yeah I’ve never found the math on profiteering particularly favorable. I tend to avoid 3 BP like the plague, 2 I can handle, even if it can be frustrating, and 1 I find very manageable. And I don’t think there is an efficient enough way to gain that money if you’re just going to wipe BP. However, keeping an advanced one tabled so that you can gain 15 bucks and fire off a combo? I can jam with that.
Yes, it’s not worth using in a deck focused on taxing the runner and especially not with NAPD contract. If you are using it in a taxing deck, you can use x3 Ireress. While taxing decks are some of the most popular archetypes right now, there are other archetypes that can do very well. For instance, I have an excellent Weyland deck that focuses on trashing programs and requiring all 3 breaker types. It uses Wraparound, Chimera, and Inazuma along with program trashing to keep the runner out. If the runner doesn’t have the right breaker, it doesn’t matter how many credits they have.
But if the runner does have the right breaker you’ve just fuelled them to break every piece of ICE.
That deck only works while the runner has an incomplete rig.
Iress is terrible - it’s cheaper to break with almost any decoder (certainly all the viable ones) than the value of the BP you’ve given away. Look at http://www.sneakdoor.com for full details, but basically a single BP is break even (or better) for any decoder except Force of Nature, Aurora, Pecock and Zu. Any more than that and the runner is still making money, unless he has no breaker. Factor in that you also have to draw and play Iress…
BP is extremely important, especially if your ICE is cheap, binary gear-check. In that case 3BP makes the server like Swiss cheese. It got to the point with my Weyland Supermodernism deck that I was wary about scoring Hostile Takeovers too soon, because the BP ruined the long-game.
Ireress mostly has been unplayable because the Yog. Seems like people are pulling away from him now, at least a bit. I’m not saying that will make Ireress MVP, its still pretty meh, but honestly I think 1-2 in a deck that sometimes gets caught going too hard on BP is justified if you need to keep the runner from getting free accesses.
Clearly, the right way to play Ireress is in front of two more Ireresses, which are all in front of Midway Station Grid (which is juuust behind an Archer or other ETR Ice).
That’s not a terribly complicated idea at all, what do you mean? 
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[quote=“GreedyGuts, post:32, topic:1314”]
Because they have to, though. Runners want to make as many runs as they need and no more.[/quote]
What does that even mean? Of course, I have to run. There are no ways for the Runners to win outside of running (well, I guess you can deck the corporation, but that’s not quite a thing yet). How many runs do I need? You say that as if at some point mid-game, someone is going to be like… okay, I did 20 runs. That’s enough. Well, no, unless if you won (or lost) that’s not enough. You run or you lose. Obviously, costs restrict how much you can run, but 3/1s don’t change the economics. If you don’t change the economics (typically via Ice), then it doesn’t matter if it takes 1 or 1 million runs. That’s why 3/1s are inherently poor, because they don’t change the economics of a run, and they end up weakening your ability to change the economics by consuming resources.
[quote=“false_idol, post:44, topic:1314”]
Ireress mostly has been unplayable because the Yog.[/quote]
I think there are lots of myths about Yog. Ireress is unplayable because it’s bad. I think there are a lot of bad code gates and decoders that people imagine would be played “if only Yog weren’t there,” but really Yog just kicks them while they were already down.
^ This.
Just look at the figures on http://www.sneakdoor.com/ (for those of you who didn’t look and aren’t familiar with it, it’s an online tool comparing every ICE with every compatible breaker).
Iress is beaten for $1 (or 0 for Yog) by absolutely all of the remotely viable decoders except Zu.
This means that the only point Iress actually does his job is when the runner has no decoder. Once the breaker comes out, Iress at best breaks even with the BP, but after the first point doesn’t even manage that. Seems pretty weak to me.
I agree that it’s an awful piece of ICE, but I don’t think you understand how Ireress works. It has X 1-credit subroutines, not 1 X-credit subroutine. Also, the runner can spend their bad pub credits even if they have no code gate breaker.
Basically, unless the runner has Yog, parasite, or recurring icebreaker credits, Ireress exactly neutralizes bad pub.
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Yeah its bad, but I don’t think it is “worst ICE award” bad. And in decks that get 5+ bad publicity in a game, I totally see the merit using it to stop free R&D lock forever. That’s a bad place to be.
My point was more that runners generally want to make as few runs as possible. For some decks, that’s running every turn, because if they don’t they lose out on Desperado, or they’ll risk missing Agendas. If there is a way for me to make fewer runs and still have a chance of winning, I’ll be doing that. See: Indexing, which takes an extra run to make sure you get maximum value out of the next few, or multi-access cards, which give you better value per run.
You don’t go “I ran enough, I’m done”, but a lot of runners can’t afford to do many taxing runs. Even with Opus, it’s possible to hit a point where making a run immediately after stealing is more difficult. That’s the spot where 3/1s are helpful. It lets you tax the runner as much as if you were playing a 3/2, without the same amount of risk if they go in and make off with it. Better still, if they do that, you’re more likely to be able to play and score a 3/2, 4/2, or even 5/3 yourself next turn and score it while the window is open. Using another 3/2 for that is riskier.
3/1s do change the economics in conjunction with Ice. By themselves, no, that’s stupid, I agree. FA generally doesn’t want too many 3/1s if 3/2s or 2/1s are available. But as part of a taxing/glacier strategy? Yeah, making them run (or face consequences, which most of the good 3/1s are able to present) and break themselves doing it so you can score something bigger, or so you can find out “no that server’s not safe at all” with something small? There’s value there, I think, so long as you don’t go overboard with it. More than 2-3 3/1s in a deck needs a miiighty good bit of reasoning.
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Absolutely, sorry yeah total misread. I was just looking at the number on sneakdoor and didn’t account for the fact it can have variable subs.
There will be plenty of decks that won’t care about the lost cash though - a few of the forthcoming cards in this cycle have income that can be accessed on the fly.
Ireress can be a fine piece of ice in the “take a million BP” Weyland deck if the opponent is not running Yog. The problem is that Yog is pretty common.
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If it was playable, it’d be played. Enigma is played despite Yog. Hell, Pop-Up Window is played and that only causes you to lose one credit not “a million.” All in a world with Yog.
I think mushin no shin makes 3/1s a lot more viable. My problem with then has always been the clicks and credits you have to invest for 1 point but mushin no shin cuts this down from 4 clicks and 3 credits to 2 clicks.
If the runner musters up the courage to make the run or has infiltration its not game ending and if they don’t run it you get the score + the entire next turn to take actions. House of Knives is an all star obviously but I have been splashing mushin no shin in weyland to use with posted bounties and vulcan cover ups and its been a lot better than I thought it would be. Unless the runner has expose or its a potential match point most runners do everything but run the mushin no shin’d thing.
With my Weyland deck with bad pub, I usually carry 5 bad pub midgame and more later. The purpose of Ireress is to 100% negate Bad Pub on a server. If you have two on the same server, it’s a ridiculous tax.
@Arkhon and others: As far as breaking Ireress, I don’t think you understand how the card works. It always breaks even with BP because it gains subroutines for each BP. With 5 bad pub, it would tax 5 credits, effectively negating the BP for that server. If broken with anything but yog, it still costs 1 credit per subroutine.
Ireress is the best BP mitigation card. Compare to Elizabeth Mills which can be trashed from R&D and HQ, costs 2 to rez, and only removes 1 BP. Or compare to Witness Tampering which costs 4 and two clicks to remove 2 bad pub. If your deck wants to mitigate having bad pub, Ireress is usually the best choice.
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Yeah I acknowledged above that I misread it.
Still only useful if the runner actually needs money for the rest of the run though, so it won’t touch stealth decks. Also, you have at most three copies of Iress in the deck and would be lucky to see them all in a game; you will have at least four servers in play, so rocking 5 BP without Iress on a server is still giving the runner a lot of value. The BP is still a massive liability.
In my old Personal Worskhop deck I was using running into Ice Walls as an economy play against Weyland decks that took too much BP. That’s still quite viable now with SMC, Clone Chip and Savoir Faire.
I disagree that Iress is the best BP mitigation card. It’s a dead card until you have BP and against Yog (arguably the most popular codegate breaker) and there are a few runner builds that don’t care about the credit loss anyway. I would say Veterans Program is better, simply because it’s still doing the job of getting you towards a win even when you have no BP, so it’s never a dead draw.
Veteran’s Program is a dead draw (and worse, a liability) when you don’t have the capability to score an agenda. You don’t need all three copies of Ireress in play, just one over R&D and maybe one over HQ depending on the runner. If you do draw all three, that’s great, stack a couple on R&D and BP ends up helping you!
I’d say that the mere existence of Lotus Field makes Ireress playable, where it wasn’t before.
Well, I guess I’ll wait and see.
That argument doesn’t really apply because it’s true of any agenda. You didn’t put Veteran’s Program in your deck solely for its ability, you put it in because the rules state that you have to include 20 points of agendas. If it wasn’t Veteran’s Program then it would be a different agenda - which would be every bit as “dead” and a “liability” as VP in the scenario you describe.
If you’ve got to the point where you’re considering agendas as dead cards then you’ve lost 
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