200 Guys With Hatchets and Ladders
Edge
Cost: Asc Asc 2
Limited. Smoke all non-Unique Characters you control when this card leaves play. When an opponent plays a Unique Character, you may return up to X 1-cost Characters from your smoked pile to play. X= the Unique Character's cost.
While not a very powerful card on its own, this card from the Seven Masters set screams to be abused. In this week’s article, I will go into some obvious and non-obvious combos for 200 Guys With Hatchets and Ladders (200G from here on) and show how the card can be used to maximum effect.
The first thought that I had when I saw this card was: how much fighting can I squeeze out of this edge? Getting back 4 fighting when an opponent plays Ting Ting is nice, but doesn’t really help an awful lot, so something has to be done to multiply the effect. The most obvious combo is pump cards: Fanaticism, Stand Together, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, Armies of the Monarch instantly come to mind as ways of getting more than 1 fighting per power spent by the opponent, and there are some characters that can easily be 2 or more damage for 1 power, such as BuroMil Grunt, Manchu Soldiers, Little Grasshopper, Consumer on the Brink, Simian Liberation Army and Fire Woman. The true potential of 200G becomes obvious once you realize that you can merrily sacrifice any character that 200G returns (unlike Inauspicious Return), and most abusive card to combo it with is Thunder Squire. Together with Thunder Captain, you can return to play up to 7 fighting (with Fanaticism and Stand Together) per power the opponent spends. Who, under these circumstances, would want to play a Unique character anymore? Who indeed… and that is where the weakness of a deck built exclusively around 200G comes in: it is extremely easy to play around. In fact, several tournament caliber decks don’t even need to rely on Unique characters any more, leaving you with wasted card slots. So when you build a deck around 200G, you have to take into account that you will likely have to win without it ever going off. You also have to either protect 200G (say, with Manchu Bureaucrat) or have enough Unique characters of your own that losing the 200G doesn’t take you out of the game.
But 200G can be played in a much more insidious fashion, true to the Ascended spirit. One of the design principles of Shadowfist is that Unique cards should always be better than non-Unique ones. Either the cost-to-fighting ratio is better or the abilities are better. This holds true, by and large. Exceptions to this rule, non-Uniques that are as good or better than their Unique counterparts, exist, and they are heavily played: CHAR, Deep-Cover Rebels, Gorilla Fighter, Big Bruiser. But in general, Unique gives you more bang for the buck.
Enter 200 Guys. Here we have a card that makes it worse to play a Unique. Some Uniques aren’t bothered by 200G. They have Toughness, and evasion ability, or some other ability that makes them indifferent to weenies. But in many cases, 200G almost reads “When an opponent plays a Unique character, reduce that character’s fighting by his cost.”. If the weenies themselves don’t scare the opponent, then add Stand Together, or have an ID Chopshop around for your Manchu Soldiers. So now you’ve broken the symmetry of the game: Unique characters are better for you than they are for the opponent.
But not only do Unique characters have better numbers and abilities than non-Unique ones, they also cost more. And in Fist, the fighting-per-power ratio does not progress linearly. Six power buys more fighting than two times three power. Practically all characters in the 5+ cost regime are Unique (and the ones that aren’t suck, with very few exceptions). Thus, if you have large amounts of power, you’d rather be playing Unique characters than non-Unique ones. Here’s where the second asymmetry comes in. You can now play symmetric cards, cards that benefit everybody, like Bull Market, and benefit more from them than your opponents can. You can drop your Reascended and big Lodge characters with impunity, while your opponents have to worry about bringing back hordes of your little guys when they play a hitter. Thus, they will either play hitters at reduced value, or they will sit on their power, and either way you will get more mileage out of the Bull Market than they will.
So your 200G deck will ideally have lots of weenies coupled with lots of big Uniques. This suits 200G just fine, because now you’ve circumvented the drawback. Who cares if your weenies get smoked when 200G gets removed from play? All your hitters will stick around, and the weenies will come back as soon as you play the next 200G.
To maintain the deterrent status of your 200G, be not afraid to use your weenies at every possible instance. Throw them at opponents’ characters, play Final Brawl, Napalm Sunrise, and Tommy Gun. Not only will this keep your smoked pile full of weenies to discourage the next Unique from hitting the table, but you can also make sure that any character with 4 or less fighting doesn’t stick around for long, and underline your opponents’ need to play a Unique to get anywhere. A truly devious cycle.
Remember that weenies returned by 200G can be sacrificed, and don’t hesitate to feed them to Tommy Hsu or the Red Scorpion Killers.
In summary, 200 Guys with Hatchets and Ladders can be a fun card to build a powerful one-trick pony around, but don’t expect it to win often. A better use for 200G is as a tempo card that lets you limit the opponents’ options so that you can ultimately come out ahead. In that sense, 200G is a perfect Ascended card.