I hereby convene this emergency session of the Conference of NLA cyber-criminals.
Seriously, I want to know where everyone thinks the faction stands. The way I see it, it just took a mean blow to the head and shows no signs of immediate recovery. No Account Siphon? No Andromeda? No Desperado? There’s not been a competitive Criminal deck in…ever that did not make heavy use of these cards.
I mean, I understand that the entire meta will be shaken, and it’s not like other factions didn’t lose good cards, but most of them have at least one clear path going forward. Anarchs had good decks that didn’t use Medium. Weyland barely even used Scorched Earth anymore. Etc.
I’m not sure Criminals didn’t just become sub-competitive for a while.
I would love to try out and see how Silhouette fares in the post-rotation/revised core set meta, but I fear it is indeed very difficult to keep up without the core tools that made criminals what they once were. The pressure of seeing blue is no longer there I think. Or not as much as it was before at least.
Then again, I am indeed happy that you will now see red and you will think of anarch things instead of just siphon spam extraordinaire.
I have 0 interest in playing Criminal until cycle 8, and honestly as a Criminal fan I’m pretty down on the game right now. I like how FFG made sure to replace Weyland’s fun, iconic card (Scorched) before removing it, and I really, really wish they had done the same with Criminal and Siphon. As a Criminal fan, I will probably not play a lot of Netrunner until whatever the siphon replacement is comes out.
But, I do see Kim with Friday Chip and Imps being decent. Dunno really, I am not a big anarch player or anything, so I wanna see what the people with experience on that faction will do with it.
Geist should 100% still be playable; he’s losing very little. Some Geist decks didn’t even run Siphon anyway, and Fall Guy moving into core is great for him.
I think Anarchs got it much worse than Criminal. Losing Parasite and one of the usable fixed-strength breakers hurts. Also, Fairchild 2 is now an amazing piece of ICE, as is Komainu. as their natural predators have been removed.
Faerie going evergreen is a nice boost, and replacing Ninja isn’t causing anyone any grief. Evergreen HQI is strong too – Gabe loves that card. Losing Account Siphon and Despy does suck, but I’m interested to see new similar cards in the future. Maybe the short-term is weaker, but long term I’m sure blue will be strong.
Also, all of the corps have gotten weaker with rotation (just losing Jackson hurts them all), so runners losing a step probably just keeps the game closer to balanced.
That was my first thought. Some sort of Geist + DDM build is probably super good, considering how gimped multiaccess in general is now. It was always hard for Geist to leverage the pressure of early siphons because he’d rather be setting up in the first several turns of the game, so I don’t think it comes as much of a loss.
More seriously, I think losing siphon probably affects anarchs more. Criminals should still be able to find ways to win, and in Emergency Shutdown they still have one of the games most powerful events. Furthermore, with less RnD multiaccess, and without Jackson in the game, HQ pressure will likely become a much bigger deal and so their multiaccess will gain some value. Finally, they probably remain as good a faction at dealing with mass assets as Anarchs even without desperado (Anarchs lose whizzard at the same time).
Obviously this doesn’t mean Criminal decks will be the same as they have been, but I would imagine they can still be good and am excited to see what they might look like. My first take would basically be a standard Andy deck with FIS, the ID swapped to Fisk, Doppelganger for desperado and equivocation for medium. Play a couple of Shutdowns instead of siphons and use mobius to keep hitting RnD, while also stuffing HQ for Legworks.
In the long run, I expect this to be good for Criminals. More than any other faction thier design space was tied up by the core set: they were never able to print anything remotely siphon like despite it being thier most iconic card and mechanic; they were trapped in tag-me for 2 whole cycles (arguably longer); none of thier non-run econ options were ever worth exploring. We might now see a larger number of balanced cards exploring these themes rather than just one or two overpowered ones.
I like your thinking re: Emergency Shutdown. I think it’s a good “uh oh” card to have in a core set experience. It accomplishes a little of what Siphon did—draining Corp credits or creating a credit differential for the runner—without creating an endless cycle of misery.
I agree with all the points about Emergency Shutdown. Overall, the new theme seems to be more of a soft denial in the form of derez instead a hard “you have no money whatsoever”-denial if you get Siphon going. I’m ok with this change.
Also keep in mind, we keep HQI as @BubbaTheGoat mentioned. Gang Sign, HQI, Aumakua, Aeneas etc. should be at least a reasonable shell, if not a good one. Add some seasoning with FIS or maybe Pheromones and enjoy.
Siphon and Siphon replacement existing together would create an oppressive deck using both (which doesn’t happen with SE and Boom because here tags are the bottleneck, not the amount of kill cards available). I think the replacement will come very soon anyway, as the article about first pack of new cycle mentions amoral Criminals chanelling corp funds to their own accounts
I would start looking from decks which didn’t use all of those: Geist and Leela, both used no Andy and no Desperado. Geist, as already mentioned, didn’t rely on Siphon much. Leela used threat of Siphon to make the corp delay their scoring, but now, with Jackson gone, HQ multiaccess can do the same thing - it will be way easier to flood the corp with agendas.
No siphon,no Desperado is the best thing ever happened to Criminals.Honestly I believe some people are just so accustomed to certain cards that not only they don’t want to play anything else,but also they think any changes are unacceptable.
i think it’s easier to look at who benefited most from Core 2.0.
Jinteki who was already a natural criminal predator gets to keep ronin and gift and says goodbye to net shield and parasite (kakugo sends its regards). I’d expect people to gravitate to Jinteki which by default makes playing criminal rough because the only real trick crim had was siphon to zero and access everything.
shaper loses Kate and RDI but has RnD pressure in spades anyways and now has every other faction having to borrow from them to pressure RnD. RnD pressure is quite important so I’d expect everyone to follow the path of least resistance and play shaper and borrow from criminal for legworks.
Shaper is also best equipped to deal with Jinteki (feedback filter and film critic) plus its the faction with recursion(clone chip,levy) now that deja vu is gone.
My prediction is shaper v Jinteki until Boggs can seed enough cards into the other factions to rebuild their foundations.
Hostage is a big hole. It made Geist playable (to get out traders and fall guys) and also let out of faction connection 1ofs find their way into crim decks.
