I think D4vid should be errated to an AI icebreaker. That way it gets killed by Swordsman and can’t break Turing. It also makes NO sense why a card that breaks any type of ice would not be considered an AI (or even an icebreaker).
2 Likes
plz don’t kill my navy mumbad city grid makes BlueSun great again illusion.
7 Likes
Most of these cards are fine on their own, in isolation. Putting the whole set together, Anarchs have an unbeatable suite that explains their rise to 60+% of the competitive meta:
- Faust
- Wyldside
- Pancakes
- Parasite
- Datasucker
- D4v1d
- Medium
Now the obvious response to that list is “well that’s seven different cards. If Shaper was allowed to just magically assume they get the 7 cards they want installed, you’d be calling them OP too”. “It’s a seven card combo” sounds like a joke.
But the problem with that logic that we have internalized is that #2 and 3 on the list massively accelerate the rate at which you find the rest of your engine, then remain a powerful part of the engine once it’s online. Wyldcakes helps you find all the pieces to get setup fast, then Faust turns those free cards into free breaking.
I think fundamentally the “free draw 2 cards” is the part that’s out of line, not the other pieces. If you had to click twice to draw two cards to feed to Faust, and you had to put yourself at risk for flatlines by spending cards and not having enough clicks to draw back up, then we wouldn’t be complaining about Faust…
5 Likes
Are we going to go back to the whole, Dumblefork is good because their rig doesnt cost 20 credits and Reg Ass Anarch is bad because their rig actually costs 20 credits.
D4V1d isnt the problem here. Faust easily is. Set up cost is low and invalidates small ice far better than yog.0 ever has.
2 Likes
There are specific rules for how icebreakers interact with ICE that D4V1D breaks- specifically icebreakers need to have strengths and they can’t interact with ICE that has higher strength. D4V1D can interact with ICE strength from 5-infinity which doesn’t follow the rules of icebreakers unless you gave it, like, infinite strength which seems like a weird precedent to set.
Happy to join in the delusion. 
1 Like
I would settle for calling D4v1d Strength 20. If an ICE were advanced above that, then it deserves to stay unbroken.
2 Likes
In reality, the issue is Faust. If you were to remove one card from the Anarch engine, it would still function okay, but without Faust, it can’t.
3 Likes
To be fair, D4v1d at least did mostly kill off IT Department nonsense. And that card was even worse for the game/an NPE than anything the anarchs have. “Don’t care how big your make your ice, I still get through it!”
1 Like
The ‘problem’ is Wyldside.
If Wyldside didn’t exist, Chronotype wouldn’t be played, and Faust would be a Decent breaker with occasional power turns involving Inject/IHW. (And Criminal would be more likely to use it, and Drug Dealer/Faust would be what people complained about. But I like Drug Dealer/Faust because you’re all in on Cards as Fuel, and you have no $$$ at all. It’s an interesting archetype that’s shot in the face by MWL’ing Faust.)
The problem with focusing on Wyldside is that then Anarchs have really bad options for getting cards they want. Shapers get the card they want by paying a bunch of money and a card. (Test Run, SMC… Artist Colony.) Criminals get the card they want by drawing carefully and with selection. (Express Delivery, Special Order, Mr. Li… Drug Dealer.) Anarchs get their cards by just saying ‘screw it, gimmie all of them.’ (Duggar’s, Wyldside, Inject)
Nuking Wyldside would nearly cripple some Anarch archetypes. I have a hard time seeing Noise be competitive without the raw fuel that Wyldside gives him to install all his viruses. MaxX remains fine, for the most part. Whizzard loses the Dumblefork build, but he can still look for a job. Valencia ends up having a large problem that can only be solved a few ways… (DLR Val, for instance, didn’t run Wyldside and was ok with it. … Uh, I don’t remember it running Wyldside anyway?)
The problem with all of this is that they’ve already demonstrated that they’re willing to destroy popular, longstanding archetypes that were cornerstones of the game. Desperado is on the MWL.
I would expect to see Wyldside on the MWL next time it changes. I would also guess they’ll use the argument they did with Desperado, that they want to see more diverse Anarch strategies instead of everyone riding Faust-WyldCakes. And I’ll say the same thing as when MWL hit Desperado: First you have to make available other viable Anarch strategies that compete with Faust-WyldCakes.
(EDIT: Right, almost forgot. The other issue with Wyldside is that it hurts the game for variance reasons: If you open Wyldside+Any Econ, you have a better hand than anything else you could possibly draw. To be fair, you can argue the same for Sure Gamble, but it has other issues that keep it from actually hurting variance. (Time of draw not mattering as much, for instance.))
1 Like
Hey, don’t forget Grappling Hook (or as I like to call it, Crappling Hook) which did it first and isn’t rotating…
Grappling Hook is also not an AI or an icebreaker. I’m bad at detecting tone on the internet so I can’t tell if you’re making the same point as me on purpose or on accident.
Also the first runner deck I built that was even vaguely competitive was in a meta full of HB glacier with Gabe, grappling hook, e3 feedback implants and knight so it holds a special place in my heart and I’m sad both that you called it crappling hook and that I didn’t think of it when I was originally explaining why D4V1D is not an icebreaker.
2 Likes
I’m really confused about the point you’re trying to make, or what side you’re on? Because you said “it’s ok to put Wyldside on the MWL if they give us other Anarch strategies we can use,” but then you acknowledge that Earthrise Hotel and Offcampus Apartment are adequate alternative draw engines available to Anarchs already. Are you just setting the minimum on the number of unique, competitive strategies the faction needs to have available without the card at 8 or something?
I suppose that was too many words.
Here you go: “Wyldside is a problem”
4 Likes
Ironically, it wasn’t on any list of “Anarch Core Set Cards That Are Annoyingly Good” until Chronotype landed in-faction 
Oh god here we go around the wheel of blame again! 
But in all seriousness, it was low on the list of oppressive cards in isolation, but I think that this juncture we can all agree that something went badly wrong in the play testing phase for all these Anarch pieces.
4 Likes
D4v1d needs to be able to break infinite strength for flavour reasons (vs goliath)
Oh no. We are not going there.
Playtesters have absolutely no say in what gets done in a game. They make a few suggestions, but mostly they are to provide data. Often, a card that is obviously a problem gets stuck because of some whim of the designer. Then the deadline hits, and the card gets out. YOU DON’T KNOW THE PAIN I AM GOING THROUGH AS A PLAYTESTER (for Ashes, not for Netrunner) RIGHT NOW, AND I CANT TELL YOU BECAUSE OF MY NDA. But long story short, there is this card in Ashes that had an effect that Isaac really wanted to be in the game. He refused to change it, despite it leading to rules problems and being OP. He eventually did change it, weeks too late, but he was considering just leaving it. If the designer wants a card, it stays, no matter what testers say.
Another issue is the fast release schedule combined with the large cardpool. They can’t test every interaction in the short period of time they have. It just doesn’t work that way.
8 Likes
If we remove Wyldside:
Earthrise isn’t in faction. Testing has shown in Criminal that it works, sort of. It’s the Amitage Codebusting of draw engines: Apex wishes he could use it, and no one else cares.
Off Campus Apartment does work, but at the least, Noise wouldn’t be able to use it and look anything like he does right now. Val used it because she wanted Joshua and Fall Guy too.
2 Likes
I mean, Timmy made second place at Worlds with Earthrise Hotel in Anarch, but we should really wait until the strategy is really proven out amongst the best players before rushing to any hasty judgments, right?!?!!?!!?
I think if you remove any of the Anarch ice-hate trifecta, the others get much worse. Hypothetically banning any one has different ramifications for the game and meta, and similarly hurts the rig. If you were going the route, you’d just have to decide if you wanted big ICE, gearcheck, or tempo to be more emphasized. (D4v1d, Faust and Parasite, respectively.)
As for Wyldside, I think it’s an interesting enough card on its own that I’d rather it was in the game. Pre-Chronotype Noise often had to choose between getting 2 cards or having a 4 click power turn, and that was an interesting choice. Chronotype is either useless, or a 3-credit better-than-Beckman. I don’t think Beach Party or Starlight Crusade decks are worth defending in the face of the Breakfast Club.
In short: Kill d4, make Blue Sun great again. Build a Curtain Wall, and make the dirty Anarchs pay for it.
3 Likes