Recently people on BGG and elsewhere have been talking up pretty dedicated flatline decks-- Weyland decks running 3x Scorched Earth, 3x Punitive Counterstrike, and the Accelerated Diagnostics combo.
Do these decks have any credibility? My impression is “no, people are just running incompetently against them,” but they’ve taken a few Store Championships with pretty strong results, so I think it may merit further investigation.
i think they are pretty janky but will beat up the average field at a store championship.
there are a lot of factors going on but here are few.
there is no magnum opus in the field. infinite money on the runner side is a problem for pure flatline decks. they cannot flatline if they never have more money than the runner and usually cannot reverse course and start chaining out agendas because they cut corners on ice.
anarchs have the best tools to empty the kill cards and transaction econ out of the corps hand but are currently considered the weakest runner faction.
the pure flatline deck is only one type of weyland deck that someone may bring to a tourney. even if you are a good player and know to stay ahead or even on money how quickly can you identify the type of weyland deck you are playing against ? some weyland decks rush agendas. some are hybrids that score agendas with a back up scorch plan etc if you misidentify your opponents strategy you may be in trouble.
its also hard to dial back the aggression in a field with HB and NBN FA also present. say round 1 and 2 are against NBN rush and HB FA. are you disciplined enough to dial back on the aggression that won you the first two rounds when you see the weyland id card? maybe. maybe not. it takes a lot of discipline and experience to change gears rapidly.
Weyland against a general field will always be a pretty good choice since they have several cards that the runner has to play around or they sometimes just lose. Also it can be pretty hard to play around everything until you have gotten enough information about the corpdeck to determine what kind of list he is running. That said, strong runners can and will know early what they are facing and then it should be very hard to flatline them. And if your meta is cutting plascretes it gets alot stronger…
In my experience, the flatline decks have to win quickly, or lose in the end. Unless you manage to score Government Contracts on the threat of the kill, it just isn’t feasible to stay ahead in credits against a runner that decides to play passively (god forbid they actually have an MO econ or something)… and if the runner plays slowly and cautiously, eventually you’ll choke on agendas (you can’t really hold your kill combo pieces and all the agendas you’ll be drawing), or the runner will slowly creep to 7, all the time avoiding your kill windows. Also, don’t underestimate the fact that you’re still a combo deck at heart, and it’s quite possible it’ll take you a decent while to assemble all your pieces.
Also, getting siphoned sucks even more than usual when you’re running this kind of deck - you don’t have enough ICE to reasonably protect both centrals that matter, and a successful siphon is a 10-credit swing (even after dumping the tags) - that’s usually too much of a setback to be able to get into the killzone again.