What you are really saying here is that a totally different deck might be good for totally different reasons.
I think what Calimsha meant was that you should try to play other people’s decks, card-for-card, while suppressing the urge to insert your own deckbuilding until you get a feel for how the original deck works. Not that you shouldn’t try to do your own stuff, just that getting good at the game with existing decks will in turn make you a better deckbuilder.
(And no, I don’t think shi kyu makes sense here, least of all with a heterogeneous agenda suite.)
Have we played or met before? Do you play at Phantom or MNGG?
Come on out to MNGG on may 10th for a GNK, if you can make it.
No we haven’t met, the 10th I have to work possible I can switch with someone but kind of tough on a Sunday. Small chance I can make it though. I was just clearing the air because I heard through the the grape vine my post sounded like I beat you ( highly unlikely)
Played at a small tournament today, two observations: Meru Mati is functionally identical to Ice Wall, IMO. I didn’t focus on putting it on HQ at all, because there were usually better options. It’s a toss up between the two.
And the 5/3 => a second Corporate War and a Hostile Takeover was fantastic.
Yep, it’s just casual play but it is every week. 5pm. I’m inconsistent about going myself (stimhack league games are higher quality ) but I’ll try to make it this time.
Is Susan good enough for Bootcamp Glacier? It could be pretty good anti-Prepaid Kate tech. Hefty splash but that ICE is very good when rezzed. The only runner it’s completely dead to is Stealth Andy, and BS wins that MU anyway.
Thanks for the write up. This is by far the strongest Weyland archetype out there right now, and for once in the life of the game, it’s not all about scorch!
Really loved your insights on how and when to look for which scores, definitely going to be trying out a lot of these ideas.
Thing is, most kate decks are packing either 1 femme or 1 atman now, so it’s not even an auto-win button, but it cripples your ice suite to include it for other matchups.
Bit of a tangent, but… even though this deck is strong enough already, I still have a major gripe with Weyland’s card pool, and it’s that the in-faction ice suite is so fragile that there’s no room for creativity in terms of influence. RP can play whatever combination grails or booths or ashes or ELPs it feels like; HB can put a full playset of caprice if it wants. This deck loses so much if it’s not playing 2 booths, 2 lotuses, and 2 ashes. I even have trouble justifying a single pip of influence just to test out a DBS.
If you want to annoy your shaper friends, a changeling can force the atman install just as well (and nobo’s idea of patch can be worth 2 scavenges and 10 credits thereafter… actually, now we’re talking…).
God, I hate playing changeling, but I’ve slotted at least on copy in my last 3 or 4 weyland decks because it’s just so damn annoying to so many runners.
Yeah I can make it tomorrow night. It would be cool to play, I think BS is probably the toughest match up for my deck Ive been running, and I think it’s still to be determined if my deck is a gimmick deck or not, but it has been building up some wins. When I first saw boot camp played I couldn’t help but think it’s a favorable match up for my deck a least a 50/50 shot , I could be way off base though I haven’t been playing long and like a noob probably think it’s better then it really is.
Yeah this makes sense. If it was a straight swap for a Tollbooth or something it’d make a little more sense, but having to cut a Booth and a Lotus hurts a lot. As you’ve said, there’s very little wiggle room and no adequate replacement. If it was neutral it’d be a straight swap for Wormhole, but we’re not so lucky.
Yeah, this is an issue that’ll be solved with time. Other than the bad cards that are dealt to all factions (Salvage is bad, but nothing out of the ordinary when you look at Power Tap/Net Police), this is partially because the good cards are split between two archetypes, the first being GRNDL and its Supermodernism, and the second being the recently emergent Blue Sun glacier decks. The tempos are completely different.
Currently, it has two not-perfectly-defined viable deck archetypes, which is a different world to having a hyper-flexible ETF or a very malleable RP but no other truly tier one decks in faction. Negotiator and Meru Mati are very strong cards and a nice step in the right direction, but yeah, this problem stems from Weyland having two deck types, which could even be considered a strength to some people.
In my opinion (which may well be wrong), any deck that used to have Caduceus. Some people have reservations about Negotiator, but Caduceus is a worse when Kate (with her one-link) is so strong. Neither are great and just two credits to Mimic when it’s out, but Negotiator’s quite a bit better before the Mimic’s out.
If nothing else, it means that you can play up to 6 Caduceus as opposed to 3. Negotiator and Errand Boy are recent additions to the otherwise Caduceus-exclusive set of playable-Weyland-sentries-that-aren’t-Archer. Three options are better than one, right?
That’s kind of what I thought. Errand boy is really good except for the parasite food problem.
I like caduceus because it’s such a gut wrenching facecheck turn 1, Even if you’re Kate. Negotiator is really underwhelming if there are no programs in the board. Almost unrezable. I agree it’s playable, I don’t think it’s quite good.
Any thoughts on running High Risk investment rather than PriReq? It seems like HRI should be able to get you more creds than PriReq, and doesn’t require a curtain wall score, so should help you win the Ash game for the last agenda.
Also, I’m not sure I agree on running caduceus as your only sentry. Pre-paid Kate and Mimic strategies are very prevalent, and as other people have mentioned, it becomes a gearcheck at that point rather than something genuinely taxing. I think a couple of changelings do good work against Pre-Paid, suckerless Kate.
I also am not 100% sold on hive. It’s great and very taxing early game, but when you’re a deck trying to score out, those subs start dissapearing very quickly, and it does nothing to punish the runner on facecheck - most runners would just bounce off it, build up money, and then wait until they have to run into your remote to steal an agenda.
I feel like Weyland is not just a victim of ‘not enough cards’. The box came out, and it did barely anything to improve Weyland at all; certainly less than the release of Blue Sun. The problem with Weyland is that two of the ‘themes’ of the faction, Bad Publicity and advancable ICE, are everywhere but also very underpowered.
BP is actually just terrible to take. If there were a way to reliably remove the runner’s breakers for money, it would be one thing, but it’s just impossible to keep runners out consistently going into the end game, no matter how fast you manage to get there. Taking BP means you want to adopt this strategy that’s pretty much totally opposed to the standard, proven way of winning as Corp: taxing the runner.
Advancable ICE has different problems, but in a similar way, it’s full of all these just-ok cards with not enough reason to put all of them together and no good way to win. So you got your ICE real big. Great job, now what? The agenda suite doesn’t support TOL FA very well, and if you were playing BWBI, you’re giving up Blue Sun. Crap like Space Camp is just super underpowered, and the low starting strength of cards like Ice Wall and Shadow make you not ever want to advance them in the first place.
This all leaves Weyland spread really thin. It’s not like there aren’t Weyland cards, it’s just that they don’t work well together. It’s like there’s 4 separate strategies going on with hardly any overlap, making it feel like there’s no playable cards whenever you build a Weyland deck. Blue Sun makes Hive, OAI, and Curtain good, but doesn’t work at all with advancing your ICE. Argus works with DRT but has no good economy. BWBI is generally too underpowered to justify itself, and the natural Glacier deck attempt falls flat because of no good protection upgrade or drip economy in faction. Power Shutdown and Archer are both reasonable on their own but simply can’t ‘race’ ubiquitous runner recursion or even a Criminal deck with 3 Faeries in it.
What if instead of Power Shutdown and Archer, there were an asset that cannibalized ICE advancements for $4 a pop, or an Upgrade that made the runner pay $2 for each advancement counter on ICE protecting the server to access other cards? What if there were a Cerebral Castsish thing that blew up programs instead of dealing brain damage? What if Weyland could actually fucking tag someone without help from NBN or Jinteki? The faction is a fucking mess. It doesn’t know what it wants to be doing.
Warning, gonna enter theorycrafting territory, never put the card in my deck yet, so go playtest it yourself
I thought about HRI but I don’t like it for 2 reasons. One, depending how the runner behaves, scoring the 5/3 can drain both player’s bank accounts, making HRI potentially blank. Pri req is sometimes also blank, but in a way you control rather than the runner controls.
Two, your clicks get insanely compressed around the time you’re scoring your 5/3 – 2 back-to-back turns of IAA-AAA, bouncing adonis, moving ice around to respond to runner threats on centrals, etc. The turn after scoring is typically putting adonis back and/or fixing your centrals to make up for the tempo loss it takes to score. Pri req on the other hand lets you get a clickless tempo boost when you score, which you can set up in advance when your clicks are less pressured. The more I play the deck the more I find myself keeping an unrezzed curtain wall on archives or HQ just waiting for OAI anyway.
I know, so play a taurus too.
Even with the mimic, a 2cr tax is not nothing. For a mere 3 rez cost that’s a really good deal, and there’s lots of times you just need to put any amount of tax that’s not zero on your HQ and/or archives while not stretching your bank too thin. It gear checks, it punishes face checks, it’s cheap – that’s everything that architect does, no?
I personally don’t think that any destroyers are worthwhile, but I haven’t playtested with nebula. You could try that. 2 nebulas and a wormhole seems less consistent/resilient, but has a unique potential upside.
All I can say here is try it. It’s for the remote. It takes a couple games of practice to get a sense of the impact you can make by forcing the runner to come into your remote repeatedly.
Take one for the team, Dan. Make the card Weyland needs right now, not the one it deserves.
On the note of cards I really wish happened, I really, really wish Constellation Protocol was able to move advancement counters onto any card that can be advanced, not simply ice. It would actually provide advanceable Weyland with a solid never-advance game plan (any installed card in a remote could now be a scored 4/2 or an Atlas with a counter the following turn). They would perhaps have to further bump the influence just to ensure it couldn’t be easily played out of faction (and possibly up the rez cost/lower the trash cost, as the card would actually now be strong), but given that the other factions would also have to splash advanceable cards, I don’t think imbalance would result.
Now I’m just making myself sad.
EDIT: Also, to stay on topic, Bootcamp (dedicated) Glacier is wonderful (the first deck archetype I tinkered with, upon Blue Sun’s arrival) and was a favourite of mine for a good while, until my hipster tendencies stopped me from playing it because Blue Sun is too mainstream Weyland yo. Great stuff, @bblum.
) but I’ll try to make it this time.
