I’m going to try my best to not be salty here, and I hope you share a similar viewpoint.
Industrial Genomics (and to a lesser extent other Museum decks like Gagarin and NEH) have taken our meta by storm, and we are scrambling for ways to handle it. True, real assetspam has finally landed, and we runners have a hard time dealing with it. They have a passive wincondition, are incredibly good at taxing you out, and do not have to score.
This is the first time we’ve seen an assetspam deck besides Near-Earth Hub, and they had Fast-advance as their primary wincondition. We’re seeing the emergence of a new type of Netrunner, and we have to theorycraft on how to handle it.
So, my questions for the Hivemind of the internets are these:
How do you deal with Museum Assetspam decks?
Are any of these solutions non-Anarch?
How do we minimize the amount of cards necessary, so that we have game against other decks?
I’m currently playing a ValPocalypse list which is quite powerful, but I still would like other options.
Popular cards I suspect will be suggested include Archives Interface, Hacktivist Meeting, Imp, Scrubber, Salsette Slums, Employee Strike and Apocalypse. But even with this tech, we somehow still seem to struggle.
So I turn to you, internet. How do you deal with True Assetspam?
The most important thing to realize against Genomics is that you are not going to beat it by trashing assets, running archives or by filling your deck with supposed hate against it. Rather, you the only way to beat it is by adjusting your play and keeping your options open. Don’t play to Genomics’ strenght or you’ll lose.
Anyways, assuming you are playing against Bio-Tech variants, all that matters is R&D. They don’t play Vanity Project so their agenda density is quite high and they shuffle every turn, making Medium and R&D Interface much more powerful. Your goal as Runner is to hit R&D while wasting as little time elsewhere as possible.
Remember. They don’t play Caprice, nor Ash nor Batty. There’s nothing preventing you from a total R&D lock.
If you play Shaper, a single Net Shield is all you need. For practically nothing you nullify the first Biotech and the first Hostile Infrastructure.
For Criminal, schew Maker’s Eye in favour of R&D Interface and Medium. Security Testing as a 2-of is a great bet too, you don’t need as many Plascretes as you used to.
Anarchs should favour Whizzard and Imp and move away from Faust.
All three factions can play Employee Strike which is great against the meta as a whole.
Archives Interface is terrible, Hacktivist Meeeting is decent but very inconsistent, Apocalypse doesn’t work with Shock in archives and potential Hostile Infrastructures on the board, Scrubber is good in Valencia, wouldn’t play it in other factions. Salsette Slums is 100% meta, like Plascrete but dead on other matchups.
There are many varied types of IG deck, but I would strongly advise against the R&D-only strategy. In fact, my number one piece of advice, as someone who enjoys playing as IG, would be not to focus on R&D!
Like I say I can only speak from one perspective, but most currently popular IG decks share the trait of not having much, if any, plan to score agendas. Agendas stored in centrals and card recursion are therefore common themes among the varied decks. Focussing on a single central (usually R&D) makes life much easier for the Corp, since the one real advantage of having your centrals as a recursive loop (rather than the usual production line) is that you can choose to a large degree at which part of the cycle you store the agendas. Ignoring HQ and Archives is a surefire way to have the Corp stash all the agendas there and watch your futile R&D runs with a suppressed smirk. The most nervous moments as Corp are against Runners who run each central at least “often enough” to give you no safe hide-and-seek spots.
So what we’re looking at is medium, but consistent, spread out central pressure. Rather than Legwork or The Maker’s Eye, we should look at cards like The Turning Wheel and Interfaces. Instead of burts plays, we need to punish centrals every second or third turn?
I’m not sure it’s about cards, or that there’s a hard and fast rule, it’s just about appreciating that if you’re agenda hunting against a non-scoring, recursive deck it’s kind of like a big psi game with the Corp as to where the agendas are. Put yourself in the shoes of the Corp: if the Runner had never run HQ all game, where would you stash the agendas? If the Runner had been running Archives every few turns, but threw their hands up and stopped bothering once you slapped a Caprice Nisei on Archives, where would the safest place be?
Just be aware of your own threat on the three centrals and think what your play will entice a sensible Corp to do, given that they choose to a large extent how to cycle the agendas between them.
R&D should theoretically be the safest place for the Corp to store agendas. Archives runs access all agendas in one go! And HQ only has five cards, much more agenda rich than R&D if there’s more than one in there. So running R&D as a main goal is reasonably sensible, since in some ways it’s where the Corp should want their agendas to be, all things being equal. But you have to check Archives and HQ frequently enough that the Corp still feels that those two servers are more risky and that R&D is the safest place to leave their agendas. Else pretty soon, there won’t be any there at all!
I mean, hitting R&D frequently enough is still probably good. But you never really get “lock”, where they can’t draw cards you didn’t see first. And that’s not even counting the City-Hall-Heritage shenanigans…
One piece of tech I didn’t see you mention is Film Critic.
Odds are you’re going to lose the battle of “can IG install nasty assets faster than you can trash them?”
Your real hope is in finding 7 points before they get enough nasty stuff to actually kill you. Film Critic is your best friend at snatching Future Perfects and Fetal AI, and it only takes 2x TFP and 1x anything else to win the game…
Absolute, #1 tip is to familiarize yourself with the types of lists these archetypes run, prefereably by playing a lot against them. I know it’s a cop-out to say “practice more” but as you rightly point out it’s a whole new world for asset spam and there’s a lot to learn about what they are and aren’t capable of.
As others have said, focusing on assets is often “playing the corps game,” but it’s useful to think about what tech you’re packing and how it might interact with their win conditions. for example, councilman can be robust ronin defense, while a pol op or two can solve bio-ethics before it gets rolling. Use what you have and figure out how to attack whatever they have left.
for specific tech:
Anarch: obvious answers are imp recursion, whizzard, slums, archives interface. Their RnD tools are also brutal, with medium and Keyhole (when played correctly) representing two of the biggest threats to these decks.
Shaper: as someone mentioned above, Net shield is a lot better than it seems. It can do a ton of work taking the sting out of damage taxes. Paricia is also a viable threat, especially if you’re already a rich runner (which many shapers are, these days). FF is ok, but weaker than it once was, as bio-ethics can turn this into a gargantuan tax each turn.
Crim: don’t hold your breakers in hand, and remember to slot RnD threat. easy run econ and siphons mean you can become fantastically wealthy and force the corp to rez things before they want to. Import a vamp (a blue card in disguise if ever there were one) to clean house on traps, psi games, and the like. Oh, and if they have ICE at all, make sure your breakers aren’t in hand when you run, ok?
It’s not only, you’ll lose if you don’t ocasionally hit other servers, but it’s where IG loses and where you should focus. You simply are not going to win by running archives because that’s what Genomics wants.
Tone down the sarcasm, will you? You can see it’s a manner of speech because I do note that they shuffle every turn.
But really, deep down I think this is futile. I don’t think any of the complainers are looking for strategic advice anymore than the people complaining about Faust, Account Siphon or Caprice are. It doesn’t matter what I say or do, people will find a way to twist it as “proof” that Genomics is unbeateable and that the game is ruined and that Whizzard with three copies of the godawful Archives Interface is your only choice.
I mean, @TheBigBoy is right. You should just play against it and see what works and doesn’t. No more, no less.
I think the Film Critic plan is solid, because TFP turns into a huge liability at that point. But mostly it’s looking at the boardstate. If they’re broke, trash their money assets. If they are struggling with draw, hit HQ and archives early and get rid of assets like Jackson.
Of course, none of these suggestions are decklists. Would we be able to get enough economy (for spending 8 credits to run R and D.), a breaker suite, and the hate cards all into one functioning deck?
