I’ve thought this for a long while, actually. My problem with D4v1d is that it’s often a better breaker than Faerie, for the cost - you pay 3, but you can save upwards of 15 credits with it (1 counter vs, say, Asteroid Belt == 4c to boost Corroder, 1 to break). Or, to use another comparison, Faerie is still paying 3c to break Assassin, while with D4v1d you paid 3 to install and you’ve still got a counter left.
I don’t really see how exploitable Wyldside is without something like Faust to convert cards so efficiently. Its been around forever without causing problems. Shaper has crazy amounts of card draw and its never been an issue. Cards are always good, but they’re normally throttled by clicks + credits.
In concept, I sort of love faust. I like the idea of a non-credit based breaker that you have to sell out for, but then it works. The problem is the cost wasn’t designed high enough.
7 Likes
The problem with the MWL is that most players simply take the regular quantity of the cards they were going to take anyway and take the Influence hit. Perhaps they make some small sacrifices elsewhere, such as less multi-access or a slight hit to econ. In reality, the MWL actually solves nothing, because according to Damon the problem was that these cards were in “a plurality of lists” and the cards are still as prevalent as they ever were.
I mean, really… when’s the last time you saw a Shaper without at least a couple of Clone Chips and three PADs, or an NBN without 3 Astros and 3 SanSans?
Anarchs don’t even give a shit about their Influence. They have an overabundance of good cards. You can build a great Anarch deck and spend zero influence. They’ll keep playing with Faust until you literally rip it out of their hands.
Someone said Faust would be balanced in Criminal… it was spoiled as a blue card! Why didn’t it stay that way?
Between Faust, Museum, and Wireless Net Pavillion, I wonder if they’re even listening to their playtesters…
2 Likes
Padless shapers are more popular than ones with Pads, right now, actually. But that’s specifically because they need an influence dots for HQ pressure, FA control, and an adequate breaker for high strength sentries, unlike Anarch card pool covering everything, which you touched on…
That’s my only worry for hitting Wyldside is that it might dismantle Anarch entirely, similar to hitting Desperado in Criminal. In other words, Wyldside does everything that Anarchs do. They trade Flexibility for Power. The problem is that because Anarch has all of these single-problem solutions (Think of how the Cutlery is done, and how David only helps against Big ICE) that drawing All Of Them ends up being too strong.
I feel the one thing that will make it so Noise can still survive without Wyldside is actually Djinn. Anarch’s only tutor happens to get the exact thing that Noise cares about. I believe MaxX will just stop using WyldCakes, and Whizzard will switch to Earthrise. The other quirk of Earthrise instead of Wyldside, by the way, is that extra copies of Earthrise aren’t Faust Food the way extra Wyldsides are.
The key difference between Wyldside for Anarch vs Desperado for Criminal is that there exist other, viable, engines that Anarchs are already using, but Wyldside+Faust is slowly pushing against those other engines by simply being ridiculous. In Criminal, there weren’t any other viable engines already in existence.
im packing swordsman, aggresive secretary,will o wisp and powershutdown with punitives. and my deck is doing great
sometimes
2 Likes
Honestly, I remain perplexed that this conversation has continued for months. Corps are crazy strong right now: the last thing I want to do is cripple the one runner setup that keeps asset spam from being autowin.
1 Like
I’d have thought that in theory the opposite ought to be the case? Surely a Runner deck with “standard” credit-based breakers will include enough, long-term credit sources in order to fuel that icebreaking? If facing a low-ICE, asset spam deck, those credits can surely be repurposed to trashing assets. By contrast a deck that expects only to need enough resources to fuel finite breakers and ICE-negating tricks won’t have those spare credits to redirect when coming up against a wall of assets.
1 Like
Asset spam is one Corp deck. Other than that, runners are winning more.
FTFY 
But seriously, over on the regional results page we got a detailed breakdown from Madison and while the asset spammers were bolstering the overall win rate, there were some non-asset-spammer IDs boasting even higher winrates than the dreadmills.
2 Likes
Having been witness to the initial high of Anarch with core, then subsequent fall, I find the current dominance of Anarch right now both amusing and satisfying, rather than a problem. Over the course of this LCG, various ‘problems’ have come and gone. Anarch was the whipping boy for so long, and it looked like Criminal would dominate forever.
I chuckle when I hear Crim players say, “all Crim gets is cheap influence cards that just get imported into other factions.” That was the warcry of Anarchs for ages. I can think of no better example of the “living” state of the game than to see dominance ebb and flow and have arguments surface years later - but for an entirely different faction.
And for the record, I certainly don’t think these conversations are without value. We need to talk about these things. In the end though, the card pool will change and the meta will shift. Someone will knock down the current “King of the Hill” and take the crown.
It’s not the sky falling - it’s just the wheel turning. If you stick around long enough, you will see it happen.
7 Likes
But the issue is the power creep that comes along the way. Andysucker hasn’t gotten any worse, there are just even better decks now.
Decks getting better isn’t power creep, at least not in a sinister way. It’s the nature of a game that continually adds cards. Nobody would claim Core decks to match the power of today’s winning lists, or call that power creep.
Power creep is insidious when a card is essentially the same or better in every measurable way to an older, staple card. I don’t think that applies here.
2 Likes
Tbh, if platesters have little to say, this is called a premiere, not playtesting ?
1 Like
2x Pancake would transform maybe into Salsette Slums, which is still food for Faust against a glacier. This particular point is unchanged.
Play the deck… You makes me think about me ranting against Syphon until I tried to play it efficiently.
Today, is MaxX > Whizzard ? No.
So maybe Anarch drawing cards is not the main problem.
Maybe you did not change your playing since Lunar, I don’t really know. But in this meta, you need new solutions, and they allready exist.
-.-
Mumba Temple vs Dedicated Server is pretty close though.
5 Likes
Dedicated server is hardly a staple though. 
1 Like
I think it’s pretty clear why, too. Mumba Temple breaks a lot of the balance ‘rules’ because of its stipulation on 15 ice. Clearly this was designed when 15 ice was considered low or something.
Though you could still pay 2 influence (like Dedicated Server) and run it with 16 ice. What an unbalanced little card. Hence it’s everywhere.
3 Likes
I think it would be better if it was something like 10 or 12 ice, not that I see Mumba Temple as a problem really.
I don’t know if it’s a ‘problem’ either. Sometimes unbalanced cards are important to print - they can be fun, powerful, meta-defining, archetype-enabling, etc. (I won’t pass judgement on whether Temple serves such a purpose). But it certainly breaks a lot of the previous balance trends established on corp econ assets.