Mermaids

Gameplay

Just add water

The Mermaids are all about luring their opponents to their doom, tempting them in with a beautiful song and bodacious bosoms before revealing their true nature as base-scoring, VP-stealing fish-people. Their 3 main strengths are moving minions (both their own and enemies), preventing minions from contributing to their owner's power, and a healthy dose of play on base actions. Moving minions is one of the core Smash Up archetypes, the Mermaid's stand out with their second focus on suppressing those unfortunate minions. Rather than killing them outright or swapping places with them as other moving factions like to do, Mermaids instead use them as a tool for scoring bases. Take 'Charmed', an action that allows them to move an enemy minion to a base where they have a minion and prevent that minion from adding to it's controller's total until the end of the turn. Functionally, this is a power increase for the Mermaids - as the aim is to score that base this turn (aided by also being able to play an extra action), while the minion ISN'T giving power to its owner but IS counting towards the breakpoint on a base. This is further strengthened by cards like 'Captive Audience', giving one of their minions +1 power until the end of the turn for each minion they don't own at its base. And playing an extra action for good measure. The final fishy piece of the Mermaid puzzle is their on-base actions, these allow them to make bases really quite unpleasant for enemies to play on. As i'm sure you can guess, they are then free to lure enemies onto these bases and play at an advantage. 'Shipwreck Cove' is particularly nasty, it gives all their minions +1 power and can even be transferred to a new base after the current one scores! The Mermaid's main weakness is that they really need to be able to move enemy minions to be effective. They've got lots of cards that do this but the downside is that the overwhelming majority of them can only be used on minions of power 3 or less. This can make higher-power factions really hard to deal with, as they can freely set up without worrying about what the Mermaids will do.