Leela is good because her ability makes her naturally strong against NEH. it’s an ICE light deck that really wants to take advantage of the time the runner is using to set up. Oh, you want to score that Astro early? That’s fine, Siphon, Siphon, Legwork. Oh you’re going to hold back until you have ICE enough to stop that horrible thing from happening? I’ll just set up my rig and then start Legworking you then while that Astro is still in your hand. Because she has natural defenses vs the rush deck, she has room to pack a lot of hate for the Glacier decks too. She’s less consistent, but she’s definitely good.
The Crim dog is good not becasue you are playing it over Passport. You play it with Passport. It’s great. Ross, I played Gordians and Passport at worlds and I was really happy with it, and I would consider it again. But the influence you save could be anything (it could even be a Gordian’s Blade). I think the Crim dog is the best one. Shaper doesn’t really need it as much as criminal did, replacing Corroder is worse value than replacing Gordian’s (not to mention that you are replacing a 4 cost with a 3 in crim rather than replacing a 2 with a 4 in Shaper) , and it saves you 2 influence rather than 3.
I agree about Rex. I’ve found it to be a great replacement for Zu or Gordian when run with Passport, and you can use the influence on anything else. 2-3 influence is nothing to be sneezed at, it packs 1 more strength than Zu, and breaks for free. I don’t think 3 creds to install is a tremendous amount.
Fair enough. The influence save from using Zu or Gordian could go into something like a(nother) Parasite, more R&D dig, or whatever. Which isn’t something to sneeze at.
Just now I know to pack Levy University and build the dream remote of 3 Quandarys, 2 Enigmas and something to stop the Inside Job!
One thing I’m finding with leela is you need hard hitting programs/events like medium/TME and Legwork/NA/HQI. The reason being is into the midgame you have the luxury of not forcing a rez of more than 1 ice on a remote, when a glacier player goes to score, you legwork/TME and pull up an agenda, lift that card out of the remote and you’re safe to set up more. Basically criminal’s greatest weakness, glacier, gets handled pretty good. Another route is to weaken the remote to inside job by lifting the outer ice and inside job it to score it from the table. It’s flexible.
Also once they stick the agenda out there, if you can steal one with TME, now you can legwork HQ (or sneakdoor + HQI, whatever) for a good shot at snagging that same agenda from HQ. Use criminal tricks to buy yourself time to draw into these cards, in addition to her innate ability to make the corp not want to score.
These tools as described above also work when you just let the corp score, bounce HQ or RnD Ice and hit that server hard with your multi access. You can get the corp coming and going with her ability, and she’s strong against PE. She’s definitely up there in strength, I’d say above Gabe, but I love Gabe.
For me 3 Same Old Thing, 2-3 TME and 2-3 legwork are a must, so you have access to multiaccess event runs when you need them.
The Shaper dog gets through Eli for 1 credit, four times. That alone is enough to play it, I think. Plus in Shaper you can easily Scavenge/Clone Chip it. 4 cost is a little steep so it’s less desirable to SMC than Corroder, but if you run Modded in Kate, you get it for free. I think the dogs will slowly grow on people as everyone realizes the influence they can potentially open up in your decks.
You dont need help getting through Eli in shaper though. That’s what Atman does, better than any other card in the game. Atman always has, and always will be the the Eli breaker in Shaper. The shaper dog is replacing corroder or snowball or inti, and it’s worse than all of them unless you’re already running scavenge in your deck. It’s fine if you are, but it provides nowhere near the freedom and utility that Rex gives to criminal. And if you’re running the dog instead of Atman, that’s just crazy.
I think that DBS is an easy 7, and that you’re underrating BOTH the criminal and shaper dogs.
DBS is usually just better than PAD campaign, and that still sees plenty of play after all of this time. For 1 influence outside of NBN, you can splash one of these. There are plenty of times when I build a deck and have one influence left over with nothing to do with besides put a wraparound in or something.
The shaper dog is just filthy efficient. It’s the only non-corroder fracter I would ever consider running. @Calimsha crushed me with these dogs recently, and I would go so far as to say it’s the primary reason not to play Atman in shaper right now.
The criminal dog is mostly just good because of lack of better options. Neither Yog nor Gordian Blade are great splashes anymore, but everyone has been putting up with playing one of them. Now you can just play some dogs alongside passport and call it a day. I don’t know if it’s a great plan, but it sounds reasonable enough, especially for criminal decks that plan on pounding centrals and just need to have some way of breaking remote code gates.
Everyone is going to have a different opinion, and no one is going to be right all of the time, so I’ll just go ahead and say this is one of the better Netrunner set reviews. I would have been more brutal on some of the cards I think will never see play outside of wonky decks, but the wonky deck lovers would crucify you if you told them superior cyberwalls is proxy fodder.
Also, let me be the first to say that a singleton Snatch and Grab in Redcoats style decks is amazing. I’ve always had an issue with people being able to just load up Kati for a number of turns while I try and do things but now they can’t get too out of control before I am capable of killing her.
I’d say you can make an argument for DBS, EBC and the Shaper dog to be a “7” instead of a “6”. Just based on the criteria I posted above, I felt they fall into the 6 instead of 7.
DBS: It’s great for people who want specific cards but don’t want to draw. For everyone else, there’s Jackson Howard.
EBC: Just not going to be played outside of glacier/slow builds in my opinion. Still great for glacier builds though, and Asset tutor is definitely worth playing. Probably end up getting cut as splash as the 50th card.
Lady: It’s stupid efficient, just as you stated. Without recursion it looks a lot worse and if you’re spending recursion on Lady you’re missing out on recurring other great things like Femme. Rivals Corroder only because you have to spend influence on Corroder.
Rex: I actually played with Rex in a switchblade Andy deck before posting this. I had originally rated Rex at 5 or 6, but reduced it after playing with it. Passport just seems like a better option.
Those are my reasons, anyways. Like you said there’s no pleasing everyone. People crucify reviewers no matter what. That’s why it’s fun. It gives the community a chance to open up and talk about cards and possibilities to make the game more interesting, using the review as a standing point or point of dissent.
I think it might be better if we switched away from set reviews in general to a “so-and-so’s top 5 picks from whatever-set”. A lot of people get put off when their favorite card is panned as unplayable in competitive netrunner, (it’s not that Acquisition is bad, it’s just not breaking news). Furthermore, I think there is more value in spending time putting together reasons/decklists for why we think a card is good rather than quibbling over number ratings of mediocre cards. Expect me to do a top 10 picks from Order and Chaos in the near future. Anyone who does set reviews for us is encouraged to switch to this format for the future, (nothing against this set review, though, it was very very good).
If tollbooth came out last season there would have been arguments over set reviews with some saying it’s 5/10 at best because single-sub ice just dies to Femme. Now there’s no doubt it’s back up to 8+ thanks to architect making people play mimic.
Something similar goes for the dog heads. If the meta were 80% blue sun, Lady’s rate would be pretty embarrassing, but the meta is still 80% eli 1.0 decks, which IMO makes her an auto-1-of in every green deck.
As for the blue and red dogs, the rate on them is actually pretty similar. Difference is that the blue one has a home waiting for it, as it complements passport, while the red one doesn’t, as d4v1d plus mimic already cover all sentries that anarchs are worried about.
Having a home in every single deck archetype is something we should be scared of - we don’t want them to be releasing new NAPD contracts or datasuckers every single pack.
I would rephrase the descriptions of this range something like:
6: Strong candidate for one particular deck archetype, but easy to cut (bootcamp, blue dog)
7: Staple or almost-always-include for one archetype (daily business, lady, architect)
8: Auto-include / build-around card for one archetype (caprice, TFP, oversight AI, biotic, sansan, identity cards for good but not meta-warping decks)
Well, I would rank them within the picks I think. I think about 25% of every datapack sees some play, for the most part, (based on a scientific study in which i thought about it for a second), and I wouldn’t want to make it so narrow that you miss a lot of important cards.
This is why I personally don’t like number rating systems. The number realy could mean anything. Personally, I liked Mike Flores’ set review system for MTG. He use to gives them ratings like “Role player”, “Staple” or “Flagship”. There is a huge difference between those 3, but a role player might end up seeing more play than a flagship depending on the meta. Maybe a rating within those categories. I dunno. But 's weird to me to rate cards as completely different like Eli and Oversight AI on the same scale, getting such similar scores.
If you got some time, you should try the list i’ve posted on the big shaper thread, maybe make some adjustements on it depending on your playstile (i’ve cut the third legwork for two stimhack for instance) and you will see how this dog is filthy strong. Combined with CyberCypher, Scavenge and Clone Chip you’ve got a rig who can get through all the barrier/code gate for almost nothing and with a ridiculously low install cost.
Lella is really hard to rate; I think overall though, a good plan is to build your regular old explosive crim deck and see what happens: you don’t get the start if andy, or the early money of gabe, but this ability really lasts all game and can open the board way up in so many different ways as so many different times.
that said, run NEXT foundry against her and LAUGH ON INTO THE NIGHT
CybSoft is nice in addition to Cyberfeeder in Anarch. Takes the place of Sahasrara, in those builds, and saves MU.
Bifrost Array is great in CI, especially 7-point CI decks. Makes it easy to do one-turn scores by reloading EffCom.
License Acquisition is good in the yet-to-be-popular taxing NBN style decks, which will be more popular when FA-NBN dies down due to Clot/Traffic Jam. Been playtesting with it lately, and bringing back things like Adonis Campaign or The Root already rezzed is a fantastic ability.
