Let’s also not forget about Friendly Neighborhood Account Siphon Recursion / Team Econ Denial, which is still pretty prevalent alongside Faustycakes out of red (and blue, should you get paired down in swiss ;)).
Faust was pretty fun for my opponents in my Game Day / Beach Party Panchatantra build, but let’s be honest: that’s the level of jank it should be rolling at, not alongside super-top-tier world-crushers 
Agree with more un-trashable ice. We were discussing the same thing after a store champs yesterday. I think each faction needs at least 2 more un-trash-able ice (that aren’t crap).
The cutlery were fair cards before Faust. No one was using crypsis to turn them on, for example.
They were fair, for sure, if you classify unplayable as fair (excluding Knifed of course).
Yeah, Architect 3x in every deck made Forked absolute garbage. We don’t need the silverware to be terrible. Spooned has always been solid, people just started playing it more. Knifed has always been good too.
I’m not sure about this. What I am sure about is that insta-Parasite was easier to access and took care of the code gates as well as the other ice. The reason Knifed was played is because Eli was in every deck.
There were always tollbooths and Turings to D4 down. It wasn’t in every deck, but it was a perfectly legitimate choice.
Yeah, basically what the cutlery are is positional ice destruction; and when the corp had reliable conditional ice to place (architect, eli, lotus field, etc) That you might not be able to break efficiently or on cue it didn’t make as much sense to run the cutlery.
Faust kind of just made them a sure thing in my book and there’s less defense at exactly the same time. It’s a little unfortunate. 
In a game where only 20% of the cards are good enough to play in tournaments, being borderline unplayable means a card is above average and fair.
Forked was still good even before MWL. Untrashable ice doesn’t make cutlery bad, it just gives the corp a way to play around it, which they currently don’t have. The only thing a corp can do to stop cutlery is pop a Nisei token or a Batty, two very situational solutions.
I just played against a couple of Faust-based decks at our casual Monday pub meet-up. Both were played by the kinds of players who tend to win the tournaments around our neck of the woods.
The first game was against the “NRDB decklist of the week” Whizzard-Faust-D4v1d-Wyldside deck: The 2-Armed Ice Feast
He stole a couple of one-pointers, Levy AR Lab-bed through his deck a second time and then ran out of cards. Game over.
The second game was against an Andromeda-Drug Dealer-Faust deck (but with no D4v1d)
with two copies of Levy AR Lab Access. This game the Runner only stole one point, and had used Levy twice and was two-thirds of the way through his deck for the third time round before he overextended and got a Ronin in the head (choice between advancing out the double-advanced TFP or Ronin-ing for the win, obviously the latter is more fun!). The writing had been on the wall for a while though.
The deck I played was an endlessly-recursive, spiky Industrial Genomics deck: National Museum of Ronin
I don’t know if this is a great deck against all comers. I don’t even know if it will win whenever I play with it for a third time! It certainly isn’t “tuned” for anything. I’m certainly not convinced it could win in less than an hour if it needed too. What it did absolutely do was punish two good decks played by two good players (better than me, certainly!) which were over-reliant on Faust. Faust was an absolute liability.
I won a PE game today when I triple- EMP’d the runner on his last 3 cards with no cards in his stack. Hit the Levy with a scored House of Knives.
I’m not great at PE, but it works well for me against Faust.
The problem with using this approach is that there are huge concerns about IG’s ability to finish games within round time in a tournament setting. Draws and even timed wins yield less prestige. If both you and your opponents were extremely fast players, maybe you could finish two double levy games in 65 minutes. Most players can’t/won’t.
It does kind of raise the question of whether a different angle could/should be taken to ban Levy AR Lab Access (And perhaps, just for consistency’s sake, Hades Shard and Museum of History) from tournament play. It’s like, the weakness to Faust is cards, so the strategy you should take is to tax cards. The first thing the corp does to adapt is go for flatlines and the first thing the runner does to adapt to that is keep lots of cards in hand and run I’ve Had Worse. Since there’s no upper limit on that, the next thing the corp does is aim for -deck- HP and aim to exhaust all the runner’s resources that way. And then the runner’s response to that is to run 1 or even 2 Levy and say, “the only games we manage to finish will be the ones I win”. And that kinda subverts Netrunner itself when part of a deck’s strategy begins to implicitly involve the threat of having no match result at all. 300 card decks with only 7 agenda points are disallowed by the way the rules are setup for similar reasons.
I’m not sure Levyless Faust decks present a problem on their own.
This is ridiculous on a multitude of levels. First of all, it makes the most fun (and best) ID in the game unplayable. It also drives the power of Jinteki kill decks significantly up. And its banning, which the team has said they are against. I could go on and on, but banning a card that only resets the stack (admittedly, only once per copy) is a necessary.
Well every change makes something playable or unplayable. It’s kind of subjective to decide which ones are best. There might be a great GRNDL deck that fast tracks for an Underway Renovation to put behind Hive and then protects centrals and that remote with a clever, exciting plan, that is buried in mega unviability because Levy AR Lab Access exists.
Same for driving the power of Jinteki kill decks up. Jinteki are a bit underwhelming at the moment. Not sure why PE deserves to be tier 2 and NEH deserves to be tier 1.
Damon has said before that he “believes in bans” in a podcast. WNP got an errata, which is almost as heavyhanded as a ban. If there was reason to believe that Levy AR Lab Access creates issues in conducting tournaments and keeping games from drawing, then MWLing it would be totally inappropriate, because it can’t show up in games at all if that’s really the case.
I was just musing though, not saying “oh my gosh this is the only answer” or even firmly asserting it’s a super real valid option.
As I mentioned upthread (or was it in another thread?) don’t be afraid to use those Ronin’s early (i.e. not for the kill). If they are using Faust, that means they are generally NOT throwing cards they need in the bin, which makes their hands ripe with Levy and other recursion. On another note, Blacklist has done so much work for me, it’s not even funny. As a matter of fact, I think replacing the Pop-ups in the IG deck just posted with Blacklist would be a good call.
And it’s not just Levy, it’s Deja Vu, Same old Thing, and the - albeit much less ubiquitous - Clone Chip. I even rezzed one during a retrieval run for the lulz. Having a couple Hostile’s rezzed means they might even trash their only out in the process of being able to use it (completely anecdotal, but poor Hayley had a hand of like 11 cards with no stack, ran Blacklist guarded by Komainu, was able to pay all but one and still trash Blacklist. The one net killed her last Levy… and I had 2 unrezzed Hostiles waiting for her in case it didn’t).
Also, Damon said that in the context of what extremes he would go to for balance. He also mentioned that no developer WANTS to errata, restrict, or ban… and it sounded from his answer like he would try to use all other options before outright banning.
perhaps we need to have a more in depth discussion about tournament structure because dismissing a large chunk of control archetypes as unplayable due to timing constraints is a bit disappointing for the games design
control decks are as important for the game as aggro (FA/rush) and kill decks, and their presence makes the landscape, strategically, way more diverse. the corp needs to be able to build to the extreme on each side in order to stretch the runners deckbuilding choices
coincidentally, I took a 54 cards museum RP deck to a SC this weekend and the games averaged around 30 mins.
I don’t disagree, but then maybe the answer is a Restricted list with Faust and Levy on it? Not that I really support that, but I see where the other guys are coming from.
Well, it emphasises the fact that tournament Netrunner isn’t the same thing as just Netrunner really. Some cards shine in that very specific set of tournament conditions: Faust is one of them.
In terms of tournament Netrunner, in theory we have a principle which ensures this isn’t an issue:
What does that actually mean though? Let’s say you are playing a 45-card Faust-Wyldside deck with a couple of copies of Levy AR Lab Access and maybe you expect to draw an extra card every turn in addition. To play at a pace which allows the game to finish in time (30 minutes, given that there are two games in a match), you are looking at 120 cards / 3 cards per turn = 40 turns. So given that you are bringing a deck so long on cards, you need to be playing 22 second turns per player. And if the Runner is drawing slower than three cards per turn then you need to take your turns quicker, obviously.
Do people actually see this happening in practice? And if not, is it because people are trying to deliberately cheat things in their favour? Or is it that they don’t really take much notice of following the logic through so rigorously because they think the rule is based on an impractical premise so ignore it almost completely? I know which answer my money is on!
I agree, there should be something more than ‘it plays slow, and is therefore unplayable at a tournament’ to hold IG and other control archetypes out. But at the same time, I don’t want 90 minute rounds either, netrunner tournaments are long affairs already.
Also, if games average around 30 minutes, it would be fairly likely that a matchup with 2 control-corps would take more than 60 minutes at least some of the time. If any control deck reached pre-MWL popularity, we could well see a significant portion of matches go to time with the current 65 minute limit. Further, with slow players it is not inconceivable that a single match could last nearly 65 minutes.