As written, the Order of Sol works in the Corp’s turn too, right? So basically worth $2 to a Personal Workshop build if you’re prepared to go broke every turn.
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Rachel Beckman has daddy issues unfortunately as well as a very slow car. She’s very good at putting hits on suspects though … Oh wait wrong game.
Not sure how anyone could look at Quetzal and not be impressed. She breaks almost every barrier for free, Eli for 1 click (or 1 credit and 0 clicks with e3). Paired with TME, Legwork, Siphon… at the very least, it will force Corp decks to be more liberal with code gate installations… which raises Yog’s stock. Double barriers on servers will help, but that’s expensive and taxing on ice supply. Keeping HQ, R&D, and a remote safe from her free runs means 6 barriers, and a simple Corroder installation will ruin that plan. More likely Corp will simply have to live with Quetzal’s ability to get in anywhere.
One tough thing about making Quetzal work, in my mind anyway, is that any anarch that isn’t Noise gives up a huge angle of attack on archives, and, especially when playing an ID that will negate a lot of your opponent’s ICE, threatening as many servers as possible is going to be critical. I think the fact that there is nothing in the game easily comparable to the ability leads a lot of people to be dismissive off the bat because she can’t simply supplant another ID’s deck and be optimal. Imagining the right Quetzal deck isn’t easy.
I think that for this ID to be very strong, you’re going to need to play DLR to turn archives into an actual soft point. Maybe something like the Anatomy of an Anarch Reina deck but with Mimic/Yog/Knight as breakers. Maybe with Siphon, maybe without.
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True, I think the Reina Siphon decks are probably closes to what she wants. My first thoughts went to multi-access events (TME and Legwork) to get the most out of her ability, but that eats up a lot of influence, and they lose some value later on when most servers are double or triple-iced.
Perhaps DLR is necessary, but it’s a bit fragile, and can take a lot of setup to get the most milling out of it, and it means you have to continously check for Jackson. It’ll work great when you are ahead and will be awful when you’re behind. Medium, Nerve Agent, and Keyhole don’t work as well when she will only get 1 free run per turn. Fall guy? Seems bad. RDI? Expensive and eats influence. Will have to do some testing. For science!
I’ve been trying out a Quetzal Ice Destruction deck running Keyhole, with the basic plan of getting rid of problematic ice before they can get it set up, nuking the things that I can’t break easily, and just generally hammering their ability to keep me out as hard as I can. Fun way of punishing people for only running 15 Ice.
It’s had… mixed success. Some of that is adjusting to proper use of Keyhole, some of that is fixing economy and draw issues. I like it a bit more than the DLR plan, but that might just be because I’m not a huge fan of playing the DLR Deck in general.
Definitely having the problem of drawing my deck in the wrong order, though, and not entirely sure how to fix it. Ah well.
EDIT: I mean, the specific fixes. Inject will help tremendously, no doubt.
Well, in a way I think just relying on Datasuckers amounts to (or should amount to) a certain amount of Archives pressure. Then there is DLR, as you mentioned, and Keyhole. But really, I think Security Testing will be an excellent splash with Quetzal. Perhaps, since you should be able to get a lot of runs in early, it could even be good with Hemorrhage (or not, more likely).
@mediohxcore makes a good point. Quetzal’s ability is nice for the early game, but Anarch is least well-placed to leverage the cheap, early access without going out of faction. By the mid-game Quetzal’s ability basically becomes a slow, conditional form of economy and is only worth more than $1 vs. some quite specific ICE. It will be interesting to see if Order and Chaos brings anything new to help Anarchs pressure the early game - at present I can’t see Quetzal doing much unless she drops an early Keyhole - everything else she needs is a lot of influence to invest.
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This.
So what remains to be seen is how good she can be with the right imports. To be fair, her ability is very good early game and good to fair late game. That seems totally reasonable to me. Even if it’s just $1 a turn, that’s what Kate gets you. The power of extending the period when you can run without a rig, and getting far more accesses in that time, will have to be assessed.
You might as well run Sneakdoor to force extra ICE in front of the Archives, while still hitting an important target (HQ). DLR will need some extra preparation and with NBN as strong as it is, going tag me to enable DLR doesn’t really strike me as an optimal plan. Usually Sneakdoor can be difficult to install because of the MU, but when you don’t need the barrier breaker right away it might fit quite well.
Quetzal can make a lot of use from Imp, Datasucker and the multi-access viruses in the early game. Parasite as always with Anarch.
I really like the man paths you can go here. You can build her around an AI as Wraparound doesn’t suck so hard. You can build her around Siphon/Vamp or big multi-access events as you can land those a lot easier than other runners. You can treat it as extra consistency - no need to include 3x Corrodor to ensure you don’t get locked out of a server by a Wraparound.
e3 and Overmind builds, with Deep Red and Knight (or the Cerberus breakers as we move on) start looking really interesting.
Another huge positive for Quetzal is she negates the need for a full breaker suite very quickly, as she essentially starts the game with a barrier breaker. That will eliminate a huge amount of ‘consistency and draw’ problems people have with anarchs in general.
Strong argument for paintbrush in here somewhere too imo.
At four influence and no in faction tutoring, it’s hard to see how that can be made to work.
Tinkering if anything, you would get more value from it as a surprise than as a resuable ability and the influence is cheaper. I don’t think it’s the best use of influence though - Anarch already have Knight and D4V1D for surprising punching through binary ICE.
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It’d cost your influence but the benefits are outstanding. She seems like a ‘rig builder’ rather than the more chaotic Noise stuff. I forgot it was 4 though, thought it was 3, so you could include tutors for all your key programs. So I don’t thing it is a ‘strong’ argument anymore, but maybe something to fiddle with.
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That’s not really what I meant … Something tells me I needn’t explain further though. Maybe one day I’ll be clever enough to play this game without icebreakers. In the meantime though, I’ll keep installing the software that let’s me get through ice if that’s ok. Incidentally, I think between Duggar’s and her built in ability she can quickly assemble a rig that can break through whatever it needs to.
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Rachel Beckmen provides Connections decks with their kingpiece, in my opinion. 5 clicks, especially early game, is huge.
She just may push Connections into even stronger territory.
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[quote=“whatisthistreachery, post:61, topic:1807”]
Rachel Beckmen provides Connections decks with their kingpiece, in my opinion. 5 clicks, especially early game, is huge.
[/quote]…Can connections decks afford/make up the costs of playing her, though? Maybe, certainly not impossible, but it’s tricky – and bars the deck from even thinking of running Siphon, since it doesn’t matter if you remove the tags.
[quote=“Chill84, post:59, topic:1807”]
you are going to have a bad time.
[/quote]Yeah, going to speak from personal experience here – Quetzal’s got a neat power but you want to use it to bust in ASAP, not set up to bust in later. Later, they’ll have more than one barrier. Y’know what more-or-less nullifies her lack of need for a fracter? Two Wraparounds on one server.
Also, strong as her ability is, NEH tends to run only about 5 barriers. Her ability is pretty great against HB, decent against some Jinteki (Tennin most of all), and lovely for beating up Weyland. Unfortunately… none of those are really the decks to beat at the moment.