Fallen Heroes
Event
Cost: Dra Dra 0
Toast a Character in your smoked pile to give target Character +X Fighting until the end of the turn. X= the number of resources required and provided by the toasted Character.
Fallen Heroes is another one of these cards that went straight to the binder when I was opening my Dark Future boxes. But the recent play test showed me how powerful exactly free surprise fighting bonuses, and thus I am writing a Card of the Week article in honor of this underplayed, soon to be available again card.
Fallen Heroes very much like a Open A Can of Whupass, arguably one of the most powerful events in the Dragon repertoire. So why does it get played much less? It has a drawback that hurts twice: you have to toast a character in your smoked pile to play it. A toasted character cannot be returned to play with Golden Comeback, and often it’s the big hitters that have all those crunchy resource symbols all over the bottom of the card. Secondly, every time you play against a Dragon deck, that free fighting bonus of yours, already paid for in blood by a toasted character, can easily turn into a free Hacker for the opponent. But it has a surprise advantage that Open A Can cannot beat: you can play it at any time, especially right before you hit the site after the opponent declined interception. You don’t tip your hand by playing it before the attack. It has a second advantage over Open A Can that is not shabby, either. It only requires two resources as opposed to three, which makes a huge difference in a multi-faction deck. Finally, since the set will be reprinted soon, it is much easier to get your hands on a sufficient number of Fallen Heroes, while Open A Can still is a promo card and costs lots of Power Points.
Fallen Heroes is not a card for every environment. If your environment is loaded with cards that steal power or toast things, and Hackers abound even in non-Dragon decks, odds are someone will have a Hacker in hand to cancel your Heroes when it matters most. (You laugh, but the Chapel Hill group went through such a phase, with two Ascended players playing five Bites each in their decks.) Most groups, however, only feature Hackers in their Dragon decks, and then not even the full complement of five per deck, giving Fallen Heroes a good chance of succeeding. There are multiple ways of dealing with the Hacker problem: play more Fallen Heroes than they have Hackers, return your Fallen Heroes to hand (with Ashes of the Fallen or Fighting Spirit), or cancel the Hacker. With the first two options, there will be so many events that the Dragon player can cancel with his Hacker that you’ll make the decision of which one to choose really tough for him. Canceling the Hacker as it’s played also does the trick, and can be accomplished with Stick it to the Man, Wu Man Kai, or Akani Hideo, to name three. Finally, the costs of having a Fallen Heroes canceled are two-fold: you lose a character in your smoked pile, and you may fail in succeeding in your attack and lose your target character in the process. While the second one is hard to avoid, the first cost can be mitigated by simply toasting only what you need. If you only need +2 fighting to take the site, toast a Scrappy Kid, and not Bei Tairong. Save Bei for later instead.
Now that we’ve dealt with the first disadvantage, let’s deal with the second, the toasting of characters. First off, this may actually turn out to be an advantage. Some decks, like Netherworld Return decks and There is Always one More decks actually like having fewer characters in the smoked pile. But assume for a moment that you are playing a regular Dragon deck for a moment, where you’d rather return big characters than toast them. Fortunately, there is a boatload of low-cost characters that require three Dragon resources: David Maxwell, Jenny Zheng, Dirk Wisely, and the list goes on. These characters are all characters that you wouldn’t want to return anyway, but they provide great fodder for Fallen Heroes, if you’re going for maximum fighting. But remember the special benefit of Fallen Heroes: it can be played at any time. Unlike the Can, where you want your bonus to be as big as possible, Fallen Heroes lets you operate with a lot more precision, meaning that a +2 bonus from Fallen Heroes may often be worth more than a +4 bonus from Can. So instead of loading your deck with high-resource cards (which in turn will either require more foundations than usual or ramp cards like the Gambits), you can use your ramp characters for Fallen Heroes. Of course, you can always mix the Can and Fallen Heroes in the same deck, in which case your high-resource characters get to pull double duty.
Since we talked about dual faction decks earlier already, let’s take a look at which factions mix well with Fallen Heroes. Obviously, the best factions will have characters that provide many resources while requiring few. The Purist and Ascended characters of quality typically require two or more resources to play, and are thus no good. The Monarch characters don’t require too many resources, but also provide few. The most suitable factions are the Seven Masters, followed by the Hand and the Architects. The Masters are just perfect: you get four symbols on almost every card, while the requirements are never more than two. And Monsoon just loves to surge forward in vengeance of Fallen Heroes. The Hand ramp characters are almost all at three resources total, so they can cheaply power your Fallen Heroes. And the Architects? Two words: DNA Mage. Three resources off of a foundation character is hard to beat. And it’s always a nasty surprise when the Ambusher of the Day becomes bigger all of a sudden…
I was happy to see people other than me play this card at KublaCon, and I’m certain that the card can find a place in your deck, too, once you’ve given it a try.