I’m starting to find that it’s fallen so far out of fashion that if you try to spam it like the old days you can catch people off-guard with it. But if it’s not a surprise everyone good will know how to play against it. (So it might work in swiss, but not in elimination.)
Corp gearchecks are cheaper than ever, too, and the sentries have become much nastier to faceplant. Suppose you blind-siphon a 1-ice. Often, you’ll hit a Paper Wall, Quandary or Wraparound and not slow the corp much. Or you eat a Komainu and lose your hand. Or you hit an Architect and they install some asset and rez it. Crim at least has Faerie to negate the sentry problem.
So that slows it down as an aggro tool. As a control tool it’s still not bad, particularly if you’re taking them below a critical credit threshold (7->2, say, turning off Hedge Fund and Snare!). If you’re doing that for net +1-3 credits, a couple of sucker counters and/or the ability to play Emergency Shutdown that turn it’s not bad at all.
one siphon doesnt just win the game anymore which is good. i think we all wanted that since core/genesis but its still really powerful as part of a disruption package.
if i have siphon in my deck now i have follow up ie DLR/vamp/lamprey or something big and disruptive to leverage the money into like the shards.
i often leave ice on RnD alone alone now and just pick away on HQ and the remotes so the corps money cannot be sunk in defending RnD so i have bigger potential to follow up siphon for indexing and makers eye.
siphon is awesome in a leela/logos deck because you can easily set up combo turns where you double siphon -> shutdown->makers eye etc.
if your runner deck plays a straight up money->breakers->access stuff game then there are better options for your card slots. this is why i think people have mixed results in the standard andysucker decks with siphon because andy is the ultimate money->breakers-> access stuff runner and siphon doesnt fit in her game plan as well because she has no follow up.
Peak Efficiency stinks as any more than a 1x. If you see it early, you have to rez 4 pieces of ICE (costing, say, 8-10 credits with NEXT and Boot Camps) before it’s a Beanstalk Royalties. It’s a lovely boost later when you’re stabilised though. Every time I saw it in my Foundry decks I wish I’d drawn something else.
It might be better in next rush decks where you’re tossing out tons of cheap gear checkers. Had a friend who used to run pop-up, paper wall etc with Security Subcontract. In that kind of deck it may make sense to capitalize on all of the cheap stuff to fund an ash or two. I don’t like it where there’s really expensive stuff.
I got flatlined earlier this week by an ETF who used PeakEfficiency to power a double Punitive Counterstrike while I was thinking I got enough creds to dodge a double Punitive. I think i’m gonna disagree
But seriously, I run 3x Peak as a direct replacement to 3x Restructure, and it’s a massive improvement. Seriously, rezzing 4 - 5 bits of next ice/eli/arch is easy just of the ID ability and being a glacier, and from there Peak is just better than any other option.
The only counter point is massive parasite recursion decks, but these days Kate parasite recursion is dying it’s only really Noise that’s doing that, and Noise matchups are just a mess anyway.
People have kind of hinted at this in the thread, but I think the reason AS is less powerful than before is a cascade effect from Corp economies preventing the runner from playing full Tag Me Siphon Recursion.
Back in the early Spin Cycle it wasn’t uncommon for many Andys to Siphon you 5-6 times in one game and never clear tags. As Corp economy improved the denial aspect wasn’t strong enough. Criminals were forced to play a long game and reintroduce resources. Security Testing’s release solidified that.
Siphon is much less frustrating to deal with when it costs three clicks and nets 4 less credits. It also makes it often the wrong play so it gets held back more. Typical Siphon recursion is much less common and I think it was that strategy that was so painful to play against.
In my opinion, luckily, AS is not as effective as it used to be. Back in the days when corps economy was more fragile, AS almost always produced a significant downturn in the corp’s tempo, independently of when it was landed. Hence, it was enough to keep on spamming AS for winning games, essentially. This is also because the tag punishment effectively consisted in Scorched Earth and Closed Accounts, which you could easily deal with by covering yourself with a few layers of Plascrete and by landing another AS, respectively.
I believe things are different now: with time people have adapted their game styles, new light Etr ICE came out, corp’s economy stabilised even further and new ways of punishing tags are being provided, with the result that AS is not as deadly as it used to be. It is still a pretty strong card, but its effectiveness is now confined to specific windows that the runner has to identify within a game. An out-of-time Account Siphon is not likely to produce significant effects, in my opinion.
As for AS as an economy card, I would say yes only provided that you can float tags.
I prefer having 1 free slot than third copy of a card that against some corps is dead. 2x with 1x Planned Assault & 1x SoT is enough.
Tunnel vision with 3x Account Siphon in every crim is crazy.
This is like a group therapy session for account siphon victims. Account Siphon is almost never dead, and even the threat of you having it is enough for the smart corp to change their game wildly. You HAVE to play around it, or else you probably lose, tags or no. The runner has the most flexibility in playing around strategies that the corp has, its not like you’re losing sleep trying to play around tollbooth, you played femme back during core, or with taxing ice, you parasite it. With account siphon, you either protect your HQ, and capitalize on every scoring window, or you get murdered. Cause if you’re waiting for multiple turns to be able to make a scoring window, because of lack of any one card type, like ice or actual agendas to score, you’re going to get siphoned, and that will lose you the game most of the time.
Failed? It got him to Worlds cut, and then won exactly as many games as Dan’s Andy deck (one). I’d love for my decks to “fail” that badly.
He also flubbed a Runner game via leaving Security Testing in the wrong place, which is in no way related to playing 1x Siphon.
Frankly, when Corps have ~75% win rate in the elimination, it doesn’t matter how many Siphons you play - if you’re forced to play Runner too often, you’re done.
There are good arguments that 3x Siphon is still right, but his performance there isn’t one.
I guess the takeaway lesson from this is that just because one of the top players tries something unusual at Worlds, that doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea…
