PACG Record, 128-7 so far

[Sliska Zafir]

So, after playing close to the total 138 scenarios, my son and I have a 128-7 record. Two character deaths.

ROTR: 31-2
Lost two - Black Magga, ?

S&S: 32-3
Lost Best Served Cold x2
Lost Free Captains' Regatta

WotR: 33-2
Lost two of the intros, managed 30-0 afterward
332 highest check

MM: 32-0, with the final 3 remaining, we're hoping for a perfect run, but the Shrine of Infinite Void as a temptation...

It hasn't been easy, we've had many close calls, a bit of luck, and had to scratch our heads and eke out every bonus we could muster at times. At others, trying to beat our highest scores against villains has been great fun too. That's what makes this game a blast.

[elcoderdude]

Great!

Do you remember who died where?

[Doppelschwert]

Wow, how did you manage to roll 332?
That would be at least 17d20. I guess both of you played more than one character each?

[Sliska Zafir]

Alahazra died in part3 in S&S, Ranzak in S&S too, part1.

332 was in WotR, with Adowyn, with a ridiculous amount of dice.

So far my favorite is Mummy's Mask. The evolution of the rule mechanics and unusual scenarios, plus the trigger mechanic, makes the game surprising and keeps you guessing. Playing a party of Alahazra, Ahmotep, Drelm, Ezren with nice balance and good success.

[steve496]

Doppelschwert wrote:

Wow, how did you manage to roll 332?

That would be at least 17d20. I guess both of you played more than one character each?

My guess is that it doesn't take anything *too* weird to hit that sort of number. There's probably a Verbovezzor or something involved, but given that your average Elemental Bombardment in deck 6 cracks 100 if you blow all your mythic charges on it, it doesn't seem too unreasonable that with a good roll and some slightly more exotic buffs you could get up around 2-300. I don't remember exactly what my group's highest roll was playing through Wrath of the Righteous, but I'm sure it was well over 200.

Of course, if you *do* put together some more exotic combos things can get *really* out of hand. We later went back and played Season of the Righteous, and I *do* recall the highest roll we saw in that. Because it was an 861.

[Doppelschwert]

steve496 wrote:

Of course, if you *do* put together some more exotic combos things can get *really* out of hand. We later went back and played Season of the Righteous, and I *do* recall the highest roll we saw in that. Because it was an 861.

o_O

Can you elaborate on that?
The highest I managed to obtain was ~ 150 with three characters, and only because I was lucky enough to roll all my d20 in the range 17-20.

I'm having trouble what you could use to come up with that many charges, even if you had the necessary amount of dice to transform into d20 each.
I guess you can somehow use several mythic marshals, elemental bombardment and additional blessings of ascension as well as the chalice of ozem to generate mythic charges, but 40+ charges still seems pretty hard to achieve.

[steve496]

So, I have the full write-up of this somewhere with the exact dice pools and whatever if you're actually curious, but to give the general idea:

The fundamental question is how one gets enough mythic charges. Because once I tell you that I had 55 mythic charges (and 7 left on Verbovezzor), its easy enough to see how Elemental Bombardment gets to those sorts of numbers, as you gain 1d20+2 per mythic charge if you spend them all.

And the answer is: Reanimator Mother Myrtle and Time Stop. Myrtle doesn't have Arcane so Time Stop banishes instead of burying, which means it discards or recharges instead - so you can use it more than once. And thanks to Reanimator, every time you kill something you get to fish it out of your deck/discard pile. And with a couple Potion of Healings or Cures, you can make sure everything else stays in your deck and out of your discard pile. So its now basically a game of "every time you get in a fight, spend a mythic charge and draw your entire deck".

And at that point its easy. All you need is a way to gain mythic charges (Blessing of Ascension, Nectar of the Gods, etc.), a way to move mid-turn (say, Boots of Teleportation), and enough extra explores to get from one fight to the next - and now you can explore as many times as you want, at as many locations as you need to, each turn. And if you have more than one mythic charge gainer, you start gaining more mythic charges than you lose and they steadily accumulate over the course of your (arbitrarily long) turn. I was up to 3 mythic charge gainers so was netting +2 every time I fought something.

So, with two full locations as a run-up to the boss's location, I got up to 26 mythic charges. Then I dropped a Verbovezzor and the Mythic Marshall used the first 5 explores of the last location to give me his 6, plus 19 off the Verbovezzor. And I fought a few things in that last deck as well, bringing me to 55. With 7 left on Verbovezzor. And blessings. And so on. One Elemental Bombardment later.... 861.

[Keith Richmond]

That is one nutballs turn. At first I thought you'd run into
"End Your Turn: First, apply any effects that happen at the end of
the turn. While you do this, unless a power directed you to end
your turn, you may play cards and use powers. If your number
of mythic charges is greater than the scenario’s adventure deck number, discard any charges in excess of that number. Then, reset your hand (see Reset Your Hand on page 15). When you’re done, the turn passes to the player on your left." then realized you were describing one horrifically long single turn.

[Iammars]

steve496 wrote:

So, I have the full write-up of this somewhere with the exact dice pools and whatever if you're actually curious, but to give the general idea:

The fundamental question is how one gets enough mythic charges. Because once I tell you that I had 55 mythic charges (and 7 left on Verbovezzor), its easy enough to see how Elemental Bombardment gets to those sorts of numbers, as you gain 1d20+2 per mythic charge if you spend them all.

And the answer is: Reanimator Mother Myrtle and Time Stop. Myrtle doesn't have Arcane so Time Stop banishes instead of burying, which means it discards or recharges instead - so you can use it more than once. And thanks to Reanimator, every time you kill something you get to fish it out of your deck/discard pile. And with a couple Potion of Healings or Cures, you can make sure everything else stays in your deck and out of your discard pile. So its now basically a game of "every time you get in a fight, spend a mythic charge and draw your entire deck".

And at that point its easy. All you need is a way to gain mythic charges (Blessing of Ascension, Nectar of the Gods, etc.), a way to move mid-turn (say, Boots of Teleportation), and enough extra explores to get from one fight to the next - and now you can explore as many times as you want, at as many locations as you need to, each turn. And if you have more than one mythic charge gainer, you start gaining more mythic charges than you lose and they steadily accumulate over the course of your (arbitrarily long) turn. I was up to 3 mythic charge gainers so was netting +2 every time I fought something.

So, with two full locations as a run-up to the boss's location, I got up to 26 mythic charges. Then I dropped a Verbovezzor and the Mythic Marshall used the first 5 explores of the last location to give me his 6, plus 19 off the Verbovezzor. And I fought a few things in that last deck as well, bringing me to 55. With 7 left on Verbovezzor. And blessings. And so on. One Elemental Bombardment later.... 861.

This is amazing. Like super amazing. This is peak mythic.

[steve496]

Keith Richmond wrote:

That is one nutballs turn. At first I thought you'd run into

"End Your Turn: First, apply any effects that happen at the end of
the turn. While you do this, unless a power directed you to end
your turn, you may play cards and use powers. If your number
of mythic charges is greater than the scenario’s adventure deck number, discard any charges in excess of that number. Then, reset your hand (see Reset Your Hand on page 15). When you’re done, the turn passes to the player on your left." then realized you were describing one horrifically long single turn.

Yeah. In a previous scenario where I only had one mythic charge adder (so wasn't escalating, but was still unbounded on explores) we counted 56 explores in one turn. Note that we didn't figure this out by counting as we went along - we just counted how many cards were left at the end and subtracted.

[Doppelschwert]

Thanks for sharing, that is amazing!
No need for the details, the general outline suffices to understand what was going on. I guess you hold the high score, and it is a well deserved one :)

[Frencois]

Keith Richmond wrote:

...then realized you were describing one horrifically long single turn.

... then I realized something is broken (in Mother Myrtle) and needs to be fixed.

[Doppelschwert]

Why is there a need for a fix in your opinion?

It only works in WotR, only in AD6, and you need access to several cards to pull it off, which is highly unlikely to happen in OP (can't keep either Timestop nor Elemental Bombardment in your deck, after all, so you need to encounter and acquire both during a scenario, which is not very likely given the pool of spells at that point). It works very well in a homegame where you shuffle the class decks into the box, but I'm sure you're able to houserule that situation in case you don't like it.

She can't even reliably recharge the card outside of WotR due to reliance on charges, and there are only a few spells that bury in the other sets (Charm Person and Invoke comes to mind as the next possible contenders).

[Keith Richmond]

I would prefer if Mother Myrtle's ability to change banishes only applied to cards where they would otherwise discard or recharge if you had the requisite skill or class ability, but an attempt to word that correctly might not fit on the card.

It might be addressed at some point, mind you, but it will not be done as urgently as an exploit that is trivial to accomplish, and easy to fix.

I'd also prefer if people didn't ruin the experiences of others in Organized Play by doing so, of course.

[steve496]

I think you want to be careful about scaling back Mother Myrtle's recharge ability too much, because the fact that you get to recharge all sorts of crazy stuff that isn't even on the map for most characters is a big part of what makes her distinctive and fun. The fact that you can build a deck almost entirely out of stuff that recharges and thus cycle through it aggressively, is fun. The fact that there are a lot of cards that are good for you but much less interesting for other casters gives her a very distinctive playstyle, which I appreciate.

Restricting her to things that are already theoretically rechargeable I think would be very hard to get right, as, for instance, the ability to recharge potions (which are normally banish only) is a big part of what makes her an Alchemist. And a number of the other banish-only cards and spells aren't really that concerning. Its really just Time Stop and one or two other cards (Book of the Damned, maybe?) that are problematic. It might be possible to fix by just changing "Banish" to "Remove from the game" for a couple of the really high-powered things.

Ultimately: while Myrtle does break the game in non-OP Righteous deck 6, I'm not convinced she's broken in any other context. Through the first 5 decks of Righteous, she was a totally reasonable casting character on par with other ones we played - a little weaker in raw combat ability though more versatile than someone like Ezren. And I'm not aware of anything in the other sets that would be problematic to the same degree. So while I totally understand the impetus to rein in the absurdity of Mother Myrtle Time Stop, I do think it would be important to do it in a way that doesn't otherwise disrupt her playstyle/capabilities very much.

[Keith Richmond]

Exactly, yep.

[Sliska Zafir]

129-7 now as Ahmotep closes 3 locations not on her turn in Crypt of Water.

[Sliska Zafir]

OK, so we did end up 30-0 for Mummy's Mask, with a few close calls. Don't let the record fool you though - it wasn't easy, and it took great strategizing to get the win. Mummy's Mask is a difficult game; the sheer amount of damage it puts out is formidable (especially through barriers), so you need to always have something to reduce or prevent it.

We rocked it with the "Grade A+s" Alahazra and Ahmotep, and my son played Drelm Vaultkeeper and Ezren Spellsage. Ahmotep gets kudos for turning tons of failures into successes, Alahazra was a curse vacuum, Drelm demolished traps and Ezren just overpowered bad guys.

First playthrough on all four base sets record is 131-7. But who's counting...?

[Doppelschwert]

It's amazing that you were able to finish 35 scenarios with just 30 wins and no losses ;)

[Sliska Zafir]

Yep, got that number wrong! Guess it's 35 then.