After another loss with Foodcoats because I was too timid about pushing for scores, I watched again the Hoyland v Wong worlds 2015 match for inspiration.
A few things struck me.
Hoyland went to score every time he had agendas in hand. I play much too slow and that is why I end up feeling like I’m on the back foot the whole game. @TheBigBoy wrote on his blog that you should lose the game and in your remote and not HQ. @Cerberus gave a great illustration of that principle in this game.
Temujin wrecks the entire Hoyland game. These are decks from a different era, but the balance between runner and corp econ is part of what made that game so interesting.
We would be telling a totally different story about that game if Timmy had won either Psi game. Variance is a central aspect of the game.
It is a great game to watch from both sides. Worth doing again if you want to be inspired to play Netrunner.
I think you’d want it in addition to Ash ideally - the synergy between the two is very nice - but how you find the deckslots for that is quite beyond me.
It is a much different game than the Hoyland v. Wong classic. A couple of observations from a far from expert player.
Dan’s anticipation of his opponent’s strategy was tremendous. The Turing on HQ makes perfect sense if your game plan is to hold a bunch of agendas in HQ while you keep slamming campaigns in your remote over and over again so you can money up enough to trash the DLR pieces. (Yes, as the commentators said, going Tag Me from the start was probably a mistake for Val.)
I would have been very tempted to put the Turing on R&D to slow down Keyhole, but it absolutely needed to be on HQ if he was going to spend a lot of time with a lot of agendas in his hand.
It looked to me like he had a plan all game to deal with bouncing back from or avoiding Siphons. In the late game when Gary landed a Siphon taking Dan down to zero, he had an Adonis ready and then played credit-credit Hedge to burst right back up to 9. He held that Hedge Fund for a long time, I assume waiting to use it for that purpose.
And his patience waiting for the Blackmails to come was also impressive.
In Hoyland’s game, Dave was much more aggressive with fairly small servers and pushing agendas aggressively. In this game, Dan was much more patient and careful building to a lock out position and keeping on top of the money game the entire game.
Watching this game – much more than Hoyland’s – I see why people say Rumor Mill is such a blunt instrument. Dan’s deck would have been 100% neutered if Val were playing Rumor Mill instead of Hactivist.
Yeah. Brainstorm isn’t taxing. If you aren’t actually trying to kill the runner, they’ll happily hold like two cards and pay through your 9-to-rez ice with some spare change. Or on game point, they just take the brain and whatever. If the runner has nothing to fear, they can easily take 5 brain.
An earlier version had biotic instead of the 3rd lateral growth. With one or two exceptions, the biotic seemed to expedite my victories rather than ensure them. I decided that it is more important to have more money. I think it has been the right decision.
I started playing Kenny Deakins’ Foodcoats list a couple months ago. It does not have Biotic Labor, and I thought that was a problem. But what I found was that playing without it highlighted what I’d been doing wrong when I had it. When I had Biotic Labor, I would get into spots where I was looking for the BL instead of advancing my game. Counting on it to bail me out would lead me to make poor decisions.
Not everyone would fall prey to that, of course, but I found that playing without BL made me a better player, even if probably does mean I lose a game every now and then that I could have won by squeezing out a late 3/2.
