Generally, every game opens up with the villain doing serious damage, deploying huge numbers of minions, and basically making things hell for the players. The game progresses, with the heroes rallying, assembling their ongoing cards and equipment, taking apart the villains' minions and equipment, and finally coming back from the brink to win. Exactly like in the superhero comics the game drew from!
Of course the villains attack first, forcing the heroes to defend themselves and innocent bystanders. It wouldn't be very heroic for the heroes to attack first.
Likewise, when each hero is incapacitated, they gain support powers for whatever heroes are still up — now, how many comic books have you read where the whole super team has been knocked on its ass, only for the last man standing to gain a Heroic Second Wind and pull out a victory?
Absolute Zero's cold attacks that do him fire damage reflect physics — "generating" cold really means taking away heat. Therefore, a system that creates and projects cold must transfer the heat somewhere else. So when Absolute Zero is blasting something with cold, he's creating heat elsewhere — hence Hoarfire, which is a cold and fire attack, and the other attack one-shots where AZ takes fire damage equal to how much cold damage he's putting out. Alternately, he's generating cold attacks by venting the chemicals that keep his own suit cold — so each attack he makes is draining from his own life support.
Legacy is a great leader of a team, and the larger the team the more useful he becomes, considering how many team-wide boosts he can throw out. His base power Galvanize, in particular, is extremely useful as part of a large team. Young Legacy, on the other hand, doesn't have Galvanize, instead using her Atomic Glare as a high damage-dealer. The brilliant bit is... Legacy is an experienced leader who can motivate an entire team. Young Legacy doesn't have that experience, but her high-damage base power is extremely useful for a smaller team that doesn't put out as much firepower as a large team. Their powers encourage the players to use them like they would act in reality: the experienced hero leading a big team while the inexperienced hero assists a smaller team!
Ambuscade doesn't scale up very well against larger teams. He's a serious opponent against three-man teams, a moderate but manageable threat to a four-man team and will likely get smashed by a five-man team. Because... he's a hunter. A smart hunter waits until his prey is vulnerable and easy to bring down, and doesn't blunder into a situation where he's facing overwhelming danger. So of course he's most dangerous when he's up against a small team. One could interpret him fighting a small team as stalking and attacking his prey when they're the most vulnerable, while fighting a large team is him making a mistake and stumbling into a straight fight with a larger group of heroes than he planned.
Further, the more heroes there are, the more likely it is for his Personal Cloaking Device to be played during setup - as if he realized he bit off more than he could chew and tried to bail, but the heroes track him down anyway.
Legacy's powers are mostly focused on protecting and supporting his allies instead of attacking his opponents directly. In the Freedom Four comic, Legacy went straight for Baron Blade and got his ass kicked thoroughly because he attacked Blade directly and on his own. When he recruits the Wraith, Bunker, and Tachyon, he lets them do the work against Blade while he distracts Blade and takes hits for his team, until the Wraith can ambush and disarm Blade, Bunker can destroy the drill, and Tachyon can punch her way through the Blade Battalion and hack the platform's main computer. This is exactly how Legacy works in-game.
The three most prevalent card types — "Ongoing", "One-Shot", and "Limited" — are industry terms for types of comic books.
Expatriette's outfit is a deliberate fashion statement. On her base card, she wears a white collar, with stripes of navy blue and teal for a top. This is a deliberate contrast to her mother, Citizen Dawn's emblem, which is yellow on the bottom, with red and orange alternating stripes. While Dawn's emblem is meant to resemble a sun rising over the horizon, Expatriette's outfit evokes a moon shining down.
Speaking of Citizen Dawn, she pulled a Do Not Adjust Your Set to announce the creation of her micro nation and inviting supers to join her... Because her powers are to manipulate existing light sources. And radio waves and visible light are just electromagnetic waves of differing frequencies. So her powers logically extend to radio.
Generally-speaking, the villains that scale up most dangerously are actually the sort of villains that would be realistically dealt with by a small team of heroes:
The Dreamer scales up hard based on how many heroes are fighting her, but she is much less dangerous when it's a small team, which more accurately represents how the heroes "fighting" her would be using minimum force to save her.
Gloomweaver is vastly more dangerous based on how many heroes he's fighting, but that's because a small team of investigators would incur a less extreme response from his cultists than a large group.
Warlord Voss sends more mooks after the heroes based on their numbers, because a large force of heroes is an obvious threat that he'd throw a lot of troops against. A smaller force sent to assassinate him, on the other hand, would garner a weaker response....
The Ennead deploy more members based on the number of heroes, which makes sense, as more heroes would draw more members of the group out to fight in the first place.
Arranging for multiple heroes to converge on a situation presumably involves plenty of communications - which Miss Information has bugged, giving her enough warning to find something appropriately scaled to deal with them.
Nearly all Environment or Villain cards have conditions for their targets — the hero with the most cards in play, the highest/lowest HP, most/fewest cards in hand, etc. And many Environment cards also have destruction conditions — ways, aside from using a card or power that destroys such cards, to remove them from play. Except the Celestial Tribunal's Trial cards, which all only say they must go next to a hero/villain target that doesn't already have one, and which have no destruction conditions except for when that target leaves play. The only lingering effect of any trial is it makes the subject the target of the Executioners. Essentially, the ship's AI doesn't care what you've actually done, and you can't be acquitted — once you're accused, you're to be executed. In other words, Gameplay and Story Integration of a Kangaroo Court.
Vengeance Five Baron Blade's incapacitated artwork shows him staring down Ra, Nightmist, Fanatic, Tempest, Mr. Fixer, Captain Cosmic and Mainstay all by himself while his Progression Serum seems to be wearing off as his silhouette seems to no longer have quite so noticeably bulging muscles. This is a wonderful bit of gameplay and story integration because between his high hit points, the damage reduction and healing granted by his genetically fused physique ongoing, and the fact that his incapacitated effect is dangerous (especially if you have anything out that increase damage dealt by heroes) the odds are good that you'll leave Baron Blade for last and deal with the rest of the Vengeance Five first. Which means that you'll end up acting out what the art portrays, Baron Blade stripped of his teammates, stripped of his Progression Serum (thanks to ongoing destruction once all other threats have been dealt with) and surrounded by heroes who aren't in the mood to display Mook Chivalry.
It may seem weird that Expatriette, a normal human vigilante with normal guns (lots of them, but still), or Wraith, a BatmanGender Flip with thrown gadgets, can out-damage Legacy, a SupermanExpy, or Bunker, a military engineer in a suit of Power Armor that the lore states puts him on equal footing with a tank division. But then again, Expatriette can cause much less collateral damage with normal guns, exotic ammo, and a rocket launcher than Bunker, whose Gatling gun, Flak Cannon, Grenade Launcher and OmniCannoncould easily level a city bloc if he wasn't careful, and Legacy, who could probably derail a train or collapse building with a single punch. While you're fighting, Expatriette is probably shooting whatever villain targets she can while Bunker and Legacy are evacuating the area, making whatever potshots/cheap shots they can along the way. Once Bunker has collected his ammo crates, and the city blocks nearby have been evacuated, Bunker activates his Turret Mode and sprays the area with his Flak Cannon, Grenade Launcher and Gattling Gun, and Legacy can cut loose and throw all the damaging One-Shots he has been drawing. Meanwhile, Expatriette keeps running between her supply caches, shooting whatever she can on the way, and Wraith pops in and out of hiding throwing her gadgets at high value targets.
Before finding the mask granting her control over corvids, thus making her The Matriarch, Lillian Merle Corvus loved buying cheap but good looking antiques at the flea markets. Corvids hoard shiny stuff. She was already a case of Steven Ulysses Perhero, but even her behavior had a lot in common with the corvids she got the powers to control.
Most of the Flavor Text on The Matriarch deck sounds like it has been written by trying way too hard to be edgy. That's because it actually was. Almost all of the flavor text from that deck is from The Matriarch poem books.
Her victory theme in the computer version is once again going for the overly dramatic feel, a combination of cawing, wings flapping and ethereal sounding instruments, along with a One-Woman Wail. It probably is some track she composed herself.
Baron Blade's theme is called "Legacy of Lunacy". Legacy of Lunacy His Revenge Before Reason vendetta against Legacy extends even to his theme song!
The image on La Capitan's Walk the Plank card shows Unity being unamused at being about to be shot by La Capitan in the void behind. Now maybe she is Defiant to the End... Or maybe it has to do that Walk the Plank does absolutely nothing to Unity except for some pretty low Projectile damage, as all her damage comes from One-Shots and her golems, and neither are that much affected by the "Unable to use Powers until the end of the next Villain turn" clause on Walk the Plank card. Maybe she has good reasons to be so bored about it...
It stops her from building a new golem, to be fair, but that is indeed pretty minor when she already has her stuff online and hungry.
Why does Rainek Kel'Voss, as a Scion, have damage reduction based on the Inevitable Destruction card's count up to doomsday? Because he's playing both sides! The more desperate the situation, the more likely the heroes are to go easy on Voss because he's giving them information they might be able to use! Notably, when Voss usurps OblivAeon he immediately stops having that kind of protection.
Grand Warlord Voss is trying to conquer the planet. Why does he only need 10 easily killed Mooks to win, and why are there only 3-5 heroes fighting him? The other heroes are probably holding the line against his legions world wide while you're attacking his logistics. Every mook you annihilate is a radio outpost, artillery forward base, recon cell, what have you, that supports his unseen legions the other heroes are fighting offscreen. They're easy to kill because they're just support personnel, but as the saying goes... Amateurs study tactics, professional study logistics.
This fits in with Word of God that villain HP is an abstraction of the effort needed to stop their entire plot, not just beat up the individual. Baron Blade is an excellent example of this: on his front side, the heroes aren't attack him at all, the "damage" is effort involved in finding and destroying the Terralunar Implosion Beam, at which point his flip side suits up to fight directly, to the Baron himself only had 30HP of endurance. This is also why his Challenge mode is called "Decoy Implosion Beam" - the front side is the heroes wasting time on the fake before having to go through Baron Blade to disable the real thing.
As mentioned on the Police Brutality page, the Police Backup from Megalopolis can end up causing serious injury to The Dreamer... But to be fair to them, during a situation which combines runaway Psychic Powers manifesting nightmares and a Creepy Child deep into the Uncanny Valley sleepwalking through it all, it's all too believable that a police officer could mistake her for yet another illusion-made-real. And that is even assuming she is misidentified as a valid target and not the victim of a stray shot on one of her actual illusions. And it's possible the cops just don't know what the heroes do: if they haven't been told that the Creepy Child is an unwilling participant and killing her will delete an important hero from the timeline, going straight for the source of the murderous nightmares would seem like the sensible thing to do.
Luminary's deck contains a Kill Sat called the "Orbital Death-Laser". It deals irreducible damage, meaning nothing short of redirection or out-right immunity can stop it. This is a man who has been on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge since he was thirteen, and apart from knocking the USSR out of his home nation isn't stated to fight a lot of other heroes unless Legacy is incapacitated somehow. So, why does he need aKill Sat in the first place?
You do recall that Baron Blade's original plot was to crash the moon into the Earth, right? If anything, an orbital death ray is a step down from that.
The really worrying thing is that the Death-Laser would actually be really good at hurting Legacy on a deck level if the two went head-to-head: most of Legacy's tanking is heavy damage reduction, which the Death-Laser ignores, Luminary deals enough damage types (in particular projectile, fire, and electrical) that Legacy would have trouble sparing a power to constantly shield against energy, and Blade's ability to use it immediately once the targeting console is deployed would make it hard for Legacy to respond in time. It is horrendously effective against Iron Legacy.
