Originally published at: DJ Hedgehog Reviews Up And Over - StimHack
Discuss the latest StimHack article here.
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Switchblade gets a 7 but Architect gets a 5?
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Yes, and yes.
EDIT: If you’re looking for a reason-
Switchblade: Efficient, new style of viable play, costs 3, kills multisub sentries.
Architect: Best case scenario it fires 1 time. Most of the time people will faerie or have a sentry breaker out making this a 4 cost ICE that taxes for 2. It has to fire for the subroutines to be relevant, and like I said if you can guarantee that it fires 1 time I would give it an 8 or a 9.
No, it isn’t. It doesn’t draw. It lets you…not draw. And costs a fortune to do so. It’s like, the opposite of Scorched Earth protection unless you are using it to dig for Plascrete.
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About Fester - you left out its synergy with Darwin. The Corp chooses to either lose 6 credits each purge, or allow a massive Darwin to run rampant.
Reversed Accounts - this card needs to be rated higher imo. You could run it in a Midseasons/psycho deck for example. It looks to be a fantastic splash in Weyland also. I dont think you need Mushin no Shin exclusively for this. And at a trash cost of 3 (!!). It seems more like a NAPD in these cases, drop it if you’re unsure if the runner can get into the remote. If they can’t, great, lose 16 credits, if they can, nothing lost.
Reuse - Will work amazingly well with the new Jinteki ID upcoming. Maybe not a big thing at the moment, but definitely is the start of something.
Even if those subs don’t fire once I believe it’s still a fantastic value. I’m only paying 4 to rez a sentry that:
- Doesn’t die to Parasite(!)
- The runner really really doesn’t want to just walk through, so at best for them they’re paying 2c stealth with Switchblade, or more likely, 2c minimum each time they want to break.
I would say that it doesn’t have to fire to be relevant. If they burn a Faerie on my Architect that’s cool with me, keep burning them on that and not my other Sentries.
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Or play Closed Accounts for a whole heap of a lot fewer credits.
Plus, I don’t know how many credits you’ll routinely hit with this, I don’t think too many runners are sitting at 16+ credits while spending all of their ways to recover (Kati, Dirty Laundries, etc.)
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I appreciate the point on Architect, but I think the faction is important here. Up to now, fetching an early game Farie or sentry breaker against HB only became pressing once you had a valuable programme on the board. Now, it becomes pressing from the word go - because hitting an early Architect is big tempo boost to the corp.
And if you’re assuming that the subs never fire, Rototurret gets played pretty widely, dies instantly to parasite, is broken by Femme without a strength boost and has the same cost for the same number of subs.
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Yep, I misread the card. Much worse than I thought, which wasn’t very high to begin with.
The rating for Universal Connectivity Fee seems very high to me. I’d call it 4/10 at max.
In the regular mode, you can pay $2 for the bad half of a Pop-Up Window, and also lose the surprise value. Or you can just let them into your server for free for a long time until hopefully:
a) They are tagged
b) They run that specific server
c) They have enough money that they care about losing it
d) They have not enough money to answer it with Parasite or an AI breaker.
I also think Inject is 8/10 at least. If your Anarch deck can’t handle dumping random programs into the heap, that’s something you need to address at the deckbuilding stage.
In practice, it’s something like:
- A 0-influence Easy Mark that loads the heap with Caches and Parasites to turn on your Deja Vus and Clone Chips that you were playing anyway.
- A 0-influence Diesel, bringing you closer to your vital non-program cards such as Aesop’s Pawnshop or Account Siphon.
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Thats very true. I was think of more like before the midseasons hits. Use it as a way to guarantee they have fewer credits beforehand.
Well against a Midseasons deck you’ll always want to have a very high amount of credits to counter the Midseasons when/if it hits.
Seriously, this. Beyond that- there is a trap ICE in this pack that potentially kills all the runners credits for 2 of your own. While the runner has to be tagged, that’s not impossible. Reversed Accounts has to be installed and advanced, costing you time and money. If they run on it and kill it maybe that’s bad for them, but it’s not great for you either.
I can’t tell if you’re using The Big Lebowski for or against my argument, but I approve either way. “You want a toe? I can get you a toe.” - Architect
I don’t disagree about the faction being important. But, I do disagree about a sentry breaker. Ichi and Rototurret are both good reasons to get a killer against HB. I would rate Rototurret the same as architect because honestly I value it’s subroutines more highly even though it dies to parasite. I’ve killed numerous programs and the end the run has saved me many times.
The problem here is that it’s either one or the other and you have no control over it. If you like playing random games in a game that’s full of randomness, be my guest. I’ll take the instance where you draw when you want to draw for the time where you get credits instead. Running is much harder these days and not getting what you want out of this card can win/lose a game. Inject reminds me of Hearthstone as far as RNG and it’s really hard to take that game seriously because of it.
To the person that said “Just use Deja Vu”… seriously? You’d rather waste resources on a missfire than just pay 1 influence for a Quality Time? If you gain a net 3 for Inject and pay a click and 2 to Deja Vu how is that a good trade off? The group-think around here is mind boggling some times.
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The Noise thread had a huge amount of back-and-forth about Inject, and I don’t think anyone has really put a hugely convincing case forward. A new thread purely looking at this card would probably be a pretty good thing - everyone is very split.
(I’m personally very split too - some days I think it’s a great card, other days I think it’s awful.)
I’m a nihilist, man.
However, I think you’re off on Architect.
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It’s been a very good splash for my Exile deck if that means anything.
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I think Architect is great. It’s a 2cr tax that cannot be avoided, or got rif of, and Faerie might get spent on it. If it fires, it’s pretty cool. It forces a breaker, even if it’s just a Mimic. Its only downside is it doesn’t end the run.
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While Architect doesn’t end the run, it’s almosty impossible to access a agenda through RnD if you walk through a Architect. It pretty much does everything you want out of a early sentry (and you do want some sentries) and is serious pain for a major archetype (Noise). It really should have a higher score!
Well, that’s true - but firing off your Architect to install a naked agenda, or even an iced agenda, is probably not the gameplan you had in mind!
Architect is only a 2 credits tax if you’re using Mimic, Atman (w/ sucker) or Femme’s bypass ability. Faerie is 1 credit but single-use. Anything else and it’s at least 3 credits to get through, plus unlike Rototurret it cannot die to insta-parasite.
Of course we’re excluding Dinosaurus, Ice Carver, Personal Touch and other support cards.