Scramble Suit
State of the Art Tech
Requires: Tech Tech 1
Subject Character cannot be intercepted by Characters controlled by players with cards in their hands. Any player may discard his or her hand when subject turns to attack.
As was pointed out correctly on the forum, this card will usually give you one uninterceptable attacker, but after that you may even be helping the opponents by letting them flush their hands. We should also remember that a character that is uninterceptable is far from unstoppable; denial events and sites can still ruin your day. So, is this a niche card or a killer card?
First off, Scramble Suit goes best with characters that have built-in event or site immunity, even damage redirection immunity, or factions that can provide either. The Seven are the most worthy target, as they become unstoppable in their new Suits, unless your opponents can somehow dump their hands. But other characters work well, too: Dr. Amanda Snow, the Golden Gunman, Concourse Goddard, Swift Eagle, Captain Jake Molloy, and Hung Hei Kwon, to name a few. Any faction that can play Fortune of the Turtle or redirect or cancel events easily will be able to make good use of Scramble Suit. Finally, site weakness can be easily shored up with Whirlpool of Blood, or maybe you’ll just zap the offending sites with Orbital Laser Strike, Blow it Up!, or cancel it with Verminous Rain or Invincible Chi . All of these measures make sure that your opponent will really have to get rid of his cards to stop you Scrambled attacker. Used in this way, the Scramble Suit makes for a game winner. It can penetrate a log-jammed board fairly easily with the proper backup, and if one unblockable attack is all you need, the drawback never comes into play.
If you want to be unblockable turn after turn, smoke the Suit and play it again! Monarchs are probably best at this, using Spirit Pole. Architects can use Arcanotechnician or Dr. Klaus Herrbruck, and Salvage is for any Tech faction. Smoking the Suit, of course, is easy. Waterfall Sanctuary or Stone Dolmens will do the job in a pinch. Alternatively, you can combine the Scramble Suit with the Homicide Detective to make sure that even players who make use of the option to discard will have cards in hand. Unless you have event immunity or the opponents have no power, giving them cards might actually make them more likely to stop you.
Then again, why would you want an unblockable attacker turn after turn? Shouldn’t one turn be enough? Several characters and events let you benefit from successful attacks, starting with Dirk Wisely’s Gambit and Moonlight Raid, and going over Flesh Eater to Nihilist. A Scramble Suit will provide enough of a cost as that opponents will think twice before they stop an attack that does not pose a direct threat to them.
You can always make the decision even more difficult. Who in their right mind would want to feed your Paper Trail or Pony Express unless it’s game-deciding? Alternatively, try increasing their hand size, either with Dragon Boat Festival or with an Art of War that you “lost”, or keep them low in power with Bite, Iron Monkey or Mole Network, so that they cannot play out most of their hand every turn and will have to discard more cards when you turn to attack.
Finally, Scramble Suit may actually enable a decent Architect Discard dueling deck. The Architects can already dish up a very formidable discard deck: Arcanowave Researcher provides a discard ability, along with Magic, and together with DNA Mage there is enough Magic to play Curtain of Fullness, which can in turn be recycled by the Arcanotechnician or Andrea Van de Graaf. The main problem you will run into is that the opponent will simply play down his sites and save up enough power to make a final push for the win before you run him out of cards. However, Scramble Suit will let you make almost unhindered attacks on his sites, unless he feels like helping along his own doom. Bonechill makes a good target for the Suit, since he will toast a resource as a side effect when he comes into play. Just don’t expect your friends to still like you after you’ve mauled them with a deck like this.
So, how can you stop an unstoppable attacker wearing a Scramble Suit? If you expect the Suit to be played soon, you can either try to hold only events in your hand after your turn, or even play down to zero cards. This makes you vulnerable to other kinds of tricks, however. A better way is finding a method that will let you discard a lot of cards when you choose to do so, and provides you with a benefit boot. Artillery Strike, Binary Spirit, Bouncing Benji, Deadly Hands, and Palace of Virtual Light are examples of such cards. The good old anti-state standbys such as Realpolitik and Waterfall Sanctuary will also deal with Scramble Suit in short order.
In summary, I think Scramble Suit will bring a new breath of life into log-jammed games, providing enough incentive to keep the game moving at fast pace, lest the Scramble Suit player gets his unstoppable combo together and just walks over to take the last site.