Except basically nobody was on that combo before Temu and Bloose got banned and Aesop got restricted (and Kati rotated).
Cold Ones and Lock Hayley were basically the successful Shapers at the time and neither ran those. The Rise of Tappy is pretty much entirely down to the evaporation of all the better options.
Forget Temu Bloose, if they would give me back even something like Kati I’d be happy to take the Tapwrms out of my decks.
Even if there are new econ options, I think Tapwrm (and it’s easy of play) has grown on people (pun intended). I myself knew it could make money, but just didn’t simply like the style of play. Now it’s hard not to put it in a deck simply due to the ease of which it becomes profitable (even if it doesn’t gain me credits and costs the Corp clicks).
TLDR: Being forced to play tapwrm for econ has shown truly how elegant and useful the card truly is.
Pre-Aaron, old siphon was 3 clicks to make 6 credits and remain tagless (minus the cost of breaking HQ ice). New siphon is 2 clicks to make 4 credits. That’s very similar. Yet Crim decks still ran 3x siphon before Aaron.
Wari says you don’t have to encounter this ice this turn. It’s different from hippo that makes you encounter the ice. It’s more like a bad Inside Job
Come to think of it, Dirty Laundry is probably the closest Diversion comparison in terms of runner econ: DoF costs a click more and a credit less, only pays the full amount if the corp has 5 or more credits, and specifies an HQ run, which would definitely make it too narrow to use just for the money, but holy cow, a Mining Accident Lite that Dirty Laundries as a byproduct is a pretty significant econ card.
An inside job that requires a successful run on HQ (which usually entails breaking ICE) and having already exposed the ICE previously (to reliably count). I’d say it’s more like a terrible Rigged Results than a bad Inside Job.
Will pad tap + tapwrm be good enough to replace saccon + tapwrm?
i don’t see why a criminal deck running any of those wouldn’t want all 3
the only consideration really is influence, but i could still see merit to running both tapwrm and pad tap
with tapwrm, you can only really have one at a time, and the corp purges to get rid of all of them at once
but pad tap has to be manually killed, each one, so you could easily have all 3 out and drain the corp’s time is they go for pad taps while tapwrm is still generating credits
Mostly just thinking about slots. Here’s the econ shell I use now:
3x Gamble
3x Career Fair
3x Earthrise
3x Casts
3x Peace
3x Tapwrm
3x Saccon
That’s already a lot of slots for econ draw, so not sure I can just add in the new cards. If I can swap saccon for pad tap, that saves my influence (and possibly a to-be retricted card). There’s also the siphon replacement to work in…but I’m reticent to drop “sure” money for more conditional econ when it all can be purged or clicked away.
Soooo…Tapwrm restricted. And Crim suffers yet again because its best cards are too good in other factions and are under-influenced. Sigh.
I wasn’t crazy about the Tapwrm econ in criminal anyways; it always felt more like a shaper lock-out strategy than a crim aggro strategy.
Speaking of shaper-y criminals, I’ve been having some fun with this list:
It’s not quite where I want it to be. I like 3x Modded to help the setup speed, but I really want to get 1-2 TTW into the list.
It’s a really fun list to play, and forces the corp to make careful decisions to rez and position ice. I had been using Inversificator, but not having paperclip is too painful when Weyland is popular in your meta.
I’m not sure if it’s been mentioned here, but, given that I, too, am blue about blue, I thought I should share that I am excited by the following:
Diversion of Funds -> Mining Accident
Seems good? Getting a guaranteed bad pub if the Corp is below 9 credits seems like something that could prime the pump of a run-based Criminal - which I certainly hope becomes feasible again because control-style Gang Sign Criminal gives me the sads.
Thankfully, so far we’ve gotten Criminal cards:
But, we do have spoiler for PAD Tap and No One Home at 1 influence. PAD Tap being the more worrisome one.
Yeah, Pad Tap will be everywhere at 1 inf. It always seems like they jack the influence up on crim jank but leave the econ infl very low.
I am honestly a little afraid of this combo coming out of Steve. With some more help from RNG Key, Rip Deal etc. you could make a terrifying central pressure deck. It might feel a bit like the old Siphon-Spam…
Hey y’all. A crim econ card is about to get good…in another faction. Three steps ahead seems to interact well with Marathon. Guessing it’ll see a little shaper play.
i mean asset spam isn’t as much of a problem anymore, but Criminal has so many tools against asset spam and Shaper pretty much just has Astrolabe. this is 100% fine tbh
What are Crim’s best counters to spam?
Here’s a question I’ve been mulling:
Is it harder to create strong-but-not-OP cards for Crim than Shaper or Anarch?
I think it’s easier for Criminal because they’ve the worse in-faction draw & not great recursion either (RIP Deal, Steve Cambridge). Shaper, on the other hand, has good draw, tutoring, and recursion so I feel like it’s easily the most dangerous faction in terms of accidentally printing something strong that turns out to be oppressive.