From the Genesis cycle, please welcome Salvage! It’s an impressive feat for such an old card to make it this far since you would expect the designers to be more conservative as time goes on to avoid power creep, perhaps? Salvage had an easy win over Net Police which was struggling in the wake of the NBN big box making it look more useful than normal. Next it faced newcomer Test Ground which won by the biggest margin in round 1 but then lost by the biggest margin in round 2. The third round was very exciting with a last minute upset over the highly controversial Toshiyuki Sakai with only 2 votes making the difference. Can Salvage go all the way?
From the Spin cycle, please welcome Record Reconstructor! RR arguably has an even more unique effect than Salvage which goes to show that uniqueness is not a trait that will hold you back in this competition. It is also somewhat of a port from the original Richard Garfield-created Netrunner where it was once again considered to be one of the most useless cards in the game. It started this competition with an easy win over Neotokyo Grid despite some people having pegged that card to be one of the top seeds. It took out Disrupter in the second round which was suffering from NBN big box shock. It was the only runner card to make it to round 3 where it defeated what we might now consider to be the second most useless ICE in the game, Zed 1.0, by 5 votes. Can this runner card reign supreme?
I think that Record Reconstructor’s interaction with the Executive cycle (Director Haas, Chairman Hiro etc) is far more useful than anything you could do with Salvage. This should be a pretty one sided round.
If you could advance Salvage while face down, I can think of one scenario where it would be highly effective: Your opponent is playing Cy-Cy and no Parasite; they have no reason to suspect that a card advanced more than 3 times is a code gate because Wormhole is the only playable one, so they don’t move their Cy-Cy before running on your new server; and you have the new current called Surveillance Sweep active, so the runner is going to get tagged by every single subroutine. It’s like a Midseason Replacements that you have to spend clicks advancing and get the runner to run before you can use it! But this doesn’t work since Salvage can only be advanced while rezzed.
Record Reconstructor is a card that I thought about putting in some Shaper decks to get around a resurgence of Shocks and Shi Kyus at one point. That card would let me load up on Datasuckers pain free. I ultimately never came close to using it, but I had at least THOUGHT to put it in my deck for like a split second.
The other is just a terrible card that I have never thought to ever put in my deck.
Pretty easy decision, imo.
Edit: Also, on the way back from Tulsa, @pacer, @dodgepong, and I debated the worst card for each faction I think. We had some pretty lively debates. It turns out debating the worst card is so much harder since you have no reference point for what it can even do since you’ve rarely if ever seen the card in play.
Loved this whole thing! One piece of feedback if we ever do follow-up rounds or similar; every post should have links backwards and forwards! It ended up feeling very disjointed as conversations from one round would keep it at the top while a later round would fall away. for example I think I accidentally voted twice in round one, then didn’t see round two at all, the saw round three after it had closed.
Do something like suicide chess, where you build a deck and hand it to your opponent at the start of the game. Correlate the placement of decks with the cards that are in them and get an idea of what cards usually make a deck worse.
There might be a way to include all rounds in a single thread for future contests of this type. However, polls can’t be added or modified from a post unless you’re an admin.
Well, salvage is the worst card, it’s official. I thought zed was bad, but I’ve hit with zed before. Salvage is impossible to be meaningful, especially with midseasons
Fuck you nerds. (oooooh bahram, dolin’ out the harshness, j/k i love you guys) Time to prove you guys wrong and find the use for these titan cards of the netrunner world.