Originally published at: Discerning the Metagame: Spin Cycle - StimHack
Discuss the latest StimHack article here.
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Great article. I’m eager to try out a never advance Jinteki style deck. Lots of 1/2 point agendas and with Inazuma, hopefully a taxing server. I think it’ll be great in RP. Hopefully, Jinteki can find a good way to stop R&D leaking.
I’m interested in whether Jinteki “Never Advance” will become a thing as well, though I think Tenin Institute will better enable it. Jinteki has access to very good standalone 4/2s; if I can score them off the table, that’d put a lot of pressure on runners.
Without the fear of serious net damage from PE, or being as click-intensive as RP, what stops the runner from checking your Remotes most of the time when you place an Agenda, especially when he starts realizing what you’re doing? Jinteki Ice generally isn’t amazing, and you’re likely running cards like Snare! and Edge of World, which while solid, are trashable / require cash to fire. Wouldn’t this still likely work better out of PE?
On topic, this is an excellent article. I’m not really surprised by the NBN success, and I expect HB to be on the rise again. Does anyone think the change in tournament scoring will shift the meta much?
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I don’t think it’ll be on the same tier as PE (or potentially Harmony Medtech). It will have to be a build not dissimilar to a glacier build. Runs will have to either be so taxing or so damaging that the runner will have to spend an entire turn clicking for money or drawing cards (or a combination of the two). That’s the only way I can see Tenin even coming close to being competitive.
I’m also interested in how the scoring structure changes will alter corp/runner balance.
I think HB received the least help this cycle aside from Cerebral Imaging, so I can’t say I’m surprised by the slight decrease in its win rate. However, I would certainly have thought BABW’s rate would go up though, thanks to Power Shutdown and Hive. I’m hesitant to believe HB or Weyland will improve competitively for the first half of the next cycle, simply because Gabe + central only breakers will be a massive thorn in their side.
I also should probably have mentioned the new combo decks (Power Shutdown, Accelerated Diagnostics, etc), but my disdain for them proved too great, since they aren’t consistent enough for a tournament. 
Was going to read it. Then, I saw it was written by that Lysander clown. XD
THEN, I saw my fave new stat cat, Tomokato, was involved. Dragged me in.
Seriously, a sound article. Really solid work, kids.
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Nice work. The one thing I’d say is that in quite a few cases (e.g. EtF) the change in winrate is so small that it may just be noise. It should be possible to estimate confidence and put error bars on the graphs, although I’m not certain you can do that in Tableau.
Edit:
I just saw that he did a Chi-square test on EtF on BGG. I guess the dataset is large enough that even seemingly small differences have at least a moderate likelihood of being significant.
Finally someone who agrees with me. Everyone on BGG seems to be in love with Tenin.
I think after H&P Jinteki will be back in the game; it’ll be much closer than it is now but I still think they’ll be the weakest faction, despite all the new toys. I think the problem with them is, and still will be, that they need to do too much to get their schticks to work for them. They seem to have a lot of answers to their various problems now, but they all require deck space and you just can’t do it all. On top of that, the runner has a number of hard counters to Jinteki’s net damage threat and with that neutralised what else do they have? Comparatively weak economy, expensive (and slow) agendas and porous ICE.
I think it could be the case that they’ll be hard to play against in swiss because you must run cautiously, but once you know which “flavour” of Jinteki you’re dealing with and realise how to adjust your game they’ll lose potency - making them suck in the KO stages. Anyway, this post has got a bit off-topic, but nice article!
EDIT: What I’m most interested in, looking forwards, is the effect the Criminal cards have on the game. The leading runner faction gaining a half-cycle worth of cards is huge; I’m hoping they really manage to do what they did with HB in C&C and somehow manage to not give the leading faction any kind of boost whatsoever. It would be nice to see Criminal tools finding their way into other factions, rather than vice versa. As @Lysander said in the article, Anarchs have some great cards but they don’t seem to be able to get them to work for themselves. It looks like there will be a push towards resource-based decks too, I really hope the diversification Lysander alluded to happens.
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My 2c / questions, etc:
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I wonder how much of the +10% bump Kate got is attributable to the internets discovering “the Atman build” :)?
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I’ll be surprised / disappointed in the internets if GRNDL has continued it’s torrid pace. It won a lot early but surely everyone’s figured it out now, yes? Unless there’s some new tech I don’t know about yet, BABW and GRNDL get owned so, so hard locally.
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I’m a little sad that Jinteki still isn’t working out, though with H&P imminent that’s hopefully a short-lived sadness. RP feels—subjectively—better than 35%. I used this build at 3 SCs where it went 10-4. Admittedly, it got absolutely owned in those 4 games; not even a chance of victory. It’s weak points are still major, major vulnerabilities.
And I suppose that’s without the Feedback Filter auto-include. Harumph.
- Noise, bro… man. I’m glad the bleeding stopped close to 50%, I guess? Still: far from completely neutered by J-How. Still the best Anarch (Sorry, Reina.) I want Reina and Noise to be S-tier, but I can’t get them beyond A :).
Great article, thanks for the analysis!
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Great points, here’s my speculation on them.
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I think Kate rose so much because she received many Tools and is now very focused. I felt like Genesis Cycle Kates were largely “Toolbox” builds that were clunky. Now we have blitz Kates, possibly packing Siphons, and we have complete control Kates, packing Atmansuckers. Either option is very refined and focused.
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I hypothesize Weyland in general is higher on OCTGN than in a tournament simply because there is less on the line. In prepping for a tournament I am far more likely to incorporate a third Plascrete to avoid any losses, whereas on OCTGN a loss isn’t the end of the world.
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Bear in mind these stats don’t reflect Double Time’s impact. I wouldn’t be surprised if RP gained a couple percentage points from Caprice/NAPD Contract, or if Making News/HB improve marginally due to the latter.
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I really like this article from @Lysander, and the interactive stats are really nice.
However I have noticed some people confused by the various tier rankings. I think it would help to make what the tiers mean more explicit and clear.
I think in the future when discussing tiers the following is definitely the best way to think about it.
God Tier (S rank). Any character here is brokenly good, above the maximum level that should be allowed, and obsoletes the other characters.
Top Tier (A rank). The group of strongest characters. Being here doesn’t mean there’s any problem.
Mid Tier (B rank). These characters are noticeably weaker than the top tier, but still very useable.
Bottom Tier (C rank). These characters are noticeably weaker than the mid tier. They are still useable.
Garbage Tier (F rank). Any character here is too weak to bother with. Something really went wrong and they need a boost to become a real part of the game again.
Under this framework I would quibble over where the tier list in the article ended up. I would say that we actually have no S rank IDs. But we do have some Garbage tier IDs (BWBI, CB, etc).
For comparison, I would put Gabe - Andy - Kate all in the top tier for Runner, and NBN (both), GRNDL, BABW, HB:ETF in top tier for Corp based on that data.
Edit: CB not CI
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I like this ranking system.
And the Collective goes in both the S rank and F rank (as it’s shredded).
As a completely statistically insignificant sample of one…I don’t always include Carapaces in early builds of decks on OCTGN. I tend to playtest actual cards and then pull the two/three worst to pull in the Carapaces when I play in “real life”. Partly this is to test out cards more efficently, partly so I get practice for when my Carapaces don’t show up.
Tangent, my favourite OCTGN GRNDL moment was first turn he/she played Hedge Fund but left left HQ open. Me, “Gamble, Siphon, Vamp to zero, run HQ, score Vulcan Coverup…”.
Really, you think Cerebral Imaging is garbage? It’s got a better win rate than a lot of other IDs in the mid tier. Or did you mean Custom Biotics? I agree that’s not great right now, although I have actually seen a pretty good Custom Biotics build - I think it has more legs than people give it credit for and a lot of potential going forward, but time will tell.
Really? I have not found this at all. I’ve been playing my version of Supermodernism for a while now and it is just so robust. It has two serious win conditions and it is very fast at pushing through agendas. It takes more skill to play than people realise, but it is still very strong. I’ve only lost one game with it across two store champs and a Chronos tour.
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Woops. Yes CB is garbage tier, not CI. Thanks for pointing that out.
And while they might have future potential, I am talking about current performance. In particular based off the presented stats.
Yeah, CI is top tier for sure right now, imo. It probably doesn’t or won’t show up in that data until The Build gets popular.
I find that it wins a lot in swiss, but almost never one the knockout stages begin (or one goes up against a final-cut-level opponent)…
For largely this reason. If you’re on your game, it seems like it’s crazy easy to “turn off” the Weyland kill threat. Plascrete + Money.
That said, I’ve been looking for quality video of a good player operating a supermodernism style build against opponents who aren’t lining up to die, and I haven’t found it yet. It’s possible that I’m just missing something.
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I agree a rating system demands clearly defined parameters, but I respectfully disagree with the qualitative nature of yours, as the boundaries are subjective in nature and there will be disagreements in some cases.
I’d suggest a more empirical rating system, such as:
-God Tier (S-rank): >65% win rate among the top quartile. You win 2/3rds of games competitively and likely steamroll the rest of the field.
-Top Tier (A-rank): 55-65%. You win more than you lose competitively and do very well against the rest of the field.
-Mid Tier (B-rank): 45-55%. You average a .500 competitively. With a bit of luck or subpar opposition you can win a tournament.
-Bottom Tier (C-rank): 35-45% competitively. You might hit .500 with a lot of luck or a weak meta.
-Garbage Tier (F-rank): <35% against the top quartile. I want you in my meta.
In your defense, these results would mirror yours (no current S-rank) but at least there’d be absolutely no confusion.
Edit: I can see an argument being made to subtract 5% from the top two categories for Corps, to better compare them to one another. Otherwise there’d be no A-rank corps, and it’d be weird to call the best corp “Mid Tier”.
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