[Article] What's Wrong with Weyland?

Hello everyone!

I’ve penned an article with some of my thoughts about the current state of the Weyland Consortium.

I hope you all enjoy it, and I’m interested to hear your thoughts on what I have to say.

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Bblum’s gonna have some words with you.

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Excellent! Words are wonderful!

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[Article] What’s wrong with Bblum and Weyland?

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I am surprised you think BaBW is such a good ID, especially compared to Blue Sun. I feel like for it to ever come back, you would need some sort of Sundew, like if Subliminal Messaging was a transaction. There is never going to be the critical mass of transactions you want to be playing to make up for how insane Blue Sun’s ability is unless you can get value multiple times out the same card slot, BS is just way too good. Even without considering OAI-Curtain, just the fact that it gets you a refund on your Hives going late puts it on par with BaBW.

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What I like about BaBW is that it gives you money right when you need it if you are planning to score through remotes reasonably quickly and defend centrals early. Operation economy is best if you can get it sharply and early, and then ride that wave to victory. BaBW increases the chances that you are going to be able to rez key ice early when you need it to protect you from Siphon, R&D attack or archives pressure while you’re trying to force out those first two agendas. With some pressure off influence in one of the areas I mention, you could afford to splash for more transactions and not compromise ice, remote defense or tagging ability, all of which you currently have to pay influence for.

Blue Sun would similarly benefit, but I still think that the power and consistency of BaBW’s early economy would rival or exceed Blue Sun for that style of deck. Admittedly you lose some lategame power and flexibility, so it would then be about weighing up which phase is more important to your deck.

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Weyland was my first corp love, but I agree with most points of the article. BBlum’s Bootcamp Glacier is the only Weyland deck I can see myself playing and winning with at the moment - and that deck was barely changed by the release of O&C. Unfortunately, as much as I love Scorch, I don’t think its worth importing the package into BBlum’s deck. It can win with agendas much more easily, reliably, and without wasting deckslots. The release of IHW scares me way too much to try and play Scorched again at the moment, especially the good old Snare package has lost much of its appeal. Posted Bounty into Scorch is probably still a good idea, but you still need to IAA in a remote, and at that point, why am I not scoring agendas?

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Imo there are definitely some viable Weyland decks.

Blue sun: is very good but it suffers from D4v1D, and needs to find an answer to it, like RP found one against switchblade. But with the existence of clot now, glacier will get a boost and I think we will see more blue sun.

Titan: has always been a crazy corp. It can win games very easily (if you play ToL Titan), but it is too inconsistent.

Argus: Is better than people think. I’ve been playing it lately (17 agenda rush with profiteering and midseason) and was surprised with it’s power. It looks like a Jinteki deck but you have the perfect ice (ice wall, enigma, archer) to gear check runner and you can actually set pressure by scoring the agendas since they make you stronger instead of making you poor.

BABW: has always a strong opening. With 3 influence you can have 12 good transactions (BeanS, Hedge, Restrucure and GLC), but it doesn’t have a decent plan to actually win other then SS,SE,SE. I think you have to import something like 2 caprice to be abble to play a good glacier deck with it.

Gagarin and BWBI: Not good enough YET.

So econ isn’t the problem from weyland, but scoring is. A few better ice can def. help but for a low amount of influence you can import some nice ice like lotus or eli. The biggest problem for me are the agendas. I’m not sold on 5/3’s and you have only atlas as a decent agenda. Then you can choose either NAPD or Hostile. There is just no alternative, i’ve been so desperate to play PSF, Glenn and even helium to find one. They just need a good 3/2 that actually does something when you score it (without overadvancing it) in order to play some nice neveradvancing decks with a threat of FA.

Oh, and Weyland could have been good without: “I’ve had worse”, the shards and wanton. It killed my combo decks :sob:

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If you are really desperate for an answer to D4V1D, Sub-boost shuts it out of most of the relevant ICE (Curtain Wall, Orion, Heimdell 2.0 in HB - it’s also hilarious on Wotan but that’s another story).

I don’t agree that Clot is going to give Glacier a boost. With FA declining to some extent, I think you will see more and more mid-late game runners who just out money corps (clickless economy, doubles/may, supplier etc).

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Agreed. A lot of non-Blue Sun Weyland decks end up putting economy agendas in some of their slots – Hostile at minimum, sometimes also Fracking. But if you can’t rush out one of the economy agendas, making money later in the game becomes a problem if you aren’t Blue Sun.

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Yeah Weyland sucks shit. It’s 90% Faerie’s fault. The econ is unreliable or just straight horrible unless you play BABW, and then it’s only enough for agenda rushing, which hasn’t worked since Faerie came out, and will not work until Faerie is gone. It could have been decent if Guard had cost 3 or 2 to rez, but it’s too much to pay for an ETR.

And yeah, glacier is not getting a boost from Clot. Glacier was at its best when people were gunning for NEH. Slow Runner decks annihilate slow corp decks, and Parasite/Multi access annihilates fast Corp decks. Corp as a whole is in a bad spot, but Weyland has been the worst for a long time, and is showing no signs of becoming better anytime soon. Maybe Corporate Town will be good, but it’ll likely be a card that just makes HB better instead of Weyland. As long as they have the worst Ice, no viable fast advance plan, agendas that dish out unnecessary Bad Pub, and no in faction scoring upgrades, Weyland will be bad.

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The article asks for an agenda to bolster ICE and neglects to mention Firmware Updates.

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I’m not sure that Weyland should get an Ash/Caprice-like solution to remotes. Nor should their Ice be Bioroid-level taxing.

Rushing agendas, flatlining, and program destruction seems to be Weyland’s niche. Maybe another rushy destroyer to chew up Faeries would help. Like a cheaper Roto that trashes itself.

Flatlining has to have some place in Netrunner. If high level runners make it irrelevant in tournies, so be it I suppose.

It has to go one of two ways - either Weyland gets more tools to make it better at the things it is good at (because the current answers are broad enough and/or efficient enough to be near-ubiquitous) or Weyland gets some new ways to play the gameplan that the card pool seems to be tending towards - scoring bigger agendas out of remotes.

The fact that the best Punitive Counterstrike decks are in HB rather than in Weyland should make it clear enough that the meat damage threat is only credible when backed up by the threat of scoring combined with taxation of the runner’s economy. Weyland has to do a lot more work to set up that situation than HB or NBN.

The meat damage side of the double threat, despite being high in influence, is more successfully imported to other factions than run in Weyland becuase Weyland is worse at the core aspects of corp gameplay comparative to the rest.

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Adding advancement counters to ICE is not sufficient bolstering when it only adds a strength. If it adds subroutines it’s good enough, but playing Woodcutter or Salvage in the hope of scoring a Firmware Updates is hardly my idea of a good time!

I love that you just left out GRNDL. I went back to look at it and I forgot how bad it was. 10 influence? What were they thinking.

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Funny, 'cause @Xenasis said in the Reddit thread that it’s one of the best IDs printed yet. UK players knowing something the rest of us don’t? I know that one Donald Bowden has been doing very well with the ID recently. Shame that Netrunners.uk don’t have some of his games streamed, because I’m from across the pond and thus don’t know what his actual decklist is and what he does different…

I don’t think that’s fair. GRNDL’s ability is one of the strongest in terms of raw power, and any more than 10 would simply be OP. The reason it’s not seen more is because there are lots of really bad cards printed for Weyland (HE-3, Salvage, etc), but the ID ability itself is amazing for an early game rush, which has a great synergy with what the faction’s good at.

It’s worth noting that GRNDL took second at the 62 player London SC. I think GRNDL’s better than BS generally, both are viable, top tier decks, but GRNDL doesn’t lose if it can’t get off OAI/Curtain Wall like BS tends to. It’s quite surprising to me that people rate BABW higher than GRNDL, but I guess that’s because of personal experience.

This article I think misses the point in a few places by seeming to talk only about a subset of Weyland strategies. It talks as if Weyland can only ever be a full on glacier faction, and if so, I can agree somewhat with the criticisms, but that’s simply not the case, and if you’re playing GRNDL a lot of these don’t apply, the ID plus an early agenda basically solves money problems, all of the good ICE is neutral/in faction (Ice Wall, Enigma, Chimera, etc), and the Scorch threat is GRNDL’s Ash.

I tend to like TWA stuff, and the reason it wasn’t mentioned is probably down to good GRNDL decks not being too popular most places, which I find bizarre but understandable. I don’t want to sound too critical (as I fear I often do about a lot of things), and the article does bring up a lot of good points about having a horrible ICE selection for glacier outside of Blue Sun, but it felt like an important part of Weyland was left out.

@clercqie There’ll be a video of Donald playing in the Birmingham SC top 4 going up at some point but I don’t know exactly when. It’s not really some special super secret build that’s especially exciting, it’s just basically an up-to-date version of Supermodernism and Donald is an incredibly good Supermodernism pilot.

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Do you mean that even though +1 str or +1 sub = +1 cr to break in a vacuum, str is less good because of icebreaker base strength, datasucker and things like that?

I was thinking more along the lines of the space ice, where you can quickly drop 2 advancements after scoring to make it cost 3. So you’re indirectly boosting ice by making it cheaper to stack them deep.

Also, have you ever seen anyone use Project Wotan as part of their main gameplan?

@endgame - Yeah absolutely. Datasucker, base strength of icebreakers, D4vid, Femme, Cerberus are all reasons why subroutines are preferable where the runner is breaking, in addition to the fact that you get an extra effect if they don’t break.

Project Wotan is good - probably not as good as the Fragments or Pri Req in those strategies that want it, which is why it generally doesn’t see much play (though I have had it used against me to good effect - it can keep the scoring window open for the next agenda very effectively).

In terms of space ice, my point is this - if you’re relying on things like Firmware Updates to be able to rez your ice, you’re likely to have a hard time protecting the Firmware Updates or centrals in the early game. You could say ‘but you just play a mix of small ice and constellation ice’, but I don’t think that’s consistent enough from a deck design standpoint where a group of your ice are now pretty much completely unable to defend centrals early and are very slow to come online in remotes. You’re trading off consistency for the potential to rez some medium sized ice in the mid game at a slight discount, but the space ice isn’t even impactful enough to reward you for that effort in my experience.

@Xenasis The bad cards printed for Weyland is one of my big beefs as identified in the article. I haven’t had the best experiences with GRNDL, but can see how the metagame at the moment is well positioned to reward it as a strategy. The earlier corps can get online at the moment the more likely they are to win, and GRNDL certainly gets online very early! I could have mentioned it when I spoke about Argus aggressive strategies, because those are probably the two ways the faction can go fast.

Thanks for the feedback - I was really trying to address that weakness in midrange deckbuilding where the cards just aren’t efficient enough to allow you to win against a runner with a moderately efficient economy and a plan of attack that targets more than one central.