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Post by doctor on Sept 30, 2020 7:00:56 GMT -5
With Call and Elgyn you can find data drives at Cargo Bay, with 40 card deck, 5 cards in hand chances are quite huge that you will pull at least one into hand. Sometimes i also use Got It to search the deck for data drives, minus of that cards above the Data Drive go to lost pile. Vriess is a nice search engine (first turn he can search twice and still conceal the shotgun) but his speed 2 on ptv is tragic.
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Post by Shaolin Yautja on Sept 30, 2020 10:47:04 GMT -5
Elgyn is a must since the hand size for rogues is 4 by default. 40 cards is ideal so you can reach those drives as early as possible. I've looked at the Got It errata from the FAQs and Tournament Rulings from the web archives of the avp ccg website, it would be an excellent method to reach the drives quite early in the game. The side effect however is that if you don't have a character that is a Scout using the effect of Got It, you may risk losing many cards in your deck if those drives are towards the bottom of your deck: And for Rogues, only Rogue Assassin and Creepy has the Scout resource to bypass that card's side effects. Theoretically, you could use a Regroup event to recover the discarded cards because of Got It's side effect, but then that also means you would have to wait until you have Regroup in hand first and that will be a problem since Regroup is only restricted to 1 per deck. As for the situation with Vriess and Ripley 8, I reviewed their resources and see one distinct advantage they would have and that is their "Lucky" resource. If your opponent really wanted to stop you from downloading and attaining tokens quickly they either have to connect to you fast or they would have to cripple your drives permanently fast. I can see that a opponent may want to use It Was A Bad Call and Malfunction combination to cripple your drives, but since Ripley 8 and Vriess has the Lucky resource that combo is less effective to stop you from downloading quickly as it would require an opponent to play 2 copies of It Was A Bad Call targeting either Ripley 8 or Vriess and a Malfunction before they could cripple one of your drives or any other item permanently. Basically the first It Wad A Bad Call targeting a Lucky character merely temporarily removes their Lucky resource rather than giving them the Unlucky resource, and will require a second IWABC targeting that same Lucky character to give them the Unlucky resource. The other advantage is being able to use the event "I Thought You Were Dead" if your opponent ever manages to kill one of your "Lucky" characters you can bring them back to life and have them regroup with any of your fellow Rogues. It would only cost 5 CP for Lucky or any Ripley character. Also don't forget about Ripley 8's stats, she has a good speed rating thus a better defense is always an advantage rather than a disadvantage. Having Call means regardless if the opponent attempts to Malfunction combo your data drive you can still download simply because of her Synthetic resource.
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Post by doctor on Sept 30, 2020 13:01:20 GMT -5
Still the Got It route was the fastest route i ever used, you would be realy unlucky to drop more than 7-10 cards, and sometimes you can have more luck when for example Operations go to lost pile while you search, oponent faces are pricless in such moments.
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Post by Shaolin Yautja on Sept 30, 2020 14:49:33 GMT -5
That is absolutely fantastic! If you only had one Operations in the deck and that becomes discarded because of Got It's side effect then it will actually become more beneficial to you and most likely would tilt the game in your favor than not. Losing operations is favorable and is an excellent trade off.
The only exceptions are decks that are aggressive and has 2 or 3 copies of Access Space in their deck. If your opponent is playing defensively or trying to win by any other means other than confrontation and combat then that means you pretty much already won that game.
Chances are they would also try to avoid connecting to you and confronting you and the. The entire match becomes a race of who satisfies their alternate victory condition first.
Maybe a Eager Youth deck built around winning by evacuating an Ambushed Predator may also be an interesting match up? Not sure if it could match the speed of other alternate victory or non-confrontation type of decks. But Ambushed Pred is unique so that could take some time. Theoretically I suppose they could try and go through their entire deck similarly with Got It and somehow to bring it in play but because Ambushed Pred is infected then that will be a serious problem if infected roll fails. But that would be a terrible deck against Aliens though since they'll have to have a Hived Airlock in play at the very beginning of the game.
I was going over the FAQs and rulings to see if they ever mentioned anything specific about this regarding Operations discarded because of Got It's effect. Didn't seem like it.
We only know that in Contact it's mandatory to play locations from hand during movement round regardless, unless it's a location that is illegal and can't fit into the current locations in play then it's discarded normally or if it's already a duplicate location it becomes removed from play.
Countdown scenario does not mandate playing locations from hand during movement round, but players can't discard them at will during Discard and draw round. In that case, players can hold Operations in hand and avoid connecting for as long as possible until they reach the bottom of their location deck.
I only remember they had a ruling for the card Regroup and Operations and it's not legal to call Operations when using Regroup as it would make the deck illegal. But nothing on preventing Operations from being discarded because of Got It's effect. I'm surprised the testers and designers didn't say anything about Got It in the erratas in regards to Operations being discarded but that is very advantageous for Rogues.
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Post by doctor on Sept 30, 2020 19:35:37 GMT -5
I know, i was playing with Got It in Rogues for years and such Operations going out scenarios were realy common. Access space decks are like 80% of decks that i see so i would be more surprised if i would not see a Found Em + Access space combo.
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Post by Shaolin Yautja on Sept 30, 2020 21:14:17 GMT -5
The one real weakness I noticed for Rogues is they don't seem to have any cards that will allow them to generate combat pool over and over again as quickly as possible. Although you could gain more cp with Call at locations with communications, I bet we both would agree that it's better to download data tokens altogether with her instead since she can't be disrupted by malfunctions. And it's good to get a head start with data token accumulation with her if the drives have not been brought into play yet.
So because of the lack of massive and quick CP accumulation and gain for Rogues I would think that it's best to keep cards that require cp expenditure at a minimum in the deck and heat of battle also helps opponents to gain cp. The rogues combat pool gaining support isn't the best available.
Unlike how Marines and Predator, they have events that can help them gain CP continuously turn after turn without having to rotate a character over and over again.
Marines have 2 by 2 formation and Predator has lay of the land. Aliens have natural selection to help them generate CP but they have to kill and capture enemy characters or civvies over and over for this.
The other issue I noticed is that if you fight Predator without any malfunctions and/or disarmaments then the flechette rounds are practically useless against them as they will most likely be wearing armor when they engage you. The flechette rounds effect states that it does not inflict any damage on targets with armor.
This is particularly problematic when fighting any 7 power predator with a hunting kit or ceremonial armor as they would have sufficient resistance to take no damage or very little damage. Meaning if they do reach you, the game will be more in their favor.
Against Aliens, however, flechette rounds are an excellent deterrent.
One other thing I had been thinking about are cards like The Will To Live and I Thought You Were Dead, especially in a situation when you are down to 2 Rogues alive remaining and the "evacuation" or uploading of the data tokens victory condition is almost met and they manage to take out one of your characters. You can resurrect a dead character with either of those 2 cards. Then during search round, rotate to download data tokens and evac those tokens the following turn's movement round.
Although I'm not sure if the data drive is considered dropped and will be required to be picked up again first when one of your characters is kia and then subsequently resurrected with TWTL or ITYWD. But let's say you didn't declare any attacks, and your characters are still in ready position in combat round and an enemy character manages to kill one of your rogues, you then play The Will To Live or I thought you were dead on the recently killed character all just so you can download whatever data tokens you still need for the turn and complete the data tokens evacuation process in the following turn. If you already had enough data tokens to evacuate and win the following turn then those 2 cards can make a huge difference even if an enemy character manages to reach your rogues.
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Post by doctor on Sept 30, 2020 22:04:37 GMT -5
CP and Rogues is always a tight situation. Heat Of Battle is practical a must have, also Call cp generation if you sit in Communications Center, other option is Chapel location. For more combat oriented Rogues there is Take Names card, and that can give even up to 10 cp in one turn of shooting. I agree that all the cp 2 cards are rather to be avoided unless realy immportant game changer and cp 3 cards are no go into Rogue decks. In case of Predator it`s a simple situation, if you didn`t win the game or close to it by the time Predator player grabed all his toys, you should not be playing Rogues. Maybe it`s a good idea with Disarmament but as we still speak of 40 cards deck, maybe better would be Hit Bellow The Deck to get dmg + with option of damaging equipment on oponent, with 5 shots at least some has to work. Still more of a sideboard deck card.
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