E. Kim Appreciation Thread

Netrunner General
583

Actually your completely right. Dropping ops from a corps hand may seem a shallow amount of aggression from where im sat but it could derail a game plan for the other side of the table.

584

Oh, of course. But when you run R&D on turn 2 and trash it, that can seem low impact - because it doesn’t impact corp turn 3 (usually) but it will probably matter at some point.

Even from R&D, it matters. You get a Celebrity Gift and a Hedge Fund? That’s 10 credits of Ops that the corp doesn’t have in the deck any more. While deny from deck isn’t quite denying from pool, it does add up.

585

Had a game last night against a Titan where I thrashed 2 Hedge Fund, 2 Restructure, 2 Beanstalk, a Scorched and a SEA Source. Felt good. :smile:

I’ve gone back from Symmetrical Visage to Earthrise Hotel in my build. I needed the extra click that the hotel gains me. I also cut the Liberated Accounts and 1 Kati for 3 Armitage Codebustings, which did wonders for maintaining tempo. It’s the right call for my playstyle.

I still really like Imp here, because it’s so versatile, but I’ll try the Ice Carver / Scrubber idea in the future as well. Should indeed alleviate MU issues.

And @ItJustGotRielle, what are you doing playing Plascrete in Kim? :stuck_out_tongue:

586

I’m playing a very janky Ed deck atm, it’s really fun but not competitive yet.

Draw is Inject / IHW / Wyldside / Pancake / one Larla
It got a double crusade comet module that Hayley showed and lot of run events. Chop boting instead of Aesoping stuff like Beach parties.
I’m hesitating on the double module, not sure it’s really working out of shaper (QG-> Sing is one clic 2c + trash that server though)

I’m working on this, the list is not really show-able for now :wink:

1 Like
587

Yea the few times I played using kati to drop liberated is just too rough. Symmetrical is the kind to help keep a bit of pace to put down liberated, but end up not really running. I also still have this Morning Star sitting in my deck, so memory is a hard issue. Atman isn’t cheap either, but all of them really don’t need to show up until later. The other option was Lucky Find for a SO and Clone and keep the Liberated. SMC/Stim I kept ending up with the good programs in my hand.

588

So heres the list from last night. I know i said 6-1 but to be honest it could of been either 5 or 6 games, i cant remember, all i know is i only dropped 1 of them. We were playing lots of games back to back, so i ran Ed against the same deck 2-3 times in a row, which is pretty standard practice for me when switching runners and archetypes. By the end of the night i felt like i was getting a real handle on Kim.

Ill be taking a overhauled version of the list to a GNK over the weekend to see how i handle Kim in a competitive environment.

So the list. The datasucker rig is pretty savage when set up. Special orders helped, so did over the top card draw. Funnily enough though the issue was money. A lot of the econ takes credits to install or play haha, so i found situations where i had to click up to install liberated or earthrise. The new version includes clone chips + SMC’s over special orders and the sneakdoor, and uses inject for draw instead of earthrise. Hopefully thats going to speed things up a bit.

Sneakdoor i genuinely believe is a good call in Kim. His ID ability makes sneakdoor an insane central pressure tool. The problem is MU. Iv yet to find the breaker suite that is as cheap or efficient as the anarch 'sucker rig, and less than 5 MU. I dont want to turn to interfaces for multiaccess because thats silly - its anarch, you have some of the best multi access tools in the fame IN FACTION.
Iv no idea how the criminals pull it off with just desperado, but im going to start looking at sneakdoor gabe decks as inspiration because i think sneakdoor in kim has a future. For the time being though, im shelving it to free up inf and MU.

Hacktivist is pretty annoying for the corp, but just that. Playing it and having it played against me, you just play around it. I have 30% cards in my hand that i care about at this point in the game, or i have a suitable way to recur them, or im about to score and kill HM anyway - screw it, trash the card out of HQ and ill rez something anyway. 100% of games last night when HM was played, this exact thing happened.

Its a pest, not a deterrent. Sometimes you just dont care about rezzing that non ice. Its a good tilt move though, you can watch your opponents reaction to it and get some good tells.

Its (HM) staying in the deck, because yeah its an ant bite but 1000 ant bites will kill you (dont look that up, just take my word for it), but i think hacktivist can be a 2x include and still be as punishing as it ever will be, the notable exception i think to this is if you are going for eater/vamp horror show econ denial, then yeah, play 3x for crisium hate.

Queens Gambit works VERY well with HM though.

I never needed to install Zu or femme, and yeah i know every said it already :stuck_out_tongue: , they should both be taken out for an atman@4.

I wanted a nerve agent every game i played. I wanted a knifed every game too.

Ed Aggro rev1

Edward Kim: Humanity’s Hammer (Order and Chaos)

Event (18)

Hardware (3)

Resource (10)

Icebreaker (7)

Program (7)

15 influence spent (max 15)
45 cards (min 45)
Cards up to Breaker Bay

Deck built on NetrunnerDB.

1 Like
589

Yep, I had exactly the same issue. Good to hear I’m not the only one. Believe me when I say to try Armitage instead of Liberated. You feel the difference instantly. :smile:

590

My desire isn’t to troll, but I want to pose this question to Kim lovers: aren’t you totally playing on hard mode by choosing E.Kim?

This is my hierarchy of Anarchs:

MaxX-super strong ability, essentially 5 clicks and built in ghetto-tutor system. Able to attack with regular breakers or eater shenanigans well.

Noise-most disruptive ability, so much so he doesn’t need to run as often. He pressures just by building his board and econ.

Valencia-great built in Econ. Blackmail is both an alternative way to pressure/control early and exploit Anarch cards or gain econ late. Can make use of tutors/reg breakers or do Eater shennanigans with Blackmail to control remotes.

Reina-the Headlock build is tough to deny, and she exploits it well. It can be nullified at high levels of play though, leaving her pretty sunk. Straight up she’s sub par to MaxX and Val.

Quetzal-a close second to MaxX for utilizing Eater builds. Siphon probably really good in her too. Otherwise the econ gained from her ability is too conditional. Better playing MaxX or Val.

Whizzard-great econ ability in more than half the match ups, but the old Siphon builds are too fragile. He’s good with Reg breakers and tutors, but still is a half-step too slow. Better off playing MaxX or Val, or Kate.

E.Kim-needs to access to be effective, so a straight up tutor build seems the best, but he has absolutely no economic support besides 1 link. His ability could act as a built in Imp for late game Medium runs, but you have to get there for that to work. If reg MaxX is fast enough and reg Whizzard is a half-step too slow, reg Kim is a full step too slow.

I’m interested to hear other evaluations of Kim relative to other Anarchs. As of now I think he could have been a 40-card min runner.

2 Likes
591

At this point we’re trying to solve a puzzle “how to win with Kim.” I can say no one thought Rose was going to win an EVO tourny, but there she was 2013 because someone saw something from that character no one else has. We have harder numbers here so it might be completely futile, but it’s still takes time to hash out.

2 Likes
592

I don’t see it that way- Kim gains strength as the game progresses. With standard breakers, the Corp must ice a decent amount to keep you out. The SMC + Stimhack play gives you access on rush decks (scoring behind an early Lotus Field, etc). If you are putting ice down as the game progresses, and you fire Jackson (which all decks still play 3 of), unless you had 3 agendas you need to bury, you are putting econ cards back in. So if you are scaling properly into late-game as Kim (with a completed rig and end-game economy options), Medium becomes a much greater threat to you the longer the game goes:

  1. You are not playing much ice, so my accesses are cheap and aggression level much higher.
    -or-
  2. You are playing 2/3 of your ice (typical), meaning R&D is becoming more dense with trashable assets and Operations.

As the game goes on (psi games being the exception here), you cannot keep a full rig runner with Stimhacks out of a remote. This being said, a Corp will use Jacksons not for getting ice back, but to put back in useful tools (Interns, Trick of Light, Oversight AI) and economy operations (Hedge Fund, Sweeps Week, Celebrity Gift), or spent asset economy (Adonis, Eve, Sundew, PADs, MHC) as their R&D grows thinner, trying to increase the draw odds for getting another to try and muscle in a score window. This means that with a Scrubber and Medium as Kim, R&D digs become substantially more devastating as the game progresses. The impact of Kim’s ability is substantial when it works, yes, and the same is said of every anarch’s ability. MaxX has a great ability except when your Punk Rock throws 75% of your recursion cards away before you Levy; Whizzard is great except when the Corp pulls ahead early with burst econ operations, Noise is great except when you spend half the game drawing for an Aesops that you swear to god is in there somewhere.

Losing an early Hedge Fund off of R&D matters. Losing an Interns at any point matters; you put an interns in instead of another ice because you want that redundancy in your deck- so acting as if it’s inconsequential is simply false. You don’t put bad cards in a deck, so losing any of them is bad. You are losing the ability to steer the game in the direction you want each time you lose an operation, being limited much more rigidly to “get money, install ice, score agendas” in a very cut-and-dry fashion. Realizing this and building a deck to break remotes while still keeping up R&D pressure allows him to thrive. Kim is not just a worse, red shaper. He is not a denial runner like Reina building a deck to keep her ability relevant all game, not a blitz runner like MaxX rushing you down. Noise also gives disruption, but it is a much more chaotic disruption, you’re losing a little of everything, and the runner doesn’t know what you’re losing til he checks. Edward Kim makes you lose valuable cards, and the both you and the Corp know exactly what is being lost each time, and Kim can then act on the information. When you are losing lots of ops, you are relying on asset econ, or you are recycling those ops into R&D while still mandatory-drawing each turn, making R&D more dense, making accesses even more potent.

Anarch breakers are so efficient, you don’t need economic support. You said so yourself, a tutor build is the best. You have the best economy card in the game, Stimhack, a click for 9 credits and a run. You weaken your grip size using it, but your ability lets you trash the ops that would threaten that smaller grip size. You have Parasite in faction to destroy ice that you can’t break cheaply (the only two coming to mind in my build is Ichi 1.0 and Tsurugi), you have D4v1d in faction to walk through Tollbooths when you need to, and your faction has great heap recursion. Different runners do different things, and even small changes from one I.D. to the next within the same faction can greatly influence the way the deck operates, the way it is built, and the way you pilot it to utilize it.

4 Likes
593

With no hand size modifiers, and me being a fan of Stimhacking, I had to do it. First off, I got wrecked at a little GNK tournament up here on runner side, getting flatlined 3 times- once by Scorches, and twice by a Punitive for 6 points after taking a Government Takeover as my first agenda. For whatever the reason 3 Government Takeover decks were at the GNK tournament and I learned that IHW doesn’t do much when you have a hand size of 4 and take 6 meat damage. It was a necessary evil so that it never happens to me again like that :stuck_out_tongue:

NBN Scorch decks are getting hot again, and the Breaking News + Traffic Accident + Scorch is a thing to be really concerned about. The single Plascrete is a security blanket for me; it’s hard being a shirtless one-handed vigilante in the world these days.

594

Eh, possibly. I play to have fun and deck building is 50% of that for me. Otherwise id net deck whatever was hot and ignore anything that wasnt hitting a high winrate.

Thing is, Kim i think is a sleeper ID. Not sleeper in the exile-needs-a-few-more-cards sense. I mean that there is an inherent aggression to his ability that i think can be as effective as some of the other regarded top tier anarch ID’s. If i’m honest i think noise’s ability is the most out right aggressive in the whole game. But Kim’s is certainly potentially just as disruptive.

Consider the play, your run HQ with imp. You can blow away a card, reducing HQ density and potentially hurting econ or disrupting the corps game plan. The key here is the former, not the latter. You reduce density of whatever your hitting. Not everytime, not consistently no. But combine it with the times you hit something you can pay to trash, or an agenda. Now its consistent pressure.

Another example, one iv done many times. Playing noiseshop. They install 1 ICE over HQ turn 1, leave RND open. You have a cache and maybe another cheap virus in hand. You run RND, see nothing. Install cache to mill the card you just saw and run again, seeing a completely new card. You’ve reduced the density of RND and achieved multi access without and interface or medium.

Kim has the same capacity for aggression, i think its subtle compared to noise but its there. Here’s another thing to consider - when someone slaps noise down, which central are you going to be keeping an eye on over the course of the game? Just by the virtue of being noise you have pushed the corp into a defensive stance where they need to keep you out of archives. When Kim hits the table the corp is looking to shift click expenditure to operations, leaving them in hand is risky, they will try and score quicker because scorch is less of a threat, econ can become an issue and it can be difficult to rebound from a costly run where they had to rez a lot of ICE… the game changes.

595

Depends on definitions. He’s a challenge not because his ability is weak, but because he doesn’t have an established deck. There’s a difference between unexplored and shit.

I’m playing the deck because I’ve always wanted to be more aggressive in Anarch without going full siphon (and all the risks that entails), basically since core set. Kim really rewards that.

Kim is more disruptive than noise in the short term. Long term Noise catches up, of course.

I mean, most anarchs don’t have built in econ. Only Val, Whizzard (and maybe sorta Quetzal) have that. If that’s what you require from an ID, then yeah, Kim doesn’t have that. Neither does Leela, for that matter, and she’s still good.

However, post O&C, Anarchs are so much better on so many fronts. IHW makes plascrete less necessary. Day Job is a pain, but it works. Vigil is monster.

The power of Kim is very, very straightforward - he makes the most stable, reliable card type tissue paper. I’ve said that up and down this thread, but it’s super critical. When building corp decks, people expect to be able to use their ops, sooner or later. Kim throws a monkey wrench (well really just a hammer) into that plan. Kim’s early accesses mean something that MaxX’s or Whizzard’s don’t.

Whizzard makes sorta fragile things REALLY fragile. Kim takes the indestructible and breaks it accidentally.

Could he have been a 40/15? Eh, right now I don’t think so. The one link is enough.

2 Likes
596

Is Progenitor really pulling its weight in this deck compared to Parasite? You even have 2 Deja Vu to make Viruses better

597

I’ve had harder times making that call for Nerve really. The times I ran Sneakdoor I didn’t want to go broke and once the Sneakdoor was down Archives gets iced. My first deck was 3x SMC using Armitage/Liberated/Casts money. Progenitor sounds like a great memory solution, but it’s hard over Djinn with SMC’s. Fewer burns on SMC for viruses with that out.

@vinegarymink If anything Deja is to let him install Prog and then reinstall Suckers on em.

598

Kim at 40 would have been awesome. I’d rank Anarchs in current meta as such:

MaxX
Noise
Whizz
Val
Reina
Quetzal
Kim

only reason Val below Whizz is the +5 deck size. I think it does make a difference, I rarely find myself losing to valencia and it’s almost always because they seem to be struggling to find what they need. occurs with lists running SMC, Special Order, card draw, whatever. I’ll shut up about Reina Denial if she puts up good results at Regionals; I’m still convinced good players should be able to reliably beat the deck. It seems too one dimensional to be optimal. not speaking blindly; I have played it myself. my ranking of Whizz is probably biased.

1 Like
599

I can see that. However, the gaps at the bottom aren’t that huge. It’s not like Kim’s The Professor levels of terrible.

Also, if we’re all talking about how good scrubber is, then it makes sense for Whizzard to be good, right?

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600

NB4 “cards not drawn might as well be at the bottom of your deck” to counter your RnD operation lock argument.

Because that only works for agendas, not operations :wink:

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601

Agendas have to go somewhere :stuck_out_tongue:

Multiaccess makes the ‘bottom of R&D’ argument less valid.

602

No its not, at least it didnt in testing. Its since gone from the deck. Parasite is also absent, probably a mistake. At the minute my build looks a lot like leela - efficient in faction breakers, in this case the datasucker rig, and tons of money and draw. The notable difference is SMC’s as Kim doesnt have criminal advantage of early game aggro events like siphon or inside job.