Hemorrhage Noise: Is hemorrhage the return of Noise?

Deck Archetypes
102

Most decks I play against actually only have Jacksons, with about half of them having SanSan. I just suspect we value different plays differently. Here’s the main points of difference:

Think about the plays you can (and sometimes do) make because Jackson trashes for 3. Like, when you have 2 in hand early, you’ll play him out unprotected and draw cards once, letting the runner pay to trash him. You’ll recur him later if needed (either with Interns or one of the other Jacksons), and the 3 credit tax can be a significant tempo hit, especially early. Whiz stops this.

He also trashes JH for free when accessed from a central, which is a situation where you definitely would want to pay to trash, especially later in the game in an RnD lock situation. This alone nets me 6-9 credits per game, which is about on par with the utility Gabe provides in a tough game. So I’d be already fine with Whiz if everybody just ran Jacksons. However…

Sure - if you have an Imp and you play it before you see the SanSan and still have a counter left and you haven’t used it this turn yet. Being Whiz means you don’t have to fill any of those conditions and can nuke SanSan with much more flexibility. If 2 credits are too much, or you’ve used the credits already that turn, sure - Imp away. But being able to save that Imp counter and/or its use for the turn opens up more plays… that’s something I definitely value more than random Noise mills, and sometimes even more than targeted Noise mills.

Fewer things are more frustrating than getting needed Operations in your hand Imped… being Whiz means I get to do more of that. Surely that can’t be a bad thing.

How is trashing a troubleshooter for free useless? Are you playing a different version of Netrunner than I am, one where being Anarch means you’re forbidden from accessing centrals with multi-access cards? Like, seriously dude :stuck_out_tongue:

Also, certain plays come to mind - like, a corp setting up a server for an IAA play by putting in a Troubleshooter on a previous turn. If you go in to check it, you’ll trash it for free instead of for 2 credits. Given the credit efficiency of Anarch icebreakers, that’s often relevant! Same thing with Refinery.

Ash is pretty common in Making News, i’ve seen Jinteki use him to great effect now that they have money, and even certain Weyland builds make good use of him (yes, there is more than one Weyland deck you can actually play competitively).

In general, what I’m seeing in Noise vs. Whiz comparisons like this one feels like a clear case of cognitive bias - you play a game where you feel like you don’t get enough value out of Whiz’s ability, so you compare it with the ideal use case of Noise’s ability… but that’s not really fair (to either of them).

Personally, most times I’ve played Reina or Noise in the 3 months, I invariably ended up wishing I’d have taken Whizzard instead. The one notable exception to this was a game where Reina’s link saved my sorry ass repeatedly, which is why I think that’s her best feature :smiley:

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103

I’ve always thought Whizzard deserved a Link rather than Reina. This way he’d have some utility even against operation-based corps. Reina on the other hand, could have had her decksize/influence tinkered with, or an additional ability. I think this would have been far more interesting, while making their roles more divergent.

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104

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING ;)! I TOTALLY DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD TRASH CARDS FROM HQ/R&D! \s

In general, what I take away from your arguments is that you play against different decks in general than I do, or have different approaches to solving the problems they present :). I cannot remember a tournament loss this year where Whizzard would have saved me more than a couple credits, and I take notes :). I’ll point out that I could very easily turn your red herring about cognitive bias back on you: you could very well be comparing the ideal use case of Whizz against the worst-case scenarios for Noise. But I prefer to be more respectful and assume that people here are, you know, competent.

If I could regularly get even 6-9 credits of savings per game out of Whizzard, I’d think he was a lot better! I’ve played Whizzard quite a bit, since Anarchs are my main hobby. If my tournament meta / the OCTGN meta shifts to the point where I think I’m likely to save that kind of cash in every game, he’s definitely back in contention as a top anarch!

I think they probably both deserve it, to be honest. Their core abilities are both focused on denial, just in different directions—Reina’s is less powerful but can’t get rock-paper-scissored away. On the other hand, if top-tier corps started running such that we could, like PeekaySK does, get 9c of mileage out of Whizzard in most games, he wouldn’t need it!

We need some kind of dynamic build point system for IDs ;). How cool would that be?

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105

I’ll go over my notes from the last two store championships (those are most solid) and calculate the average amount of money Whiz saved me and report back. I’m curious myself whether I’m just remembering things wrong or our metas really are that different.

If you feel offended, I apologize - that wasn’t my intention. In a discussion that aims to be analytical, however, I think it’s pretty important to speak up when you think bias is taking place, giving the other participants incentive to re-evaluate.

I find Noise’s ability particularly hard to analyze correctly, unless both you and your opponent are pretty much playing with the specific goal of doing so and make a detailed trash log our something. His value changes with your deck composition, but also with your opponent’s (much like Whiz’s) - specifically, with his agenda density& composition and the amount of recursion he’s running. Add variance on top of that and you have a pretty unpleasant can of worms. I don’t know whether you have a similar personal experience, but I often hear people complaining how they didn’t mill anything (or didn’t mill enough), and how that was a “bad luck” loss (when it can often be traced back to one of these factors).

To get back on topic, though - even though hemorrhage didn’t turn out to be the return of Noise, I’m wondering whether Lucky Find couldn’t help significantly. Presumably, Noise will have a lot of stuff lying around to pawn, which gets him from 0 to 9 in two clicks. That could well be worth the influence, I feel. Hemorrhage can take the place of other, out of faction viruses that were previously featured mainly for milling, thus getting some of the needed influence.

106

I radically disagree. I actually think Whizzard should have link strength -1. Right now he is far too good against taxing corps and needs to be brought in line somehow.

107

That’s fair, and I apologize in turn for being snippy. I was stressing about my runner choice for my areas last and hardest Store Championship and in a way this made my mind up: Noise it was. And I won, so: thanks :).

I kept track of how many cards I paid to trash for the entire tournament, and I think you’re going to be surprised: across five rounds of swiss, playing against a variety of tier-1 decks, I trashed: 3x Melange, 1x SanSan Grid, 1x Bernice Mai. I also trashed a SanSan from HQ with an Imp token because I had that option. I didn’t even need to trash the Bernice, because I was going tag-me, but hey, it was in the way. So for an entire tournament I would have saved 8c with Whizzard.

This is not uncommon: it’s at the low end of the variance, but not uncommon. Noise’s ability, on the other hand, won me two matches directly—I bounced the GW agenda twice and picked up a total of 8 AP with him over the day. Also not an uncommon outcome for me.

Again: if I could save 8c per game rather than per event with Whizzard, I’d swap IDs in a hurry :).

In other news, @PeekaySK I owe you a drink of your choice for your Cerebral Imaging list. It’s a monster, and it was the other half of my SC win today. I’m known for hating HB with a passion, so I figured if I showed up with it out of the blue it would throw all the regulars for a loop, and it did.

2 Likes
108

Hm, that’s kinda low. Thanks for the data! One more question: did any of your opponents run assets that they ended up discarding / hand padding / hemorrhaging with?

Of course, credits have varying value at different times (like, a Bernice trash is usually way more valuable than just straight 3 credits), but I’ll definitely keep an eye out and collect more data.

Hey, hold on - your math is off. SanSan + Bernice + 3x Melange should be 11, not 8. Even if you count the SanSan as just 3, it’s still 9. Adding the SanSan you imped would bring us to 12, so in the vicinity of 3 credits per game. That’s about on-par with a 1-link blank runner in a medium-trace environment, right?

My brother from another mother! I’m exactly the same, but CI is weird enough for me to stomach it. The only other kind of HB I’ll actually play is Stronger Together, because I want to make all those people that are like “well that’s a crappy identity” cringe once they realize that even looking at me from across the table is going to cost them like 25 credits.

Well, I don’t see myself coming to worlds anytime soon (living in central Europe, working at a university, and have a small son), but I’ll definitely keep your debt in mind :stuck_out_tongue: Maybe I’ll win in a lottery or something.

109

If Bernice is 3, then yeah, 9—and again I was already floating 4 tags so I didn’t need to kill it :). I’d have Imp’d the SanSan from HQ even if Whizzard at the juncture it happened at. But even at 12c total (most optimistic), across five games, that’s barely over 2c per game. Calculating with some offset for “importance of credits at this game state” it’s under 2c/game, which isn’t great.

I’ll be in Europe later this year, but sadly not yet central europe :). Someday!

110

Im right with peekaySK, on this, ive been a wizard player since he came out. Now with reina out, i keep trying her but Always end up wishing i was wizard.

111

Looking at the Honour and Profit cards, I can see quite of lot tricks in there that support Hemorrhage - Leg Work, Early Bird, Window (? the one that lets you expose cards as they are drawn). Unfortunately, the net effect looks like an incentive to put Hemorrhage into a Ken deck rather than bring them all over to Anarch.

112

I’ve put my Noise deck on hold until Cache comes out cache · NetrunnerDB Virus economy with Gorman Drip and Aesop’s Pawnsho looks extremely good.

113

Make sure to also include that “install three programs” card, it’s killer with anarch in general (and could potentially breathe new life into Wyldside).

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114

You sure the 3rd player was skilled and not just cheating?

Celebrity Gift only allows you the reveal up to 5 cards for 10c (net 7c) :smile:

115

I feel like Mass Install is going to be better with more “traditional” anarch builds, while Duggar’s or Wyldside :).

116

I disagree. It might be MOST useful there, but as a one-or-two-of, I think any Noise deck with Deja Vu might want to consider it. You need to have the econ, first and foremost, but the ability to draw a virus, Deja Vu two from your heap, then install all three of them to mill three cards for either a run on fresh R&D cards (following a Medium run that dug relatively deep last turn) or to try and score something in Archives…

The issue I often run into with Deja Vu is playing the gained cards with enough time to actually do more in the turn. Mass Install helps with that significantly. I mean, it helps all the more if you’re running Duggar’s or Wyldside, and I suppose in that sense it is better there, but I think it’s got a place in decks that aren’t always going to be over-drawing as well. (Though combining it with Sahasrara seems like fun times.)

117

Okie; we’ll have to disagree then. My anarch build rarely wants to install more than 1 or 2 cards, and deckspace is super tight as it stands :).

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118

I’ve been mulling around over a Noise deck, that got some cool new pieces recently. First, if you are of the camp that Jackson makes Noise unplayable, you can now literally shoot him in the face, forcing at least semi-preemptive Jackson shuffles. My feeling right now is to access archives in smaller, faster bursts, rather than trying to outright win with any single archives run. Mass install and try to get in there and see 4-5 milled cards. Rinse and Repeat. Using Hemorrhage into a Nerve Agent run (which is as good as a legwork with a Grimoire in play). Savoir-Fair and a Deep Thought gives you the power to sit back and snipe draws if you prefer more of a control deck, which also seems strong.

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Yes, I play board-control Noise (otherwise known as “kick 'em while they’re down”) and the gameplan is definitely to mill in bursts around Jackson and dumpster-dive quickly :).

120

Right now Shock! seems way too prevalent for me to be into Noise.

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121

With Jinteki, Shi.Kyu is another big concern. It’s why I’ve tried to work some degree of the credit denial strategy in – Shock! still hurts, but at least they can’t Shi.Kyu for anything TOO painful without money.