Corps > Runners

I’ve played against it ~6 times in the past few weeks with varying corp builds and haven’t been hit by a profitable siphon in any of those matchups (against several different players, including steven wooley). There’s a difference between knowing it’s coming, and building with siphon in mind. I was also one of the original proponents of the deck, and in most of wooley’s videos/articles he gives me shout-outs for making it. I’m saying it’s dead because it’s dead.

If you want to play that style, bring the anarch cards into andy, make a ghetto rig and spend your influence on dlr/parasite/knight/deja vu, you have more ways to get on top, and fao makes sticking siphon much easier in that kind of deck (you’re also andy with 3 siphon 3 planned assault, that’s consistency)

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I don’t think I’d call H&P part of the Spin Cycle.

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As a fellow early utilizer of the “Surprise Siphon Noise DLR DLR DLR” archetype, I concur. Once corps know/expect it, there are too many bad matchups (=matchups where you have to draw the nuts and play well to win). Again, if you want to do well in a large tournament, you do not want a high-variance deck, and strong corp resiliency means that you have to land more and more combo pieces in the right order to achieve effects, meaning you’ve been pushed into a higher variance quanta :).

Boring, resilient corp strategies are dominant, which sadly limits the range of good runner decks to those with a “big money, big breakers, plenty of redundancy/recursion” plan.

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you’d change your Ice to bigger Ice, but the I’m imagining it running the same agenda spread and scoring philosophy, just you know with bigger Ice.

Out of interest, what’s a non-boring corp strategy? Rush and/or kill? I assume fast advance with some combination of SanSan/Biotic/Astro and Upgrade* decks with some combination of Ash and Caprice are the boring strategies?

*Seems like Glacier is the wrong terminology these days for decks that score slowly out of remotes, it’s almost never the ice that’s the problem, it’s the nasty things you find at server’s end that stop you grabbing the agenda.

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Netrunner where meaningful runs can only be made once or less per turn is, to me, boring Netrunner that I have virtually no interest in playing; ergo all these builds that are on the “Max Econ Tax” plan with little deviation (Redcoats, CI, some RP and even NBN builds) are, IMO, terrible for (at least my interest in) the game :). Literally anything else would be better: FA, Rush, Net Damage tax, Meat Damage decks, decks where taxing is hard but possible with some clever play, Destroyer decks, decks-that-play-against-stereotype (FA in Weyland, killshots in HB) etc.

I’m totally on board with calling taxing ICE decks that lean on Caprice / Ash a different name :slight_smile:

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Card Attrition. Program Destruction.

Program Destruction is great when it goes well :smiling_imp:

No rig for you!

It seems like I’m in the minority in the Netrunner community, but I actually don’t find FA to be a boring strategy at all and disagree with the argument I hear all the time that they are basically like playing Solitaire. I think people underplay the options that the runner has against these decks. Because Netrunner is built on credits, every ICE rezzed is crucially important and every run is crucially important. If the corp could genuinely just ICE up HQ, play operation economy and expect to win every game then FA would be solitaire, yes.

But against a strong runner you have a very high chance of losing the game that way. Instead, you must threaten scoring remotes, protect San-sans, gain money, protect R&D, anticipate account siphons and sneakdoors and so on. I’ve found all my FA games to have just as much depth and just as many interesting decisions as decks that build scoring remotes behind ICE towers, or “fun, real Netrunner” decks.

I do think that certain FA cards are probably a bit too strong balance-wise, but I don’t think that FA in general is bad for the game.

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Strongly agreed, stik. I find NBN much more interesting and interactive than most Weyland or HB decks.

I see what you’re saying, and I do enjoy playing NBN and fast advancers in general. It’s a totally legitimate corp strat that needs to exist. I think what turns me off playing against them sometimes is that you live or die by accessing centrals enough. On a stupidly good day that means 4 accesses, on a stupidly bad day that means 44 accesses of R&D and/or lots of accesses of HQ.

While rationally and outside the heat of battle we all know it’s a card game, and getting your cards in a usable order is part of the equation. It’s easier to feel unlucky against Fast Advance. It’s also easier to remember the game where you access (what feels like) 20 cards for 2 points, you don’t remember accessing 10 cards for 7 points nearly as easily.

Against corps who are ‘playing fairly’ it’s easier to feel like you’re reading the situation and playing skilfully. Whether or not that’s true I’m not so sure.

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