RE: High-Risk Investment. I really like it over Pri Req, for a number of reasons. First of all, the best strategy against this deck is to sit back and money up until I try to score. HRI discourages/counters that. Second, the obvious reduced setup required. Third, when you’re having a bad match, often you don’t have any untrashed Curtain Walls, at least on centrals. I often rez CWs to score that 5/3. Finally, they both essentially take a click to get the money, so it comes down to when you feel the biggest crunch. Do you find it harder to find a click the turn after scoring to re-install that free ICE, or can you find a click to enough money to make the next big play? The number of times I’ve been able to do something meaningful simply because I was able to click for 8 credits is pretty big. HRI has generally been good to me, but I can see how it comes down to playstyle/when you feel click crunch.
Also, Hive is love, Hive is life. Probably the best ICE in this deck, for realsies.
EDIT: Additional thoughts on Negotiator over Cadu. I REALLY don’t like it. That ETR clause makes a huge difference. Early face checking are when these slots are most relevant. Cadu is a 3/2 credit tax and an ETR, or a 5/3 credit tax. Negotiator is a 2c tax. Paying through Negotiator to get single R&D accesses for 2 early game is probably viable. Doing the same for Cadu is much more costly.
They’re not just ok, they’re bad. Ice Wall is the only one that really merits consideration (it’s pretty good). The Genesis cycle ones are appalling, Swarm is almost always a really awful Grim. Fire Wall should be 4 to rez. The Lunar cycle ‘morph’ ICE are all 2 creds too expensive. The ‘Cosmic’ set is also at least 2c overpriced. Wormhole is perhaps playable, asteroid belt is really bad, Nebula is a 9 credit Grim without BP - if you take a whole turn to reduce the cost it’s 3creds (+3 clicks)… ugh. Weyland ICE that can be advanced just goes in the binder unless it’s called ice wall.
This is about right. I do think that racing to 4 or 5 and then fast advancing the win is doable. It’s not a particularly robust strategy. My experience with this sort of deck is you stomp 75% of the field, are competitive with the next 15% but just lose after the cut.
Negotiator is essentially (supposed to be) Weyland’s Pup, much like Searchlight. Both are basically inconsequential by themselves to a runner, but both do something small to tax the runner.
The biggest trade off being that Searchlight can actually benefit from weird fringe cards like patch or sub boost, while Negotiator won’t really as you can always just money up to get through it.
I do think Negotiator is kind of an option if link heavy Runners ever become a thing. The cloud breaker programs are another carrot for runner this cycle, encouraging them to get more link. At 2 or 3 link, Caduceus becomes a bad card, while Negotiator at worst becomes a tax of 2 credits.
pup is good because it costs less to rez than it costs the runner to go through, having a breaker out doesn’t reduce the tax (except switchblade) and they always have to pay in some form. Negotiator at best breaks even the first time through, gets owned by mimic, and sometimes can just be ignored altogether, there is also almost no credit denial synergy in weyland to try to help it. If they were aiming for pup they missed the mark by a long shot.
While I won’t argue that Negotiator in the current meta is good by itself. I will argue that it is taxing during all stages of the game and it might be a worthy swap over from caduceus if the meta ever becomes over saturated with +link for whatever reason. Or when Caduceus rotates out. Whichever might come first.
There could be a Current, Upgrade, or Agenda that has something like these effects…
ICE that can be advanced, that are also currently advanced, cannot have a strength less than the number of advancement tokens (or base strength, whichever is lower).
[Two Clicks]: Place a power counter on this card. All ICE in this server is considered to be advanced by the number of tokens on this card.
[One Click]: Rearrange the placement of up to three advancement tokens (or maybe all advancement tokens) from any ICE to any other ICE.
Once per turn, you may remove an advancement token from a card to gain 2 (or 3) Credits.
Maybe not perfect, but there’s some brainstormed ideas.
I think this happened because of the early factions. There’s an lecture Lukas gave and in the beginning there were supposed to be 6 corps, Jinteki, HB, NBN, Weyland, Blue Sun and Argus. In the end we got only 4, and 3 of them merged into Weyland Corsortium so maybe that’s why the faction is all over the place.
On a side note, what you guys think about the public agendas? I really wanna try that 3/1 since it can wipe out the runner deck if the runner doesn’t deal with it ASAP.
Oh yeah, I just remembered why I was so averse to replacing ice wall with meru mati. It all comes together against headlock reina. You need as many cheap ETRs as possible for your remote to overload her knights, and a 1-advanced ice wall is immune to clone chip parasite.
I may have missed mention of it, but have you given any thought to including a 1 of Reversed Accounts? It’s been a fantastic card in my Blue Sun glacier deck, acting as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” card for the runner.
The thing is that, when it comes down to it, Weyland is still the Archer/Project Atlas/Scorched faction and little else. It has gained practically nothing during the last two years and half of the good things it got in that time like Power Shutdown or GRNDL are now less powerful than they were on their release.
And, to me, they still have the same issue they have always had: They cannot force the Runner to run in any way but baiting. It’s great that you can make them run through Data Raven and Archer, but they’ll always do it on their terms and that sucks.
I mean, Weyland doesn’t have assets and if they did, the BP from Hostile Takeover would make them bad. And if you don’t play Hostile Takeover, you can’t play Archer which is one of your most powerful cards. Even worse, if you do play Hostile Takeover, then Caduceus starts to suck and Shadow becomes less effective. There are very severe anti-synergies between the best cards in the faction.
The exact text is “resolve a subroutine on another piece of rezzed ice”.
The FAQ entry reads
"The subroutine that resolves is not considered to be on Wormhole (e.g. when the Corp uses Wormhole with cards like Data Raven or Viktor 2.0, the power counters are placed on those cards and not Wormhole)."
On a Negotiator you resolve the Negotiator’s sub. Resolving any subs on that piece of ice comes with the caveat that…
“the runner can pay 2 to break any subroutine on negotiator”.
