[Article] What's Wrong with Weyland?

First of all, I agree on pretty much every count about how supermodernism is on its way out (except I’ll add that archer also sucks). Weyland’s power level, even for non-scorch decks, has always been buoyed up by the scorch threat, and runners are growing more and more ways to simply not care about it. It’s sad when the best scorched earth deck in the meta is out of faction entirely (NEH butchershop).

However, blue sun is a glacier identity. I think for a long time people have not realized this, instead focusing on the fact that, in terms of the game’s flavor, weyland is all about winning in a totally over-the-top way (trashing the runner’s rig or catching them in a flatline with their pants down). In terms of the game’s strategy I call this “win-more”. :stuck_out_tongue:

The ID ability gives so much flexibility in terms of reacting to what the runner is doing, which on paper seems like it might be about sudden influxes of credits for SEA source, but it’s really about finding really crazy scoring windows out of seemingly nowhere. One moment the runner has spent $10 on the remote to trash adonis or take NAPD, two turns later the corp is up 3 points, has a free tollbooth, and the runner needs 4 agenda scores to win. This article complains about the lack of in-faction aggressive secretary effects, but NAPD contract is the best advanceable trap in the game.

The key is that this playstyle is possible without spending an arm and a leg on deck slots (which supermodernism needs to do), giving blue sun the luxury of an extremely consistent deck composition: 19 ice and 7 recursion/tutor effects. There may not be any “free wins” like with astroscript or with scorch, but there are no bad matchups.

I’ll also agree that the in-faction ice suite is terrible. Wormhole was a small breath of fresh air here, but the faction has been reeling ever since the loss of Hadrian’s wall (to Lady, of course), which had been a godsend for crim matchups. Most of all I’d really love to see an early-game 4 strength sentry that isn’t a destroyer or AP.

Finally, on one particular comment:

Ice Wall is an excellent aggressive piece of ICE, but Weyland decks, with the exception of Argus, cannot be aggressive. They do not have the economy to defend against increasingly diverse threats to centrals whilst scoring out multiple agendas early, behind small ICE.

Both here and in the podcasts, I think you guys at TWA are focused overly much on classifying deck archetypes into the same buckets you’d use for magic the gathering, and in this case it’s stopping you from seeing why blue sun is good.

Honestly, chess is a closer game to netrunner than magic is. You start the game with 49 pieces, and you are trying to deploy them to build your board position at a faster rate than your opponent. You build tempo by making multiple threats at the same time that they have to lose resources defending against. It’s not about being an aggressive deck, but about evaluating the board state and deciding whether you need to play an aggressive role or a controlling one. Blue sun’s ability gives it so much flexibility and reactivity that it can switch between roles faster and better than any other deck in the game.

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I rate them both as unplayable trash bin identities.

I think this is pretty spot-on. Some decks are certainly better or worse than others at playing at certain strategies, but there has never been a super successful deck that couldn’t speed up or slow down to adapt to the game state. Weyland rush decks have always suffered from this sort of impossible-to-overcome late game weakness. If you don’t win or get close to it very quickly, you lose. Often, to get to that point, you need to do things like shove an agenda out there and just hope they don’t have a corroder or a stimhack or whatever they need to get in. This is never going to be a valid game plan for strong players in my book. Being able to do this sort of thing is important, but having a deck whose game plan hinges on it is just opening yourself up to all kinds of RNG failure, and if you’re good, you shouldn’t ever put yourself in that position.

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Agree with pretty much everything you both said @mediohxcore and @bblum. Blue Sun is best positioned at the moment and as I noted, would benefit from seeing one of the holes plugged (better in faction 4-6 cost sentry is a prefect example).

A lot of people have criticised what I say in the article from the point of view that you CAN use certain strategies (BWBI, super modernism, punitive, GRNL) and win games. The whole point I was trying to make was about lack of consistency and relative power, which I think you summed up well Dan.

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This is true of more than just GRNDL – it’s true of BaBW and Titan as well, at minimum. The problem is “plus an early agenda,” and it’s a huge problem. I’ve got a Titan rush deck I’m testing out at the moment, and if I manage to rush out an early agenda, it’s hard to lose… but if I can’t, it’s hard to win, because it’s so easy for a modern runner to out-money me.

Though an ID that starts with 10 credits is significantly better at getting out an agenda early on than one that starts with 5.

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It’s also crazy hard to rush out early agendas because of Parasite, SMC, Inside Job, having money to rez two ice and advance without gettin ruined on centrals… Rush hasn’t been a viable strategy for a long, long time, and likely never will be. Weyland having that as their “thing” has always held them back.

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im really liking argus with midseason, scorch, punitive, power shutdown, traffic accident and a bunch of cheap ETR ice. the multiple angles of attack are really nice and if there was ever an agenda to rush its high risk investment. i used to play supermodernism BABW quite a bit and it didnt have a lot outs to a runner who suckled opus and dug for plascrete. now if i think thats what they are going to do i go all in trying to score HRI. if they get it sometimes it means they are running before they want and die to punitive and if they dont i encourage them to suckle opus all they want.

best tech card the runner never sees coming lol…big brother. i’ve big brother’d off triple advanced posted bounty to traffic -> scorch kill on more than one occasion.

argus is poorer than the other ids but the nature of its ability means the runner has to be careful and slow down which ive found perfect for midseason. i used to run midseason in BABW and the runner would be on match point so quickly sometimes there was never a midseason window.

its risky style of play for sure but i’ve found it works pretty well if your runner meta is less traditional andy and pre paid kate and more drip andy and slower anarch stuff.

Uhh… You can play really anything you want a rack up wins in a meta like that. In metas filled with the best decks, you’re not getting off the ground with green cards corpside.

id say my meta has realized that the only thing you can "win"in a netrunner tournament at this point is internet notoriety.

That doesn’t make Weyland good at winning internet notoriety.

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the perception/reality or whatever that weyland is subpar makes it the best if your goal is notoriety. if I show up to whatever tournament and win with NEH/Andy im just another try hard who played decks everyone knows are good. if i show with Argus and the Professor im the guy who proved everyone wrong.

While that’s true if you win, generally what happens more often is that you’re the guy who I’m glad brought Argus and Prof, as it allows me easier wins. I’m not saying either are terrible, it’s just that generally other options are usually better in terms of consistency.

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The only thing you prove if you win with less popular, less strong decks is that you got lucky, your opponents were bad, or everyone in your meta brings special snowflake decks so they can get bonus internet noteriety.

Stop tryharding and play whatever you enjoy. Thats the only thing that counts for any bonus points in my book.

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supermodernism is probably not quite good enough, but it’s in my opinion really fun to play, and play against. I think it’s probably too easy to play around. So long as the runner doesn’t panic, he or she should win. But the games are often tense and close.

I’m not sure what it needs to be competitive or if it just needs someone like Hinkes to take it to the top of a medium sized tournament for a time in the sun. It might simply be not quite good enough and too well known. It will be better if runner decks slow down, because they don’t have to race NEH to first astro.

On Archer is bad, really? I know it costs a load, but the only good answer is faerie and shutdown. If it’s in your deck, the runner has to play around it. I don’t know…

Weyland Rush needs something. I don’t know what. I hope it gets it!

Do you think ffg tried Subliminal Messaging as a Transaction? Seems filthy, but possibly easy enough to play around. I think W could do with 1 more standard transaction, maybe as simple as a pay 3 gain 7 and BABW becomes worth a close look again.

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  • Parasite
  • D4V1D + e3
  • Knight + e3
  • Atman@6
  • Sharpshooter
  • Femme Bypass
  • Switchblade
  • Inside Job
  • Escher to someplace irrelevant
  • (not letting them actually have an agenda to sacrifice)

(only listing the methods I’ve personally used in the last 2 months)

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On Archer is bad, really? I know it costs a load, but the only good
answer is faerie and shutdown. If it’s in your deck, the runner has to
play around it. I don’t know…

(Sorry if you weren’t addressing this to me) I rate Archer as a piece of ICE - I think it is the best ICE in the faction by a long way. The problems are 1) turning it on with Hostile and what the associated bad pub does for a taxing plan, and 2) getting people with it given that runner answers are ubiquitous, efficient, recurrable and spread across all factions. When you combine those two, you get a piece of ICE that is powerful, but likely to be broken on first encounter and likely gives the runner resources to break it in future encounters. With another ETR Sentry in faction at str 4+, Archer would become miles better.

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They have another ETR Sentry in faction at Str 4+ (Changeling)

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Yeah Changeling is an option. Despite the setup and rez costs (you end up paying almost as much as for a Tollbooth to rez it with a counter without using Firmware Updates), something like Changeling helps against some of the one-shot sentry answers. Unfortunately it doesn’t have teeth of any kind though, so it only really does half the job, and at a very steep price.

I’ve played changeling on and off, and outside of its role as a calimsha-kate-with-no-atman hoser, it’s just too expensive for what it does, and it’s really bad to try to bounce around and reposition.

Caduceus is weyland’s best ice IMO. I’ll put it on par with Eli at this point considering the presence of lady and knifed.

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Caduceus is by far Weyland’s best ICE in a vacuum, but in Blue Sun, Hive is positively insane. If any faction could get a refund on it once it became useless/wall of static, it would be played in virtually everything.

Archer is okay but runs into the issue of being next to useless against Criminal. It’s hard to justify room for an ICE that requires you play a mediocre agenda if it’s not even going to be worth playing some of the time.

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