I’m glad D4vid is on the list because it made corp deckbuilding much less interesting. With less D4vid, corps can maybe use some interesting big ice.
4 Likes
Yeah, it made expensive, one sub strength 5+ ice irrelevant. Wraparound, archangel, and turing were okay because they were cheap enough to rez, but even tollbooth started getting cut from my decks because taxing 3 credits and 1 d4v1d counter just wasn’t enough to justify the 8 rez cost. Never mind susannoo, wormhole, or grim, all niche cards but previously role-players in the right decks. It really restricts both deckbuilding and future design space.
3 Likes
I don’t believe Anarch can ever be fair, before Cyberdex, mimic was the bad guy with datasucker, Yog made code gates bad, Corroder is awesome. But it’s just too good, it has the NBN problem of being potentially anything, making it so only those who played hours and hours of training matches against the most ball busting decks can figure out what to do in time to give themselves a proper defensive strategy. Now it seems Anarch is going to be disruptive more than anything, and that’s fine with me. Anarch was just too good against everything, but now it’s going to suffer the variance it should.
2 Likes
This is a revealing quote, even if you did not mean it to be. You can’t win by playing defense against Anarch. You have to play aggressively and recklessly.
5 Likes
Was Anarch really always that dominant? It seems like in between the release of Order & Chaos and this most recent MWL/FAQ update, they were in an excellent spot, but for most of the rest of the game’s history they were arguably the worst runner faction. A year and a half of good times doesn’t erase two years of mediocrity.
1 Like
How long a faction has dominated the meta should have nothing to do with balancing the game right now.
Edit: Sorry, I’m sure that wasn’t what you were implying. I’ve just seen that come up a lot and I don’t see why it matters.
2 Likes
D4 doesn’t remove value from big ICE. You have to Rez it and tax the counters. Take this from someone who stubbornly played Blue Sun in the red meta. Suck it up and rez the Tollbooths and Curtain Walls. They don’t have infinite D4 counters. D4 counters are a resource like credits; it’s not that hard to understand.
2 Likes
Yeah, but consider stuff like the advanceable big ice from O&C. That stuff just doesn’t get played, because D4v1d breaks it trivially.
Edit: Well, that, and the fact that D4 players are often using Cutlery too, which means that they get to conserve those credits since they only have to break it a single time.
2 Likes
Space ICE is garbage anyway. Only Wormhole is close to playable. Don’t act like D4 is the only reason why.
3 Likes
Space ice is really just too slow/expensive to be played, even if d4 doesn’t exist at all. Taking just Asteroid Belt as an example, it’s 9 to rez for a 6 STR single ETR ice, which is obviously untenable to rez if unadvanced. If you advance it, you’re sacrificing a click and a credit to do so, so each advancement is analogous to losing 2 credits: the credit you spent, and the credit you didn’t click for. So now if you spend a turn advancing Asteroid Belt, you effectively spent 6 credits for a str 6 single etr. This is still really mediocre, because if I’m spending that kinda cash, I want the ICE to do more for me than cause the runner to bounce. Even if we’re ignoring the dodgy “1 click = 1 credit” math and saying that we’re in fact just rezzing this ICE for 3 credits (the credits spent advancing the ICE), it’s still the loss of an entire turn just setting that up.
I think the only saving grace of Wormhole is it’s rediculous STR of 7, which is extremely costly to break, coupled with the fact that it has a potentially very threatening subroutine. Everything else is kinda bad (with the exception of Blue Sun using Orion in OAI shenanigans).
1 Like
D4vid doesn’t invalidate ICE that is right at str 5. While d4vid is only 3 credits, with a click to draw a replacement d4vid and a click to install a new d4vid and the three counter restriction it comes out to roughly fair on ICE that is right at str 5.
It does invalidate ICE beyond str5 though. Yeah, Blue Sun should try to use Curtain Wall to tax the counters, but really and truly you shouldn’t try to play Blue Sun in the d4vid heavy environment, period.
That’s also the reason Susan got knocked out, d4vid ignores the extra 2 strength on her and treats her exactly the same as he treats Inazuma: 1 counter to break, even if it was rezzed for 6 less.
The notion of Corporate Troubleshooter in a Batty Next deck is pushed out, because part of what it would be doing is putting stuff at 7+ str.
If you look at the total number of inherently 7+ str ICE, it’s extremely low, and a lot of it wasn’t playable anyway.
4 Likes
You can beat Anarchs as Blue Sun. You can even beat Dumble. It’s just really f****** hard.
Okay I’ll admit Anarch with Employee Strike is near impossible
This article is very much doom and gloom for the anarch as we played it. And it is right. Many of those decks no longer have the influence to splash all of its options. That said, I completely disagree that Anarch is now so weak that it will drop to <15%. There has been an abundance of cool and powerful cards in Mumbai that are all in-faction for anarchs. Many of them tools that allow for anarchs to bypass cards, pressure HQ in a big way, or blow up ice like it is no big deal. The reason why they were not used is because we have been stuck in a rut. The old suite was also easy to play, hard to disrupt, and even easier to recur. I think Clone chip did a lot of damage to the game for enabling these decks.
D4v1d is one of these tools, and it still stands as an incredibly powerful card. Even at 4 influence it was being splashed by Shapers everywhere. The reason is obvious: it obsoletes a lot of high strength ice, much like how yog obsoleted most code gates with less than 3 strength. And that just makes for an unhealthy design space. What were you to do, create multiple high sub high strength ice at an affordable cost that really messes with the runner? That would definitely crush D4v1d, but it would also be pushing the power level, further obsoleting existing ice. No, it would be better to reduce the number of D4v1ds in the world of netrunner, to make ice like firewall and susano relevant choices again, to bring back corporate troubleshooter or the IT department.
It is not like the card is completely gone. Now it just means there is a small tax to pay for this ability. As it should. Maybe now Anarchs will start looking for those EMP devices, or DDOS without apocalypse.
5 Likes
D4vid should have been virus tokens.
D4 + Cutlery was a big enough reason to never play anything that cost the corp more than 5 credits to rez against anarch. 1x Tollbooth for a Crim match-up at worst, and you could cut that on the assumption you won’t see much blue at your event.
It does occupy a rather large wedge of design space, 5 and over, to infinity, which is the main reason I can see it being on the MWL. But from a balance perspective, to have this all happen, with Parasite and Yog as well, it’s like “no, anarchs, you don’t get to do anything anymore.”
Parasite could have easily come off MWL this time around, I think.
1 Like
I’m not sure if seeing less D4v1d is the correct solution though, at least in a vacuum. It’s kind of a runner necessity because of the pushing of power levels on ice, especially code gates (which was in itself a response to the dominance of Yog). A part of the reason crim has been out in the wilderness for a while is that they are the faction that cannot effectively run D4v1d, so they can easily be punished by relatively cheap ice like Archangel and archives Crick.
While I can see that D4v1d is somewhat oppressive, reducing its prevalence needs to go hand in hand with replacement cards being printed that do the same job in a less broad way. Off the top of my head, something that cheaply breaks only ice with a strength greater than its rez cost would do a good job of dealing with some of the problem ice, without pushing big ice out of the game. (Sadly, the devas feel like a missed opportunity to help fill this gap.)
6 Likes
I think the oppressive nature is in large part that Shaper can fetch and recur a singleton in an incredibly efficient way. The fact that they are now STILL happy to pay 5 inf on one of them is amazing. There is no other card in the game anybody considers at that influence price point, not even by a long shot, whereas David is pretty much an auto-include.
quote="Severijn, post:53, topic:7763"
Many of those decks no longer have the influence to splash all of its options.
[/quote]
Many of those decks no longer have the influence to splash any options.
It now costs 6-8 influence to sport that faust/wyldside/adjusted chronotype/D4v1d suite, that still leaves 4 influence in the worst case if you are also running parasites. 4 influence is not nothing. If you run a different suite, like say eater, core or Caïssa, that will free up most of that influence. Also, of all the factions, anarch is the one faction that needs to splash the least. It has card draw, HQ & R&D pressure, card filtering, economy, multi access all in-faction. The one thing it really lacks is tutoring, but that is again not that vital as anarch often forgoes the need by playing AI breakers anyway.
1 Like
I had been out of the scene for a couple of months, went to our regional with Blue Sun / Leela because I’m used to them and I’m a martyr. First three Corp games were Anarch w/ employee strike. Two of them had it first turn. Holy hell I was confused, talk about hard mode. “What is this sorcery and why is it happening?” One opponent: “Woo, sniping at IG and hitting BS, what a wonderful world!”
Hopefully these changes will mean that I don’t faceplant into that as often.
2 Likes
Crick is a really instructive example, because while a lot of people focus on D4v1d invalidating expensive ICE, it also made some of the ridiculously overpowered ICE we’ve seen lately manageable in a faction that did (up until pretty recently…) lean on fixed-strength breakers. How many times have you broken Crick with Yog? Gutenberg with Mimic? And it’s not just the scientist ICE—cards like Archangel are also just insanely tough to deal with.
Luckily, we’re not losing D4V1d, just paying one influence for it. I’m still totally with the original article that this is an unnecessary reach. Without the D4v1d nerf, there’d still be less Anarch & people would see a bit less D4v1d & get to play their big ICE. Yes, Shaper sometimes splashes for it, but it’s far from an auto-include in every Shaper deck.
1 Like