Painters

## Overview

*They say a picture is worth A Thousand Words - but how many VP can it be worth? The Painters are an eclectic group of artists who aim to capture the true essence of Smash Up in their portraits. Their pictures capture everything - heart, soul, power, abilities, and more. This faction uses a simple “Energy” mechanic which uses tokens to represent the creativity and artistic inspiration which the Painters bring to their work. Each Painter arrives in play with Energy tokens equal to their power, which they can spend on powerful effects. Although the Painters are few in number, they can bring portraits of each other to life to ensure you always have the right Painter for the job. Ration your Energy and your blank Canvases carefully and you’ll surely paint your rivals into a corner!*

The Painters faction features a cast of six eclectic artists who use Energy to power their abilities. Their abilities revolve around spending Energy to copy features of other cards, either those of other players' or your own. They have a rare quadruple feature action called Canvas which allows you to spend Energy to paint a portrait of one of your other artists, bringing them back into play all game long. Fueling your painters with Energy will ensure that you always have access to a versatile toolkit of abilities which adapt to the situation. This faction challenges you to stretch your creativity in how to use some of the abilities, which can be surprisingly open-ended and flexible.

Image Album: https://imgur.com/a/Hei9wPz

## Details

#### General

* Name: Painters
* Author: ludichrisness
* Complexity: 3.5/5
* Version: 1.1
* Last updated: May 18, 2023

#### Mechanics

* Energy
* Madness

#### Special Details

Painters are one of the first custom factions to use a common community mechanic, called Energy. Energy is a generic positive counter which gains meaning from abilities that reference it. It is explicitly intended to function together with other custom factions from other authors which also use Energy (and/or Marks, the negative version of the same idea).

## Cards

#### Breakdown

Painters have 6 minions and 14 actions. They have a total minion power of only 18, or an average of 3 per minion. Among their actions, there are:

* 3 play-on-base actions: Happy Accidents, Still Life, Zeitgeist
* 6 play-on-minion actions: Canvas (4x), Celestial Brush (2x)
* 5 standard actions (all of which affect one or more minions, **in bold**): **A Brush With Death**, **A Thousand Words**, **Perfect Likeness**, **Stroke of Inspiration (2x)**
* 4 actions that directly increase a minion's power: A Thousand Words, Celestial Brush (2x), Zeitgeist

#### Minions (6)

* **1x Arrowny (3)**: Place Energy on this minion equal to its power. Talent: Remove an Energy from this minion to play a Canvas as an extra action. Until the end of the turn, that Canvas has the ability “Ongoing: This minion has added power equal to the highest printed power of another minion here.”
* **1x Shai (3)**: Place Energy on this minion equal to its power. Talent: Remove an Energy from this minion to play a Canvas here as a copy of an action currently in play. At the end of the turn, return it to your hand if you still control it.
* **1x Ammy (3)**: Place Energy on this minion equal to its power. Ongoing: After any player adds one or more additional cards to their hand from any deck and/or discard pile, you may remove an Energy from this minion to draw a card from the same respective location.
* **1x Hallward (3)**: Place Energy on this minion equal to its power. Ongoing: After another minion is played here, you may remove an Energy from this minion to have it copy and repeat the abilities of that minion and lose all other abilities until the end of the turn.
* **1x Pickman (3)**: Place Energy on this minion equal to its power. Ongoing: After another minion is played or moved here, you may remove an Energy from this minion to have that minion’s owner draw a Madness card. Talent: Discard a Madness card to draw a card from your discard pile.
* **1x Bridger (3)**: Place Energy on this minion equal to its power. Talent: Choose a minion. Remove an Energy from this minion to pick one ability until the start of your turn:
	+ That minion's printed power is treated as 5.
	+ Your minions at its base cannot be destroyed.
	+ After another minion is played, that minion may move to its base.

#### Actions (14)

* **4x Canvas**: Play on your minion. Talent: If this card was in play at the start of the turn, remove two Energy from this minion to return this card to your hand, then search your deck and/or discard pile for a minion of power 3 or less and draw it. If you drew it from your deck, you may play it as an extra minion.
* **2x Celestial Brush**: Play on your minion. Talent: Remove an Energy from this minion to play an extra action OR this minion gains +1 power until the end of the turn for each Energy on it.
* **2x Stroke of Inspiration**: Place up to three total Energy on your minions. For each Energy you don’t place, you may shuffle a card from your discard pile into your deck.
* **1x Perfect Likeness**: Return a minion of power 3 or less and all actions on it to their owners’ hands. You may play another minion at its base as a copy of that minion until the end of the turn.
* **1x Zeitgeist**: Play on a base. Ongoing: Your minions here have +1 power. Talent: Remove an energy from one of your minions to transfer this action to or from its base.
* **1x Happy Accidents**: Play on a base. Ongoing: When a minion is played here, you may remove an Energy from one of your minions here to immediately use its Talent an extra time first.
* **1x Still Life**: Play on a base. Talent: Play an action on one of your minions here from your discard pile.
* **1x A Brush With Death**: Destroy one of your minions. Place a total amount of Energy on your minions equal to the sum of that minion’s power and its Energy.
* **1x A Thousand Words**: Choose one of your minions. It gains +1 power until the end of the turn for each energy which has been removed from your minions this turn. Special: You may play this before a base scores.

#### Bases

* **(18) Haunted Gallery (4 3 2):** On your turn, you may destroy one of your minions to place a counter of your choice on one of your minions here. They gain the destroyed minion’s abilities until the end of the turn.

* **(16) College of Fine Arts (2 3 1):** After any player plays a minion here, each player may place an Energy on one of their other minions here. On your turn, you may remove all Energy from one of your minions here to play an extra minion with power less than or equal to the Energy removed.

## Clarifications

* **Ammy, Arrowny, Bridger, Hallward, Pickman, Shai**: If an "always-on" ability like Zeitgeist modifies these minion's power as they are played, they receive Energy equal to their modified, not printed, power.
* **Ammy:** If any player adds a card to their hand from their own deck (whether it is a draw, a place, or an add effect), you may draw a card from your deck. If you add a card to your hand from another player's deck, you may draw another card from the same player's deck. If another player adds a card to their hand from your deck, you may draw a card from their deck. If another player adds a card to their hand from a 3rd player's deck, you may draw a card from the same 3rd player's deck. All of these work the same for drawing from a discard pile, except that you can choose the card you draw (drawing a card from a discard pile does not need to meet the conditions of the original ability; for example, mirroring Scrap Diving could allow you to draw a minion from your own discard pile). If any player adds a card to their hand from a side deck, such as the Madness or Treasures deck, you may draw a card from the same side deck.
* **Hallward:** Hallward loses his own printed ability after it is used to copy another minion. If he copies a minion with an On-play ability, he uses the same On-play ability as if he had just been played.
* **Happy Accidents:** The talent copied is on the minion in play, not the minion being played.
* **Shai:** If Shai copies a play-on-base action, the Canvas is played on her base.

## Strategy

### General

Painters have a very low number of minions, which could easily make them minion-starved. Compounding their problems, their minions are all 3 power, making them weaker and easier to destroy than normal. However, this is all part of a plan, because of your Canvases. Painters keep their equity not in their power footprint, but in Energy counters - most of the time they will enter play with three Energy counters each. Canvases are a quadruple feature action which allows you to turn two of those Energy counters into another minion (probably a Painter) from your deck or discard pile, making sure that you always have a stream of minions on the board and in play. Canvases return to your hand after being used, allowing you to always have one available for your purposes, but they also take a turn of being played before they can be used.

In general, Painters have a very versatile toolkit of abilities which copy and react to other events that occur to give you a great deal of control over the game. Many of the Painters, like Arrowny, Shai, and Hallward, can copy parts of other cards - sometimes spending Canvases as currency to do so. Arrowny copies power, Shai copies actions, and Hallward copies abilities. Ammy is one of the most intriguing, copying draw events from both the deck and the discard pile. These cards can copy rivals or even your own future moves, making them surprisingly flexible.

You have several options to convert your Energy equity into power when you want to break a base. The classic move is a Canvas turning into Arrowny to play the same Canvas and copy a leader (5 power minion) for an 8 power burst with only Talents. There are any number of ways to push that further, such as Bridger turning someone into a 5-power minion for her, Hallward to copy that ability and use it himself as well, or Celestial Brush to gain power off of your Energy before you use it. There are some extremely good abilities on offer, with the only limits being your supply of Energy and your creativity. Pickman can also be terrifying as the first minion on a base, especially if you load him up with extra energy from Stroke of Inspiration or Zeitgeist. Swarm factions will have a nightmare trying to break his base as you flood their hand with Madness, making the base extremely unappealing for them.

In general, Painters are all about the 2-turn plan; play a Canvas one turn, with a clear goal in mind for how you plan to explode on the following turn. Once you build up some board presence you'll find that you have a ton of options for how to approach your turn, and you can make some impressive bursts before even getting to your regular plays. Painters' main weakness is being quite localized in some of their abilities, which makes positioning extremely important for them. Their only movement card is Bridger, who offers an interesting kind of reactive movement. This option can let you pivot to your true target, or prevent solo scores from rivals if you literally can't cover all of your bases with a limited number of minions.

Canvases are very impactful, but they also take time to set up and will sometimes not get to fire before they leave play. It's important to know all of your options for retrieving cards from the discard pile, because Painters can burn through their best cards quickly, leading to some very slow rebuilding turns. Pickman can allow you to draw from your own discard pile if you take on a Madness; Stroke of Inspiration can shuffle cards back in; Canvases can draw Painters from the discard pile if you absolutely need one, although they don't get to play it for free; and Still Life can play actions of your minions directly from the discard pile. Many of these are draw events which can be copied by Ammy, making her a crucial engine to get in play to make it less appealing for rivals to draw cards and to get extra bang for your buck with your own recursion options.

Painters can be extremely fun, but do take finesse in pacing yourself with your best cards. It's important to know everything in your deck ahead of time, as well as some of the options in your rival's deck which you may be able to copy during the game. Make sure to ration your Energy carefully, because there is not as much of it as you think, and you can burn through it quickly. Take advantage of the low power footprint of your Painters as they can have a great deal of equity attached to them with modifiers and Energy, without adding much at all to the power on a base. Once you get a few Painters in play, you should have a self-regulating engine that allows you to explode when you need to, while keeping options and flexibility open for future turns.

### Partner Suggestions

Painters make for a great support deck or headliner deck, offering a lot of creative and flexible options. The obvious choice is to build off of Canvases which can search for and recur 3-power minions, but those plays will often be used for Painters themselves due to their timing and cost, rather than partner 3's. Instead, you might look at which Painter abilities can enhance or exaggerate useful parts of your partner's gameplan. Look for abilities which are useful when doubled with Hallward, or higher than normal printed powers for Arrowny. Shai can make forgeries of your partner's actions, letting you double up on actions that were never intended to be doubled. Painters mostly appreciate more options for what to do with the tools they have, making for lots of exciting synergy opportunities as you hunt for ways to interlock the two sets of cards.

#### Published

* **Ancient Egyptians:** Burying is a very natural way to speed up Canvases as they are considered to have been in play at the start of your turn. AE also complements the low power footprint of Painters with having zero power creep off of their buried cards. If AE gets their draw engine going from Pharaoh, you can quickly access the key Painter cards you need to make your gameplan work, and Pyramid Engineer is the rare 3-power minion which you may actually choose over a Painter just for the chain combos that it can enable - having access to it as a talent from a Canvas is extremely appealing. Just watch out for being overly landlocked especially in multiplayer games with more bases.
* **Killer Plants:** Sprouts and Painters are a match made in heaven as you can quickly access your best Painters for the current situation. Painters are already all about the two turn plan, and this speeds it up even more. There are some terrifying combinations of cards here, such as Happy Accidents having Shai forge Overgrowth off of a Sprout popping on her base, allowing for a simple double score. Although you sure won't get much benefit from Blossom with only six uniquely named minions, you will certainly appreciate the extra minion plays to get parts of your engine in play faster, as well as the free recursion and access which Killer Kudzu brings to the table, making your explosive plays that much more explosive.
* **Knights of the Round Table:** The headlining element of this combination is Shai being able to forge your Knight quests (including the Grail), allowing the VP farming to stack up quickly. Although you can have some challenging rebuilding turns looking to establish minion presence with two minion starved factions, there are benefits as well; Merlin appreciates the 14 actions which Painters bring, and the movement of Knights really helps to offset the local nature of many Painter cards. Painters add some strong area control to the powerful Knights gameplan which really lets them control the board.
* **Mermaids:** Having direct search and recursion for one of the strongest 3's in the game with the Charmer is very appealing on the surface, but there is a lot more to see here as well. Pickman becomes extremely potent when you can drag minions into him or force people to play on him, making one think that dishing out Madness should have been a feature in Mermaids all along. Mermaids have a ton of chainable actions which can rearrange power on the board, which chain really well into some of the Painter terminal actions. Whether you are forging another Desert Island with Shai, getting extra energy off Shipwreck Cove, or providing extra draw with Ammy, both factions really appreciate what the other brings.
* **Star Roamers:** If you aren't getting the 3 power minions you need out fast enough with Canvases, Ship's Captain can speed up the process massively. The Star Roamer movement package is greatly appreciated by Painters, who also benefit from selective returns to hand to refresh and restock their Energy allotment. Science Officer is tremendously valuable to actually return them, allowing you to slip Painters in and out of your hand for the task at hand, always having Energy for your abilities when needed.

## Author Notes

Painters are a ton of fun. This is a collection of dangerous and powerful abilities that I could never have in a normal faction, tempered by the use of Energy as a cost, making them impossible to exploit too much. I love unique minions but they add a lot of inconsistency in drawing the right minions at the right times, but Canvases solve this is a really natural way which makes sure you're guaranteed to see your key Painters when and where you need them. I also really like the idea of spending Canvases on some really powerful abilities, like essentially turning one into a mimic off of Arrowny. Painters include some nods to some of my favourite magical painters and pictomancers in fiction, and I had a lot of fun using Midjourney to create the art for this faction, especially getting the same minions to feature in many of the actions. I hope you enjoy!