Villain Profile: Trixie Nixie

This week we conclude our introductions of the villains from the Realm of Runes Card Game. While new villains are a ripe area for future game expansion, the base set includes ten proper villains, plus the tutorial villain, for a total of eleven different game experiences. Today's villain may be last alphabetically, but she's certainly not the least!

Trixie Nixie

Trixie is, as the name suggests, a nixie. Fey like her are known for using their alluring voices to cause people to come into the water and drown. In this case, this means you! The whole time you're trying to beat Trixie Nixie, you're also struggling to keep hold of enough air to stay in the fight. Trixie does not generally do a lot of damage, or do it very frequently, but she does have a mechanic that can cause a character to instantly die, regardless of the number of Hit Points they have left. It might sound unfair, but you as a player do have full control over how it works.

Holding Your Breath

Unlike the standard villain experience, Trixie Nixie does not assign henchmen to each hero that must be defeated before she can become a target. She does assign henchmen, though. Sort of. During game set-up, each player is given a copy of one of her henchman cards, "Your Breath." This card goes into your hand and counts against your hand size. Right away, this effectively reduces your hand size against her for the whole game, but there's more. If you discard "Your Breath," you instantly die. As you might guess, many of Trixie Nixie's game effects can force you to discard cards from your hand.

The cards Trixie Nixie forces you to discard is compounded by cards moving out of your hand, either onto the play area or into the discard pile after use. Because the villain and henchman effects are (mostly) predictable, this does at least allow you to have an idea of at least how many other cards you have to have in your hand in order to avoid being forced to discard "Your Breath." Combined with the effective hand size reduction, this severely limits the number of cards each player feels comfortable actually playing on each turn.

It's this resource management that makes up the bulk of the challenge when playing against Trixie Nixie. A lot of the powerful combos that players can pull off with each other require using a lot of cards. That's not normally a problem against other villains but can be deadly with Trixie. You have to play more conservatively, deciding which resources are worth burning and which you have to hang on to in order to ensure you can survive the round.

Trixie Is Tricksy

While the players are having to play conservatively to ensure their own survival, Trixie has several interesting defensive abilities. First, she has Epic Regeneration. This means that she recovers Hit Points equal to the number of players at the end of every player's turn. Despite limited resources, the heroes still have to manage to do more than that amount of damage each turn, or else her ability to heal outpaces your damage and begins to undo all of your progress. Heroes may want to use their early turns to set up for more damage later - but don't take too long because Trixie Nixie is still going to do her best to hurt you while you wait.

Her other defensive ability comes from her passive ability. In short, she becomes immune to whichever damage type she was dealt last. So, if you deal her melee damage, no melee damage can be done to her again until she's been dealt either ranged or energy damage. This defensive trick further complicates the heroes' ability to consistently deal damage to her. Some of the strongest spells, like magic missile, deal multiple instances of damage repeatedly. The very thing that makes them strong against other targets makes them a lot less effective here. This additional complexity further increases Trixie's challenge.

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Trixie Nixie occupies an interesting design niche amongst the villains. She doesn't deal an overwhelming amount of damage, and she doesn't have exceptional defenses. Yet her alteration of the game's normal status quo gives her a challenge far beyond her apparent difficulty. If she has one weakness, it's that she's all alone. So, effects that can increase damage dealt to targets, like the Hunt Target tactics card, can pull a lot of weight in this fight. Preparation is key! So... how long can you hold your breath? Next time we'll return to the Tome of Whispers to continue our exploration of vehicle combat, so stay tuned!