Tachyon, Bunker, Absolute Zero, Expatriette, Mr. Fixer, NightMist, and Unity (all of whom require some time to get out combinations of cards which then trigger to deal big damage.)
  • Buffer: Legacy, Argent Adept, Captain Cosmic.
  • Pet Master: Unity, Captain Cosmic, Luminary, Akash'Thriya.
  • Crowd Control: Tempest, Visionary.
  • Jack of All Trades: Wraith, Mr. Fixer, Omnitron-X, The Sentinels, Guise, Sky-Scraper, Tempest, NightMist.
• The Alcatraz: The Block, a special prison operated by F.I.L.T.E.R. that is located in its own pocket dimension and filled with superpowered criminals.
• All for Nothing: Downplayed. The heroes Visionary and Omnitron-X supposedly travel back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong (saving her younger self from being Strapped to an Operating Table for Visionary, and destroying his past selves before they could do too much damage for Omnitron-X). Unfortunately, it turns out that neither of them actually traveled back in time, but instead to another reality (that reality being the timeline the game takes place in also known as the "Prime Timeline") meaning that they didn't change the future at all. On the other hand, they managed to do quite a bit of good in the prime timeline so it wasn't entirely for nothing.
• All There in the Manual: There's a rather extensive lore to the game for those who are interested, but it has little effect on the game itself. Most of it can be found in the creators' podcast, The Letters Page.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The Freedom Tower environment, which involves the villains raiding the Freedom Five's own headquarters and results in battles in various rooms throughout the building.
• Alternate Reality Game: Had one leading up to the reveal of the OblivAeon expansion. The game's wiki has a summary of it.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Environments often don't discriminate between hero and non-hero targets, and thus can take out villainous cards. The Raging T. Rex attacks the target with the second highest HP, which is usually a Hero target, but later in the game, or against villains like the Ennead, it will do the heroes a favor. Cards like the Kraken's Tentacle or the Raptor Pack will instead target the lowest-HP target, which is usually a minion. With Unforgiving Wasteland (exiles cards from the game) out, you can even get Baron Blade prevented from flipping because a chupacabra ate him.
• Alien Invasion: Grand Warlord Voss is leading one. Should he have 10 minions out when he starts his turn, it's successful.
• The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: OblivAeon's invasion brings about at least a Hazy-Feel Turn for a lot of villians, with Baron Blade, the Ennead, Citizen Dawn, Infinitor, Kaarga and La Captina all joining the forces of good. The Ennead, Infinitor and La Captina even sacrifice themselves! Subverted with Voss, who appears to be helping the heroes but is actually just planning to steal OblivAeon's power for himself.
• Apocalypse How: Multiversal and apparently Physical Annihilation. The coming of OblivAeon has been foreshadowed and referenced, particularly in Sentinels Tactics, which takes place after the event, as an event where the multiverse comes crashing together. In her Tactics bio, it's mentioned Visionary can no longer access alternate timelines, and when asked about the game titles, the game's writers have said there's a reason Tactics doesn't have "Multiverse" in the title. The OblivAeon expansion has finally explained: the heroes must battle to prevent the destruction of all realities, but OblivAeon is responsible for any ability to travel between times and universes, so his defeat means all timelines and universes will become cut off from one another. In some cases, heroes even end up stranded in a world that's not their own.
• Arch-Enemy: Each hero shares a symbol on their card with a specific villain that is marked as their archnemesis. This means that all damage inflicted by cards that share this symbol with their target is increased by one. In some cases this is detrimental to the hero (e.g. Legacy, who doesn't have much in the way of damage vs. Baron Blade, or Unity, whose damage is mostly minion-based, vs. Iron Legacy, whose bulk damage doesn't even let Unity keep her golems out) and in others it results in a mutual barrage of destruction (e.g. Ra and the Ennead). In still others it doesn't have much of an effect either way (e.g. Akash'Bhuta and Argent Adept, neither of whom has a great deal of personal damage output: Akash'Bhuta relies mostly upon her Limbs to deal damage, especially if Entomb can be dealt with, while Argent Adept's damage dealing is incredibly weak and he relies mostly upon his team).
  • In Vengeance, some of the nemeses have extra effects should their hero be active. (Such as The Hippo redirecting all damage Friction would take to himself, but only if his nemesis Haka is active.)
  • Also, The Ennead share symbols, as do The Chairman and The Operative. This means if you can get them to attack each other, such as with one of the effects under Attack Deflector, they do extra damage to each other.
  • Averted with the villain Greazer Clutch, who is Only in It for the Money. His archnemesis is "the hero with the highest starting HP". This can be exploited to a degree depending on team composition: for example, if the highest-HP hero target is Setback and the villain team contains both Greazer and Plague Rat (Whose nemesis is Setback), Greazer and Plague Rat will do extra damage to each other whenever they hit each other - and, since Plague Rat deals damage to all targets, including ones on his own side, and Greazer deals backlash damage whenever someone musses his hair, they deal a great deal of damage to each other.
• Arc Fatigue: In-Universe, sort of. The Letters Page reveals that the OblivAeon Crisis Crossover comes right on the heels of the already-lengthy and complicated Skinwalker Gloomweaver event.
• Arc Number: Five comes up a lot. The main superteams all have five core members (the Freedom Five are self-explanatory, there are five Prime Wardens, and a total of five people are in the Dark Watch, although Nightmist and Harpy don't have much overlap; the big exception are the Sentinels/Void Guard, with four). The game is designed for a maximum of five hero decks, and, in team villain mode, five villain decks as well. Most actual decks have a multiple of five cards in them (40 for heroes, 25 for villains, 20 for team villains and 15 for environments). OblivAeon has ten Scions, and five of them have unique shields.
• Arc Welding: Invoked by the writers. In the Letters Page podcast, the writers describe the publishing history of the Freedom Five as being originally a series of Monster of the Week one-shots where they were fighting robots or aliens each week. A later reboot took all those robots and retconned them as being Omnitron's drones, and took those aliens and retooled them as Voss's Gene-Bound legions.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Irreducible damage ignores any damage reduction effects, whether the effect is on the attacker or the target. The main sources of this damage are certain heroic or villainous Ongoing cards — like one of Mr. Fixer's stances or Progeny's ongoings; equipment cards — Chrono-Ranger and Omnitron-X each have equipment that does irreducible damage; one-shots like Parse's Between the Lines; or Advanced rules for some villains, like Iron Legacy.
• Army of The Ages: Not quite an army, but La Capitan's pirate crew includes a Viking, a Rōnin, an acrobat, a flying ace from either WWI or WWII, a Cavaliere from medieval spain, and French Musketeer.
• Art Evolution: The art started off pretty good already but got even better with every expansion. For a particularly good example, look at Young Legacy's original card art◊ versus her Anniversary Foil card art◊.
• Art Shift:
  • The Enclave of the Endlings takes its style from old sci-fi comics and the stylings of Jack Kirby, to whom the expansion the cards come in is dedicated.
  • Guise has this on a few of his cards, portraying him as a Rob Liefeld style musclebound hero, and as a super-deformed anime character. In his case, it's justified because he's a shapeshifter.
  • The Rook City art is deliberately darker and more "realistic," even including a lot of blood on many of the characters.
  • Gloomweaver's Strength of the Grave card is drawn in the style of Hellboy.
  • The Operative's incapacitated art is drawn in the style of Sin City
  • The "Xtreme" Prime Wardens are drawn like over the top Antiheroes from the early 90s.
  • Taken to the Logical Extreme with Definitive Edition, which sees all the card art updated to be in different styles depending on the era the "panel" is from. For instance, the art on Legacy's "Danger Sense" card in the Enhanced Edition shows the current Legacy in the "modern" art style, but in the Definitive Edition will instead have the Golden Age Legacy, in Golden Age art style.
• Attack Deflector: Many of the characters have cards that let them redirect damage they would have taken to another target. Some of them only work on damage above a certain threshold, others below. Iron Legacy's Superhuman Reflection, Kismet's Inexplicable Obstruction, Mr. Fixer's Driving Mantis Style, NightMist's Amulet of the Elder Gods, The Sentinels Writhe's Caliginous Form, and Tachyon's Synaptic Interruption all have the characters redirect the damage to either a target of their choosing or an enemy target. Unity's Stealth Bot, The Scholar's Alchemical Redirection and Wraith's Smoke Bombs redirect damage from hero targets to another hero target for tanking purposes, while Sky Scraper's Thoraxian Monolith redirects damage from other hero targets to herself for the same.
• Bad Future:
  • The Shattered Timelines expansion details a couple, such as the Freedom Six timeline where Young Legacy dies, turning Legacy into a Knight Templar, "Iron Legacy", who takes over the world and rules it with an iron fist. Also referenced in one of Visionary's cards, in which she has a vision of the heroes defeated and shackled by Voss's forces. This is given a subtle nod in the character art in the video game — normally, nearly all the heroes are smiling in their portraits. The Freedom 6 variants, however, are all wearing variations on the theme of scowl.
  • The "Vertex" timeline, associated with the now-discontinued Tactics games, is this compared to the "Sentinel Comics" post-OblivAeon timeline associate with the role-playing game. Rook City is absolutely trashed; the populace has become suspicious of heroes and is trying to regulate them; many villains get horrifying upgrades in power level (including some already high-level-threat villains becoming even higher-level threats); and many heroes end up dead, making self-destructive choices, becoming darker and more anti-heroic, or even full on turning into villains themselves.
• Bat Family Crossover: Word of God is that the game represents these. For instance, the Wraith has repeatedly fought and defeated Spite in her solo adventures, but the in-game battle against him represents a larger confrontation where she needs to call in help to take him down.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Singular Entities and Prime Aspects are beings with cosmic levels of power who are devoted to a single concept, such as chaos, entropy, and progress, to name a few. As such, they tend to define "good" as anything that promotes and supports their chosen concept and "evil" as anything that removes or opposes it. Sometimes these concepts overlap with what mortals would consider "good" or "evil", such as Wellspring creating the Legacy line in the name of Progress and OblivAeon wanting to destroy everything in the name of entropy, but it's only ever a coincidence, and even "good" entities are generally still creepy and eldritch.
• Boss Game: The game is always a battle between a team of heroes and a powerful villain. With few exceptions, the heroes' sole win condition is to incapacitate that one being. Many of the bosses have a substantial number of minions that they can deploy: Baron Blade, The Organization, Grand Warlord Voss, and the Matriarch are the biggest offenders.
  • The two primary exceptions are The Dreamer and the Tormented Ally variation of Infinitor. Both of these are rescue missions, where your goal is to destroy enough of the manifestations while preventing the Dreamer or Infinitor from dying until you save them.
• Boss Rush: One challenge on the game's wiki for Spite, Agent of Gloom doesn't make him any harder — instead, it makes it so that when he's defeated, the players immediately set up a game against Skinwalker Gloomweaver without a chance to change heroes, reset or heal. That said, they do get to keep out any cards they had in play against Spite, which softens the blow of a difficult task.
• Boisterous Bruiser: On the hero side we have Haka, on the villain side we have Kaargra Warfang.
• Cast from Hit Points: Comes in two flavors:
  • Some hero Ongoing cards, like Solar Flare or Pushing the Limits, have maintenance costs, where the hero must do themselves damage to keep the card out and working. While the damage can be reduced, they must do at least 1 point of damage, or else the card is destroyed.
  • Other hero cards and abilities, like Nightmist's spells or Golem Unity's base power, have activation costs, where they take damage before the effect happens. With these, though, Damage Reduction or immunity effects can let you avoid the damage entirely while still getting the benefit.
  • On the villains' side, Citizen Dawn has Channel the Eclipse, which lets her play an extra card at the start of her turn, but deals her cold damage at the end of it. Unlike the heroes' maintenance costs, it's not destroyed if she somehow avoids the damage.
• Catastrophic Countdown: A couple villains (and two of the environments) feature this as their main threat to the heroes. Of course, each of them is a completely different mechanic to fit the theme of the fight.
  • Baron Blade wins if he starts his turn with 15 cards in his trash on his front side, representing that his Terra-Lunar Impulsion Beam is fully charged and has pulled the moon into the Earth.
  • Voss wins if he starts his turn with 10 minions in play, representing his forces overrunning the planet.
  • Deadline wins if he removes all environment cards from the game, representing him damaging Earth so much it's sent back to the dark ages.
  • OblivAeon has a couple of these. One counts down on each of his turns, and when it hits 0, he removes an environment from play. He has another pool that when it reaches 12 tokens, he removes an environment from play. The number of environments left in the game — 5 to start — also represents a countdown; if he removes four of them from the game, he has destroyed the multiverse and the heroes lose.
  • On the environment side, Wagner Mars Base has a self-destruct and Silver Gulch has a card that traps the heroes in the past if the environment's trash is empty.
• Cardboard Prison: The Block is not particularly good at containing supervillains, with the environment consisting almost entirely of escaped criminals and prison riots (with a few guard cards mixed in).
• Central Theme: Each expansion has one:
  • Base Game: Comic Book super hero team
  • Rook City: Darker and Edgier
  • Infernal Relics: Supernatural
  • Shattered Timelines: Time Travel
  • Vengeance: Revenge
  • Wrath of the Cosmos: Space.
  • Villains of the Multiverse: Even more revenge
  • OblivAeon: Enemy Mine and Heel–Face Turn
  • Definitive Edition: Comic book super hero team but refined.
  • Rook City Renegades: Darker and Edgier but refined.
  • Disparation: Alternate Universes
• Challenge Run: Each Villain card has an "Advanced" setting that tweaks their rules to make things harder on the heroes. Among the effects are increasing the amount of damage villain cards do, reducing how much damage they take, and speeding up the villain's Non-Standard Game Over. The game's wiki and the video game also include other challenges, such as immediately setting up Skinwalker Gloomweaver after beating Spite, Agent of Gloom, starting Akash'bhuta with more of her targets out or increasing all the damage The Dreamer takes to the point of being a One-Hit Kill. Doing both Advanced and Challenge rules in the video game is dubbed Ultimate mode.
• Clothing Damage: In the digital version the heroes get new portraits when they go below 10HP and again when they're incapped, with them looking worse and worse for wear each time, including lots of ripped and ruined uniforms. The male characters tend to suffer more extensive clothing damage than the female ones: Chrono-Ranger actually ends up shirtless.
• Company Cross References: The Nexus of the Void Environment is also known as Spirit Island.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu:
  • Inverted, in that it's applied to the heroes by way of Level Scaling mentioned below. Grand Warlord Voss, for instance, starts with a number of minions equal to the number of heroes, and when he goes into combat himself, his damage output is H-1 and H-2. So a full party of heroes is facing five mooks just to start with, and taking 4 and 3 damage against the boss himself — and god help the players who go in with five. But the minimum party would only start off against three mooks, and only take 2 and 1 damage from Voss himself when those mooks go down.
  • Also played straight when the heroes are incapacitated — each incapacitated hero has a power that in some way helps or supports whomever's left standing, sometimes letting them play cards or powers. This means the last hero standing can effectively have multiple turns, making him a One-Man Army, able to take down mooks by the truckload.
  • Played straight with some villains in the Vengeance/Villains expansions. Villains like Baron Blade, Plague Rat, and Ambuscade who can be fought as a single villain are suddenly less powerful now that they're teamed up with other villains. That being said, each of the recurring villains has a justification for why they are suddenly a lot weaker than their solo versions. Ambuscade is actually an illusion created by Glamour. La Capitan, a time traveller, is a much younger and less experienced version than the heroes are used to fighting. Miss Information and Baron Blade are no longer hiding behind schemes and trickery, but are fighting openly, with some newly-earned powers. (Although, Baron Blade was already a pushover, and the Vengeance version is arguably more dangerous than the original.) Plague Rat was captured, restrained, and experimented on by RevoCorp, so not only has his infectious bite been toned down, but his handlers keep him from being TOO deadly.
• Continuity Snarl: Unavoidable by the modular means the game is established. It is far from uncommon to see players choose the Bad Future versions of characters fighting alongside past incarnations to fight opponents in environments they really have no business in (just try and rationalize how in the hell Spite's victim cards make sense when playing in the barren, deserted Final Wasteland, what the Chairman's thugs are doing in the Ruins of Atlantis, or how The Matriarch got all those birds to the Wagner Base on Mars, for instance). This gets even funnier with the OblivAeon expansion, which includes five former villains as heroes, so now players can have the new heroes fighting their own past selves. Of course, the players will also only have a very vague sense of what happened where, as the events referenced in the cards' quotes were never published, so the players are free to Hand Wave it however they like. Word of God eventually confirmed that every game is canon within its own universe - and some pieces of the Multiverse are weirder than others.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The Sentinels franchise overall is more in Lovecraft Lite territory, but the Tactics/Vertex universe goes straight into this, especially by the time Prime War comes along. One, everyone both hero and villain keeps being driven mad and into bad decisions by both their own powers and the lure of limitless cosmic power in the form of OblivAeon Shards. Two, the Vertex universe is threatened and eventually destroyed by the "Mist Storm" which is a mindless cloud of destructive energy formed by the aftereffects of Nightmist's interdimensional portals to gain aid during the OblivAeon fight combining with the forces in the destroyed Nexus of the Void. The heroes are sometimes seen trying to rescue people from it, but in the end they can do nothing to stop it and it just relentlessly consumes everything. Three, those few people who are rescued from the destroyed universe, are only rescued so they can serve as pawns in a war of cosmic beings known as Prime Aspects to determine which abstract concepts deserve to rule the outer realms of existence, with little care for the actual desires or morals of any mortals thus "conscripted". All in all it's pretty bleak and dripping in heaps of cosmic nihilism and Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Counter-Attack: Several cards enable this.
  • Wraith's Combat Stance and Ra's Flame Barrier automatically attack the first card to damage each of them a turn...Which can lead to the hilarious situation in which one of them hurts themselves, and if that's the first damage they took that turn, the cards trigger and make them hit themselves.
  • One of Absolute Zero's modules makes him do cold damage whenever he takes fire damage; another lets him do a single attack whose power is based on how much fire damage he's taken since his last turn.
  • One of Baron Blade's cards damages the first hero to attack him in a given turn. His hero deck as Luminary has a device that punishes villains for hitting his devices.
  • One of the things that make The Chairman and The Matriarch such high level foes is their ability to pull this consistently. Defeating any of The Chairman's mooks results in The Operative attacking the hero with the highest HP. The Matriarch either does damage to or destroys an Ongoing or Equipment card of the hero with the highest HP whenever one of her numerous-but-fragile birds is taken down. Attacking either group without some kind of damage reduction is a quick way to take a pounding and can make automatic-damage ongoing cards (such as Visionary's Demoralization, which automatically damages every enemy at the start of her turn) into more of a liability than an asset.
• Creepy Child: The Dreamer, who is an alternate timeline version of the Visionary. Unlike other villains, the goal with the Dreamer is to not hurt her, as she is an innocent child. Instead the goal is to defeat the psychic apparitions she unintentionally brings into the world.
• Crisis Crossover: The OblivAeon event, which not only sees villains turn hero (permanently or otherwise), but includes heroes from alternate universes rushing to help fight in the grand finale.
  • The addition of Sentinels of Earth-Prime is this in a meta sense. Mixing and matching heroes, villains, and environments from the two sets is akin to the rare DC and Marvel team-up stories.
• Critical Status Buff: The primary mechanic of the RPG is the GYRO system (Green, Yellow, Red, Out) which functions like this. Each character has three zones, the Green Zone, the Yellow Zone, and the Red Zone and progress through these zones the more damage they take, unlocking more attacks as they do so.
• Damage Reduction: Both hero and villain decks feature damage reduction of one kind or another. Hero damage reduction usually applies to damage to the hero whose card it was, though some support heroes, like the Argent Adept, can spread that protection around. On the villains' side, their cards much more often provide some kind of damage reduction to either the whole villain team, or a group within the villain team. The biggest is Grand Warlord Voss's innate effect, where for each of his minions in play, he reduces all damage to himself by two, making him effectively invincible if more than two or three are out.
• Damage Typing: Each card that deals damage specifies a damage type, whether as mundane as projectile and melee damage or as exotic as radiant and infernal. In approximately 75% of cases, the outcome of combat is the same regardless of damage type, but some cards can increase, decrease, or completely prevent certain types of damage. For instance, Legacy can use the power printed on Next Evolution to briefly become immune to one damage type of the player's choice, while The Wraith's Targeting Computer increases the Projectile damage she deals, but not her melee damage.
• The Dark Age Of Comic Books: Parodied with the "Xtreme" universe, which started in-universe as a semi-serious set of alternate universe comics and gradually mutated into an hilariously over-the-top piss-take of comics in the 90's. That said, Adam and Christopher actually have a fair bit of nostalgia for the comics of the 90's, being ninties kids and having collected comics in that era, so the mockery is a bit more affectionate than it usually is.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • The Rook City expansion. Based on the more gritty, realistic side of comic books, it features an industrial complex and crime-riddled city as environments, a gun-toting one-woman-army and a Technical Pacifist Old Master Auto Mechanic for heroes, against such villains as a Vampiric Draining, drug-dependent serial killer, a Corrupt Corporate Executive crime boss, his Dragon, a mutated, man-eating rat-man that lives in the sewers, and an emo poet girl who can control birds.
  • In the game's metafictional plot, the Tactics timeline was created because some of the Sentinel Comics writers felt the "main" timeline (what is the RPG timeline in real life) had gotten too lighthearted, and so they wanted to do stories where things went in a more grimdark and bleak direction.
  • Mercilessly mocked in (where else?) Guise's card Gritty Reboot. It has all the typical Darker and Edgier tropes (dead family, hardboiled detective and in the online version, Guise saying "Everyone I know is dead!") but it's Guise.
• Darkest Hour: When they're reduced to zero HP, hero cards flip to their incapacitated side, which shows the lowest point of their heroic career. While it's often a literal defeat, others have been more abstract— Dark Watch Expatriette's is Setback being magically turned against her, Setback's own is abandoning his costume in a dumpster, convinced he can't really help anyone, Fanatic's is her being betrayed by her mentor, and Wraith's is failing to save her friends from Spite.
• The Day the Music Lied: In the digital version when fighting the Challenge Mode version of Agent of Gloom Spite, the win screen shows Donovan's grave and plays the victory music as usual... only to then have the music peter out as the grave splits with a loud CRACK and Gloomweaver appears having taken over Donovan's warped and reanimated body. The game then returns back to the play screen as you're now fighting Skinwalker Gloomweaver.
• Deader than Dead: The "Unforgiving Wasteland" card in the Final Wasteland environment makes it so that if a target is destroyed by damage from the environment, it isn't just put into the trash but removed from the game entirely. And yes, this applies to hero character cards.
  • Oblivaeon himself can do much worse. If the countdown token reaches 0, he destroys an environment and removes the it from the game. In phase 3 however, he not only erases the hero with the lowest HP, but also their rewards and incapacitated heroes.
• Death Is Cheap: Played with. There are several cases where a character "dies" in one timeline but is said to be replaced by someone from another timeline or it turns out to be a Disney Death. But actual real resurrection is not only extremely rare, but outright stated to be horrible, often undesired by the person in question, and something that fundamentally changes them.
  • When Fixer is brought back to life he ends up full of rage both because he wanted to be allowed to rest and because the manner of his resurrection means he's essentially a ghost inhabiting his own zombie body. It takes a long time and a god-tier magic ritual before he's anything close to his normal self again.
  • When Fanatic is brought back to life as a child it turns out that the child wasn't even actually brought back to life at all, and she's actually a strange spirit being just now permanently inhabiting that child's body.
  • When Spite is brought back to life, it's at the behest of a demon god which turns him into a warped zombie who must kill a sufficient amount of people or become a permanent vessel for the demon god in question, and Spite is expressly a sadist. The creators note: "Coming back from the dead is always a horrible time, but Spite was fine with it because he's into horrible times."
  • Haka's ability to come back to life any time he's mortally wounded comes at the price of every other Haka in the multiverse aside from one gender-swapped double, since all of those Hakas have had their lives funneled into these two last remaining Hakas.
  • While Biomancer never actually dies per se, he can heal any damage or wearing out that would lead to him dying by replacing his parts from the flesh of other people's bodies. But this has over the centuries left him losing his humanity both in terms of form and morality.
• Death or Glory Attack:
  • Several characters have ways to deal huge amounts of damage at the expense of their equipment. Omnitron-X and The Wraith, for instance, have one-shot cards that let them destroy all their equipment cards to do massive damage, leaving them extremely vulnerable and limited in their actions afterward. Haka has a card that lets him discard as many cards as he wants in one turn to boost his next attack — which can make for a hell of a punch, but could also leave him with nothing in his hand. Interestingly, he has another card that applies the same kind of boost to defense, and another that lets him heal one HP for every card he discards.
  • Ra's final variant, Ra: Setting Sun, takes this and runs with it, fitting as it depicts his final, suicidal attack on OblivAeon. His power, "Blaze of Glory," does 2 irreducible damage to every non-hero target, and to Ra himself, destroys one of his Ongoing cards and removes four of his cards from the game. His incapacitated powers are similarly themed — one lets another hero do a 10 irreducible HP attack, while another destroys every non-hero target at 4 HP or below; either one also removes Ra from the game entirely.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Mr. Fixer started off life in comics as a hero named Black Fist, a funky kung-fu master who was an intentional attempt to mimic Blacksploitation characters of the era.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Some of the villains include an extra-dimensional demon, an immortal nature spirit, a near omnipotent trickster, and of course, the omnicidal cosmic entity OblivAeon. It's possible to beat them with purely mundane heroes like Bunker, Expatriette, and the Wraith. Depending on the cards used, the punching can be quite literal.
  • In Megalopolis, the police deal a target 1 projectile damage at the end of each environment turn. So they can - in theory - take out Spite or Gloomweaver or Apostate with a handgun, or with their bare hands if Cramped Quarters Combat is in play.
  • This can be inverted with powerful heroes like Haka, Legacy, or Captain Cosmic being taken out by low level thugs.
• Difficulty Levels: Comes in three varieties:
  • Each hero is rated 1-3 in terms of complexity or difficulty to use them effectively. A 1-complexity hero (like Haka or Legacy) tends to have very straightforward powers and cards which each have a direct use, meaning you can do something constructive each turn. A 2-complexity (Bunker, Visionary) hero tends to require a little more set-up with powers that are more supplemental than direct action, but the set-ups are relatively simple, meaning you might need to play a card to do something constructive, but that card is still pretty straightfoward. Heroes rated at 3-complexity (like Absolute Zero or the Argent Adept) have more complicated set-ups and powers that do nothing on their own or even harm the hero themselves, meaning they need two or more different cards out before they can really contribute to the team — but once they are set up, they can do some serious damage.
  • Villains are rated in difficulty on a 4-point scale. Low-level villains tend to have single-effect cards, or cards that the players can neutralize before they come into full effect; mid-level villains have more minions who do stronger attacks, and have stronger ongoing effects such as damage reduction and buffs; the highest-level villains tend to have a lot of minions, play extra cards over the course of their turns and can attack or disrupt the players when they try to take out those minions, forcing them to strategize and pick when they want to attack — or they simply do hideous amounts of damage, like Iron Legacy.
  • A sort of 'hidden' difficulty modifier is in the environments. Some environments are fairly neutral and hit both heroes and villains in equal measure (Damage in the Tomb of Anubis tends to hit everyone, regardless of affiliation); others tilt in favor of the heroes (Insula Primalis, for instance, whose raptors attack the lowest-HP target, which tend to be minions, and whose damage boosts tend to help the players more than the villains). Still other environments, like Rook City and Megalopolis, seriously hinder the heroes, preventing them from playing cards or using powers, and buffing villains while exacting stiff penalties to remove the effects. The videogame eventually started sorting environments by difficulty.
• Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: There's an adaptation consisting of a dedicated application for the game.
• Discard and Draw:
  • Several of the decks are built with different styles, modes, or equipment that can't be played with others, evoking this trope — each of Bunker's different modes destroys the others when it enters play, Mr. Fixer can only use one style and weapon at a time, and the Naturalist switches animal forms. One environment card — Time Cataclysm's Fixed Point — lets players subvert this by making all cards indestructible, allowing for combos that are impossible otherwise, allowing for a Mr. Fixer with two styles or sets of tools out, or what has been called the Turducken Naturalist.
  • This is also the basic concept behind the "Variant" character cards for heroes and villains. While they use the same decks as the cards they can be used in place of, they have different hitpoints and base powers (in the case of heroes) or rules for interacting with their decks, in the case of villains. At its best, this system completely changes how some characters play: America's Newest Legacy is less of a buffing/support hero and more of a tanky damage dealer thanks to her base power (+1 to all hero damage vs. deal three energy damage to a target), while Dark Watch Mister Fixer goes from a support-oriented low damage dealer to a smashy hyper-carry that needs a team's support to operate most efficiently (Deal 1 damage vs. deal 3 damage, then destroy a hero ongoing or equipment card).
  • Completionist Guise lets you switch variants midgame.
• Dragon Their Feet: Possible with The Chairman and The Operative, since it's possible to take the Chairman down to 0 HP before The Operative, but the heroes can't win until they're both down for the count.

E-K

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Artwork on different cards will frequently feature characters from currently-unrelated expansions. Also, it's not uncommon for a hero or villain to share a nemesis icon with an unreleased deck. The Vengeance expansion, for instance, included mini-nemeses for all the pre-OblivAeon hero decks, including Captain Cosmic and Sky-Scraper, who didn't debut until the later Wrath of the Cosmos expansion.
  • Captain Cosmic is also shown on Argent Adept's Silver Shadow card, again well before his debut or even the reveal of his name.
  • Visionary's "Prophetic Vision" card from the core set shows Iron Legacy, who didn't appear as a villain until 3 expansions later in Shattered Timelines.
  • The Engine of War variant of Bunker, who is the villainous Fright Train who pulled a Heel–Face Turn in a Bad Future, was released at the time of the Shattered Timelines expansion, while Fright Train's villain deck came out later, as part of the Vengeance expansion.
• Eldritch Abomination: Several. Including but not limited to Gloomweaver (an evil demon who lives in an Acid-Trip Dimension and is trying to escape from that dimension in order to spread despair and misery across the mortal plane), Wager Master (a cosmic entity from before time that's obsessed with playing "games"), and OblivAeon (the result of two immensely powerful cosmic beings fighting and then one cosmic being swallowing the other, creating a being of pure entropy with a singleminded drive to wipe out the entire multiverse).
• Elite Mooks:
  • The Vengeful Five's decks feature nemeses of some heroes in the role of mooks. Most are much stronger than the minions in the other decks.
  • To a lesser extent with Citizen Dawn's Citizens of the Sun. Each is unique and they tend to have higher HP than the nameless, interchangeable mooks in other decks, and the ones who share a naming scheme support one another, making them an extra challenge when they can team up.
  • The Chairman's unique underbosses in his tiered mook system. The underbosses summon their own Thugs out of the trash, have much higher HP and can be brought back with Jailbreak. Also, the only way he flips is by putting underbosses in the trash.
• Emergency Weapon: Thematically. Every hero in the game has some method of doing damage, so even if only a support character is left standing, the heroes still have a chance of winning.
• Enemy Civil War: Played with for The Ennead and The Chairman and Operative. Because they share a Nemesis icon, their attacks do extra damage to each other if you can deflect them. Word of God is that The Ennead, despite being a team, don't actually get along with each other all that great. For extra fun, The Chairman automatically counter-attacks when he's hit, so if you deflect a strike from The Operative to him, he'll retaliate against her.
• Enemy Mine: The OblivAeon expansion sees five former villains joining the heroes to fight against the cosmic destruction being wrecked by the titular multiversal threat: Baron Blade as Luminary, La Capitan as La Comodora, Deadline as Lifeline, The Matriarch as The Harpy, and Akash'bhuta as Akash'thriya.
  • Other expansions feature Ambuscade becoming Stuntman, and Omnitron going from Villain, to Environment, to Hero.
• Energy Weapon:
  • Omnitron and Omnitron-X have quite a few of these.
  • Legacy's daughter adds a pair of eye beams to her family's superpowers.
  • Various iterations of Baron Blade have ray guns. His deck as Luminary mounts one in orbit.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Villain teams and their minions are quite open and inclusive. Citizen Dawn is the only one who openly discriminates, and it's less about skin color or gender and more about whether or not you have powers. She also doesn't care where you got them, only that you have them.
• Evil Counterpart: The Vengeful Five, the villainous team in the Vengeance expansion:
  • Baron Blade to Legacy: Blade has upgraded himself with a serum intended to replicate Legacy's powers, and his deck includes a lot of team buffs, like Legacy's does.
  • Ermine to The Wraith: A Badass Normal burglar, who specializes in shutting down hero equipment and ongoings, which is one of Wraith's major functions.
  • Friction to Tachyon: A speedster whose powers come from a suit meant to replicate Tachyon's, her deck is filled with dark mirrors of Tachyon's cards.
  • Fright Train to Bunker: A gigantic heavy hitter, just like Bunker.
  • Proletariat to Absolute Zero: Both essentially faceless in their costumes, with science-based powers. And while Absolute Zero has to live in a cryogenic chamber, Proletariat was cryogenicly frozen by the Soviets.
• Evil Twin: And good twins, and plain old bizarro twins, when the OblivAeon storyline brings in lots of alternate universe heroes. There's morality flips like Apostate taking Fanatic's place and good-aligned versions of Akash'Bhuta and Ermine, identity swaps like Setback as Legacy and Sky-Scraper as Tempest, gender flips like a female Baron Blade (who is also a good version of him to boot), power flips like a Legacy that has super-intelligence instead of super-strength, even nationality/race changes like a female Native American version of Chrono-Ranger.
  • On a more mundane level there's Biomancer's demented flesh creations that impersonate/replace existing people, usually for some nefarious purpose.
  • One of the Dreamer's most powerful manifestations is an evil version of Legacy
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Baron Blade, Akash'Bhuta, and Ambuscade all make a decision to put aside their vendettas against the heroes in order to fight against the Multiverse-ending threat of OblivAeon (no, we won't make the pun). Unfortunately, it doesn't last.
• Exact Words: In a meta sense. Many of the common strategies rely on the exact wordings of the cards allowing for the targets of effects to be different than the creators might have originally intended. Most of these have since been made into perfectly legal tactics as of the digital version, and a few others have come to light thanks to the digital version that weren't apparent before.
  • For instance, any card that allows a player to choose "a target" without specifying, including Absolute Zero's Isothermic Transducer, can be interpreted as including that character or other hero cards — meaning in AZ's case, he can target himself with the cold damage generated when he takes fire damage, and with the right equipment, heal himself to nullify the attack (with his Focused Apertures and/or Cryo Chamber in play along with his Modules, getting hit with a fire attack can lead to Zero's health actually going up). Similarly, Akash'Thriya's Thrashing Brambles power allows her to, after hitting the villains, trigger her seeds' on-death effects by attacking them.
  • Haka's Savage Mana uses its wording to become incredibly potent against minion-heavy decks. Savage Mana puts any card that Haka destroys underneath it (to charge him up for a massive attack later on), instead of the villain trash, which lets him "trap" villain cards and prevent them from being played from the trash. This makes him incredibly useful against decks where the villain can play destroyed minions from the trash, like Warlord Voss' dreaded Forced Deployment, Citizen Dawn's Return With The Dawn, or the Chairman's Prison Break. Its especially useful against Baron Blade before he flips, as it prevents Blade from dumping extra cards into his trash, which speeds up his Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Also important are the game's distinctions between "turn" and "round." A round is everyone getting a turn, starting with the villain, and ending with the environment, while a turn is any individual's turn. This distinction means that an ability that can kick in "every turn" can happen up to seven times in one round. Nightmist's Amulet of the Elder Gods, which lets her redirect the first damage she takes any turn at the cost of two cards, can be used to make her nigh untouchable. Fanatic's Divine Focus and Guise's Blatant Reference, similarly, lets them sacrifice a card every turn to do damage.
  • Savvy players can exploit Kaargra Warfang's Title deck thanks to this — instead of waiting for an enemy with Damage Reduction to come out so you can grab the Seeker title, there's nothing stopping one hero from whacking another to grab it. Likewise, Deathcaller can easily go to Captain Cosmic for killing his own constructs for other effects. This even happened in the comics; Tachyon's podcast episode mentions that she made an enemy of Tempest by turning on him in the Arena (non-lethally, of course) in order to impress the crowd and get the Colosseum to go away sooner.
  • Because Legacy's Take Down specifies "the end of your turn" (i.e. Legacy's turn), it has no downside when used out of the normal turn sequence - something like Parse's Syntactic Analysis or her Fugue State variant's power, for example, or a couple of the Argent Adept's songs. This can even be used to create an infinite loop: whenever Take Down expires, Visionary cycles it from the trash to the top of Legacy's deck with Mental Divergence, and then Omnitron-X uses its power to play the top card of Legacy's deck...
  • Normally heroes only get one power a turn, but even if they gain additional powers uses, a given card can only have its power used once a turn (that is, multiple power uses have to be "spent" on different cards). Ex-Patriette has her two signature pistols, Pride and Prejudice, which each have a power to shoot them... But Pride also says "if Prejudice is in play, you may use it's power now". This counts even if you already used Prejudice's power that turn, which means that if you have multiple power uses and shoot Prejudice first, following up with Pride will let you shoot Prejudice a second time, for free.
  • Mr. Fixer's "Overdrive" lets him use his base power twice in the turn it's played. This applies even if you don't have multiple power uses. Even better, if you use your single power use on a different power, it still applies, letting you follow up with two more uses of his base ability on top.
  • Damage a hero deals to themselves counts for effects that would trigger when a hero deals damage. This can be troublesome if you have damage buffing out (Legacy, for example) or backlash damage (Wounding Buffer, Ra's and Wraith's retributive damage cards), but can also cause some hilarious interactions:
    • Captain Cosmic zapping himself with Unflagging Animation will trigger Autonomous Blade if he has one out, and anything that would cause Mr Fixer to damage himself (Infection, Miss Information, incapacitated Vengeance Baron Blade) or another hero (Friendly Fire) will trigger Jack Handle's effect, preventing the damage and turning it into a hail of blows aimed at all the bad guy targets.
    • Similarly, villains hitting themselves will trigger effects based on that: if you have Chrono-Ranger's "The Ultimate Target" bounty (which lets Ranger use a power once per turn when a villain deals damage) on Akash'Bhuta in normal or advanced mode, Target will trigger whenever one of Akash'Bhuta's limbs is destroyed and forces Akash'Bhuta to damage herself.
    • Taken up to eleven when Greazer Clutch and Plague Rat are in a villain team; Greazer punches anyone who attacks his hair, and the Rat has a card that hits all targets and then forces all targets hit to damage themselves. Plague Rat plays the card and hits Greazer's hair, so Greazer decks him, then the hair hits itself, so Greazer hits it, then because he just damaged his hair, he punches himself, then Plague Rat hits Greazer who hits himself again.
  • Judge Mental boosts all psychic damage. Proletariat deals psychic damage to himself for having clones out. If the two are out simultaneously Proletariat can kill himself in a few turns.
  • There's a handful of deck interactions that have very interesting implications with these kinds of rules.
    • All three Omnitron decks — the villain Omnitron, the hero Omnitron-X, and the environment Omnitron-IV — have cards with the keyword "Component," and cards that affect other cards with that keyword. Omnitron-X, for instance, has one attack card that does damage based on how many Component cards he destroys, but doesn't specify they have to be his. This even extends to the character cards: Cosmic Omnitron, for example, flips from a card-playing form to a damage-dealing mode when there are no Components in play, which can be very inconvenient (or, in Challenge mode, disastrous - Challenge mode Cosmic Omnitron deals enormous amounts of damage when flipped, and can take a while to flip back because it starts out with more components in play) - but if one of the components from Omnitron-X or Omnitron-IV is present, it'll "count" and Cosmic Omnitron won't flip until such time as Omnitron-X loses the Component (which admittedly could be next turn, but small mercies...)
    • Because it specifies Relics are immune, Nightmist, Ra, and Apostate won't have all their cards wiped by Fanatic's End of Days or Apostate's Apocalypse. Argent Adept's instruments, however, will be destroyed because while they may be relics in the sense that they're old, they're not Relics with the keyword. La Capitan will lose most of her board, but not La Paradoja Magnifica, which is classed as a Relic.
    • Visionary's Decoy Projection has the keyword "Distortion," meaning it won't stay around long in the Realm of Discord, whose own Distortion cards all have text saying to destroy all other Distortions when they enter play.
    • Grand Warlord Voss wins if there are 10 or more Minion cards in play at the start of his turn, and his Damage Reduction is based on how many Minion cards are in play. Because the Mobile Defense Platform includes six Minion cards of its own, he is especially dangerous to fight there.
  • Thanks to the digital version, some interactions have come to light that might not have to players of the physical game.
    • Guise's "Uh, Yeah, I'm That Guy" copies all the Ongoing cards in the play area of a particular hero — what became clarified in the video game is that this includes the "When this card enters play," rider some cards have, such as the healing effect of "Inspiring Presence" or the damage on "Living Conflagration," making Guise an even better partner for the likes of Legacy or Ra. Unfortunately, it also includes damage riders and destruction riders, so copying Mr. Fixer while he has a style out will instantly destroy both cards, and stealing the Naturalist's current form destroys it from his own play area.
  • For a long time, Citizen Dawn was considered incredibly hard to defeat because putting five of her Citizens in the trash flipped her to an invincible side that kept dealing damage until H-1 Citizens were out. What a lot of players didn't realize was that Citizen Dawn's card specifies that she is also considered a Citizen, and they forgot to include Dawn in the Citizen count before flipping her back over. As a result players would spend several unnecessary turns taking damage from multiple targets while waiting for another Citizen to come out.
  • Most effects that work off Devices don't specify hero or villain ones, which usually works out really well for Luminary. Villain cards that buff devices, such as the advanced modes of Omnitron and team play Baron Blade, also buff Luminary's (turning Heroic Luminary into a ridiculous powerhouse, since it's almost impossile to destroy her stuff); Heroic Luminary counts heroic, villainous and environmental Devices for her Power, which can make team villain games extremely brutal (any game with Baron Blade and Friction is going to start with three devices out, maybe four, which means Heroic Luminary's lightning bolt is likely to start on par with some of the beefiest damage-dealing innate powers and then go up); Timely Disruption can be used to take out a villainous Baron Blade's devices; using Triple Cross to force Omnitron, which is itself a Device, to damage itself will also trigger some damage to it from Backlash Generator, because it's a non-hero card dealing damage to a Device; the Device Assembly Line in Mordengrad can give you free plays, and the Mobile Alert Platform stat boosts; and any destroyed Device, regardless of side, will trigger All According To Plan. The one major downside is that since Omnitron isn't defeated while there are Devices, Luminary's own gear can delay the end of the fight until you've gotten rid of it!
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Played for laughs in the OblivAeon Letters Page episode, where Christopher and Adam spend several minutes establishing the existence of a Telenovela universe, only for OblivAeon to wipe it out of existence.
  • Played much more seriously with the Iron Legacy timeline which is destroyed by La Comodora in the leadup to OblivAeon. At that point it was considered a mercy to destroy the timeline since basically everything was destroyed and almost everyone was dead and all that's left are the Wraith and Iron Legacy, fighting against the backdrop of a broken city. La Comodora even says that erasing a timeline is not something to be considered lightly.
• Expendable Clone: Played in two separate ways. Proletariat generates copies of himself each time he's struck, which don't last very long but share his same mind; he tends to use Zerg Rush tactics as a result. In a much darker sense, Miranda Fischer - better known as Idealist - was created as one of these, raised as her "mother's" daughter with the intention of being sacrificed to bring back her husband.
• Expy:
  • Every character and environment is an Expy to one or more existing Marvel, DC or other comic characters. Not that this is a bad thing. They are obvious expies, but then their backstory is changed enough that they manage to be unique characters while still being expies.
  • The three major superhero teams are also expies to major superhero teams in DC or Marvel.
    • The Freedom Five stand in for both the Justice League and the Avengers, as the world's premiere superhero team headed up by the the Superman/Captain America analog and involving expies of Batman, Flash and Iron Man/War Machine.
    • The Prime Wardens are the Defenders, with Virtuoso of the Void Argent Adept standing in for Sorcerer Supreme Dr. Strange^note both magically empowered mages and alliterative titles; The Savage Haka standing in for The Incredible Hulk^note gigantic bruisers with scholarly sides; Tempest for Namor^note both related to the sea, and the team's base is in Atlantis; Fanatic for Nighthawk^note flying, winged humanoids; and Captain Cosmic for the Silver Surfer^note cosmic heroes whose powers come from a world-destroying Big Bad.
    • The Darkwatch are a stand-in for a combination of the Marvel Knights and DC's Shadowpact. Mr. Fixer pulls double-duty as a Daredevil and Iron Fist stand-in, while Expatriette serves as the Punisher. Nightmist and The Harpy work the occult side of things as stand-ins for characters like the Ragman, Klarion the Witch Boy and the Warlock's Daughter.
• Fantastic Racism: Grand Warlord Voss thinks of other alien races and humans as inferior to Thorathians (his race) and many humans are racist towards alien characters, particularly the hero Tempest.
  • In a twist of irony, despite being created by writers in-universe as an analogue to the civil rights movement akin to the X-Men, Tempest is extremely racist towards Skyscraper. His prejudice is relatively justified as she is one of the aformentioned Thorathians, who destroyed his home planet, and he grows out or it eventually.
• Fictional Country: The country of Mordengrad, ruled over by Legacy's arch-enemy Baron Blade. It used to be a Soviet Bloc State before breaking away after the Baron killed a few Russian officials asking for weapons.
• Flyover Country: Played for Laughs. In the Disparation Dark Watch universe, Earth is this to the rest of the universe.
• Foregone Conclusion: According to the creators, Sentinels Tactics takes place a few years after the last expansion to Sentinels — meaning that we already know OblivAeon will be defeated and that the Freedom Five and other heroes survive the battle.
  • However, not all of them will survive the battle and the timeline is split in two so we have two forgone conclusions based on a few small differences.
• Foreshadowing: Hints about OblivAeon were in the game from the starter set, with things like Aeon Men appearing on hero cards, mentions of a cosmic entity involving itself in the description for Cosmic Omnitron, or Voss, in the design he used as the tenth Scion, showing up on a card in Wagner Mars Base. This would continue into hero, villain, and environment cards, and even expansion names; the Shattered Timelines expansion is named after something OblivAeon did as part of his Evil Plan, for example.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: Guise's cards will frequently instruct the player to do non-gameplay related things, like give high fives or yell "Woo!". In the video game version, he will point at your hand and try to tell you which card to play. And his Completionist variant allows the players to swap another hero card out for one of its variant cards mid-game, by virtue of Completionist Guise owning all Sentinels merchandise.
• Friendly Fireproof:
  • Averted for the heroes themselves, several of whom have one-shots that must hit heroes, like Haka's Rampage or Nightmist's Oblivion, and any card that does not specify what kind of target can also hit heroes.
  • Played straight with some environment cards that are friendly to the heroes — Rook City, in particular, has two helpful civilian cards that cannot be harmed by hero targets.
  • Averted with particular note to Setback, whose "Friendly Fire" card has him take able to take damage whenever a hero hits a non-hero target. This helps him acquire more tokens, which fuel his luck-based powers. The art for Expatriette's Shock Rounds even has him taking a hit from them in possibly the weirdest Meet Cute ever.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Guise and Setback are, generally-speaking, not very well-liked by the other superheroes, the former for being rather annoying (and stealing their equipment) and the latter because he causes bad luck to everyone around him. The sole exception with Setback is the other members of Dark watch, particularly Expatriette, and the Scholar seems to be fond of Guise.
  Letter: What do the Freedom Five think of Guise?
  Christopher: They try not to.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: There are some effects that work really well to get a theme across.
  • Harpy's deck uses counters to track whether her magic is more controlled (purple) or chaotic (green). Cards that represent more controlled use tend to flip green tokens to purple, while ones that represent letting the power off its chain or reaching beyond her limits tend to do the reverse. The clever bit is that her deck has a noticeable bias towards flipping purple, meaning that her standard character card (representing her during a period with little training) will struggle to maintain control...but her Dark Watch card, which is her after receiving some training from Nightmist, is much better at it due to having a base power that lets you choose which type of token to flip, as one would really expect now that she knows a bit more about what she's doing!
  • Greazer Clutch has attempted to catch both Legacy and Sky-Scraper before. His character card locks onto whoever has the highest HP, which is likely to be either Legacy or Sky-Scraper if they're part of the team (unless you've got Akash'Thriya or Haka there too).
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The powers and abilities of each character in their backstories vary from the way the characters work in the game. In general, a lot of characters have to get cards to activate abilities that are innate to their powers.
  • The most obvious is Legacy, who despite being a Flying Brick, has a deck mostly focused on healing and protecting his allies. Interestingly, in the Freedom Four comic, Legacy behaves much like he does in-game, distracting Blade and taking hits while the Wraith, Bunker, and Tachyon do the actual damage to the platform and drill. Iron Legacy, meanwhile, shows what Legacy would be like if he wasn't holding back; Word of God specifies that a lot of Legacy's restraint is instinctive, so Legacy can't just power himself up to Iron Legacy levels by getting pissed.
  • His alternate form, Greatest Legacy, gets this from the other direction. Since only the character card is different, he retains the effects and powers that depend on or otherwise reference Legacy's impenetrable skin — a power that only the current Legacy developed, and which Greatest Legacy wouldn't have.
  • Both Legacy and Haka are supposed to be nearly invulnerable (Legacy has impenetrable skin and Haka is immortal) yet they are vulnerable to most attacks unless they invoke specific cards.
  • Completionist Guise's power allows the players to swap other hero cards out for their variants. Which...doesn't really make any sense, from a story perspective, since the variants are all either the base heroes at different points in time, alternate universe versions, or totally different people taking on the mantle as a Legacy Character.
  • Also with Guise, Santa Guise is able to wrap up cards and give them away, meaning that he can give out boxes containing not just things like guns and robots, but also resilient skin (Legacy), rainstorms (Tempest), explosions (Expatriette), specific combat actions (Haka), backup copies of unique weapons like Absolution (Fanatic), the Hippocratic Oath (Southwest Sentinels), and Big Damn Heroes moments (Stuntman). Try to figure out how that looks on the comics page.
    • Word of God eventually stated that Guise's abilities vary by medium, so his assorted antics that only make sense in the card game only happen in the card game.
  • Plague Rat has Infection cards, which represent his mutagenic, infectious saliva. This affliction canonically has to enter the bloodstream. Even given that No Biochemical Barriers is generally in force in comics (allowing Plague Rat to infect the likes of Tempest, Sky-Scraper and Lifeline), he canonically cannot infect robots like Omnitron-X, energy beings like Doctor Medico, or undead like Dark Watch Mister Fixer, all of whom are as vulnerable to the disease in-game as anyone else (as are both forms of Akash'Thriya, whose body is made out of either stone or Void energy).
  • Luminary's Kill Sat is a bit weird. First, he appears to have one above every location in which he's played. This makes relative sense on modern Earth, where he can presumably use the same satellites, and is perhaps understandable in the Final Wasteland (assuming it lasted centuries up there) and Dok'Thorath (which has an orbital bombardment card), but is a bit weird in places like the Block (which is an extradimensional prison without any "outside" to put an orbital cannon in), Silver Gulch (which takes place 74 years before Sputnik was launched), or the Realm of Discord (which is mystical and weird). Additionally, the Kill Sat in question has really good aim for something being fired from miles above the battlefield, given that it can, for example, hit Apostate without harming his relics, many of which he actively holds or wears. And then Heroic Luminary enters the picture; as an unambiguous hero, the names and Doomsday subtype of any of Luminary's superweapons don't fit, and instead the cards represent things like the lunar prison she used to trap Legacy of Destruction.
  • Luminary is also the ruler of Mordengrad. Nobody apparently told the people in the Mordengrad environment deck about this. Either the lack of a scar is screwing with them, or someone's leading a rebellion.
  • Luminary is also not the Nemesis of Iron Legacy (though they do have unique dialogue in the Video Game), despite the fact that Iron Legacy fell because Baron Blade killed his daughter.
  • A villain's HP represents the trouble the heroes have dealing with their Evil Plan, not so much their actual physical durability. Hence the reason that Citizen Dawn has a mammoth 80 health, yet went down to Fanatic in the Cosmic Contest, and the reason that Wager Master - a singular entity who mortals can barely scratch, and who could be on par with OblivAeon if he cared to start rounding up minions - only has 51 health and Baron Blade's Power Armored flip side has less health than his normal side.
  • Word of God has gone on record saying that they would have liked to have had Captain Cosmic's Requital variant - which has absorbed the power and madness of his fallen brother, Infinitor - add the Infinitor-specific Manifestation subtype to his Constructs if the idea had worked out.
  • Sometimes the card art doesn't quite match up to the game mechanics.
    • The art of Argent Adept's Inventive Preparation — a Rhythm card — has him blowing his Eydisar's Horn — which only affects Melody and Harmony cards.
    • The art and flavor text on Nightmist's Mistbound indicate she's banishing Voss to another dimension and defeating him — the card does no damage, instead blocking a deck from playing any cards, so it can't defeat a villain (although it can certainly make life harder for many of them).
    • Expatriette's Unload shows her gunning down a bunch of Voss's troops with her firearms — including the Gene-Bound Soldiers, who are immune to her projectile damage. (Possibly justified by her variant ammunition, which substitutes damage types.)
    • Tachyon has her flavor text describe Lightspeed Barrage as dozens of punches, but the in-game effect is one chunk of damage.
    • Absolute Zero's Coolant Blast shows him blasting several of Proletariat's clones, but the power on the card is a single-target attack.
    • Kismet's Hapless Strike has the highest HP hero hit the lowest HP hero — but depicts the Argent Adept (24 base HP) hitting Fanatic (31 base HP). (To be fair, Fanatic runs off Cast from Hit Points, so she could easily have burnt herself down to lower than Argent Adept's health).
    • Pervasive Red Dust in the Wagner Mars Base destroys equipment cards — but depicts Visionary, who doesn't have any equipment in her deck.
    • While Thorathian Monolith makes Sky-Scraper change to her Huge card and depicts her as such, it's possible for her to swap to her Normal or Tiny cards while it's still in effect, so that she's still somehow shielding her teammates while she's only a few inches tall.
  • The Mobile Defence Fortress is, in the setting, the primary base of Baron Blade and rented out to other supervillains, designed by an evil genius to stop a superheroic invasion. However, mechanically, most of its cards don't actually do anything at all — they mostly just protect and heal each other while ignoring both heroes and villains, at best occasionally throwing out ping damage — and is usually used for games where you don't want the enviroment to interfere.
• Glass Cannon: Several heroes have good damage but non-great defence, such as the Idealist or KNYFE.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Baron Blade's scar gets worse and worse with each appearance of his. By contrast, when he comes back as the (sort-of) heroic Luminary, his scar is completely gone.
• Green Rocks: Of the crazy Phlebotinums in the Sentinels multiverse, two in particular count for this: Isoflux-Alpha and OblivAeon shards.
  • Isoflux-Alpha is the result of a scientist's experimentation with an anti-matter generator and gives powers to most people who touch it, regardless of his weird and out there they may be. Characters with this power source include Mainstay, Dr. Medico, and Chokepoint.
  • OblivAeon shards are chipped off pieces of a massive beyond cosmic entity that serves as the main bad guy for the Card Game's final expansion. They can also give anybody any power though usually at the cost of driving them insane. Characters with this power source include Captain Cosmic, Infinitor, and Proletariat.
• Guide Dang It!: Some of the unlock methods for variants in the digital version are not exactly intuitive. For example, all five of the Prime Wardens are locked behind Redeemer Fanatic (you need her to unlock Prime Warden Argent Adept, and you need him to unlock the other four). Unless you know the meta-story of the game (which is entirely All There in the Manual), you'd have no reason to guess that version of her was necessary, even if you know you need Fanatic in PW Argent Adept's unlock game.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: To an extent. Heroes mostly have HP in the 25-30 range, while a typical boss villain will have more like 90, with the highest hitting 200 (except OblivAeon, who has forms with 180, 130, and 10,000 - although that last one is supposed to be handled in other ways). Villains very rarely do more than 5 damage in a hit, and even that once per round. Sufficiently prepared heroes, on the other hand, will be doing that kind of damage each turn, and in the right circumstances can do upwards of 50 damage a turn. In perfect circumstances, some characters can hit past 100.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • The villain Omnitron upgrades itself repeatedly, finally adding an empathy component. When it does this, it realizes the death and destruction it caused as a villain and travels back in time to join the heroes.
  • In the Iron Legacy dark future, Fright Train has taken over the role of Bunker.
  • After her defeat by the Freedom Five, The Matriarch gets some tutoring and magical training from Nightmist and joins the heroic Dark Watch as The Harpy. Sometime before Sentinels: Tactics, she takes the codename to Pinion.
  • A much Older and Wiser La Capitan, seeking to atone for her past self's deeds, becomes the hero La Comodora.
  • A promo card shows that Infinitor pulls one of these. The card specifies he is a hero target and his gameplay focuses on keeping him alive while taking down his rampaging Hard Light projections. In the end, he does a Heroic Sacrifice to save his brother.
• Hellfire: The Infernal damage type, which is associated with demons and the occult and favored by the likes of the villains Apostate, The Ennead and Spite, and hero Nightmist. Like its opposite, Radiant, few if any targets are immune to it.
• Heroic Build: Pretty much standard across the art style, to the point that even Baron Blade, who relies entirely on his intellect and inventions, is cut like a Greek god. The exceptions are the Scholar, who spends most of his time napping, and has a pot belly as a result; and Parse, who is depicted in in older art as skinny and in newer art as being on the chubbier side.
• Hostage Situation:
  • The Dreamer's battle plays out like one. If the heroes kill the Dreamer, they lose. In order to win, they must defeat her "captors": the projections from her nightmare.
  • There's a card in the Megopolis Environment deck where one of these plays out. It prevents the heroes playing cards.
• Intercontinuity Crossover: NightMist, AKA Faye Diamond, is the granddaughter of Joe Diamond, one of the characters in Arkham Horror. One of Arkham's creators designed both NightMist and her nemesis, Gloomweaver.
• Interesting Situation Duel: The Environment deck introduces this element as its effects help or hinder the heroes and villains.
• Kid Sidekick: The Potential Sidekick, Thiago, a unique Victim from Spite's deck, who helps the heroes by offering lots of extra card draw... but whose potential death at Spite's hands deals the heroes psychic damage.
• Killed Off for Real: Multiple characters are killed off, mostly due to Heroic Sacrifice, during the OblivAeon event and it's made clear that this is a permanent thing. Among the characters killed are...
  • Nightmist, who dissolves into mist permanently in order to summon heroes from other dimensions to assist in the fight.
  • The Scholar, who sacrafices himself in order to save Guise from dissolving into weird cosmic goo.
  • La Comodora, who rams her ship, La Paradoja Magnifica, into OblivAeon's chest. Though Chrono-Ranger theorizes she might have survived.
  • Ra, the Ennead, and Anubis preform a suicide attack against which, since it's a suicide attack, results in their deaths.
  • Akash'Thriya, who turns herself into a tree in order to help heal and somewhat repair Megalopolis. This only applies to the RPG timeline, however, as the Vertex Timeline splits off before she does this and instead she just becomes dormant and later resurfaces as a villain.
  • Bloogo, the Last Aphan, is killed off while protecting the heroes.
  • A death unrelated to the OblivAeon event is Spite who, after coming back from the dead due to Gloomweaver magic, pretty much has his mind erased after Gloomweaver takes him over and after that his body is destroyed by the heroes, rendering him dead for realsies this time.
• Kirby Dots: These are used in the Enclave of the Endlings, because the whole deck is an acknowledged love letter to Jack Kirby.

L-O

• Large Ham: Given what the card game is based on, this trope was inevitable:
  • Baron Blade lives and breathes this trope. If he does something he makes a spectacle of it. This is due in part to his insatiable ego and also in part to his desire to kill Legacy and have everyone know it.
  • Apostate is this in order to play up his fallen angel deception.
  • Citizen Dawn has ham to rival Baron Blade, as a lot of her schemes exist solely to show unpowered people how superior she is to them.
  • On a similar note, Citizen Hammer, in contrast to his partner Citizen Anvil, is just as hammy if not more than his boss.
  • Empyreon, a power-hungry villain that later becomes a scion of OblivAeon, is very hammy.
  • Speaking of the Big O, almost all of his lines are shouted. Combine this with his size and he's a literal large ham.
  • Kaargra Warfang is a very hammy character, being the villain's resident Boisterous Bruiser.
  • Meanwhile, on the side of good we have the hero's own resident Boisterous Bruiser, Haka who, as long as no innocents get hurt, enjoys a good fight.
  • Fanatic is, well, a fanatic who's constantly shouting about holy power as she smites evil.
  • Likewise, Ra, God of the Sun, is very hammy and scoffs at all who dare challenge him.
  • JUDGE MENTAL (yes, pronounced exactly like that) is a minor villain example since he shouts a lot, including his name. JUDGE MENTAL!
• Laser Blade
  • Gene-Bound Ion-Lancer and L'Epeiste each wield one.
  • K.N.Y.F.E's main super power is making laser blades from her fists.
  • One of Captain Cosmic's cards is a sword made out of solid light.
• Legacy Character:
  • Ignoring the pun, this is Legacy's schtick. Every Legacy gains all the powers of the previous Legacy, and adds a new one, as detailed under Combo Platter Powers.
  • One of Bunker's promo cards is the Bunker who served in World War II, while the Shattered Timelines version is Fright Train, who took up the hero's mantle to fight Iron Legacy.
  • The Ra of Sentinels Tactics is described as "not the man he was," with a markedly different personality and demeanor of the Ra in the original game. Further, his art has him with darker skin and different features. While it's not said, the implication is that someone else found the Staff of Ra and took up the sun god's power, much like multiple people in the Marvel Universe have picked up Mjolnir and taken over as Thor. The ARG leading up to the announcement of OblivAeon confirms this — the Blake Washington Ra is killed fighting the villain, and The Letters Page confirms it's Thiago, from Spite's deck.
  • The Ennead can pull the same relic thing as Ra, as can Anubis after his destruction by OblivAeon.
• Legion of Doom: The Vengeance expansion has Baron Blade forming one, creating a team of five villains named the Vengeful Five to take on the Freedom Five. While the other four are all new playable villains, three of the others had shown up earlier in their Nemeses' decks, implying they'd been part of the various rogues galleries in the past.
• Leitmotif: Each villain gets one in the digital version as of the Rook City expansion that plays when looking at their entries in the Multiverse or after losing to them. The environments also have their own particular music that plays in the Multiverse menu and during combat.
  • And now, as of this writing, 21 of the 36 heroes have Leitmotifs composed by the same guy who did the music for the game (with a little outside help).
• Lesbian Vampire: Blood Countess Bathory seems to be one. She's only ever seen draining blood from women, and all of her vampiric servants are female but one. And that one is a "drudge" who is merely a fanatically-loyal manual laborer.
• Level Scaling: The game is designed for 3-5 heroes. This does not mean, however, that playing with more than that gives the players an advantage. The villains often have attacks or other effects that are dictated by the number of players (usually somewhere between -2 and +2 the number of heroes), so if you take six or more heroes into the fight, it's that much more difficult. Suddenly you're being even more swarmed by minions, and when the villains themselves attack, they're doing extra damage. On the other side of it, an undersized party finds itself facing far fewer minions, and taking almost negligible damage from those same attacks.
• Light 'em Up:
  • A lot of Fanatic's attacks deal radiant damage. Hers are some of the only attacks that feature the damage type, meaning that few, if any enemy targets are immune to it.
  • Zhu Long, if he appears during a game on the Temple of Zhu Long environment, will deal both toxic and radiant damage in his True Form card.
• Like Reality, Unless Noted: While the world of the game follows the typical Superhero formula of really only superficially resembling our earth, the "Metaverse" where Sentinel Comics are published has been explicitly noted to be exactly like our reality with the exception of Sentinel Comics being one of the big comic publishers and animation being largely accepted as a storytelling medium.
• Living Shadow: Writhe is stuck in this form, due to a botched experiment.
• Lovecraft Lite: Despite being intended as a pastiche/homage to superhero comics, the overall setting also manages to be this. There are cosmic beings known as Singular Entities which are the closest thing the franchise has to gods, who operate according to their own Blue-and-Orange Morality motives, with usually little care for how it affects mortals caught in the middle; there are many strange cosmic forces which can grant amazing powers to mortals who wield them, but can enact terrible prices if not wielded correctly; there are eldritch locations and beings aplenty working according to their strange ways, and there's even one character whose backstory directly references Arkham Horror and by extension the Cthulhu Mythos itself. But in the end it is still a superhero story and so while you might sometimes break your arm doing it, the heroes still can in the end defeat anything that directly threatens mortal life and make the world a better place to be.
• Luck-Based Mission: To a certain extent, since decks are supposed to be randomly shuffled both before the game, and during because of certain cards. All the An Adventurer Is You designations work fine...provided the key cards for those aspects aren't randomly shuffled to the bottom of your deck. The same applies the other way — the difficulty of a villain can spike way up or down depending on whether their most powerful cards are on the top or bottom of the deck. For this reason, heroes who have the option to search their decks for card types (like the Wraith), who can draw lots of cards (like Tachyon, Guise, Haka, and Bunker), or who allow other heroes to draw extra cards (like Team Leader Tachyon) are considered very powerful.
  • Unlocking variant cards in the digital version of the game can be this as well, especially villain cards. For example, unlocking Mad Bomber Baron Blade requires that you first defeat Baron Blade once, and then take on Citizen Dawn and defeat three specific minions in the same turn. Since those minions support one another, it gets really hard to bring them down all at once and is very dependent on your heroes, their powers, their cards, and praying that Citizen Dawn doesn't draw an extremely powerful card that interferes with the entire game.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: While dice aren't involved, the cards are shuffled often to randomize the game. Several heroes have abilities that let them either look at their next card and optionally discard it, pick what card the villain will draw next, or allow another player to draw two cards and discard one (or, alternatively, discard a card already in your hand and keep both) outside of their normal turn order. Other decks have cards that let a player go through their deck or trash and just pick a card with a given key word on it rather than wait for it to come up on the draw. This is the primary purpose of Visionary's deck.
• Mad Scientist:
  • Baron Blade. He becomes even madder in his promo card form "Mad Bomber," which takes place after he's had a Villainous Breakdown. He's no longer the collected aristocrat with minions and a grand plan, he's a lunatic with a gear loose, blowing things up and blasting people with a death ray.
  • Biomancer is a magical one of these; he dabbles heavily in alchemy and strange technomagical contraptions during his early days, and though his biological experiments are done using magic, they still resemble Evilutionary Biology in the end results.
  • The 1950's Greatest Legacy Radio Play episode of the Letters Page podcast gives us Doctor Devlin Dour, a one-time antagonist whose plan is to mutate and mind control the citizens of the city of Megalopolis using his special poisonous concoctions.
  • Writhe got his powers by playing around using shadow energy in inventions. He then later turns into an eldritch one of these when he takes an OblivAeon shard with the rest of the Void Guard. He spends his time almost obsessively creating horrific cosmic-powered inventions that are just wrong in various ways.
  • Pike Industries is essentially an entire company full of mad chemists, constantly trying to find new drugs both to sell to an unsuspecting public and to help The Chairman fuel his longevity.
  • In turn Project Cocoon is this to trying to create and study superhumans, including plenty of dodgy experiments on people both mundane and superhuman.
  • There's also Fort Adamant, which was specifically a military organization trying to find ways to incorporate superpowers and supertech into military applications. At first it was a mostly upright (or at least as upright as the US military usually is, anyway) organization under General Armstrong which had mostly reasonable experiments including the Bunker suit Tyler Vance wears and training the Southwest Sentinels into the Void Guard. But then Doctor Demikahv came along and turned the Fort into a madhouse of unethical and awful experiments to the point where Armstrong and the Void Guard found themselves forced to try to destroy it.
  • Then there's Idealist's mother who was playing around with life energy while trying to resurrect her dead husband.
• The Mafia: The Organization, under the control of the Chairman. They combine a mixture of street thugs, hitmen, Dirty Cops, informants, thieves, and other lowlifes to make your life hell.
• Make Some Noise:
  • The Gene-Bound Banshee, a minion in Voss's deck, which does, and is immune to, sonic damage.
  • In the lore as revealed on The Letters Page, there's The Shrieker, who was part of the Freedom Five in the Golden Age and had sonic-based powers. In the Silver Age retool, she was forgotten about, then reemerged as the latest Glamour.
• Mass Card Removal: Hero cards that stick around for more than one turn are usually tagged as Ongoing or Equipment. Most villains can only destroy a few cards at a time, but some other villains are much nastier:
  • Citizen Dawn's Devastating Aurora is the most infamous, often just referred to as That Card. It wipes out all hero Ongoing and Equipment cards and also all Environment cards.
  • Omnitron has three cards that qualify. Sedative Flechettes destroys all hero Ongoing cards, Technological Singularity destroys all hero Equipment cards, and Terraforming destroys all Environment cards. The former two simultaneously deal damage while the latter gives him extra plays equal to the number of cards destroyed.
  • Baron Blade puts a twist on the concept by letting you choose how many of your cards he's going to destroy, but the more cards you keep the harder he hits you later.
  • Miss Information has a similar effect. She also has another card that forces each player to choose between destroying all their cards or discarding their entire hand.
  • Apostate's Apocalypse card destroys all cards other than Relics (which his deck specialises in). The only reason it's not nastier than Devastating Aurora is that there's a delay before it activates, giving you the opportunity to destroy it first.
  • The Ennead, Chokepoint, and Kismet all have cards that destroy all Environment cards for some benefit, but they can't do the same against hero cards.
• Mauve Shirt: Many environments feature named characters who help out the heroes, like Hunter Fulepet in the Court of Blood who helps keep down the vampire population, or Sheriff Pratt in Silver Gulch, 1883, who explicitly attacks non-hero targets only. Unfortunately, since most of them aren't immune to hero damage, they are vulnerable to Friendly Fire.
• Mêlée à Trois: Games that take place in some of the more aggressive Environments can easily become this.
  • The Enclave of the Endlings' target cards consist solely of powerful aliens that are very displeased at this invasion of their home, and will rip into hero and villain targets with equal abandon.
  • Dok'Thorath Capital is enveloped in a civil war, with cards representing both freedom fighters and regime soldiers. They'll attack each other just as much as they lay into the heroes and villains.
  • A game with Ra on the team, the Ennead as the villain, and the Tomb of Anubis as the Environment becomes one of these that's supported by game mechanics — Anubis, the Tomb's most powerful card, shares Ra's Nemesis icon with the Ennead, so his attacks will deal increased damage to both them and Ra (and vice versa).
• Me's a Crowd: Proletariat can create clones of himself. Everyman, a Disparation hero found in the OblivAeon objective deck, is an alternate Legacy where the Parsons line's cumulative powers lead to this trope rather than Flying Brick.
• Meta Fiction: One of the literary conceits of the game is that its lore is not directly based on a fictional superhero universe, but based on various comic series created by a fictional company called Sentinel Comics which portrayed the fictional superhero universe. So the art is intended to be comic panels or covers; the flavor text quotes issues of imaginary comics; and the Letters Page podcasts often talk about things like fictional writer retcons, what era the character was created in, blow-by-blow descriptions of the fictional comic issues the characters were in, fictional reader reactions to fictional issues, fictional animated spinoffs, etc. As the creators put it: "This podcast is a series of lies, built upon a house of lies, on a foundation of lies, in Lietopia, on the continent of lies."
• Militaries Are Useless:
  • Played straight in that the regular military is unable to do anything to stop the more powerful, overt villains like Baron Blade, Citizen Dawn, or Grand Warlord Voss, so it falls to the heroes to defeat them. In the case of Warlord Voss, if he has more than ten minions on the field by the start of his turn, he wins automatically as his armies overrun Earth.
  • Subverted in that Bunker is a Military Superhero, so the military does lend a hand when they can.
  • Amusingly, it is entirely possible for a game set in Megalopolis to end with some horrifying cosmic supervillain being finished off by the local police (possibly by being punched out by the cops if Cramped Quarters Combat is active).
• Military Superhero: Bunker, whose suit was made as part of the Ironclad project of the US Military. KNYFE is a former agent of F.I.L.T.E.R., which is basically a very heavily militarised border control agency. This would, in turn, make Sergeant Steel a Military Supervillain.
• Mirror Universe: In the lore there's the Inverseverse, an alternate universe where everyone who's good is evil and everyone who's evil is good. And Anubis... is still kind of a jerk. Though in a different way. The Action Hero Stuntman and Ivana Ramonat Luminary variant cards are from this universe.
• The Mole: Freedom Five secretary Amina Twain is secretly the villain Miss Information.
• Mooks: Many of the villains can summon characters from their villain decks. Baron Blade's Blade Battalion, Voss's alien army, Matriach's birds, Omnitron's drones, the Chairman's Thugs, and La Capitan's crew all come to mind.
• More Dakka:
  • Bunker and Expatriette use guns. Lots and lots of guns. Bunker also has his OmniCannon, and Expatriette can fire two pistols, a shotgun, an assault rifle and an SMG on the same turn, with the right setup.
  • One of Bunker's cards makes all but explicit reference to it — it's called "Turret Mode," its effect is that you can use two powers in a turn (read: fire more guns) and boost their damage. The Flavor Text? BUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDA.
• Multinational Team: The various heroes and villains come from a huge range of nations.
  • While many of the heroes - especially the Freedom Five - come from the United States (Legacy, Bunker, Tachyon, Absolute Zero, Argent Adept, Nightmist, Setback, Chrono-Ranger, etc) many more come from other countries. Fanatic is from Peru, Unity from Israel, Haka from New Zealand, KNYFE from Scotland, the Naturalist from Nigeria, Visionary from China, Parse from Australia and Sky-Scraper and Tempest from outside of Earth.
  • The villains are just as diverse. Outside of the obvious nonhuman ones, there's Baron Blade, who hails from a a small fictional eastern European country, Ambuscade from France, the Operative from the Philippines, and La Capitan from colonial Spain.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Especially in the online version where this is strictly enforced. Each variant card has the same deck and since there's only one deck for each hero, you can never play more than one variant of the same hero.
  • The big exception to this is villains and heroes who are alternate versions of the same person. (The Dreamer and the Visionary, Legacy and Iron Legacy, all the hero decks coming in OblivAeon, etc.)
  • Omnitron offers another aversion. You can play a game against Omnitron (the villain deck) using Omnitron-X (the hero deck) inside Omnitron-IV (the environment deck).
  • One of the last mini-expansions is for the Void Guard, 4 powerful heroes that draw their powers from a similar source. Why are they all packed together? Because Void Guard are the same characters as The Sentinels, who were already in the game as a quirky deck with 4 character cards for one player. There's now nothing to stop one player from playing as The Sentinels, while the rest play as the individual members of Void Guard, resulting in each character being on the table twice.
• Nintendo Hard: OblivAeon mode. Fitting, since it represents the biggest, deadliest, most dangerous villain ever fought in the game's universe. Each Scion has a different set of abilities it can use to screw you over, Aeon Men come in faster than you can take them out, the environment will get in your way as usual, and that's not even getting into all the ways OblivAeon himself will screw you over. For example, one of his cards does a frankly unnecessary 9999 damage.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty:
  • Played with, via the Level Scaling above. Many of the harder villains don't have fixed values for their attacks, or for their minions' attacks, instead doing damage that's the number of heroes minus 1 or 2. This means that using the minimum party — which logically should make things tougher — nerfs a solid chunk, if not most, of the villains' attacks. Gloomweaver in particular is hit hard by this, as most of his minions that do damage do it on this scale, making his zombie horde and cultists a formidable obstacle for a full team of five heroes, but sitting ducks for three heroes.
  • The listed difficulties of the villains doesn't always pan out as accurate, either. While The Matriarch, listed as one of the game's toughest villains, will often have over a dozen birds out at once, and hits the players whenever they're taken out, each bird does such little damage that even basic armor will keep the heroes from being hurt at all so they can focus on just whacking Matriarch. On the other side, the lowest-rated villains, Omnitron and Baron Blade, each have cards that severely punish equipment-heavy heroes and can turn a game from a solid victory to a Total Party Kill if the heroes are caught off guard.
  • Interestingly, the Advanced rules for the Chairman makes him more manageable, assuming you're able to handle the increased damage output. Instead of needing to take down three Underbosses to flip him, you only need to defeat one. If your team can withstand the increased damage when the Chairman flips, he can be taken down very quickly with burst damage.
• Non-Standard Game Over: A good handful of villains have different ways to cause the heroes to lose besides just wiping them out.
  • Baron Blade will cause a Colony Drop should he have 15 cards in his trash at the start of his turn.
  • Grand Warlord Voss overruns the planet with minions if he has 10 of them in play at the start of his turn.
  • The Dreamer turns the standard win condition of reducing the Villain to 0 HP into the lose condition. The Dreamer is a little girl who's as much a victim of the dreams she conjures as anyone, and only has six hit points. For the heroes to win the Dreamer must flip and then a certain number of her Projections must be killed.
  • An environment even has one. Silver Gulch 1883's Lost in the Past card causes the heroes to be lost in time (i.e., Game Over) should the environment end its turn with no cards in the trash. And can put a card back into the environment deck at the start of the turn.
  • The Wagner Mars Base unsurprisingly has a self-destruct device, and the heroes have to forgo fighting the villain to deactivate it.
  • Inverted with Gloomweaver; if the heroes can trash three Relics, they win instantly.
  • If the Propulsion Systems in the Mobile Defense Platform get reduced to 0 HP, the platform blows up and everyone dies.
  • The promo villain Wagermaster's whole shtick is alternate win and lose conditions. It's even possible to win or lose before the heroes get a single turn.
  • Kaargra Warfang has Colosseum Favor. If the heroes get 20, they win instantly (And in fact cannot win any other way), while if the villains get 20, the heroes lose (and can most certainly still lose the normal way).
  • Deadline creates massive environmental catastrophes in order to destroy humanity. Should enough of these occur, cards from the environment deck are removed from play. If, at this point, the environment deck is gone, Deadline has destroyed the planet and the heroes lose.
  • The Celestial Tribunal has Representative of Earth. A Hero from the box is put into play as a 10 HP target. If they are ever incapacitated, the Earth is sentenced to destruction.
• Non-Uniform Uniform:
  • The Citizens of the Sun all have distinct appearances, but all share Dawn's emblem somewhere on their outfit, often as an undershirt of some kind beneath their jacket or dress.
  • The Freedom 5 variants announced in the OblivAeon Kickstarter are all visually distinct, but have the Freedom 5's emblem somewhere on them, while in the "Tactics" timeline Unity wears the team insignia as a belt buckle (with an "i" added, which she insists stands for "Intern" but coincidentally makes the symbol read as "Freedom Six").
• No-Sell: Several decks have ways to make their character or others immune to damage, usually for a turn at a time. Also invoked in individual cards — Legacy considers being shot with gunfire as an ideal time to think about dinner plans, one of Haka's cards has him barely noticing a bomb exploding on his back, and Iron Legacy has several cards depicting the heroes attacking him to no effect, and their resultant Oh, Crap! expressions.
• Not Hyperbole: The flavor text from the "Captain's Orders" card from La Capitan's deck has her stating she wants th heroes' heads yesterday. She means it literally.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Second editions of cards and errata serve this purpose.
  • The Raging T. Rex in Insula Primalis originally targeted the target with the second highest HP, before a reprint amended it to the target besides itself with the second highest HP.
  • Visionary's Wrest the Mind card lets her redirect a target's damage however she chooses, at the cost of some HP. The first print had no restrictions, and took 2 HP from her and the target, while the reprint nerfed it to exclude character cards and raise it to 3 HP. This eliminated the ability to affect the villain cards — which had been a Game-Breaker for several villains — and shortened how long it could be used on minion cards.
  • Flesh of the Sun God makes Ra immune to fire damage, and Imbued Fire makes all hero damage fire damage — together, they'd make him immune to Solar Flare's upkeep cost and therefore keep a powerful buff out without cost. Later editions of the game change the language on Solar Flare to read that the card is destroyed if Ra takes no damage.
  • The Vengeance rulebook contains a couple because of the new format, and the Sentinels deck itself. It includes a note that cards that affect "the villain deck," only affect one of the villain decks and the heroes can choose which. For the Sentinels, it makes particular note of Plague Rat's infection cards, saying that only one Infection card can be played on them and the players decide which character card it affects and it counts toward Plague Rat's flipping mechanic.
  • Definitive Edition introduces "fixed damage," which cannot be increased, decreased, redirected, or have its type changed (e.g. from psychic to fire). This is mostly used for upkeep costs of cards like "Pushing the Limits" and "Solar Flare," or cards like Plague Rat's ongoing infection cards. This prevents hero damage buffs from making the upkeep costs worse, and preserves thematic appropriateness of certain damage types from being altered by hero effects.
• One-Liner: The flavor text on a lot of the cards. Several of these are a Shout-Out of some sort.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Averted. Fanatic's civilian name (which she never uses because she's always Fanatic) is Helena and La Capitan's second name is Helena. Downplayed, however, in that there's no confusion since Fanatic is, as said before, always Fanatic and La Capitan's first name is Maria and she is often referred to as Maria Helena (if not her very long full name.)
  • Also averted but downplayed in the case of Tony Taurus, a.k.a. Heartbreaker, and Anthony Drake, a.k.a. Argent Adept.
• Out of Order: For the card game, the Vengeance expansion came out before Wrath of the Cosmos. The video game released Cosmos first, however, because Vengeance includes a whole different gameplay style that is more difficult to adapt to the electronic game.
• Overly Long Name: Maria Helena Teresa Fafila Servanda Jimena Mansuara Paterna Domenga Gelvira Placia Sendina Belita Eufemia Columba Gontina Aldonza Mafalda Cristina Tegrida de Falcon A.K.A La Capitan. She sheds most of these names once she becomes La Comadora who regrets everything she's done in the past (Can it be called the past if she was outside time for most of it?).
• Our Monsters Are Different:
  • Our Demons Are Different: The Sentinels Universe has many flavors of demons. There's Gloomweaver, who Was Once a Man and seeks to enter this world from the Realm of Discord in order to spread despair and gloom (hence the name); Akash'buta, who's more of a spirit gone rogue but fits here too; and Oni, who aren't technically demons but rather humans who put on masks and turn into Oni as a form of magical suicide bombing.
  • Our Gods Are Different: None of the gods are actually real gods (except Anubis) and are instead avatars who posess the power relic of dead gods. Following Obliv Aeon, Anubis is also dead now and his relic has been lost somewhere. To a greater cosmic extent there's also the Singular Entities, such as Wager Master and Obliv Aeon, and Prime Aspects, such as Wellspring (who gave the Legacy line their powers). The two occasionally overlap.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: The Court of Blood is... actually pretty true to the original vampire myths. It's an all-female court of vampires (with one male manservant) run by Blood Countess Bathory (based on the legends surrounding the real life serial killer of the same name). The vampires use blood magic to sustain themselves and also make deals and pacts with people such as Lifeline who seek blood magic power.
  • All Trolls Are Different: Doc Tusser is the only known Troll in the Sentinels universe/multiverse. He's basically a normal dude with weird skin and a healing factor.

P-Z

• Player Archetypes: Two informal ones have cropped up in the fandom: Jeremys, who like playing in ways that do all the damage, and Johns, who like figuring out the most painstakingly optimal strategy. Named after the two Handelabra employees who are the main hosts of an official Let's Play of the game each week, where they have those respective playstyles.
• Podcast: In 2017, the creators of the game finally began recording a long-discussed podcast about the lore behind the game, The Letters Page
• Psychic Powers: Visionary and The Dreamer / Muse have access to telekinesis, telepathy, psychic constructs, and a whole slew of other powers. The Idealist only has access to Psychic Constructs.
• Poisonous Person: Gene-Bound Bionaut. Naturally comes with a toxic immunity. The last "true" survivor of the race that became the Bionauts, the marvellously named Venox, the Last Mubbloxian, is even worse - Bionaut only hits one target, Venox hits everyone.
• The Real Spoofbusters: Plague Rat's team villain deck, rather than minions of his own, contains a number of RevoCorp handlers... who inevitably lose control of him and get eaten. The handlers dress in green jumpsuits, carry an assortment of gadgets, and the card art for each of the four types is based on one of the original Ghostbusters (1984): the RevoCorp Analyst is skinny with glasses like Egon, the Neutralizer is cheerful and pudgy like Ray and also wearing what look like Ecto Goggles, the Restrainer is balding with a five o'clock shadow like Peter and has on a pseudo-proton pack, and the Tanker is black, has a mustache like Winston, and is wielding what is clearly a slime blower (which deals toxic damage, which of course Plague Rat is immune to).
• Redemption Demotion: Villain boss characters are much stronger than their heroic counterparts. For example, Infinitor's Heroic variant has a less than half the hitpoints of his villainous variant, and deals much lower damage. Legacy is a justified example, he's implied to be holding back preferring to lead and support other heroes. Thus when he snaps, he's terrifying.
  • Played straight with the villains who are fighting OblivAeon, who all have reduced HP in their hero decks. Word of God is that a given villain's HP is not necessarily literally that villain's toughness or stamina, but more represents the difficulty in thwarting their plot.
• Redshirt Army: A few environments include cards representing hero-friendly characters, such as Police Backup in Megalopolis and F.I.L.T.E.R. agents in The Block, who usually focus on attacking villains or hostile environment targets. These are usually very fragile allies who die when they catch any real villain attention.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Inverted. Tachyon's bio shows that she is directly responsible for countless technological innovations, including developing cars that can reach sixty miles to the gallon, a cure for cancer, and establishing a fully-functional base on Mars.
• Robot Master:
  • Omnitron's deck is capable or siccing Drones on the heroes, and can rebuild them from the trash should the heroes destroy them.
  • Unity's deck is focused on this on the heroes' side.
• Rogues' Gallery Transplant: Downplayed. Each heroes Nemesis will have more It's Personal backstories with variants of other heroes. Downplayed in that the Nemesis hasn't changed.
  • Probably due to the two being Foils, the Wraith has a decent amount of interaction with the Chairman. In particular, Freedom Six Wraith ends up killing The Chairman and taking over his operation.
  • This finally does wind up happening for a few villains in the Villains of the Multiverse expansion. Ambuscade switches from hunting Haka to The Naturalist, Plague Rat falls into the captivity of RevoCorp and is used to hunt their creation Setback, and Miss Information returns to take vengeance on the Freedom Five. Also, Citizens Hammer and Anvil get their own deck and nemesis in Visionary, whereas they were previously minions in Citizen Dawn's deck (nemesis: Expatriette).
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Being the first edition of the game, there are naturally a fairly large amount of typos. Only one actually fits this, though; In the Rook City environment, the card Scum and Villany. It should, of course, be Villainy, but as it turns out, Villany is a place.
• Running Gag: On The Letters Page, either Christopher or Adam will frequently follow up a plot development with, "And then they died," to the point that they have to stop and say, "No, seriously," on those few occasions when a character actually bites it.
  • One in the card game itself with Absolute Zero's suit being destroyed at seemingly every opportunity. The ice man himself even lampshades it on several occasions.
• Secret Identity: Most of the time this is averted hard and the number of heroes with secret identities can literally be counted on one hand. To whit, the only two heroes in the multiverse era who are purposefully keeping up a secret identity are the Wraith and the Naturalist. Likewise, the only villains with a purposeful secret identity are the Chairman, the Operative, and Ambuscade (and even he drops that once he becomes the hero Stuntman).
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Iron Legacy ends up doing this unintentionally. In the original timeline, Baron Blade succeeds in killing Legacy, and Young Legacy steps up in his place. In Iron Legacy's timeline, Baron Blade ends up killing Young Legacy, and Legacy snaps as a result. During the Shattered Timelines expansion, Iron Legacy ends up fighting heroes from the past, including both Legacies — and as a result, they're both recuperating when Baron Blade makes his move, and neither of them fall into his trap.
  • The Visionary's story (and the Dreamer's origin). She exhausts her power to go back in time to protect her younger self from being Strapped to an Operating Table.
• Shock and Awe: Tempest's entire race is capable of using lightning among their weather powers. The Slave Mook versions of them in Grand Warlord Voss's deck do this damage type.
• Shooting Superman: Lampshaded in one of Legacy's damage reduction cards. Getting shot at by Mooks is apparently a perfect moment for Legacy to think about what's for dinner.
• Shoot the Dog: The death of Spite is this. The Wraith is against killing and, even recognizing that Spite was a monster who needed to be put down, and even when given the opportunity to kill him, she couldn't do it. Seeing this, and foreseeing the consequences of letting Spite live, Parse put an arrow through his head.
• Sidekick Graduations Stick:
  • Thiago, listed in Spite's deck as "Potential Sidekick," ends up becoming the next incarnation of Ra in Tactics once Dr. Washington perishes fighting OblivAeon. He's noted as being a bit less arrogant than the previous Ra, but no less hot-headed.
  • Young Legacy in both new timelines post OblivAeon. In Sentinels Tactics, where her father is still active as Legacy, she graduates to Beacon. In the RPG, where her father has retired, she takes up the mantle of Legacy properly.
  • In the RPG timeline, Ra / Blake Washington's sidekick Marty Adams becomes the new Anubis.
• Slave Mook: Voss's army has quite a few of these. He follows the typical format of enslaving beings that are useful to him, and killing off everyone else.
• Solo Tabletop Game: Since the villain and environment decks run on autopilot, is entirely possible to ignore the "cooperative multiplayer" aspect of the game and simply play all 3-5 heroes by yourself, if you don't mind doing all the bookkeeping yourself. Many fans expressly use the digital version for this purpose since that version handles all the bookkeeping for you.
• Soviet Superscience: Responsible for the villain team Perestroika. To wit:
  • Proletariet got his powers from Soviet experimentation with an OblivAeon shard.
  • Same thing with a soviet villain named Iron Curtain, minus the OblivAeon shard thing. His daughter proceeded to inherit his powers.
  • Marxman (cue rimshot) has been alive for years, also due to Soviet Superscience.
  • And finally there's, of all things, Mecha Stalin. Whether or not he's the actual Stalin is ambiguous but the main point is that he is a Cyborg made by Soviet Superscience.
• Status Quo is God: A solid effort at aversion, rare among board games. The expansions flow in chronological order, and new promo cards show character growth for heroes like Ra and Fanatic, Haka being the last surviving human, and a Villainous Breakdown for Baron Blade. Teasers for upcoming sets hint at greater changes to come, including the death of Legacy. This last is subverted, per Sentinels Tactics — because both Legacy and Young Legacy were fighting Iron Legacy, neither of them was killed by Baron Blade. Young Legacy instead takes up the name Beacon, presumably to avoid confusing names.
• Straight Gay:
  • Tachyon. The only references to her sexuality are in one of her giant dumps of random bits of info, where she mentions spending weekends "with the wife", and in the Freedom Four #1 comic.
  • Dr. Medico, who only gets an offhand mention of his husband in his text-dump backstory.
• Stripperiffic: Downplayed, but still present because this is a comic book game and that sort of thing's a requirement. Almost none of the women are indecently dressed, but among the heroes, The Wraith's outfit has a cleavage window, the Visionary's various costumes are essentially corsets with a belly-button window, Tachyon's default costume only covers one shoulder, Expatriette bares her middriff, and Unity's wearing a very short tank top. Of the men, Haka and Ra are bare-chested. For the most part, the villains avert this, although Ermine does wear an outfit that exposes a fair bit of cleavage, Friction has a bare shoulder in a deliberate mirror of Tachyon and Fright Train's outfit is basically a pair of pants and his mask. Parodied with Guise's Total Beefcake card, which depicts him in a bikini — which is worn over his normal superhero tights. Which are, in fact, part of his shapeshifted skin. Guise is weird.
• Studio Episode: One of the environments which heroes and villains can clash in is Champion Studios. Its main gimmick gameplay-wise is a special type of card called a 'Conflict' that needs to be dealt with, ranging from a room filled with Banana Peels to the heroes needing to win a game of baseball; despite the latter card potentially being an instant loss for the heroes if it whiffs three times, Champion Studios is one of the more forgiving environments to play in, with relatively few villain targets or hazards.
• Suddenly Voiced:
  • The digital version of the game has spoken dialogue for Guise and singing snippets for Argent Adept.
  • The trailers for the digital version have voices for Baron Blade, Chrono-Ranger, Kaargra Warfang, Tachyon, and Sky-Scraper.
  • The Sentinels of Freedom spinoff video game gives us even more voices: Absolute Zero, Bunker, a different Tachyon, Wraith, Legacy (Felicia Parsons/Fields), Expatriette, Unity, Setback, The Adhesivist, Fright Train, Ermine, the members of Perestroika, and Highbrow.
• Superhero Speciation: Each hero has unique powers, and even among the heroes who fit a similar archetype as outlined in An Adventurer Is You work differently in how they fill those roles, with further deviation among the variants. Legacy, for instance, is normally support-based, but with Young Legacy's power, the deck can pump out a lot of damage instead.
• Superhero School: In the RPG, the Freedom Five become the Sentinels of Freedom and open Freedom Academy at Freedom Plaza (built on the site where Freedom Tower used to reside before OblivAeon destroyed it) to teach the next generation of heroes.
• Tabletop Game A.I.: The deck (or decks) representing the villain(s) that the human-controlled heroes fight only requires someone to actually draw the cards. Beyond that, the villain's actions are completely based on how the game is going when it comes to choosing targets, empowering minions, and even claiming victory.
• Taking the Bullet: Several heroes have cards that do this either by mechanics or in flavor.
  • Legacy's Heroic Interception depicts him catching a missile, and renders all heroes except himself immune to damage. His Lead from the Front card also lets him redirect damage meant for other heroes to himself.
  • Haka's Enduring Intercession redirects all damage from environment cards to Haka.
  • Fanatic's Divine Sacrifice forces enemies she attacks with it to focus on her exclusively until her next turn.
  • Unity's Stealth Bot has this as its only function, able to redirect any damage to itself, and reduce it by 1.
  • Sky Scraper's Thorathian Monolith basically has her stand in front of all her teammates in giant form, taking all damage directed at them and reducing it by 2. This can lead to her taking mammoth amounts of damage if, for example, she has some inconvenient titles against Kaargra Warfang and she uses her sonic clap power.
  • Two friendly civilian cards in the Rook City deck have provisions that at the end of their turn, the villain card damages either them or one of the heroes.
  • The heroes have the option to take on any environment-generated damage that would otherwise hit The Dreamer, since the heroes lose if she drops to 0 HP.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Tachyon. Okay, she's blonde. But, with a great sense of humor (she memorably described her lab team as "only the top scientific badasses") and standing at a full six feet tall, she fulfills most of the name, and certainly fits the archetype.
• The Team: Being a cooperative game, any battle comes down to a team effort among the players, who are each filling different rolls. Any game needs, at minimum, three heroes. In-Universe, there are four organized superhero teams as of OblivAeon:
  • The Freedom Five: Legacy, Bunker, Wraith, Tachyon and Absolute Zero with Unity as their intern; in Sentinels Tactics, Unity takes a spot on the team after Tachyon is killed.
  • The Darkwatch: Nightmist, Expatriette, Setback, Mr. Fixer, and Harpy, a reformed Matriarch
  • The Prime Wardens: The Argent Adept, Haka, Tempest, Fanatic, and Captain Cosmic
  • The Southwest Sentinels also count, being four characters, though they're a single hero deck. They later reform as the Void Guard with individual decks.
  • While the teams remain largely the same in Tactics, there are some slight differences to the teams in the RPG.
  • The Freedom Five disbands and forms the Sentinels of Freedom, an organization more focused on training the new generation of heroes. A new team named Daybreak forms, which includes Felicia Parsons as Legacy and Muse, a grown up Dreamer.
  • The Prime Wardens disband, and among the first modules in the RPG is reforming the team.
  • Another new team, The Paradigms, is formed by a reformed Revo-Corp and headlined by Unity and Benchmark.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Implied thanks to some of the card art, Word of God and game mechanics, as any team of heroes works together even if the relationships between characters are actually strained.
  • In the first case, "Hippocratic Oath" in The Sentinels' deck shows Dr. Medico separating a bruised Expatriette and Chrono Ranger, who had apparently gotten into a fight.
  • Most superhero teams aren't fond of working with Setback and Guise — and further, they don't like being on a team with each other. Expatriette is the one hero who likes inviting Setback along, being a couple.
  • Tempest and Sky-Scraper will work together, but they do not get along well. Sky-Scraper is a Thorathian, like Voss, although her backstory has her in the resistance against him. Tempest, after seeing her in action against her nemesis, comes around to respect and admire her and she has joined the Prime Wardens by the time of the Tactics: Prime War expansion.
  • As far as mechanics go, Setback is hit again — some of his cards are detrimental to the hero team as a whole — forcing card destruction or discards — so working alongside him can be rough.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works:
  • Ra can use the Staff of Ra's power to deal projectile damage. The staff is destroyed upon doing this, however.
  • Mr. Fixer also throws his Tire Iron. Instead of boosting damage, it automatically destroys targets that get hit this way and are under 2 HP after damage.
• Theme Naming: Present everywhere, but Citizen Dawn's deck takes the cake:
  • Citizen Winter, Citizen Spring, Citizen Summer, and Citizen Autumn.
  • Citizen Anvil and Citizen Hammer.
  • Citizen Blood, Citizen Sweat, and Citizen Tears.
  • Citizen Truth and Citizen Dare.
  • Citizen Assault and Citizen Battery.
    • In fact, the in-story reason that Expatriette named her signature twin pistols Pride and Prejudice is that, growing up among all those Citizens, it wouldn't have occurred to her not to use Theme Naming with them.
    • Citizen Slash shows up in Vengeance, which led to the fandom speculating on his partner's identity. Citizen Hack finally made his debut in Tactics.
    • The Letters Page podcast reveals there used to be Citizens Pain and Gain, one of whom is Expatriette's father.
• That One Boss: invokedReferenced in game with a difficulty rating system. The hardest villains under this system (rated 4 out of 4) are The Chairman, Iron Legacy, The Matriarch, and Progeny.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted, in a comic strip leading up to the OblivAeon expansion. Ryan Frost, who was depressed even before his biochemistry mutated, sees a therapist and talks about how people stop thinking of heroes as people and see them only as their costumes, noting that no one calls "Gene" anything but Writhe anymore or knows that he's got a great vinyl collection, except maybe Frost himself.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: There seems to be some flipflop here in the backstory.
  • Explicitly averted, unexpected for a relatively lighthearted superhero setting. None of the heroes seem to have any compunction about killing, and Spite's Agent of Gloom promo bio explicitly says Wraith kills him by firing a razor-bladed weapon through his head. The flavor text for Wraith's Razor Ordnance — probably the same weapon — even has her quoting Ra's Al Ghul's answer to the no-killing rule: "Compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share." That said, the fact that other heroes are uncomfortable calling in Fanatic for help against "mundane" criminals like bankrobbers implies that they favor a sort of "proportionate response" to crimefighting.
  • The official story states that Wraith could not bring herself to kill Spite and that Parse finished him off when she couldn't. Similarly, Iron Legacy came about because Legacy's refusal to kill Baron Blade, resulted in him eventually killing off Young Legacy.
  • Bunker implicitly shoots people in his solo comics as a Military Superhero with at least four guns, but spent a good chunk of his time with the Freedom Five relishing the chance to cut loose against the aliens and robots who the Comics Code will actually let him shoot.
• Title: The Adaptation: The digital version of the card game is called Sentinels of the Multiverse: The Video Game.
• [invoked] Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: In-universe this is the reaction people had to the later comics under the Vertex label, which are set in the Miststorm Timeline. Things progressively got worse and worse. Heroes became villains (or acted villainous), people were obsessed with stockpiling OblivAeon shards, the government and public's hatred of superheroes continues to make things difficult, all in all a really bad time. Eventually people just stopped reading because things weren't getting any better, resulting in the Vertex line getting canned and the Miststorm timeline being completely destroyed.
• Torches and Pitchforks: An Angry Mob sometimes forms in the Court of Blood, dealing damage to everything but itself (including other angry mobs). If no vampires are in play, they go on to destroy one Environment card, including themselves, implicitly either rampaging around or dispersed by the heroes.
• Trapped in the Past: Both Visionary and Omnitron-X are incapable of returning to their futures(actually alternate timelines). Neither of them seem to have any problem with it, though, as their futures are pretty sucky (well, in Visionary's case, at least. It's a bit more vague with Omnitron-X).
• Triumphant Reprise: Legacy and Omnitron-X's themes are triumphant reprises of their villain counterparts (Iron Legacy and Omnitron respectively).
  • Zig-Zagged with Tachyon's theme. While the theme is mostly original, the beginning sounds a lot like the beginning of her not-nemesis Friction's theme.
  • There are two heroic reprises of Infinitor's theme: Captain Cosmic's theme and the theme of his Heroic Variant.
• Turns Red: Some of the villain cards flip into a stronger, or at least more destructive, form when they're either low on health, out of health, or out of minions — i.e., when they're starting to lose the fight. For some villains, like Voss or Citizen Dawn, the players will want to keep them out of this stage.
  • Baron Blade is the straightest example. When he is brought down to zero HP, he flips into a robotic Powered Armor, goes back to full health, trashes his shield cards — He's entering the fray, rather than sitting in his defense platform — and begins attacking the heroes directly every turn.
  • Fittingly, Iron Legacy is another. When he drops below 20 HP, he gains Damage Reduction — after already having several cards that reduce or redirect his damage — starts focusing on the hero target with the lowest HP and starts healing. His flipped side is especially dangerous in Advanced mode, where he'll redirect the first instance of damage he takes a turn to one of the hero targets, making him all but invincible against heroes who can't attack more than once a turn.
  • Gloomweaver's Skinwalker variant flips when he's brought to 0 HP, then immediately heals back to double his original HP and starts hitting everyone on the field every round. If the heroes don't have a way to mitigate it or finish him quickly, they're in trouble.
• Ultimate Universe: After the Oblivaeon event, the game and the fictional comics focus on two major timelines - the Miststorm or Tactics timeline and the RPG or main timeline. The Miststorm-verse is treated as an Ultimate Universe: it's darker and edgier, characters have different names and redesigns and beloved characters die for real. As a nod to the Marvel Ultimate Universe, the Miststorm timeline is eventually destroyed.
• Unexplained Recovery: During the storyline in which the heroes defeated the Chairman, Mr. Fixer was killed fighting the Operative, but came back. For more than two years, the most fans got out of the creators was that he wasn't revived with the Lazarus Vats that the Chairman and the Operative bathe in, because while they rejuvenate, they can't actually bring back someone already dead. (This is consistent with the card game, in which they heal both, but do not revive them if incapacitated.) Eventually, coinciding with the appearance of his Dark Watch Variant GTG finally revealed the secret. Mister Fixer was revived by his old nemesis Zhu Long as a brainwashed minion, before Nightmist was able to restore his mind.
• Unwinnable: Certain combinations of heroes and villains can result in unwinnable games, usually because one or more of the key targets is immune to particular damage types.
  • Shu of the Ennead, for instance, is immune to Melee and Projectile damage types. A team like Legacy, Parse, and Wraith — who only have access to those types of damage — can't hurt her at all. In an Environment like Megalopolis, whose damage-dealing cards only do melee or projectile to villains and whose only damage-type-changing card changes the damage to melee, Shu is outright invulnerable and the heroes can't win. Handelabra even put out a One-Shot battle with that specific setup, essentially forcing you to use Parse and Wraith's powerful deck control to prevent the Ennead from getting a chance to put Shu into play.
  • The Unforgiving Wasteland in Final Wasteland can do this to a few decks that depend on certain cards to come into play or be in the trash for effects, as it takes cards out of play entirely.
  • If more than two of the Chairman's Underbosses are taken out of play, he'll never flip and remain invulnerable indefinitely.
  • If Citizen Dawn flips to her Merged with the Sun side, she's invincible — and only flips back when H-1 Citizens are in play (H+1 in Advanced mode). If she flips and then Unforgiving Wasteland eats too many of her citizens, she can never flip back.
  • Advanced Gloomweaver is immune on his front side to Melee and Projectile damage. He, at least, the heroes can beat either by destroying his Relics or letting him flip — unless Unforgiving Wasteland is out and environment damage destroys one, taking it entirely out of play. If this happens to a party that can't do other types of damage, Gloomweaver can't flip, and the instant win condition, which specifies that the three relics be in the trash, can't trigger.
• Vampire Vords: All the vampires in the Court of Blood speak with an exaggerated Funetik Aksent, clearly modeled on Bela Lugosi's Dracula.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: The villain always gets the first turn. Their set up usually involves deploying a number of minions or devices, and the heroes have usually taken some damage by the time the villain's turn is over. This mirrors the typical comic book plot, where some villain attacks the city or is after something, and the heroes have to react to stop their plot.
  • In Vengeance mode, it goes villain-hero-villain-hero until it gets to the environment, but the bad guys always start out with access to their specialist gear, minions and so on - Blade always starts with a device out, for example.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: The Naturalist, though at first it wasn't voluntary.
• We Have Reserves: The minion-heavy decks, such as Voss, The Chairman or the Matriarchs, use this as a strategy, with numerous ways to bring mooks to the forefront, and even revive them from the trash. Outright stated in the flavor text of one of Expatriette's cards, which allows her to automatically damage any villain target the moment it enters play: A Blade Battalion Commander, apparently admonishing his troops with, "Get out there! She can't shoot all of you!"
• The Wild West: The 'Silver Gulch, 1883' environment deck. It even has a wagon full of dynamite, which always blows up at the least opportune time.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Infinitor, who, in addition to the powers his brother Captain Cosmic got, was also driven insane by the screams of voices from across the cosmos now in his head.
• World of Chaos: The Realm of Discord is another dimension where the laws of physics can change on a whim. One moment you're fast, the next you're slow, and remember to watch out for exploding bubbles.
• World of Snark and World of Ham: Somehow manages to have the characters be both incredibly over the top and hammy, and incredibly snarky, occasionally at the same time.
  • The X-TREME!verse is called out in the Letters Page podcast as being a deliberate World of Ham. From the look of the EXTREME PRIME WARDENS cards, they're not kidding.
• Wretched Hive: Rook City in general. Especially so if you're fighting The Organization there.
• You Dirty Rat!:
  • Plague Rat, whose mutations have turned him into a giant, toxic rat creature.
  • The Pike Industrial environment includes rats as targets. They do minimal damage to the lowest-HP targets, but the Experimental Mutagen card buffs them for each card out.
  • The Rat Beasts from The Final Wasteland, which are implied to be the descendants of Plague Rat — they even share a nemesis with him.
• Zerg Rush:
  • The Matriarch's entire style. Her individual birds do not hit very hard, but when there's 15 of them on the field at once, on her second turn, it doesn't matter. Made even worse when you remember that taking out any of them causes damage to your own team anyway.
    • Definitive Edition Harpy copies her villainous counterpart's style of play in her own deck, which centers around getting as many flock cards into play as possible. The key difference is that while the Matriarch can spam birds willy nilly and suffer no consequences, the Harpy will have to deal with some SERIOUS backlash if she over extends and puts too many of her avian companions on the field.
  • The Organization does something similar. Give them a moment's rest and they can put out a small legion of minions, all of whom are buffed by bosses.

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