For me, Adam has a fun and competitive matchup against most decks, but a couple of terrible ones. Anyone have advice for playing against:
NBN Midseasons decks: you would think Sea-Scorch would be Adam’s worst fear because of his 3 card hand size, but I’ve always managed to get out Public Sympathy or Brain Chip before they get the combo and enough credits. Hitting an Explode-a-Paloooza and then getting Midseasoned though - what do you do? They can trash your Always be Running and put out a Resistor that you will never get through, then wait to draw a kill combo or Psychobeale combo.
Not running isn’t an option because of ABR, and running archives is a waste when you need an early agenda to power the brain chip.
Jinteki: if Jinteki puts net damaging ICE on all of their servers, especially Komainu and Tsurugi which can’t be clicked through, they’re brutal on Adam. Even if he doesn’t take any damage from ice, his hand is wiped by a snare or Fetal AI. Safety First will draw 1 card after this, but PE just needs to score 1 agenda and Neural EMP…
Does Adam need to slot 3 film critics to be safe against NBN and Fetal AI? That’s wasting so many deck slots… is Adam still good when slowed down by critics?
I agree there are some TERRIBLE matchups with Adam. I find RP to be particularly nightmarish. Basically any ICE you can’t just bounce off is trouble. If all three centrals are guarded by punishing ice (Komainu, Cortext Lock, Crick, shoot, even pup is a problem) Adam is in trouble.
The film critic may be a bit of overkill due to his lack of free clicks.
I think, at the end of the day, Adam just needs to be careful in certain matchups and draw the cards that increase his hand size.
I, however, just played a game where the 7 cards that would do that were in the bottom 18 cards of my deck. Ugh.
I believe there is an adam build for most metas, and well suited for nearly any corp. The trouble is making him great against top meta decks, while still maintaining strength against medium and T2 decks. Faust goes a long way towards that, but I think Faust’s days are numbered.
Being careful with card draw won’t help against Midseasons decks that give you a million tags, kill your ABR, and then just wait for a great combo like Psychobeale or double scorch. Film critic is the only way I can think of dealing with that. NBN has so many great tag mechanics that lots of them don’t use midseasons, but is it worth including film critic so you don’t have to concede the midseasons matchups?
Midseasons decks can do this to every runner, though. It sounds like you’re relying too heavily on ABR - if your deck has a single point of weakness, you’ll be exploited by any deck that can take advantage. A Shaper deck that relies entirely on ProCon or Personal Workshop for its econ is going to be in the same boat. Resources are fragile, always have a backup plan.
Now, sometimes an NBN deck gets a god draw and Midseasons you by turn 3. And sometimes they can chain out 3 astros by turn 3. Yellow isn’t fair to anyone, and there isn’t a runner deck in the world that won’t drop some non-zero percentage of games to yellow decks. You just have to be able to play smart and win the games that are possible for you to win.
@hbarsquared is right wrt Midseasons decks, they’re simply going to hurt Adam. My testing vs them so far however tends to either going faster than them (don’t forget that if you’re on game point Midseasons does nothing) or dying, and I’m not packing Film Critic, tho I’d consider 2 if your meta is full of Midseasons.
Hilariously, depending on your deck composition I would think that sometimes it’s OK to lose ABR
ABR isn’t necessary by the end of the game a lot of the time… but is necessary for a 10-tag resistor. Adam doesn’t pack D4vid the way Shaper and Anarch do - it’s too much influence when ABR lets you get through big ice most of the time.
But maybe I’m overthinking this - most NBN decks won’t draw Midseasons, Explode-a-Palooza and Resistor on the first turn. Only the ones I play!
i played against a Cybernetics Division the other day, and that 2-card starting hand size was super annoying, especially because i knew the deck was packing Snare!s and the like to go for flatlines
i had to start blanking Safety First until i scored my first agenda, which cut out a lot of card draw for a while
What happens if you ABR through the Oversighted Curtain Walls every time though? I would think that would keep them too poor to put out a non-Oversighted Curtain Wall, at least until they start protecting Curtain Walls with a Hive outside of it. And by that point hopefully you could get out a rig? I haven’t played Blue Sun with Adam.
BS glacier doesn’t really rely on OAI Curtain wall, though it’s certainly nice. You’re much more likely to be looking at adonis behind hive or datapike or something making the corp rich whilst you flail for your untutorable E3.
Sometimes you sit down across from an opponent and you have to hope for the best. You just can’t be prepared for everything. I kind of feel like you are getting very worried about a few specific situations. If Midseasons is that scary, you may need to play as someone else? I mean, how long can you play the “what about (insert specific horrible matchup scenario)” game? NEH is good against most people.
Yep. Midseasons hurts. Big stacks of EtR Barriers suck. Ice you can’t just bounce off of sucks. You just have to figure out how to play around them I guess. It is really nice ABRing through an OAI’ed Curtain Wall though.
I can’t seem to not end up stealing 2-3 Explode-a-paloozas every time I play against NEH. Is it too much to ask for an Astro?
If RP is your concern, some of my earlier Adam builds had Film Critic and/or Scrubber, both of which helped. With Critic and an Anarch rig, I actually felt fine against RP. Helps against Midseasons too.
As for the facecheck problem, I’m definitely running 3x Lovegood in any build. Which goes hand-in-hand with the reason why my Adam never loses to PE: Drug Dealer. 1x DD + Safety First = EoT Wyldside.
If you have ABR and E3 on the table, any half-decent BS glacier player is going to protect an OAI curtain wall behind something else. If you don’t have E3 on the table, then you don’t have enough clicks to use ABR and E3 to kill the CW.
Cybernetics was already mentioned, but I’ll add that I’ve been playing around with a CD deck derived from this one: Xanatos Gambit · NetrunnerDB
And found that not only is “2 card starting hand” really annoying, but it means you really can’t afford to risk running that Mushin’ed Man Up because it could be a Cerebral and that’s game over on turn 1 or 2.
