"Hey, look at this pretty successful Ken Tenma list": The Crimson-Leaves Strike, Two-time Store Championship Winner

Here we go. Nothing like a chum-baiting statement to get the good players in the game to hulk out and become an asshole, like me.

Love it.

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Maybe I’m just confused by ~crazy stimhack etiquette~, but isn’t the onus on you to show us what a proper tenma deck looks like? Your brother’s deck is obvious (which isn’t a bad thing; it’s obvious for a reason) and you seem awfully perturbed by people pointing that out, but a new thread wasn’t necessary to show that certain blue cards are good.

Edit for spelling, woo

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I’ll just rephrase Jesse’s statement and say that Desperado has been the best runner card in the game since day 1 (maybe tied with parasite pre-lotus field). Getting it in play on the first turn off the game gives you a ridiculously good shot at winning said game. This is why Andromeda is played the most. Having Desperado on turn one is better than any other runner ability.

That being said, yeah, this deck looks like it shits all over PE. It was a good choice for the meta down there. Having the large opening hand doesn’t necessarily help vs net damage.

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Eh, you (like everyone else that has met me) knows what I am like. Nice guy, honest to a fault. I just tell it like it is, maybe that is why I don’t post much, doesn’t seem to translate as well on the internet as it does in real life.

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My mom says the same thing about me.

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I moved the Leela discussion over to the Leela thread.

Try to stay on topic.

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As I mentioned, this is the kinda deck I do in Ken. I do a similar style in Andy, but thats even more ‘sit back’ with Supplier and just being a remote-busting deck.

My quick (and I mean like threw together in 30 seconds) version of Oracle May Ken

I have a more refined version of this somewhere, but can’t find it. You can see the basic idea though. I’m using Ken for the extra influence, for the fact that this deck prefers Makers to RDI, and because his ability helps keeps the economy up. Drawing cards for money, playing them for more money. Not the greatest deck in the world, but it is a deck I designed for Ken… and it was pretty reasonable win rate when I was playing it more often.

Its 2 Desperado because you run less. You set up unless you have a reason to run (like a run event or Bank Job). You could easily change this for Security Testing and a 3rd Desperado, but I last played this when NEH was stupid popular, so Bank Job was the meta call (and are worth 10 bucks a pop with Aesops). You do a lot of set up in this, so its not as made for the whole ‘stack all the benefits into a sec testing run’ thing.

Is this the best thing to happen to Criminal? Fuck no. I play Shaper for a reason, but its something to show as a point.

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I think this is probably true, actually. Because Andy is effectively blank after the first turn, the best thing to do with her is to just play a truck load of good, synergistic shit, and because she was printed with a blue background, that good, synergistic shit is good, synergistic criminal shit. So anything she does, optimally, is going to be a good criminal playstyle. However, the reason it’s Andysucker is because Andy is the one able to get it set up and be threatening with it the fastest, seeing as she’s the one who can get that insane first hand with such reliability.

Honestly, if she was printed red, she’d probably be the best Anarch as well, and the cards she’d run would probably be characterized as the optimal Anarch playstyle. She’d be shittier, though, because she wouldn’t have Desparado in faction.

edit : Shit, forgot to write what I wanted to about Ken! Got caught up in the Andy.

I think a “proper” Ken deck probably looks similar to a prepaid Kate deck, but with more run events. The problem with this is that Prepaid costs 1 in Kate and 2 in Ken, making it a slower card. Public Terminal was pretty clearly printed with him in mind (and it only costs 1, making it kind of what Prepaid VP is in Kate), but you really have to be playing a shitload of run events for those to be good, and if you’re playing that many run events, glacier decks make you pretty sad, since you can’t run as often, so you don’t get the needed value off of the Terminal, making it objectively worse than Prepaid, which can at least be used to play economy cards.

Not having instant tutors in faction (SMC) or insane card draw (Diesel and QT) also either make him slower, or waste his influence to import them. Sure, Special Order is in faction, but it costs a click and a credit to use, and you still need another click to install the card. So you just kinda end up being a slower Kate with little to no recursion. If you want to play a more Andysucker type deck, you’re just a slower Andysucker, and should probably just switch IDs.

So I guess the problem with Ken is that his playstyles are covered in other decks better than in his own. I’m still waiting for a couple cards to exist that ends up giving him his own good niche, but I don’t know what they’d be.

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This is the tenma I had more success.

Stealth tenma

Ken “Express” Tenma: Disappeared Clone (Honor and Profit)

Event (18)
3x Account Siphon (Core Set)
3x Dirty Laundry (Creation and Control)
3x Legwork (Honor and Profit)
3x Special Order (Core Set)
3x Sure Gamble (Core Set)
3x The Maker’s Eye (Core Set) [color=#32CD32]••••• •[/color]

Hardware (7)
3x Desperado (Core Set)
1x Feedback Filter (Creation and Control) [color=#32CD32]•[/color]
3x Silencer (Double Time)

Resource (9)
1x Crash Space (Core Set)
3x Ghost Runner (The Spaces Between)
2x John Masanori (Opening Moves)
3x Security Testing (Honor and Profit)

Icebreaker (8)
1x Breach (Honor and Profit)
1x Corroder (Core Set) [color=#FF4500]••[/color]
2x Faerie (Future Proof)
1x Passport (Honor and Profit)
1x Refractor (First Contact) [color=#32CD32]••[/color]
2x Switchblade (Up and Over)

Program (3)
3x Cloak (Creation and Control) [color=#32CD32]••••• •[/color]
17 influence spent (max 17)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Up and Over

Deck built on NetrunnerDB.

So basically Stealth Andy with 3xMaker’s Eye instead of 2xRDI.

And none of the stealth…

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I think Stealth might be the only thing that Andy does uniquely well at compared to other criminals IDs. The starting hand size lets you find your combo pieces early on. If they ever print an ID that’s just flat out better than Andy and people start using that new ID for generic good criminal stuff, I think that stealth will still be Andy’s nitch.

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Unless we finally get a stealth ID. I’m imagining it having 1 recurring credit that can be used on icebreakers, and the ID has the subtype stealth.

That would be 15 kinds of retarded.

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Care to elaborate?

The only reason Stealth isn’t unbearably overpowering is that it, by definition, requires a lot of moving parts.

Consider the impact of a Switchblade that would need 1 stealth credit to work instead of two - this is what you’d create, for the first half of the game or so. Consider how balanced Refractor would be, if it had a base STR of 5. Same thing.

Another thing you’d mess up is how much influence it costs to get permanent stealth credits for the various breakers. When you’re playing a stealth deck, you’re not just gated by the availability of stealth credits and needing to fish for the cards, you’re also gated by their permanency - the only inf-free source is temporary, and the only general-use source both costs influence and is a program (thus leading to MU-related deckbuilding restrictions, vulnerability to trashing and increased clunkiness factor). If you create a runner that has a general-use recurring stealth credit, you break all of this:

  • It can be used from turn 1, getting the whole suite up much faster
  • It doesn’t cost influence
  • It lets you have more stealth credits in total, thus turning off a significant part of the counterplay currently available

I can maybe see an ID like you described if the stealth credit’s use were restricted to the breaker type that’s in-faction for the ID. That way, you’d just break one card instead of the whole set… but in general, it still strikes me as a really bad idea to do something liek that. At the very least, it would have to have, like, 10 inf.

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I get your point, but ID abilities are supposed to actually be useful. I’m not sure why Silhouette (the STEALTH operative) didn’t have this ability, but I could see a 45/10 runnner with 1 recurring stealth credit being balanced. Maybe it can only be used for stealth breakers or abilities as opposed to just general use for icebreakers.

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Free stealth icebreaker credits from turn one would be terrifying even with super low influence - look at how Valencia is able to leverage her free credits for runs already.

If you make a stealth ID ability it shouldn’t be faster stealth but more powerful stealth in my opinion: something like “Whenever you install a stealth card put 1c on $THIS_GUY. You can use these credits to pay for using icebreakers.” something that magnifies the stealth rig’s power (with 4c ghost runners and the chips giving you a one-off activation of their non-favoured breaker type) without making it faster (…and opens up janky combos with installing things repeatedly :))

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BP is for every run though, 1 recurring credit isn’t. You still have to have breakers to even use your “free” credit and it may not be useful (eg, refractor vs enigma). Keep in mind that stealth breakers are spread across all 3 factions so limited influence would hurt the ability more.

I just realized this is off topic, maybe it should be moved to Imaginary Cards.