The Toxic Moor (Sc. 68)
OR: The Ultimate Burn
We figured that the Bandit King could wait, so we headed down south to the Toxic Moor to see about a magical healing tree. Our road card on the way had us once again dealing with Inox (#24). These ones gave us a lovely parting gift of 10 Gold, unlocking a Burning Mountain… and starting the scenario with two discarded cards.
When we got there, we found out that the Great Deku-like tree was being burnt down by some overexcited drakes. Oh no!
The two-player layout for Scenario 68 is challenging. Flow and GREM started just a few spaces away from an elite, high-octane Rending Drake. There’s a corridor down around the bend full of water obstacles and poison monsters. To make things worse, the whole scenario is on a timer — take too long and the tree will burn down (IE game over). The tree itself is in a big party room full of grouchy monsters. Oh, and you start with poison because why not.
Our plan was: take out that elite drake asap. He deals 7 damage and Wounds (status effect: lose 1 HP at the start of every round). Flow and GREM setup an awesome combo — that was completely negated by the drake pulling a ridiculously low initiative (meaning he went first). He ran over and clawed up poor GREM’s face.
We did some damage, but the next round the drake pulled another low initiative card AND got a high shield bonus. This time he scratched up Flow. Flow had pulled two Nulls (cards negating all of her damage) at this point and was about ready to (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻.
It’s maybe important to note that Flow and GREM aren’t known for their high HP pools. One hit from the elite drake puts us close to death.
We finished off the drake (after burning some good cards) in the third round but not before he took out Flow… We realized that the scenario was pretty much lost at this point. GREM was on his own and had few of his big cards left.
I had him grind through the next three monsters, trying to maximize XP and gold pickup. By the time that he died (in service to the Blood God!), he actually accumulated about as much XP and more Gold than he did in the last scenario…
We EPICALLY failed this scenario. By a mile. Not even close.
We briefly contemplated going back to the boring old Bandit King, but… how could we leave the Great Deku tree behind???
We decided to take a break and then restart the scenario.
***
Rules We Struggled With:
- We had forgotten that you can negate damage with card discards!! Had we remembered this, Flow would have survived and we would have probably made it a little further into the scenario. To be honest, though, the run was cursed from the start.
