Man, I’ve been playing Criminal for so long now I’m just used to the meta totally ignoring me.
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Them installing imp then checking your face down CVS is my personal favorite. And yes, as long as Noise and Kate are the two best/most popular runners, clot will be around which means that CVS will be around. And sponsorship being probably the best Corp card this cycle absolutely helped it.
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Surely you meant to say, “I’ve been playing Criminal for so long I’m used to defining the meta, not following it”? 
'Cause it’s a pretty recent development, comparatively speaking, that you might not see a Criminal in the top cut of a tournament.
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Yeah, Crisium was printed to hose Criminal 
The meta wasn’t ignoring Criminal as much as struggling greatly to deal with them. Caprice, Crisium and Will’O were all designed to help, and I’d argue that the rise of asset economy also had to do with Criminal’s dominance, since it gave you a place to dump money pre-siphon.
Criminal’s basically been an afterthought for all of 2015. That’s a pretty long time, isn’t it? At least by card game standards.
Andromeda won a very fair amount of Regionals this year, with one or two Leela in there too
The thing is, it’s classic aggro with way more outs late game. If you can just get to game point, you have this weird late-game Noise factor in FIS + HQI that lets you get really random accesses that are hard for the corp to stop or control. A lot of games you get up 4-0 or 5-0 and then spend the rest of the game ditching your hand to access 2-3 random cards every few turns. Eventually you win doing this. This is because the hail-mary phase of the game lasts quite a while, since any lapse in central defense during a scoring window can snowball and unravel the corp super fast, and scoring that is too aggressive can get busted by your AI + Inside Job/Siphon/Crim Shenanigans (again, similar to Noise).
I don’t know if it’s corps not adapting, but I win A LOT of games lately by Levying and then milling the corp out with FIS since they turtled too hard and didn’t take any risks to score out. Against traditional Aggro Criminal you can just defend centrals until they fizzle out. That doesn’t work against this deck.
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Woah, that’s weird. Yeah, I think the meta is too rusty against Criminal, if Gabe’s pressure is making corp’s mill themselves on FIS. Someone in each meta should take it on themselves to play some aggro Crim to get people in shape.
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I had this exact discussion with another Criminal player in our meta last Saturday. Both of us had left the faction since regionals, but we agreed that the Criminal playstyle is a hard thing to shake. We also noticed that a lot of corps that are doing well around here don’t have very good means of dealing with Criminal’s strengths. Worst case scenario we just make everyone else splash some Crisium Grids, best case we run over an unprepared meta.
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Do it. But be kind to newer players; they are summer children and have never known the winter of Account Siphon spam.
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Nonsense. Crush them, I say. Let them know the true meaning of fear.
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All hail Siphon! Hail to thee, great equalizer!
All hail Siphon! Hail to thee, destroyer of corp economy!
All hail Siphon! Hail to thee, thou shalt be recurred by Same Old Thing hereafter!
Hail! Hail! Hail!
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At our last casual meetup I took a Geist deck with 3x Siphon, SoT, Crescentus, Clone Chip, Muertos and Emergency Shutdown, and Eater/Keyhole. It was good fun (for me).
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How relevant is Gang Sign with FIS (and Fisk)? Can you flood HQ with enough agendas that even scoring one becomes a liability?
Its worth exploring. I avoided it due to deck space.
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I don’t think that’s the direct combo.
I think the effect you should be looking for with FIS is that unless there’s a jackson in play, hq’s agenda density goes up significantly. So say you play it when the corp can’t play an agenda (about to score or no safe remote), they play some or discard, then multi access on hq the turn after looks a lot better.
Now gang sign does tend to come with HQ interfaces, and it triggering is about the same as them giving you a free run, so that should work.
I keep forgetting that Sneakdoor is a card and losing games that were otherwise under control.
2 Agendas and Ichi 1.0 in hand, no ice on Archives? BETTER CLICK FOR A CREDIT
D’oh!
Possibly my favorite time to FIS is after an IA in a remote I don’t feel comfortable challenging. I will generally be able to challenge the remote by next turn, if Corp waits. If not, HQ is likely incredibly juicy.
unless of course, Team Sponsorship ;D
shrug, nobody plays that card…
“Oh, my sweet summer child, what do you know about fear? Fear is for the winter, when the Siphons fall a dozen deep. Fear is for the long night, when the ice are unrezzed for turns, and servers are made and filled and destroyed all defenseless. That is the time for fear, my little Corp, when the Blue Runners move through the net…”
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