The top thoughts I can see out of faction is Mandatory Upgrades, swapping the SanSan City Grid influence for Media Blitz, saving credits and swapping around fragility. It’s worth dabbling to see just how worthwhile it is (SanSan is more resilient but Media Blitz Upgrades gives you a universal fourth click and saves you three credits). You could technically salvage bad agenda picks killing your current with Archived Memories. Self-Destruct Chips and Sentinel Defense Force = no.
Weyland imo does not have the influence to spend on Media Blitz, though their agendas and deck structure (Gov Takeover decks have low density for currents) support it. The decks just not there.
Jinteki = no. Medical Breakthrough is interesting but no, 3 influence.
In faction = no? Restructured Datapool is awesome but its very bad against linked runners. Too situational. Rebranding Team is meh, I’m not even playing it my Spark builds.
Utopia Fragment is an interesting one though. Probably not reliable enough and you’d have to fast track.
Restructured Datapool is good enough in Making News vs 1-link runners. If they have 2 or more, I agree it’s not great…unless you also run PTD for more trace credits or you’re very rich.
Oh man… It hadn’t even twigged that you could bring back those Special Offers with an Ad Blitz. As they’re effectively Hedge Fund, this just lets you continue to recur econ! Roll on that operation free deck. Shame we’re seeing a resurgence in AI breakers with Faust on the scene.
Faust is fine, since it will tax them a card. For ICE that rezzes for 1, that’s pretty solid tax. If they ever don’t pay it, you get your investment back immediately.
That said, Special Offer gets a lot less grand if you have to put it in a multi-ice server. I’m thinking that it’ll be best when you’ve got some assets you want to protect, but protect thinly. NEH seems like a prime place for it to protect PAD campaigns or SanSan/DBS
I don’t think so, unless you want to ensure (siphon?) being able to rez a piece of ICE ona remote no matter how much econ denial comes in. Special Offer’s 1 credit rez cost makes that a harder sell.
If you’re installing it infront of ICE, you’ve turned it from a spare Hedge Fund into a worse Beanstalk (worse because it’s the same return but now you can’t use it from 0 and you have to pay down 1 credit to do the install at all).
I’m pretty sure it’ll only be good when it’s the only ICE on the server or early game centrals ICE. Otherwise it becomes an increasingly weak economy card. On its own, though, it’s way nicer than the old situation of putting a popup infront of a PAD to increase the tax of trashing it since it’s a better one-time gain than Pop-up
I’ve finally started my foray in to the D&D cardpool for NBN, messing around with all 3 IDs. Having a lot of fun with Sol and Spark but I just keep seeing Butchershop in every build I make. Sol can exploit Surveillance Sweep quite well (especially by playing it after a steal into Midseasons/SEA) and Spark really wants to tag for Closed Accounts, and Sync is directly related to tagging.
I feel like every thing I build ends up splashing Scorched/TA. Am I missing something here or is this always the right call.
Note that Surveillance Sweep only works during a run. It doesn’t help you SEA Source or Midseason a runner.
Death is one way to punish tags, but it involves spending a lot of influence and thus shoe-horning your deck into murder. You can also punish tags with Psychographics, All Seeing I and Closed Accounts, all within faction. Psychographics is my personal favorite as it is the best FA tool in the game if you can sneak a few tags on. We’ve also gained a few more pieces of soft tag punishment in Resistor and Reality Threedee. Basically, try and build an NBN rush deck and use tags as tax, with the option of turning them into an accelerator if the runner floats them. Clearing tags is very taxing and if you can profit from a runner going tagme (and tagme doesn’t subsequently blank a lot of your ICE) then it could be interesting.
This card looks unplayable to me. The Bad Pub is really ugly even if you assume it pays 2c per turn. I agree with the rest of your post. Closed Accounts and psycho have been very good for a long time.
It’s not in any of my decks right now, but I’m not writing it off yet. But yes, Bad Pub is terrible for a deck that’s likely running several traces. That said, it immediately becomes much better if you have Broadcast Square, but then you’re looking at paying money to make money which is a tough call.
Do you object to the ID, or using it in that deck? He’s got a lot of ads in there, so I think he’ll get milage out of it.
As for the ID its self, I’m looking forward to testing it. I’m not sure it’ll be strong, but the ability to drop the runner to 3 credits at the start of their first turn (rez 1 ad at the end of corp turn 1 and the other at the beginning of runner turn 1) seems intriguing. Not sure about that particular deck, but I’m not convinced the ID its self is trash.
Special Offer’s a bit of a trap. You need to put it where the runner is going to run; but if you put it someplace you already have ice it loses a lot of value.
Not sure if it’s a trap, per se. Just a lot harder to play than you’d think given that it just looks like another hedge fund.
I think it shines nicely protecting PADs or SanSans, or something that you can throw down over a central early (or archives to discourage checking) in order to continue to make a profit in the ramp up.