[Article] What's Wrong with Weyland?

Netrunner General
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Yeah hive is probably going to edge out cadu in the post-clot world. But early game anti-facecheck ice is also key for BS, and 0-link runners (leela and max) have never been so common as right now.

Archer is also pretty rubbish against shaper if you ask me. It’s only taxing in any sense against anarchs. Kate is up to her ears in options for how to deal with it on the face check, and since she’s a “quality” runner (choosing TME over RDI) there’s no pressure for her to find ways to repeatedly pass it, so it’s not even good at taxing the recursion.

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42

So @bblum, can I ask you what you like to import? I’ve taken BS to the last 4 SC and have had lots of success playing a glacier build with the off chance of Sea-scorch-scorch. I started this game as a glacier player but when I picked up BS, I always had the mindset of “Weyland is a kill faction.”

I have Janus in there right now with the scorch combo but I want to know what you like to throw in. My immediate thoughts are Ash, tollbooth, lotus field. Among my group, I think BS is best for the meta (at least where we play)

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@bblum’s deck is a vegan glacier, dedicated to making mad cash, taxing the runner, and scoring out agendas. Here’s his current build as of Thursday.

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44

Archer is better out of faction. A surprise Archer is still pretty game defining.

Archer (in Weyland) suggests you’re taking bad pub, which means trying to tax the runner is really hard.

I genuinely think Wormhole helps as a blowout ICE that criminal and to a lesser extent Shaper and Anarch struggle with.

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For one influence you can have Security Subcontract which gets you 4 credits back :wink:

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46

I wonder how much weyland would be better with an operation tutor as efficient as executive boot camp is for assets?

  • Allows you to spend less influence on your tagging operations
  • Get Restructure early (especially for GRNDL) and Scorched late
  • Copies 4-6 of OAI for Blue Sun
  • Additional copies of Titan’s FA splashes
  • Copies 4-6 of Housekeeping to make taxation builds better?
  • One-of Snatch and Grabs and power shutdown for when you need them.
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You get most of that with Project Atlas.

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That’s why I specified ‘as efficient as executive boot camp’ :smile: .

Whilst Atlas is awesome it is not in any way efficient to go “need card” -> “get card” with an Atlas in hand. Scoring atlas is the goal rather than the process.

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Sorry to call you out again ( :stuck_out_tongue: ), but this is bollocks, at least in a post-O&C world.

In Titan specifically, Firmware Upgrades is a much better Archer enabler than a Hostile Takeover is. Sure, it means you probably don’t want to run three Archers and/or rely on them to actually “score your real agendas”, but two Archers with three Upgrades is both totally fine and supremely functional.

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I’m more than happy to be called out. Especially when it’s constructive calling out.

I haven’t tried Titan yet. Maybe that’ll be my next attempt at making Weyland go fast.

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51

I’ve been thinking a bit more about the Archer business - here’s an attempt to put into words what my experiences amount to:

Three Archers and three Hostiles is a package that to me says “I want to get an Archer going ASAP”. This may or may not have been a good idea for Weyland in the past, but with the way the meta is right now, I think it’s definitely a mistake to aim to rez Archer early (especially at the cost of taking BP).

A rezzed Archer is a significant investment, and so ideally you don’t want to rez it until you can protect it properly, by having infrastructure already in place: Sucker tokens being reasonably expensive to acquire, some Faeries already burned up, maybe a Crisium Grid on HQ. This, naturally, takes time and resources - that to me says “mid to late game”. For that, we obviously don’t need three copies of Archer, and if we presumably have some other one-pointer that already did its work at that point which we wouldn’t mind feeding to the damn thing, there’s no need for the bad pub.

Now that I think about it, I tend to view Archer as the complement to Hive, in a way. Hive is something I want to score my first agenda behind, and it gradually becomes less of a problem for the runner. Archer, on the other hand, is something I want to score the last agenda behind, once I’m ready to rez it and keep it relevant until the game ends - whether that means Crisium Grid to stop Shutdowns, other ICE to stop Cutlery (this is where the need for another ETR sentry comes in - shame that Guard sucks), an Ash in the server to make the runner break Archer multiple times, or whatever else.

Hostile into Archer as an early play makes sense to me only if you’re unable to score an agenda without a rezzed Archer, and so you need to FA the one that’s required for the rez. Now, mind you, that might still be a legit play, for instance if you want to score a game-changing three-pointer behind it… just don’t expect the rez to last you the whole game. So then, the question becomes whether the agenda you’re rushing behind the Archer is worth playing the whole game with one bad pub. It might make sense, it might not.

Two Archers with an appropriately adjusted ICE suite is working fine for me, so far.

tl;dr Seems to me that playing two Archers and some one-pointers with “when scored” utility and without the BP downside is the way to go.

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52

What are you using the Firmware Updates for? Mark Yale, Space Ice, Changeling?

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Mostly Mark, with a side dish of making Shadow un-Mimicable and Orion cheaper. Occasionally, pumping Fire Wall out of Morning Star range has also come up :stuck_out_tongue:

Can’t stand Changeling, that thing needed a second sub.

edit: also, not just Upgrades - another good enabler is Chronos Project.

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54

I need to do some actual analysis, rather than go on gut feeling. But all Weyland ICE that can be advanced feels like it’s costed correctly if it had 1 advancement for free. (Satellite Grids for everybody). The Morph ICE is all 1-2 credits too expensive. Lycan at 4 is totally playable, Changeling at 3-4 is good (it would also be good if it started as a Sentry), Wendigo has positional ICE problems, but is probably just about good enough at 2 and wouldn’t be OP at 1. If the space ICE started at 7 they’d be good. This is probably the problem with Weyland.

Supermodernism style decks probably need a biotic labour/ToL to finish the deal. That kind of means GRNDL is out. Otherwise you get to 4 or 5 and the runner has a mountain of BP (more than 1 is a mountain in most cases) and scoring the last agenda becomes near impossible. Maybe I should just stop trying and be sad that sort of deck doesn’t work at the sharp end of tournaments.

@PeekaySK The elephant in the room, of course, is that you typically don’t want many 3/1 agendas in your deck. They aren’t very good. What’s your agenda suite? Have you got a recent Weyland decklist I can ‘borrow’ from?

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Changeling is an expensive Bastion, which you can pay another credit to make it Mimic proof. That’s really good against a lot of decks.

This is probably a pretty good analysis. I’ve been looking a lot at Shipment from Kaguya, given we’re reaching critical mass of advanceable ice. Using them to advance agendas and space ice at the same time is a pretty powerful play (economically at least another Hedge Fund, and huge tempo). I tried sticking them in BABW, but I just ended up with the usual Weyland (particularly BABW) behavior: I became incredibly rich and then lost.

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Love your analysis @MasterAir. All very good points well made.

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Sure!

Still very much a work in progress, but here’s a Titan I’ve been mostly fond of, so far - I can’t decide on the agenda suite, this is the 10-agenda version. The 11-agenda one has a Chronos Project and a Posted Bounty in place of the Geo Fracking and the Wendigo.

The thing I like least is how all my small Sentries become irrelevant vs. Link - it totally sucks, but I haven’t found a good solution yet.

Psycho Investment v1.2

Titan Transnational: Investing In Your Future (Order and Chaos)

Agenda (10)

Asset (5)

Upgrade (2)

Operation (14)

Barrier (6)

Code Gate (4)

Sentry (7)

Multi (1)

  • 1x Orion (Order and Chaos)

17 influence spent (max 17)
20 agenda points (between 20 and 21)
49 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Order and Chaos

Deck built on NetrunnerDB.

edit:

You just literally cited the reasons why I can’t stand it:

  • It’s an expensive Bastion - Bastion is already too expensive for what it does in quite a few matchups
  • You can Mimic-proof it, but only vs. decks that forget that Ichi 1.0 exists.
    • …as a corrolary, it’s wide-open to one of the best Lotus Field solutions out there

So, meh.

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Heh, you’re running the good agendas in that. I don’t like Midseasons decks in general, but I think you’re onto something good with these.

High Risk Investment - one of the best, if not the best, Weyland 3-pointer. I’ve been playing it a lot in Blue Sun, and it’s really strong. Two counters in Titan seems phenomenal. I think probably every Weyland deck needs 3x these cards. I’m moving to the opinion these are better than Atlas (there, I said it).

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59

My snap judgements are that quandary should be enigma or datapike because parasite should at least need a few sucker tokens to be a decoder. That said, those 2-3 credits are a big deal.

I like Wormhole. Despite what I said previously, it’s still a PITA for everything (except D4v1d) to break and is often Tollbooth good, because it’s a must break when one spiky ICE is rezzed. I’m going to rework this list without playing it, and then realise your decisions make sense. Thanks for the inspiration!

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60

Those Quandaries used to be two Enigmas and a Wormhole, actually. Back then, the two Beanstalks and the two Restructures were three Melanges and an Interns. The deck was too slow/money-starved, so I swapped the econ around a little. It felt borderline OK, but I wanted to make it all flow a little faster, so I downgraded to Quandaries. Ideally, I’d like to keep the Enigmas, but then I’d like to find at least two more slots for econ… and at this stage, the only ones I can reasonably see freeing are the Crisium Grids - but those are way too useful when you’re packing Archer and are trying to stop the runner from burst-winning, like you need to with a Midseasons build.

In my experience, Wormhole isn’t worth it without a good sub to copy. Either you’re paying 9 credits for a single ETR (waaat) that can get turned off by all your cheap ETRs dying (waaat), or you’re sinking a shitload of time (and a smaller shitload of money) into making it 0 to rez. Here, the only sources of good subs would be Archer and Orion, and I don’t want to be too married to the necessity of having either rezzed. In the games where you can’t have an Archer and/or an Orion, about the last thing you need is another piece that depends on them to make sense.

Builder makes Wormhole significantly better, and an earlier version of this deck ran an ICE suite with Builders (if you do that, the Hives probably become Fire Walls, and one of the Caducei possibly becomes a Nebula), but… that shit is SLOOOW and very counter to the Midseasons package in my opinion.

Here, I want to rush early points, then keep rushing until one rush fails - then Midseason and use Psycho to close out with a three-pointer. With this general plan, both Hive and Quandary seem good - they let me score early and potentially stop a leakage of points that could turn off the Midseason plan.

To take a page out of @spags’ playbook, I’ll summarize my feelings about Wormhole with a picture:

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