Sifr is a thing now, so how do you deal with it? While I wait for Willingdone to post a video about playing against Sifr, I’m interested in your thoughts.
Only really obvious things occur to me so far: Lotus Field, Magnet, Architect. Ark Lockdown to get parasites out of the game. Rush really hard.
Is there ever a reason to play Magnet rather than Lotus Field if you are Weyland (asking for a friend).
What ideas are you coming up with?
Depending on what sort of SIFR setup you are looking at, my suggestion would mostly be: go fast. SIFR is an expensive console; SIFR + breakers (even just Atman 0) is basically as expensive as Nexus. This depends a lot on the corp build, obviously, but my generic notion would be to protect R&D, double ice the remote, and push or agendas whenever you have the option.
It won’t be until Terminal Directive drops, but something I’m thinking of doing is going Hunter Seeker to kill the Sifr after they steal something, and then using Ark Lockdown to remove it. (And any extra copies the runner just happened to discard.)
Power Grid Overload doesn’t look too bad all of the sudden, if you’ve got the cash. Blue Sun Weyland might be interested.
Lab dog is pretty much useless when you consider how much Atm0n/AI there’s going to be.
I guess there’s always the option to run 1-2 Shattered Remains if you’re a masochist that likes looking at art of sad Chaos Theory.
Enforcing Loyalty is a thing. Against anarchs you can kill clone chips and against shapers you can kill the console.
Good point, I had forgotten about that.
I’m starting to think that going forward, a large part of a good defense is going to be a good offence: Disassembling the runner’s rig.
If you are Blue Sun, you can move it around and keep it (un-rezzed) in front of your (rezzed) big ice, only to be rezzed if the runner installs Parasite on the big ice and runs.
But let’s be real, nobody should play Blue Sun right now. It’s matchup against SIFR is incredibly bad.
Id actually like to test that before making that assertion. Blue sun just got a ton of low cost and taxing midrange ice such as sapper, veritas and mausoles
That was my initial impression as well, but a friend of mine (who is a much better player than I am) is going full steam ahead on Blue Sun against Sifr. I had been testing it for about a month and had been excited to try it until I saw Sifr.
I think @rojazu has the right idea though, Blue Sun has a lot of good midrange ICE that I can use that should probably displace 1 or 2 pieces of big ICE it had been using.
Finally, Blue Sun is able to keep a lot of its ICE face-down, or pick up a piece if it gets a parasite on it and doesn’t die. Blue Sun can also play Magnets (3c ETR code Gate for 1 inf isn’t a bad fit) and leave them in front of important ICE
I will simply try to avoid decks that rely on ICE, specially those that cost 4 or more or can be nullified by Atman, Parasite and Yog. I’ll try to stick Friends in High Places on everything instead.
I did test it, it was brutal. Oversighting the good midrange ice doesn’t make you enough money to keep up with runners, or to justify running BS over BABW.
The problem with BS against Sifr is that BS’s relative immunity to getting its ice blown up by Parasite is one of the big perks. Sifr means Parasites are automatically live, while also making it dangerous to leave ice rezzed. Derezzing those ice to protect them costs you credits and clicks and eats into the natural advantages of BS.
I think if BS is going to survive, it needs hard-to-break ice that are awful to facecheck, behind ice that the Runner wants to Sifr. It’s like the Dumblefork days, only worse.
The only saving grace is there probably aren’t any decks that want both Aaron Marron and Sifr. Which means deckbuilders need to choose between free-rolling CTM or freerolling glacier. I myself have just gone back to CI7 in disgust.
Something that might help BS is whenever Tithonium comes out, since it’s a beefy enough piece of ICE that can’t be Parasited.
Self-Adapting Code Wall should be nice as well.
I played a lot with my HB: AOT deck this weekend and generally found that Sifr is somewhat problematic, but not all that scary due to my plethora of mid-range ice I can rez for free or very cheap and recur with Friends in High Places.
However, most of my ice were code gates, and Yog very quickly caused big issues with my ability to build taxing servers. So Yog was my problem card, not Sifr.
I like the idea of Biotic + FA a Chronos Project in HB, but I don’t like what a 3/1 does for my agenda density and deck slots.
