How I would do Sunny as a Shaper. Again set in the era of core 2.0. Sunny’s job of security testing for a living has got her somewhat addicted to running for the thrill of it.
ID. Shaper. Natural. Globalsec
45/12 Link 2 (or 50/15)
You have access to Globalsec. Globalsec cards don’t count against your Influence limit.
Security Chip. Criminal. Globalsec. (Stolen from Globalsec)
Another Day, Another Paycheck (criminal). Globalsec.
Globalsec Security clearance. Shaper. Globalsec. “When your turn begins, you may lose click. If you do, look at the top card of R&D; If you do not have access to Globalsec, trash the top card of your stack.”
White Hat. Shaper. “…trace0 (or trace 3 if you have access to Globalsec)…”
So the idea being that these runners are differentiated by having cross-faction sub-types that they have enhanced access to. Sunny’s a shaper who works for the man, Adam’s a criminal who has escape from control of the man, Apex is an AI who plans to eat the man…
I’d agree with this. I think the more cards are printed for the mini’s (regardless of power level) the more that 25inf becomes a problem. When they first came out you were using almost every pip of influence for breakers/econ/draw. Now you still see a lot of that, but the mini’s don’t need to spend their inf on their tricks anymore. Sunny has her hats. Adam has FTT and Logic Bomb. Apex got… I guess assimilate was okay? But again, the more cards they have in their respective factions, especially if they’re high power, the more the 25inf starts becoming a problem because they can look more and more like current meta decks. There are Adams that look strikingly similar to reg anarch atm (1st Place Store Championship Bochum "Lean and Mean" Adam · NetrunnerDB).
this is how i’ve always seen them as well. i kind of feel like their influence spread should have limited them to these roles somehow
i also think the major mistake here was first designing them as neutral and being able to be used interchangeably (and with other neutral cards influence-free) but then last-minute changing it up.
the mini faction cards actually seem like they would work really well if you could actually fit them all into one deck too.
when they were first spoiled, my main concern was Adam, who had most of his cards kind of unusable in his deck (at the very least, you were limited to 2 copies of his directives in your deck unless you bought 2 D&D boxes)
i think it’s fine if a particular minifaction is at the top of the meta, but i think a lot more testing was necessary for them. i agree that they needed more cards to work well, but we’re potentially reaching a breaking point where it might be too much, but we’ll see. i think they should be getting more low-influence cards that are just passably useful for everyone (consider how the reactions to Process Automation and Build Script would have been if they were a minifaction card instead of neutral with 1 influence for everyone)
This is a bit of a pipedream, but ever since Terminal Directive I’ve thought that that style of expansion would’ve been a much better fit for the mini-factions. If they just exist in the story mode you avoid any issues with importing their cards into the canonical factions, and their strong theming could help avoid the vague and incoherent crap that was the TD storyline.
Adam in particular seems to be begging for a campaign mode: “Who the hell is Adam?” is a good central driving story, and breaking free of directives works better as an arc over multiple games than within a single one.
You know, I think I would’ve been okay with them having 15 influence… if they had launched with more cards in D&D. At the end of this cycle (so they’ve existed for three cycles), each will have 10 cards, not counting ID’s. Each of the runner factions in just the core set have 15.
Take the NBN slots out (because NBN deserves no cards), and allocate them between the three, and they probably would’ve had a lot less miserable time up to now.
Hopefully when we get Deluxe rotations (please FFG hear our cries), they do something like this to preserve the minis (ideally it’s just the mini faction cards from D&D and wishfully a core set completion set, not Strike and no new mini faction cards). It’d be a fun way for people to buy in since most people like them for their lore more than competitive viability. Adding a well though out campaign (not TD) would definitely have high appeal to those players and would likely see a fair amount of sales to existing players even if it offered no new cards.
I’ve read about this Geist ‘mini-faction’ before. Could someone explain to me why it’s considered a faction of its own? I don’t quite get it. Is it so different from the other Runner identities?
It’s more said tongue-in-cheek and fairly clear from comparing Geist decklist to other Criminal decklists.
The Geist trashcan ability is completely different from most Criminal abilities. The playstyle for Geist doesn’t really match any previous Criminal archetype either. It’s more like Shaper (and probably no one would have batted an eyelash if it was), because to use trashcans effectively you have to install cards with trashcans. The number of trashcan cards isn’t significantly more common in Criminal either.
When Geist was released it came with trashcan breakers and a trashcan Console, and later gotten Tech Trader and not really other specific cards since. Like the mini-factions have been supported. Except, when new trashcan cards are released players try to decide if it’s worth including if they are in-faction/neutral or have low influence costs.
i don’t think that’s the case at all. Geist got a few trashcan cards in his cycle, but there were plenty of them before. it’s just that it was something that criminal did (grappling hook, cortez chip, crash space, decoy, crescentus, etc.) but never was a fully fledged-out archetype. and as tvaduva said, not really anything criminal did necessarily more than others.
drawing cards is very shaper, so that’s probably what he meant by that comment.
but Geist is a minifaction in the same sense Noise was. you can’t build just any anarch or criminal deck and slot one of those IDs into it, nor can you take any old deck for another ID and just swap to Noise/Geist. they play very differently and definitely require lots of the cards that trigger their ID ability, much moreso than you would probably normally put in your deck without it
honestly, the only reason Noise wasn’t called a minifaction that often is because he was around for such a long time before the minifactions existed. Geist was only around for a few months before them
There are value IDs, like Kate and Whizzard and Andy, who basically provide something economic or efficient in their ability. Certain cards are better in their deck, sure, the contours of a Hayley deck are very different from Kate even though they’re both efficiency machines, but it is easier to swap a base set of cards from one to another. Then there are build around IDs where the base deck is just wildly different from the rest of the faction. Geist gets called a minifaction mostly because he received so much explicit support (the cloud breakers, tech trader) whereas the best Noise cards, like Medium and Parasite, still saw play in other Anarchs even if Noise’s deck was built quite different.
Criminal has been the home of powerful one-use effects since the start of the game, and more specifically on-use effects that help you get into servers. I’m thinking of the trinity of Inside Job, Emergency Shutdown, and Forged Activation Orders (as well as the install + trash cards listed above, Faerie, etc). I could see Geist’s inception as “a Criminal ID that can get his draw from quintessentially Criminal effects,” but Tech Trader giving you credits as well as draw really pushes Geist to jam as many trashcan cards as possible (ultimately not resembling any other criminal build). When Faust was legal, draw had an even more warping effect on deck building choices. Dean Lister + Turtle has a similar effect as well.