Heh, been a long time since I’ve heard “dies to doomblade”
Point well taken; and I didn’t at all mean to argue that the card is bad because of these counters.
just saying it’s not totally accurate to say [quote]
there’s simply no easy way to get past it.
[/quote] when there is an easy way to get past it.
The whole thing hinges on the 9 rez cost - when you’re talking about eli, an 8 cost breaker or 4 datasuckers+parasite are pretty darn expensive just to trash 3 credits worth of ICE; that’s why Eli is considered so strong: the really good counters to him cost way more than he does! Even though the costs are the same to the runner to use these tools against ashigaru, the cost to the corp to force the runner into these solutions is three times higher.
That said, this ICE is a brick wall on first rez, and nestled deep in a remote, this ICE can be a big surprise out of a faction with very few truly beefy ETR ICE.
So now that you can have a plus 10 handsize in any Corp due to research station and more importantly, cybernetics court, does this make ashigaru seem more desirable?
Well, it’s good against Lady, right? They can still run through it with the infamous Atman 4 though, or parasite and wait 4 turns. But yeah this gives them a good reason to pay 5 to trash your cybernetics court. Not sure if that works out as a net win for you or not. Plus Court costs a million influence.
I would have thought that it would only really make a difference to a Runner deck without any ICE trashing/derez effects. An Ashigaru is going to have a big target painted on his head for top trash priority with 5 subroutines. Will 10 make a difference?
It seems that it’s only in the case where the Runner absolutely has no choice but to ‘honestly’ break the subroutines that it would start to make a difference. How many Runner decks is that?
I agree. I also think that Cybernetics Courts 5 influence per copy means you would only see it out of HB and even then, the three influence bite of Ashigaru probably would only be worth it out of MAYBE a weird CE deck, but that would eat up a ton of influence.
As an aside, it would be really nice to see a card that did something like this:
“Self-Preservation Countermeasures
Neutral
Operation: Security
Cost 0
Install Self-Preservation Countermeasures on an installed piece of ICE as a hosted condition counter with the text ‘When host ICE would be trashed, prevent host ICE being trashed, derez it and trash all items hosted on it.’”
That way you could at least attempt to deckbuild with some of the cool ICE without the immediate thought of: “It’ll be trashed as soon as it’s rezzed”, which is a bit sad.
You can knife it, you can shut it down, you can parasite it. I will make the 15 sub double patched ashigaru + ash CI glacier deck. All will bow to my great intellect!
