Well, it’s true that ultimately the mechanic that leads to victory is doing damage points to things with hit points, and some of the heroes focus more on that than other things. But everybody’s got other tricks up their sleeves (heroes and villains alike) and depending on which heroes, villain and environment are in the mix the flow of the game can be very different. For example, since I last posted I ran another (significantly lengthier) solo game. I had The Visionary, The Wraith, and Ra versus Citizen Dawn in the Wagner Mars Base environment.
The Visionary hardly wound up doing more than a few points of damage over the entire game, but was incredibly useful, between precognitive one-shot cards that allowed me to move particularly nasty villain and environment cards to the bottom of their respective decks, decoys that soaked damage on her behalf, ongoing powers that let me destroy enemy ongoing cards or fish friendly ongoing cards out of the trash, dropping ongoing powers on other people that let me choose the damage type every time they did damage and raise or lower the amount by one (I used this to let Wraith turn all her attacks into projectile damage for her +2 projectile damage equipment bonus with an additional +1 damage on top, despite Ra’s ongoing power converting all hero damage to fire, and used a second copy on Citizen Dawn so that her attacks could be converted to fire (to bounce harmlessly off Ra’s fire immunity) as well as accelerate her self-damage from Channel the Eclipse by changing it to fire (for a +1 fire damage bonus from Ra’s ongoing power and an additional +1 from Visionary’s damage-changing power)), and her baseline power to accelerate one hero’s draw rate by having them draw two cards and then discard one.
The Wraith absolutely churned out equipment, with a variety of projectile attacks, a +2 projectile damage bonus, a utility belt that let her consistently use two powers a turn throughout the game, an environment damage debuff (stackable, though I never managed to do so), and most critically, a power that let me look at the top two cards of the villain deck and pick one to put on the bottom, then draw a card. This meant Wraith was often in a good position to burn cards to get rid of some of the nastier Mars Base environment cards, and it meant I could keep Citizen Dawn from getting any sort of engine together or (mostly) popping some of her nastiest one shots.
Ra is pretty much a damage dealing beast, but a couple of his ongoing abilities proved very handy for combos (Imbued Fire, which gives +1 damage to all instances of fire damage while it’s out and also converts all damage from hero targets to fire damage, useful both for buffing his own output and the Visionary’s output on the few occasions where she attacked; and Body of the Sun God (I think), which makes Ra immune to fire damage and has a power that he can use to make all hero targets fire immune until his next turn).
Citizen Dawn’s big thing is that she is regularly spawning fairly nasty superpowered minions called Citizens. Each one is unique, and they come in themed groups, most of which combo if you let her have more than one of the group out. Citizen Battery, for example, does a single 3 point energy hit. Citizen Assault hits everyone for lower melee damage. But if they’re both out, they buff each other’s attacks. (I never let this happen, thanks to Wraith’s ability & Visionary one-shots.) She also has ongoing powers that heal all Citizens (and she shares the Citizen keyword), fish Citizens out of the villain trash and put them back into play, and deal cold damage to her every turn in exchange for playing two villain cards per turn instead of one. And her oneshots are mostly pretty brutal - one destroys all ongoing, equipment, and environment cards in play, which fortunately only happened once in my game, very early on (it nukes Wraith and Ra pretty bad). Another heals her by 10 HP (which is significant) and all her Citizens to full. A third zaps every hero for energy damage and makes them discard 2 cards. Her special mechanic is that if she starts a turn with more than a certain (number of heroes-based) number of Citizens in the trash, she temporarily powers up and becomes invulnerable while she pumps out villain cards double quick. This ends as soon as she has a certain number of Citizens out at the start of one of her turns (again based on the number of heroes), so you kind of have to sit there and tank for at least a turn or two because you can’t hurt her and if you kill too many of her minions she’ll stay that way longer. Visionary has a card called Brain Burn that was very helpful here - it zaps the entire villain trash back onto the bottom of the villain deck (and then Visionary takes damage equal to the number of cards you moved this way, but I shunted all of that onto a decoy). Still, it’s hard to kill her before she can pull this off the one time she gets to.
The Wagner Mars Base was…interesting. Sometimes a Meteor Swarm would happen and everyone would become immune to damage (this happens at the right time to tank all environment and villain damage and you can then potentially have the first hero skip their turn to get rid of it so the other two can kick some ass). Sometimes the biosphere would catch fire and every target (hero, villain and environment all three) would take fire damage. Potentially, increased by Imbued Fire and if Ra had a chance to use the appropriate power, the entire hero team was immune. I got some beautiful use out of that, but it hurt just as often. Another card was a (destroyable) buff to all villain damage. Most of the time, nasty. But I did manage to use it to good effect to have Citizen Dawn burn herself for a turn or two of six fire damage between the Visionary’s damage-altering power and Citizen Dawn’s Channel the Eclipse ongoing. Once the Self-Destruct Sequence triggered, which meant spending hero turns defusing that or lose the game. The Pervasive Red Dust kept fragging Wraith’s equipment and Ra’s Staff of Ra, only to recover most of it the following environment turn, which meant Ra was playing the Staff of Ra quite regularly and healing 3 HP every time. This made Ra the defacto tank most of the game. There were two other cards, Oxygen Leak and Maintenance Level, but the latter never got played (all the copies got used for the Self-Destruct Sequence) and Oxygen Leak could be disposed of before it really did anything (although I think I misread the card and it should have been more difficult to get rid of - I thought it said discard 1 card to toss it, but it sounds like it’s actually discard 1 ongoing card, which are rarer and more precious).
