Playing on OCTGN in SHL3 with @moioioi, he’s ETF and I’m MaxX.
Game is going fairly well, 2-2, I feel just a touch of momentum. I have my Heap view open of course to see what MaxX is dumping in there every turn. There goes my Levy. Hey there go my decoders. We’ll get them back, it’s so easy!
Hmm, a new card in that Architect-protected remote. My Mimic is out. Eh, he’s low on credits and I can put a ton of central pressure on. Surely he won’t try to score out somethere here.
It was a dang Chronos Project!
He, as any skilled OCTGNsman would do, was peeping my Heap and saw an golden opportunity. After that @moioioi was able to seal up his servers with code gates (I didn’t mention yet that all my Parasites were in the expunged bin as well) and nail the win.
Chronos Project is a powerful card that can really swing a game around. If you’ve been Chronos’d and have a good tale feel free to share.
A similar thing has happened to me twice in the last week with Prepaid Kate where it hurts almost as much to lose the Levy (and the precious 1 parasite). Now, I feel much stronger compulsion to run all the PE remotes which is dangerous in itself. Plus I am finding myself hesitating to pitch the Levy even with a same old thing on the board (something that before I would do automatically if I was above 5 cards at turn’s end).
I was thinking today that Eater, MaXX, and O&C has got be one of the worst things to happen to Shaper in awhile. Not only has Chronos Project seen a resurgence but Crisium Grid is now popular – screwing maker’s eye and indexing – as well as swordsman kicking Katman while she was down (so … now I need to splash a fracter and a killer with my Atmen?). And what did Shaper get from the big-box … Day Job maybe.
Not to get really off topic, but I feel like this is a feature of OCTGN that’s different from meat-space play. In OCTGN you can check any public information at glance without your opponent knowing (and thus giving away your action), which doesn’t really work in real life, where you have to ask to look at cards in archives, how many cards they have in hand, etc…
I’ve been Chronos’d 3 times whilst playing Maxx this season. Once vs. Argus, which took about 23-24 cards, but not the levy, and rendered IHW more or less useless. Once vs. DRT NEH, clearing me out of cards in the game excepting a Mimic, a corroder, and a medium installed, and two liberated accounts and an Imp in hand. The other time was vs. RP Grail, clearing out my all my parasites early in the game when I’d played one and milled the other two, for 12 or so cards total. I won all three games, only the NEH one was even close. It does hurt Maxx some, but I’ve not lost a game to it yet, and I’m not sure it’s worth the deck slot.
I’ve had it landed on me a time or two, and yeah, it can win games at the right moment, but the right moment always seems to be so narrow. It sucks to lose cards you were planning to use, but so many stars need to align for it to hit cards that make the game truly winnable.
The only type of deck I see this going into is a PE or argus style deck that’s simply filling up on punishing one-pointers. If your plan is to score out Chronos just doesn’t do the work; what would you pull out? breaking news? hostile takeover? It’s even hard to justify over one-pointers like clone retirement and false lead (which are both actually very good choices in the right deck).
you didn’t lose levy… and were playing against argus
you had 2/3 breakers, multi access and econ still available
you just lost Parasites unless i’m misunderstanding
I don’t know if these are making strong cases against Chronos not being worthwhile. what maxx mills is entirely out of your hands as a player, are you suggesting that you won these games through sheer skill? I’m certain you played very well with what you had available, but I think it’s ludicrous to claim that these games were winnable regardless of what Chronos removed. as @steve_houston 's story illustrates, it’s pretty difficult to win a game with no breakers, let’s be honest
I think Chronos trigger is pretty much always valuable in some way; however, it is a 3/1, which is a very weak agenda. the other weakness of Chronos is that the Corp generally doesn’t have much control over what enters the heap.
I think Chronos is a fair choice for many Weyland Rush builds, nearly all PE builds and possibly other IDs.
as an OCTGN player moving into meatspace soon, I am not looking forward to this fact. I am considering asking very quickly credits/cards at the beginning of my every turn on either side, I assume most opponent’s would consider this annoying, but too bad. takes a total of 3 seconds; it’s not going to extend the game by any significant margin and it’s a crucial aspect of netrunner. I might also use my own dice to track the opponent’s hand size, so I can just glance at it, and adjust it during their turn. from watching streams and briefly playing IRL, it is often very difficult to discern how many credits a player has without making it obvious in some way, so you might as well ask. some players just toss credits in a heap, they deserve whatever annoyance you are going to throw at them
Other point of all this being, you don’t get to choose very specifically what you want to remove with Chronos. It’s not a targeted marketing effect, you see what’s discarded and hope you’re making the right play. If it’s not single-handedly beating the runner it’s at its best against, and does very close to nothing against 95% of Crim builds, then I’m really hesitant to say a 3/1 is worth the slot.
This being said, I haven’t played with Chronos myself, so maybe it’s awesome if you play very well otherwise, but I don’t see much of a skill-rewarding aspect to Chronos.
Yesterday playing my Calimsha Kate vs PE. Turn one 3 installed servers. Checked two of them. Abit later in the game, 25 cards in the trash, including Deus and mimic, dear sir advances three times, yup, chronos project. All i could do at this point is congratulate him with the win and bashing my own skull in for not checking all unadvanced remotes.
I was playing MaxX Eater-Keyhole - my opponent scored a Chronos and wiped out half my cards, then later scored a Bifrost Array to knock me down to 10 cards total (I had breakers but no economy). I did not win that game.
So this season there was a weekend where I attended two SCs in the space of two days. Seeing how the Saturday one was 5 hours’ travel away, and I actually TOd the Sunday one, I played the same decks at both. As my choice of runner, I packed MaxX.
Long story short, over the weekend I played 9 games of swiss and 4 games of double-elim with her. Out of those games, I got Chronosed a grand total of 9 times, 7 of which happened the turn before I wanted to Levy. Basically, whenever there was an unadvanced card in a remote that I didn’t bother to check, it was a Chronos
After that weekend, I decided to let her rest and play other IDs for a while.
You definitely need to become hyper vigilant checking remotes the couple turns before your Levy.
I think I’m something like 6-0 after getting hit with Chronos on Maxx. There are a few common scenarios:
It’s early and you don’t have much in the heap
It’s late and you have a full rig
Oh dear, my code gate breakers… all my cash into three medium runs! This is less silly than it sounds. Your codegate breakers are probably sitting in your heap because you don’t need them yet. Now you just need to win before they can change the situation.
I’ve both hit and got hit by Chronos as MaxX and I agree with many here that the window for Chronos to have a real impact is very slim. Even in cases where the Chronos hit 2/3 of the deck many times it has not had a big impact. You need to hit so much of the right stuff and in general MaxX runs multiples of most important cards.
The Keyhole-Eater version runs 3s and if you manage to hit a big chunk of the deck it normally is late enough that it doesn’t matter.
Reg-versions have multiples too and you are happy if you clear out one breaker type, but they still have parasites to clear out that specific type, so you also need to hit all the parasites.
On top of this you need to be able to actually score the Project at that exact moment, which is not trivial, nor reliable even if you slot 3 of them. Sure, you can run a 1of to round out your agendas and be happy when it does pay for its slot, but that seems not very often.
Attrition PE, however, should still like Chronos, but that is more about hitting any cards than hitting specific cards
Anecdote: Before my first SC this season, just after O&C came out I tested my HB:ETF against a bunch of MaxX on OCTGn and ended up not running Chronos due to it being too lackluster on a whole bunch of games. I think my deck was better off from running 2 Gila instead and won the SC.
Yeah, Chronos Protocol is a must for attrition PE, easily x3. Not only can you remove recursion, requiring the runner to dig more for what they need, you can get rid of the all-important LARLA (or make it much more ineffective).
Playing Leela against Grail RP. No points on the board and I have no breakers out. He installs and advances behind two ICE. I run R&D, score Chronos Project, bounce the bottom ICE, run the remote, scoring a Nisei II, bounce another ICE and win from there. I don’t remember if I had the credits to score the NAPD that the Chronos would otherwise have been, but I suspect not.
I agree. LARLA is a tough pill for PE to swallow, and chronos can go a long way towards fixing that.
Outside of those decks, it’s a middling pick against one popular ID - (as has been said above, MaxXes tend to pack quite a bit of redundancy), a weak pick against 2 factions (anarch and shaper) and total garbage against the historically-most-powerful faction. Long story short, unless your deck has a way to put important cards in the trash, Chronos is almost certainly not the best agenda choice.
As a strong proponent of the “1 Chronos in every deck” policy of late, I would like to call bollocks on this.
Criminals often run fewer than full sets of strong events (like, say, Inside Job and Emergency Shutdown) and pack a couple SoTs to have them become flex slots. It’s not inconceivable to hit all copies of one of the events with a scored Chronos, which makes your game significantly easier.
Ever faced a Shaper build that runs one Parasite and a fuckton of recursion for it? The Parasite often hits the heap early, to be ready for Cloning.
Ever faced a Shaper build that runs on Prepaid Econ? Have you seen what happens to those decks when you Chronos their heap with most of their Gambles, Finds and Laundries? Any Power Nap-based econ is hit even harder.
Ever seen the face of a Noise player when you Chronos their heap with all the Caches? Suddenly the whole Aesop’s/Deja Vu thing looks a lot less profitable.
t;dr: I played a singleton Chronos in 3 SCs this season (both out of RP Grail and out of HB Rush/FA), it was never a dead include.
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