Last night saw us down a player for Imperial Assault’s final mission of the campaign, and the other two players were not up for anything new and complicated, so we broke out Sentinels of the Multiverse - some would argue that that’s a fairly complicated game but to me it isn’t, they’d both played at least once before, and I’ve played dozens of times and can track virtually the entire game in my head so handled all the math and turn-processing type stuff. My girlfriend played Chrono-Ranger, my friend Liz took out Haka again (a fairly uncomplicated starter, for sure), and I lived life dangerously and randomized my pick from the fan Cauldron expansion, ending up with The Stranger. We fought Plague Rat (muuuuch easier than Kaargra Warfang, who I made the mistake of trying with this group last time.) inside the Freedom Tower.
The Stranger is an interesting character that I ended up quite liking. Heavy support, very little offense. The gimmick is that it has Runes and Glyphs. Runes are ongoings you play next to other things - heroes, non-character cards, non-hero targets - to buff or debuff them, including allowing extra card plays, redirecting damage dealt to them to the highest HP hero, dealing toxic damage to a target when they take damage (once per turn), dealing extra damage, healing when they deal damage (once per turn), doing less damage, taking more damage, and the weirdest card in the Stranger’s arsenal - Mark of Destruction, which goes next to a non-character card with five HP and when one is destroyed, the other is also. But if it takes damage from non-heroes, that redirects the damage to the heroes instead. So it’s basically an explosive you attach to cards like villain ongoings or environment cards or whatever, and then you whack it until it goes off. The drawback to most of these runes is that every time you start your turn, you have to choose whether to destroy the rune or deal one irreducible toxic damage to yourself. So your buffs are either very temporary, or hurt you to maintain. Which is where the four Glyph cards come in. Each Glyph lets you ignore one instance of self-damage on your turn. Which, baseline, lets you maintain one Rune indefinitely. But it can also, e.g. shield against Plague Rat’s Infection cards making you hurt yourself. But that’s not all they do. Two of them give additional powers (the default character card power is playing a Rune). One lets you play a Rune and do a toxic damage, the other draw a card. A third lets you react to villain and environment targets entering play (IIRC by playing a Rune). And a fourth lets you do fire damage whenever your Runes or Glyphs are destroyed, so there’s some percentage in swapping out the buffs or debuffs. Plague Rat doesn’t do a lot of ongoing destruction, but The Stranger seems well positioned to deal with villains that do. The final piece of the Stranger’s toolkit are one-shots, which give additional card draw, fish Runes or Glyphs out of the trash or deck respectively, shuffle runes back in, chain additional Rune or Glyph play and heal, generally a combination of two of the above.
Unfortunately, one of Plague Rat’s big things is that he can become immune to toxic damage and I only got the Glyph that does fire damage on the last turn of the game, so I contributed almost no damage to the process. Making Chrono-Ranger able to play two, then three with hat cards per turn was surely a big help, though, as was later buffing his damage, and then buffing damage against the Rat. And I was quite happy to blow up a couple of his obnoxious ongoings with Marks of Destruction, though the toxin immunity popped up again later. Sigh
Chrono-Ranger and the Plague Rat are nemeses, so between that and the Ranger’s card that buffs damage from and to him based on his bounties he did the vast majority (probably 50-odd HP worth) of damage to the Rat, but was our first and only casualty, Thankfully Haka was able to pick up the slack, especially once Chrono-Ranger could give him another power use on Chrono-Ranger’s turn. We won with a reasonably comfortable margin, without the Rat ever flipping.
which is a shame - I’d love to give it a whirl - it sounds excellent.