There are a lot of good, powerful cards in Android: Netrunner that haven’t found home in a deck yet. And there are decks that might not be particularly good, but that could be much better with some tweaking. This is a thread to help each other find a good way to put those cards to work.
Here are a couple of mine:
Midway Station Grid: This is an incredibly powerful card which had the misfortune of being reborn in the wrong card pool. There are very few pieces of ICE with multiple subroutines and their natural partners in crime, 5/3 agendas, don’t have very powerful abilities.
I used to run it in HB alongside GRNDL Refinery and AggSec and it was extremely powerful but I think it might also be playable in either NBN or Weyland. The problem is that I don’t know how to spend my influence.
The Board: This card has one of the strongest effects on the game, yet it requires you to do the impossible: Build two different servers, one for The Board and another to score agendas on. I think that when that NBN Studio comes out, this might see play but for now I struggle to find a way to keep it on the table and score at the same time.
Lawyer Up: A draw card in a faction with no draw. It’s a Diesel with one tag you want to clear, and Criminals regularly end up with exactly two tags making it Diesel+2cr+1 click! Amazing! And yet it’s normally dead until you land Siphon, and until you draw cards you can’t play your Siphon. So it never comes out in the right order, and you take it out again.
I tried The Board in my Gagarin deck. The main challenge there was that runners often get their winning agenda from a central. To protect against that I had to rez The Board prematurely. Then, even if the runner whiffs the central run, they can focus their efforts on getting The Board next.
does it though? it only has any effect once the runner has 7 points, which is a circumstance you never want to allow, and the trade off of being a “reverse public support” (i.e., points in your deck that only the runner can score) is pretty significant. more to the point, for it to work you must rez it as soon as the runner hits 5 points (as any access could be their winning agenda), which is basically like revealing to them where they can find their last two points.
[quote=“ErikTwice, post:1, topic:6430”]
Midway Station Grid
[/quote]yeah, I want this card to be good so bad! It’s really too bad it isn’t splashable (4 influence… ) but I could see some kind of Sol NBN glacier deck making good use of it, maybe with splashed spiderwebs or some such?
Ice Analyzer specifically in Noise. In theory it sounds great! 0c to install, I want to be forcing the corp to rez lots of ice so I can parasite it, I want to install lots of cheap programs, and it’s another good Aesop’s target. In practice though it never quite does enough.
This. I feel like many of these Execs would see more play if they were only worth 1 agenda point to the runner. Still a risk to include them, but 2 AP (more than a quarter of the way to victory!) is a tough hill.
NBN Glacier-lite was a hobby-horse architype locally a couple years ago; so close to good from a Never Advance shell. Probably worth revisiting!
My Nasir build runs IA, and yeah… it’s always not quite there. I feel like Tech Writer is a universal upgrade for it… any deck that wanted IA to work better would be better with Tech Writer.
Kit. :’(
I’ve also been casting about for a Resourceless Runner build; the frontrunner is Criminal, specifically Gabe or Leela. Though with the Desperado hit, it might only be viable in Shaper economy now. Mostly I’m looking for a deck that takes ALL THE TAGS and doesn’t care. Because SYNC.
Also tried to make a Cybernetics Division deck work for a while, and Chronos Protocol. CP’s problem is that Jinteki doesn’t have good breaker-trashing abilities, and Runners just wait for their breakers to show up before running, or at least run without them in hand. It feels like CP has the same hurdle to overcome that Leela does: Smart players will play around your ability.
I tried to make ChiLo City Grid work for a while, but ended up decided that it’s costed incorrectly. If it was 1 to rez I think it’d be a lot stronger but at 3 (3?!) it shoves its self into a niche where it’s too expensive in the early game where your traces are more likely to hit, and by the time you can rez it late game the runner is likely breaking your tracing subroutines. There’s a very narrow window in between those two phases where it’s quite strong indeed, but it was very inconsistent.
It’s one of the better tag-me setups I’ve had as of late. Wonky to pilot, but has answers to just about everything. I did a ton of test draws and found that if you draw aggressively you can get Faust on the table and start siphoning in 2.5 turns. Obviously that can vary and the clone chips will need to go (or something), but you might like it.
I’ve been playing something similar, though I focus more on the Test Run / Scavenge combo with Femme:
Test Run Femme means it’s very easy to land early Siphons, and Scavenge lets you move her later if you ended up Femme-ing a Quandary blind or something.
The deck was already MWL legal, which probably means that Corroder should have been a Lady all along. The deck has a lot of recursion so Lady probably would have worked fine, but I was wary of overloading Scavenge since I have Femme and Torch. I still have thought about swapping Corroder with Lady and Utopia Shard – Utopia Shard to try to snipe Psychographics from hand since that’s a huge pain when playing against NBN. Sometimes NBN is leaky enough I can score a ton from R&D and keep them Siphoned before they get enough credits to Psychobeale, but it’s a tight matchup.
Silhouette… always Silhouette. Chicago style? London Operative style? Apocolypse? Overminded?
Hell, I’m even trying a Caissa-style Sil deck, just for the hell of it.
Pheremones and Muertos Gang Member to a lesser extent, but they’re not too tough (they’re just always the 46-49 card).
And Bagbiter… Bagbiter. What a bastard this guy is.
Somewhere there’s a FFG employee who’s been keeping this secret, broken deck that explains this card.
Almost forgot, I’ve been working with a Valencia Comet build for a while that got gutted by the MWL. Can’t PPVP Lucky Finds anymore, so the econ is much worse. But Day Job-Comet-Blackmail is some of the sickest things you can do with it. Really most of Comet Val’s Comet chains end with a Blackmail, or a Deja Vu to get Blackmail. It also used a full Cutlery suite, because Comet. When is Comet like Doppleganger? When you have a ton of Run events!