D4v1d, it's your fault, not Faust

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I am not blaming “the outside playtesters”; I, uh, I know enough about the netrunner playtesting to know that this is also the case for ANR. I mean the entire process of designing and testing cards :slight_smile:

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You want to be really careful about driving D4v1d from the meta. Losing it opens the door for ITD and a brand new world of boring.

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There’s so many more counters to IT department now.

I guess the term “Anarch Problems” has taken on a whole new meaning :smile:

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to reiterate this point: [quote=“SimonMoon, post:5, topic:7322”]
There are a gazillion of these threads about which part of anarch engine right now is the real problem. And the answer as it normally is that it’s the sum total and not any specific part.
[/quote]

it seems like none of the cards in particular are the problem, but rather they are all just very powerful together (arguably too powerful)

i dislike wyldside the most because of all the cards it is the one most affected by draw timing

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The next time I see Earthrise in Anarch is down in 44th place. So yeah, real common card there.

I also never said it didn’t work. I said it worked, kinda. If you’ll pay attention it’s working because he used Career Fair for it. This means that any deck that is already running Wyldcakes + Career Fair will switch to Earthrise and gain 3 influence and 3 card slots. Which is actually Fine. The problem with Wyldside is draw order and the constant +2 cards a turn. They’re also paying more for Earthrise.

…for one deck.

You guys are trying to solve many problems when the solution is crystal clear.

If the main problem is “you’re in, Fausting thru all ma servers”, then nerf Faust.
But I can say the problem is the corpo player is too lazy to pack silver bullet against this, when the runner packs Plascrete since 5 cycles, and maybe would use clot, salsette island or things like that when he’s supposed to attack.

I’ve been enough playing with Faust-Wyldcakes to say it changes the problem from find money to break ice & trash asset to finding cards to break ice + finding money to trash asset, money you can get with the cards you’re throwing away.

People say “blabla, wyldside snowballs”, but Faust is actually anti-snowballing so that’s really fine in fact.

The problem is mainly LARLA then Faust. Larla is the one which fuel your engine a second time. If you kill that (with a silver bullet such as a chronos for exemple), then you basically just won the game.

Reading you, you guys did not play the deck. You never trashed the wrong card and loose.

Faust is your special problem ? Then stop relying on strength and use subs.
Wyldcake is your fundamental flaw ? Then tag the guy and laugh.
Noise makes you cry ? Then pack interns and thank him for helping you find your ice & stuff.

Corp guys are too perfectionist, protective “for da Great Game Plan, which is da perfect FA / da perfect glacier / da perfect asset spam / da perfect whatever” to pack those cards.
Then hey, I guess it’s YOUR problem, not really some x y z runner card.

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Precisely. ANd thats why my Titan packs 3x Swordsman, 3x CVS and 2x Troubleshooter to bring Swordsman out of MImic range. ALso 2x Eliozabeth Mills (supported by 2x Interns) to repeatedly trash Wyldside.
Yes, a lot of “silver bullets”. But I prefer calling that a silver Shotgun, since the whole package makes orange decks lose
more than 3 out of 4 games played.

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D4v1d is certainly a clunky card design because it screws way too much with the economic balance of the two sides (And it should’ve been AI as subtype tbh).

Corp players are certainly not too lazy to pack silverbullets against Faust and the comparsion to Scorched/Plascrete doesn’t quite fit. Corps don’t have a neutral silver bullet which just needs to be played out to solve the problem. They have one ice, which doesn’t help if the runner has a sentry breaker. What the corp actually needs is a trace event like snatch and grab or something like that, that kills an AI breaker or a neutral trap, non AI-breakable ICE, with the same effect.

I said it in another thread and I’ll gladly say it again. Card recursion that’s too efficient is the underlying core problem right now, for both sides. Levy and Temple have warped the meta and will continue to do so.

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Putting aside the issue of whether D4v1d is responsible for Anarch’s dominance in the current meta, I think a Wyldcakes-less, Faust-less D4v1d is certainly a problematic card from a design perspective.

Like Yog.0 and Lady which were both put on the Most Wanted List, D4v1d is an “icebreaker” that breaks a certain class of ice so efficiently as to punish a corp that decides to include ice of that category in his or her deck. It’s actually a problem for the same reason that Lady is; its ability to break ice for free was intended to be balanced by the fact that it’s limited-use, except that with the recursion supplied by Clone Chip, Deja Vu, and Levy - cards that these decks want to run anyway - its power counters are effectively limitless.

Mostly, the reason I don’t like D4v1d is that it makes building an ice suite as a glacier player less fun. I can’t count the number of I’ve wanted to include high strength ice but felt that doing so would handicap me in matchups against Anarch and even Shaper with influence to spare. Whether it’s Blue Sun + space ice (Curtain Wall, Wormhole, etc.), Jinteki glacier (Susanoo), or HB + bioroids (Janus, Wotan, IQ), D4v1d pushes ice compositions towards medium strength/multi-sub ice (with punishing face checks as a bonus). Fundamentally, it alters the expectation that high-strength ice should generally be more expensive to break, which I would imagine heavily constrains the design of large ice going forward (or worse, the power level of future ice on the order of Crick and Archangel becomes justified purely because D4v1d exists).

The potential problem with MWL-ing or even banning D4v1d is that the Anarch fixed-strength breaker suite is in dire need of something D4v1d-like to deal with high strength ice. Before Order & Chaos, relying on Datasucker counters potentially alongside an Ice Carver was, in my mind, a great solution, as it was effective but had corp counterplay in the form of purges or sealing off the central servers. Unfortunately, in a world where instant speed purges are generically useful to stop Medium digs, protect ice from instant death, and fast advance, a sucker-based engine is fragile at best, creating a void that is uniquely filled by D4v1d. I don’t know that I have a particular point here other than that elegant answers to high strength ice have existed before this, and just because some archetypes in the current meta need this card, it doesn’t mean that the card itself is healthy as a result.

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Preach it brother! (Or sister)

I love me some old school Netrunner with ICE and breakers and stuff.

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If D4v1d didn’t employ power counters, and instead said:

Trash: Break all subroutines on a piece of ICE of strength 5 or greater.

would it be a more interesting card?

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it would be good if weyland, instead of anti-AI card had an anti-power counter card, that let them remove/manipulate/move power counters hosing lady/atman/d4v1d, and interact with cards such as plascrete, earthrise and the upcoming turning wheel. maybe some ice that on encounter allows you to move 1 power counter to another installed (non-ice, cos then raven would be broken) card on either side of the board, could be interesting part of the design space to explore

it could lead to some amusing situations where the runner encounters the ice and the corp moves power counters off public support/plascrete and onto atman to screw with its strength, or is forced to remove counters from say david onto a public support, so the ability could have some situational drawbacks too

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Docklands Crackdown Meta has finally Arrived!

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Oops. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

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eh, I coulda been more clear, nbd :slight_smile:

Three Anarch decks use Wyldside to great effect: Noise, MaxX, and Whizzard. Lots of other Anarchs use it as well because it happens to be the most efficient, hands-down, card draw engine available to the Faction right now.

I can’t be certain of Max and Whizzard, but I know Noise at least used Wyldside without Chronotype in the “Good Old Days”. (He used to mitigate it with Personal Workshop, throwing as many cards as he could onto the Workshop and then when he finally had some free time, actually made runs or did other things. Aesop’s + Wyldside has been his go-to economy engine since Core Set.)

It’s a question of targetting the symptoms or the root. Faust is a symptom of the problem, and without the powerhouse of draw that Wyldside is, Faust becomes a smaller problem because you killed the root. It’s arguable that even D4v1d is a symptom, that if you kill Wyldside you wouldn’t have the raw quantity of recursion to return him easily. (I honestly don’t know about that one, but I also think D4v1d isn’t a huge problem for the same reasons @crfluency stated.)

If we ban/restrict/MWL Faust, then it’s only a matter of time before another card comes along that can abuse the Wyldside. I personally like Faust and the way that he trades long-term setup for short-term power, and it offers interesting play.

Faust - Effect: Trade cards for breaking. Doesn’t solve economy issues and won’t work forever.

D4v1d - Effect: Limited use high-strength breaker. Doesn’t solve economy issues and won’t work forever. (Yes, recursion extends its life, but it does eventually run out for good.)

Wyldside - Effect: Offers a constant ‘Click: Draw 2’ effect which isn’t replicated anywhere else in the card pool at this time. It doesn’t work forever, but it does solve economy issues, as you can use Cards to get Money.

So, give Anarch tutors if you don’t want them to draw ?

But we don’t want to target the root, do we? :confused:

We still want orange to be playable and we still want to keep as many archetype alive as possible.

David and wyldside are all well designed and only powerful with other cards in play. They are both the core pieces of the anarch rig. I’m not a big fan on going after the heart.

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