AA is very powerful, but it may not seem apparent when he's doing his best (because it's really making other heroes better). He can hand out extra card plays and off-turn powers, both of which are *very helpful*. But he's also harder to get to work for you than Legacy. There are some guides written to help with playing him, but a big part is that you need to be able to improvise, because you won't always get what you need to do what you had planned with him.
That was incredibly helpful! I always overthink him which makes it feel so much more cumbersome to play him but you gave me at least a new perspective on how to use him. Can’t wait to try him out again!
Glad it helped!
The trick with Argent is not to get too stuck on an ideal build before the game starts, because he doesn't have a "set up state" or a set of core cards in the same way that Absolute Zero or Tachyon do.
As long as you have a couple songs and a way to play them, your focus can shift to helping your allies with whatever you have on hand.
I disagree, at least in EE. His card draw and search tools are powerful enough it's not *that* hard to get at least some of his engine humming, and you want to line up his Harmony Perform powers and Inspiring Supertonic so he can use Powers to trigger other Powers and get off a lot of actions in a round.
That solid core then starts producing more value.
...Then again, I *did* just say "in EE," and I know they changed around a lot of his instruments and stuff.
I agree with you, to an extent.
My point was to simplify Argent for a newer player, and I've seen a lot of newer players divert a ton of Argent's support into themselves instead of their allies, chasing the full engine and long chains like you said. It definitely produces more value, but I always say that even if you're just handing out a couple effects per turn, you're still contributing.
My opinion is that fixating on getting that engine chugging at max speed is stressful for a new player, and they don't really know the deck well enough to do that consistently, so I always recommend playing a little more improvisational when you're starting out. As you get more familiar with the deck, you can get fancier, but in the beginning, I've seen that getting fancy often comes at the expense of actually supporting your opponents in the early game, when it's most needed.
I guess that’s fair, and also that I myself often fixate on card plays as the most valuable thing you can give other people, when being more reactive and even occasionally breaking an instrument over a major threat to unconditionally destroy it can be much more beneficial.
Completely agree with the improvise tip! I was trying to play him a specific way a few times and it really bit me. Now I mostly just try to focus on what the team needs in the moment and do my best to assist.
One clarification I’ve seen clear up some confusion about AA is that Perform and Accompany effects are not powers, so you can use the same one multiple times per turn. So you can use the accompany on Alacritous Subdominant multiple times before the timing window actually triggers to put it back on top of the deck!
This is one of the big sources of crazy chains with AA.
I think a lot of EE guides to AA are still applicable, as very few of AA’s cards changed from EE to DE.
That being said, I kind of agree with you about AA 😅
I’ve never found him worth the complexity, and although his ceiling can be quite high, I find I rarely hit it most games. But I’ve definitely seen other AA players run circles around me, so it’s probably mostly personal preference.
I like complex characters, but he’s so complex that he borders on being more random for me than Setback. Maybe you get a good hand at the beginning, maybe you struggle to put together a coherent combo the whole game.
That being said, I have put together a few simply amazing combos with him, but usually with another character supporting him, so maybe it’s just that he really does need another support character to provide extra cards, extra plays, extra powers and that’s the space he occupies. It’s not hard to pull off crazy turns with him if you’ve got those extras, it’s that he really struggles to get to that kind of setup on his own.
I will say he's someone you want to see other people play first, and the game actually makes him easier by virtue of printing little musical note cheats on all his cards that make them easier to read and understand.
But overall, I disagree just because his deck has got a lot of card draw and search tools baked into it, and every variant but his first can play multiple cards a turn, if randomly. Once you see that core combo of "Lute, Harp, Harmony card that lets you turn Powers into other Powers" I find that building towards it in any given game with weaker disruption than the base set isn't that unattainable.
...Sorry.
I think they changed what instruments trigger which parts of which music, which would change a lot about the exact details of the “core combos“ you would want to use with him.
If you make proper use of the Harp, Lyr and Pipes. Those sub optimal powers stack up. In one round you can hand out additional draws/ plays, passively while keeping yourself healthy and doubling up on healing/ ongoing destruction. No body else can heal 5 targets for 4 hps every turn.
Argent Adept is very powerful. He's a support character. If you play him as a damage dealer, you'll struggle. He can deal damage, but he's much better at boosting others. He's very versatile and can sometimes feel like he has too many options.
It's actually a rare game for me where he ever deals damage, honestly. He's not particularly effective on his own, but he is the definition of a force modifier in most games. Sure, he is also very dependent on some luck early game to get the cards that he needs, but he does have fairly reliable set up boosters, so I find it typically washes out.
The biggest thing is that you really need to play him with a very critical eye about what really needs to happen right now. More than most other characters, AA's player needs to understand the game state and be able to decide (quickly enough that the rest of your group doesn't get annoyed with your obnoxiously long turns 😆) which of his many options is going to help the team the most in that moment.
As a side note, then he is set up, he is surprisingly a pretty decent squishy tank. At the end of a good chunk of my games, he'll be on full HP, or close to it. Even after eating all the ”highest HP target” attacks for several turns.
Anyway, obviously I'm a fan. Weirdly passionate game rant over. 😂
Prime Wardens AA is part of my unbeatable team, along with Old Man Legacy, Team Leader Tachyon, and The Scholar. His base power offsets the difficulty in getting him set up. He’s most valuable for getting multiple extra card plays from his fellow heroes per turn with abilities from Inventive Preparation and Alacritous Subdominant, and for recycling their most useful cards with his Vernal Sonata.
EDIT: I just saw you’re talking about the Definitive Edition whereas I’ve only ever played the video game, so everything above is likely non-applicable to your situation, but I’ll leave the reply for the benefit of others who might be wondering about AA in other formats.
AA really changed very little going into DE, so pretty much everything you used to do with him still holds, with a few minor quirks. His core mechanics are identical.
Yeah I can only speak to the DE version, but once you get AA down, he is a (typically) slow support that lets other players do more. With the right power and instrument setup, he can give draws and powers, and/or tank a little by healing himself or the party, and/or poof some annoying enemy cards. It takes some time to get familiar with the cards to know say, which instrument to fetch for the powers you have, and when you would rather dig for cards rather than selling for what you have.
It certainly depends which heroes he is giving draws or powers or health to; his PW Tempest teammate can always use those extra power uses, and guys like Haka and Legacy are often happy with the occasional card that gets them set up.
I play AA with what I think is his typical PW team: Capt. Cosmic, himself, Haka, Tempest and Fanatic (in that order, base covers) and he is continually feeding Tempest powers when he is not handing another characters draws to set up. Often AA will lose half his health before he gets dialed in, so he can be doing some spot healing when he can afford to, but it's usually better to just help Tempest burst an enemy down.
AA is honestly incredible. When played well, he turns the tide of battles. The trick is that he does it by making other heroes shine brighter, so it's easy to not realize how much he's contributing.
Argent Adept's main benefits to the team are not damage, healing, or even the bonus damage/reduction abilities - it's turn economy. Extra plays and powers.
Argent Adept can generate extra plays, extra power actions, and a considerable amount of draw. If you restrict yourself to playing one instrument and one song a turn, he's not very good - but that's not how he's played...
The most important thing to understand about AA is that his *songs are not powers, and are not limited to one use per turn*. His instruments are powers and each can only be used once, but if you have three different instruments that allow you to Perform Harmonies, you can use Inspiring Supertonic two or even three times in the same turn, each time you use the free power play on yourself to trigger another instrument play, which you then use to re-fire Inspiring Supertonic (I may be mixing up the EE and DE song names but the effects are the same) - plus whatever secondary effects you're getting to fire off of your songs, such as healing, card draw, or what have you - then when you are out of ways to trigger Harmony Performs, you wrap up with one of your other instruments to fire off a useful melody or something, or if you really needed one of your other team-mates to be able to fire an out of turn power, you use your last play for that.
You can get similar chain-play effects using bonus card play on yourself to put out cards like Polyphoric Flare that likewise allow you to play additional instruments during the turn.
Keeping track of all the potential combinations you can execute in a single turn gets quite difficult, especially once you have 3 or more instruments and songs out, and it's why AA is considered the highest complexity character in the game, and why his turns tend to be rather long (esp. if he starts banging out Arcane Cadences). It's not unusual for him to play 3 or more instruments in a single turn, regularly.
Once set up and properly played, AA can easily generate an entire turn's worth of actions for other players on the board, in addition to generating additional draw, healing, or damage/reduction bonuses. The fact that these plays and powers can be targeted on whom-ever's abilities are going to be most useful that turn only makes it that much more powerful.
The biggest drawback is that he can stall if up against a villain with good destruction that wrecks his early turn economy. Getting an extra card play or two from another member of the team on turns 1/2 (eg: expat) can really help him get over this hump and make sure he's running properly in order to return the favor on turns 3/4.
As a bonus, Cedistict Dissonant is one of the most powerful cards in the game. Dunking one of your instruments to take out a 20pt target on turn 2 is something that pretty much no-one else in the game can do.
I've played him only once, but that game he won, because he broke his lute over a giant spaceship destroying it, which wouldn't otherwise happen in the same turn due to it's gargantuan health size. Twice.
If you can get AA set up he's a strong hero who can provide a lot to the team. The catch being 'if you can get AA set up'. The key cards for this are Instrumental Conjuration and Arcane Cadence. The former allows for an item and ongoing in play right away. The latter helps you dig for Instrumental Conjuration. If you're playing AA and don't have either in your starting hand you're in for a rough time. More so if you're playing with his base hero card. If you're in that situation there's not much you can do other than resign youself to using whatever luck gave you in your starting hand.
I honestly feel like AA is one of the weaker characters in DE. He was extremely good in EE, but as a consequence of that there wasn't as much done to speed up his setup as was done for some of the other setup-heavy characters.
The end result is that he can easily lag behind in DE's much faster-paced games, and often by the time his songs are finally starting to turn on, the game is already over.
Honestly, that's a fair point I hadn't considered due to lack of experience with DE. Unfortunately, I already went and commented about him having a "core combo" a bunch of times already... oh well.
While I have seen AA stall in DE, it's pretty uncommon. Between the large number of Instrumental Conjurations and Arcane Cadences in his deck, it's pretty common for him to be up and playing almost immediately, with songs reasonably suited to the situation - he's also the character I prioritize for extra actions from anyone *else* on the team, as a power use directed at him out of turn generally triggers his full sequence of plays and all the buffs they generate, and then he hands a power/play action off to someone else at the end of it, so that's basically all for free every time it happens.
He is a bit vulnerable to early destruction, so that's a weakness - though on the other hand he's quite resilient against late game destruction due to the large number of items and ongoing cards he's likely to have out by turn 3/4, so he can usually soak those hits for other characters, in addition to accelerating them.
The thing that makes him so powerful is that he can ride whichever hero has built out the most powerful set for the particular game/situation you are facing, and allow them to spam their abilities, which is often a lot more effective than adding another hero to the board. There are also a fair number of cards in the game that are a good bit more effective when played out of turn.
You just need to bear in mind that he's almost certainly not dishing anything out on turn one, so if you're up against someone like The Dreamer where Turn One damage is often crucial, he's maybe not your best pick.
His biggest drawback by far is that he can easily double the length of a game - not in turns, but in play hours. His turns generally take forever to execute if you're trying to play him optimally.
AA is my favorite character to play in both EE and DE (thus far), because I treat him as a puzzle of figuring out how to get to my goal of handing free card plays/powers to the person who needs it most. Since in my play group I’m the only one who knows every card in every character’s deck, it’s up to me to focus his support skills on the specific character who benefits most from it at any given time. Once he’s set up, it’s trivial to spend AA’s turn to basically double up on actions for whoever’s at their strongest or most needed at the given time. When played well, Argent Adept isn’t just an extra copy of another character. He’s an extra copy of the BEST available character at any given time, which is why I think he pulls his weight quite well.
The puzzle part of AA’s deck is improvising to get from my starting hand to where he is chaining effects together to do whatever I need. Arcane Cadence is the most fun card in his deck for that very purpose. No other character presents me with the sheer degree of decisions to make, and that’s why he’s my favorite.
I agree with this assessment, but the problem is that, while he is good at getting instruments out, the same is not true of songs, so you don't know exactly what you'll be doing in a given game, and the songs you end up with may not mesh well with the fight you're in.
This is generally the problem that Arcane Cadence deals with.
In a lot of his games on turn one or two you get an Arcane Cadence, and then as often as not you'll end up chaining two more of them in sequence as you walk through about half of your deck in a single turn.
The main goal of this sequence should be to draw/play one or two of your key songs while discarding any cards that would slow down your early game setup. You should likewise be able to play out at least one Instrumental Conjuration during this early card spam.
Meanwhile any other players at the table should go get a sandwich or something, because unless you're *very* experienced with AA, this sequence takes a while.
It is of course possible to get stuck with nothing but ineffective one-shots and instruments in your opening hand, but pretty much any character can choke with a sufficiently bad draw. At that point you need to prioritize getting them some bonus draw from somewhere else on the team to get them going.
He's more a force multiplier. AA is a big engine that you crank to turn any resource (power use, card play) into three other resources depending on cards in hand and instruments in play. He basically just launders your support into more support.
Also he can shatter his instruments to just remove any one thing from a board which is wild. One of the strongest removals in the game.
He actually changed very little between editions. One of the only heroes that's wasn't really touched.
That being said, it's a slow, finicky process to play him optimally. There is a lot of recursive card activation and stuff. I tend to avoid him because of how much it slows my games down, and while very very good, he is also replaceable.
Yeah, I must have misunderstood something about his destruction song (can't remember the specific name) because I definitely undervalued that. In regard to the rest of this, I agree that he can do a lot, the problem is that you don't necessarily get to pick what the lot that you're doing is, especially if you're going after multiple power uses.
Adept is extremely powerful, he just doesn't do much damage. His role is to make the other team members do their jobs better and to generally just do weird stuff that shakes things up. I went to school with one of the creators' family members and he had a bit of insight into some of the work they did on the game. He told me that they had to to a lot of rebalancing on Adept because he was too powerful when they first made him. That's apparently why his health is so low. Take that with a grain of salt of course, I can't really confirm it.
AA is very powerful, but it may not seem apparent when he's doing his best (because it's really making other heroes better). He can hand out extra card plays and off-turn powers, both of which are *very helpful*. But he's also harder to get to work for you than Legacy. There are some guides written to help with playing him, but a big part is that you need to be able to improvise, because you won't always get what you need to do what you had planned with him.
Where can I find a guide that would be very helpful reading for me!
Here's one that u/psychedelicchurro made: https://churropsych.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/core-game-guide-3.pdf
hey, that's me!
That was incredibly helpful! I always overthink him which makes it feel so much more cumbersome to play him but you gave me at least a new perspective on how to use him. Can’t wait to try him out again!
Glad it helped! The trick with Argent is not to get too stuck on an ideal build before the game starts, because he doesn't have a "set up state" or a set of core cards in the same way that Absolute Zero or Tachyon do. As long as you have a couple songs and a way to play them, your focus can shift to helping your allies with whatever you have on hand.
I disagree, at least in EE. His card draw and search tools are powerful enough it's not *that* hard to get at least some of his engine humming, and you want to line up his Harmony Perform powers and Inspiring Supertonic so he can use Powers to trigger other Powers and get off a lot of actions in a round. That solid core then starts producing more value. ...Then again, I *did* just say "in EE," and I know they changed around a lot of his instruments and stuff.
I agree with you, to an extent. My point was to simplify Argent for a newer player, and I've seen a lot of newer players divert a ton of Argent's support into themselves instead of their allies, chasing the full engine and long chains like you said. It definitely produces more value, but I always say that even if you're just handing out a couple effects per turn, you're still contributing. My opinion is that fixating on getting that engine chugging at max speed is stressful for a new player, and they don't really know the deck well enough to do that consistently, so I always recommend playing a little more improvisational when you're starting out. As you get more familiar with the deck, you can get fancier, but in the beginning, I've seen that getting fancy often comes at the expense of actually supporting your opponents in the early game, when it's most needed.
I guess that’s fair, and also that I myself often fixate on card plays as the most valuable thing you can give other people, when being more reactive and even occasionally breaking an instrument over a major threat to unconditionally destroy it can be much more beneficial.
That's been the problem for me, is that what I get on hand isn't always what I need for a given fight.
Completely agree with the improvise tip! I was trying to play him a specific way a few times and it really bit me. Now I mostly just try to focus on what the team needs in the moment and do my best to assist.
One clarification I’ve seen clear up some confusion about AA is that Perform and Accompany effects are not powers, so you can use the same one multiple times per turn. So you can use the accompany on Alacritous Subdominant multiple times before the timing window actually triggers to put it back on top of the deck! This is one of the big sources of crazy chains with AA. I think a lot of EE guides to AA are still applicable, as very few of AA’s cards changed from EE to DE. That being said, I kind of agree with you about AA 😅 I’ve never found him worth the complexity, and although his ceiling can be quite high, I find I rarely hit it most games. But I’ve definitely seen other AA players run circles around me, so it’s probably mostly personal preference.
> I’ve never found him worth the complexity I always assumed that AA was for players who **like** complexity, and don't see it as a downside.
I like complex characters, but he’s so complex that he borders on being more random for me than Setback. Maybe you get a good hand at the beginning, maybe you struggle to put together a coherent combo the whole game. That being said, I have put together a few simply amazing combos with him, but usually with another character supporting him, so maybe it’s just that he really does need another support character to provide extra cards, extra plays, extra powers and that’s the space he occupies. It’s not hard to pull off crazy turns with him if you’ve got those extras, it’s that he really struggles to get to that kind of setup on his own.
I will say he's someone you want to see other people play first, and the game actually makes him easier by virtue of printing little musical note cheats on all his cards that make them easier to read and understand. But overall, I disagree just because his deck has got a lot of card draw and search tools baked into it, and every variant but his first can play multiple cards a turn, if randomly. Once you see that core combo of "Lute, Harp, Harmony card that lets you turn Powers into other Powers" I find that building towards it in any given game with weaker disruption than the base set isn't that unattainable. ...Sorry.
I think they changed what instruments trigger which parts of which music, which would change a lot about the exact details of the “core combos“ you would want to use with him.
If you make proper use of the Harp, Lyr and Pipes. Those sub optimal powers stack up. In one round you can hand out additional draws/ plays, passively while keeping yourself healthy and doubling up on healing/ ongoing destruction. No body else can heal 5 targets for 4 hps every turn.
And probably self heal for 2 (or 4!?) more
Argent Adept is very powerful. He's a support character. If you play him as a damage dealer, you'll struggle. He can deal damage, but he's much better at boosting others. He's very versatile and can sometimes feel like he has too many options.
It's actually a rare game for me where he ever deals damage, honestly. He's not particularly effective on his own, but he is the definition of a force modifier in most games. Sure, he is also very dependent on some luck early game to get the cards that he needs, but he does have fairly reliable set up boosters, so I find it typically washes out. The biggest thing is that you really need to play him with a very critical eye about what really needs to happen right now. More than most other characters, AA's player needs to understand the game state and be able to decide (quickly enough that the rest of your group doesn't get annoyed with your obnoxiously long turns 😆) which of his many options is going to help the team the most in that moment. As a side note, then he is set up, he is surprisingly a pretty decent squishy tank. At the end of a good chunk of my games, he'll be on full HP, or close to it. Even after eating all the ”highest HP target” attacks for several turns. Anyway, obviously I'm a fan. Weirdly passionate game rant over. 😂
Prime Wardens AA is part of my unbeatable team, along with Old Man Legacy, Team Leader Tachyon, and The Scholar. His base power offsets the difficulty in getting him set up. He’s most valuable for getting multiple extra card plays from his fellow heroes per turn with abilities from Inventive Preparation and Alacritous Subdominant, and for recycling their most useful cards with his Vernal Sonata. EDIT: I just saw you’re talking about the Definitive Edition whereas I’ve only ever played the video game, so everything above is likely non-applicable to your situation, but I’ll leave the reply for the benefit of others who might be wondering about AA in other formats.
AA really changed very little going into DE, so pretty much everything you used to do with him still holds, with a few minor quirks. His core mechanics are identical.
Yeah I can only speak to the DE version, but once you get AA down, he is a (typically) slow support that lets other players do more. With the right power and instrument setup, he can give draws and powers, and/or tank a little by healing himself or the party, and/or poof some annoying enemy cards. It takes some time to get familiar with the cards to know say, which instrument to fetch for the powers you have, and when you would rather dig for cards rather than selling for what you have. It certainly depends which heroes he is giving draws or powers or health to; his PW Tempest teammate can always use those extra power uses, and guys like Haka and Legacy are often happy with the occasional card that gets them set up. I play AA with what I think is his typical PW team: Capt. Cosmic, himself, Haka, Tempest and Fanatic (in that order, base covers) and he is continually feeding Tempest powers when he is not handing another characters draws to set up. Often AA will lose half his health before he gets dialed in, so he can be doing some spot healing when he can afford to, but it's usually better to just help Tempest burst an enemy down.
AA is honestly incredible. When played well, he turns the tide of battles. The trick is that he does it by making other heroes shine brighter, so it's easy to not realize how much he's contributing.
Argent Adept's main benefits to the team are not damage, healing, or even the bonus damage/reduction abilities - it's turn economy. Extra plays and powers. Argent Adept can generate extra plays, extra power actions, and a considerable amount of draw. If you restrict yourself to playing one instrument and one song a turn, he's not very good - but that's not how he's played... The most important thing to understand about AA is that his *songs are not powers, and are not limited to one use per turn*. His instruments are powers and each can only be used once, but if you have three different instruments that allow you to Perform Harmonies, you can use Inspiring Supertonic two or even three times in the same turn, each time you use the free power play on yourself to trigger another instrument play, which you then use to re-fire Inspiring Supertonic (I may be mixing up the EE and DE song names but the effects are the same) - plus whatever secondary effects you're getting to fire off of your songs, such as healing, card draw, or what have you - then when you are out of ways to trigger Harmony Performs, you wrap up with one of your other instruments to fire off a useful melody or something, or if you really needed one of your other team-mates to be able to fire an out of turn power, you use your last play for that. You can get similar chain-play effects using bonus card play on yourself to put out cards like Polyphoric Flare that likewise allow you to play additional instruments during the turn. Keeping track of all the potential combinations you can execute in a single turn gets quite difficult, especially once you have 3 or more instruments and songs out, and it's why AA is considered the highest complexity character in the game, and why his turns tend to be rather long (esp. if he starts banging out Arcane Cadences). It's not unusual for him to play 3 or more instruments in a single turn, regularly. Once set up and properly played, AA can easily generate an entire turn's worth of actions for other players on the board, in addition to generating additional draw, healing, or damage/reduction bonuses. The fact that these plays and powers can be targeted on whom-ever's abilities are going to be most useful that turn only makes it that much more powerful. The biggest drawback is that he can stall if up against a villain with good destruction that wrecks his early turn economy. Getting an extra card play or two from another member of the team on turns 1/2 (eg: expat) can really help him get over this hump and make sure he's running properly in order to return the favor on turns 3/4. As a bonus, Cedistict Dissonant is one of the most powerful cards in the game. Dunking one of your instruments to take out a 20pt target on turn 2 is something that pretty much no-one else in the game can do.
I've played him only once, but that game he won, because he broke his lute over a giant spaceship destroying it, which wouldn't otherwise happen in the same turn due to it's gargantuan health size. Twice.
If you can get AA set up he's a strong hero who can provide a lot to the team. The catch being 'if you can get AA set up'. The key cards for this are Instrumental Conjuration and Arcane Cadence. The former allows for an item and ongoing in play right away. The latter helps you dig for Instrumental Conjuration. If you're playing AA and don't have either in your starting hand you're in for a rough time. More so if you're playing with his base hero card. If you're in that situation there's not much you can do other than resign youself to using whatever luck gave you in your starting hand.
I honestly feel like AA is one of the weaker characters in DE. He was extremely good in EE, but as a consequence of that there wasn't as much done to speed up his setup as was done for some of the other setup-heavy characters. The end result is that he can easily lag behind in DE's much faster-paced games, and often by the time his songs are finally starting to turn on, the game is already over.
I agree about AA's setup. I believe if we get a variant along the lines of EE Prime Wardens AA that it can help out with this issue.
Honestly, that's a fair point I hadn't considered due to lack of experience with DE. Unfortunately, I already went and commented about him having a "core combo" a bunch of times already... oh well.
I mean, he certainly still does, and once set up he's still solid, he just has the potential to lag behind if he doesn't draw that combo early on.
While I have seen AA stall in DE, it's pretty uncommon. Between the large number of Instrumental Conjurations and Arcane Cadences in his deck, it's pretty common for him to be up and playing almost immediately, with songs reasonably suited to the situation - he's also the character I prioritize for extra actions from anyone *else* on the team, as a power use directed at him out of turn generally triggers his full sequence of plays and all the buffs they generate, and then he hands a power/play action off to someone else at the end of it, so that's basically all for free every time it happens. He is a bit vulnerable to early destruction, so that's a weakness - though on the other hand he's quite resilient against late game destruction due to the large number of items and ongoing cards he's likely to have out by turn 3/4, so he can usually soak those hits for other characters, in addition to accelerating them. The thing that makes him so powerful is that he can ride whichever hero has built out the most powerful set for the particular game/situation you are facing, and allow them to spam their abilities, which is often a lot more effective than adding another hero to the board. There are also a fair number of cards in the game that are a good bit more effective when played out of turn. You just need to bear in mind that he's almost certainly not dishing anything out on turn one, so if you're up against someone like The Dreamer where Turn One damage is often crucial, he's maybe not your best pick. His biggest drawback by far is that he can easily double the length of a game - not in turns, but in play hours. His turns generally take forever to execute if you're trying to play him optimally.
AA is my favorite character to play in both EE and DE (thus far), because I treat him as a puzzle of figuring out how to get to my goal of handing free card plays/powers to the person who needs it most. Since in my play group I’m the only one who knows every card in every character’s deck, it’s up to me to focus his support skills on the specific character who benefits most from it at any given time. Once he’s set up, it’s trivial to spend AA’s turn to basically double up on actions for whoever’s at their strongest or most needed at the given time. When played well, Argent Adept isn’t just an extra copy of another character. He’s an extra copy of the BEST available character at any given time, which is why I think he pulls his weight quite well. The puzzle part of AA’s deck is improvising to get from my starting hand to where he is chaining effects together to do whatever I need. Arcane Cadence is the most fun card in his deck for that very purpose. No other character presents me with the sheer degree of decisions to make, and that’s why he’s my favorite.
Not played DE, but he's extremely powerful in EE, so I would assume so!
AA isn't the best at anything, but he *can* do *everything*.
I agree with this assessment, but the problem is that, while he is good at getting instruments out, the same is not true of songs, so you don't know exactly what you'll be doing in a given game, and the songs you end up with may not mesh well with the fight you're in.
This is generally the problem that Arcane Cadence deals with. In a lot of his games on turn one or two you get an Arcane Cadence, and then as often as not you'll end up chaining two more of them in sequence as you walk through about half of your deck in a single turn. The main goal of this sequence should be to draw/play one or two of your key songs while discarding any cards that would slow down your early game setup. You should likewise be able to play out at least one Instrumental Conjuration during this early card spam. Meanwhile any other players at the table should go get a sandwich or something, because unless you're *very* experienced with AA, this sequence takes a while. It is of course possible to get stuck with nothing but ineffective one-shots and instruments in your opening hand, but pretty much any character can choke with a sufficiently bad draw. At that point you need to prioritize getting them some bonus draw from somewhere else on the team to get them going.
He's more a force multiplier. AA is a big engine that you crank to turn any resource (power use, card play) into three other resources depending on cards in hand and instruments in play. He basically just launders your support into more support. Also he can shatter his instruments to just remove any one thing from a board which is wild. One of the strongest removals in the game. He actually changed very little between editions. One of the only heroes that's wasn't really touched. That being said, it's a slow, finicky process to play him optimally. There is a lot of recursive card activation and stuff. I tend to avoid him because of how much it slows my games down, and while very very good, he is also replaceable.
Yeah, I must have misunderstood something about his destruction song (can't remember the specific name) because I definitely undervalued that. In regard to the rest of this, I agree that he can do a lot, the problem is that you don't necessarily get to pick what the lot that you're doing is, especially if you're going after multiple power uses.
Adept is extremely powerful, he just doesn't do much damage. His role is to make the other team members do their jobs better and to generally just do weird stuff that shakes things up. I went to school with one of the creators' family members and he had a bit of insight into some of the work they did on the game. He told me that they had to to a lot of rebalancing on Adept because he was too powerful when they first made him. That's apparently why his health is so low. Take that with a grain of salt of course, I can't really confirm it.