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?
Have you ever compared a Geist deck to anything else?
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.
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Geist was the patch to Exile.
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That’s what I think too (disagree with the 2nd part of your post, they are fine.)
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0 inf Apocalypse for lots of IDs ? Please no.
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I see. So it’s more a case of an Identity that is in the wrong faction!
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
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Really good point about Noise.
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.
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That and fact that you’re doing so much installing, which isn’t common in Criminal (outside of Iain, I guess).
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The number of generic ID is smaller than the number of the specific one though.
(and it’s a good thing)
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.
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