I personally love Excalibur in a deck with some combination of Ash, Caprice, and/or Nisei, as many runner decks do not have a way to break it, so you can get free scoring windows out of it.
Iām pretty sure Viper is positively bad in a list running all of Ashigaru, Lotus Field and Merlin - Do you really want to have half your ICE at 4 STR? It even costs influence, and is not actually a hard ETR. Atman at 4 is already an excellent play in like 90% of cases, youāre just adding value to it. A Wraparound would be a much better use of the Inf, I feel.
In Soviet Russia, Excalibur makes fun of you!
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Excalibur on the scoring remote with either caprice or a scored nisei mk2 is just nasty. Itās downright the best late game remote ice against crim in RP.
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Guys. Morningstar is bonkers when you have that personal touch and ice carver. Curtain wall is nothing!
As much as a STR 4 Atman is not the end of the world for Ashigaru, and Merlin still taxes it hopefully for 3 credits, you are right. Iāll at least change out the Viper, maybe do more tweaks.
So, back to MS - do yāall mostly run 1 corroder and 1 MS, or go all in and do 2 MS?
Iām now putting Ashigaru in my RP deck, and its been quite good, especially in the tollbooth slot. My style tends to hold cards in HQ anyway.
Keys are to not put it on centrals unless its mid-late, not to rez it early game (run 2), maybe not rez at all vs anarchs, unless you can bako over it, and avoid Wanton Destruction if itās on the remote.
I actually quite like it over WoT.
I always did 1 and 1. Sometimes itās easier to just slap a Corroder on the table and go than wait for a MS to come up and cheat it into play. Also sometimes you play again Blue Sun and donāt have a critical mass of Datasuckers yet. I donāt think Iād ever go all-in on MS for the same reason going all-in on Yog as a decoder isnāt a good plan anymore either.
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Has anyone tried Ashigaru vs Lady? How does it hold up?
Iāve been running Ashigaru in my latest J:RP build; itās been great midrange-to-late tax on centrals. I loved watching them ponder the 2-3 Lady tokens it would take to break, and the runners seemed to hate it.
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Ashigaru is in my RP deck for lady hate and i can attest to it working. I had a game on Octgn last night each run against my scoring remote took 3 lady tokens. Its more than ok as a tax against most fracters bar MS, as long as you are keeping the handsize up, which may or may not be a good thing depending on the state your game is in.
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Drop a Caprice in this and theyāll fall in loveā¦
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Agree 100%. Standard scoring remote in many games is either ashigaru or lotus field behind excalibur, in front of caprice. With 1x nisei scored the difficulty of entry spikes dramatically.
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Smacks lady. I had a game where the runner broke one ashigaru over my scoring remote, then just dropped his shit when I rezzed the second one. They just donāt run it on centrals.
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Ashigaru is one of my favourite pieces of ICE, itās really taxing and thereās simply no easy way to get past it. Femme doesnāt work, it overtaxes Lady and at four strenght itās tough enough that it wonāt die to Parasite.
Its drawback is that there are not that many decks where it shines. Itās expensive to play and doesnāt fullfill central duty in Jinteki RP because they can just bounce off it harmlessly, making it inferior to Wall of Thorns. But itās great and Iām extremely happy to play it in Genomics.
I particularly like that itās a one-card defense for any server. You just drop it and that central gets sealed out. And if you put a Caprice behind it, you donāt need anything else to have a powerful remote.
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Iām a big ashigaru proponent as well, but there are a couple of holes here. One, Morningstar makes this binary ice, and its getting easier and easier to play with d4v1d and more in-faction money for anarchs. For this reason, especially against anarchs, I like to try to get an idea of what fracters theyāre running before I go ahead and rez this guy.
Two, 4 strength isnāt enough to make this parasite-safe. for killing a 9-credit rez, 4 strength is easy as pie for most dedicated ICE destruction decks, and not too long at all even for toolkit shapers.(esp compared to commonly parasited 4 str ICE like Eli).
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I have seen Morningstar only once in actual play and I was the one playing it. If it ever gets popular, sure, Ashigaru will stop being a good card but so will Eli 1.0, Wall of Thorns and every other barrier not called Curtain Wall or with a rez cost under two.
I also donāt think strenght four is particularly weak to Parasite. I mean, if it is considered weak, what isnāt? Less than 16% of the entire card pool has a strenght over four and half of that 16% is stuff like Checkpoint, Cell Portal and Snoop. Itās a bit like the ādies to removalā argument at that point, cāmon 
I mean, yeah, it would rock if Ashigaru had strenght 10 and slapped your opponentās buttchecks with net damage but I think itās pretty damn good already hahaha
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Dies to Doom Blade.
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Itās not that it dies immediately to Parasite or something, itās that itās not very resistant to Parasite and youāre paying 9 for it. Assuming Parasite was the only Icebreaker in the game, youāre paying 9 for something thatās broken as easily as something that costs 3 or 4 (Eli/Bastion). You can really get punished for rezzing it against a savvy runner with a few Datasucker counters. With Tollbooth, at least they have to pay the three.
I tend not to like the ādies to Parasiteā argument for most things, but one of the weaknesses of Ashigaru is that the low strength for high cost does make it very easily punished by Parasite. Thatās not necessarily a bad thing enough thing to make you not want to play it: the entire reason you play it is because it has multiple subs, but itās definitely not a null factor.
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Every time I see the card art, all i can see is a lady getting hit with the grip of a sword someone threw at her, and somehow it implies being hit with a flying swordās butt kills anything.