My belief is that draw power is incredibly powerful in the draft format, especially on the Runner side, and so my selection is Quality Time. Femme and Knight are super tempting, but they are no good to us if we can’t draw into them. With the reduced deck size in draft, Quality Time will help push through the chaff that will accumulate via draft and help us collect and play our key elements. 6AP to win also speeds the game and we will need to bulk draw to keep ahead. Since our economy is so Opus centric, finding it quickly is imperative. Quality Time helps find Opus, or the Test Run to find Opus, along with our breaker suite along the way.
Bringing this same philosophy over to the corp side, I’m selecting Anonymous Tip. The corp is doing a mandatory draw every turn and doesn’t want to get agenda flooded, so draw power is de-emphasized somewhat, but ultimately the same principles hold true.
BTW, one problem with this democratic draft by poll system is that cards like Quality Time and Diesel will probably split the vote of “Team Card Draw”. It will be interesting to see if Quality Time and Diesel combined get more of the total vote than whatever the actual eventual selection gets.
Given that we already have a few pretty good ETR ice, i’m thinking we should continue in that direction. Big agendas are good for a rush strategy, so i’m fine with tne pri reqs. And braintrust ? OK, he’s a 3/2, but he’s the worst of them. I would like another himitsu-bako. I’m afraid Archer will be hard to play in that format. It must be out when we score our first priority, or we must have a one-pointer or two-pointer scored. Meh.
On the runner side, I’m hoping some draw stuff might come back later but we can do without it. I pick Knight.
Corp: No Midori?! It’s a palace coup! “I thought this was America! Isn’t this America?” ;3
Archer all the way. Braintrust is rarely worth it (except for the lack of options) even in Jinteki; 3/2s are great but any deck needs at least one nice big FU ice, and Archer is hard to beat for ruining someone’s day. Let’s send these punks to the…“Daaaaynger Zone”.
Runner: We already have 3 (admittedly mediocre) starter breakers plus two AI breakers and three decent economy cards out of 30; tough a call as it is. I think we go for Quality Time.
It’s a crazy tough call though; Femme is splashed in almost all my decks just in case ‘that ice’ shows up and here Test Run would make her that much easier to cheat out. And I like Knight a lot; along with Atman and Darwin, if someone else got a Swordsman somehow we’d just have to concede gracefully.
But drawing a whole new hand is hard to beat. Draw is where I lose most of my tempo as a runner when things go awry.
With all these votes for Archer, I feel obliged to remark “man, aren’t you all pissed you didn’t take my advice to grab Clone Retirement when we could”, then slither back into shadows where I can bask in my own awesomeness
With just 38% of the vote, Braintrust squeezes in as the pick of choice. Archer came in close at second with 27%, and Himitsu-Bako in third at 23%.
Knight was the dominant choice for the runner pick. With 52% of the vote. Diesel and Quality time together might have split up the votes from those who wanted card draw, but even still both of them combined only added up to a paltry 18%.
Some interesting choices for corp, we get either Beta Test for another 3/2 agenda, Subliminal Messaging for economy or a Archer. We will likely get a big ICE on the wheel (Janus or Curtain Wall) which is good since we need something to improve the Prio Reqs we will be running. Myself I really like 3/2 agendas and will vote for Accelerated Beta Test.
Runner pack is not as deep, and for me it’s between the two breakers (Atman and Battering Ram). Darwin, Atman, Atman, Knight seems like a pretty efficient rig for draft standards and if we would get our hans on a Datasucker… On the other Hand Battering Ram is a strong and really efficient breaker if we can support the memory and also improved by the tinkering we have already. Not sure what will wheel from this pack, New Angeles, Borrowed Sattelite and Access to Globalsec?
I guess we have to take Accelerated Beta Test now. Our previous pick of Braintrust effectively forces us to take it. We will want to somehow get our hands on another 2/3 Agenda in order to make the 2,2,2 scoring pattern work out - or luck into some fast advance. 3,2,2 is decent enough too.
I’m also guessing that we are going to be taking the second Atman. The huge problem with this all AI rig that is coming together is that it is going to be extremely difficult to face check ICE in the late game, especially the larger program trashing Sentries. Knight could be a tool for that, but it is very easy for a corp to shake a Knight loose early, and the only way to get it back will be using the Test Run to retrieve it. The Test Run could be better used on other things.
If we can get a Datasucker though, watch out. we will have the Djinn to tutor for it and the Atmans to exploit it fully. Big gamble, but if we hit the Datasucker jackpot, Jackson Howard that’ll be awesome.
I’m pretty certain Battering Ram is a bad choice here (and in general). We’re already in a bit of a pickle memory-wise (MO, Keyhole) and when you do the math, the Ram is actually very inefficient for small ICE and not that efficient for large ones. Hell, I’d pick Inti before the Ram - at least he’s actually extremely good at what he does (going through Chimeras, Wraparounds, Paper Walls and baby Ice Walls for minimum cost).
In a normal game I would very much agree about Inti over Battering ram, but in a Cube where we are talking about an advantage over 8 cards (all pretty much high-priority picks) drafted by six players I wouldn’t touch Inti with a broom.
We have six possible fracters in the Cube (not counting the AI breakers):
Aurora
Battering Ram
Corroder
Inti
Morningstar
Snowball
I’m guessing that by passing the Battering Ram we hope for one of the Corroders or Snowballs since we might get away with only one fracter running Darwin, Atman and Knight?
We already have one fracter : Aurora. It’s not good, but it’s ok on very small pieces of ice. About datasuckers, I’m pretty sure those are very high on anyone’s list, so we’re not going to see any in this pack : this is already the second pick. Maybe in the last pack, if we’re really, really lucky. Now, for the pick… I’m not too happy about a second Atman without datasuckers. Stimhack is my pick : excellent trick, and the drawback is mitigated somehow as we’re not too scared about flatline in draft;
On the corp side, I’m very sad about our previous pick. That pack had some interesting stuff, and we take a bad agenda that does nothing by itself. Oh well. If we want to use it, we need to draft other 2pointers, at least two more (only two two-pointers make it unlikely we’ll be able to score both in many games). In today’s pack, we have another 3/2 which ability we will probably never use. Meh. On the other hand, we get Sulbiminal Messaging which we considerered some time ago : that would be my pick. Perhaps more 3/2 will come, and I’m not too worried if they don’t.
it would be nice to know what exactly is in the cube, since apparently the other people drafting know things like that Account Siphon isn’t in the cube.
Cards through Fear and Loathing. I mentioned there was no account siphon early on in the thread. But it was probably easy to miss. In general, most cards that are in the cube are two of. Any unique corp card is a 1 of.
C:I’m pretty upset with previous pick, archer and himitsubako were much better then braintrust imho. In this pack I vote for Archer, I don’t think that empty 3/2 is a way to win draft and ABT does not much without precog/jackson howard.
R: For runner we need much more economy then we have. I vote for stimhack. It is strong as ace in the hole aswell.
C: Hostile takeover. Plz don’t pass it with archers:(
Also strong card as it is. Economy, scoring from hand. Allows to achive 6 point with 3-2-1 pattern.
R: Personal workshop. Economy we need. Great synergy with atman and stimhack.
For runner Workshop seems all kinds of awesome with our current cards and even if that memory chip looks very tempting I don’t think we can justify taking it here.
Corp is more interesting, and Bad Pub makes Hostile not as great as it usually is but it’s still the pick for me.
Worth noting is that it leaves us with uneven points, so we need to take more agendas. Not sure what we want our distribution to look like, we can either go for:
3-3-3-2-2-1-1, 3-3-2-2-2-1-1-1 or 3-3-2-2-2-2-1 (this last one seems pretty bad if we want to go to 6 points)
The corppack is surprisingly deep, we will likely wheel a playable card (as well as a Director Haas), don’t think we would mind either Yagura, Geothermal Fracking or Oversight AI.
Hostile Takeover is great and relatively easy to score; if we’re going to ‘good agenda’ load, at least it’s a card that makes crazy expensive ICE much easier to play when it comes up. Viper distant 2nd choice.
Workshop hard to beat here; no more tag-me, I guess! Cyberfeeder only other realistic choice for me, and not close.
