Stuff I Need When My Wife Gets Angry

So the thing about gaming is that we’re all after the same thing. We want to get your endurance below 0, and lower than our endurance. That’s the point, right?

Well, taking things beyond cardboard, we find ourselves asking: Do we really want to worry about endurance? Looking at all things from a strategic angle, we should be able to agree most players come to the table with the intent of taking your endurance below 0, and keeping theirs higher than yours. You know where your opponent is going. Most deck archetypes you’ll see are already discussed or you have good experience with, so you know where they’re coming from. So then… what? You know what they’re going to do, generally speaking.

Sun Tzu made a good point: When they come left, you counterstrike right. Well that involves either AWC, or simply preventing them from reaching their end point through stall. The problem with AWC is their lack of prominence, and easy of execution. Stall is fine, but it’s just another path from point A to point B. You’re doing the same thing as your opponent.

As I was thinking about things a few days ago, I was discussing deck construction for my other game with my buddy Dev. While discussing how a player’s personality effects tek and strategy, he stated something that got me thinking: I don’t need to win, I just need to make you lose as much sanity in the process of making me lose as possible. So I sat down to think about how I could integrate this into a right strategy for the left strikes I was expecting at the tourney yesterday. To add to the issues, it was for Strange Bedfellows that I was going this.

My default base for any deck is GK. I love the versatility of GK, and I love Batman in general. He’s more or less the literary equivalent of the American Dream. His life has been one of tragedy, but he’s overcome and turned his scars into strength. He stands for Justice, even going so far as to defend a man who murdered one partner and crippled another because the way he was going to be taken down was unjust. He is a man of principles, and the will to realize those principles. He is willpower in action. Love Batman.
On a mechanical level they have a great attack pump(Taking Aim for a +8 is always nice), Card Cycle(The Hook-Up), Card Draw(Card Draw Barbie), a common Tutor(Bat Signal) and the ability to interrupt your opponent’s tek and disrupt their rhythm(Most Modern Legal Batmans, From the Shadows, Bat Got Your Tongue, Interrogate, etc.). So you have a solid base to build from. Mechanically they’re one of the best rounded teams in modern. So then with my mechanical inclinations, and literary devotion, I had a base.

Still, a base without meat and veggies is just broth. Also, to meet the Strange Bedfellows reqs I needed to mix a villain in with the whole thing. Joker+Batman=Robber Barons. Already played that last month. So then, who? A brief look through the old binder o’ love and I see Hush. Hush is definitely a Batman villain. Awesome.

So GK/Arkham Inmates. Taking these two, I found an idea fluttering around my head. The problem with Ideas fluttering around your head is that if they stay in there, they just bother you. You have to let them out. It’s similar to a fly fluttering around your car while you drive. You have to roll down the window and let it out. And so I sat down and let this idea out. When I rolled the window back up and looked down at the table, I saw all hidden GK characters, allowing me to have only one visible character: Hush. That meant that with no one visible but Hush, he’d be adjacent to no one. No one Adjacent meant his effect would trigger, and I realized what that idea was going for: If anyone attacked Hush, they’d die.

Let me backtrack here, to explain in full, the text of Hush, Silent and Deadly reads: While Hush is not adjacent to any character, whenever he stuns an exhausted character, KO that character. As you have to exhaust to attack, generally, that means anyone he counterstuns dies. Point blank, they’re gone.  Unfortunately at 7/7 on turn 4 he’s paid for that kind of skill with stats. What are Friends For? and Nasty Surprise make up for that, allowing him to counterstun up to a 6 drop. And thus, Wall of Silence came into its first incarnation.

The deck was run, it did well, but it needs work. The main problem is that I refuse to run Fartifacts. I find them immoral. The problem is that with Fate’s Tower, Fartifacts, and Shaw Industries, I’d have a 14/14 4 drop with an auto kill ability. The added cycle of Fartifacts would only make the cycle tek of the Gotham Knights more potent. That’s really what should go in the deck, but I’d feel like a sell out for running them. So I need a way to build up Hush. My inclination is to run Universal Weapon instead of a 5 drop to give him +3/+3, turning him into a 10/10. A few heroic efforts and I can rock him out as a 14/14 by the time all is said and done.

Now back to Dev’s comment and how it relates to Wall of Silence: Point A>Point B and the running off of said issue. Hush buffed to 6 drop stats means you’re unable to attack without losing people. A few defensive tricks like Against all odds, and general pumps like Great White, and Shaw Industries and even when outgunned by a team attack he simply repels the hate with Bruce and Company preventing opposing pumps and Tek. You Play completely defensively, contradictory to the common sense approach of A to B. You allow them to become stymied, unable to attack without losing a massive amount of people, and after they shatter against the deadly quiet you come in and clean up. Your “to” in the “A to B” is simply kicking the opponent’s “To” out of the equation, never allowing them to get to B. Not winning, but making them lose.

It’s a different way of looking at things. It’s not stall, because you’re not trying to make it to a higher turn. You end it on 6, after they’ve exhausted everything they have just to fail. Attrition. Hush’s job is not to die for his country, it’s to make some other poor son of a bitch die for his.